I’m not averse to exposed situations: Sigrid Thornton is back on stage

Sigrid Thornton does not shy away from tough gigs. Less than a year after her mother died, she is starring in a show about motherhood, family and dysfunction.

Sigrid Thornton.Credit: Wayne Taylor

“It is raw but I’m not averse to putting myself into exposed situations like this,” she says. “I just want to live a rich and full life as much as I can, and this is one of my ways of doing it.”

She’s referring to Mother Play, by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Paula Vogel and staged by the Melbourne Theatre Company, which opens next week.

Directed by former artistic director of the Queensland Theatre Company Lee Lewis, it also stars Ash Flanders and Yael Stone.

Lewis runs “a very open, personal and exposed rehearsal room”, Thornton says. Because of the content of the play, “the things that come up in relationship to getting really under the skin of the story are sometimes very painful”.

For her, that’s part of the deal. “It hasn’t been a year since my own mother died. So I have a strong relationship to certain important aspects of this play and the relationships it’s exploring. It’s been very intense. I mean, after about day three I came into room and said, ‘Oh, I’m f---ed!’ I was so exhausted by day three.”

Thornton says Vogel explores the idea that death is not the end of the conversation. “It continues, as anyone who has lost a very close family member such as a sibling or a parent, knows.”

From left: Director Lee Lewis with Yael Stone, Sigrid Thornton and Ash Flanders in the rehearsal room.Credit: Charlie Kinross

Only after her mother’s death, when Vogel was in her 70s did she put pen to paper about her extraordinary life. “This play has been in my head for a long, long, long, long time,” she told Playbill.

Mother Play: a play in five evictions traces the fortunes of a single mother named Phyllis, played by Thornton, and her two children. Beginning in the 1960s when the children are barely teenagers, the show follows the family over the next 40 years.

“[This] is an homage or a way of talking to her mother, after the fact, which I think anyone who has experienced the death of a parent will understand,” Thornton says.

American playwright Paula Vogel.

“It’s a memory play, and by that I mean it’s Paula’s direct memory of her childhood and her early years, living on the poverty line in the states around Washington DC. She had a complex and challenging childhood in many ways, not least because the mother, who I play, is a functioning alcoholic. She has aspirations for both her children … and these revelations are played out through conversation and action.”

“She’s clearly a difficult mother but no less inspiring in her way. She was a force, the kind of figure that people noticed in the room. She knew it but was trapped in a paradigm that didn’t suit her personality. This is not too much of a spoiler to say: she has had very, very bad luck with men.”

Does performing in a piece like this provide a degree of catharsis? “No question, it is therapeutic. Anyone who’s making creative work would say that it is both cathartic for them personally, but also that the hope is it will also have some ... connection with the creator’s experience,” Thornton says. “And perhaps, if one is very, very lucky [there will be] some kind of healing from that.”

Yael Stone, Thornton and Ash Flanders in rehearsal.Credit: Charlie Kinross

Going back to the theatre after a few years away is like returning to the gym after a break for the Melbourne-based actor. “You work up to it... The memory is still there but it might take a little while to get it back.”

It also changes with every production. “You have to develop a whole set of new muscular responses that match your character, which will always be different.”

As well as a degree of muscle memory, there’s also intellectual memory involved, “wrapping your head around that combined with an exercise of making a play, making a story together with people who all have their sensitivities and learning about each other and how to work in particular ways that suit each individual, and all of those things add to the mix when we’re discussing and working on extremely personal material.”

Therein lies the joy – discovering the characters and their stories, along with the director and other creatives.

Sigrid Thornton declared at age six she wanted to be an actor.Credit: Wayne Taylor

The show has been fascinating to research. “There’s a lot of information out there about [Vogel’s] experience: her output, her sexuality and coming out, and all of those things in relation to her own parents,” she says. “We are playing a person’s real-life experience and the obvious dysfunction in the family I think anyone can relate to. It’s not that far from Christmas, is it? We’ll still have those memories.”

One of this country’s favourite actors, Thornton has grown up on our screens, big and small. In 1977, she starred as a fresh-faced 18-year-old in Bruce Beresford’s The Getting of Wisdom, but it was her work in All The Rivers Run, beamed into lounge rooms around the nation, that cemented her in our hearts. Then came The Man From Snowy River and later Prisoner and its more recent offspring, Wentworth. Then in the ’90s, there was SeaChange.

Theatre has been a constant since her 30s – aged six she knew she wanted to be an actor – and returning to the MTC, she says, feels like a homecoming. As well as Mother Play, she has three projects underway, details of which remain under wraps for the moment. Several scripts are in development: that’s always the core – the strength of the writing. “But I’m going to be working on both sides of the camera,” she says.

Thornton argues creative work is essential in every society. “First Nations people valued above many, many things – it could be argued, above everything, apart from getting enough food and water – storytelling because it was an essential component in understanding the world, teaching future generations so that they could move forward with some clarity and a sense of connection, which is also critically important.”

Many of the themes in Mother Play resonate powerfully in a world with right-wing politics on the rise and under the Trump administration, particularly women’s rights and queer rights.

He is wreaking havoc in so many ways, Thornton says. The attacks on the arts and on free speech are incredibly worrying. “The dismantling of the arts in any way, shape or form is anathema because creative work is in no small part about helping people feel connected to others, helping people feel that they are not alone.

“I do sincerely believe that the making of good stories, even purely to entertain people and make people smile, all of that storytelling needs to stay alive, malleable, flexible and free.”

Mother Play is at the MTC’s Sumner Theatre from June 30 to August 2.

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