MARTA DUSSELDORP
Small-screen favourite Marta Dusseldorp is enjoying treading the boards again both in Sydney and in her new home in Hobart.
The Australian actor relishes her new lead role in the play, The Deep Blue Sea.
Marta Dusseldorp enjoys a challenge. Star of television shows such as A Place to Call Home, Janet King and Jack Irish, Dusseldorp relishes a meaty role that allows her to discover a character’s hidden layers or learn something about human nature.
The Deep Blue Sea’s Lady Hester Collyer is one such role.
The protagonist of Terence Rattigan’s acclaimed 1952 play, Hester is contemplating suicide after leaving her High Court judge husband for a dashing young ex-pilot whom she belatedly realises may not be able to give her what she needs emotionally. Rattigan, who wrote the play after a break up with his male partner in post-war Britain when homosexuality was still illegal, is considered to have based the play around his own experience.
Says Dusseldorp, “Hester’s is a really complicated journey, it’s not something that I understood from reading it straight away so I’m always interested when I find a role a bit overwhelming or perplexing, or I need to dive further into it to pull it apart.
“Rattigan has written it with these really great puzzle pieces that slowly join up to make this beautiful mosaic of life as I would like to see it – people from different backgrounds and different experiences coming together as one.
“Having said that, it’s not at all sentimental. It can be really, really funny and then turn on a dime and become incredibly heartbreaking.
“When you first read the play, it seems like, ‘Oh yes, we know what this is’, and then you peel off the layers as the rehearsals go on and you find this beautiful undercurrent of complication and muddiness and murkiness … and then hope is right at the bottom of it. That’s why I felt compelled to take this part.”
Despite having been written almost 70 years ago in a very different time, Dusseldorp feels the play is just as relevant now as it was in conservative post-war Britain.
“The Deep Blue Sea is a story of a woman who, through her community, learns to reinvent herself and find hope for the future,” she says. “So I’m hoping it will appeal to everyone … young, old, rich, poor, hopeful, unhopeful. I think everyone will get something out of this because they’re all represented inside this minutiae of the greater world that we live in.
“I wouldn’t do it if it weren’t still relevant today – I don’t see the point of rehashing classics for the sake of it. This play has a real urgency right now, it speaks to the fact that – as we become more individualised and isolated by technology – we’re forgetting the celebration and collaboration of being part of the human race. For me, it’s a call to action of finding out who you live next to and who you’re married to; why you’ve fallen in love with someone and how to engage with them spiritually and physically as one – those things can’t be separated.”
Dusseldorp says the play explores the question of how to have selfrespect and not let others judge you, a pertinent message in this age of social media obsession. “Rattigan wrote it as an ode to his partner and without giving too much away, it should leave the audience with tools to articulate more for themselves how wondrous their lives are. It’s a really beautiful gift.”
Last year Dusseldorp traded her Sydney life in order to move to Hobart, with her Tasmanian-born husband, actor-director Ben Winspear and their children – Grace, 13 and Maggie, 10. The couple’s focus in the Apple Isle will be their recently formed production company, Archipelago Productions.
“We’re opening the Hedberg Studio, our brand new state-of-the-art theatre space currently being built next to the Theatre Royal in Hobart. We’re doing a season of The Bleeding Tree by Angis Cerini from 9–16 May; Ben’s directing it and I’m in it.
“The arts festival, MONA FOMA creates an incredible buzz and vibe in Tasmania but we want people to know they can come here any weekend hopefully and something from the arts will be presented. It’s our vision to attract people from the mainland.”
• The Deep Blue Sea, STC
4 February – 7 March, 2020 sydneytheatre.com.au
“YOU PEEL OFF THE LAYERS AND FIND A BEAUTIFUL UNDERCURRENT OF MUDDINESS AND MURKINESS .” MARTA DUSSELDORP