Barry Otto on Adelaide Festival, Belvoir’s Seventeen and The Dressmaker

Barry Otto is taking on his first stage role since his dramatic pullout from the Adelaide Festival in 2013.

Barry Otto on stage at the Belvoir, where he’s about to play a 17-year-old.

Every morning, Barry Otto endures a silent confrontation, a moment of reckoning he would rather avoid, in the bathroom of his 1880s mansion. “I have to face my face,’’ says the award-winning actor with a wide-eyed gravity only a seasoned thespian could get away with. “I can’t tell you how quickly the decades have gone. I have to face a mirror now.’’

Otto’s demeanour shifts from self-absorbed to self-deprecating and suddenly he is pretending to shave his chin, with a flurry of soft, downward strokes, here in the middle of the Belvoir Theatre boardroom in Sydney’s Surry Hills. “I can’t get away from a mirror, because I have to shave and I stop and I think, ‘Who’s the old bugger in the mirror?’,’’ he riffs. “I have to face my face, and I see Dad.’’ Best known for his film roles as the relentlessly bullied father in Baz Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom and the cuckolded adman Harry Joy in 1985’s Bliss, he emphasises the word “dad’’ with an upward inflection and an air of bewilderment. “You sort of become your family,’’ says this son of a Queensland butcher, who grew up to be more adept at parsing complicated dialogue than cutting up sheep carcasses. “The years have gone truly so quickly, I’m just starting to feel a bit old.’’

Not old enough, however, to entertain any ideas of retirement from the stage or screen. At 74, Otto has a significant role alongside Academy Award winner Kate Winslet and Liam Hemsworth in the high-profile Australian film The Dressmaker, to be released in October. Otto plays a sadistic chemist in this outback tale of love, revenge and high fashion, which the director, Jocelyn Moorhouse, has described as “Unforgiven with a sewing machine’’. Next month, the AFI and Green Room award-winner is teaming up with other decorated stage veterans (Maggie Dence, John Gaden, Anna Volska, Peter Carroll, Genevieve Lemon) for an age-defying theatre experiment. These veterans, some of whom were treading the boards before there was a subsidised theatre here, will play 17-year-olds in a new Australian play titled — aptly enough — Seventeen, for Belvoir.

Otto plays troubled teen Ronny, an outcast at school and in his own home, and during this interview the actor is a lot like a restless (if charming) adolescent in a calculus class, a long, lean bolt of nervy energy. While answering questions, he digs his fingers into his eyes, rubs his brow, drums the table with his pale, slender fingers, tucks his hair repeatedly behind his ear. At one point he demonstrates how he portrays the hunchbacked chemist in The Dressmaker. “He has scoliosis of the spine. Like that far,’’ says Otto, bending so far forwards, he cannot lift his head. Still doubled over, he says in an old man’s quivering voice: “Filming from underneath sometimes.’’

To play Ronny, Otto will no doubt tap the same vein of skittish vulnerability he brought to his screen roles in Strictly Ballroom and Bliss. As the play opens, Ronny hasn’t been home for eight days; he has been sleeping rough in a local park. “He’s an unhappy young man who’s hated high school and thinks he’ll fail everything,’’ Otto says of his character, who is young enough to be his grandson. “His dad has said he will amount to nothing. I think when you get things like that said to you at a young age, it’s soul-­destroying. He’s an only child and he’s very, very low.” Ronny is also an outsider at school, and Otto hints that the play, by dramatist Matthew Whittet, will canvass darker themes: “It’s so dangerous that black hole of suicide, some of these young, 17-year-olds today ...’’ Director Anne-Louise Sarks cast Otto as “the lonely outsider of the group’’ and has found him to be “incredibly open and alive to the moment in rehearsals. And he is relentless. I think he’s a perfectionist, but with such generosity and playfulness …. Barry is utterly truthful. I knew he’d bring heart and depth to Ronny.’’

Ronny is Otto’s first stage role since his dramatic eleventh-hour withdrawal from the anticipated one-man show The Kreutzer Sonata at the 2013 Adelaide Festival. His cancellation, just a day out from opening night, generated national headlines as the show, an adaptation of a Tolstoy novella, had been billed as a festival highlight starring a “theatre legend’’ and “living treasure’’. Rehearsals had been moved to Sydney so Otto could be near his family, and the production was the first the just-­appointed artistic director of the State Theatre Company of South Australia, Geordie Brookman, had directed in his new role.

For all the chaos Otto’s withdrawal caused — there was no understudy — there are no profuse apologies, no elaborate mea culpas, from the actor. Rather, he explains soberly that pulling out from this strenuous solo role was a matter of self-preservation for a man then aged 72. He says evenly: “I got to two previews and I was in a state of exhaustion. I had to stop. It was very hot in Adelaide and I was on my own. My wife (Sue Hill) came down and stayed for a few days. We’d had a wonderful reception for the two previews, but I had to pull out. I just sort of got very, very run down and it was a big piece, a wonderful, wonderful piece.”

He reveals he couldn’t cope with late script and other changes: “We were doing rewrites after the previews and I thought, ‘I can’t cope with this, now there are cuts here, there and everything.’ The older I was getting … I just sort of got really homesick from being away. There were other reasons, too. It was a metal set and the lights were very, very bright and sort of blinding; we were trying to adjust those at the last minute.’’

At the time, Hill, who works in arts education, said Otto was “deeply distressed’’ over the cancellation. “He knew this was a mountain to climb and is shattered not to stand on the summit on opening night,’’ she said. Two years on, I ask the multi-award-winning performer how hard it was to pull out of this star vehicle, given all the work he and others had put in. “Awful,’’ he says, pointing out he has never withdrawn from any other production in his 50-year career. “Yeah. It was very, very hard. But I had to put myself first. The two preview audiences were fantastic, really fantastic. I think it was going to be a hit, so it was very, very hard for me.’’

Once he had quit, how did he feel? “I just sort of stopped, really,’’ he replies. “Because I’d been sort of going nonstop. I just thought, ‘I’ve got to stop; I’ve just gotta stop.’ I’d never felt that before. But that’s, you know, in your 70s.’’ He pauses and adds, as if giving himself a reassuring pat on the back: “That’s all right.’’ (The show went ahead, with an unrehearsed actor, Renato Musolino, working with a script in hand.)

Reading between the lines, it seems that Otto has reached an age at which he needs to be looked after. He lists among the difficulties he encountered in Adelaide “(being) interstate, looking after yourself, doing my own meals. I’ve done that over the years, you know, right back — in my 40s, 50s, 60s.’’ But by 2013 he found it a stretch. (He mentions that Hill picks him up after rehearsals for the Belvoir show, and he turns up to this interview with sandwiches so beautifully wrapped in pristine white napkins, they might have ribbons tied on them.)

I ask whether he feels a sense of trepidation about his role in Seventeen, his first live performance since that unhappy Adelaide Festival experience. “No, not really,” he says without hesitation. “I can get into it with, you know, friends I’ve worked with over the years. It’s a kind of nice reunion.’’ While Seventeen reunites six mature actors, the teenagers they portray are about to go their separate ways after years of sharing the same asphalt quadrangles, sitting at the same scratched and scribbled-on desks; nursing secret crushes and desires. “It’s saying goodbye to that first innocence,’’ reflects Otto.

On this brisk winter’s morning, drama students from the Newtown High School of the Performing Arts have swung by the Belvoir rehearsal room to share their experiences of what it’s like to be 17. They test out metallic play equipment bolted to the rehearsal room floor, including a roundabout, a climbing frame and a steep, narrow slippery dip. This is the kind of equipment no longer built in risk-averse, modern parks, and one wonders how high the senior cast members will have to climb, slide and swing. Otto takes careful note of the students’ energy and physical ease on the playground props, the rhythms of their speech patterns — how they talk fast and over the top of each other — their shiny, high hopes for the future.

He and his fellow cast members will be dressed in school uniform for the show. He reflects that “we will look like what we look like — you know, our age — but in our hearts and minds, we’re going to be 17”. He says his own youth, which unspooled slowly in Brisbane in the 1950s, “was such a naive time. I’ve been trying to remember when I was 17 and how naive and sexually inexperienced I was.’’ Drugs weren’t as prevalent, either. He spent most of his free time with sketch pads, and once he finished school he went to technical college, studying life and geometric drawing. (He was a commercial artist before he got into acting through Brisbane’s amateur theatre scene, and he is still a prolific painter.)

Although he’s been performing for most of his life, Otto says that with every new play “it’s like starting all over again. It’s a lot of fun but it’s always a lot of work and it’s not as though you assume you know everything.’’ On the other hand, being on stage “keeps us young in the mind. And it’s fun, play-acting is what it is deep down, being someone else who you’re not.’’ As a bus lumbers noisily along the road outside, he quips: “We’re all suitable cases for treatment, actors I think. You’re screwing around with your emotions, because acting is believing .’’

If Otto’s teen alter ago Ronny is a skein of unacknowledged vulnerabilities, his screen persona in The Dressmaker could hardly be more different. In the film, he plays Percival Almanac, an elderly chemist from a small country town in the 50s. Percival develops photographs, so gets to know the town’s private business. “He’s not a very nice man,’’ explains the actor. “He gets his comeuppance in the end, though.’’

The film revolves around Winslet, who plays a beautiful dress designer returning to her home town to right the wrongs inflicted on her in the past. Otto’s chemist is cruel to Winslet’s character and to her mother, portrayed by Judy Davis. In one scene, Davis’s character confides she has “an itch, down below’’. The chemist disapproves of such itches, so adds sink cleaner to the medicinal cream he gives her. “So it’s a character role, you know, and he’s awful,’’ says Otto. “But anyway, there are people out there, aren’t there? Characters in a town?’’

Asked what it was like to work with Winslet, he says the British Oscar winner was as approachable as Australian cast members: “She’s not the kind of actor doing great big special effects movies. She’s still looking for challenge; for female acting roles. She’s like, quite Australian.’’

His daughter Miranda is another internationally successful actor (she is currently filming a new series of US television drama Homeland in Europe). In 2010, Otto appeared with Miranda in another local film, South Solitary, set on a remote, wind-lashed island. Miranda played the lead, while he portrayed her uncle, a stern, pedantic lighthouse keeper. “Working with my daughter was a breeze,’’ he boasts. “She started very, very young; she was a professional really, before she went to NIDA. She grew up around it, so it got in the blood and you just let your children do what they want to do.’’

He relishes talking about his three adult children (“they’re your children all your life’’) and grandchild. The younger two children, Gracie and Eddy, come and go from the mansion in Sydney’s inner west, which has its own coach house. Gracie is a film director, and he volunteers that both his glamorous daughters are competitive. He jokes that Gracie is “a dynamo. I run for cover when I see the blonde come!’’ His third child, Eddy, 29, is a schoolteacher and professional cricket coach. “Sport, sport, sport. It’s all sport. I’m the ham,’’ he says with a laugh. “Eddy’s got the big voice’’ (he puts on a deep, voiceover-type voice) “He’s bigger than me. He’s a big man.’’

Over a long career, the actor and family man has won a miscellany of prizes including an AFI Award (for Strictly Ballroom) and two AFI best actor nominations (for Bliss and The More Things Change). He has also won two Green Room awards, and in 2008, was nominated for a third, for his masterful performance in an adaptation of Moliere’s Tartuffe. In this production, he played yet another gullible father, Orgon, and Orgon’s mother, at one point conducting a hilarious, two-way conversation with himself.

Otto has collaborated with many of the biggest talents of Australian screen and stage, including Nicole Kidman, Luhrmann and Barrie Kosky. In 1999, he starred in Barrymore, a play about the dissolute life of American screen idol John Barrymore, as Judy Davis made her directorial debut for the Sydney Theatre Company. Davis drew out Otto’s ability to inhabit reptilian as well as meek, disarming characters. The Australian’s theatre critic John McCallum wrote: “Davis and Barry Otto … have managed to create an utterly repellent character who is fascinating like an aching tooth you keep probing with your tongue to check that it still hurts.’’

If he could do it all again, would Otto choose acting? He says he would. “It’s been great to me. I’ve got a lot out of it. I’m a great lover of Chekhov. I’ve done a Lear. The great writers are still such an enormous challenge to actors, no matter how old you are.’’ He admits, almost reluctantly: “I suppose I’m starting to wind down, getting quite old. You don’t realise how old you are sometimes, when you’re an actor.’’

Seventeen opens at Sydney’s Belvoir St Theatre on August 1.