Not A Poisoned Chalice, But Blanchett Needs To Play It Smart
Sydney Morning Herald
Tuesday November 14, 2006
CATE Blanchett is the female actor of her generation. Intelligence, luminosity and a chameleon-like ability to play a queen and a former heroin addict with equal conviction, have earned her a stellar reputation in Hollywood and beyond.
But when she was pondering a new career as the Sydney Theatre Company's artistic director, perhaps she should have picked up the phone and called Kevin Spacey. The two actors starred in the 2001 film The Shipping News - Spacey as Quoyle, Blanchett as his ill-fated partner - but this conversation would not have been about movies. Spacey, the Oscar-winning star of American Beauty, has spent three turbulent years as the artistic director of London's Old Vic Theatre, a venerable 200-year-old institution near Waterloo Station. Like Blanchett, he has plenty of credibility as a stage actor - he studied at New York's Juilliard School, she at Sydney's National Institute of Dramatic Art. But Spacey's stint at the Old Vic has taught him a bitter lesson: an actor's fame and reputation count for little when it comes to making the artistic choices that allow a theatre to be both adventurous and solvent. When Spacey rode into town in 2003, he was greeted with jubilation. He declared he would use his star power to attract big names to the struggling London theatre - John Malkovich and Willem Dafoe were cited as examples - as well as much-needed subscribers and investors. Spacey put his money where his mouth was, pouring #100,000 ($250,000) of his cash into the Old Vic and anticipating further investment of more than #3 million."I've got four films to do first but as soon as I finish them I want to get my butt back on that stage where it belongs," he told The Guardian. "My parents brought me there first when I was five. It made a big impact on me, I still have the program." Three years later, Spacey still seems to adore the Old Vic, but London's love affair with its high-profile artistic director is on the rocks. His first production, the Dutch comedy Cloaca was panned - a "stinker", wrote The Times. This year's staging of Resurrection Blues, Arthur Miller's penultimate play, unleashed a salvo of critical abuse. Ironically, the production looked like a brilliant confluence of theatrical credibility and Hollywood star power; the exact thing that sent a frisson of excitement through London's theatre scene three years earlier. Many in Sydney's theatre community are hoping Blanchett can deliver something similar. Resurrection Blues was directed by the movie legend Robert Altman with a cast that included James Fox, Maximilian Schell and Neve Campbell.Things went wrong from the start. Altman told a journalist he didn't fully understand the play. One of the cast, Jane Adams, walked off in the middle of a performance and Schell seemed to forget his lines. "Clumsily inept," said The Guardian; "A fiasco," said The Daily London . The Evening Standard's theatre critic, Nicholas de Jongh, suggested the play had the "allure of a sagging derriere" and called on Spacey to consider his position.If the Old Vic's director was rattled he didn't let on. "There must be an impression that somehow this stuff bothers me, but they're selling newspapers, and I'm selling theatre seats," Spacey told The New York Times in May. "I'm having the time of my life."But in an interview with The Observer, he admitted his silver screen fame was proving a double-edged sword. "I know I'm a bigger target as long as I'm seen as a Hollywood movie star instead of as an actor of the theatre, even an artistic director," he said. "They don't accept that I come in to work here every day, and I have done for the past 21/2 years, and will continue to do so." Blanchett could be subjected to the same prejudice, but I doubt it. Sydney's theatre scene just isn't as cutthroat as London's, and while the artistic director of the de facto national theatre company will always face intense scrutiny, there is immense goodwill towards Blanchett and her co-artistic director, Andrew Upton.She is one of our own, for a start, not a Hollywood interloper. And the idea of our best actor running our top theatre company is justifiably exciting.Blanchett also has strong, deeply felt ties with the Sydney stage. Her Sydney Theatre Company debut was a 1993 production of Oleanna alongside Geoffrey Rush, that other Hollywood star who can be seen at the multiplex one day and in the bar of the Belvoir Street Theatre the next. Anyone who saw Blanchett's Hedda Gabler knows she can command a stage; now we want her to command a theatre.If there is an outbreak of tall poppy syndrome down at the Wharf, she should remember Spacey's defiant response to a torrent of bad press."Whether it's positive or not, people are talking about the Old Vic Theatre again with passion and commitment and controversy and debate."
© 2006 Sydney Morning Herald