It can be done
Kate Mulvany overcame childhood cancer and her partner’s death to become Australia’s busiest playwright. Now she’s bringing an unusual and inventive work to New Zealand, writes Steve Kilgallon.
Kate Mulvany credits her mother, a schoolteacher, for the fearsome work ethic that means she can write nine hours a day and take to the stage most nights, despite suffering from enduring, debilitating pain.
She also credits her mother for getting her out of Geraldton, a remote Western Australian port town, where career prospects didn’t stretch much beyond the mines and the fishing boats. And she also believes that her mother – and father Danny – imbued her with an attitude that said even a young country girl could succeed in the Sydney theatre scene.
Mulvany, nowadays one of Australia’s busiest playwrights, wasn’t in Auckland this week to see one of her works, Medea, make its New Zealand debut, although she hopes to come across before its three-week run concludes. She’s too busy: she has three scripts for three different theatre companies all due next week and is performing herself in a Sydney Bell Shakespeare production.
Hers is an attitude forged by a remarkable personal story of survival, one which may soon make it on to the big screen.
Mulvany is in the final stages of securing funding (and has sent scripts to interested directors) for a feature film adaptation of The
Seed, a play she wrote about an Australian Vietnam veteran and his daughter. Mulvany’s father, a ten-pound Pom, was exposed to Agent Orange serving as a conscripted soldier in the Vietnam War, and as a result Mulvany suffered the rare Wilms’ Tumour as a child. She lost her hair, saw her best friend die in hospital and was told she wouldn’t live beyond her teens. Wilms’ cost her a kidney, any hope of bearing children and left her with a life of back pain.
‘‘When you’ve had childhood cancer, you and your family don’t sweat the small stuff,’’ she says. ‘‘I was a crayfisherman’s daughter in Country WA, so it was not really a common thing for someone in my position to turn around and declare they want to be an actress and playwright. But having survived cancer, you and your family all go ‘yep sure, go for it, let’s make it happen’. So I guess it gives you a rigour and determination and discipline to succeed, even in the most competitive of industries.’’
Mulvany shifted to Sydney at the age of 21, but says she found that easier than a teenage move from Geraldton to Perth which ‘‘scared the life out of me’’. ‘‘I just had a gut feeling that I was supposed to be here: I just met the right people and the right people supported me but a lot of the elders of the industry helped me.’’
She rapidly secured stage and screen roles that led her into a prodigious writing career. ‘‘It’s luck,’’ she says, talking to me from her home office in Tempe, in Sydney’s inner-west, where she’s enduring her deadline hell. ‘‘But it’s also that I’m pretty tough on myself in terms of work ethic, so I know I can back up what I am saying. I think the schoolgirl nerd in me makes sure I still hand things in on time. I have to get the work done on time. Mum was a schoolteacher and she hammered in to me, that when you say you will deliver you damn well deliver.’’
For those who don’t see much theatre, Mulvany has appeared in all places for a jobbing Aussie actor – Underbelly, Blue Heelers, The Chaser – but may be most recognisable for her role in Baz Luhrmann’s extravagant movie adaptation of The Great Gatsby. ‘‘Baz was after people who were quite theatrical, because that’s his style, and he often uses stage actors in his films. He put out a call for someone to play the ‘loathsome Mrs McKee’, so I read the book and thought ‘yes, she is loathsome, I love her’.’’ Mulvany got the part, and Luhrmann would fly her on to set for her scenes – her sister would wait at the stage door in Perth, and drive her to the airport for the midnight flight to Sydney to be on set for 5.30am.
As you can tell, her atrophied back muscles and damaged vertebrae have not slowed her down. ‘‘I should probably get some more rest, but it is good. The effects will remain with me for life but I don’t have much choice about that,’’ she says. ‘‘I do try to alleviate the chronic pain as much as I can but doing a show every night takes its toll.’’ She doesn’t, she says, reject roles on the basis of them becoming too physical: the play she’s in right now, Justin Fleming’s new work The Literati ,a modernisation of a Moliere play, is full of pratfalls. ‘‘But when I am on stage, I don’t feel pain because I am playing that character, I am in another body. It’s when I get off stage that I feel it: it’s kind of warped, living a life of constant pain and having it sidelined when on stage but feeling worse when I get off.’’
Mulvany’s list of playwriting credits is now over 20, and that’s despite a three-year spell of nearseclusion after the suicide of her partner, actor Mark Priestley, in 2008. She was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress. She’s now married, to actor Hamish Michael, and lives a ‘‘quiet life’’ with Michael and their two cats.
Anyway, Medea, a clever reimagining of the Greek myth about the wife of Jason (of the Argonauts), who slays their two sons when Jason leaves her for another woman. It’s an old story, often told, but Mulvany and cowriter Anne-Louise Sarks have recast it to focus on the two boys, playing inside their bedroom as their parents rage and argue outside the door.
It’s been staged in Sydney, Warsaw and London and had a mixture of professional child actors and complete novices, but Mulvany says that inexperience brings a rawness and reality to the staging. In Auckland, two pairs of two children will alternate across the three-week run. ‘‘The script itself is written quite tightly, quite structured even though it may not seem that way when the audience is watching: they see two children playing, making jokes, chasing each other and playfighting. But it’s actually a tightly bundled very tough script to stick to.’’
The Auckland season is being directed by Rachel House, an
actor, director and writer whose stocks are high right now after her turn as the power-crazed social worker in The Hunt for the Wilderpeople. Mulvany says she knew of House’s work even before she was suggested. ‘‘I jumped at the chance and she was just in exactly the same place as we were, right on the same wavelength.’’
Mulvany thinks its a fairly unique approach: in a rough sense, it’s close only to Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are
dead, in that it plays on the same idea of taking two minor characters and thrusting them into the foreground. This, though, is no comedy. ‘‘We are watching two children in the last hour of their lives: the audience knows it but the children don’t. Despite that, what we wanted to do was capture the joy of being a child and the innocence of childhood, and that it’s the adults that destroy that innocence unfairly and injustly.’’