Foxy Moron Gets Jumpy

The creator of Kath Day-Night, television’s ‘foxy moron’, JANE TURNER is to play the lead in Jumpy, a major MTC/STC stage production. FRANK HATHERLEY asks her if she’s feeling jumpy about straight theatre acting.

We meet in the empty Theatre Royal green room between matinee and evening performances of Rupert. David Williamson’s revue-style portrait of Rupert Murdoch opened in Sydney a few days before, so this was only Jane Turner’s second matinee.

“It was good,” she says, tucked into the corner of a comfy sofa. “Except I kicked a cushion and almost fell over, then stumbled on my line. I love live theatre!”

She’s petite, direct and formidable, with not a trace of the afternoon’s recent makeup. Her thoughts and memories come out rapid-fire.

Jane shares top billing in Rupert with imported Hollywood star James Cromwell, though he’s on stage the whole two-and-a-half hours as hero/narrator Murdoch while she’s on and off, playing many parts, most notably UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The audience loves her.

Her life with the wildly successful Kath & Kim franchise — which she writes, produces and performs with her long-time friend Gina Riley — had come to a pause.

“After we finished the film [Kath & Kimderlla, 2012],” she says, “I sort of had a year off at home. I just really needed to lie low and chill out. Gina had been sick and I wasn’t being offered anything that I wanted to do.

“What I really wanted to do was some theatre, so I put the feelers out and the Melbourne Theatre Company said ‘yeah, we’d love you to do Jumpy next year’. It’s a lovely English play by April de Angelis.

“And then Rupert came up, so I thought ‘great, a little reintroduction into the theatre world’. Now I get a week off over Christmas and then I’m back in Melbourne to start work on the 29th.”

Jumpy plays Melbourne in February/March, then moves to Sydney until mid-May. So she won’t be moving with Rupert on it’s publicised move to London’s West End?

“Oh, that’s never been part of the deal,” she says. “I think it’ll be cast over there. There’s a girl [Fenella Woolgar] I saw do Thatcher in London in a play called Handbagged. She was fantastic. She should do it.”

But, I remind her, the lead in Jumpy is a sustained, one-character role. No running on and off as different comic characters.

“Yes,” she exclaims. “All the theatre I have done has been revue style — wigs on, wigs off. So it’s going to be very different for me. I’m a bit nervous.

“But it’s exactly what I wanted to do. It’s perfect timing for me. It’s not even the funniest role in the play. Oh, she’s funny, the central character, but she’s real and she’s on stage the whole time. There are no scenes without her.”

Audiences are so used to seeing her do exaggerated comedy: how will she go playing ‘real’?

“Actually, I always think of Kath as being quite real – well, I know I’m pushing the ‘real’ envelope – but people are always coming up to me a saying ‘My mother’s Kath!’ or ‘My sister’s totally Kath!’.

“You can only write about what you know and Gina and I were definitely living that life, going to IKEA, going to shopping malls, driving around, and having teenage daughters. It came out of the whole new ‘helicopter parenting’ thing, and out of Reality Television shows like Sylvania Waters.”

What, I wondered, was her first experience of acting on stage?

“When I left school I joined St Martins Youth Arts Centre which was this youth theatre company in South Yarra in Melbourne. I was eighteen.

“We did lots of live shows with Helmut Bakaitis. He was a fantastic director, very sort of avant-garde, very charismatic and we all just adored him. He ended up being Head of Directing at NIDA.

“I met Gina at St Martins. The first show we did together was called The Sensational South Yarra Show [1979]. It was like a Brechtian Opera, very sort of Marxist-Leninist. It was a revue, a whole lot of sketches and songs. There were about 50 of us in it.

“We did some gritty things, all original shows. The Zig and Zag Follies [1980] was all about early television – how video was ruining television, something like that. I played Princess Panda in that: she was a television character of the 60s.

“Do you remember Zig and Zag? They were huge in Melbourne! They were sort of like big clowns. Actually, I think one of them got done for the usual... but let’s not go there.”

Jane shifts position on the green room sofa.

“Anyway, after Youth Theatre we all moved into stand-up, moved into comedy. Gina and I started doing comedy at The Last Laugh and The Comedy Café — doing sketches that we’d written ourselves.”

You never thought twice about writing your own material?

“Absolutely not! I’d write something for an audition. They’d say ‘oh, that’s amazing, you can write! Okay, let’s put you together with this person or that person’, so we wrote shows in like 9 days. We all emerged into the 1980s television comedy boom.

“Oh,” she remembers, “I did one theatre play for the MTC around that time called Blabber Mouth, the Maurice Gleitzman play. It was sort of for kids, or young adults, at the Russell Street Theatre.

“And I did a one-month season of The Rocky Horror Show in Adelaide. I was Janet in that. It was a ball. Nigel Triffitt directed it and Peter Rowsthorn, my Brett in Kath & Kim, played my Brad. We were all a team from way back.”

Before Rupert, Jane’s most challenging theatre job was in Holding the Man, the successful 2006 drama by Tommy Murphy, adapted from the memoir of gay-activist Timothy Conigrave. She played Sydney and Melbourne, and went with it for a season in London’s Trafalgar Studios, the old Whitehall Theatre.

“London was great. They really embrace theatre traditions. The actual theatre was okay – nice auditorium, art-deco-y, smallish – but the dressing rooms were just old and cramped. And you had to traipse up about 20 flights of stairs to get to them. It certainly wasn’t glamorous, but it was right next to Trafalgar Square.

“But, see, even with Holding the Man I played 12 different characters.”

She frowns, remembering the task ahead of her, then smiles. “My director is Pamela Rabe, she’s fantastic, always an amazing actor, one of my favourites. We’ve had a few meetings and we’re on the same wavelength. She’s really collaborative. So it’s going to be good, I think.”

She looks around the green room, its walls covered in old posters.

“I love doing theatre. I love the dressing rooms, the cossies, backstage. The actors are gorgeous. It’s a great collaborative world – a team, always relying on each other, always so full of adrenaline.”

Jane Turner is right at home.

Jumpy plays at the MTC from 31 January to 14 March and at the STC from 26 March to 16 May.

Images: Jane Turner - top image by James Green; as Maggie Thatcher in Rupert - photographer James Morgan, & lower image by Bronwen Sharp.

More reading

MTC Season 2015

STC Season 2015

Originally published in the January / February 2015 edition of Stage Whispers