30 August, 2024

Funeral director’s theatre career resumes for Hall comedy

Scene change… Rachel Nash is relishing being back on the boards

It’s been years since Rachel Nash last took to the stage at the PumpHouse in Takapuna, but the experienced actor was thrilled to step into the breach to fill a leading role there.  
Tadpole Productions roped in Nash for the Sir Roger Hall comedy Taking Off, directed by Simon Prast, when former television presenter Louise Wallace was a late withdrawal due to an unexpected family commitment.
Nash, Jodie Dorday, Laura Hill and Darien Takle play a quartet of Kiwi women setting off on their big OE. 
The women are simultaneously terrified and exhilarated by their mid-life adventure.
Nash, who has acted since the mid-1980s, can’t recall details of her last time at the PumpHouse, but she certainly remembers being in and seeing various plays by Hall, who lives in Takapuna.
She puts his work’s enduring audience appeal down to being so relatable. “It’s in the familiarity of the characters. We love to see ourselves.” 
In Taking Off, Nash plays Noeline, who nursed her terminally ill husband for years, before embarking on a trip they had intended to take together.
She joins Frankie (played by Dorday), a Lotto winner leaving her dull husband behind; farmer’s wife Ruth (Hill), whose husband is having an affair; and Jean (Takle), recently made redundant by her company after 20 years of service.  “I am delighted to be back on stage with such a fine bunch of women,” she says.
Tadpole was able to swap out its posters to include her, and Nash has been rehearsing this month, ready for the play’s opening next week. 
Nash trained at Theatre Corporate drama school as a 19-year-old and went on to work in theatre, film and television and teaching.
Among her highlights were roles at Auckland Theatre Company in Enlightenment, and the Basement in The Vagina Monologues, and on screen in The Gulf, The Almighty Johnsons and The Cult.
But as the years went by in what she says can be a “bits and bobs” job in New Zealand, she developed an alternative career as a funeral director and then as a funeral and wedding celebrant. 
She started down her new path around 15 years ago, after her mother died. “At that time I thought there must be people who wanted the same way of doing things as I did.” 
That meant a funeral that was “not the typical men-in-suits formal way, but still professional”. At Aroha Funerals, she says she draws on similar skills to those employed in acting. “All of the stuff you bring to being an actor, the observance, empathy and looking at things openly – I draw on all of that.”
She is grateful to her employer giving her a month’s leave to fully focus on the play, saying: “I’ve stepped out of one career and back into the other.”
Returning to the North Shore is a bonus. Her family history and childhood memories go a long way back in Devonport, where he mother grew up. Her great-great-grandmother, Dora Morrison, was an early settler, whose family gave land for Vauxhall School and their name to Morrison Ave.
Nash relishes tapping into human connections, be it through the past, theatre or funerals that comfort and empower families. For now though, she is firmly focusing on Taking Off.

• Taking Off , 5-15 September. Tickets
  from the PumpHouse, ph 489-8360,
  or pumphouse.co.nz

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