Pamela Rabe emerges from theatre rehearsals where she is playing a strict Catholic nun, the actor seeking divine order from a grey late afternoon on the wharf above Sydney\u2019s Walsh Bay. \u201cDo we walk \u2013 in the rain?\u201d she asks crisply.<\/p>\n
The clouds yield and the rain loses its nerve as the tall, formidable Rabe steps onto the steel balcony to pose with laser focus on the camera lens. Canadian-born Rabe first sought early career traction in Sydney in the late 1980s and early 90s to distinguish herself from her Melbourne acting milieu, where she was revered as an \u201cactress with a capital A\u201d<\/a>, of whom a critic remarked, \u201cmakes strong [people] swallow hard and lesser mortals involuntarily bow\u201d.<\/p>\n Whether playing a sinister jail \u201cscrew\u201d in the television series Wentworth<\/a> or a savage, sarcastic matriarch on stage in August: Osage County<\/a>, Rabe leans into her imposing physicality. In person, she has a strong, charismatic presence coupled with a well-read, deadpan humour. As we wander the wooden piers towards the Harbour Bridge, I note we have lost the photographer and publicist. \u201cOh, I hope so,\u201d she says with a chuckle.<\/p>\n Rabe, who lives with her theatre director husband, Roger Hodgman, on a semi-rural property outside Hobart, has been working steadily since migrating to Australia in 1983, most recently in Eamon Flack\u2019s challenging stage adaptation of the ecocide thriller novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead<\/a> at Sydney\u2019s Belvoir St theatre. Of the play\u2019s three-and-a-half hours, Rabe was responsible for perhaps 85% of the dialogue, playing a traumatised schoolteacher who mourns dead animals.<\/p>\n \u201cI felt very proud of my brain,\u201d Rabe says, shutting her eyes, pinching her nose and waving one hand above her head. \u201cI\u2019m holding my nose, I dive in, and trust that [my] brain had put that somewhere that could be accessed, then articulated with feeling and hopefully sense. To realise that my brain could still do that at 67 was very heartening.\u201d<\/p>\n Rabe finds rhythm in her texts, likening the delivery of lines to a pianist or a violinist playing rapid-fire notes. She says the late neurologist Oliver Sacks is one of her favourite authors because he breaks down how we embody life experience to tell stories, notably how the ageing or amnesiac brain uses music as a bridge to memory.<\/p>\n Rabe is rehearsing her role in Doubt: a Parable at the Sydney theatre company\u2019s building on the harbour. Photograph: Jessica Hromas\/The Guardian<\/p>\n I suspect Rabe is too busy to mull too much on her own ageing. She remembers now the late Ruth Cracknell \u2013 \u201ca profound influence on my life\u201d \u2013 whom she met when they starred in the Neil Simon play Lost in Yonkers<\/a> in 1992. At the same time, Cracknell was also playing the character of Maggie, who had early dementia, in the sitcom Mother and Son<\/a>. Cracknell was then 66, Rabe 33. \u201cShe was younger than I am now and she seemed ineffably old,\u201d Rabe muses.<\/p>\n Today, Rabe is stepping out from rehearsals for the role of the iron-handed head nun Sister Aloysius Beauvier in John Patrick Shanley\u2019s 2004 play Doubt: A Parable<\/a>, set in 1964 at a Catholic church and school in the Bronx, New York, where Father Brendan Flynn (played by The Newsreader\u2019s Sam Reid) is accused of abusing an altar boy.<\/p>\n double quotation markEveryone assumes I must have been Catholic because I have seven brothers and sisters … it was Canada \u2013 it was just cold<\/p>\n Sister Aloysius clings to her self-perception as a moral guardian who can \u201csmoke out incipient danger\u201d, says Rabe, who sees resonances in this social media epoch when disagreements turn people into enemies. \u201cThe notion of \u2018you\u2019re either with me or against me\u2019 has very much permeated our modern social culture,\u201d she says. \u201cWe\u2019re all hardwired to want to know what\u2019s right and what\u2019s wrong. [Doubt] is an argument for sitting in uncertainty, and that\u2019s the most alive you can be.\u201d<\/p>\n Doubt, Rabe says, is \u201csomething we all battle with every day\u201d but suggests the tendency towards certainty pre-dates our social media era, recalling Americans responding to an earthquake on television decades ago. \u201cIt was like they\u2019d all prepared for the camera. They were confidently describing something in very manageable sound bites. America has been particularly groomed to produce this [certainty], which has become more a global standard of the way we should present ourselves to the world.\u201d<\/p>\n Rabe saw Audrey Hepburn in The Nun\u2019s Story when she was 12 and toyed with the idea of returning to the church, \u2018but then I realised it was just the costumes\u2019. Photograph: Jessica Hromas\/The Guardian<\/p>\n Ravenous capitalism meanwhile would undermine the Rabe family\u2019s own certainties. Faith had been important to Rabe\u2019s late mother, Reta, raised in a Presbyterian tradition in the central Canadian prairies. \u201cEveryone assumes I must have been Catholic because I have seven brothers and sisters,\u201d Rabe laughs. \u201cNo, no, it was Canada \u2013 it was just cold.\u201d<\/p>\n Reta had toyed with becoming a missionary, if not a nun. \u201cShe became disillusioned because we moved to the west coast of Canada, and we\u2019d always been very much a church-going family \u2013 just a Sunday service with our little white gloves on and dimes pressed into our hands to be put in the collection plate \u2013 but as she went to this new church, she felt that there was more interest in what financially could be brought into the congregation and to line and glam up the altar \u2026 she just went cold turkey, that was it: we weren\u2019t going to church any more.\u201d<\/p>\n