Couple of Stagers

From the Herald Sun, Weekend section; page 3, 5 March 2005.

Familiarity breeds contentment for partners whose life is a stage, writes Harbant Gill.

“WE NEVER lie to each other,” says Jacek Koman as he sits next to his partner of 15 years, Catherine McClements. The assertion, delivered without fanfare, comes in response to a question: how do good actors know when their partners are telling the truth and not just acting incredibly well?

“The interesting thing is that familiarity helps to discriminate quite clearly,” Koman says. “I know that because I used to watch my mother on stage and you see the line where the person becomes an invented character. “I remember cringing watching my mum... I just could not stand the experience of seeing to a point a person, and then," he says snapping his fingers, “This invention.”

This razor-sharp detection, however, is also what makes it difficult for the couple to act together.

“You can barely look in each other’s eyes because you are so aware of the falsity of acting,” says McClements, acclaimed star of shows such as Water Rats and CrashBurn. “It’s much easier to act with someone you don’t know. You see their personality as part of their character and their character as part of their personality, so it seems the truth.”

It is fortunate then that the pair never come face to face in the Melbourne Theatre Company’s Cruel and Tender, in which they play a bloodthirsty general and his sleepless wife, for whom tragedy awaits when she discovers he has a mistress.

McClements and Koman have acted together about a dozen times – in Angels in America, The Secret Life of Us and a new series called Mary Bryant for instance -- but only twice as a married couple: in Macbeth in 2003 and now Cruel and Tender.

The toughest test was Macbeth. On-stage and off.

“Our daughter Coco was not even two then and we had to move to Sydney for three months. We had to take Catherine’s parents with us, we were a whole big household, to work on that particular play in a very short space of time, waking up three times through the night every night and then rehearsing those two intense roles, Lady Macbeth and Macbeth,” Koman says. “That was the toughest test... after that nothing can be as hard. In rehearsals when you are more yourself and less the character, it’s all quite mixed up because in the meeting of the two of us there would be the meeting of four really. But certainly by the time we perform on stage, it doesn’t matter.”

It was Moliere who brought the Eltham lefties-bred McClements together with Polish-bred Koman at the Anthill Theatre in 1988. Sometime during the season of playing on-stage lovers in Moliere’s The Imaginary Invalid, they became lovers.

“It does happen,” Koman laughs.

McClements, who adores Koman’s accent, says: “I thought he was a really good actor, you know. I think probably that was the beginning.”

Koman: “First, professional evaluation.”

McClements: “And then personal, yeah.”

They laugh.

Their deepest contemplation for Cruel and Tender is not what each would do if they found out the other was having an affair, but the subtle issue of complicity.

McClements: “How complicit is a woman in a marriage, how complicit are the couple in each other’s actions, how sullied or infected are you?”

Koman: “Even if you carefully try to stay oblivious to what...”

McClements: “...what is happening.”

Koman: “The extent to which...”

McClements: “Like Imelda Marcos and Marcos, how much can you blame Imelda Marcos, which is actually quite a lot.”

Koman: “Not blame her for what happened. But she benefited from it and used it consciously, knowingly.”

McClements: “Complicit in it.”

Koman: “It’s potentially an important position to be in.”

McClements: “And you imagine what the role then of a wife is, is it to comfort and to heal someone like that or is it to stop? Like what’s happening with politicians now and their wives, the choices that they are making about going to war and that sort of stuff. How complicit are they in those decisions? If it is the person you are closest to, then very, I imagine. Like the Clintons, all the things Bill Clinton was involved in Hillary Clinton I imagine was very up there. She’s a very intelligent and active woman. What George Bush’s wife is doing is a whole other thing.”

Clementine Coco, 3 1/2, has not yet seen her parents in their more confronting roles on stage, television and film.

“She saw me as a donkey once in Midsummer Night’s Dream and she liked that. But only to a point, then she wanted tata (Polish for father), she wanted me,” Koman says.

McClements adds: “We took her, she was just three, and a friend of hers who was three also. They sat, in Shakespeare, and they watched. Coco got a little funny in the end because she wanted Yahts (Jacek is pronounced Yaht-zek) to be sitting next to her but... that children can sit there for two hours and watch Shakespeare, that’s beyond most adults really.”

Koman and McClements tell her that their job is to tell stories. “We have this game that we play about three dogs that we met in Poland about a year ago. They were huge dogs -- Maggie and Toffee and Honey. I’m always Toffee and Cath is Honey,” Koman says. “You are standing in front of her and you’re being the father of her, and then you go (he pants) and suddenly you stop being a father and you are a dog now. I like that she thinks that our job is to tell stories. That’s why she’s so demanding in the evening, because she knows we are professionals.”