Becky Shaw
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Becky Shaw

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Becky Shaw is the MTC’s comedy answer to the dark drama of last years August County Ausage.

Becky Shaw is the MTC’s comedy answer to the dark drama of last years August County Ausage. Both are very American plays dealing with family, death and relationships, but rather than imploding through internal tensions, it is the external force of the titular character, Becky Shaw, that is tugging at the seams.

“Becky Shaw is the key to the play,” explains Kate Atkinson, who is playing Becky in the Australian premiere. “She really serves as a catalyst to the behaviour to all the other people in the play. In many ways it is their story, it is in the old classic dramatic tradition, you have the family into which a stick of dynamite is thrown and what you see is the fallout and how they respond. So there is a lot of other really interesting conflict between the other characters in terms of their reaction to Becky.”

Written by Gina Gionfriddo, an American TV show writer, the play was nominated in its American run for a Pulitzer, and rightly so. It is full of the sprightly one-liners and sharp put downs that characterise this style of theatre, “No one respects a woman who puts up with infidelity,” the mother deadpans at one point, “that’s what kept Hilary Clinton from being president.” “It is pacy, it takes you on a ride,” Kate says of the writing. “She is a TV writer so it’s got that pace to it, like The West Wing or Law and Order, everyone’s talking quick and the witticism come think and fast. I like the parallels to Dickensian drama and George Elliott, the story of a lowly boy who marries into money, it is virtually Heathclift and Cathy, there is a lot to do with money and finance, very Dickensian. Even the character name Becky Shaw is a nod to Becky Sharp from Vanity Fair. But is also very funny and very contemporary.”

Kate has been working on Australian stage and screen for 15 years, notably in the ABCs beloved Sea Change and in last years production of Roakabye for the MTC. I was attracted to this show primarily because of the strength of the script and the fact I was being asked to play Becky,” she says. “I am usually asked to play level-headed, grounded, the straight man kind of character. I do get asked to do a lot of comedy, but in this role there is a lot of psychological complexity and fragility, which I never, ever get to play. It is quite difficult for me to play that level of vulnerability, whether or not you believe her reason for acting in the way that she does, as they say in the play, if it is a con or a reality, whatever the reason as an actor you still have to have access to that. I thought I would find it a challenge and I have, and I have really enjoyed that.”

In building her performance Kate’s advice is stick with the source. “The script is very strong, so firstly I have to be very clear in honouring the words on the page,” she says of her performance. “If you as an actor start building the back story, a psychological body then I think you are going to get yourself into trouble. So I can only show as much as the writer has given me to play with on the page. I really feel that one of the nice things about the play is that the audience gets to do a lot of the work, I didn’t want to play it in such a way that I was telling the viewer that this woman is damaged or this woman is a stalker or a malevolent force, she could very well be legitimate, just a woman, a normal person at a transition point in her life.

“So I play each scene as though she is all those things and built it up through out the show so you see it all. And also it is a comedy, so it has been a tricky process.”

It is a knife-edge performance she pulls off – too much and she is a crazy woman, too little and she is just a victim. The play itself is well worth the watch, with the other cast members doing much of the heavy emotional lifting and Daniel Frederiksen as Max, getting all the gold lines. And while the American accents do suffer from not being from any one place in particular, which happens a lot in Australian theatre, all the players nail their parts.

“This show is a bloody good laugh,” Kate says, “It is intelligent, insightful and identifiable. I don’t think that there is any character or any insight into relationships that you can’t identify with or access, it might not be something you want to recognise in yourself but it’s there.”

Becky Shaw by Gina Gionfriddo is on at the MTC’s Lawler Studio until Saturday November 13.