Top-secret play a surprise to actor as well as audience

Theatre audiences are used to being surprised, but what happens when it's the actor going in blind?

White Rabbit Red Rabbit has no rehearsals, no director - and one actor, who has no idea what's in the script.

The first time Ricky Dey saw the script was when he opened the envelope in front of the audience, and within seconds, he had to perform it.

"It was funny, opening the envelope, like, 'What's the first words gonna be?' But before then I actually didn't open it, I looked at the audience like, 'What's going to happen?!' It was a really great moment, us sharing that."

White Rabbit Red Rabbit is a leap of faith, designed to be performed each night by a different actor - one who's never seen the script before.

And like everyone else who's performed it, Dey can never do it again.

"Looking back at it, retrospectively, I'm like, 'Oh, I could've done this or I could've done that,'" he said.

"And I'm really desperate to talk to some other actors and see how they found it!"

The play's being staged as a fundraiser for Wellington's BATS theatre and the secrecy surrounding the challenging play has drawn actors to it from all over the world since 2010.

"I put the name of the play into Google and then was like, 'No no no, I don't want to ruin this moment,'" fellow performer Daniel Gamboa told Newshub.

"I knew the writer's name and that was about it," Dey said.

The playwright, Naseem Soleimanpour, was forced to stay in his native Iran after protesting against mandatory military service.

So he wrote White Rabbit Red Rabbit with the idea being that while he wasn't allowed to leave, his play - and his message - could.

That's something that resonates with Colombian actor Gamboa, who came to New Zealand as a refugee with his mother in 2012.

After fleeing to Ecuador, where he says he felt "trapped" like Soleimanpour, he says New Zealand was different.

"Coming into somewhere new, exploring a new journey, and at the end telling the journey and being successful doing that" is what he believes being in the play's all about.

"Being part of this play, also it's about myself and my own journey. I came to this country without knowing anything. What was I going to speak? We weren't really told anything," he said.

Gamboa's performing later this week, so he's still in the dark.

"Just a couple of nights ago I had this nightmare of coming on the stage, opening the envelope, and just freezing."

Dey believes Soleimanpour, who is now free to leave Iran, had his own aims for the audience.

"He's gone, 'I want to transcend borders with this. I want to bring a community together and realise they're in a moment here and now, and realise their actions in the present can affect the future.'"

The audience, of course, is also encouraged to go into the play not knowing anything - so revealing more would just be spoiling the surprise.

Newshub.