Wentworth S6 Promo
Look out! Wentworth's notorious prisoners Franky Doyle and Joan 'The Freak' Ferguson have escaped! P.S. Wentworth Season 6 premieres Tuesday June 19th at 8.30pm on showcase Source: TV Week
Wentworth’s Joan ‘The Freak’ Ferguson actress Pamela Rabe stars as Jesus’ mother in solo show
AS JOAN “The Freak” Ferguson in hit TV series Wentworth, Pamela Rabe plays Australia’s most-hated villain.
But in her solo show, the Malthouse Theatre’s production of The Testament of Mary, the acclaimed actress takes on the controversial role of the mother of Jesus.
“They’re not that different in the end,” Rabe said.
“As an actor you’re exploring a human being, the humanity of a character and doing your best to bring that story alive for an audience.
“They’re both women. I just play the woman. The challenge is actually for the audiences to flip from one to the other.”
The play is based on award-winning Irish writer Colm Toibin’s novella, which became a Tony Award-nominated Broadway play and is frequently restaged around the word.
The Testament of Mary examines themes such as women’s roles in history being rewritten to suit dogma and dealing with the aftermath of trauma. It has found a resonance with current issues including “fake news” and religious extremism.
“This is not the depiction of a saint, this is the depiction of a human being, a mother whose son has died,” Rabe said.
“We know so little about her, and the little that is known is only from some very meagre, meagre words in the New Testament in the Bible.”
The in-demand actress, coming to the play directly from performing in Ibsen’s Ghosts in Sydney, said doing a solo show was “lonely” and she was “descending into a world of grieving mothers”.
“What I love about this piece of writing that Colm Toibin has created (is) it’s very interrogative, an imaginative exploration which invites everyone to have their own individual response to the kind of trigger that he presents,” she said. (more…)
The Devil You Know
Wentworth Season 5: Pamela Rabe reveals her life as The Freak
PAMELA RABE WALKS into a room on the Wentworth set to talk about the highly-anticipated fifth season of the series, premiering in April on showcase.
While her character Ferguson is renowned for a dagger glare so intense it can leave even a hardened criminal shaking in her shoes, the actress describes herself as “shy”, which is evident as she gazes at the floor or out the window as she ponders then answers questions.
When asked if she can relate to the late Dennis Hopper’s (Blue Velvet) quote on playing characters who plumb the darkest depths of human nature, Rabe says: “People keep asking me, ‘What evil lurks in you to play bad characters?’” Hopper said. His comeback to that was, “There’s no evil in me, I just wear tight underwear”.
Rabe shoots back, “Well, I just wore a tight bun. Keep the bun tight!”
She laughs, but it turns out there’s some truth to what she’s saying.
Pamela Rabe on Wentworth and The Glass Menagerie
Pamela Rabe has built a reputation for playing the “heavy” roles in the theatrical canon – The Wicked Witch of the West, even Richard III – but for sheer malevolence, nothing tops playing Joan “The Freak” Ferguson, the sadistic black-gloved jailer of the rebooted Prisoner series Wentworth, airing on Foxtel.
Rabe, who is preparing to play a monster of a different stripe in Belvoir’s coming production of The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, has recently finished filming the third season of the series in Melbourne.
“I’ve known Maggie Kirkpatrick [the original “Freak” from the ’80s soapie] for a long time now,” Rabe says. “We did a tour of The Beauty Queen of Leenane for the Sydney Theatre Company playing a mother and daughter. So there was some serendipity in me being asked to take up the gloves.”
On screen, Rabe lives up to Prison Officer Joan Ferguson’s unofficial title. “I felt like I had to earn that nickname,” Rabe says. “When the audience knows you’re going to get nasty, it’s all about working your way to that destination as interestingly as possible. It’s a great challenge.” (more…)
Pamela Rabe indulges her nasty streak
SADISTIC: Pamela Rabe plays fearsome new prison governor, Joan “The Freak” Ferguson on Wentworth.
The characters had ripper nicknames like The Freak, Queen Bea, Boomer and Vinegar Tits.
The sets were cobbled together from hardboard so flimsy you could see the walls wobble if someone slammed a door.
To heighten the mood and disguise the low-budget sets, the lighting was dimmed down until everything looked as grey as an incoming storm cloud.
There were steamy lesbian liaisons in the prison laundry, heroin overdoses in the dunnies, pervy prison wardens, amorous electricians. There were drug-induced flashbacks, gratuitous cavity searches, riots, suicides, arsons, and alarming outbreaks of forced cunnilingus.
There were bashings for Africa; if a new inmate clashed with the tough old chick who was “top dog”, she might find her life leaking away on the shower-block linoleum, having been stabbed through the heart with a sharpened toothbrush.
A melodramatic soap opera that recalled a badass Neighbours, set behind bars, cult Aussie series Prisoner ran for a marathon 692 episodes between 1979 and 1986, its far-fetched stories derived from the power struggles of inmates and staff within a women’s prison in Melbourne. Viewers loved it. Like Acca Dacca, budgie smugglers and shark nets, the thing became an Australian institution.
“Oh, good god, yes,” says Pamela Rabe, one of Australia’s greatest actresses. “And not just here in Australia, either. It screened all over the world. I grew up in Canada, but my Australian husband got me watching it over there on late-night TV. When we moved out here in 1983, I discovered just how much people loved it and the huge effect it had on popular culture.” (more…)
Freaking Out Over Evil Role
The reinvention of a classic Aussie TV drama has given respected actor Pamela Rabe a chance to show her strengths Actor Pamela Rabe, right, says she "burst out laughing° when…
Wentworth Season 2’s New Governor Gets Sadistic
Cruelty, sadism – it’s all there in the new governor’s hairstyle.
“Give me the stuff of nightmares.”
That was Pamela Rabe’s suggestion to hair and make-up artist Troy Follington when it came to creating the hairdo of Wentworth Detention Centre’s formidable new governor, Joan Ferguson.
‘The menace of quixotic tyranny’: Pamela Rabe (right) recreates Joan Ferguson in season two of Wentworth. | Photo by Ben King
They played around with a few different styles, before they realised that of all the Wentworth characters that owe their ancestry to the original Prisoner, Joan was the one whose accessorising bordered on the iconic.
The original Joan ”The Freak” Ferguson had a pair of black leather gloves, which she would ceremoniously don to conduct her infamous body searches.
It was a signature of the humiliating, cruel, yet random power that The Freak exercised over her minions.
Pamela Rabe locked on a new Joan Ferguson
Pamela Rabe is as ready as she can be for the reaction that is about to follow for her debut as Joan Ferguson on Wentworth.
Mindful that Maggie Kirkpatrick’s original creation of the role in the iconic Prisoner would elicit hostile reactions from fans on the street, she concedes, “I’m sure even this incarnation of the 21st century Joan Ferguson is going to piss a lot of people off.”
But what a role to play.
“With this character being so iconic in its creation, the execution in Maggie’s hands and peoples’ memories of how Officer Joan Ferguson existed, I get the sense that how Joan Ferguson, now Governor, enters into the prison environment is with a few more noticeable nods to the original creation,” she says.
“So you will see black gloves, an element of a fairly delicious disjunct with what people would consider a ‘sociable emotion of feeling’ and her strategies and objectives.
“She’s described by some other characters as a psychopath. There’s something in the way Joan has risen amongst the ranks that taps into those original characteristics of Joan Ferguson.”
Rabe hadn’t seen the first season of Wentworth when she was approached for the role, but she had seen some of Prisoner on Canadian TV where she grew up.
“They used to play Prisoner: Cell Block H on television, right after Don Lane, late night.
“They went to 24 hour programming before Australia so there was a lot of hours to fill.
“By the time I arrived in 1983 it was already part of Australian culture.
“I was aware of the characters, and particularly Joan Ferguson, enough to know I needn’t have any hesitation.” (more…)
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