You could almost conclude that New Zealander Madeleine Sami is possessed by each of the characters she plays in this drama, so total is her transformation from one role to another.
Disbelief, incredulity, and admiration fly through the brain as the 22-year-old actress morphs effortlessly from savvy Fijian matriarch to mono-brain-celled rugbyplayer, or from precocious little boy to an English girl dizzy with diffidence.
Her not inconsiderable brief is to create a picture of a dying world: a Fijian community based in Auckland, New Zealand, where - as playwright Toa Fraser puts it - people "used to sit down at the dining room table at breakfast time and be finished with their second bottle of Johnny Walker by lunch". In No 2, Fijian matriarch Nana Maria is one of the few relics of that world - and the action is set on the day when she wakes up at 3am and cracks the whip for a feast to be held where she can name her family successor.
It is one of those plays where the appeal could not begin to be gleaned from a listings description. For its humour, subtle social observation, pathos and wit are all intrinsically bound up in Sami's mercurial performance. Fraser wrote the play for her, and she has made it hers to the exclusion of all other contenders.
Indeed, you suspect that it becomes a far better play through her ability - for instance - to mimic the yelping laugh and jerky speech patterns of an immature young man, or to re-enact the laboured eccentricities of an elderly Fijian woman, since she compellingly brings the rhythms of her native New Zealand alive in a way that goes deeply beyond the words she speaks.
Tim Simpson's minimalist stage design provides nothing apart from a yellow-washed backdrop and an armchair, where Nana Maria sits as she issues orders to her family and encourages a visiting young English girl to down gins and smoke cigars. Yet whether she is mimicking roasting a pig on a spit, or staging a flirtatious dance contest, Sami acquits herself with a style that should have casting directors beating a path to Upper Street.
No. 2 (Number Two)
