Helen Dallimore: tragedy tomorrow, comedy tonight

Rosemary Neill talks to Helen Dallimore, the multi-talented actress about to star in the musical Spring Awakening

HELEN Dallimore had never appeared in a professional musical when she decided to audition for a lead role in the $15 million blockbuster Wicked in London's West End.

It was 2006 and the Australian performer had arrived in England 18 months earlier, only to find that acting jobs were as scarce as they had been back home. She recalls: "I had no acting work. I was teaching and I was working in a bar, which was very humbling because I was over 30 and I didn't think I'd have to do a job like that. I basically had to start again."

With nothing to lose, Dallimore tried out for the role of Glinda, the stupendously self-absorbed good witch from Wicked, an extravagant confection that bills itself as "the untold story of the Witches of Oz".

She got the gig and went on to win over famously tough-minded British critics. A reviewer for tabloid The Sun enthused: "Dallimore has whizzed in from Australia to almost steal the show. She reveals a terrific voice and brilliant comic timing." Veteran critic Michael Billington wrote in The Guardian: "Dallimore's Glinda is very funny as the peachy blonde who begins by announcing: 'It's good to see me, isn't it' and gradually evolves into an Evita-style powerbroker."

The Sydneysider worked her magic as the self-parodying Glinda for a year and now says: "Wicked was certainly the biggest thing I've ever been involved with. It was incredibly stressful, a huge amount of responsibility, just the sheer responsibility of opening a new show on the West End, creating a new character. There's so much money behind it." She performed eight shows a week and the "slog of the job" meant "you couldn't really do anything else except eat and sleep and drink lots of water, so it was joy and torture rolled into one". (She says she didn't put her hand up for Wicked's subsequent Melbourne and Sydney seasons, because "a year was enough".)

Dallimore has the spunky glamour of a 1940s movie siren, from her voluptuous curves to her pale blonde hair and salty repartee. On the day of our interview at Sydney's Wharf Theatre she looks a million dollars in high-heeled suede boots and a tight woollen dress that accentuates her hourglass figure. She is a natural - and irrepressible - comic. As she touches up her lipstick for Review's photographer she begs him to keep her "menstrual zit" out of the shot and asks: "How's my make-up? Doesn't do what it used to; just settles into the craters." (In fact, the 30-something's complexion is as smooth as a new bar of soap.)

When we meet, on a cold and blustery November afternoon, Dallimore has been performing in the Sydney Theatre Company's gleefully scurrilous revue Pennies from Kevin and is limbering up for her next STC show, the indie rock musical Spring Awakening, which opens in February.

For Pennies - which finished its Wharf season this week - Dallimore slipped into the skins of prominent female politicians, past and present. She put on a red wig and broad drone as she morphed into Hermione Gillard in a skit in which Gillard, Kevin Potter and their pal Swan Weasley attempted to escape the deficit, or that-which-should-not-be-named. Her Penny "K. D." Wong sang a maudlin rendition of Constant Cave-In and she swaggered around in a fat suit as she portrayed a Rome-based Amanda Vanstone in a sketch called La Dolce Big-Eater! (Pennies will tour nationally from February, but Dallimore's Spring Awakening role means she'll be handing on the fat suit and wigs to another performer.)

Earlier this year the National Institute of Dramatic Art-trained actor impersonated other famous women (Britney, Nicole, Angelina) on television for the Seven Network's sketch comedy Double Take. Sipping her english breakfast tea, she says that masquerading as Jolie "was a big fantasy. My husband still has a photo of me as Angelina Jolie on his phone, with the big lips and the black wig and the very, very slimming clothes."

Last year she found herself in another West End musical, Too Close to the Sun, the fate of which could not have been more different from that of the long-running Wicked. Too Close was about the last day in the life of Ernest Hemingway and she played the suicidal writer's fourth wife.

"That musical, we don't speak its name," says Dallimore with feigned solemnity, before breaking into a low, rumbling chuckle. "We got notice the day after opening and played for two weeks [before closing] ... That is really the biggest turkey I have been in. It was essentially a musical about Hemingway's suicide.

"Yeah, it was Springtime for Hitler. It'll make a good chapter in my memoirs."

Her forthcoming project has a more auspicious track record. Spring Awakening has won eight Tony awards and was inspired by the play of the same name by 19th-century German playwright Frank Wedekind. The story unfurls in a provincial community in 1891 and is a cautionary tale about teenage desire and adult sexual repression.

The original play references masturbation, abortion, rape, child abuse and suicide, and even a little rustic bondage. For decades it was banned in various countries, but this doesn't surprise Dallimore. "It's all about sex, in the end. Sex hasn't been popular until quite recently," she jokes.

She will play the adult female roles in Spring Awakening, including a mother who empathises with the teens and their unruly hormones, and "a vile schoolmistress who is at the opposite end of the spectrum". Ultimately, says Dallimore, the adults in this show are just as constrained as the teenagers by their morally uptight era.

So how does this intriguing hybrid - a classic play hitched to an indie-rock score that oscillates between pop and punk - speak to our more sexually liberated era? Dallimore replies: "The difficulties and anguish of adolescence and the feeling of isolation and not being able to relate to an older generation is a timeless conundrum. That's what the juxtaposition highlights."

Dallimore is the daughter of two academics and grew up between Sydney and Oxford, where her family stayed during her parents' sabbaticals. Her bicultural childhood has incubated a split acting personality; she presents herself as English when she auditions for roles in Britain and as an Australian when she works here. "I went to school there [England] for many years and my English accent is just another side of my personality," she explains.

She is married to Abe Forsyth, an actor, film director and son of Drew, a fellow cast member from Pennies. After spending long periods apart pursuing their careers, the couple is now based in Sydney.

"Eventually you have to make a decision about where you're gonna be," she muses, adding that she found "the crowds, the expense, the cold of London still Dickensian. It grinds you down."

While her specialties are comedy and musicals, she would like to do more drama. "I love drama but I don't get as many chances to do it as I'd like. Maybe if I dyed my hair brown ... " She pauses, unable to resist one last gag, "though being blonde doesn't seem to have affected Cate's career. I haven't seen anyone call her a bimbo lately."

Spring Awakening opens in February at the Sydney Theatre.