After 18 years in Australia, during which she has established herself as one of that country’s best actors, Pamela Rabe is coming home to Canada to “connect the dots.”
Rabe, who was born near Toronto and raised in Vancouver, came to Australia in 1982 as a 22-year-old who had just graduated from drama school.
Since then, she has worked in almost 50 Australian stage productions, eight TV series and six movies, including her role in The Well for which she won the Australian Film Institute’s best-actress award in 1996.
For the next few weeks, Rabe will be in Brisbane, Australia, in Martin McDonagh’s award-winning play The Beauty Queen of Leenane.
Then on May 14, the morning after the curtain comes down on Leenane, Rabe, 40, will fly back to Canada to spend four months at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont.
She will be in George Bernard Shaw’s The Apple Cart,directed by her former tutor Christopher Newton, and also in the one-woman play, A Room of One’s Own,based on the Virginia Woolf novel.
Rabe won the Sydney Critics Circle best-actress award last year for the same play.
She says she’s excited about returning to Canada for the longest period since she left as a young woman “with everything ahead of me.”
“It’s going to be an odd cultural connection, but it will really join up all the dots for me,” she told Brisbane’s Courier-Mail newspaper. “I’ve got seven brothers and sisters and a mother waiting there for me.
“I sense the gathering of relatives like a thundering herd across the prairie — all intending to come and stay with me.”
Rabe recalls frequently moving around Canada as a child before her family settled in Vancouver, where she did most of her schooling and became active in drama studies.
Rabe is married to Australian theatre director Roger Hodgman, a former director of the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre, where she performed as a student.
When Hodgman decided to return to Australia in 1982 to take a post as head of drama at the Victoria College of the Arts in Melbourne, he invited Rabe to come with him.
“Roger had seduced me with a number of really interesting Australian movies that were out at that time,” says Rabe, who is now an Australian citizen.
On rare occasions, you leave a theater feeling that your life is not quite the same as it was beforehand. Perhaps you’ve learned something new, perhaps not. But the performance you’ve just seen has stirred you so profoundly that you believe you will never forget it.
A single person speaks for 90 minutes on a nearly empty stage. Her props are a desk and chair, a pencil and pad, a small pile of books. And her hands. Her remarkable hands. She is a tall, handsome woman who invests her character with both shrewdness and struggle.
For 90 uninterrupted minutes, in Patrick Garland’s stage adaptation of English novelist Virginia Woolf’s essay A Room of One’s Own, Pamela Rabe as Woolf struggles to write the essay she first gave as two speeches in 1928. Her audience consisted of students at Cambridge University’s two women’s colleges, Newnham and Girton.
The students’ literary societies have invited Woolf to speak about women in fiction. Rather than lecture about George Eliot and the Brontes, though, she gets thinking about why so few women have written fiction. She even invents a gifted but frustrated sister for William Shakespeare.
She begins with a fictional narrator who isn’t allowed to enter the university library because she’s female. She concludes the incident with an irony, delivered with a quiet savagery modulated only by the decorum of her language: “That a famous library has been cursed by a woman is a matter of complete indifference to a famous library.”
From there, she moves to her premise, surprising because it’s not what common wisdom says writers worry about. She tells her female audience, “It is necessary to have 500 [pounds] a year and a room with a lock on the door if you are to write fiction or poetry.” She argues that there can be no psychological and artistic independence without economic independence — and independence, for a woman who wants to write, is everything.
Not surprisingly, the essay, published as a small book the following year, has become one of the seminal feminist works.
The Woolf of Rabe’s portrayal is ferociously intelligent. She usually contains her rage beneath an elegant, ironic demeanor but it’s never far from the surface. Though photographs of Woolf suggest an inward-looking person, the play and Rabe give us Woolf in a public forum. She is up on her feet, striking a pose to get at the truth. And Rabe, of course, is an actress. She must ultimately look outward. Her performance holds the private novelist and the pub-lic lecturer in exquisite balance.
The prose is quite literary, not what one expects to hear somebody saying to somebody else. But Rabe’s mastery of Woolf’s rhythms allows her somehow to create a voice that is slightly formal and occasionally hortatory yet conspiratorially intimate. It’s as if she’s saying to us, “Yes, yes, I’m making a speech. But don’t forget we’re all in this together; we all see the irony but we all feel the anger.” It all makes for a moment in the theater that might very well stay with you for a lifetime.
