Keeping It Secret

Marthe Rovik can tell us there's a crime involved somehow in The House On The Lake, but she can't tell us how, or what the crime is. She can tell us her character is a doctor named Alice Lowe, but she can't say what kind of doctor, or anything else about her character. She can tell us that the only other character is David Rail (Kenneth Ransom), her patient, but she can't tell us anything about him, either, other than that he has anterograde amnesia, and can only remember things for 15 minutes.

“We have very strict guidelines in what we are allowed to talk about and not talk about, due to a number of reasons,” she says, careful not to reveal the reasons. “But it just makes it all the more exciting for you as an audience member.”

The House On The Lake is a psychosocial thriller, which Rovik says has been described by its playwright, Aidan Fennessy, as 'Memento meets Edgar Allan Poe'.  

Like Memento, Rovik suspects it's the sort of play that will have audience attending more than once.

“I'm hoping it's a kind of story that would actually bring you back another time,” she says. “You know how you have stories when you know what's going on, when you have that light bulb moment, you go, 'I want to see it again now, because now I know, it's interesting to see how people behave together.'”

Rovik is Norwegian and arrived in Perth via Melbourne and Sydney. The reason for her relocation was, of course, love. A visit to her Australian then-boyfriend, now-husband's family has so far lasted five years, and is not set to end any time soon. After shifting around, they eventually settled in Perth because Rovik found the theatre scene here to be somewhat less difficult to break into than those of Sydney and Melbourne.

“Because of my profession I was searching for the best place to get work, and to find a good agent. And I did go to Melbourne and I did go to Sydney, and I did work there. I am very passionate about working the theatre and I found that for an outsider, like myself – I haven't gone to school here so I don't have the contacts that you have when you graduate within your own country from acting school – it was really hard to break into Sydney and Melbourne,” she explains.

When Rovik first moved to Perth, she made use of the great independent theatre resource, The Blue Room Theatre, to establish herself in the scene. She applied for and was accepted into last year's season, producing and starring in a modern interpretation of an Ibsen play. It seems to have worked. “The doors were a little bit more open in Perth, I felt, for newcomers. And I think that I've proved myself right, because I've slowly progressed and finally I got a job with Black Swan, which was my dream and my goal.”