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Just about every time Miranda Otto has stepped on stage with the Sydney Theatre Company, it has been at some momentous stage in her life.
Forty years ago, aged only 18, she made her professional stage debut in the obsessive German psycho drama The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant. In 2002, she met her now-husband Peter O’Brien when they starred spouses in A Doll’s House. In 2005, her six-month-old daughter, Darcey, would be brought in to be fed before Otto went on stage every night for Boy Gets Girl, in which she also starred opposite her dad, Barry Otto.
“I walk along here, and I think, ‘Oh, that’s where Pete used to park his bike,’” says Otto, who is sitting at a cafe downstairs from STC at Walsh Bay.
A motorbike – surely it was a cool motorbike.
“A Vespa! There’s definitely ghosts in the building.” (She does clarify that she had crossed paths with O’Brien once before, in 1988, when she did a small spot on The Flying Doctors, on which he played a spunky pilot. “I remember all the make-up ladies fussing over Pete because he was that guy,” she says, laughing.)
They are bookmarks in a full life. Now, 40 years after her first role with STC – and 15 years since she last appeared, in 2011’s The White Guard – Otto has returned to the stage, this time courtesy of a chat with one of her Lord of the Rings co-stars.
“I was at an event with David Wenham, and he was talking to [STC artistic director] Mitchell [Butel] on the phone – and I think Mitch was trying to get David to do something [it worked, Wenham is starring in An Iliad], and he was like, ‘Oh, can Miranda do something?’ and I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I’ll do something’,” she says.
“And then Mitch got my number, and then he sent me the play. And then it was like, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s been a while since I’ve done it.’ But then, part of me was just like, well, I guess this is the moment. So it was sort of like, ‘OK, let’s go.’
The play that has lured Otto back is The River, which is about a woman (Otto) who goes missing while on a moonlit night-time fishing trip with The Man (Ewen Leslie) for, of all things, sea trout.
Written by acclaimed Brit playwright Jez Butterworth – who also wrote the Bond film Spectre and the Oscar-winning Ford v Ferrari – the 80-minute play had people lining up for tickets during its debut in 2012, even as critics called it “eerie, tense” and “slightly unfathomable”.
“When I read it, I had to keep going back to it, because it’s haunted me in some kind of way,” says Otto. “Because it’s a bit of a riddle, and it’s hard sometimes to know exactly what’s going on.
“Because often you’ll read a play – and I think this is what attracted me to it – is often you read a play and you know, OK, there’s the emotional high point, there’s the laugh, there’s there’s the denouement, and with this, it was much more like, ‘Hang on, where is all that?’”
The River is directed by 26-year-old Margaret Thanos, a theatre wunderkind who has been making critical waves with her work at Belvoir and several other independent theatre companies.
Otto became a fan of Thanos’ work after she returned to Sydney permanently following years of living on and off in Los Angeles, where she missed the “smell of the air, the sound of the birds we have in Sydney”.
She became smitten with Thanos’ “edgy and dark” and “funny and frightening” approach after seeing her productions of Furious Mattress at Belvoir’s downstairs theatre 25A and Or Timon of Athens at Sport For Jove. So she suggested her to Butel.
“The way that she walked this line with the tone [in Furious Mattress] was quite incredible,” says Otto. “I just thought it’s a play that could so easily go terribly wrong – if you play it too much for laughs, it’ll be awful, if you play it too seriously, then that won’t work – but I was just so impressed by how she walked this line of it.”
Finding and promoting younger talent is something Otto is keen to do more of. It’s how she got her start, after all: plucked from the stage and onto the screen for her first film, Emma’s War, in 1987.
“I love going to all these smaller companies and seeing what they’re doing and seeing all, all these people who are coming through,” says Otto. “I think it’s really encouraging. I mean, I know funding and things like that are terrible, but I feel like the actual state of the arts is quite healthy.
“There’s lots of really interesting things happening, and it’s interesting to work with younger people who have different views on the world to bring a different kind of energy. I’m interested in being a part of that.”
The River is at Sydney Opera House from March 30 to May 16.
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