Eryn Jean Norvill, the actor at the centre of the Geoffrey Rush vs The Daily Telegraph defamation trial, is finally finding fame — and acclaim — for the 'right' reasons: her art.
Eryn Jean Norvill plays 26 characters over 2 hours in Sydney Theatre Company's adaptation of Oscar Wilde's cautionary tale The Picture of Dorian Gray, a frenetic tour de force that sees her morph from a petulant princeling of Victorian society to a leering, decrepit parliamentarian; from a charismatic Liberace type with a platinum Elvis quiff to a shuffling, elderly, farting housekeeper.
She does it all via modulations of voice and physicality, multiple quick-changes of costume, props and wigs, and iPhone filters that she operates live while monologuing.
The show, adapted from the novel and directed by Sydney Theatre Company (STC) artistic director Kip Williams, casts the 37-year-old performer as a kind of whirling dervish at the centre of an intricately choreographed ballet of live performance, pre-recorded and live-recorded video (captured by an onstage crew using movie and smartphone cameras) that Williams has dubbed "cine-theatre".
Norvill delivers a physically demanding, creatively virtuoso solo performance that has been critically lauded and has summoned standing ovations night after night across three seasons in Sydney and Adelaide — with a fourth opening in Melbourne in June, and a partnership with Michael Cassel Group for international touring.
As an audience member, there is a sense at the curtain call that you have just watched a highwire act: myriad moments of potential slippage and missed connections that have been miraculously navigated to success. You applaud in not just admiration, but astonishment — and even relief.
Perhaps surprisingly, Norvill says the hardest part of performing the show each night is the character ostensibly closest to home and who is given the 'straightest' characterisation: a young actress (named Sibyl Vane) making her living playing Shakespearean ingenues, to whom Dorian proposes.
In a pivotal scene, Sibyl renounces the artifice of the stage in favour of emotional truth and her authentic self — and our feckless young protagonist rejects her.
In Norvill and Williams's hands, this monologue sounds a tragic, clarion note that cuts through both the satirical tone of the show and the 'performative' milieu of the story.
"She's like, 'No, I don't want to be a part of that world anymore.' And Dorian goes 'Yucky!'," Norvill says, screwing up her face in Dorian-like distaste.
There is a plangent subtext to Norvill's performance as Sybil Vane: she too has played her share of ingenues (Ophelia and Juliet) and classical heroines (Cordelia in King Lear; Roxane in Cyrano de Bergerac; two of Chekhov's Three Sisters) and describes, across her career, a similar disenchantment with these 'shapes of woman'.
But where Dorian is Sybil's downfall, this show has been Norvill's triumph: not only did she take a key creative role (she is billed as dramaturg and creative associate) but she has fashioned a kaleidoscopic performance that refracts two decades of experience, training and creative experiments to dazzling effect.
She did all this after an ordeal that shook her faith in the theatre industry and her future as an artist; an experience that transformed "every molecule" of her and left her wondering if she'd ever return to the stage.
The origins of a shapeshifter
"The golden light of a perfect Summer's day streamed into the room and danced about the figure as if in worship." - Narrator
Norvill describes herself as a maker rather than an actor, a distinction that dates back to her childhood encounters with storytelling and performance.
Star Trek was a formative influence: "We got the VHS every week of the new episodes, and we would watch it as a family … [it] introduced me to the idea of theatrics and moral storytelling; the idea of shaping a moment around a particular conundrum and a set of values that people strive towards.
"And of course, aliens and shit like that," she adds.
Star Wars was another favourite, and her reading tastes ran to sci-fi and fantasy (favourite authors included J.R.R. Tolkien, Douglas Adams, David Eddings and Robin Hobb).
She found performance almost by accident.
"My parents told me that I could try things, so I tried a lot — and I pretty much bombed out of a lot as well," she says, checking off physical culture ("I was really shit at that"), ballet ("really shit"), clarinet ("shit"), group sports ("I really liked being in a group, but I didn't like being competitive") and debating ("I kinda liked the idea of forming an argument, but I didn't like the pressure and the hierarchy of the first, second and third [speakers]").
"So I think I tried a lot of things — and then found that there was a relief in the idea of making things up," she says.
She found her sweet spot in extracurricular classes at the now-defunct Australian Youth Theatre in Sydney, which she recalls as "a place that was more about making and improv; it was about being a creator".
Primary school was an uncomfortable experience: "I was a bigger girl. So I think in order to survive, because I was bullied quite a lot, I would just kind of fit into whatever clique I felt safe in — whether that was being a funny person, or whether that was being serious, or trying to be sporty, or whatever."
High school was uncomfortable in different ways; while she had close friends and thrived in subjects like English and Drama, Norvill chafed against the academic pressure of the education system.
"It wasn't about learning; it was about some weird idea of expectation, and the pressure of getting things 'right'," she says.
"And I just stopped applying myself, really, after that feeling became the majority of what I was thinking and doing."
By this point, she was determined to pursue theatre as a career.
Instead of going to Schoolies at the end of high school, she tried out for the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) in Sydney; when she wasn't successful, she applied and was accepted to PACT Centre for Emerging Artists' 2003 imPACT ensemble (alongside comedian and theatre maker Zoë Coombs Marr, among others).
At the end of this, she auditioned and was accepted by the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) — attracted by its reputation as a well-rounded 'makers' degree (as opposed to actor training) and by the chance to fly the coop.
"The majority of my experience in Sydney as a teenager and as a young person, I felt very confused and disassociated to what seemed important to [my friends]. And I went to a school whose priorities were a different kind of shape than my priorities were. And I got a bit small," she reflects.
"So I was like, 'I don't think I want to keep this shape; it doesn't make me feel very strong. What would happen if I left [Sydney]?' And that felt deeply liberating."
Permission to fail
Norvill had a positive drama school experience — although in many ways, the culture there was not what she expected.
"I thought maybe a place like that would be separate from the pressure to measure up and succeed; but of course that was still there," she says.
She chafed against the norms, hierarchies and power dynamics of the school (and industry): "There was an idea of male and female, and the bigger roles and the smaller roles — all of that weird structure of power and opportunity."
She recognises that she thrived in ways that others did not — "I was given a lot of opportunity in that place [VCA] to try and fail and succeed," she says — and clocks the privilege of being "a white girl, with blonde hair".
Even so, she says she was grateful for "the few moments where I was given an opportunity to be a very different shape".
Studying clowning, character and mask work, she found another sweet spot.
"The Chekhovs and the Shakespeares, I found them very claustrophobic — but there were these other things that we got to learn about that kind of cracked my brain open, and I felt really strong," she recalls.
"It's [clowning] got nothing to do with the shape of gender or even power structures; there's not anything classical about it. It relies on intuition, and you have a real sense of ownership of character. I found it really empowering."
The clown work bolstered her sense that creativity flourished outside the traditional dynamics of teacher and student; director and actor; auteur and art.
"I got a bit rebellious, blah blah blah," she says self-deprecatingly.
Early career lessons
"I came out [of VCA] and started thinking about making [work] … I was like, 'Where are my collaborators?'" Norvill recalls.
"And then I realised that the small-to-medium and independent scene is just hard work — it's the hardest work you'll ever do…. And I was so fucking poor; working all these jobs and getting fired from all these jobs." (She says she is a terrible waiter and a great bartender, and has an extremely low tolerance for rude people).
She landed a couple of gigs in regional touring shows, including Bell Shakespeare's Actors at Work program, which served digestible riffs on Shakespeare to high school students.
"It was a daily grind — it did not suit me at all as a performer … [but] it's a really excellent thing to learn rigour," she says of the experience.
The best thing that came out of it, she says, was meeting Emily Tomlins, with whom she went on to co-devise and perform two shows — one of them the award-winning fringe festival hit A Tiny Chorus, in which the two showcased their clowning skills as odd couple Darren and Ralph.
Around this time she also fell in with the Hayloft Project: a loose collective of theatre makers spearheaded by actor-turned-playwright-turned-director (and fellow VCA alum) Simon Stone, which debuted in 2007 with a riotous take on Frank Wedekind's 1891 play Spring Awakening.
Norvill was part of Hayloft's adaptations of Chekhov's Platonov in 2008 and Three Sisters in 2009.
"It was working with a group of people that I really respected, and I knew them, so I had trust there … It felt like everything I'd thought that I wanted to be involved in," she says, describing the hands-on, working-bee spirit with which they transformed a run-down warehouse into the set for Platonov, complete with a DIY pool.
"But my experience of it inside of it was very different. There was no sense of consent or boundaries, [and] there was not a huge amount of conversation about the dynamic of the making in the room. I realised that I was at the bottom of the pecking order when it came to my voice being listened to … there was still a real sense of hierarchy. And part of that was some confused gender dynamics, and some bad behaviour," she says.
"[The making of the shows] was a collaborative thing, but in the way that it was recognised — it should have served all of us, but it did not."
At the same time, Australian theatre was suffering from profound gender disparity, with women writers and directors vastly underrepresented (just 24 per cent, respectively, in 2010) on the country's main stages. There was a growing sense of disenchantment with the "boys' club".
For Norvill, looking back on the Hayloft experience with hindsight, "it makes complete sense".
"I didn't understand how to have any of the conversations that I would now — that I now have every day.
She describes it as a "deeply formative" experience.
"In one way, it was an incredible thing for me to be a part of, and I still love love love many of the people [I worked with]. But I would never work like that ever again. And I would never support it. And when I see it, I call it out."
Gaining the main stage
The years 2009 to 2010 were a quietly productive period: besides Hayloft's 3xSisters, Norvill appeared in Kenneth Lonergan's Lobby Hero at Red Stitch Actors' Theatre, and she and Tomlins found success for A Tiny Chorus at the Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide Fringe festivals.
She moved back to Sydney, and landed a recurring role on Home and Away as trainee detective Graves.
Then in 2011, she landed her first mainstage role, playing Ophelia to Ewen Leslie's Hamlet in Simon Phillips's production for Melbourne Theatre Company.
Norvill in MTC's Hamlet with Ewen Leslie (top) and Garry McDonald (right).
Supplied: MTC/Jeff Busby
The same year, she took a smaller job that had a different kind of significance: a part in an indie production of a new Australian play, Pictures of Bright Lights — which is where current STC artistic director Kip Williams, then a recent NIDA graduate, first saw her.
Neither of them knew it yet, but it was the precursor to a key creative partnership, with their stars rising in tandem at STC across a run of six shows to date.
The following year, they found themselves in the same room again — but as collaborators, in an STC workshop run by UK director Declan Donnellan (co-founder of Cheek by Jowl theatre company).
Norvill asked Williams to work on a scene with her and another actor, and recalls: "He was very calm, he was very smart, and he was really focused on the work. And he was a dag — a theatre dag.
"And all of that was very endearing to me, because I felt that I could immediately just go, 'OK, I don't have to worry about any egos in the room.'"
That experience would lead to Williams casting Norvill in the leading role of his feminist adaptation of Romeo and Juliet (2013) for STC — which reconfigured the play around Juliet's voice and actions.
Celebrating failure
Even as Norvill was transitioning to the main stage — with supporting roles in Melbourne Theatre Company's production of Top Girls and Griffin Theatre Company's The Boys in 2012 — she was feeling somehow dissatisfied and restless.
"I just needed to get up and leave for a bit, and see other parts of the world — what kind of stories they were telling. And just generally kind of shake myself up … I was hungry for that feeling when you're looking at a completely new context and you go, 'Oh, I just feel a little bit closer to a sense of comfortability in myself' — or a sense of liberty," she says.
A successful grant application funded a trip to Berlin (where she saw a radical interpretation of Romeo and Juliet at the Schaubühne, which blew her mind) and France, where she undertook a month-long clowning course at the internationally renowned École Philippe Gaulier (whose alumni include Sacha Baron Cohen and Emma Thompson), which proved pivotal.
"It was one of the more terrifying things I've done, in an acting class scenario," she says.
The Gaulier training consolidated Norvill's passion for clowning and her skills — but perhaps more importantly, it fuelled a way of working that embraced risk and vulnerability and "this idea of celebrating failure".
"Something about that dynamic — [you] let go and lean over the edge, and when you feel like you're falling, that's when it's working — I was like, that's f***ing f***ed up," she laughs.
"But also it means that there is no sense of authority; that there is no sense of right and wrong. It's just about the person and the attempt, and that's enough. And I found that I love that. … I really kept that deeply inside of me."
On a roll
Norvill appeared to be hitting her stride: the next three years brought mainstage roles — including Roxane to Richard Roxburgh's Cyrano — and a run of shows with Kip Williams, who was appointed artistic director of Sydney Theatre Company in late 2016.
Their artistic collaboration has given rise to some of her most satisfying creative experiences, including a 2015 production of Tennessee Williams's gothic melodrama Suddenly Last Summer in which she played Catherine (a role popularised by Elizabeth Taylor on screen): a young woman grappling with the memory of her cousin's horrific death abroad.
Norvill in Cyrano (above) and Suddenly Last Summer (below).
Supplied: STC/Brett Boardman
Later that year she won the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship, which funded a two-month trip to Los Angeles to secure US representation and study improv at the Groundlings school (whose alumni include Conan O'Brien, Jimmy Fallon and Kaitlin Olson).
"There has always been a lot of push for Australians to go over there [to LA], and I thought, you know, it's important for me to make a decision on whether that may or may not suit me as an artist or a person," she says.
It was another formative experience in terms of developing her skills as an artist.
"Watching people who had been doing it a long time, it was amazing how integrated they were; how they just put out offers and could pick up offers, and they were so quick. They would make something from nothing. I was kind of in awe."
But she felt discombobulated by the entertainment industry culture.
"[LA] just kind of went 1,000 miles [an hour], and every conversation I had was very on the surface, and I didn't really understand how to participate.
I became very aware of things that I've never really been aware of before, like my body. And there was just such a kind of scramble — everyone scrambling to participate," she recalls.
"It didn't make me feel like I could be myself or I could do particularly good work."
Turning point
To cap off 2015, she starred as Cordelia to Geoffrey Rush's King Lear in Neil Armfield's production for STC.
At the time, it seemed like another feather in her cap: an iconic role in a high-profile production. In hindsight, it was a major turning point in her life and career, and the beginning of an unravelling.
But it was two years between King Lear opening in November 2015, and the Daily Telegraph cover story on November 30, 2017 that exploded Norvill's world — and for the young actor, ostensibly in the prime of her career, life went on.
She appeared in Williams's production of Arthur Miller's postwar family thriller All My Sons, playing 'girl next door' Ann, the former fiancée of missing-presumed-dead World War II pilot Larry.
And she was part of a collective of friends and former colleagues who devised and presented an experimental theatre piece for a conference on the emerging field of "performance philosophy" — in Slovenia.
In the same trip, she returned to LA — to consolidate her relationship with her US management — and reaffirmed her suspicions that the city did not suit her as an artist or a person.
Ultimately, she parlayed her experiences in LA into a show, re-teaming with Emily Tomlins (A Tiny Chorus) and indie Melbourne outfit Elbow Room to co-devise the two-hander Niche: a sci-fi thriller about a pop star-cum-machine created by a marketing team, which premiered in August 2017 in Melbourne.
Norvill with co-star and creator Emily Tomlins in Niche.
Supplied: Sam McGlip
"We were thinking about the machine of celebrity. I wanted to make a show that could unpack our obsession with fame and ultimately reveal it as empty and ridiculous, so that it felt less scary to me," Norvill says.
Time Out's 5-star review dubbed the show "dazzling, flawless, insightful, probing", with critic Tim Byrne writing: "Norvill and Tomlins are simply flawless, their individual performances so perfectly calibrated that watching them together brings to mind a duo of musicians riffing off each other's talents."
She closed the year with another iconic role: playing Masha in Kip Williams's STC production of Three Sisters.
A world explodes
Norvill was mid-season with Three Sisters when The Daily Telegraph published its now infamous cover story accusing Rush of inappropriate behaviour towards a female co-star (later identified through legal proceedings as Norvill). By the time the show closed in December, Rush, who vehemently denied the allegations, had launched defamation proceedings against publisher Nationwide News (which were ultimately decided in his favour).
In her interview for this profile, Norvill declined to answer any questions about Lear and the subsequent trial, in which she testified that he had touched her in a sexual manner and that cast members had enabled his inappropriate rehearsal room behaviour.
She told ABC Arts:
However she did talk about the effect the intertwined experiences of King Lear, the legal proceedings and the media coverage had on her.
"In terms of how it changed me as an artist or as a person, I mean, every molecule of me has transformed in some way or another," she says.
In the aftermath, she withdrew from a starring role in Melbourne Theatre Company's production of Mike Leigh's 1977 comedy Abigail's Party, which was scheduled to open in March 2018.
But she honoured an existing commitment to star in Declan Greene's adaptation of Lars von Trier's apocalyptic drama Melancholia, at Melbourne's Malthouse Theatre, which opened in July 2018 — at which time legal proceedings were underway.
Norvill in Malthouse Theatre's Melancholia with Leanna Walsman (top).
Supplied: Malthouse/Pia Johnson
She played a young woman contemplating the imminent end of the world in the aftermath of her wedding (and failed marriage).
"Obviously, the role was particularly challenging at the time, but also it felt like home to see a world end every night," she says, exhibiting a dark streak of humour.
As 2018 wore on, the legal proceedings and Norvill's role in them were the focus of close media scrutiny, intensifying when the trial began in October. Her testimony was pored over, as was that of the cast members and other industry figures who appeared for both sides.
In April 2019, the presiding judge, Justice Michael Wigney, handed down a decision against Nationwide News.
Rebuilding
In May, Norvill escaped to Japan with longtime collaborator and friend Emily Tomlins. They traversed the country together, and then Norvill stayed on in Tokyo for some weeks, alone, relishing her anonymity.
"[There was] an extreme sense of a different pace, a different dynamic, a different texture of life … [that] was really deeply refreshing to me," she recalls.
It was during this time that Kip Williams first raised the idea of adapting The Picture of Dorian Gray.
"We just touched base — because we like each other — on Zoom. He was like, 'Look, would you think about reading this book, and I've thought of maybe doing a show around it.' And I asked, 'What kind of piece?' And he said, 'I was thinking of a one-person piece.'
"And weirdly enough, I felt a bit of relief in the idea of just doing a one-person piece," she recalls.
"I was in a state where I didn't know what kind of artist I was; I didn't know what it meant to participate — I didn't know what I thought of the arts community.
"I was disenfranchised and confused and wanting to maybe not be an artist anymore."
"And so I didn't want to explore that with someone else. I thought, you know, that's not fair."
"So the idea of being [in] a one-person show — it was [a relief]."
She blazed through the first half of the novel while sitting in Tokyo's Robot Restaurant "watching this bizarre battle between robotronic dinosaurs and ninjas," she recalls, laughing.
Later, in her Airbnb apartment, she switched to reading it out loud: "And as soon as I did, I was like, it's so lush and so musical … there's a metric to it, and a flourish."
Norvill had read Wilde's book as a teen, and has only vague memories of that encounter: "The mood of it, the feeling of it, and it being very thick and heady."
But reading it in May 2019, in Japan, his tale made a powerful impression.
"And so, when I read this book and saw this person where the self-image had been split into many different facets, I think that I was drawn to the idea that we could tell a story and show many different sides of a person; of what's right and wrong; of gender."
"I liked the idea that we could kind of explore the quagmire of human experience, and say: all of that, it can be within one person. And that's OK; it's not so simple."
She said yes while she was still in Tokyo, and the imaginative process of creating the show began.
New ways of working
The person who returned from Japan had undergone a profound transformation.
"My needs and my experience after [King] Lear and the trial, were very, very different — as a person, as an artist, in every aspect of my life," Norvill says.
Back in Australia, she collaborated with Williams on a production of Lord of the Flies for STC, as dramaturg; and she recorded a couple of audiobooks (J.P. Pomare's In the Clearing and S.L. Lim's Revenge).
At the end of 2019 she returned to the stage within a large ensemble cast in the new Australian work Anthem, playing a disenfranchised Chemist Warehouse worker who holds up the company's CEOs — a fun part: "She was just an idiot, she was a clown, and she got to wave a gun around a bunch of people in suits," Norvill says.
Returning to the theatre was daunting, she says: "But to be surrounded by a group — a huge ensemble of people with a lot of diverse artists — I really enjoyed that … It felt like a really good community."
When it came to building The Picture of Dorian Gray, Norvill knew she needed a new way of working.
"The bedrock of trust and [creative] rigour and how communication worked — all of that stuff needed to be clear at the start so that we could kind of undertake, together, [to grapple with] this epic, unfathomable, scaly beast."
Norvill describes The Picture of Dorian Gray as "one of the best experiences" she's had as an artist — and a lot of that came down to the project's first moments.
"We started and we [each] said, 'Hi, this is who I am, this is what my needs are, and this is what I think safety looks like, what I like to do, what inspires me as a creative [person].' This is what is at the core of the project. … [And] I think that was a really clear and healthy way to begin.
"And in that conversation, it just became really clear: this is the right [way to do things]."
This foundation has made the team more resilient, she says: "We have had so many challenges, and yet we keep going. 'OK, we've resolved that in a way that feels safe to all of us. And we're moving on.'"
She describes the creative model as less hierarchical — particularly between her and Williams.
In general, she is sceptical about ways of working that are based on hierarchies and strictly delineated roles, though she acknowledges that this is how much of her industry — and most industries — work.
"I guess I'm questioning why there has to be a director, when actually how things develop is through a lot of conversation with a lot of different individuals that are doing different things in the room — from stage management to mechies [theatre technicians/crew] to the scenic [team] to the wardrobe [team].
"I understand that there needs to be a frame about it [but] I don't necessarily think that that frame has to be set up with a pinnacle [or] voice at the top."
She's also far more thoughtful and active about safety in her workplace than she used to be — for herself and for others.
In mid-2017, she and fellow actor Sophie Ross founded Safe Theatres Australia, in response to what Norvill describes as "widespread problems of sexual harassment, discrimination and bullying in the theatre sector", with the aim "to create theatrical workspaces that are free of harassment, bullying and discrimination".
Their first act was to compile a dossier of anonymous testimonies from theatre practitioners and artists, and this document (which was delivered to the major theatre companies) and the duo's advocacy spurred the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) to commission a landmark survey about sexual harassment, assault and bullying in Australia's theatre industry.
In March 2018, Norvill and Ross convened the first Safe Theatres Forum, attended by a broad spectrum of artists, theatre companies and industry stakeholders, which resulted in a joint statement outlining a "shared commitment to cultural change in the theatre sector".
For herself, Norvill says: "Every room I enter into now, I am very, very aware of setting up pathways for communication … If I witness something, I speak — whether that's just someone having a bad day, or whether that's bad behaviour. I'm also extremely transparent when it comes to where I'm at.
"It's a lot more work. But I don't have any qualms, fear or regret about doing that work, because I just see it as necessary."
The art of endurance
In the first season of The Picture of Dorian Gray in 2020, when she was performing seven shows a week, Norvill says she regularly lost her voice by Sunday.
"The piece, in terms of its physical and vocal demand, is the biggest thing that I've ever had to do. I'm not just speaking for 2 hours, I'm speaking through a lot of different voices. And it's that change in [vocal] pitch and the shifting between roles physically and vocally and imaginatively [that is demanding]," she explains.
"I knew that that was going to be the task from the beginning, so I built this bible of all the characters that I played — I built it off my own body and what I was interested in and what I thought was most fascinating and most electric about the pillars of each character. And from that, I had to find a way that I could use my voice every night sustainably."
But ultimately, she says her performance is only possible because of her deeper creative investment in the show.
"I've done some classical roles and roles where my stage time was very small, and I've been exhausted — much more exhausted than I am now. And emotionally hollowed out.
"[But with Dorian] I was at the very origins of it, and have been involved in weaving it all together across lots of different aspects.
"And there's something about building the momentum of doing this piece from that, and through using my whole creative self, that keeps me rejuvenated and fuelled."
The rich, multifaceted material has proved a constant source of inspiration, too.
"In the first season, I was like, 'It's about the lack of consequence, and about power, and about this consumption of the things that are open and vulnerable in our society.' And now I'm like, 'No, it's about the struggle for the authentic self, and how hard it is to be genuine. And how society does not reward that,'" she says.
"I'm sure it will change the next time we do it. But I think it's all those things … they're all in one conversation."
When I ask Norvill, during our interview, how she thinks the experience of King Lear and the aftermath have shaped her, she answers slowly and carefully.
"You know, I didn't think I was [an artist] anymore. But I am. And I guess everything that happened in that time is going to inform what kind of artist I am — and that's something that feels really, like, good.
She pauses, searching for the thought she wants to articulate.
"Something about the pillars of what you thought kept up your world, and your community, and even the structure of the society you lived in — something about those pillars falling down, has enabled me to go, 'Oh, well, where can I actually look to find the support and the strength and the joy' — and it's in very different places than I used to look. And a lot of that is inside me.
"I guess I had no choice but to go, 'Well, bring it on.' You know?"
The Picture of Dorian Gray runs until May 14 at Roslyn Packer Theatre; then opens in Melbourne on June 5 as part of Rising Festival and runs until July 31 at Arts Centre Melbourne.
Credits
Reporting: Dee Jefferson
Digital production: Anna Freeland
Key photography: Daniel Boud
