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PLENTY RUN EXTENDED!
Of course, the BIG news this week, in a story we "broke" on our Cate/Sarah
list, the run of PLENTY at the Albery has been extended until July 24. To refresh your memory, here's Jonathan Kent in The Express: "The play dramatises the intriguing statistic that 75 per cent of women flown behind the lines for the Special Operations Executive in the war were subsequently divorced. Ms Blanchett plays - or rather lives - the part of Susan Traherne, a posh English resistance agent who loses her marbles in drab post-war Britain. Blanchett rips up the carpet - in a series of ravishing dresses - wrecking polite dinner parties, boozing and smoking manically to recapture the sense of purpose she found in war. The performance is wired, erotic and superbly flaky...the intensity is astonishing. By turns depressing, funny and puzzling, the play is a snapshot of a life in crisis in a country that has also lost the plot. The Almeida Theatre production - with ingenious sets by Maria Bjornson - is directed with a haunting sense of tragedy". And then, there's the Daily Mail: "...played with extraordinary force, grace and passion by Cate Blanchett...On stage she is looser, limber, altogether larger, with coltish movement, flowing blonde hair, fearless energy, a great voice and an almost frightening emotional power... The play, given a tough, springy production by Jonathan Kent and a brilliant design by Maria Bjornson . Susan is both a specific and a symbolic character, and Miss Blanchett hits exactly the right sound of despair, rhetoric and self-dramatisation. She is a marvel, and a revelation...Overall, the show constitutes another triumph in the Almeida Theatre's colonisation of the West End. Unmissable." USA Today chirped in: "Ms. Blanchett has the most beautifully resonant theatrical voice since Richard Burton". CATE INTERVIEW Otherwise, since it is a rather slow week regarding Cate news, we thought we would begin to serialize a wonderful interview Cate did with ABC Radio (Australian Broadcasting Commission) earlier this year. We have made mention in our Cate bio of her love for music and her enjoyment in sitting in on ABC, spinning records and chatting. Here, for your enjoyment, is Chapter One. Today we will be talking to Cate Blanchett. Just 18 months ago, arts writer Brooke Turner prophetically wrote "For Cate Blanchett international fame seems imminent," and there I was a couple of months ago, in Hollywood of all places, on tour with The Sydney Symphony Orchestra, walking along Santa Monica Boulevard under giant posters of Cate Blanchett in the movie Elizabeth and hearing the buzz in movieland that she is being hotly tipped for an Oscar. How does an actor deal with all this? Especially one who doesn't appear to seek out the stardom side of things at all, but whose reputed to be really much more interested in the business of acting. I hope we find out some of this today, Cate Blanchett is our guest. She's a NIDA girl, she's worked successfully on stage here and abroad, she's had a run of roles in films in recent years, Oscar and Lucinda was the first really big one, then came Thank God He Met Lizzie and Paradise Road. But it's Elizabeth, directed by the Indian, Shekhar Kapur, that has everyone talking. It's a wonderful film, despite being criticised as historically questionable. Blanchett's Elizabeth is a sexy, strong-minded woman and I'm interested to find out how she got under the skin of this English queen. Cate Blanchett is our guest and she joins us with music that she's asked for. MUSIC CUE: From the original cast recording of "You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown". ABC: From the original cast recording of "You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown", and I can't tell you who they were! CB: (laughing) I don't know who's giving their Lucy, it's not the same record, well not the same Lucy I grew up with so I don't know. ABC: Cate Blanchett chose that, good morning, CB: Hello. ABC: Welcome to the program. Tell me, you grew up with that as a record or as a show you went to see, or what? CB: No, I have never seen the musical, but I think my father brought it back from the states for us, so as a family we sort of (chuckling) used to act out all the parts. ABC: That's wonderful and while you were singing along you still remembered all the words. CB: I know, I know, it's very strange, it's funny enough that when I was doing Oleanna with Geoffrey Rush that we sort of bonded over this musical because he was amazed that I knew all Lucy's lyrics. ABC: How did he come to know..did he know them as well or.. CB: Well.I can say coz he's out of the country at the moment, (confidentially) but he played "Snoopy". ABC: Did he? CB: Yes. Yes. ABC: In what? CB: In Brisbane, years and years and years ago. ABC: Geoffrey Rush as Snoopy.I wonder if that's on his CV? CB: Probably not. (laughs) |
ABC: You've done a lot of work with him actually, haven't you, or
quite a
few important pieces with him? CB: Yes, a lot of turning points funnily enough, for me, as an actor have been with Geoffrey, we sort of seem to orbit one another...one of the first things I did out of drama school was Oleanna with him and that was an enormous growing experience for me. ABC: That was a fantastic play, I loved that. But could we talk about Elizabeth, because that's what's in everybody's mind at the moment and I sort of think it's a bit funny to talk about it to you because the shoot itself was made and in the can and edited and in the theatres a long- longish time ago, so the work for you is now part of your past and you've obviously thought of other things since then. But could you tell me about what went into the business of getting the role of Elizabeth, was it offered to you and a decision you had to make, or what? CB: Well it's sort of a bit of a myth I think, you read those thing about where I beat 'such and such' for the role, things don't really work that way, projects often are around for years and years and years, this was one of those ones and I just happened to be in London at the time when Shekar was there and we met and we got on and he sort of cast me from that meeting. And, which is great. ABC: But you, who set up that meeting? CB: Robyn Gardiner, who represents me here. ABC: So with the view that for you playing Elizabeth in this film? CB: Yes, yeah, I just happened to be with Thank God He Met Lizzie, it was in the marketplace at Cannes, so Cherie Nowlan and I were in London and then on the way back I was there for, I think, 24 hours and they set up a screen test and I screen-tested which was quite an amazing experience. ABC: In what way? CB: Well I, well Bruce Beresford, when I did Paradise Road with him, he said that he doesn't believe in screen testing Australian actors because the screen tests, there's so little money that's put into them here, there's not the make-up and the hair people and it's not lit in such a way as the screen tests are overseas, so he thinks that Australian actors don't stand a chance. So he really had to sort of fight, whereas over there just spend so much money that you can. ABC: Like a mini-film? CB: Like a small south African nation. ABC: Did you have to learn lines for it, or can you stand, I imagine, like an audition on stage where you come on stage and they're in the audience and you've got the script and you read a bit and then you go off. Anything like that at all or not? CB: Well my, my experience was unusual. I think I was working with Shekar and he doesn't have an enormous love of language, he's much more interested in the emotional experience of what's happening at the time, so the lines were sort of there and thrown away, so he wanted me to improvise a lot of Elizabethan dialogue which was, you know, a little bit difficult but you know, I don't mind being pushed in that way, I found it challenging. ABC: When he offered you the job did you say "yes! yes! yes!," immediately, or did you have any doubts about it? CB: I was intrigued by him and his filmic sensibility. I thought The Bandit Queen was such an incredible film and it still stays with me, so the thought of working with him on that particular piece was exciting but I knew that I had to be away and I just got married and you know, it was quite a painful decision. ABC: How long was the shoot? CB: Umm.I was away for about four and a half months I think. ABC: Where was it shot? CB: Oh, It was mostly in and around, we were based in Newcastle in Northern England and we went sort of an hour out, on the coast. ABC: And did you read a lot about Elizabeth? How did you decide to play her? CB: Well the script takes a very, it has a very strong bookend, a very strong beginning and a very strong end which are diametrically opposed to one another so it was important to me that that journey was really subtly marked because. ABC: I don't know how you did it, because you start off as a young girlish girl, a playful, flirtatious, sexy girl and you end up a very strong, stiff, white-faced brocade queen. CB: Yes, yes the end is probably the more recognisable side of Elizabeth, as a monarch that we know, so it was great to go back and whenever you're delving into a political figure's internal life it does have to be invention. But for me, I read mostly, her letters and, funnily enough, her handwriting, I found...It just really, you can in a lot of ways forget that people like that were human beings that lived and breathed so seeing.. ABC: What was her handwriting like? CB: Well it was quite moving actually, I saw a letter that she wrote to her brother when she was incarcerated, a letter she wrote to Edward and it was incredibly--it was meticulous, it was just divine, it was like butter, her handwriting and then I read a letter she wrote at the end of her life, I think it was Essex's death warrant and it was incredibly frail and spidery. But she was known for her beautiful hand. ABC: But she was a sexy, sexy young woman wasn't she? Oh, I'm sorry, we're all out of time for this week. Please join us next week when we continue the wonderful Cate/ABC Radio Interview. Good night, ladies and gentlemen. :-))).
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This is certainly exciting news for Cate fans, as Cate has been packing them in,
and this will give that many more fans the opportunity to witness Cate's
brilliance on stage.