2025 will mark a return to acting for me! I’m fortunate to have been cast in Rowan Greaves’ production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream taking place in May next year.
The last time Rowan and I worked together was when he was Artistic Director of Australian Theatre for Young People and he hired me as teacher for the very youngest classes.
Frankly, I wouldn’t be doing this if it was any other director.
I have total confidence in him, and I’m delighted he has confidence in me.
And he’s cast me as Puck! Talk about a Dream role. I’ll be drawing on all my physical resources to be a sprightly sprite.
During 2024, I had a number of conversations – especially with Merridy Eastman, Zac Mckay, and David Pidd – that made me realise I had unfinished business with theatre. When I quit acting in 1985, it was because I felt unqualified and less capable than I should have been.
The last show in my time at Freewheels in Newcastle was Sparks’ll Fly, a TIE production written by Graham Pitts for that cast, which included Ruth Robertson, Vanessa Ready, and Kerry-Anne O’Hearn, as well as me. It was about a young woman determined to be an electrician despite sexist opposition. I played the brother.
The thing is, I had a great deal of trouble finding the character. When given a meaty, dramatic role written for me, I couldn’t meet the challenge. I felt I didn’t have the technique to achieve any kind of transformation.
I found myself delivering a pastiche, at best. In the end, I just concentrated on saying my lines and not bumping into the furniture, as Spencer Tracy famously advised. The performances were fine, we got good reviews, but I somehow decided I wasn’t really an actor.
Oh sure, I could get up and be confident in front of an audience, but that’s performing, not acting. So, I quit being an actor.
This tied in with my contract at Freewheels finishing, plus my desire to stay in Newcastle since I’d formed a relationship with Hazel and wanted to stay with her.
I spent two years doing everything connected with theatre BUT acting. I was a stagehand for the Hunter Valley Theatre Company, I taught at two competing youth theatre companies, I got a TAFE grant to set up a Newcastle Theatre of the Deaf, I was “Artistic Director” for Fanny’s nightclub (look, it paid well and I transitioned them from wet t-shirt competitions to Putting On The Hits miming contests), I taught young models how to catwalk, I did TV and radio ads (“up to 55 days, interest-free!”), I busked, I held non-verbal theatre workshops for young adults with intellectual disabilities.
When Hazel and I moved to Sydney together, I did audition for a few productions but nothing really happened for me. Hazel was working at Horan, Wall and Walker, an information agency, which offered me a job writing capsule reviews of movies, TV, and theatre.
That gradually expanded into writing full-time for HWW: events listings, then creating a faxed news update for local media, and when the web came along, creating a movie listings website and other tech products. My theatrical career became a memory.
40 years is a lot of time for reflection and reconsideration. Thanks to HWW, I went to see a lot of theatre, and wrote a lot about it. And I stayed friends with actors, so talked about it a lot.
When Rowan said he was producing A Midsummer Night’s Dream and had a great cast but hadn’t found his Puck yet, I tentatively messaged him on Facebook to ask if I could audition. At first, he thought I was joking and then thought I hadn’t realised it was an amateur production.
When I said I’d like to give it a go, Rowan simply said, “You’ve got it!” No audition required, even after all this time.
I feel the time is right to have another crack at acting, and then why not Shakespeare, why not The Dream, why not Puck?
We had our first reading this past Sunday. It felt like slipping on a comfortable pair of old gloves.
Rowan has cast very well. There were some stumbles over the Shakespearean language but personally I truly felt in my element, assured with the character, the words and the action.
It helps that I know The Dream well, having seen a few productions and having read it for pleasure.
It’s a wonderful piece of theatre, and another of Shakespeare’s plays about plays and players, along with Hamlet.
Of course, there’s an inherent challenge for a 64 year old to play a mischievous fairy, but we have ideas about that, Rowan and I.
Sure, you may well say of me, “What fools these mortals be”, but come May 2025, it’ll be me saying it, back on stage again.