The horrifying gift that shocked national treasure Robyn Nevin

If you were to give a gift to stage and screen doyenne Robyn Nevin, what would you give her? Not an Order of Australia, of course, as she already has one. Ditto a Helpmann Award, a Sidney Myer Performing Arts Award, a JC Williamson Award, a Green Room Award, a Film Critics Circle of Australia Award and a Logie. She has them all, and loads besides.

I don’t know what I would give Nevin, who has been acting since she entered the very first class of the National Institute of Dramatic Art in 1959 and is, in a word, intimidating. But it would not be what a producer sent her as a wrap gift for last year’s horror movie Sting, about a monstrous arachnid.

Robyn Nevin at France-Soir restaurant. At 82, she’s still performing eight shows a week.Credit: Justin McManus

“I have got a serious problem with spiders,” Nevin tells me over lunch at swanky South Yarra bistro France-Soir. “And the producer sent me, after I finished it, this little glass vial filled with about 500 tiny black spiders. I unwrapped it and opened it up, and it was pretty horrible.”

I am so horrified that someone would send such a gift to Australia’s thespian national treasure that it only occurs to me a few minutes later to make sure the spiders were fake (they were). But Nevin says she absolutely loved making the movie, and film in general, which is quite different to theatre acting.

“In theatre, you have eight shows a week, five or six nights a week. And you wake up in the day and you think, what time is the show? Is it at noon? Is it a two o’clock show? Is it one o’clock? Is it at 5.30, is it at eight or seven? Is it at 11, schools matinee? And according to that timetable, you have to think about how you’re going to manage your life during that day, to conserve your energy for when it’s needed. That’s what that’s about. Whereas, if you’re in a film, you get there in the morning, you go home at the end of the day, broadly speaking, and then you can stop and flop.”

Not that Nevin is showing any sign of stopping, or flopping, at 82. She’s still performing eight shows a week – most recently as Madame Morrible in Wicked – and to keep herself fit and healthy for that level of physicality, week after week, she swears by the Feldenkrais Method of movement therapy, which she describes as “a godsend”.

Liam Head (Fiyero), Courtney Monsma (Glinda) and Robyn Nevin (Madame Morrible) in Wicked.Credit: Jeff Busby

“Quite often, I’ve played roles where I’ve had to adopt certain postures, physical postures that over time will cause a problem. And the Feldenkrais practitioner can help me to do exercises as soon as I come off stage to counteract that posture. So it’s been a gateway to something very, very important to me.”

Nevin has squeezed in our lunch during a brief break in rehearsals for the upcoming Agatha Christie play And Then There Were None, which she is directing at the Comedy Theatre. There is no time in her schedule for entrees or desserts, so we get straight to business: grilled scampi with lemongrass and butter lettuce salad for her, Scotch fillet steak for me. A glass of chablis is promised to complement the scampi perfectly, and Nevin assures me it does.

As she has been artistic director of Sydney Theatre Company, Melbourne Theatre Company and Queensland Theatre Company and has directed dozens of shows, it surprises me to learn that she had no ambition to direct when she started in theatre.

Grilled scampi with lemongrass at France-Soir.Credit: Justin McManus

“I wasn’t interested at all,” she says, as our lunch arrives. “It didn’t occur to me, and it was a very male-dominated area, of course – stage management, directors, producers, they were all male, and you’d only have females where a female was needed as an actor, or actress.

“I came to it through a process of working through, in the late ’60s and ’70s, where there were a lot of ‘concept productions’ ...” she breaks off, as a table of eight young women has been seated next to us, all talking excitedly and at great volume, making the already noisy bistro deafening. Nevin summons more than 60 years of theatre training to project her voice and stay on script.

“I was subjected to – and I use the word deliberately – a lot of productions in which a concept was laden over the text. Directors came along and had an idea how they would do a modern version of Shakespeare or any other classic play, and quite often, they would twist the text to make their versions work. And being inside that became quite problematic to me, trying to rationalise and understand how to fit inside that concept was quite often a struggle, and some of those were real vanity projects.

“Some bright young director thinking quite outside the box, and that was interesting, but it was quite experimental, and quite often those experiments didn’t work, and they happened at the expense of the people inside trying to make them work. So the actor in that situation can undergo some form of torture. And I got a bit sick of that, and I thought, I really wanted to have a go at finding a way to do plays that honoured the playwright, but without twisting ourselves into pretzels in order to make a particular idea stick.”

Steak with pepper sauce.Credit: Justin McManus

She got her chance in 1983, when the Sydney Theatre Company, where she was associate director, decided it wanted to honour International Women’s Year with a play written, designed and directed by women.

The play chosen was The Butterflies of Kalimantan, by Nevin’s friend, Jennifer Claire. She found she had a talent and passion for directing, as well as acting. “One is subjective and one is far more objective,” she says. “And the responsibility as an actor starts and finishes with you. To a certain extent, obviously, it’s a collective, so you have to work as a team. That’s awfully important. That’s kind of a given, but you’re not responsible for [the rest of the cast] in any sense, your responsibility is to the text and the production.

“So it’s quite a subjective experience, and can be quite solitary, whereas a director is overseeing absolutely everything and has a much larger, broader responsibility.”

Given she describes experimental takes on classic works as potentially torturous to those involved, I venture that it seems unlikely she is going to set And Then There Were None in space or during the French Revolution.

“No, no,” she says firmly. “It’s set exactly where it’s set, in 1939 on an island off the coast of Devon.”

Nevin knows full well how to do Christie at its absolute best, having directed a 2022 Australian smash-hit run of The Mousetrap, which is the longest-running show in London’s West End. It played to rapturous audiences across Australia, so she’s teamed up with producer John Frost again for a second bite at a cosy British murder mystery.

She says that even after all these years and countless productions on both sides of the curtain, opening night is still nerve-racking.

“Coming into the theatre on an opening night as a director, you’re absorbing a lot of, ‘Hello, how are you? Hi, Robyn, how’s it gone?’ all the way in, and that’s one of the reasons why, at the start of every production, I usually have something so that the play doesn’t start immediately. There’s some breathing space where the audience can absorb what they’re seeing and get rid of what they’ve just been hearing.”

The bill at France-Soir.Credit: Cassidy Knowlton

Nevin suddenly realises that her allotted hour outside the rehearsal room is up, and she has to rush back for the afternoon’s work.

She glances at her watch, then up at me. Having clocked my American accent when we met, there was a topic she thought we would surely cover. I don’t think it dates this piece particularly to say that the week we met was a week in which US President Donald Trump did a series of bizarre and controversial things.

“We didn’t talk about politics!” says Nevin. She is determined to rectify the omission, even as she’s bundling out the door. “The play deals with two themes that particularly interest me,” she says. “One is that, as Agatha Christie said, the human face is, after all, nothing but a mask. And in this play, all of the characters bring with them their personal story, which is in the form of a secret that shapes or misshapes them.

“And there’s also the issue of accountability for one’s actions that makes me think of Trump.”

And Then There Were None is on at the Comedy Theatre in Melbourne. It opens in Sydney at the Theatre Royal on May 3 and His Majesty’s Theatre in Perth on June 8.

Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.