The Face

From The Australian, Review; page 3, 30 September 2006.

NATASHA ROBINSON meets CATHERINE McCLEMENTS.

When the world ends on stage every night, it is bound to drive an actor to introspection, particularly when the nature of the apocalypse keeps changing. But perhaps Catherine McClements’ “funny Patch” has nothing to do with playwright Stephen Sewell.

“He wrote a different ending every day,” she says of rehearsals for Sewell’s post-September 11 black comedy It Just Stopped, which opens at Sydney’s Belvoir St Theatre this week.

McClements plays Beth, producer for a US radio shock jock. She is married to Frank (Kim Gyngell), a correspondent for The New Yorker magazine. Their seemingly perfect lives take a sudden turn when the power fails in their Manhattan apartment building, leaving them trapped with new neighbours Bill (John Wood) and Pearl (Rebecca Massey).

This examination of the fears of the war on terror generation marks a return to work for McClements, who spent much of the year in Europe visiting her husband, fellow actor Jacek Koman, who is working in his native Poland.

During a break in rehearsals at Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre, where It Just Stopped played earlier this year, McClements, 41, drifts into reflective mode, pondering what next after 20 years of solid work.

“It’s sort of what the play brings out,” she says. “I decided to be an actor when I was 16 and now I just can’t seem to find the thing yet to take it over, the thing that I would find as completely unifying. I wish I could find that thing that leads me to the second phase of my life. I just don’t know where to jump.”

McClements is not a household name but most would recognise her face, especially from the three years she spent playing Goldie on the popular television drama Water Rats. She also starred in The Secret Life of Us and the film Better than Sex, between stints on stage.

The versatile actor has worked flat-out since being offered a film role during her third year at the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney, where she studied alongside directors Baz Luhrmann and Nell Schofield, and actor Sonia Todd.

She remembers being “terribly serious” during her three years at NIDA and an all-encompassing dedication to work has been a feature of her life since. “I thought you had to be a certain person to be an actor, someone who works really hard,” she says. “I have realised it’s quite the opposite now.”

The birth of daughter Coco five years ago turned McClements’ world on its head. “Suddenly, everything had great meaning in a way. If there was a hole in the footpath, I’d think: `Why don’t they fix that hole? There are little children around, there are people with prams.’ I started to read the local paper cover to cover. Community became important. Whereas before you were just a lone pebble bouncing from there to there taking what you could get. I could never do that anymore. I also don’t want it. It seems like a waste of your life. It is very difficult now to be 100 per cent selfish.”

McClements lives in Melbourne’s buzzing St Kilda. But Melbourne is not the hub for stage actors that it once was, she says, remembering the days when the theatre companies were so well-funded and vibrant that the likes of Geoffrey Rush appeared regularly on stage.

She is pleased to be in Melbourne, close to the leafy outer suburb of Eltham where she was reared. Family members are nearby and she wants Coco to be close to them.

It falls to Koman to undertake long and well-paid stints overseas, but the absence of her partner of 16 years is not too much of a strain, McClements says.

“I always like that freedom in a relationship. I find it healthy,” she says.

Travel brings freedom too; McClements still loves to wander off on long overseas jaunts, where her favourite place is the Middle East. “The culture there is just about human interaction,” she says. “Like Ramadan; the idea that one whole country does the same sort of thing is incredible. There’s this one psyche and everyone is doing it. It’s incredibly beautiful.”

As for the future, McClements is waiting for inspiration. “I’m at an age where I’m waiting for something to take me over the way [acting] did,” she says. “I feel free now to let it go.”

CLOSE-UP

Big break: The lead in our school play, even though my singing was (and is) a little tricky.

Career highlight: Performing in Suddenly Last Summer at Belvoir St (2000 season), directed by Neil Armfield.

Lowlight: Singing in the school musical.

Favourite actor: Gillian Jones.