Photograph: Adam Gibsonĭusseldorp laments how difficult it was to find a play with two great female roles.

Stephanie Jack, at rear, appears with Marta Dusseldorp and Essie Davis in The Maids. I had heard of the translation Martin Crimp had done and I just loved it – the language in it … and I just found it really funny and dangerous and everything I’d hoped.” “He is like Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, Ibsen, Chekhov … he’s got the same sort of energy. Dusseldorp says the play, based on a true story, is about “power games, and love, and hate, and stench”. We really wanted to work together so I started looking for plays where I could really work with Essie as opposed to going off when she came on – there are a lot of those for women – and I just fell back on The Maids.”įirst performed in Paris in 1947, it’s a self-conscious play about two adult sisters, both maids, who role-play scenarios in which they murder their mistress. “Neither of us were away and we started chatting. “Essie and I got together because of the pandemic,” she says. The dearth of two-handers for women around is reflective of the fact that men have dominated Marta Dusseldorp When it hit they quickly knuckled down, sought grants, and created opportunities for local performers to keep working on the island. Back in those pre-Covid times it seemed a simple-enough plan: be based in Tasmania and fly out to jobs across Australia and overseas.ĭusseldorp and Winspear had set up their own company, Archipelago Productions, before the pandemic. Davis and her film director husband, Justin Kurzel, made the same move at almost the same time – she grew up here and has always called it home. She and her husband, the actor and director Ben Winspear, had moved their young family to his home town of Hobart in 2017. She was filming Foxtel’s Wentworth at the time. “It was pretty devastating,” Dusseldorp agrees. “The rug was pulled out from every live performer’s feet and our whole industry just went down the plughole.” “I was like, ‘well, that was a lot of work, to just watch everything go” – Davis mimes an explosion. “I literally got off a plane from having opened two films, in America, England and Australia, and every cinema shut down,” she says. Davis winces to recall those stressful times of early 2020.

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