Robyn Nevin yesterday in Sydney, where she opens tonight in Summer of the Seventeenth Doll at Belvoir Street, will take on MTC's gender-bending Queen Lear. Picture: James Croucher Source: The Australian
TALK about affirmative acting: Melbourne Theatre Company, ordered in 2009 to address a gender imbalance in its productions, is to make King Lear a woman.
Robyn Nevin, the great senior actress of the Australian stage, will play Shakespeare's befuddled monarch at MTC next year in a production directed by Rachel McDonald. Nevin said Queen Lear, as the production will be called, was not specifically about gender politics, although the queen rules in a man's world.
"Because she has been queen for a very long time, and her court is a male court, that suggests she has a strong male genetic make-up," Nevin said. "I know a lot of women who have."
MTC's 2012 season, which was announced yesterday, is unusual because it has been designed by a programming team of three -- Nevin, Pamela Rabe and Aidan Fennessy -- in a gap year between artistic directors Simon Phillips and Brett Sheehy, who starts at MTC later next year.
The season opens with Neil Armfield's production of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, which begins its Sydney run tonight with Nevin as Emma Leech. It includes new plays by Jonathan Biggins, Barry Oakley and Fennessy, and an adaptation of His Girl Friday, with Philip Quast and Rabe in the roles played by Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in the 1940 film.
Four of the 12 plays next year are to be directed by women -- a director is yet to be assigned to Oakley's play, Music -- which MTC general manager Ann Tonks said was "a much better outcome" than previous years.
MTC was ordered by its governing body, the University of Melbourne, to designate an equal opportunity officer when only one mainstage production in this year's season was given to a female director.
Nevin said she had been waiting for an opportunity to play Lear after McDonald suggested the role to her several years ago.
She has previously played a male role in Shakespeare: Mark Antony in a production of Julius Caesar directed by Phillips.
"I really enjoyed playing Mark Antony but, goodness, people had difficulty with it," Nevin said.
McDonald said she wanted Nevin as Lear simply because she was "perfect for that role".
Queen Lear would be staged as if written for a woman. "You don't have to take a machete to it," she said of the adaptation. "When you look at the play you only have to switch the pronouns and that's it."
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