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Has someone been kidnapping actors? You settle in your seat in a theatre where six or eight performers routinely fill the stage, and find … just one? And for the next 100 minutes? One-actor plays may be as old as theatre itself, but their frequency has suddenly radically increased.
The list of those on Sydney stages in recent years includes Grounded (starring Emily Havea), The Picture of Dorian Gray (Erin Jean Norville), The Gospel According to Paul (Jonathan Biggins), Prima Facie (Sheridan Harbridge), Dracula (Zahra Newman), Tom Paine (based on nothing) (Toby Schmitz), RBG: Of Many, One (Heather Mitchell), Girls & Boys (Justine Clarke), Wake in Fright (Newman, again), Julia (Clarke, again), Iphigenia in Splott (Meg Clarke), Birdsong of Tomorrow (Nathan Harrison), The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin (Simon Burke), and An Iliad is currently running with David Wenham.
Six of those may be seen in 2026 alone, and a seventh has Paula Arundell playing all the roles in Louise Fox’s adaptation of The Birds, directed by Matthew Lutton, and based on the Daphne du Maurier short story that was immortalised in Alfred Hitchcock’s unnerving 1963 film.
So what’s afoot? Cost is obviously a motivating factor, with many theatre companies still trying to regain their financial equilibrium following the COVID catastrophe. Mounting a one-hander is also a contagious challenge that captivates playwrights, directors and actors, all of whom have to strive that little bit harder to make it work.
Arundell thinks it might also be a fashion, like the current ones for plays adapted from popular novels, or musicals from hit movies. “Rather than trusting in our own imagination and poetry at the moment, we do seem to be leaning on books and films and the retelling of things rather than the new,” she observes.
Star names can help attract circumspect audiences, as with Wenham in An Iliad, Jodie Comer when Prima Facie went to London and New York, and Sarah Snook when Dorian Gray played in those same cities. Indeed, Arundell worries that star power might be becoming a greater attraction for audiences than quality storytelling and theatre-making.
Challenges facing a lone actor include learning inevitably huge roles, conjuring identifiably different voices, and performing without the usual camaraderie shared with other actors.
“It’s funny you mention the camaraderie,” Arundell responds, “because there was even a moment last week when I was going through the lines and I genuinely had a thought of, ‘Oh, it’s OK. I can run that with the lads on Monday.’ And then I thought, ‘Oh shit, I’m the lads.’ The characters that I’ve created are so strong that to me that they exist.”
When we speak, Arundell is part of the 11-strong cast for Belvoir’s Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead. “It’s like an orchestra,” she says, “and we’re all working together and bouncing off each other. And today I’ve walked in here [to rehearse The Birds], and it’s like I’ve left the group, and I’m just putting out a solo album.”
The most daunting aspect of a one-hander for Arundell and for most actors to whom I’ve spoken is learning the huge slabs of text. When I interviewed Simon Burke before his heroic turn in Elocution, he said he never usually learnt his lines before rehearsals began, and was often the last actor in a company to come “off book”. But about four weeks before rehearsals for Elocution began, he realised that his usual system wasn’t going to cut it, and was off book ahead of the first rehearsal.
So was Arundell when she first did The Birds with Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre two years ago, and she doesn’t believe she’d have managed the task otherwise. She says the methodologies an actor has previously relied on become irrelevant, “because you can’t lean on anyone except yourself. You can’t go, ‘I’m going to see what they bring tomorrow, and then I’m going to match it’.”
When Arundell first looked at the script again for this new season, amid the dialogue exchanges between characters she suddenly encountered a monologue. “I had a moment where I went, ‘Oh God, a monologue!’ And then I was like, ‘Paula, it’s all a monologue!’ I had to remind myself!”
The various voices she must employ were arrived at organically. “They come from just trusting the rhythm and the language,” she says. “So obviously when the kids [the children of a family harassed by birds] talk, there’s a naivety to them. You end up going higher and lower just because of the degrees of wonderment or degrees of cynicism that might be in their voices. Then there’s a certain calm that you can’t help but try and have as a parent, that naturally brings your voice down. So it’s not always a ‘What am I going to do with my voices?’ kind of thing. They tend to come.”
Of the many other one-handers listed above, Arundell has only seen Prima Facie and RBG. Both she found both so compelling that she could forget the craft elements – “which is a testament to the productions,” she says. She also highly rated Pamela Rabe’s solo performance in Belvoir’s 1994 A Room of One’s Own.
“She was so tender,” she says. “There was such a sensitivity to her, but then the subject matter again was just so wonderful. It’s that live experience of just being in the room with a person, isn’t it?
“There was a one-person show that I saw in Melbourne by Andre de Vanny called Swansong, and it was just riveting. So I think I am blown away by the virtuosic aspect of a one-person show,” she affirms, while being less inclined to analyse technique.
Then there’s the onus on the actor to be the focus for the show’s duration, in this case sustaining the suspense. “There’s a lot of trust that you have to have as well,” Arundell says, “because you have to believe that you and the story are enough, and that stillness [rather than busy stage business] sometimes is really compelling.”
Being in the show has made her see birds slightly differently. “The horror of birds is their being able to come from any direction at any point,” she says. “We could all be just living inside, scared of these prehistoric creatures, but obviously, we’ve won the war … Look at how much we used to have to hide from animals through history compared to how much we do now. There was a time when we were living in caves, shuddering.”
The Birds is not Arundell’s first one-hander. Early in her career, she did Beastie Girl, which she’d rather forget.
“It was a tale of Errol Flynn, and a fling that he had with a Jamaican girl,” she explains. “Which was very bizarre … I had a sword fight with myself!”
In those days, she was young enough to accept any offer, and didn’t enjoy the experience. This time around she relishes being out on her own. “It’s like that beautiful, petulant, wild child in you that says, ‘I’m out of here. No one’s running fast enough.’”
The Birds, Belvoir St Theatre, until June 7
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