In new play I Want to Be Happy, New Zealand acting icon Jennifer Ludlam plays a lab rodent called Binka. She tells Sam Brooks about the challenges and freedom of playing a caged animal.

A few weeks ago, in a draughty plane hangar that sometimes serves as a rehearsal room, theatre company Nightsong had their annual fundraiser event. A barebones rehearsal set featured a large, wooden cage, flanked by a table meant to represent a lab assistant’s workstation, opposite the usual expected catering of charcuterie and champagne. 

Alongside the usual fundraiser business – speeches from board members, sales of one-off merch, theatre people mashed up against moneyed people – the company presented a short excerpt from their new show, I Want To Be Happy.

Joel Tobeck, a familiar face to everybody in the room and many New Zealanders beyond it, bounded onto the stage, while Jennifer Ludlam, equally familiar, skulked behind him in a (faux) fur coat. Tobeck plays Paul, a lab assistant assigned to look after a guinea pig. 

Ludlam plays the guinea pig. Her name is Binka.

A few weeks later, Ludlam and I huddle around a heater in that airport hanger for a chat. Charcuterie and champagne have been replaced by costumes and chattels. The rest of the cast and crew, including writer Carl Bland and director Ben Crowder, usher themselves into the foyer to give us some space.

It’s very easy, even natural, to associate an actor with the role you first saw them in. People a generation or two older than me might associate Jennifer Ludlam as one of the hosts of children’s TV show Play School. For people my generation or younger, it’s likely for her near decade-long role as Shortland Street’s most entertaining, loveable receptionist, Leanne. For me? Her towering performance as the poisonous matriarch Violet in Auckland Theatre Company’s production of August: Osage County (a performance which rightly won her multiple awards across two cities).

Ludlam is nothing like any of these characters in real life, of course. She’s also nothing like a guinea pig.

“I went online and studied guinea pigs, their behaviour, how they move, stuff like that. Apparently guinea pigs have fabulous eyesight,” she says, with the enthusiasm of a first-year uni student. “Then I relate it to my humanness. This play is an interesting way for Carl to explore different human behaviours through another vessel.”

She compares playing a guinea pig to playing a famous person, which she’s done several times across her decades-long career. “You have to drop the research after a while,” she says. “You can do all the reading, but ultimately it has to be coming from you, and your body.” The key difference here is that sometimes famous people can actually watch the actor playing them. Guinea pigs, presumably, will not be in the audience of I Want to Be Happy.

It also takes some calibration and direction to figure out where to pitch Binka: how much Ludlam leans into the spirit of the rodent, and how much human she brings with her. “Sometimes [Ben and Carl] will say, ‘don’t twitch, Jen!’,” she says. “When to put ‘it’ in and when not to is just trial and error for me, at the moment. It will probably change night to night.”

The costume is also a key element. Next to us are several fur coats, procured by award-winning costume designer Elizabeth Whiting. “We’re moving further and further away from her looking like a guinea pig,” she says. “But I also didn’t want it to suddenly look like I was in Cats!” (Reader, don’t fear. We are far from the Rum Tum Tugger in this show.)

Despite the specificity required in how Ludlam pitches her performance, the frame around her ends up being freeing. “Who’s gonna know?” she says bluntly. “Who’s gonna know if what I’m doing is the ‘right way’ to do it, because this is my way.” She refers back to August: Osage County, where she had to play a woman well beyond her own years, strung out on downers well beyond her tolerance.

“That gave me a huge freedom in the palette to work from,” she says. “I could go anywhere! In a funny way, even though I’m a guinea pig in a cage, I can go anywhere in this play.”

Ludlam has been a fan of Nightsong’s work since she saw their award-winning production of 360, which brought the audience onstage of the Civic, sat them in swivel chairs and had them watch as a show happened around them. “Ever since I saw that, I thought that I’d really like to work with them,” she says.

It is, in fact, the third time she’s worked with the company – after bakery hostage comedy Mr. Red Light and the pandemic pivot film Call it a Night. “I like things that aren’t totally naturalistic,” she continues. “I like something that’s going to take me into another world, and take the audience into another world.”

Of Crowder and Bland, Nightsong’s founders and the co-directors of this show, she calls them, carefully, “idio… syncratic.” Crowder she calls extraordinary in his tenacity to keep going, and she marvels at the way Bland’s mind works. “Their pieces are not naturalistic. There’s magic realism, often big puppets and animals. I find their shows a challenge, but exciting to do.”

Crowder speaks equally highly of Ludlam, having admired her greatly before working with her. “I was drawn not only to her strength as an actor, but also her bold choices and generous approach to an audience,” he says. “She is a bloody hard worker, with great instincts, and will stubbornly return to any nagging concerns, like a dog to a bone, until they are sorted.”

“Ultimately, she is driven to deliver her best.”

Weeks before our interview, and weeks before Ludlam will step onstage in front of audiences, she stepped in front of an invited fundraiser crowd in a fur coat, with a focus that any actor would kill for, and many people would pay a pretty penny to watch.

“I live here,” she said, looking into a world far beyond the walls of the near sub-zero airplane hangar. She pointed at her head. “In here is a freedom nobody can take from me.”

You could hear a pin drop, or someone sip surreptitiously from their free champagne. In that moment, it didn’t matter if Ludlam was accurately portraying a guinea pig or not (and in my experience, guinea pigs tend not to be so eloquent). Everybody was in rapture.

“Sometimes if I close my eyes I see the lights and shadows of the Andes. I hear the sound of mountain streams. Feel cold, clear water on my face.”

Was she a human? Was she a guinea pig? It didn’t matter to us. She was Binka. Even better, she was Jennifer Ludlam, at her best.

I Want to Be Happy runs until September 2 at the Herald Theatre, and tours to Circa Theatre on September 7 and runs until September 30.