FROM MOZART TO MAYHEM
By Daniel Dercksen

For 27-year-old Nicholas Pauling, acting is his life and, judging from his many achievements and multitude roles ranging from Mozart on stage to a punked-out jailer in the futuristic film Doomsday, the world is his stage.

"Theatre, or acting, has become more than what I want to do. It's what I am," admits Pauling, who recently returned from working with the Royal Shakespeare Company in the UK as a winner of the 2008 Brett Goldin Bursary.

He is also one of the seven members of an exciting new theatre troupe called The Mechanicals, performing a repertory season of two Pulitzer prize winning plays, David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross and San Shepard's Buried Child, on alternate nights until August 29.

In Buried Child, Pauling plays the role of an outsider whose been missing for six years and returns home to his dysfunctional family to find that no-one recognises him, and in Glengary Glenn Ross he transforms into a sleazy and slimy estate agent who know one wants to know.

Talking to Pauling after a performance of Buried Child, he confesses that he leaves his character behind when he goes home; when he returns the following evening to step into the shoes of the other character, he has to leave that character behind and repeat an ongoing cycle that infuses his passion.

"I think if you mix the two you are going to blur reality and fiction," says Pauling, who believes that it is important to separate his personal life from the characters he plays.

"I think the art and craft of it is to keep it separate and treat it as a growing creation." 

A year after Pauling completed a BA degree in Theatre and Performance at the University of Cape Town's Drama School, he won the coveted 2006 Fleur du Cap Best Actor winner for his rousing portrayal of Mozart in the classic Amadeus, which was a "life changing" moment in his career.

That same year he hastily stepped into the role of Guildenstern in Hamlet, just days after Brett Golden was murdered, and toured with the production to the Royal Shakespeare Company's Complete Works Festival in the UK.

He also performed in Around the World in 80 Days and Romeo and Juliet at Maynardville, and received acclaim for his performance as the young professor in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,  before winning the 2008 Brett Goldin Bursary award (sharing with Thami Mbongo).

"This is one of my favourite periods right now," says Pauling, who is also one of the South African actors in British director Neil Marshall's Doomsday, which was filmed extensively in Cape Town and opens on circuit on August 29.

When he auditioned for Doomsday he did not think he would get it because he had "hideous" long hair extensions for his role in Romeo and Juliet, "but they liked it", he says.

Playing an unfortunate jailer who gets "compromised in a rather painful way and meets a kind of rough end", Pauling has the highest respect for director Marshall.

"He was so easy to work with and very generous and willing to let me play around a little, which was great," says Pauling, who enjoys working on film because "there's a luxury of playing it really small. You can do nothing and that can read quite strongly."

Right now, his main focus is on 'The Mechanicals' (derived from A Midsummer Night's Dream), and the two exciting plays at the Little Theatre; a rewarding and stimulating experience that affords theatre buffs not only a fantastic opportunity of seeing the same actors perform in two plays on consecutive evenings, but a rare chance of seeing true talent in full bloom.

"This is a dream come true," says Pauling, who finds the contrast between the two characters he plays exciting.

"In Glengary Glen Ross people are very isolated and on one path, and very few meaningful relationships develop. In Buried Child the family relationships are at once kind of severed but everyone knows a lot about the other characters."

"It has been one of the most exciting, enriching challenging and enjoyable acting experiences of my life. Great directors and a great cast, the lack of ego is such an amazing and rare environment to work in," he says.

"We are all concerned about the story and we try and tell that the best we can," he says. "Everyone is working towards the same goal in their own way which is the real beauty. All round it has been amazing and to have an audience that supports it so strongly is a bonus!"

Pauling's life as an actor began at the age of eight when he proudly played the mother duck in a school play.

"The gilded beak the snug wriggle of the tights on my legs, that white tutu, I mean who wouldn't feel instantly that they would want to do that for a living? Certainly nobody with a clear bill of health and a keen mental alertness," says Pauling, who fondly refers to this as his "poultry period"

"All I remember was webbed feet, the smell of stubborn algae and having to see a quack."

"As long as I can remember I have wanted to an actor," he says.

"I remember crying at the top of the stairs because something clearly was not going my way, and my mother saying " you are tired and you are showing off, now go to your room!"

"It was then that I knew I wanted to become an actor. The desire comes from wanting to tell stories, and give short powerful speeches I suppose and obviously to show off, as I think every actor wants or needs to do, because secretly we are all hideously insecure, and generally the bigger the ego the more insecure, so by that rationale I percolate with insecurity."

Following his dual stint at the Little Theatre, Pauling re-unites with fellow 'Mechanical' actor Scott Sparrow for Edward's Albee's The Zoo Story in October before starting rehearsals for a new production of Shakespeare's The Tempest, taking on the role of the wicked Sebatian opposite Sir Antony Sher as Prospero and John Kani as Caliban - it will be on at the Baxter in January 2009 before touring to the UK for a run at the RSC's Courtyard Theatre in Statford-upon-Avon.

Although Pauling enjoys playing tennis and spending Sunday afternoons in the company of friends, he admits that most of his time is spent "reading and trying to become a better actor."

"It is kind of crazy because there's never going to be an ultimate goal to be reached. At the same time it is very exciting. I don't have to be in the office every day. I can come to the theatre every night and do these wonderful plays."

• The other members of 'The Mechanicals'-are Guy De Lancey, Tinarie Van Wyk Loots, Scott Sparrow, Gina Pauling, Jason Potgieter and Kate Liquorish.