By Nick Miller
When actor Nikki Shiels was invited to share the load of one of Australian theatre’s boldest, hardest and most acclaimed creations, she felt two raw emotions: desire and fear.
“I was immediately hungry to be a part of the production,” she recalls, “but also incredibly intimidated.”
Capturing the soul: Eryn-Jean Norvill and Nikki Shiels.Credit: Eugene Hyland
The production is Sydney Theatre Company’s one-woman show, The Picture of Dorian Gray, about to open in Melbourne as part of the city’s Rising winter arts festival. Shiels is the “alternative” Dorian. To call it an understudy is to undersell the job: to recreate, with her art, a perfect portrayal of a hard act to follow. To capture beauty, unfaded.
This adaptation of the Oscar Wilde novel, which premiered in November 2020, is a mischievous masterclass in the potential of theatre. Director Kip Williams and actor Eryn Jean Norvill played with gender, technology and illusion; they dazzled critics and packed houses.
But the work is a career-defining monster for its star. The dance between Norvill, who inhabits and juggles 26 live and pre-recorded characters, and the cameras, sets, props, video screens and costumes that whirl around her, stretches acting muscles that few even possess.
“It’s a highly strung dance with an intricate amount of steps,” says Norvill. “Centimetres, even millimetres, if your foot is this way or that, can break the illusion of the piece.”
Nikki Shiels and Eryn Jean Norvill.Credit: Eugene Hyland
Shiels discovered the literal truth of this while learning the steps of this dance.
“It really challenged my brain and body in the most extraordinary ways,” she says. “A couple of days in [to rehearsal], Kip said something in reference to ‘a few millimetres this way’. I was like ‘really, millimetres?’ And he was like, ‘oh yeah’. Okay!”
But it’s a necessary challenge. The role is frankly exhausting for Norvill. At the end of each performance, she says, she wonders if she can do it again. In April, at a season in Sydney, a foot out of place led to a fall: a matinee was cancelled the next day. And, of course, there’s a pandemic on. And a nasty flu about.
So Shiels was brought on board. She performed five shows in Sydney, she will be on for “select” performances each week in Melbourne (producers are coy about exactly how many).
Shiels is a fine choice to replace the irreplaceable: most recently, audiences will recall her award-winning 2020 turn in Melbourne Theatre Company’s Home, I’m Darling.
When Norvill heard who was doing the part, she says, “there was a whole lot of feelings”. One was relief that her alternative “wasn’t a douchebag”. There was also a “sense of liberty” which became even stronger the first time she watched Shiels perform the whole show. There was pride, and a feeling of being buoyed by a connection to another performer in this sometimes lonely role: “I’m very, very grateful that someone is holding my hand because it’s a scary thing to make.”
But it also felt a bit like handing over an intimate part of herself. The piece is “personal, for everyone that made it, and to share that was a kind of huge thing”, Norvill says. “That’s what acting feels like, too ... The risk of it, the sense of vulnerability is very familiar to me.”
Shiels watched Norvill in the rehearsals for the Adelaide and Sydney seasons, and discovered that the spirit of the show was “infused with a great sense of fun, and making mistakes and the joy of mess in the rehearsal room, as well as intense rigor and technicality”, she says.
At the start of the process, she didn’t even know if she was capable of mastering and marrying the show’s huge emotional and technical journeys. She is still on a double trajectory: each night becoming more adept at the dance, and going deeper into the show’s imaginative world.
Shiels was also excited to serve another’s creation but still stir in “a sense of authentic ownership”, she says.
“Out there, you’re in a state of creative investigation,” she says. “Once you enter a process, and you’re running off instinct, you’re connecting imaginatively to the world and the characters and their desires. I just tried to have fun ... I wouldn’t say I consciously went out to do anything particularly different [to Norvill] — in fact, probably the opposite – but without restricting my own sense of play inside the piece.”
Norvill says watching Shiels gave her new perspective on her own choices.
“I’d never seen the piece so to witness it was quite extraordinary,” she says. “I learned so much. And Nikki was funny in bits that I wasn’t funny. I was like, ‘oh, I’m going to steal that’. She’d put in gags or little winks. I was like ‘oh yeah, winks – why not?’
“I was like a kid in a candy store. I got to look at the piece again creatively, and go, ‘oh, yes, we can keep building [Dorian], and make her even more bestial and beautiful’.”
The Picture of Dorian Gray runs from June 5 to July 31 at Arts Centre Melbourne
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