‘Like stalking a deer’: How this humble actor was lured to a huge role

On a sparkling late autumn afternoon, golden light bounces off the harbour and onto Bell Shakespeare’s mirrored foyer as actor Robert Menzies arrives.

It’s as far from King Lear’s blasted heath as imaginable. The turbulent storm scene, one of the most fiendishly difficult and demanding in the canon, is what Menzies has just been rehearsing as he prepares for that Everest of roles as Shakespeare’s ageing, tormented monarch.

Robert Menzies: ‘There are some roles you expect to go to people with a higher profile.’Credit: Janie Barrett

If Menzies is preoccupied by what has transpired, he gives no sense of it. At the end of a long day, he seems utterly present as he takes a seat. Unflinching intensity in his aquamarine eyes strikes first, before you take in the craggy face, rangy form and dark, wispy hair that seems estranged from a comb.

Presence and intensity have characterised his performances, often in dark, tormented roles, for more than four decades. He seems an ideal choice as Lear, but it’s not one Menzies expected.

“There are some roles you expect to go to people with a higher profile than mine,” he says.

And that’s the rub. Menzies, 68, has turned in memorable performances, appeared in groundbreaking productions and worked with edgy directors from Jean-Pierre Mignon and Barrie Kosky to Benedict Andrews. He’s shared the stage with Cate Blanchett, and when she made her directing debut (A Kind of Alaska) he was cast in a lead role.

The grandson and namesake of our longest-serving prime minister, Robert Menzies, is set to take to the stage as King Lear.Credit: R.L. Stewart

Hugely admired in theatre circles, he is not widely known beyond, where the name Robert Menzies more likely conjures Australia’s longest serving prime minister, his grandfather, than one of our finest actors.

Most classical actors would leap at the role of Lear. But that was not the case with Menzies, says director Peter Evans.

“Robert is very humble, almost too humble,” says Evans. “He’s never going to put his hand up.”

Evans, who has worked with Menzies over many years, began tentatively discussing the role with him about three years ago.

Menzies with director Peter Evans in rehearsal. “Robert is very humble, almost too humble.”Credit: Brett Boardman

“It was like stalking a deer, ” says Evans.

The audience will be up close to the quarry in Bell Shakespeare’s first King Lear since 2010. Performed in the round in intimate venues, it will be a pared-back production.

That bare-bones approach appeals to Menzies, who has been drawn to Shakespearean roles throughout his career.

“With Shakespeare, you get more pixels per square inch,” says Menzies. “I’ve always loved the language, the poetry and the extreme situations in those plays.”

‘I’m trying to be present with the words and the situation and have no memory and no foresight.’

Robert Menzies

They don’t come much more extreme than King Lear’s, where an ageing despot resolves to divide his kingdom between his three daughters based on how much they flatter him. It’s a cruel, foolish plan with tragic, bloody consequences.

Reams have been written about Lear, including that he’s demented, bipolar or psychotic, but Menzies is not interested in diagnosing him.

“I can’t say ‘Lear is like this’ or ‘he suffers from this’. I’m trying not even to think of him even as a character. Character is the audience’s business, not mine,” he says.

“I’m trying to be present with the words and the situation and have no memory and no foresight but just try and be there. Which makes it really difficult to interview me.”

The latter observation is not so much a pre-emptive strike as a statement of fact. Menzies rarely and reluctantly does interviews. Thoughtful and reserved, he speaks concisely, in a rich, authoritative voice, unafraid to let silence linger as he considers an answer and/or has said what he wants on a subject.

Yet he gives his full and unhurried attention. When a prominent theatre colleague barrels over and they greet each other warmly, Menzies politely explains he’s doing an interview and picks up where we’ve left off.

For years, he avoided interviews because he did not want to field questions about his grandfather.

“I would just refuse to answer,” he says. “So, some interviews just finished quite abruptly.”

Did he ever consider changing his name? “I did for a while – and then it was too late,” he says.

Menzies grew up a quiet child in a large Melbourne family, the third of six children to his real estate valuer father and primary school principal mother.

He went to classical concerts with his mother, listened to Paul Scofield’s recordings of Murder in the Cathedral and attended drama classes. In year 12, he saw The Tempest, directed by the pioneering Rex Cramphorn, and was transfixed.

“I thought, right, I’m running away to join the circus,” he says.

He graduated from NIDA in 1977 in a class that included Judy Davis, Steve Bisley and Mel Gibson.

Menzies graduated from NIDA with Mel Gibson and Steve Bisley, who both starred in Mad Max.Credit: Alamy

Menzies has gone to great lengths to hone his craft. In his early 20s, when Polish theatre director Jerzy Grotowski was staging his landmark Apocalypsis cum Figuris in Sydney, Menzies hitch-hiked from Tasmania, where he lived briefly, to see it.

When he prepared to play a blind man in Paul Cox’s 1986 film Cactus, he lived with a seeing-eye dog. Whenever he walked the dog, Menzies had to “be” blind.

And if the dog decided Menzies wasn’t sufficiently convincing, it refused to perform its own role.

As he prepares for King Lear, he sets aside memories of three earlier productions in which he has appeared in minor roles. But some aspects he can’t delete.

“I remember different cuts of the play,” he says. “There are lines that have been cut from our production which were there in previous productions. And I go to say those cut lines and it throws me.”

Some roles linger with him. When he returned home after playing the lead in Barrie Kosky’s Seneca’s Oedipus, Menzies was reluctant to unpack his suitcase, wanting to linger in the atmosphere. A play in which he murders his father, marries his mother and tears out his own eyes seems a dark place in which to linger.

“The psychologists would be horrified,” he laughs.

How long that bag remains unpacked after King Lear is anyone’s guess.

King Lear is at the Neilson Nutshell, Sydney, June 14-July 20, and the Fairfax Studio, Melbourne, July 25-Aug 11.