How a ‘depressing Tin Man’ took Madeline to Romeo and Juliet

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When Melbourne-born actor Madeline Li began studying acting at the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney in 2021, she was already armed with some advice from her Chinese paternal grandmother.

Go to the park with a notebook, her nainai said, and observe everyone. Write down their gestures. See how they talk to one another.

Madeline Li, 24, is performing the lead role in Romeo & Juliet.

Li’s grandmother herself had been an actor, too, studying at the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing.

“When I showed an interest in acting, she started giving me tips,” Li recalls, seated now in a theatre dressing room in outer Melbourne in a blue denim jacket, two years after her NIDA graduation.

“There was a system in China where you were guaranteed a pathway: she had performed as a student, but finishing her training, she went straight back into the academy as an acting teacher.”

Madeline Li as Juliet with Ryan Hodson as Romeo in Bell Shakespeare’s production.

Now 24, Li is midway through a three-month Australian tour of 26 venues as Juliet in Romeo & Juliet for Bell Shakespeare, in a minimalist production directed by artistic director Peter Evans that emphasises intimate performances.

The final venue will be the Sydney Opera House from November, where Li has never performed before, although she has been on stage almost harbourside at the Old Fitz Theatre in Woolloomooloo as a co-founder of emerging production company Last Waltz Productions.

As Juliet, she performed for the first time in Canberra in August, where the Bell tour began, to audience members knowingly mouthing famous lines – “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?” – and onto towns across five states and even to some spectators hitherto unaware of how the tragedy ends.

Merridy Eastman and Madeline Li in Bell Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet.

Li had only scant exposure herself to Shakespeare until last year. She was born in St Kilda to an Australian mother, Tracy, who had met Li’s father, Ming, while studying Chinese literature and working in Beijing.

When Li was seven, Tracy moved her and her brother, Justin, to Beijing. She attended an international school where she encountered no trace of the Bard, although at 12 she was cast in the school’s Wizard of Oz.

“Apparently I was a very depressing Tin Man,” she laughs. “I remember being quite proud because I thought, ‘He doesn’t have a heart; of course he wouldn’t feel’.”

Li (second from right) with fellow NIDA graduates (from left) Jack Patten, JK Kazzi and Teodora Matovic in 2023.

The road to Oz prompted her to begin drama classes, her parents excited that these would help her overcome her innate shyness.

“Working in theatre has helped me,” she reflects, “because you don’t want to get in your own way, walking around with your tail between your legs.”

Moving back to Melbourne, at 15 she read Romeo & Juliet and Macbeth in class, mostly to pluck themes to write school essays, and naturally saw Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet feature film.

In 2024, Li finally got her “crash course in Shakespeare’s greatest hits”, when Peter Evans cast her in his Poetry of Violence at Sydney’s Neilson Nutshell.

Between his lecture on Coriolanus, Hamlet, Henry V, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Macbeth, Romeo & Juliet and the like, a clutch of actors including Li performed excerpts, showcasing the Bard’s enduring messages about ancient enmities and violence begetting more violence.

She auditioned, then, to play Juliet in the national tour this year. “Peter was talking to me about his vision, and how minimal he wanted to make it, to put the emphasis on the language and make it as intimate and vibrant as possible,” she recalls.

“That was exciting to me because I would want to see real people on stage, not Shakespearean archetypes, which is how you’re taught learning from a book.”

Evans has suggested Romeo & Juliet “becomes Juliet’s play, she becomes the lead. She becomes the one voice talking to the audience, and she takes over. I believe that Shakespeare got more and more interested in her”.

In Women of Will: Following the Feminine in Shakespeare’s Plays, the British-born theatre director Tina Packer writes that by the time Shakespeare began Romeo & Juliet, circa 1594, he was writing “as if he were a woman. Embodying them. Giving them full agency”, with the result that he “writes about Juliet with as much insight, nuance, detail as he writes about Romeo”.

Li says Juliet, who we learn in the first act is “not yet 14”, knows her mind as she declares her love, lust and excitement with lines such as “My bounty is as boundless as the sea, My love as deep”.

In her later soliloquy, Juliet traces her fears, bravery and determination, says Li.

“She’s a young woman who’s vulnerable and very emotional but look at the language and you see the strength that underwrites all of that, that her romanticism is in partnership with her pragmatism and intelligence.”

Romeo & Juliet is at the Playhouse, Sydney Opera House November 19 to December 7.