Mark James  Title: Staff genealogist
One-line description: Culture shock junkie
Past and current roles:
Theseus (A Midsummer Night's Dream) Paul, Alex Cavendish, Crispin Wellesley, Mark Heslop, Johnny Todd (The Fifteenth Minute, Waiheke production) Leonato (Much Ado About Nothing) Mr Cellophane (Last Tango in Little Oneroa) The Mikado Pirate (Oneroa Town Musicians)
Bio:
Mark was born in Siberia, or someplace in Detroit that looks like that. He grew up in a neighbourhood of pinball gangsters, white racists, football lunatics*, trade union goons, Supremes fans, recycled Trotskyites, children of automobile billionaires and grandchildren of Purple Gang victims. This human potpourri was designed by God, or someone similar, to prepare Mark for a life in the theatre, but fortunately failed to do so.
Instead he wandered, rootless but seedy, sowing trouble on four continents. His stay in England was followed by the rise of Maggie Thatcher and other forms of mad cow disease; his year in Iran resulted in a mass movement amongst women to take to the veil; his sojourn in Paris led directly to the invention of La Vache Qui Rit cheese. A brief return to the United States saw him exiled to Texas, where the population, in revulsion, elected George Bush as governor. Finally, after having inadvertently triggered the 1997 Asian currency crisis by buying one too many plastic toilet plungers, and being kidnapped by the Afghan Navy who mistook him for Mr Bean, he washed ashore at Rocky Bay just in time to see the store burn and John Banks come to power.
At that point, Mark realised that his sole contribution to humanity consisted of questionable expertise in several obsolete video games; that his chief claim to fame lay in being the world's only Certified Genealogist to have been deported from the United Arab Emirates; and that his proudest boast was that his father's best friend once shook hands with J.R.R. Tolkien. After a life so wasted, what was left but to sink into the theatre, as that Great Impresario Upstairs had so obviously intended from the beginning? It was at that advanced age that Mark took his first stage role, and he has never looked back, mainly because there isn't much to see there.
*This is American football, which is even worse than the other kind
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