While studying Economics and Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne, Cate Blanchett also performed on several stage plays, and even served as set designer on some. She was also an alumni of La Mama Theatre.

 

A Brotherhood Bin Law Revue

Directed by: Bob Pavlich
Play run: 15 – 25 July 1987
Venue: University of Melbourne

 

 

Talking About The Weather

Directed by: Madeleine Fogarty
Play run: 1988
Venue: University of Melbourne

These artists’ exploration of myriad modes of interpretation, storytelling beyond narrative and how bodies move through space found additional fuel in the Adelaide Festival, which welcomed major international figures from John Cage to Pina Bausch. The biannual event’s impact on this community cannot be exaggerated. “When I was young, it was the only festival of the arts,” says playwright and director Andrew Upton, Blanchett’s husband. “This rare quality meant that, if the things which arrived were good, they banged in your brain with such distinct force that you kept hold of them.” Blanchett experienced this firsthand. In 1988, Melbourne University’s Edge Theatre Company, in which she and Caroline Lee were active, performed their devised play about climate change, Talking About the Weather, at the festival’s Fringe. Between nights sleeping in tents, the group attended two epic productions from different strands of the Meyerholdian tradition: Quebecois director Robert Lepage’s six-hour La Trilogie des dragons and Peter Brook’s nine-hour adaption of The Mahabharata. “We were on fire after seeing them,” recalls Lee.

Not only were these landmark productions formally inventive, but they also conveyed a political engagement with global society and a seriousness concerning theater as labor-intensive – characteristics that resonated strongly with these students and which have deepened for Blanchett over 35 years. She appreciates that good ideas remain only ideas unless realized through rigorous material work, as a joint effort by the actors, director and technical team. “It was important that we weren’t operating in a silo or in elitist circumstances,” says Lee, regarding the sizable contingent of her and Blanchett’s peers interested in the cutting-edge. “We were passionate about art as a transformative element in society and about theater’s potential to change the world.”

 

Hamlet

Directed by: Michael Cathcart
Play run: 1989
Venue: University of Melbourne
* Cate Blanchett not only acted on the play but also served as the set designer.

 

European Features

Directed by: Bob Pavlich
Play by: Kris Hemensley
Play run: September – October 1989
Venue: La Mama Theatre

She [Cate Blanchett] made her professional stage debut there [La Mama Theatre] in Kris Hemensley’s European Features. Bob Pavlich cast Blanchett after directing her in the 1987 Law Revue sketch-comedy at Melbourne University. “It was clear she was one of the university’s most interesting performers,” says Pavlich. Comprised of vignettes featuring an eclectic array of characters, including artist Egon Schiele and poet Friedrich Hölderlin, the non-narrative play was called “an opera for voice” – an apt beginning for a theatrical career that has always resisted the simple or conventional.

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On stage; Still 

Kiss of the Spiderwoman

Directed by: Sharon Peel
Play by: Manuel Puig
Play run: October 1989
Venue: University of Melbourne
* Cate Blanchett did not act on the play but was the set designer.

 

The Woodbox (1989)

Directed by: Kirsten Von Bibra
Play by: Cate Blanchett and Caroline Lee
Play run: 7 – 17 December 1989
Venue: La Mama Theatre
* Apart from writing the play, Cate Blanchett and Caroline Lee were devisors and performers.

The Woodbox, written and performed by Cate Blanchett and Caroline Lee, premiered at the tiny 34-seat space on December 7, 1989. The play concerns a mother (Blanchett), unmoored by her newfound isolation when her daughter goes traveling, who takes in her older neighbor (Lee) after the woman’s house burns down. Their personalities clash, however, culminating in a tragic finale. “It’s slightly abstract and intriguing, with a certain menace, intensity and otherness,” says director Kirsten von Bibra, after reading the piece for the first time in over 30 years. “It has its own nervous system.” Melbourne Times critic Chris Boyd called it “the theatrical equivalent of a Rorschach inkblot” and highlighted Blanchett’s “great vocal control” and her performance as having “just the right mix of neuroticism and suppressed emotion.”

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On stage 

Blood Wedding

Directed by: Michael Cathcart
Play by: Federico Garcia Lorca
Play run: 27 May – 6 June 1992
Venue: University of Melbourne

Quotes from Cate Blanchett

• “My sister, Genevieve, came to see the play [European Features]. My sister’s a harsh critic. She said, ‘That’s the first time I couldn’t see you.’ I understood what she meant.” (The New Yorker, February 2007)

Trivia & Facts

• Cate Blanchett and Elise McCredie went to the same high school too. Three decades since their collaboration on stage, they co-created with Tony Ayres the six-part TV series, Stateless (2020), which centers on four strangers whose lives collide in an immigration detention center in the Australian desert.

 

Cate Blanchett attended Methodist Ladies’ College in Melbourne and there she became the school’s drama captain where she directed and performed in school plays.

The Hobbit (1980s)
Adaptation of novel by J. R. R. Tolkien
Role: Bard the Bowman

The Odyssey of Runyon Jones (1980s)
Adaptation of play by Norman Corwin
Role: Unknown

They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1980s)
Adaptation of the novel by Horace McCoy
Role: Director

Sources: AusStage, Uni of Melb – Law Revue, Mastermind