Jane Turner’s Rupert Romp

The Sydney cast of David Williamson’s Rupert will not be travelling with the production to London’s West End in 2015.

Jane Turner, the outrageous Kath in TV’s Kath & Kim, who shares top billing in the production with imported Hollywood star James Crowell, has told Stage Whispers that she was never offered the London season.

“Oh, that’s never been part of the deal,” she said. “I think it’ll be cast over there.”

Turner is getting big laughs, especially with her deadly portrait of UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

“There’s a girl [Fenella Woolgar] I saw do Thatcher in London in a play called Handbagged. She was fantastic. She should do it.”

Turner was hardly available. She is to play the lead in the coming MTC/STC production of the English comedy Jumpy by April de Angelis. She starts rehearsal just after Christmas and the play runs in Melbourne and Sydney through to 16 May.

It’s a first sustained, one-character role for Turner who has always specialised in playing, as in Rupert, multiple comic characters.

“Yes,” she told us. “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.”

So if you want to see the Foxy Moron as a brilliant Iron Lady – don’t miss Rupert before it ends on 22 December.

Frank Hatherley

Read Frank Hatherley’s full interview with Jane Turner in the January / February 2015 edition of Stage Whispers, coming soon.

Image: Jane Turner as Margaret Thatcher. Photo: James Morgan.

Frank Hatherley's review of Rupert.