As a person living with disability, actor and writer Kate Mulvany can feel daunted by physically demanding roles.
But sometimes her unique physicality helps her to bring a character to life – for example, legendary French actor and director Sarah Bernhardt, who she is playing in her return to the stage after several years of high-profile screen roles, in the Melbourne Theatre Company (MTC) production Bernhardt/Hamlet.
Mulvany has severe scoliosis (a sideways curvature of the spine) and related chronic pain.
"My body just seems to fit the shapes that Sarah Bernhardt could make and would make on the stage; the curved back that she was so famous for," she says.
"She was super flexible and my disability weirdly allows me to do a lot of that. And I'm very proud of that."
Mulvany's disability is the result of aggressive treatment for her childhood renal cancer. When she was just three years old, a football-sized tumour was found on her kidney, likely caused by her father's exposure to the chemical weapon Agent Orange during the Vietnam War.
The real Bernhardt also lived with disability: Her leg was amputated in 1915, when she was 71 years old, after she developed gangrene from an old stage injury. But it didn't stop her from performing until her dying days — often on one leg.
Mulvany explains: "She embraced it. She made it theatrical. She used to be carried on by a bevy of actors and laid out; she performed from there. Nothing was a hindrance to her.
"That part of her really appealed to me, as a disabled person. I go, 'Yeah, we can do it. We find other ways to do it, but we can do it.'"
While Mulvany has recently been seen mostly on screen – as a Nazi-hunting nun-slash-spy in Amazon series Hunters, an artist accused of murder on Foxtel's tense jury drama The Twelve, and as record producer Marion Keisker in Baz Luhrmann's Elvis – she says theatre is what she loves most.
"I feel kind of powerful and painless in a theatre," she says.
"I don't know what it is about theatre that makes me feel like my chronic pain lifts and shifts a little bit. But I'll hold onto it as long as I can – just like Sarah."
From theatre to television
Bernhardt/Hamlet, written by American playwright Theresa Rebeck and directed by MTC artistic director Anne-Louise Sarks, opens this weekend.
"For the first time in four years I'm back on a stage — and it feels absolutely f***ing terrifying," Mulvany admits.
Her last theatre role was in the moving mental health monologue Every Brilliant Thing at Belvoir St Theatre in Sydney in early 2019.
"I used to do at least one theatre show every year," she reflects.
"I was very lucky … And then all of a sudden it stopped [because of COVID lockdowns], and that was really scary and heartbreaking to see our industry dilapidate away."
Mulvany stayed busy over the pandemic: On top of her roles on Hunters and The Twelve, she pursued writing opportunities.
She followed up her first TV drama writing credit (Upright season one, in 2019) with an episode of ABC TV's anthology comedy series Summer Love, about a surly teenage girl befriending a disabled man named Poseidon.
She also wrote for theatre, adapting Ruth Park's coming-of-age novel Playing Beatie Bow while in lockdown in Sydney in 2020, with the play debuting at Sydney Theatre Company in February 2021.
All three writing projects – Upright, Playing Beatie Bow and Summer Love – feature tough teenage girls.
Mulvany suggests when she writes these characters she may be tapping into her own "tricky" teenage years, growing up in Geraldton, Western Australia.
During her teens, her body started to change, she found out she may never be able to have children, and her chronic pain grew more severe. She started to dress differently to other teenage girls in her coastal town.
"I covered my body a lot because I was ashamed of my body and the way it was changing," she says.
At the same time, medical professionals started to use jargon to talk about her disability.
"I didn't want to be called abnormal. I didn't want to be poked, as a teenager, [with doctors] saying, 'This is abnormal. This is a deformity.' I wish people had said, 'You have a disability' to me. No one said that. No one ever used that word," says Mulvany.
"Maybe I wish I could go back in a time machine and say to myself, 'You got this, mate, you got this.' But because I can't, I get to put it on screen instead, or on stage.
"It's nice to be able to have that little bit of power and hope that maybe if there is someone like me that's sitting in the audience and also having a hard time with what it is to be a teenager that they can get something from it."
An actor and a director
Mulvany was in the middle of filming The Twelve in early 2022 when Sarks, at that time still new to her MTC role, asked her to read Bernhardt/Hamlet.
The actor's schedule was packed: Two days after finishing season two of Hunters in Europe, she started work on The Twelve in Sydney, before heading to Melbourne for the Robbie Williams biopic Better Man. After that, she shot Disney+ series The Clearing in Victoria, inspired by the real Australian cult The Family.
But Mulvany made the time to read Rebeck's play. "Within a day, I'd gotten back to her [Sarks] to say, 'I love this. This is delicious. If you still want me, let's do it,'" she recalls.
Mulvany and Sarks have collaborated since 2012, when they radically reinterpreted Medea at Belvoir, retelling the Greek tragedy through the eyes of her children.
Medea was a hit, winning five Sydney Theatre Awards, including best new Australian work, and has been produced in London and Switzerland.
"Because we used two young children who had never performed before, we really had to sit in that room as sort of parentals and guardians of those kids and the story, and live with them as children," says Mulvany.
"I think that brought a cheekiness and a joy to our [Mulvany and Sarks's] friendship and our working relationship."
That same year, Sarks also directed a production of Mulvany's play The Seed, inspired by her father's story, for MTC.
In the years since Sarks has directed Mulvany in the actor-playwright's adaptation of Jasper Jones at Belvoir in 2016, and in a new version of Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, also at Belvoir, in 2018.
Now, they communicate in a rehearsal room in a kind of shorthand: "I can tell by a furrow of her brow and she can tell by a quirk of my mouth what works [and] what doesn't," Mulvany says.
Gender-flipping Shakespeare
In Bernhardt/Hamlet, which draws on a real episode from the actor's life, Bernhardt resolves to take on the role of Hamlet, despite being a woman in her mid-50s.
"She [Bernhardt] was proud of her sexuality and she was proud of her gender. To embody that is actually really cool. I'm not inhabiting a man. I'm inhabiting a woman inhabiting a man," says Mulvany.
To prepare for the role, Mulvany read Bernhardt's autobiography, My Double Life, before diving into books and podcasts about her, as well as videos from the time, including a silent film from 1900, where Bernhardt as Hamlet duels Pierre Magnier as Laertes.
"It's amazing to watch her in motion," she says.
Mulvany is intimately familiar with the way gender-flipping Shakespeare can bring out new resonances in the playwright's work.
In 2017, she starred as Richard III in a new production for Bell Shakespeare, which she also adapted.
"There were lines that I know used to get a chuckle when a man would say it, because it was cheeky, blokey stuff. But when a female body or female voice is saying a misogynistic line, it was like the air would get sucked out of the room," she says.
"It shines a magnifying glass on issues of gender."
It's not the only male Shakespeare role Mulvany has taken on: She played Hamlet's treacherous uncle Claudius when she was studying at WA's Curtin University, and the scheming Cassius in Bell Shakespeare's 2011 production of Julius Caesar.
"I've been really lucky to play these male characters. And I can only thank Sarah Bernhardt for that," she says.
"I don't know how easy me playing Claudius in an all-female Hamlet at university, or Cassius, and then Richard the Third a bit later, would have been if it weren't for the likes of Sarah."
Bernhardt/Hamlet runs until April 15 at Melbourne Theatre Company. Hunters is streaming on Prime Video.
