The Fire And The Fury

The last two times Geraldine Hakewill graced Sydney Theatre Company's stages she was playing young, naïve, and ultimately abused characters – Cecile in Les Liaisons Dangerous and Johanna in Baal. As Hakewill prepares to return to the Wharf in the premier production of Joanna Murray-Smith's new commission for the company, Fury, to be directed by Andrew Upton, she's finally playing an antagonist. Rebecca is a PhD student, a journalist, an orphan, and at this stage, a canvas for Hakewill's explorations, ready to be brought to the life for the first time.

“Getting to work on a new Australian work is very special, it's so exciting,” exclaims Hakewill, before professing her appreciation of Murray-Smith's previous tightly woven family dramas, notably Honour, which played at STC in 2010.

No stranger to new work, the past few years have seen Hakewill debut characters from Kit Brookman's This Heaven and young German playwright Laura Naumann's Sweetbird andsoforth on somewhat smaller Sydney stages, but she says Fury is a different beast. “To be doing it at this level, at a professional level, you get the opportunity to do that in independent work quite often working with new writers, but to be working with someone so experienced as Joanna and Andrew and working at the STC and creating a character, it's very special,” says Hakewill, adding shortly after with a nervous laugh, “and also scary.

“You hope that you've created a full character, that it's got the depth and complexity that often comes handed to you when you've been given a play that's been done for hundreds of years. You can watch a video recording of a Shakespeare play done in the '70s, or you can read about different productions of a play and grab ideas from all of those, but with this, all you've got are the words on the page and any hints you have from the writer.”

Following a tight knit family of three – parents Alice (Sarah Peirse) and Patrick (Rob Menzies) and their son Joe (Harry Greenwood) – as the familial fabric comes unstitched following an act of vandalism by Joe, at the heart of Fury are questions of truth, of acknowledging and accepting the past, and of defining oneself as an autonomous individual. Clearly, an orphaned journalist is the perfect vehicle to look a little closer at such issues, and it's through that that Hakewill has defined her character.

“I think Rebecca's driving force in the play is to find truth and that is what propels her through the story, to find the truth about who she is. Rob Menzies describes her as an avenging angel; she comes in with this force to dig out the truth about the people she's interviewing, specifically Alice, but also her family, to try and understand who Alice is,” Hakewill explains.

In our conversation, truth is appropriately illusive – Hakewill can't be expected to give away too many of the play's plot twists and reveals – but the truth of the appeal of a new kind of character for Hakewill to tackle is readily available. “She's a bit older than me, she's 31, and so it really intrigued me to play someone who had more life experience. She's a lot more certain of herself than a lot of the other characters that I've played. Rebecca's got a really strong drive through the play; she's kind of ruthless in her quest to find information, and that really attracted me to her.”