Beautiful Brains

Angie Milliken and Sigrid Thornton are each playing the lead role in two different productions of a sharply intelligent play that requires actors with brains. FRANK HATHERLEY interviews the two stars and discovers that both productions are in luck.

The photo of Angie Milliken holding, Hamlet-like, a dripping brain is beautifully confronting. She’s playing Lorna James, supervising doctor of a pharmaceutical drug trial, in the Queensland Theatre Company's production of The Effect by Lucy Prebble, a play that debuted at London's National Theatre in 2012. It’s a co-production with the STC and plays Sydney immediately after Brisbane.

Angie, surprisingly, currently lives in Los Angeles. This is her first job ‘at home’ in eight years. And this really is home: she was born and raised in Brisbane. Her parents and sister will be at the opening night.

She’d always been an actor, she says. “Even when I was very young I would just get up and perform things assuming I knew how to do it.

“I grew up watching Brisbane actors. I soaked up what I could of the Queensland Theatre Company, the TN! Company [Twelfth Night Theatre Company], the Grin & Tonic troupe. My foundation in the theatre was here. It wasn’t a celebrity-filled time, but it was a very rich time. I watched actors like Bille Brown work and I thought: ‘I want to do that’.” [The Effect is playing at the QTC’s Bille Brown Studio.]

In the 80s Angie completed an English Literature and Sociology degree at the University of Queensland. Bright and brilliant, acting remained a pleasant sideline. She was part of an alternative arts and theatre group called The Fluba Troupe, advertised as ‘the quintessential existential experience’.

“I was very naïve. I was experimenting with theatre and what my place in it was, and I was very fortunate to work and collaborate with many wonderful people. I also did some regular plays at the Schonell Theatre.”

Did that convince her to try for NIDA?

“Not at all. I had never heard of NIDA! I was in a quandary at the end of my degree – should I continue studying or get a teaching degree? I was on the phone with my sister Katherine, and she said ‘really, Angie, you’ve got to stop avoiding being an actor’.”  

“Which I was,” she laughs. “I was avoiding making the decision, because I knew it was going to be a precarious life to pursue. But it was just in my blood.

“My sister said, ‘look, there’s this school in Sydney, just get the application form, fill it in and go!’ So I said ‘okay’, spread my wings and went to Sydney.”

NIDA in the late 80s was a powerhouse of talent. She was in student productions directed by Jim Sharman, Gale Edwards and Lindy Davies.

Her first professional job was in Sharman’s 1989 production of The Conquest of the South Pole at Belvoir. An actor named Baz Luhrmann played the lead. The play was not a success, though the Sun-Herald’s review approved of ‘the spirited Angie Milliken’. She was away.

Next year she played Irina in The Three Sisters for Richard Wherrett. It was his final production for the STC.

“At that stage of his illness he directed from a sofa in the rehearsal room, which was just lovely actually. He was a wonderful and knowledgeable man, expansive and funny, who just enjoyed humanity. It was a really lovely environment to work in.

“I felt so privileged to be in the company of actors of different generations, which is what Chekhov affords you, and to learn from such lovely actors as Ron Haddrick, Lois Ramsay, Linda Cropper, Pam Rabe...”

Angie was now in demand. Film and television offers came along.

“I did an ABC mini-series called The Paperman that was partly shot in Sydney and partly in London. It was loosely based on the beginnings of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.”

She thought of staying in London but got the news that Neil Armfield had offered her The Tempest at the Belvoir. “I came straight back,” she says.

She played Miranda to John Bell’s Prospero, a fond memory. I tell her that Bell had recently named this production, on an island set covered deep in sand, as the best Shakespeare he’d ever done.

“I’m not surprised,” says Angie, “it’s a special memory of mine, too. Performing in all that sand — I was in heaven.”

Thoughtful, unambitious, dedicated to her craft, she was content to do excellent work in Australia, based mainly in Sydney. “I went with what was offered to me,” she says. Her performance as Vittoria in The White Devil, directed by Gale Edwards was notable: the production went to New York.

But soon she paused. “I needed to spread my wings again!” she says. “I needed to open up a new chapter in my life! I tried living in London and was making the initial moves to work there. But it didn’t feel right to me, personally.

“On my way back home I visited a friend in LA, and I just responded to the mountains and the sea and I felt like this was really where I need to be for my next chapter.

“So for the last eight years I’ve lived in LA. That wasn’t a professional choice, it was a deeply personal one, part of my personal odyssey. Personal growth must go hand in hand with artistic growth. For me there’s not one without the other.

“I didn’t know I would be completely starting all over again, personally and professionally. There were survival skills that I needed to learn.

“There’s nothing like having an experience away from Australia to find out just how Australian you are. And there’s nothing like experiencing time away from Brisbane to know just how much a Queenslander you are.

“It’s always very important to be grounded in where you come from and to know that’s who you are. It feeds very deeply into your artistic sense of self.”

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When my editor asked me to do this interview he told me about meeting Angie Milliken at a NIDA Open Program Directing Masterclass some years ago. She was working with her acting guru Lindy Davies, whose ‘impulse’ technique remains the basis of Angie’s work.

“I was blown away,” Neil Litchfield had said, “by Angie’s fearlessness and total commitment to a workshop demonstration to amateur directors of an acting process.”

I wanted to know if she used this technique in her preparation for The Effect.

“It’s certainly the basis of what I do, definitely,” she says. “It’s what Lindy Davies called at NIDA ‘an approach to performance’. She’s taught it at the VCA as well, so there’s a whole generation of actors who are very, very familiar with it.

“It comes from real life. Whatever we do — making a cup of tea or waiting for a bus or driving a car – there are unconscious decisions that we make off impulse. So finding your way into work is finding impulses that are organically connected to what your character needs and wants within the world of the play.

“You create a state for yourself where you make organic choices that don’t come from something rational or logical.

“But first of all you have to fill yourself up with the world of the play. That involves research. What’s the world of Lorna, a doctor? What’s her relationship with Toby, the other doctor, and with the other characters?

“Allow the research to form in a deep way and you make discoveries about the language and about the world of the play. It’s like playing a sport where there are strong rules. Once you really know the rules you can play hard and confidently and instinctively within that context.”

I ask about the rules she has developed for being Lorna. She starts slowly, carefully.

“I’m the supervising doctor of a drug trial. I’ve been given a job as a favour from someone very important in my life — Toby, who is also a doctor working for a pharmaceutical company.

“I have a science background. I’m also emotionally driven, with very strong personal and political beliefs about pharmaceuticals. It’s very important to me to run this drug trial absolutely perfectly. My professional career is riding on it. I’ve had a lot of struggles in the past. I refuse to believe depression is an illness. I tend to think it’s a much more grey area...”

There’s a long pause. “It’s very hard to talk about her from the outside,” she says.

“The play is wonderful because depression gets illuminated in all its many complexities — its causes, whether we should medicate or not. All the issues that surround depression are laid out.”

A dedicated seeker after truth in her life and her art, Angie Milliken’s personal odyssey continues.

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Perhaps Sigrid Thornton is not so intense when I ring her in Melbourne, but she’s just as thoughtful, just as intellectually committed to the acting job at hand.

I soon discover that she’s not only a personal friend of Angie’s but that the two actors share a Brisbane background. “We’re both Brisbane girls!” she says. And they both have a strong connection with the University of Queensland.

“I actually grew up on the campus because I’m the child of academics. Both my parents were teachers there. My mother [Merle Thornton] initiated the first women’s studies course in the country. My father [Neil] was a Senior Lecturer in Political Science. I grew up running around the lovely green campus, a beautiful place to frolic as a child.”

Hers were politically committed and deep thinking parents, making waves in 60s Brisbane. At 13, Sigrid was arrested with her family after a march and sit-in protest against the Vietnam War. Her night in the watch-house was an education in itself.

Acting cut short her own university degree course. Crawford Productions had spotted her while she was at school and she’d been flown to Melbourne to appear in an episode of Homicide.

“During my time at school I was doing one or two guest leads a year for Crawfords. Then I dropped my arts degree course in the middle of the first year when I got another job down in Melbourne.”

Eye-catching and committed, while the acting work kept coming Sigrid had no time for formal acting training. “My training has always been on the run really. I gained an awful lot by getting into the profession early.

“But it’s swings and merry-go-rounds. I would have relished the opportunity to take all kinds of exciting risks in the safe environment of a drama school. Whereas when you’re a young actor out in the field your learning curve is exposed to the public.”

Known more for her film and television work than as a stage actor, Sigrid first made a speciality of long-skirted, feisty, period heroines, mainly in the bush. TV series included Outbreak of Love (1980), The Last Outlaw (1981), and movies like The Man From Snowy River (1981) and The Lighthorsemen (1987).

The 1983 Channel 7 TV series All the Rivers Run (‘One woman’s struggle for survival’) lead to three years (1988-92) in LA making the CBS ‘family Western’ series Guns of Paradise.

Back home, an uncharacteristic dry patch came to an abrupt end with three seasons of the ABC’s wildly popular TV series SeaChange (1997-2000), for which she won a Logie and the hearts of telly-viewing Australia.

Theatre work came later. Betrayal (2001) for the MTC, a national tour of The Blue Room (2002), Desiree in A Little Night Music (2007) for Opera Australia and, earlier this year, Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire for the Black Swan Theatre Company in Perth.

How, I ask her, does acting for the stage compare to acting for the screen?

“I love film because you can stop and start again!” she laughs. “There are no safety nets in theatre but that’s what makes it so enticing, such a ferocious jump into the unknown every night. If you get it wrong you are dependent on your colleagues to help you, on your imagination and on the audience’s good graces. You certainly can’t stop and start again.

“And I love the whole rehearsal process for theatre, the thorough examination of the text. If I could be paid just to rehearse a good play in a rehearsal room I’d be a very happy camper. Never having to put the show on wouldn’t worry me at all.

“And if you’re working on a genuine masterpiece like Streetcar the writing is so extraordinarily precise and vivid it carries the actor along if you give over to it.

“Some actors like to lock down their performance during the rehearsal process and perform exactly the same way every night. But to me every performance feels different from the last and the job of the actor is to be fresh every night regardless of how thoroughly you feel you’ve got it under your belt.”

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I am wondering how Sigrid’s approach to inhabiting Lorna, the doctor/psychiatrist in The Effect, will differ from Angie’s.

Sigrid is firm. “I like to do as much pre-preparation as I possibly can while still remaining open to the rehearsal process. It’s really important to come along with an open mind and heart and be ready for what the director, all of the key creatives and one’s fellow cast members have to bring to the table.

“I don’t learn my lines before I come to rehearsal. I think there’s a process of amalgamating the intellectual, the physical and the emotional that can’t take place thoroughly until you’re moving on the floor. It’s a process called ‘getting the lines into your body’.

“If you lock down too early you can make prejudgements that might waste time. Later in the rehearsal period you might have to double-back and reverse decisions that are already blocked in.”

Has she been researching the subject of depression and antidepressants?

“Of course,” she says. “Lucy Prebble [the playwright] is really well informed but I can’t take her word for it. I need to have a personal understanding of what is the state of play with medical research on the subject.

“It’s a timely play, set in the context of a clinical trial: a stark and clinical environment. We have to humanise it as much as possible. The core of the piece is about the way that this trial, this mental condition and these drugs affect actual people. The fundamental challenge is to humanise the characters, to show them as vulnerable, frail human beings.

“It’s also a discussion about love, the power of love to influence the heart. Well, we talk about the heart, but actually it’s also the brain. Where do we separate? What part of love is from the heart and what part from the brain?

“I think love is the most valued thing to study in any creative work. That’s my personal view.”

Images: Sigrid Thornton in the MTC poduction by Jeff Busby. Angie Milliken in the QTC / STC production by Rob Maccoll.

The Effect by Lucy Prebble

QTC and STC Co-production

Directed by Sarah Goodes

Bille Brown Studio, Brisbane

7 June – 5 July

Wharf 1 Theatre, Sydney

10 July – 16 August

MTC Production

Directed by Leticia Cáceres

Southbank Theatre, Melbourne

16 August – 20 September

Originally published in the July / August 2014 edition of Stage Whispers