There was a scene in the Melbourne Theatre Company’s 1986 production of Tom & Viv – about the life of TS Eliot and his wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot – where Vivienne, played by Janet Andrewartha, stood on stage clasping the strings of a bunch of balloons. Broken by years spent in a psychiatric institution, Vivienne remains resolute, and hopeful too, somehow. When Janet released the balloons to the sky, it felt as if the audience were all holding their breath, like a single organism.
I’d seen Janet on stage before, but this scene sealed the deal: she was capable of magic. The late playwright Michael Gurr once described the experience of watching Janet in one of his plays as “stopping time”. But it was her work on Prisoner that made her a rising star in the early 80s and her years on Neighbours made her a proverbial household name. Like a lot of those actors, particularly the older ones, she was so skilled that she could make even the soapiest of lines sing true.
