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  • Hamlet (1994-1995) / The Tempest (1995) / The Blind Giant is Dancing (1995) / The Seagull (1997)

Hamlet (1994-1995) / The Tempest (1995) / The Blind Giant is Dancing (1995) / The Seagull (1997)

Plays with Cate Blanchett with the Company B Ensemble at Belvoir Street Theatre.

 

Hamlet (1994-1995)

Cate Blanchett as: Ophelia

Directed by: Neil Armfield
Translation by: Oleg Bichenkov, Anatoly Frusin and Neil Armfield (Play by Anton Chekhov)
Play run: 23 June – 31 July 1994
Venue: Belvoir Street Theatre

 

 

 

Haunted by the ghost of his deceased father, Hamlet exacts revenge on his murderous uncle.

Cast

Richard Roxburgh as Hamlet
Cate Blanchett as Ophelia
Geoffrey Rush as Horatio
Noah Taylor as Kostya
David Wenham as Laertes
Gillian Jones as Gertrude

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Quotes from Cate Blanchett

  • On Richard Roxburgh: “He’s one of my favorite actors on the planet. There’s never a false note in anything he does. The stakes are always high, the level of play is always rich, and I always know that wherever I decide to go, he’ll be right there with me. I’d do everything with Rox if I could.” (Vogue, December 2006)

Quotes from Others

  • Richard Roxburgh
    — “I’ll always remember in Hamlet [for Belvoir] that, strangely, my most profound moment that always used to hit me in the guts wasn’t seeing my dead father’s ghost, but when Hamlet returns his gifts to Ophelia [Cate Blanchett]. And I remember giving those back to Cate and these great puddles of water spraying out of her eyes every night. It used to go right through me. And I remember thinking there’s not a moment when she’s not absolute in what she’s doing here. It feels really safe and certain in her gaze on stage. And that’s a great thing.”

Trivia & Facts

 

The Tempest (1995)

Cate Blanchett as: Miranda

Directed by: Neil Armfield
Written by: William Shakespeare
Play run: 30 May 1995 – 2 July 1995
Venue: Belvoir Street Theatre

 

 

 

A play about magic, betrayal, love and forgiveness. Prospero uses magic to conjure a storm and torment the survivors of a shipwreck, including the King of Naples and Prospero’s treacherous brother, Antonio.

Cast

Barry Otto as Prospero
Cate Blanchett as Miranda
David Wenham as Alonso
Gillian Jones as Ariel
Jason Clarke as Ferdinand
Kevin Smith as Caliban
Gonzalo Ralph Cotterill

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Poster; Rehearsals
Quotes from Cate Blanchett

  • “With Miranda, often there was a real childlike sense of pleasure when moments worked. That sense you get when you please your parents as a child – you did good and consequently when it didn’t work I was distressed. I would come off and beat myself about something that had happened. But my role wasn’t at all angsty, so there was no point in dwelling on that. You had to come on and be wondrous.” (Sydney Morning Herald, July 1995)
  • On Barry Otto: “I was utterly daunted but so excited about the prospect of working with him onstage. I’d always looked up to him, really, because he was one of those rare breeds in Australia who is able to have a deep and rich connection to the theatre but also as much impact on the screen. Then when I met him in the rehearsal room, he seems almost like he’s some sort of… he’s like a hat full of elves or imps or something. You have this instant desire to protect him because he doesn’t appear to have any skin like a regular person but then as Prospero he just erupted. He was volcanic. And you realized, ‘No, actually he can protect me.’” (Otto by Otto, 2024)

Trivia & Facts

 

The Blind Giant is Dancing (1995)

Cate Blanchett as: Rose Draper

Directed by: Neil Armfield
Written by: Stephen Sewell
Play run: 12 August – 10 September 1995
Venue: Belvoir Street Theatre

 

 

 

 An idealist becomes so embroiled in a party power struggle that he loses sight of what’s at stake.

Cast

Cate Blanchett
Peter Carroll
Hugo Weaving
Jason Clarke
Ralph Cotterill
Gillian Jones
Russell Kiefel
Jacek Koman
Catherine McClements
Keith Robinson
Steve Rodgers
Kerry Walker

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Backstage
Quotes from Cate Blanchett

  • On playing Rose right after playing Miranda [in the Tempset] who are polar opposites: “It’s fantastic that I’m being offered things that are poles apart rather than always playing ‘the juve’. With acting … sometimes I think I love the danger of it. Particularly with stage work; you don’t know what’s going to happen each night. And I love the nutting out. Sometimes I love finishing. I don’t believe in acting in isolation. It would bore me. What’s delighting me about being with the ensemble [at Belvoir Street] is that you are absolutely working with other people.” (Sydney Morning Herald, July 1995)

Trivia & Facts

 

The Seagull (1997)

Cate Blanchett as: Nina

Directed by: Neil Armfield
Translation by: Oleg Bichenkov, Anatoly Frusin and Neil Armfield (Play by Anton Chekhov)
Play run: 4 March 1997 – 13 April 1997
Venue: Belvoir Street Theatre

 

 

The first of Chekhov’s great comedies, this splendid company has spent three acts giving us the comic side of the characters and establishing their absurd humanity … the production is full of marvelous encounters.

Cast

Gillian Jones as Irina
Richard Roxburgh as Trigorin
Cate Blanchett as Nina
Noah Taylor as Kostya

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Rehearsals
Quotes from Cate Blanchett

  • “The Seagull has really thrown up a lot of questions for me because it is about theatre and the way you endure a life in the theatre or in the arts and keep working. It’s been very confronting at this particular time. I love attacking character and inhabiting somebody else’s shoes completely, but this time the masks have been egg-shell thin. It’s almost as though we have been asked to play ourselves, even though they’re not our words or our psyches.” (Sydney Morning Herald, May 1997)
  • On returning to a production of The Seagull after more than 20 years and playing a different character this time: “It’s really interesting coming back from inhabiting the equal and opposite end of the spectrum after having a career in theatre.” (The Guardian, February 2025)
  • On playing Nina: “I’d just met Andrew [Upton] and was madly in love and thought: ‘How am I going to go out every night and be broken open when I’m so deeply happy?’”

Quotes from Others

  • Neil Armfield:
    — On the phone call he received from Jane Campion after seeing The Seagull: “She [Jane Campion] said Cate’s [Blanchett] Nina was so utterly perfect and true she just wished Chekhov had been able to see it. She said it was the sort of performance a writer would hope for but never expect.”
    — On Cate Blanchett: “We planned The Seagull round her. She seemed to be made for it.”
    — “Cate had everything for Nina: the voice, the imagination, incredible enthusiasm and this beautiful clumsiness. She was heartbreaking. I remember coming home one night to a message Jane Campion left on my answering machine saying it was as if Chekhov had written it for her.”
    — “    She looked like Grace Kelly, with a beautiful comic sadness. She is so unpretentious; she has no kind of claim on herself. She would always just apply herself to the task. Quite insecure, really, with an immense reserve of skills and an ability to sit inside a thought, a great talent for an actor. It reveals so much, and that’s important with Chekhov. Like Geoffrey Rush, she has the power to be outside her body and to absolutely see it as something in a landscape.”
    — “Nina moves from someone whose comedy [in the first act] is based on her native gaucheness to someone – without seeing any of the shifts in between – comes back with this terrible weight on her heart. It’s an incredible, tragic journey, which Cate [Blanchett] was able to carry so absolutely. [It’s not that Blanchett is a Nina-in-the-making; more that] Cate, like most great actors, has access to a real sadness.”
  • Andrew Upton:
    — On his romantic connection with play: “We were engaged and Cate [Blanchett] was playing Nina in Neil’s wonderful production,” he says. “I saw that production 12, 13, 14 times. It was a great production – flawed, like all productions – but great.”
    — On Cate Blanchett, his then fiancee, as Nina: “I must have seen it 13 or 14 times. Her [Cate Blanchett] Nina was almost dangerously naive; too fragile for the world.”

Trivia & Facts

Source: AusStage