Fans flock to box office to see Marta Dusseldorp

TASWEEKEND: The Theatre Royal has been forced to add shows to meet demand for a TV star’s controversial play, writes Amanda Ducker. WATCH THE TRAILER >>

THE lean cast rehearsing for The Bleeding Tree pauses for chocolate cake. It is director Ben Winspear’s 45th birthday and he will spend most of it holed up in a Salamanca Arts Centre loft taking the play’s three leading ladies, including his famous wife Marta Dusseldorp, through their paces.

Winspear is in his element in the lead-up to the highly anticipated Theatre Royal production, but can he have his cake and eat it, too?

Can the returning Tasmanian live a fulfilling creative life in the performing arts in Hobart? Or will he have to fly the coop again with Marta and their two daughters?

Having moved down from Sydney two years ago, the thespians are dead keen to make it work here – and they are giving it a red hot go, diving into projects and bringing a host of Tassie talent with them on their mission to energise the local theatre and film and TV production.

When Winspear’s longing to get out of the Big Smoke and back to the island prevailed, he and Dusseldorp threw professional caution to the wind – or at least to the cool southerly breeze as intrinsic to the Salamanca waterfront precinct as its repurposed sandstone warehouses.

Ben Winspear and wife Marta Dusseldorp are also co-producing The Bleeding Tree.
Picture: LUKE BOWDEN

Right now, creative risk-taking has led them to this attic – which is accessed by a narrow old timber staircase that’s really little more than a ladder – and onto a topic that sounds like box-office poison. Domestic violence.

But the couple say they are unafraid of scaring people off with dark subject matter. They are convinced audiences are looking for meaning and engagement, not just easy laughs and entertainment. The play promises to deliver in spades.

When the lights go down at the Theatre Royal for The Bleeding Tree on November 12, the audience will hear these words.

“With a bullet through your neck, numbskull of yours never looked so fine.”

And here is Dusseldorp telling her two on-stage daughters what she’s just done:

“Girls, I think your father’s dead. I knocked his knees out. I conked his head. I shot that house clown in the neck.”

It is quite the dramatic premise: a bullet in the night does away with a bullying bastard who has terrorised his wife (Dusseldorp) and daughters, played by Jane Johnson and Kartanya Maynard, for years in their parched old country town.

Regret is for other people. The women’s immediate issue is how to get rid of the body, a feat they fail to achieve before it starts stinking to high hell.

“Shit we really killed him.”

In a rough poetic lexicon, the remorseless trio tell of their trauma at their decomposing abuser’s hands. Sometimes they address the putrid corpse. Disparaging barely describes their tone as they shift in and out of character and into third-person narrative to better describe their nightmare.

Over the three days following the killing, the women receive three visitors. Each becomes aware of the dead man, but none condemns the women nor calls the authorities; instead, each visitor turns away, as complicit as they have alway been in the silence about the violence that goes on behind closed doors.

Reviewing the Melbourne production two years ago, leading theatre critic Alison Croggon asked how art could possibly represent the horrific reality that an Australian woman is killed on average once a week by her partner or ex-partner.

“Can it do so without actually reproducing the violence, or making a voyeuristic entertainment of human suffering?” Croggon said. “On the other hand, what is the point of art that doesn’t pay attention to such things? In The Bleeding Tree, [playwright Angus] Cerini, clearly aware of these dilemmas, makes no attempt at realism. What he fashions instead is a surreal fairytale, a ritual of expiation. In Cerini’s story, set in a remote country town 50 years ago, the women and children hit first.”

Tickets for the nine Hobart shows are selling briskly, Winspear says over juice with Dusseldorp and TasWeekend at the arts centre’s Tricycle cafe. The couple is watching bookings, given they are also the play’s producers with their newly formed Archipelago Productions, in association with Blue Cow Theatre.

Artwork from The Bleeding Tree play by Archpelago Productions.

Their enthusiasm for the play and the chance to perform it for Tasmanian audiences is palpable.

“It’s kind of macabre and gothic, a bit shocking, but hilarious, irreverent and imaginative,” Winspear says.

“The Theatre Royal stage is one of the best in the world,” Dusseldorp says. “And I’ve played a lot of stages.”

She’s not talking just about the beauty of the venue, but the way the actors can see everyone in the audience from the stage and perhaps most of all the theatre’s acoustics, which she says are extraordinary.

“Every play I did [at the Sydney and Melbourne theatre companies] last year was miked,” she says. “I asked not to be miked and they said ‘it’s just how we do it now’.

“So we said ‘no way’ to [microphones] here. Our job is to [project our voices to] reach the back of the theatre. We aren’t there to be naturalistic. That’s what TV is for.”

The Bleeding Tree, written by Australian Angus Cerini, will be the first Theatre Royal 2020 season show to be held since the COVID-19 outbreak. It will make its Hobart debut following lauded productions with other casts interstate.

First performed in 2014, the play has won a swag of major prizes, including a Griffin Award, a Helpmann Award for Best Play and an AWGIE (the Australian Writers’ Guild annual awards for excellence in screen, television, stage and radio writing), and a NSW Premier’s Literary Award for drama.

Each production relies on serious live acting chops. There are no props or fancy costumes. There weren’t even any stage directions in the script for Winspear to follow. This is stripped back theatre. Raw and powerful. There’s music, though: Hobart’s production will feature sound by local composer Glenn Richards. Other local talent includes lighting design by Jason James, and other design elements by Liminal Spaces.

Winspear led the family’s move to Tasmania in 2018. In the lead-up years, Dusseldorp, 47, starred in several popular TV series including ABC Television’s Crownies, Janet King and Jack Irish, and the Seven Network’s A Place to Call Home. During that time Winspear was often the stay-at-home parent to their daughters, now aged 13 and 10. Though he was also networked into Sydney as both a theatre director and actor, he didn’t want to raise their kids there.

“I was doing a lot of childcare and I was sick of doing that in a super-urban environment,” he says. “If I was going to spend all that time with the kids I wanted it to be somewhere everyone could spread out, take up room; and not somewhere you have to schedule and pay for everything every time you leave the house.”

The couple did not expect to hurl themselves so passionately into local theatre and film projects so fast. It just seemed to happen and now they have about half a dozen Archipelago productions in various stages of development. They say they would never have started a theatre company in Sydney.

It’s hard enough here, but they are determined.

“It’s not easy,” Dusseldorp says. “You don’t just do it. There are lots of forms [to fill in].”

Winspear, whose father Les was part of Hobart’s Big Monkey Theatre back in the day, says that while they find many great people here to collaborate with, budgets are super-tight.

“You have to do it yourself, but that’s how I like it,” he says.

“I like to design stuff and direct it and make all the guff and put it on and be in it. I find being hands-on really invigorating. The first show I did here I had to design the set [for $200], do the lighting and direct it and clean the theatre.”

Dusseldorp spent the first year and a half commuting back to Sydney and Melbourne for her TV and theatre commitments – until COVID-19 border restrictions put an end to that.

“Like everyone’s, my life has completely changed,” she says. “I was one of those people who was mainly in the air and in airport lounges. I got in at 10pm from shooting Wentworth [in Melbourne] before the border closure at midnight.”

This year, she’s also been active in lobbying the government to maintain free-to-air TV local drama quotas and developing a TV show set in Tasmania with Andrew Knight, who wrote Rake, SeaChange and Jack Irish. Screen Tasmania gave some money towards the project’s development, and Dusseldorp hopes it will pick up pre-sales in coming weeks.

She sees potential for Tasmania as a TV production hub and has the networks to help facilitate that.

Dusseldorp in series three of Janet King, in which she plays a cool-headed lawyer.

“It’s about using what you know and what you’ve learnt and bringing it here and making it happen here,” she says. “I feel this is a really special place [but] there is a great expense to bring TV [production] here and that’s something I’d love to bash out with the Government in the sense of setting up a more robust local TV industry. I believe it could really pay for itself.”

While enjoying the slower, more family-friendly pace, she is realistic about her working future, saying that after borders reopen she will plan to go where the work takes her.

“As a freelancer, you have to take the opportunities when they come,” she says, describing her past seven years as “crazy”.

“It’s not a treadmill [I could choose] to get off in the sense that these TV series kept being renewed, which was excellent. Ben and I talked about that: ‘Do we keep going with you reprising these roles and going back in, and yes, of course, because you build the thing and you want to complete that’.”

She plans to keep creating with her network of talent at the top end of TV production and feel her way into new projects.

“I have some very strong relationships in the industry and I am developing projects with those people,” she says.

“That would be the way forward – knowing the people and wanting to work with them and them wanting to work with me.”

Winspear says the chance to collaborate with other Tasmanian creators expands his sense of creative possibility here.

“It’s partly in response to place and partly in response to the current circumstances,” he says. “All the festivals and companies here are unable to import anyone at the moment. Everything has to be sourced locally so there are extraordinary collaborations and hybrid projects emerging to fill those gaps. It’s a really terrific time to be making stuff.”

He cites his performance with Dusseldorp of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis – an altar-reading supplemented with erotic screen projections of the couple – at St David’s Cathedral last month as one such flowy collaboration.

“We didn’t know those musicians until six weeks beforehand,” he says. It all came together quickly after cathedral music director Thomas Rimes’ invitation to get involved in the First Sign of Life concert series. 500 people came to see them.

YOUNG LOVE: Ben Winspear and Marta Dusseldorp in 2005.

“I think the next 18 months to two years are going to be a really interesting time to be here,” Winspear says. “Audiences will be challenged, the artists will be enriched and the relationships that form from all of these new collaborations will hopefully energise another generation of makers to think laterally and creatively about ways to make things happen.

“You know what they say about the first five years of any business. No one gets paid and that’s where we are at. Everything that comes in goes out straight away and it’s scrambling around for the resources that can make things happen …”

The couple couldn’t care less about maintaining the appearance of a celebrity lifestyle in Tasmania; after sitting with them for an hour, it’s refreshingly clear it is their craft that compels them into the occasional spotlight.

Dusseldorp appreciates the breathing space from intrusive fans interstate, who are usually polite, but nevertheless...

“In Sydney, people would follow us in the streets and stand outside restaurants and take pictures of Marta,” Winspear says. “That doesn’t happen here. It’s much more relaxed.”

Dusseldorp says her sense of being monitored was “quite intense” in Hobart at first. Unaccustomed to two degrees of separation, she was initially taken aback when people would front up and say “I heard you’d moved here” and “well, obviously I know who you are”.

Now the couple just smile and say nice things when strangers ask them how they liked the octopus, so to speak.

“You think ‘what are they talking about?’” Winspear says. “And they say ‘my sister was on the table next to you at the restaurant last night’.”

MENTORING LOCAL TALENT

Tasmanian Aboriginal musician Kartanya Maynard will make her professional acting debut when she plays Marta Dusseldorp’s daughter Aida in The Bleeding Tree.

Maynard, 25, trained as a vocalist at the University of Tasmania’s Conservatorium of Music after singing in public throughout her childhood and teenage years.

A few years ago, she decided she wanted to expand her range into drama and wrote a play. When she sought feedback from The Bleeding Tree director Ben Winspear, they struck up a mentor-mentee rapport.

“He’s a wonderful teacher,” Maynard says. “I learnt so much from him, but I didn’t think any more was going to come of it.”

Kartanya Maynard plays a daughter of Dusseldorp in the play. Picture: LUKE BOWDEN

Little did she know. When it came time to cast The Bleeding Tree, Winspear sent a script Maynard’s way via Tasmania Performs, an organisation that supports and nurtures emerging performing artists and creatives.

Dispensing with naturalistic casting whereby actors playing a mother and two daughters need to look alike or bear a true age relationship with one another, Winspear decided Maynard’s powerful stage presence would fit the bill.

And she sailed through her audition.

“I was so nervous,” she tells TasWeekend during rehearsals. “I was ecstatic when I learnt I’d got the role.”

Without family support and the nurturing of industry luminaries through the Tasmania Performs program, Maynard says she would not be where she is today.

“I’ve learnt from all the amazing mentors I have that ‘you’ve got this, babe’,” she says.

“You can walk tall and look forward. And once you know your worth you can operate that way.”

Tasmania Performs is now mentoring four emerging Indigenous Tasmanian artists. As well as Maynard, the Arts Tasmania-assisted program is offering long-term mentoring to Jamie Graham, Denni Proctor and Jordy Gregg.

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Nine performances of The Bleeding Tree will be played on the main stage at the Theatre Royal, from Thursday November 12 to Saturday November 28. Book at theatreroyal.com.au. The Salamanca Wharf hotel is offering a limited special two-night stay, premium seats and backstage pass to meet Dusseldorp.