Robyn Malcolm's fear factor

BY KIM KNIGHT

It's bye bye Cheryl and hello Winnie, as Robyn Malcolm takes on one of theatre's greatest female roles. She tells Kim Knight why she's scared – and loving it.

Fish pie. Rum and coke. More rum and coke. It all seemed such a good idea at the time.

But the afternoon after the night before, Robyn Malcolm is vaguely regretting the party where she channelled her inner Cheryl West.

"Panadol ..." she says, searching the cupboard in the kitchen that, less than 24 hours ago, was awash with Outrageous Fortune faces gathered to watch the first show of their final season.

"It started as a bit of a jape. Because, you know, Cheryl makes fish pie ..."

Cheryl West. Malcolm's most famous small screen character, most recently seen bashing a fellow prisoner with a breakfast tray; stripped down to her Hoochie Mama bra; and banished to purgatory – also known as Christchurch.

But Malcolm filmed those scenes months ago. Outrageous Fortune wrapped in February. What did Malcolm do next?

"I told myself it had to be scary, challenging and uncomfortable..."

On August 20, she takes the lead role in a Silo Theatre production of Samuel Beckett's Happy Days. Michael Hurst directs, Cameron Rhodes co-stars. He gets about six lines. The rest of the play is Malcolm – under blazing lights, buried in a mound of earth. In the first act, she can move her arms. By the second, she is embedded up to her neck.

The play, by the author of Waiting for Godot, is considered Beckett's "lightest" work.

"It is a masterpiece, pure and simple," says Malcolm. It is also about as far from Outrageous Fortune as she could get.

"I nearly turned it down because I thought it would be too terrifying. The thing with Happy Days is, it's one of the great pieces of theatrical writing in the English canon. You have to measure up to it, but you also have to get out of the way of it."

Live theatre, says Malcolm, "is the truest and most human form of story-telling".

"It is immediate and ephemeral and only exists in the moment. That gives it a kind of intensity and almost ritualistic quality which cannot be replicated, or `saved' with the technology of recording and transmission."

If all of that sounds remarkably coherent for a woman with a hangover, that's because she emailed some quotes through later. Malcolm has done enough media to know when she hasn't said everything she could have.

The Sunday Star-Times clippings file starts in 1994 with a three-paragraph story about what the actor, then playing Shortland Street nurse Ellen Crozier, was reading (Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha).

In subsequent clippings, we learn that Malcolm got married, quit smoking, had two babies, got addicted to pilates, hated her body, loved her body, was anti-smacking and pro-recycling.

"When I talk about things like a miscarriage, or whatever, I do that deliberately," says Malcolm, in the Devonport home she doesn't mind reporters visiting.

"People get really snobby about the women's magazines, but I am a big supporter of them. They are a great forum for women right across the socio-economic scale.

"As far as the pregnancy stuff goes, the stuff around babies and mothering and the rest of it, I think there's a lot of bullshit out there in the media about how amazing we all are. I've never wanted to present that image. I'd much rather be honest. I only talk about the stuff I can be honest about."

Malcolm, 45, has always had an opinion. Raised in Ashburton, she left the small South Canterbury town in 1982, after the Springbok tour.

"My father was associate principal of the secondary school, and he signed a letter to the paper saying he was opposed to the tour, and some parents said they were going to remove their kids from the school."

It is, she agrees, "hard to believe that we were that blinkered, that bullheaded and that stupid, actually".

But if it hadn't have been the tour, "oh, it would have been something else". No nukes. No experiments on animals. "There are photos of me at protests. I guess when the deeply self-interested world of the actress takes over, I forget for a while – and then I open my eyes again and look around."

Last year, Malcolm joined other prominent Kiwis, including former Xena actor Lucy Lawless, fronting a Greenpeace campaign that called for a 40% decrease in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, and more recently the pair marched against National's plans to open up conservation land for mining.

"People get really cynical and call me a show pony... my response is at least we're doing something, we're being concerned active members of our community, giving a damn and giving some time."

Actors, says Malcolm, "tend to exist outside that cliche of wanting to avoid conflict and not wanting to rock the boat and not saying what we think. I think New Zealanders do a really amazing line in passive aggression, and maybe in this industry, we're less like that".

Malcolm for parliament? "I'd spend half my time crying. I'd get really upset that people didn't want to agree with me."

She has, so far, avoided thinking about the Auckland super city mayoral race. "Because I just don't like it. I can see that a big metropolis needs central governance, needs leadership, however I quite like that Auckland didn't... that there was governance in all its different communities and they could reflect the personality of their communities.

"I am interested in what we're going to do about public transport. The leaders of Auckland have to get cars off the road. They just do."

That's a hybrid parked out front of her house. "What did someone call it last night? My earnest car. Apparently it doesn't emit smog, it emits smug. It means I can get away with other stuff. Life's about balance. You can own a Prius, but behave badly in other areas!"

Plus, the Prius chills the kids out. "It's so quiet..." Charlie, six, and Pete, four, have, says Malcolm, "made me more sane".

"I think it's possible to be too driven, and too focused. What did Pete say the other day? `Mummy, I just want to lie on the floor with you and talk about how we build the world.' I'm so busy, and the kids remind me not to be."

Well, sort of. The week of our first interview, she was rehearsing Happy Days, starring in Outrageous Fortune and appearing in a film festival offering, The Hopes and Dreams of Gazza Snell. In Australia, she has picked up a small role in the movie Burning Man (starring Cemetery Junction's Matthew Goode, alongside Rachel Griffiths and Kerry Fox) and a guest spot on new ABC television drama Rake.

"After you've been in a successful show, actors have to go into actor prison for a bit. You don't necessarily go out and get the next big job, because you're so known. Everyone else can move slowly and quietly off to the next job, whereas actors have to have some down-time. And the success of a show can often determine that the down-time is longer than usual."

Australia offered a means to escape that situation. She says she would move across the Tasman, if the right job came along. "This whole industry is based on how long a piece of string is..."

Malcolm has mixed feelings about the end of Outrageous Fortune. "No one wants a good thing to end. But everyone's aware that it's quite good to be the ones to leave the party first. You don't want to be the show that ran aground."

Winnie – her Happy Days' character – is Malcolm's 45th role. Written in the early 1960s, the play was last performed in Auckland in 1975. The female lead has been described as the actress's Hamlet. Director Michael Hurst says it is a "tour de force", and reckons Malcolm is perfect for the part.

"She's coming into her powers. Doing Outrageous Fortune has given her a lot of extra skills and confidence and she's always been a theatre animal. She's really ready for it. It requires someone who knows what she's doing."

A fortnight after our first interview, and it's a reflective Malcolm on the phone. She has just "tried on" the mound that will confine her on stage.

"It's amazing. I feel like I'm a very lonely person in the middle of a huge landscape."

She told a friend recently she was "shitting herself" about the role. What if, she said, 10 minutes in, she looks up and realises the audience is frickin' bored and she's stuck in this frickin' thing and there's another hour to go...

"And he was fantastic. He said `That's pretty arrogant of you. This isn't about you, mate, this is about an extraordinary piece of writing. There's a reason this play has been around for a long time. It's that good. It's probably better than you'."

And then Malcolm reminds herself: she wanted to be challenged; she wanted to be scared.

She was 13 when she fell in love with acting. "I was playing Miss Piggy. I think it was a talent quest. I just had a ball. I remember the whole room laughing and it was because of what I was doing. I had this weird, almost civic sense, of how wonderful it was to galvanise a room."

But it wasn't until she went to Victoria University ("English literature, music...I honestly wasn't sure what I wanted to do") that she realised she could turn performance into a career.

She went to drama school with her current co-star Cameron Rhodes, where the pair dreamed of becoming Shakespearean actors. In 2003, Malcolm was selected for an international residency at the Shakespeare Globe Centre. Delivering the Hamlet "to be or not to be" speech to 900 people, 20 weeks pregnant with Charlie, was her most rewarding theatre moment to date. "I was challenged, working and thinking and having a ball."

And then along came Cheryl West. Ask Malcolm about Outrageous Fortune's personal legacy, and she's stumped – momentarily.

"It was a really, really bloody good job. I wish I could be more profound. It was a fantastic job on my continuum as an actress and a really high point. But I think we are always defined by the last job we do.

"And to do your job well, you have to do what nobody else does. You have to walk onto a public space – a set – crack your ribcage open and expose, essentially, your soul, and work with it like plasticene. And that's not something most people are enormously comfortable doing."

You do it, says Malcolm, because you're telling stories and creating connections that people can bounce their own lives off.

ROBYN MALCOLM: on stage versus screen

"Television is, in some respects, the most immediate and intimate of the mediums because it invades personal space and private life. It's why television characters become so loved. They are virtual villages which audiences, at the flick of a switch, can invite into their homes, not for a one-off experience but every week if they wish. It's an incredibly powerful medium for storytelling because of that. Of course, it falls prey much more often to things other than the art of storytelling. Networks and commercial imperatives mean that things aren't always as they are meant to be in TV. Television is perhaps the most compromised of mediums, but therein lies its brilliance, probably. I love television nowadays, because when it's supported by all other technologies, it is frighteningly immediate. You can watch a show and comment to 50,000 others online while you are watching! Insane!

"Theatre has something else. You have to get dressed, put your shoes on, get a babysitter, pay in advance, find a park, sit in a dark room with strangers, wait till interval to take a pee or have a drink. Theatre requires effort on behalf of an audience. Huge effort. I think you have to assume these days that most people don't want to make that kind of effort. The stakes are that much higher right from the get-go. And, as a performer, if you are sucking badly, you will know instantly. The audience will let you know. That way it is utterly a collective ritual. [British director] Peter Brook describes theatre as happening when you have an empty space, someone walks across the space and someone watches. Recorded mediums such as film and TV protect the actor and the audience from the immediacy of that experience."

Happy Days by Samuel Beckett, Herald Theatre, Aotea Centre, Auckland, August 20-September 18.

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