Tim Walter is a man of many faces. Most recently seen in Belvoir’sHedda Gabler, he has previously appeared in the absurdist hilarity of Sydney Theatre Company’sPerplex,Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead, and enough Shakespeare to sink a large horse. Now, however, Walter is stepping into the shadowy Bildungsroman of Sue Smith’sKryptonite, a political thriller with a cast of just two. About as far from the Bard as you can get, really.
“There was a time there I was just really into it!” Walter laughs about his Shakespearean roots. “Certainly one aspect was that the guys at Bell Shakespeare seemed to like what I was doing, and kept offering me work, which is never a bad thing. So I was just enjoying the opportunity of being in plays at all. If someone offered me a part I’d generally just say ‘yes’ to it. But also in the early part of my career, just out of drama school and all idealistic, Shakespeare is seen as some sort of pinnacle, so I thought, ‘Well, it’s challenging, working with poetic language, doing sword fights,’ all of that. I’m finding now that I feel like my interest is in doing a wider range of things, to pull away from Shakespeare and test myself in other ways. Try to be subtler in my performance.”
Walter’s Kryptonite character is based, however loosely, on the environmentalist Tim Flannery. For an actor, finding themselves in a role whose genesis is drawn from a contemporary figure must be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you don’t need to look far to find your counterpart and develop accordingly. On the other, your own interpretation of the character, the chance to let them emerge organically, might be stymied.
“Well…” he considers. “It gives you a bit of an insight into what the writer was thinking about when they wrote it, and the kind of things that they’re going for. I guess at the end of the day I approach the character as though it’s kind of a version of myself. The Tim Flannery reference is in there, but I’m not actually playing him onstage, I’m not worried about impersonating him in any way, though his values and such might give me an insight into the things that this character cares about, too. What I’m really trying to do is approach the character as a brand new person who may, perhaps, remind people of Tim Flannery.”
Kryptonite is set in the quarter-century shadow of the Tiananmen Square massacre, focusing on the complex relationship between China and Australia over ten years in the life of two friends (played by Walter and Ursula Mills). It sounds like a fascinating, intricate production – all the easier for the audience to escape into. But such escapism is a two-way street, and the actors themselves are just as likely to sink into the story as the unseen audience.
“It doesn’t always happen, which I guess is one of the struggles that actors face, but when you are ‘in the moment’, as they say, really losing yourself in the story, in the characters, that’s kind of what we strive for. That’s best for the audience, too, watching characters that are fully immersed in their predicaments … It’s also really great doing new writing, being in a play that you know no-one has ever seen before and so nobody knows how it goes, nobody is familiar with the story. There’s nowhere to hide.”
Kryptoniteis playing at theSydney Theatre Company fromThursday September 11 – Saturday October 18, tickets online.
