Finally some real issues in Ramsay St?  Debi Enker on how the new neighbours are making their mark

"There was a group of my peers in Sydney - actors, from TV, film and theatre - who ran a book on how long I'd last on Neighbours," chortles Shane Connor.  "And one of them bet eight minutes!"

The award-winning actor and recent Ramsay Street resident is shaking his head, running his fingers through his unruly hair and grinning, partly with disbelief, during a break in filming at the Nunawading studios that play home to the 14-year-old serial.

He's not the sort of actor you would automatically envisage in the fictional street that represents the heartland of white-bread Australian soapdom.  By his own admission, Connor often plays the bad guy, a confrontational type, a man on the verge.  So his casting as the builder Joe Scully represents a change of pace in a variety of ways.

Connor's TV credits read like a roll call of Australian drama productions: Prisoner, Carson's Law, Cop Shop, Phoenix, G.P., Law of the Land II, Raw FM, Police Rescue, Heartland, Good Guys Bad Guys, Moby Dick, Blue Heelers, Wildside and Stingers, plus an AFI-nominated performance as the traumatised survivor of a massacre in Halifax f.p.: Afraid of the Dark.

His theatre credits include Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, Fool for Love, The Shifting Heart, Backbeat, And the Big Men Fly, Byzantine Flowers and Nil, Cat and Buried, for which he won a Green Room award as outstanding fringe performer.

Although Connor has worked extensively on stage and screen, this three-year engagement on Neighbours (with 12-month options) represents his first soap stint and he's finding the hours gruelling.  The separated father of four-year-old twins says, "I've pretty much averaged 10 and 12-hour days since I started, so it's been really long and hard for me so far."

The Scullys arrived in Erinsborough on 20 October - the first new family to move into the country's best-known address since Ruth Wilkinson (Ailsa Piper) appeared with her twins in 1996.  Connor began shooting scenes with his screen wife Lyn, Janet Andrewartha, and their three daughters - Stephanie (Carla Bonner), Felicity (Holly Valance) and Michelle (Kate Keltie) - 12 weeks prior to that and, he remarks, "I've had one day off in all that time: ONE!"

The show's producers say that cast members average a 60-hour week - so much for the glamour of showbiz - and that they try to keep to a maximum of a 10-hour day for the actors.  Sometimes, though, a day that starts at 6.30 am can go through to midnight.  Currently, as the Scullys are being settled into the street, the load might be a bit heavier, though Connor notes that the emphasis is also partly a function of his character.

"Basically, Joe's the only male there when you want something stirred up.  Everyone else is so easy to get along with.  He's the only one who isn't so easy to get along with.  Well, he is, as long as you don't get on the wrong side of him.

"He doesn't really care what people think.  From what I've seen of the street, people are continually worried about what other people think, so when you throw in someone who couldn't care less you've got a bit of stirring up going on.  He doesn't fit into the landscape easily, and neither do I."

In part, Connor might be lamenting the workload but he's also enjoying playing the resident stirrer.

"The people are great and I'm really surprised that, four months in, I still enjoy coming to work every day.  I'm usually over it by that point.  I don't mean that I thought I would have hated it, but it's a huge change of pace.  I've always said no to these sorts of things, not because I looked down on them, simply because I didn't think I'd be able to do it.

"I found, as opposed to what I usually do, it's one of the greatest techniques in letting go because unlike say, Halifax, where you've got your beginning, middle and end, you don't have that on this.  If you try to treat it like a Halifax, or a mini-series or a stage play, you're going to have a very hard time.  Some actors look down on it but it's bloody hard work and if you can't master that different form, it doesn't say much for your versatility.

"I love doing fringe theatre, but I haven't worked for the Melbourne Theatre Company for I don't know how long and I wouldn't miss working for the Melbourne Theatre Company.

"I find them tedious, boring and very predictable.  I actually find it more challenging doing something like this and I find it more challenging watching something like this.  At the MTC, I find good actors made average."

Connor admits he was surprised by the Neighbours producers' invitation to audition but one of the things that persuaded him to make the commitment was the opportunity to work with Janet Andrewartha.  "I've never worked with Janet but I love her work.  I thought, 'Yeah, that person I could work with for that long.'"

Also on a shooting break, Andrewartha appears as good-natured and soft-spoken as Connor can be pugnacious, and the contrast works well on screen as well as off.  "The writers gave me a good, clear simple action," she says.  "Lyn doesn't feel good enough for the area and she's trying hard to measure up.

"That informs everything that I do as Lyn and makes me worry about my husband's attitude because his is 'Hey, if they don't like us, let 'em run around the block.'  That creates a bit of friction between us, and conflict is drama."

Joe might not lose any sleep over what the invariably nosy neighbours think, but Lyn is keen to make a good impression, to conceal the family's financial difficulties and to ensure that their trio of blonde daughters is accepted by the community.  Andrewartha describes the effect on the show of a new family on the block as being "a slightly different energy bouncing around within the same framework."

The mother of two daughters, Andrewartha, like Connor, has an extensive and varied CV, starting out as a singer, doing stand-up comedy and theatre, where her passion for the past few years has been working on contemporary plays (Hotel Sorrento, Navigating, Sex Diary of an Infidel, Good Works, Rising Fish Prayer, Underwear, Perfume and a Crash Helmet).

Over the years, she's picked up a pair of Green Room awards for her work in MTC productions, as a supporting actress in Othello and a lead actress in Tom & Viv.

Unlike Connor, she's also had experience with episodic TV, spending a year as Reb Kean on Prisoner from 1983 and playing the ambassador's wife in the ABC's Embassy.  Her decision to try a soap resulted, eventually, from a brief she gave her agent: "Over a year ago, I was knocking back a piece of work that I would normally have taken: it was doing a national tour and I said, 'I just can't do it, family-life-wise.'

"There have been stages in my life where touring suited fine, depending on ages of children.  The stuff I love doing, the theatre stuff, nearly always tours now.  I said to my agent, 'Can you find me something that will keep me in Melbourne and keep me in work?'

"After that, I spent six months not working, nothing.  Then she rang and said, 'What about television, what about Neighbours and fairly arduous schedules?'  So I came in and talked to them, did a screen test and decided to give it a whirl."

She also finds some weeks gruelling: "There have been some baaaad ones and some very easy weeks where I've thought, 'Oh my goodness, I've got the best job in Australia right now.'"  She's also enjoying both the discipline and the difference of working on a soap.  "The producers' advice - and I think it was very good advice - was to not come in with much, don't bring a lot to it, just ease into it, start gently.

"If you claim a type and a caricature and a whole set of characteristics - as you would in the theatre or in a film - then you're sort of sunk with this kind of stuff because it's almost 'suck it and see'.  So I've chosen a way for Lyn to sound but I haven't really drawn hard lines because she's got to go on a long journey.

"A lot of this work is about making a scene work, so it's not so much what the character would do, but does the scene hold, does it move the plot forward, does it hold your attention?  Always 'the story, the story' .  Of course, that is ultimately the most important thing.  But I think, with this kind of work, it's not as rigidly important as it is with plays and films."

She's also enjoying a spirit of camaraderie that she believes distinguishes Neighbours and the industry in general.  "They're just the friendliest bunch of people.  The crew, the cast and the management couldn't have made us more welcome.  My first day on set, the cameraman looked out from behind the camera and went 'Oh, g'day, you been on sick leave?'  It was fantastic and it broke the ice for me.  He'd worked on Prisoner years ago and he remembered me.  It was like coming home."
 

[Taken from The Age newspaper's Green Guide supplement - 10th February 2000]
 

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