A little video of what Sport for Jove theatre have been up to over the summer.

‘The witches are played superbly by one actor, Lizzie Schebesta. When she is prophesying she seems to be reluctantly channeling higher powers, performing in three electronically amplified voices. But she haunts all the action. She plays the children in the scenes of Banquo’s and Lady Macduff’s murders; she is at the feast, comforting Banquo’s ghost; she is there in the stripped-down version of the final battle, and then, suddenly and surprisingly, at its end.’

John McCallum- The Australian

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/stage/new-production-of-macbeth-a-thriller/story-fn9d344c-1226325875206

‘The pain and anguish caused to the witch(es) by the horrific results of the Macbeths’ presumption is powerfully realised…’

Anonymous comment

‘There’s some great, fun decisions made throughout the show, including stylised movement creating dynamism between scenes and the convergence of the play’s famous three witches into one (an appropriately spellbinding Lizzie Schebesta), in the throes of possession. Schebesta’s exceptionally controlled movement and sympathetic presence elevate the role. There’s actually a shift that comes with making her character beautiful and esoteric; she’s no longer a cruel hag, and it suddenly feels like a sin how Macbeth has acted upon her gifts.’

Rima Sabina Aouf- Concrete Playground.

http://sydney.concreteplayground.com.au/event/51509/macbeth-bell-shakespeare.htm

‘Three witches would have overwhelmed the small world of the stage, but one, with distorted microphones to create three voices, was a chilling supernatural force wrapped up in the small, fragile, and big-eyed Schebesta, who is languid and careless one moment with a sexy air, and shakingly vulnerable the next. You trust her even as she seems completely otherworldly, and that’s an intriguing dichotomy.’

Cassie Tongue- Aussie Theatre

http://aussietheatre.com.au/reviews/bell-shakespearemacbeth/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=bell-shakespearemacbeth

‘Lizzie Schebesta’s witch is simultaneously unnerving and sensual, her voice distorted and amplified, especially effective in rapid-fire staccato in her “Double, double, toil and trouble” cauldron-side speech.’

Gary Smith- Daily Telegraph

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/entertainment/whats-on/a-slay-belle-on-song-again/story-e6frexmi-1226327197743

‘Three witches? Make that just the one, a young woman (Lizzie Schebesta) in the grip of a three-way possession realised in physical contortions and a microphone fed through an electronic harmoniser.’
Jason Blake- Smh

http://eightnightsaweek.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/review-macbeth.html

‘Lizzie Schebesta gives good witch: not at all warty, but sexy; disturbed; possessed. A cotcase who’s apparently flown o’er the cuckoo’s nest.’

Llyod Bradford Syke- Curtain Call blog.

http://blogs.crikey.com.au/curtaincall/2012/04/18/review-macbeth-drama-theatre-sydney/

‘Lord, we know what we are, but not what we may be.’

Having just finished a production of the Scottish play where I played one witch, I was a bit wary of going straight into another one and daunted by the prospect of taking on all three witches. What seemed like an exciting idea at the time that I auditioned for the role, now felt audacious and daunting. But that slowly started to shift once we began the project. and it ended up being the most perfect rehearsal process; three weeks in heaven (or rather in middle-earth as the set suggests)… We worked on the set from day one, we did 2 hours of physical training a day, and spent the rest of the day rehearsing…I was working with a wonderfully brave and intelligent director, and with an incredibly talented cast.

One thing I was passionate about was exploring The Witches as conduits of higher powers rather than the perpetrators of the evil in this play. They fortell rather than control and give voice to what must be. They only tell Macbeth that we will be King, they do not tell him to murder Duncan or usurp the throne. I frequently encountered this frustrating assumption that they are evil, much as Kate Mulvany did with Lady Macbeth. I think the witches are definately mixed up in some illegal activity (in the context of the Jacobean age anyway, witchcraft was punishable by death back then) and that gives them a dangerous edge, but I don’t think you can lump them in the evil category, or accuse them of never trying to do good. Its more interesting if there’s a dichotomy going on inside them. To me Macbeth is only interesting when it is a psychological drama- about real, fallible people, where we see the disintegration of the mind of a good man, and where evil does not come from the Devil, but from a nightmare within. And I wondered how the witches would fit into this… in fact I feared that they actually contradict this.

‘But cruel are the times, when we are traitors and do not know ourselves, but float upon a wind and violent sea each way and move.’

In rehearsals, Pete and I had two objectives: to make her frightening and to make her real. We were inspired by japanese horror, butoh dance, the photographs of bill henson, and the music videos of this crazy swedish cult singer Fever Ray. And for me, the idea that the witches became possessed by darker spirits in order to become the apartitions was really frightening. I don’t believe in possession as in The Exorcist, I find it hard to relate to that sort of thing. But I am scared of a human being’s potential to totally lose control- to enter a rampage, to lose oneself to depression, drugs, addiction, oblivion- to lose your grip. I’m not saying my witch does drugs in the play, but I think we all have the potential to enter oblivion and darkness and different moods in our lives. As a person, I’m scared of the dark. Its my greatest phobia (well, that and rats, but I won’t get into that now). Its scary because its unknown, and walking in the dark requires total trust of your surroundings. And most people relate to that. So I thought, what if the witch is always teetering on that edge of darkness. In Demonology, King James said witches are attracted to graveyards and battlefields, because they love to feast on other people’s misery.

‘From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw..
And all I loved, I loved alone.
Then- in my childhood, in the dawn
Of a most stormy life- was drawn
From every depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still.’

(Alone by Edgar Allen Poe)

Pete also loved this idea of the Femme Fatale, being a male construct of a woman, who will seduce him and lead him to his own downfall. Kind of like a Siren. There is this theory that the three witches are just figments of Macbeth’s imagination and reflections of his psyche. Emanations of his own thoughts! They represent his greatest desires and his greatest fears, his dreams and his nightmares. This is how we discovered the physicality of the witch. That she is mercurial and moves like water, constantly changing on Macbeth. She is a mirror for and of him. She is the Echo to his Narcissus. And she is always just out of his reach.

One day in rehearsals, Kate Mulvany told me that they had recently discovered some 500 new fairytales that had been locked away in an archive in Germany. One of the stories in this collection was by the Grimm Brothers, and it told the story of this princess running away from a witch. And in order to hide from her, the princess transformed herself into a lake. But the witch began to drink the lake, until she had drank it all, and the princess was living inside her belly. So the princess would torment the witch by swishing around inside of her, trying to make her vomit. I’m not sure how the story ends, but it definately captured my imagination- this princess/witch creature, whose half good/half evil, half water/ half flesh!

‘No one can harmonize contained conflicts without coming to a working arrangement between the angel in himself and the devil in himself, between his rose above and his manure below. The game is a working game so long as the angel is winning but does not win and the devil is losing but is never lost.’

What I found in my research of witches in history is that they are scapegoats in society, and in countries of civil war and civil strife is where you’ll find the existence and persecution of witches. At such times, we require these targets to vent our National angst and fear. Salem being the perfect example. In Macbeth, Scotland is going through exactly that, and in fact Scotland was actually known for conducting some of the worst Witch hunts in history.  I started to see The Witch as a symbol of what Scotland was going through, and that she was a victim to its fate. What if she was an embodiment of the soul of this play- where she has both an angel and a demon in her- where she fights for both the light and the dark… That she’s a living metaphor for a person’s or a country’s potential for good and evil. It seemed right, under this interpretation to roll all three roles into one and create this one fractured, shape-shifting and very vulnerable character. The assistant director John Kachoyan put me onto this artist called Gunter Brus, who was a part of these major protests in Vienna in the 70s. He’s famous for painting this great black line down his body (as a sort of symbol of the city’s damaged soul) and walking through the streets of Vienna. And that too really resonated with me, about what the witch was in this production. (That’s him on left.)

Anyway, if you haven’t come to see it yet, we’re playing at the Opera House for another couple of weeks. You can book tickets at www.bellshakespeare.com.au/whatson/2012/macbeth.

Behind the Scenes – The Sydney Hills Shakespeare in the Park 2011 from Sport for Jove Theatre on Vimeo.

Recently, I got the opportunity to be a part of the new Underbelly series Razor. In it, I play the notorious prostitute Duclie Markham aka Mary Eugene, or otherwise known as the Angel of Death. She was a remarkable woman in the world of Australian crime. Unfortunately in this series, my part doesn’t touch on her later infamous years. But I had a lot of fun playing the cheeky 17 years old girl, who ran away from a comfortable life on the North Shore, for no other reason than to look for a good time. She quickly became one of Sydney’s most famous prostitutes and a rival to Nellie Cameron.

‘(The cast) are veritable stars… the most glaringly obvious among them being Lizzie Schebesta, as Rosalind. Virtually every word she uttered, from the very first, even in competition with a chorus of fruit bats, the drone of a plane, red-cordialised kids and sundry other noises, was clarion-clear, booming to the blankets at the back. Otherwise, too, her character was wrought with great dexterity, every expression and gesture carefully measured, without seeming at all contrived.’

-Lloyd Bradley Syke, Curtain Call.

‘In the end, though, everything depends on Rosalind, and Lizzie Schebesta is a cracker: clear as a bell in thought, voice and action.’

-Jason Blake, SMH.

While touring with Much Ado About Nothing, the very talented Arkie Michael and Nathan Lovejoy got to together to make a beautiful, hilarious short film, and very kindly asked me to be a part of it. We filmed it while we were in Canberra- performing the show in the evenings. I play a painfully shy girl called Penelope, who meets a kindred soul at the bus stop everyday, but is afraid to make contact with him- until fate intervenes.

The film, directed by John Duigan (The Year My Voice Broke) is about a Vietnamese Australian uni student, who starts working as an escort in order to aid her family and pay her uni fees. It ‘focuses on the challenges involved establishing an identity independently of how others – and society – perceive us.’ I play the love interest’s bitchy ex-girlfriend, who makes it public that Lihn, the main character, is working as a call girl. It was a lot of fun to be a part of.