“During Puberty Blues They Very Much Tried To Exploit The Similarities Between Sue and I"

22 March 2015 | 7:22 pm | Staff Writer

Life After Puberty (Blues)

In Jumpy, a new play by April De Angelis that premiered at Melbourne Theatre Company and will soon make its way to Sydney, Harding stars as Tilly, the 15-year-old daughter of Hilary, played by Kath & Kim’s Jane Turner (making her Sydney Theatre Company stage debut). The duo and their highly charged mother-daughter dynamic sit at the core of this family drama.

Despite a screen career with credits on Puberty Blues, Packed To The Rafters, and My Place, Jumpy is the first time Harding has appeared on stage outside of school productions – and even those were small affairs.

“We had five people in our Year 12 drama class, so the focus wasn’t really performing arts,” Harding jests.

Strangely enough Harding, who graduated from Year 12 last year, credits her school life for helping her land the role of Tilly.

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“My agent got me an audition for Jumpy which was between my English exam and my History exam, which was crazy because that was the most full-on time. So I started learning my lines about four weeks before because I had to learn my notes as well. I rolled into the audition and it was such a relief just to act; it felt like I was under no pressure at all because I had been used to going into these exams where I had to write 12-page essays, so I was actually quite relaxed, weirdly enough.”

Relaxed is one way of putting it, but Tilly is certainly a far cry from Harding, who has so missed study since earning a 97.25 ATAR she ignored suggestions for a gap year and has instead started a Bachelor of Arts degree.

“During Puberty Blues they very much tried to exploit the similarities between Sue and I, being the same age, this loss of innocence or these learning curves as they were happening and paralleling in my life. But I never was quite like Tilly – of course I cared a lot more about school than Tilly does, I respected what my mum had to say a lot more, my feminist mother was very successful in instilling her feminism in me and teaching me about the world from a feminist perspective, whereas in Jumpy Hilary has a much harder time doing that with Tilly.”

Harding is also adjusting to the demands of theatre.

“I’m so used to screen and that spontaneous jumping of each other’s energies, which you don’t do as much in theatre. It’s kind of funny, the first time we did the show I had this bubbly feeling like, ‘Oh, we’ve got to get it right ‘cause this will be the only time we perform it…’ But then of course we had 96 shows after that…”