I’ve prescribed a course of interviews with performers to meet afresh the theatre art. I’m a jaded doctor with a script, a leech of inspiration, but Melbourne actor Caroline Lee has plenty of it and doesn’t seem to mind sharing. In her cosy, book-filled art-deco apartment we sit round the dinner table and without break, talk for two hours. Her website tells us that she is a performer of her own and other’s theatre. The last performance I caught of her was in the Green Room Award Best Show 2014, The Trouble With Harry by Lachlan Philpott, for which Lee was nominated for a Green Room Award, should ‘a got the gong. There’s a challenge in her eye. Her knowingness translates onstage, a performer able to share her thoughts without speaking. Stillness and economy of expression are a forte, emotional range that never ceases to surprise. In Trouble with Harry we saw a woman played by Maude Davey, whose public and private persona was that of a man. Lee’s performance of his wife walked the line of knowing and naivety so, one couldn’t breathe. Stifling was the charade. The choices of a woman with son of that era were most delicately poised in the smouldering acceptance she portrayed.
From October 9 she will perform with Red Stitch Theatre for the first time in Jurassica by Dan Giovanni. I’ve done some homework, her website blog describes her 2013 and then second time around 2014 experience of month-long workshops in Florence on seminal Polish theatre-maker and theorist Jerzy Grotowski with Mario Biagini of The Open Program where she developed a solo performance piece of Carol Churchill text from Seven Jewish Children. The question of why that, there, got us straight to the guts. It was her friend and artistic collaborator that reignited an old enthusiasm for Grotowski.
‘What Bagryana (Popov) said to me was, this takes me back to the reason that I wanted to be an actor in the first place. It’s kind of like the fundamentals of telling a story, action, being connected to your intentions, to your objective to what is important about making a piece of work. Why do you want to say something. Why do you want to speak this thing. Why are you getting up in front of us and doing this, what does it mean to you? That was what got her into it in the first place, but also what Bagryana wasn’t seeing so much in the ‘post-dramatic landscape.’
‘Oh? Post-Dramatic?’
Lee is too suspicious not to question my ignorance, but we both agree tacit that an explanation will do the trick. Perhaps with a weariness of theory she wails, ‘You know the whole theory… I actually haven’t… I don’t want any of this to go on the thing…’ she points at my recording device. ‘I haven’t read the post-dramatic book either. Work based on the conceptual framework. A strong design component. Maybe the actors are either disconnected or they’re used as puppets within the framework of the auteur. So… yeah, there’s no drama – it’s post dramatic.’
‘And you don’t like it?’
‘I like it in some ways, like I find contemporary art extremely inspiring, paintings, and…’
‘Coz you’ve done some installation work…’
‘Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, I’m interested in post-modern theory. I’m not averse to it, but I do sometimes… It depends on the individual nature of the work. For me as an audience member it will just depend on how connected it is, on what I’m feeling. If I don’t feel anything, if it’s only getting me intellectually… Though I suppose there’s no rules because I’m also not necessarily interested in theatre that seems old fashioned. The world’s not like that anymore.’
‘You were aware of Grotowski beforehand no?’
‘Yeah, especially as a younger performer, when I first, first, first started working.’
She describes two years of summer camps away from the folks in Portsea performing in Nijinski directed by Robert Tutor, They Shoot Horses Don’t They? and Saint Joan of the Stockyards, Brecht directed by Mick Carter, in which she played Joan. With the glow of reminiscence in her eye, she takes me back with her, slang tone recalls sick holidays with like, totally radical types.
‘It was fully intense, absorbing, kind of passionate, that whole thing that happens when you go into the world of theatre in an ensemble situation. Especially with They Shoot Horses Don’t They I mean it was really sort of living it. We were all just kind of living it. Same with Nijinksi. It was so intense and absorbing.’
‘Your parents let you do that?’ Prudish, I display shock.
‘Well, my parents are academics, only child.’ she explains, droll. Does she raise an eyebrow?
‘And they were okay with all the theatre thing?’
‘No, I think they thought it was going to be a phase that would pass. And it didn’t. But I think I was taught by people who believed in that kind of stuff. The Grotowski heritage, Poor Theatre.’
‘And that was the first exposure you had to theatre. When?’
‘I think Nijinski would have been 1980. Mick Carter had an extremely clear vision about Joan and they Shoot Horses. I just knew everything there was to know about Brecht after that, you know, and I was 16. As much as I could eat up about that theory. Even the fact that, with the whole ‘Alienation Technique’ you still had to put in, had to feel, all of those ambiguities… it’s interesting to look back and think how deeply and passionately one can immerse at such a young age. Life changing, there was that sense of community, that sense of being together, working together to make ‘a thing’ and how that group focus can work.’
She stares from under lids that give scepticism, a challenge and examination of me. Without doubt Lee retains a quiet power, belief, confidence in herself. Which is as well because her performance can be fragile. Vulnerability might overcome were it not for that inner resolve.
‘I’d had three years of being intensely busy and I got to the end of 2013 and went… “oh, bit of an empty slate for next year”. Then I realised that 2014 was exactly 20 years since I graduated from drama school and the thing was… if there was to be a Caroline Lee retrospective, what would the monograph about the retrospective say. The adjunct question was, what do I want to do in the next twenty?’
I make the comparison with hypothetical actors who wait for the agent to call. That the path of enquiry and investigation she seems to be pursuing is not for all.
‘Partly because my parents who were both scientists were both a bit resistant. My father was a geneticist and my mother was a botanist. Because of the analytical academic background… you’re asked to account for yourself… But a profound influence on me, was reading the Vivisector by Patrick White. In that, I suppose there was a model of the artist who is self-directed. You’ve got a line of enquiry as a visual artist. What’s the representation of the world and how am I going to do it? When I first went out into the industry, so I got my Actors Equity card in that first year out of school, and an agent. It was pretty brutal and difficult and hard. And I thought, where’s my succour, how am I going to negotiate this landscape? And I was like, well, I guess I’ll just have my own line of enquiry.’
‘You did the Drama Centre course in London, Did it actively encourage the self-directed artist?’
‘Not particularly… That was the school Simon Callow wrote Being an Actor about. When I read that book, I was kind of like, wow. That next level of intensity and commitment. One of the great things about the Drama Centre was that we learnt the same subjects for the whole three years. not like doing a bit of Alexander and a bit of Feldenkrais, we did Classical Ballet for three years, we did contemporary movement for three years, we did method, they believed in the program and we really immersed. So through the work with Yat Malmgren, once we’d gotten to know the systematisation of Laban…”
Lee speaks with her hands naturally but once we start talking about the system of movement classification, analysis and notation invented by Rudolf Von Laban and published in 1928, then adapted for actors by Yat Malmgren whom she studied with, her body really clicks in with communicating.
‘One of the exercises we did was that we wrote little scenarios, little monologues to illustrate for ourselves what the types were. So we started with ‘near’, we’d write a ‘near’ scenario. What it meant for the body in space. I loved that. The writing. The creation of these characters. Made one that was… people just loved her. I wrote a thing that had a very substantial life. Yeah.’
I can see her living it as she describes it. The sense of peer approval as well as of personal achievement warms the room. A first success with what would develop into her considerable oeuvre of solo performance work.
We move back to Florence, Grotowski and the Carol Churchill text concerning Israeli settlements within the Palestinian quarter. It’s a long discussion concerning the feedback she received from the facilitator Mario Biagini in which he couldn’t understand why someone so remote from the Israeli/Palestinian conflict would choose a piece concerning it. To quote Lee’s precis, “…tragedy means that as an audience you see both sides of the situation, two sides that cannot be reconciled, although both are right in their own ways.’
I object that if a situation is to be represented then artists have an obligation to present the politics with historical accuracy, regardless of performance theories on tragedy.
‘Yes, except, for me, the best political theatre is the theatre that asks me to ask questions or to do more investigation. It’s one that provokes, another perspective. Rather than telling me something that they feel they very clearly know. I’m more interested in questions that provoke me to interrogate further, because I think I’m quite sceptical.’
‘Sceptical?’
‘In general. The moment that somebody says to me , you should think this, or this is how it is, a question arises for me that is, why is that person saying that? Why should I believe that? Do you understand every aspect? Have you devoted your life to investigating this question?’
I raise my own experience developing a performance about war crimes when the director took sympathy for soldiers who were ‘just following orders’, the “Nurumberg Defence”. Because I vetoed it, the performative line could not be pursued.
‘Sure, I totally agree, like I don’t think it necessarily potent or correct in every instance to say, anything goes… I had a violent argument with a friend about abuse by priests of young kids and I was like, it is never alright. Like I’m pretty okay in many situations to go oh yeah, there’s another perspective on this, but for me that crosses the line. And still to this day, I’m not gonna condone a piece of theatre that goes, yeah, they might have been abused themselves we can show… I’m just gonna go, no way.’
‘So if you’re playing the pedophile, what do you do, do you sympathise with the character?’
‘I don’t know whether sympathise. No I don’t think sympathise. Possibly empathise, because you’re more placing yourself within their reality. So you’re trying to work out where that behaviour or where those impulses are coming from. So you’re doing an investigation as far as you can imaginatively. I think there would be aspects of the experience of it that you might be sympathetic to, like if the character was exhibiting shame. The isolation, the loneliness, the guilt, the grief… but overall… it’s hard.’
We’ve been talking for ninety minutes, it’s Tuesday, it’s the evening, dinner hasn’t been had but Lee is keen to continue. Red Stitch have developed a loving subscription base for their internationally focused writer’s theatre. They perform Jurassica in October after Melbourne’s Fringe Festival where again the shows are many but anecdotally at least, the audiences are few. I ask Lee if she worries about it.
‘I took Alias Grace (by Margaret Atwood directed by Laurence Strangio) to Sydney for a month. We hired our own publicist. We did it at the Tap Gallery. First week we had decent houses. Second week it was dead, third week it picked up and fourth week we were packed out. And one show in the second week four people showed up. So Bronwyn the stage manager went out and said, Caroline’s very happy to do the show for you if you want, or we can give you free tickets to come back. Apparently the four looked at each other and went, yeah, let’s see it. So I did it for four people. It was really beautiful doing the show for them in that way. About three years later I was at The Stork Hotel, and I’d done La Doleur (Marguerite Duras, directed by Laurence Strangio), and I met this guy who said he was one of those four. He said, I have never forgotten. It was like a gift that you gave us. It was amazing… So who am I to say, this isn’t enough for me. These ten people. Who am I to judge what sort of experience they’re having inside of themselves, and what life it’s given them. They’ve turned up and that is enough for me. I worry a bit about the death of theatre. But enough people come running up to me in the foyer or come running up to me with that look on their faces like “fark” that I go, well, if that’s still happening in rehearsal rooms, in workshops, in theatres like Red Stitch, the Spiegeltent, then it’s good enough for me.’
