Two sides of Kate: from the Incredible Hulk to a limp piece of cabbage

Yorick arrives at the Theatre Bar at the End of the Wharf with Kate Mulvany. Although, in truth, audiences know the acclaimed actor and writer well for her association with Richard III - her knockout performance in the lead role won multiple awards - rather than Hamlet, where the skull of the aforementioned Yorick (alas) appears.

In this instance, Yorick is the name of the silver-skull-tipped walking stick that accompanies Mulvany who lives with a significant spinal disability. Although today’s plan is to talk about her upcoming adaptation of Ruth Park’s novel Playing Beatie Bow for the Sydney Theatre Company, her disability is such a part of who she is that I ask her to encapsulate her story as we settle down to sample a set menu from the soon-to-open restaurant in the dramatically reworked Wharf 4/5 at Walsh Bay.

Kate Mulvany: “We were amazed you talked for so long” said the publicist.Credit: Wolter Peeters

“I was born with Agent Orange-related renal cancer.” she tells me. “My father [Danny] was a £10 Pom who strangely got conscripted to the Vietnam War. He tried to get out of it, even having one of his mates deliberately break his nose. His mates said that in Australia if you go to war and come back, you get treated like a king!

“But when he got back, I was born with cancer but they didn’t discover it until I was three. I had a full radical nephrectomy, lost the left kidney, had the tumour removed, the ureter, adrenal gland and several ribs on one side. Also the radiotherapy was very intense in those times so it stunted all of my lefthand back muscle and bone in my spine - my muscles are about three-years-old on one side.

“So this has resulted in severe scoliosis, osteoporosis and basically means that half of my spine and pelvis are crumbling and very curved with nothing to support them. Which means I walk with Yorick. He is handsome! I have an everyday [stick] and one on the way, an Irish-style shillelagh which actor Dan Spielman is handcarving from the wood of the speaker’s box at Canberra’s original parliament house because we both believe, literally, that is about time the government supported Agent Orange survivors in this country.”

The now-banned chemical defoliant nicknamed Agent Orange was sprayed in high concentrations during the Vietnam War to eliminate crops and forest-cover feeding and hiding the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong. Dioxins, a byproduct of the herbicide, have been linked to cancers and birth defects in both troops and local people.

Mulvany, 43, is an ambassador for the Mines, Victims and Clearance organisation, MiVac, and has visited South-east Asia five times so far and met fellow survivors of wartime dioxin spraying, as well as landmines. “I don’t like to say victims. I have held newborns in my arms in Vietnam who are Agent Orange survivors at three-days-old. They live with this every day in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia,” she says. “It flummoxes me that Vietnam wants to have this conversation but we have closed our ears to it. In Vietnam there are three million people affected, into third and even fourth generations. Here we don’t know the extent because veterans didn’t feel they could talk about such things. There is a huge betrayal that is ongoing because the conversation has not been had about the ongoing effect of dioxin in men and their children and grandchildren. We need to not do it again. This is not fearmongering. Just because you didn’t agree with the war doesn’t mean you don’t support survivors.”

‘I have held newborns in my arms in Vietnam who are Agent Orange survivors. It flummoxes me that we have closed our ears to it.’

STC artistic director Kip Williams who is directing ’Playing Beatie Bow” with Kate MulvanyCredit: Edwina Pickles

When I told arts associates I was lunching with Kate Mulvany there were envious exclamations of “You’ll love her,“, “She’s fabulous”, “Lucky you!“. I find a newspaper article which says “she twinkles” and she does.Mulvany is a warm, witty, clever and engaging companion. Later, the theatre’s publicist says: “We were amazed you talked for so long!” If she hadn’t needed to return to a rehearsal, it would have been easy to linger over another coffee, another glass of wine.

Marrickville Burrata with vine ripened tomato, sourdough wafer, aged balsamic and basil.Credit: Wolter Peeters

Mulvany, who grew up in Geraldton in Western Australia, catalogues the pain she lives with in frank and straightforward detail. She was in her early 30s when she decided that she should openly reveal the extent of her disability and to “use that word″⁣.

“I would never have used it as a teenager. But people need to know, especially when I am having a day which is high pain, when my threshold is almost unbearable. I won’t ever complain and I just have to make roads around it,” she says. “But other people should know. Kate Mulvany has a disability and she works perfectly well.

″⁣So the more the merrier to make this word acceptable. Fortunately we are now in times that are more encouraging. ”

As she tells it: “One side of me is the Incredible Hulk and the other side of me is a limp piece of cabbage. So it is really painful to get through...life, I guess.”

Kate Mulvany, left, in her award-winning role in ‘Tartuffe’ with Geraldine Hakewill.Credit: Pierre Touissaint

Indeed for many years she did not realise that living with extreme pain was not normal.

“For me I have just had this pain forever. Even when you have a bad day you have such a love for your own body. You think ‘Well done body’. Not well done me, well done body,” she says. “Somehow my body has adapted in a way that allows me to be as upright as possible. I have to make allowances, the older I get. But you just do it, it could have been much worse.”

It is clear from her substantial resume that Mulvany has workaholic tendencies and admits that she has only recently stopped trying to juggle multiple projects and working 18 hours a day.

Playing Beatie Bow is her second Ruth Park project, she also adapted the epic, multi-award-winning production of The Harp in the South: Part One and Part Two which wowed STC audiences in 2018. Other writing gigs have included an adaptation of the stage production of Craig Silvey’s Jasper Jones, Friedrich Schiller’s play Mary Stuart, Euripides’ Medea and the Foxtel series Upright with Tim Minchin. Her own plays include The Rasputin Affair. Acting roles have included Tartuffe, The Great Gatsby and Lambs of God.

“For 23 years I was swimming and running at the same time which is exhausting even for someone who doesn’t have a spinal disability,” she says. Has excessive work been a form of over-compensation for her disability? There is a pause before she replies. “I come from a very working-class family...but I don’t think it is over-compensation. I think it is a distraction if I lose myself in a story which I get to do as a professional,” she says. “As an actress, I get to step into someone else’s body and as a writer I get to travel somewhere that is far enough away to distract me from the pain.

“I can do that for 18 hours a day if need be...then you come up for air and think ‘Ohhhh...I shouldn’t have done that’. But it is a wonderful distraction, yeah.”

‘I don’t think it is over-compensation. I think it is a distraction if I lose myself in a story which I get to do as a professional.’

Kate Mulvany on work and pain

Mulvany thinks there is a great fallacy around the abilities of people with disabilities. “They can do it. They just do it differently from what the average person expects. They are so strong, they are so resilient, they are so imaginative. They have to work their way through a world that doesn’t take them into consideration and that makes them incredibly strong human beings. It’s like a super power, ” she laughs. “Having said that, there are days when I am on the floor in pain...but as long as I am open about it.”

It is hard to comprehend the level of everyday pain experienced by Mulvany. Last year she discovered that she had broken her back a few months earlier - probably doing a stunt in Hunters, the Jordan Peele-produced Amazon Prime series, in which she plays Nazi-hunting nun Sister Harriet alongside Al Pacino. She will return to the US soon to work on the second season.

“That was a bit of a wake-up call for me to slow down. I didn’t notice it. If I have a new pain, usually I just think it will sort itself out, you just add it to the layers but there was something a bit different about this one which made me a bit afraid. I really couldn’t walk. I had to hobble to the bathroom every morning.”

Lockdown allowed her to take a deep breath and she scored an appointment with a “fantastic” pain specialist who told her to “slow down and stop doing what you have been doing. Take time to get the right meds, the right personal training, get a staff″⁣.

“I said ‘what people to look after me?’ and he said, ‘No, like a wizard’.″⁣ Enter Yorick.

Baby Octopus and Cannellini Beans with polenta, piquillo peppers, nduja and parsleyCredit: Wolter Peeters

Enter too our lunch. With the restaurant and revamped theatre due to open in a matter of weeks, the kitchen is using us as “guinea pigs” and has chosen a delightful menu which we supplement with a bottle of Robert Oatley chardonnay. First come share plates of Baby Octopus and Cannellini Beans with polenta, piquillo peppers, nduja and parsley plus Marrickville Burrata (who knew?) with vine-ripened tomato, sourdough wafer, aged balsamic and basil. After a suitable interval, it’s on to Seared Tasmanian Salmon with grilled asparagus and salsa crudo plus Crispy Bangalow Pork Belly Agrodolce with wilted Italian greens and Sardinian couscous. We send our compliments to the chef only to discover the kitchen has planned an encore of Sicilian Cannoli with roasted strawberries, ricotta and micro basil.

Richard (Kate Mulvany) claims he is the victim of witchcraft to catch out the credulous Lord Hastings (Ivan Donato) in ‘Richard III’.Credit: Prudence Upton

Looking out the window towards the Harbour Bridge and The Rocks, our conversation appropriately turns to Playing Beatie Bow, a timeslip novel for older children written by beloved Sydney author Ruth Park. The story is set in The Rocks and moves between 1873, when the suburb seethed with struggling families and gangsters, and the present day (which Mulvany has updated from Park’s original 1980). Playing Beatie Bow, directed by STC artistic director Kip Williams, is the story of Abigail (Catherine Van-Davies), a teenager dealing with her parents’ messy separation and coming-of-age issues, who follows the mysterious young girl Beatie Bow (Sofia Nolan) back through time. “The most important thing to me is not about a girl going back in the past. It’s about human beings calling out to each other. The lessons of their time,” Mulvany says.

Not surprisingly, Mulvany starts an adaptation by immersing herself in the book (she first read Beatie Bow in late primary school) before researching the writer and the history of the location which, in the case of The Rocks was easier last year when the coronavirus kept tourists away.

“With Beatie Bow, the city does half the job for me,” she says.

Kate Mulvany with her husband Hamish Michael (left) and John Gaden who starred in the Ensemble Theatre’s production of her play ‘The Rasputin Affair’ in 2017.Credit: James Alcock

Using a multitude of coloured highlighters, she dissects the themes and the action chapter-by-chapter. “I consider what would work theatrically, what doesn’t need to come on stage and what’s missing in terms of a modern context. Who I would rather hear from right now in 2021.”

If she senses a gap, she will go back to Park’s broader work for inspiration. She’s betting “Ruth fanatics will go ha ha” when they hear Abigail described as looking like “a muddleheaded wombat”: her ode to Park who also wrote that book.

It was also important to Mulvany to have an Indigenous character in the play even though there wasn’t one in the book (and she believes Park would have approved).

“I researched First Nations people in the area at the time but unfortunately, as we know, so many people had been pushed out. But I found that the Chinese gold diggers often worked hand-in-hand with Indigenous ‘troopers’ they were called so I could add a voice that might need to be there now.”

As with Harp in the South, Mulvany endeavoured to get into the mindset of Park whom she sometimes felt was “sitting on her shoulder″⁣ as she worked. “I feel a great deal of responsibility for her words.”

Mulvany lives in a converted convent in Tempe, which, she says, is haunted by a child ghost called Anne who died of tuberculosis. Her husband, Hamish Michael, is currently working on the ABC series Frayed and they have two rescue cats, Bowie and Heisenberg. In 2008 Mulvany was devastated when her then-partner, actor Mark Priestley, took his own life.

The bill.Credit: Fairfax Media

Our lunch is drawing to a close. While traditionally playwrights exit the rehearsal room after the first week, Williams, who also directed The Harp in the South, is happy for Mulvany to stay on. “It’s a new play so as a writer it is important to see what is working and what doesn’t. If an actor is glitching on a line or it doesn’t come naturally we can change it or get rid of it.”

Mulvany is excited by the revamped Wharf 4/5 theatre. “I put on my acting boots yesterday and got on stage and performed ‘Now is the winter of our discontent’ [from Richard III] so I could see how the acoustics are. Beautiful. They have somehow shifted. Alive is the best way to describe it.”

She picks up Yorick who has been resting by the window. “But wow, I feel almost guilty that the actors [on their lunch break] could see us eating like this when they were out there eating cheese and crackers and tins of tuna. But this was really good.”

Playing Beatie Bow opens on Friday February 26. New tickets should be released shortly; waitlist at sydneytheatre.com.au

The Bar at the End of the Wharf opens on Monday, Wharf 4/5, 15 Hickson Rd, Walsh Bay. Phone, 8399 3055. Hours, Monday to Friday, 9am till late; Saturday, 11am till late.