Noni Hazlehurst instantly conveys two striking qualities: a warmth sufficient to put a fangirling reporter immediately at ease; and a sense of strength \u2014 fierceness, perhaps.<\/p>\n
As we chat in a rehearsal space in Melbourne’s inner north, the Logie and ACCTA award-winner, former Play School and Better Homes and Gardens presenter, and star of A Place to Call Home, refers to herself several times as an “old woman”.<\/p>\n
But she is toying with a stereotype; Hazlehurst, 71, surely knows the power she wields.<\/p>\n
In a recent performance of Mother, the one-woman play she has toured for over a decade, Hazlehurst’s audience entered the theatre giggling and chatting, only to quickly become one of the quietest crowds I have ever sat among.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In Mother, Hazlehurst plays Christie, an older woman who is homeless and living with the impacts of various traumas she’s experienced. (Supplied: Brett Boardman)<\/p>\n
“Noni can be very tough and she can have great depth of feeling, but she’s a very empathetic person and she brings that to her roles,” says Daniel Keene, the playwright behind Mother and Hazlehurst’s latest show, The Lark, which opens in Melbourne next month.<\/p>\n
In both, Hazlehurst plays an older woman grappling with a rich, complicated backstory.<\/p>\n
In Mother, the woman is Christie, and she tells the story of how she came to be living with alcohol addiction and sleeping rough.<\/p>\n
Hazlehurst’s performance leaves no space for lazy judgements.<\/p>\n
“It would have been easy to characterise [her] as someone entirely different who was just a raving lunatic,” she says.<\/p>\n
Instead, Keene’s writing “sheds light on a life that you might not give consideration to \u2026 [on] people who, for all intents and purposes, fall through the cracks of our perception”.<\/p>\n
In Hazlehurst’s hands, that life is impossible to dismiss.<\/p>\n
Creating a new character ‘terrifying’<\/p>\n
After seeing Mother, and Christie, come to life, Keene was inspired to write another play for the same crew, which includes director Matt Scholten.<\/p>\n
But a second play written for Hazlehurst carried a challenge.<\/p>\n
“It became terrifying: If I’m going to write something else, it can’t be the same because that would be ridiculous,” Keene says.<\/p>\n
“So I [had] to find another person, another character.”<\/p>\n
The Lark is the story of working-class publican Rose, who has lived all her life in the inner-city pub her father once ran.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Rose, the publican at the centre of The Lark, interests playwright Daniel Keene because she is a vehicle to discuss a social history not often enough explored on stage. (Supplied: Mia Macdonald)<\/p>\n
Despite patrons coming and going, Rose is, and always has been, a loner, Hazlehurst explains.<\/p>\n
“She’s an observer \u2026 She’s had all the time in the world to watch these people and to get closer to some of the characters, but she hasn’t.”<\/p>\n
Just as Christie was let down by people who actively harmed or chose not to support her \u2014 “This poor woman, she just had no help”, Hazlehurst says \u2014 Rose, too, lives in the gravitational pull of a negative force.<\/p>\n
“[Rose’s] job is to serve; her life is to serve, whether it’s her father or the pub or the customers \u2014 but not herself.”<\/p>\n
As such, she represents the many \u2014 perhaps older women in particular \u2014 whose potential power is diminished by those around them.<\/p>\n
“We are reduced by society’s expectations to play certain roles in life,” Hazlehurst says.<\/p>\n
But Keene’s writing and Scholten’s direction “help you to see under the covers of those masks, and see what’s underneath”.<\/p>\n
Between poem and prose<\/p>\n
Hazlehurst considers it a privilege to have had two plays written specifically for her to perform, and she feels a responsibility to “do justice” to them.<\/p>\n
“I don’t want to get a word wrong,” she says.<\/p>\n
In over 10 years of performing Mother, she believes she never has.<\/p>\n
That is extra impressive when you see Keene’s script. Both The Lark and Mother look, on the page, like one long poem.<\/p>\n
“There’s no punctuation. There’s no stage direction \u2026 and so you have to find the rhythm. You have to find the music,” Hazlehurst says.<\/p>\n