A Couple of Actors

Guy Edmonds and Haiha Le are playing a newly wed couple in David Williamson’s latest play Dream Home at the Ensemble Theatre.

And in fact they’re a newly engaged couple themselves.

The two actors had met in the cast of Rupert, Williamson’s revue-style portrait of Rupert Murdoch which opened in Melbourne, toured to Washington and was then re-staged at the Theatre Royal Sydney at the end of last year.

Guy played Murdoch from brash young man to venerable sage, perhaps the trickiest assignment in the piece; Vietnamese-Australian Haiha played (among other things) Wendi Deng, Murdoch’s exotic young second wife.

“She’s a great actor,” says Guy when I met him at the Ensemble during final rehearsals for Dream Home.

“Our characters are completely different in Dream Home. Which is nice. This character I’m playing, he’s not an Alpha Male [like Rupert], he’s a Beta, not as confident, a bit smaller.”

Does playing together, I wonder, affect their personal relationship?

“It’s fine,” he says. “Some acting couples have real difficulty acting together. But we met as colleagues. The foundation of our relationship was respecting each other as actors, without any romantic connotation, so it’s actually made it easy.”

How is he enjoying working with Williamson, who is directing his own play at the Ensemble?

“I’m having a ball,” he says. “I think David has written a very funny and slightly more poignant and dramatic play than he ever imagined.

“I didn’t actually read it as dramatic as it is. But on the floor it’s got moments of real drama – which is useful, because it makes the comedy funnier. The audience won’t be expecting it, so they might laugh a little bit harder.

“And structurally it’s classic, pure storytelling.

“People can always say what they want about David Williamson – ‘he could have more edge or could be more political or whatever’. He’s 72. He’s said a lot of what he needed to say when he was a younger, angrier man.

In Dream Home there’s an edge on relationships – who we love and how we love them, how we treat marriage and how money affects relationships – it’s a relationship play.

“It’s about relationships and how flawed people can often do terrible things to each other.”

What’s Williamson like as a director?

“Direct,” says Guy immediately. “I like that. Because I’m pretty direct. I don’t like sugar coating. He’ll say ‘well, yeah, but, when you did that, I didn’t believe it, try this...’

“A more sensitive actor — and I know some! — might go [sensitive voice] ‘oh, no, ooo, he hates me!’ But it’s not personal, it’s to the point!

“And David really understands physical action on stage. It’s a dynamic production, movement wise.”

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Dream Home has an extended run at the Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, from 31 January to 28 March, 2015.

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Frank Hatherley’s profile of actor-writer-producer-director Guy Edmonds will appear in the March/April 2015 edition of Stage Whispers.