|
Expect some gruff responses to this shaggy goat story
For a pair who have only just met, Wendy Hughes and Philip Quast are amazingly lovey dovey. The actors have admired each other from afar, but the latest Melbourne Theatre Company production is the first time they have worked together, both arriving from Sydney to star in The Goat or Who is Sylvia?
"I changed my flight so I could sit next to her", Quast says.
Their rapport can only help when it comes to playing a married couple in strife in Edward Albee's new play. Hughes says she was drawn to the play in the time it took to read the script. "Once I discovered what's happening, my mouth just fell open,'' she says. "It's different. Then I couldn't stop reading it because it's so powerful, the characterisations are well drawn, and I just couldn't wait to smash all that furniture.''
Overturning tables and crashing objets d'art is all part of her character's reaction after discovering her until-now faithful husband has been having an affair with a, um, goat. Playwright Albee, of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? fame, adds Martin's confused, gay, teenage son Billy to the mix.
"This is the first production outside Broadway, which makes it very attractive, "Quast says. "It's been very successful there. It's wonderfully controversial in a way that's not sensationalist, in a way that makes the audience think and confronts them.''
Last year's Tony Award winner for best play, The Goat was first performed in New York by Bill Pullman and Mercedes Ruehl. "The story goes that Albee wrote it at the time of the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky thing and it was partially a response to that, "Quast says. "And the more we get in to it, we think how did that connect? But it's probably that people were more worked up about a bl*w job than they were about killing 170,000 in Iraq, and the questions of: What is truth, what is important?''
Quast and Hughes say they expect walkouts from shocked audience members during the show, which examines a man's obsession with a goat, sexual taboos, and a wife's reaction to her husband's news. "The play's about what is shocking and how much people will accept,'' Hughes says. "And reading an interview that Albee did, he was saying he finds the theatre now very safe and not confronting, and he wanted to write something that was definitely going to be controversial and shock people. He was sick of safe theatre.''
London-based Quast comes to the play after a career spanning everything from a role on The Young Doctors to performances with the Royal Shakespeare Company. "My career's been a hotchpotch, and I think Wendy and I have the same philosophy on hotchpotches,'' the actor says. "A bit of this and a bit of that. Not necessarily doing this because it will lead to that, but doing this because it's good for you or, 'I feel like doing that'."
Hughes' career, too, has crossed TV, theatre and film, including her fair share of period pieces, such as Careful He May Hear You, Power Without Glory, My Brilliant Career and An Indecent Obsession.
© Herald and Weekly Times
