“I haven’t been this excited in a long time,” says Robyn Nevin. “I’ve been pleased and happy and looking forward, but I haven’t actually been this stirred by the notion of acting as I am with this.”
The iconic actor is contemplating her upcoming lead role as Queen Lear for Melbourne Theatre Company (MTC). Her silver hair is long in preparation for the role, and her delicate features often break into that broad smile.
She’s at Sydney’s ABC studios to be interviewed for a Sydney Opera House documentary. “I was very much part of the birth of the Sydney Theatre Company (STC) at the Drama Theatre. When you have been around for this long, you are part of many aspects of Sydney history.”
Indeed, her career spans more than half a century. Only 16 when she entered the first NIDA acting course in 1959, she has appeared in numerous film and television roles. Her greatest roles, however, have been in the theatre, including Emerald City (1987), The Women of Troy (2008) and The Year of Magical Thinking (2009). She was artistic director of the Queensland Theatre Company from 1996 until 1999 and then of the Sydney Theatre Company until the end of 2007. She has picked up Logies, Helpmanns, the Green Room, Matilda and Sydney Critics awards and in 1991 was made a Member of the Order of Australia for her contribution to the arts. She is unquestionably the doyenne of Australian theatre.
She shifts in her seat when asked about being dubbed a national living treasure. “It suggests huge expectations and exciting outcomes and you can’t maintain those all the time, can you?” she says drily.
“She’s an extraordinary classical actor
with all the authority, the vigour, the range
and the depth to go where Lear goes.
It’s hard to think of a better fit for the role,
male or female.”
These expectations can only be confounded with her Lear, given it’s never been performed by an Australian woman before. It was director Rachel McDonald’s idea. “Lear is not really a play about gender issues, it is beyond that. The Lear story is about life and death, so in one sense the gender switch feels almost irrelevant,” the director explains. “But in another sense it changes everything. Leadership, parenthood, ageing and loss are experienced differently by women.”
She approached Nevin when she was at the STC, considering it inevitable that Nevin should play the role. “She’s an extraordinary classical actor with all the authority, the vigour, the range and the depth to go where Lear goes. It’s hard to think of a better fit for the role, male or female.”
Nevin turned her away, but the idea lingered. When Nevin left STC, she approached the state theatre companies but no-one was interested. Nevin joined MTC last year in a caretaker curatorial role alongside Pamela Rabe and Aidan Fennessy, believing her pet project was unlikely to happen. But general manager Ann Tonks was sold. “It was so unexpected and out of the blue,” says Nevin.
Initially, the language felt foreign, written as it is for a man. “Now I’m loving it because of the imagery and the poetry.” She battled to connect with the opening scene in which Lear casts out her favourite daughter Cordelia, wishing sterility on her. “The idea of cursing your daughter in order that she will never reproduce is tough stuff. It’s ugly, brutal and final.”
And she also found Lear’s madness refracted through a female experience intriguing. “Hysterica passio, down, thou climbing sorrow, Thy element’s below!” she quotes the lines. “[As a man] he’s horrified at his disintegration into a sort of womanly mode of behaviour. For a woman, it’s a rejection of her own femaleness … a self-hatred and a hatred of that which might make her seem weak.”
After Lear, she’ll appear in director’s Jane Campion’s TV series Top of the Lake and she hints at a TV comedy series in the pipeline. After that, who knows? “I wait to be invited. That’s the actor’s life and it’s the life of a freelance actor and director.” I scoff at this outrageous image of one of our most treasured performers. “Well, my agent rings me all the time,” she says drily, with a hint of a twinkle in those famous green eyes.
Published in Vogue Australia August 2012
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