GREAT PRETENDERS
As Mia Wasikowska makes her theatrical debut in Lord of the Flies, the stage is set for questioning what it is to be male and female in this era.
The stage is now set for questioning what it is to be male and female in this era. The best forum to explore and express these ideas is the theatre, and Mia Wasikowska is blurring the lines in her subversive stage debut in Lord of the Flies. By Jane Albert.
Acclaimed Australian actor Mia Wasikowska has convincingly morphed into a variety of diverse characters in her career. We’ve believed her to be the wide-eyed ingenue Alice who tumbles down the rabbit hole into Tim Burton’s dark and mysterious world in Alice in Wonderland. We’ve accepted her as the enigmatic Robyn Davidson as she treks for nine months across the inhospitable Western Australian desert with only a dog and four camels for company in Tracks. And we’ll soon see her become puppeteer Judy in a subversive domestic violence revenge tale written and directed by Australian actor Mirrah Foulkes in the film Judy & Punch. So it shouldn’t be a stretch to see the award-winning actor as an adolescent boy marooned on a desert island with his schoolmates after their plane is shot down, in the Sydney Theatre Company’s (STC) adaptation of Lord of the Flies, which will mark Wasikowska’s Australian stage debut.
After all, if there is any art form that asks its audience to suspend belief and let their imagination run wild, it’s theatre. Yet writers and directors have typically tended to stick carefully to gendered roles when it comes to casting or creating roles – until now.
In one of the biggest shake-ups since women were first allowed to grace the stage in the late 17th-century, there are monumental changes taking place in theatres across Australia. It seems almost everywhere you turn female actors are playing roles traditionally performed by men. Not only that, but men’s roles are being rewritten as female roles. And it goes further, with female actors playing roles in their own gender that were originally written for men. Confused? Don’t be. According to some of our most provocative and influential actors and directors, this is more than a passing trend and there’s plenty of time to get used to it.
Nevertheless, it is a courageous choice for Wasikowska to sign onto a show featuring a gender-blind cast for her stage debut. Despite being regularly approached by various theatre companies, Wasikowska says the time was right to join STC artistic director Kip Williams’s production of Lord of the Flies. “Lots of things I’ve been offered in theatre have been similar to the roles I’ve played in film – period women, repressed women – and I thought it could be amazing to play a 12-year-old boy on stage with a great bunch of other people,” she says. “Personally it was the right time, too, as I wanted to be home this year as much as I could and Kip’s production sounded really challenging, different and exciting. Clicking with Kip was a big part of it, as I felt I’d be well looked after, given it was my first time.”
Wasikowska had enjoyed an earlier production of Williams’s, Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine, in which veteran actor Heather Mitchell was cast as a nine-year-old boy, while young Harry Greenwood played the matriarch. For her own turn, Wasikowska was sent the script from Williams, who was hoping she’d be intrigued enough by the character of Ralph to want to learn more. “Mia is such an interesting artist, I knew she’d be interested in the playfulness of that gender bending,” he says.
Williams’s production of Lord of the Flies, in an adaptation by Nigel Williams, sticks closely to William Golding’s timeless novel that explores how quickly this group of young schoolboys descends into savagery and lawlessness in the absence of adults, trying valiantly to enact what they understand as masculine stereotypes. The production is set in the present day with an ensemble of male and female adult actors. The majority of the lead characters will be played by females, but they are simply actors playing roles rather than women impersonating men or performing in drag.
“I think men and women are more alike than we are different,” Wasikowska says. “We’re taking gender out of the equation and challenging the audience to see these people as characters, as individuals, trying to separate it from gender, which does feel of the time. There’s a lot of discussion about gender right now and about equality in our industry post-MeToo era, and I think that inevitably has an impact on the material being explored.”
While Golding’s all-male story is an indictment of an aggressively masculine culture, Williams takes it further. “None of our ensemble are heterosexual white men – they’re all people who sit outside that group which has dominated our society for so long,” he says. “Lord of the Flies tells the story of a group of boys who will grow up to inherit that patriarchal society, and part of the tension of this gender-blind casting is that the performers themselves are also outsiders.”
On a simple level, Williams hopes his casting will provoke audiences to closely examine the way we’re raising young men, the patriarchal culture that has existed as the status quo for so long and whether there’s an alternative way forward. But there’s a deeper purpose at play. Just as we’re witnessing in federal politics and in boardrooms across the country, Williams is acutely aware of the gender imbalance and that for too long female actors have been left out of the conversation.
“The existing canon of work is so heavily weighted in favour of men [in plays] where the power dynamics don’t reflect the agency and possible power of all genders. It’s about saying: ‘Let’s imagine a world where we can have people of all gender and identity playing these positions of power.’” And he’s leading by example. In addition to his gender-blind casting in Cloud Nine, Williams memorably had Paula Arundell and Kate Box play Banquo and Macduff respectively to Hugo Weaving’s Macbeth; while his 2018 season featured an all-female cast perform the traditionally all-male play Accidental Death of an Anarchist, directed by Sarah Giles.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Director Tessa Leong is a member of Adelaide theatre co-operative Isthisyours?, a small group of female creatives who make work that challenges the status quo. Their most recent production was an all-female performance of David Williamson’s seminal 1977 play, The Club, which explored the corporatisation of the Victorian Football League that began in the late 1970s, complete with buckets of macho chest-thumping. The production was staged first at 25A at Sydney’s Belvoir then at the State Theatre Company of South Australia in April. Williamson was approached for the rights to his work and agreed on the grounds his original script be maintained.
“We’d been thinking about works that are well loved by Australian theatre audiences and The Club was at the top of that list, so I started thinking why that was and what could be done that could allow
“I think men and women are more alike than we are different. We’re taking gender out of the equation and challenging the audience to see these people as characters as individuals, which does feel of the time”
people to re-see the work and what it was they’d loved,” Leong says. In her production, the three actors – including Ms Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries’ Louisa Mignone – performed the play in drag, allowing the audience to hear afresh what was always intended as an indictment on toxic masculinity but, here, performed by women in a contemporary context. “To this day that work is really potent in what it says about masculine behaviour,” Leong says, noting how jarring it is to hear women casually reciting lines about punching wives and strippers.
It’s worth remembering that when Williamson wrote the play women had largely yet to be invited into the sporting arena to the extent they are today. Yet despite the advances made through the AFLW and by the Matildas and Jillaroos, there is clearly so far to go when you consider the misogynistic reaction to a photo of Carlton player Tayla Harris kicking a goal or the sexism that’s still overheard in the commentary box.
Leong says proof of the play’s success was the fact she was continually asked how much of the text had been rewritten. “The words are the same but the work travels through time and across gender [in the second act, the male characters are occasionally played as women] so we felt like we could address more complex questions: what is the performance of gender? How does that feed into our notions of how the world is constructed? And what if women were saying those words – does it feel the same as when they were said by a man? What’s changed since the 70s, and is it enough?”
Ask actor Danielle Cormack and her response is a resounding “no”. “We’ve been in such a male-dominated landscape for so long, I’m all for telling women’s stories, but also trying to break through that and tell human stories,” Cormack says. The star of Wentworth, Rake and Jack Irish regularly tackles roles that require us to think outside the box, not least of which was being cast as a female Alceste, the traditionally male lead in the 2018 production The Misanthrope for Bell Shakespeare. The role was offered to her by director Lee Lewis, who when approached to direct the play initially refused on the grounds the world didn’t need another play about a whingeing white, ageing male. Lee suggested a female performing the role, rewritten as a woman, would be an interesting prospect.
“It was an immediate ‘yes’ from me – I loved the idea of the gender inversion,” Cormack says. “I looked at it more as a humanist than a gendered perspective. When we meet Alceste she’s feeling pretty underwhelmed by the world and the politics of the world, so it was connecting with that – the unfairness of love and the unfairness of life – as opposed to being a woman dealing with it.”
Cormack was similarly delighted to join the cast of the upcoming TV series My Life is Murder, starring Lucy Lawless, in a role that had been written for a male actor but was ultimately offered to her. “I didn’t even read the role, I just said yes because I wanted to be part of the story of asking: ‘Does it have to be played by a man? Does this role have to be played by a woman? Does it have to be heterosexual? Does it have to be white?’ Now more than ever people are talking about this, you hear it in writers’ rooms, you hear it in casting rooms. For so long we’ve been writing prescriptively, and that’s changing.”
Not only are we seeing female actors cast in some of the powerhouse roles from the theatrical canon – think Kate Mulvany playing Shakespeare’s Richard III – there are some fabulous new roles being written for women. Indigenous actor Ursula Yovich recently ate up the stage as an angry, seductive allsinging dynamo in Barbara and the Camp Dogs, written by her and supported by an all-female band; Cormack played the titular lead in Queensland Theatre’s Hedda, a new take on Ibsen’s classic but one in which writer Melissa Bubnic portrayed Hedda as a strong and vengeful businesswoman; the meaty lead roles in STC’s Frederick Schiller’s Mary Stuart, adapted by Mulvany, were lapped up by Helen Thomson and Caroline Brazier; while on screen, you need look no further than Marta Dusseldorp in Janet King or Sarah Lancashire in Happy Valley.
Wasikowska has welcomed the change. “I think there’s an increasing focus on more empowering roles for women, stronger female voices and less of an emphasis of being a counterpart to a male lead. There’s more of a shift towards what’s going on for women at this time.” In the past 12 months, Wasikowska has wrapped filming on Bergman Island, the English-language debut of director Mia Hansen-Løve, starring Tim Roth, and Blackbird, starring Kate Winslet, Sam Neill and Susan Sarandon. “I had a great time on Mia HansenLøve’s set,” she says. “I’d just shot Mirrah’s [project, Judy & Punch] so it was great to do two films with female directors one after the other.”
As head of STC, Williams acknowledges gender-blind casting and more opportunities for female actors are long overdue. “I don’t think it’s a phase and I don’t think it’s a gimmick. I think it’s a way forward, in the way centuries ago women weren’t allowed to perform on stage. It’s the next step in that progress.”
Cormack agrees and says she will continue to use her power as an actor for as long as she can. “These productions are part of a revolution that most of the women I know are part of,” she says, “because how else do we gain equilibrium? This female movement is powerful and it’s one that should be feared, but not so much that it needs to be stopped. We’re just asking to be heard and understood and treated accordingly.”
Mia Wasikowska stars in the Sydney Theatre Company production Lord of the Flies at the Roslyn Packer Theatre from July 23 to August 24. Go to www.sydneytheatre.com.au.