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  • New Zealand Listener

    NOT SHY – OR RETIRING

    Jan 30, 2022 8 minutes
    by LINDA HERRICK

    Annie Whittle didn’t have much dialogue to learn for her role as farmer’s wife Beth in Hamish Bennett’s tender Northland film Bellbird, released a couple of years ago.

    Beth hummed, sang and chatted – in short, one-way conversations – to fill the space of her husband’s silence. Whittle imbued the role with a lovely, natural luminosity, a counterpoint to Marshall Napier’s taciturn Ross.

    But Beth wasn’t around for long, her sudden exit slowly forcing her husband to acknowledge his feelings and even start uttering full sentences.

    Whittle’s work in those brief, early scenes, said one reviewer, “run through Bellbird like sunlight through a dusty window”.

    “Who said that?” Whittle laughs. “I should send them a bottle of gin.”

    Bellbird was a reminder of Whittle’s too-rare presence as an engaging film actor. But her upcoming return to the stage, in Auckland Theatre Company’s production of American playwright Bess Wohl’s Grand Horizons, requires, in comparison, the absorption of a mountain of dialogue.

    The play, which debuted on Broadway in early 2020 and is directed at the ATC by Jennifer Ward-Lealand, is a comedy-drama driven by lots and lots of talking. Or, as a New York Times reviewer put it, lots of “dirty-talking-old-lady laughs”.

    Like it is centred on a couple, Nancy and Bill, although these two are in their late seventies. Sure enough, Bill is

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