In praise of… Cate Blanchett

Success on the screen offers no guarantee of brilliance on the boards. Some actors can command both media. Others struggle to make the leap from one to the other. Cate Blanchett unquestionably belongs in the first category. Anyone who can play both Elizabeth I and Bob Dylan in the movies can obviously do versatile. But the range of Blanchett's performance in Big and Small, her first appearance on the London stage for 12 years, is still breathtaking. She is on the stage almost throughout the two and a half hours of Botho Strauss's play, as her generous-hearted but ineffectual character Lotte struggles repeatedly to connect with the people around her. Lotte passes through an indifferent world almost unnoticed. But Blanchett's stage presence in the role is compelling, as she deploys every register, gesture and movement to give the kind of once-in-a-generation stage masterclass that conjures up memories of Vanessa Redgrave in her prime.

Strauss’s play is an obscure one and at three hours, it’s not your typical silly season theatre fare. But Blanchett gives the performance of her career. Smoking and nervously pulling at her underwear, she is goofy and wildly enthusiastic as the young abandoned wife.

Directed by Benedict Andrews and designed by Johannes Schutz, it is now presented in the context of a post-GFC Europe that is amid yet another crisis. But the great artist who guides us here through Lotte’s odyssey is Cate Blanchett. This is a stunningly expressive performance, supported by an excellent cast. Her extraordinary vocal and physical skills as an actor have never been in doubt, but here she is magnificent. Her Lotte dances frenetically across this vast blackness. She falls to the ground and then springs up again. Vernacular humour and farcical comedy are interspersed with gloriously ironic visions of the transcendent and sudden moments of anguish. Blanchett plays this abject, increasingly deranged but ultimately innocent character with a mixture of vulnerability and luminosity that is heartbreaking.

The good news, for fans of genuine deserve-it A-list celebrities or (more importantly) simply good acting, is that Cate Blanchett is beyond terrific. Whimperingly, blisteringly terrific. She is a revelation, and those cynics who at times sniff at Hollywood stars bringing themselves into London's theatreland to hone their "real acting" kudos should sit down in front of this show, for the full three hours; and they would then stand and applaud. But it is well-nigh impossible to tear one's eyes from Cate Blanchett, right from the opener, as she sits, smoking, on stage, gazing at us, soliloquising at us. Fine, much of it is admittedly mad absurdist German 70s playwright soliloquising – yet she delivers it with such confidence and humour, her breaths swooping and dying but every single pointed, angry or delighted line being nailed just-so, that from here on in you actually forgive much of the play and simply marvel at being in the presence of a bona fide stage star.

It's not just the pitch-perfect range of Blanchett's emotions that captivates; her balletic athleticism mesmerises throughout. She skips, she sprawls, she teeters and pirouettes and manages to imbue a simple walk across the stage with, depending on mood, exuberant gaucheness or filigreed elegance.

At the very end, even her slouching exhaustion by life has an energy to it. There were four ovations from the audience, which I think we can safely wager is the first time for a while that London audience has felt that way about lengthy German surrealist drama. And they weren't, trust me, applauding a Hollywood star. They were applauding the realisation that sometimes, just sometimes, a person truly deserves to be a star.

Strauss has also written one of the best parts for a woman in the modern repertory and Blanchett inhabits it with every fibre of her being.

What she conveys, from the opening Moroccan monologue, is Lotte's desperate hunger for human contact: she sniffs her armpits and sprays her genitalia to ensure that personal hygiene is not her problem. That physicality underlies the whole performance, in which Blanchett at one moment skips like a frisky puppy, at another dances with the frenzy of an over-wound doll. But, above all, she conveys the feeling of being the outsider always looking in, whether peering through vast Edward Hopper-like windows or pressing her features against a pane of frosted glass.

"I'm one of the righteous," Lotte tells an alarmed stranger at a bus stop; and Blanchett, in one of the most dazzlingly uninhibited performances I've ever seen, suggests a garrulous angel who doesn't quite belong on earth.

We shouldn't, however, be surprised by her success. She was a stage animal long before she went into films. As co-director of the Sydney company, she has also had the wit to engage Benedict Andrews as director and what he brings out, through Johannes Schütz's sets, is Strauss's strange mix of realism and expressionism.

It is, however, Blanchett who will long be remembered for her moving passage from a figure of bounding, irrepressible energy to one shrouded in silence like a Samuel Beckett character staring into the abyss.

With the exquisite Cate Blanchett starring as Lotte, the manic, pitiable central character, it could have been experimental Inuit theatre and I’d have been there.

Big could refer to Blanchett’s performance in this Sydney Theatre Company show: a radiant, passionate, ever-changing and sometimes highly comic one.

If Cate’s agent wanted to secure a theatrical niche to cement public perception of her as one of the greatest actors this country’s ever produced, he or she could’ve found no better showcase than this play. My companion, particularly, thrilled and marvelled at her superbly nuanced, consummate, commanding performance: she put nary a foot nor gesture wrong; so much so, that even a distinguished cast, including the likes of veteran, Lynette Curran, while not exactly paling by comparison, couldn’t help but be thrust into the background. Yes, Lotte is the central character, but Blanchett made her even more the anchor. Cate is cool.

If there was a standout scene, it was arguably that involving Richard Pyros and Blanchett, separated by a diagonal row of desks and chairs, in the office of a big bureaucracy. Pyros matched Blanchett blow-for-blow, in a scintillating, tour de force, acting matchup of heavyweight champions.

Cate Blanchett makes her first appearance on the London stage for 13 years in this unusual and arid play. Her performance is electrifying. Blanchett brings astonishing commitment and passion to the role of Lotte, a German woman whose experiences suggest a resemblance to Alice in Wonderland. When we first see her, sipping a drink on the terrace of a hotel in Agadir, she appears robust, able to deal with the trauma of being ditched by her husband. But soon we realise she’s something very different: a vulnerable misfit who craves acceptance yet finds the world around her bewildering and frequently unpleasant.Yet this is Blanchett’s show. It is her physically compelling and ultimately luminous portrayal of Lotte’s odyssey that makes this trippy and sometimes baffling production worth seeing.

Blanchett is riveting throughout: animated and vibrant, her Lotte shows us exactly what she is thinking and feeling at every instant, and does so with as much energy as the other 13 players put together. But Strauss’s dramatic world – atomised and anomic, as so often in his work, and realised in a beautifully minimal set design by Johannes Schütz – gets the better of her in the end. The degree to which we relate to that world is moot; what is beyond dispute is the quality of Blanchett’s performance.

The answer can be summed up in two words: Cate Blanchett. In Benedict Andrews' production for the Sydney Theatre Company (of which she is one of the artistic directors), Blanchett proves she is as luminous and commanding a presence on stage as she is on screen.

Here, she portrays Lotte, a lonely graphic designer who embarks on a surreal odyssey across contemporary Germany in a fruitless search of some form of connection with old friends, an estranged husband, her brother's berserk family – even at one point appearing like a bizarre, uninvited angel on the window sill of a bickering couple who wind up rejecting her intervention.

Progressing in 10, over-protracted sketches, the piece opens in Morocco, where Blanchett's restive Lotte (at odds with her tour group) is reduced to ridiculously raunchy fantasies about two men she can hear outside in the hotel garden whose mundane business-speak (the smartly knowing adaptation is by Martin Crimp) she oversells to herself as "total philosophy".

At one point, mid-rhapsody, she beautifully times the bathetic removal of a cocktail olive pit and the tugging at a rucked-up too-tight skirt.

Establishing a winningly unguarded rapport with the audience, Blanchett manages to create a heroine who is both an open-hearted visionary able to retain a wonder and curiosity about the world, despite all the rebuffs, and a bit of a clown whose hapless antics are performed here with a balletically slapstick flair.

Blanchett is magnificent throughout, especially in the later stages – at one point, she strips to a spangly gold tutu and wrestles with furious abandonment against an invisible God-figure; at another, she keeps involuntary channelling the deep voice of a deity while chatting to a nerd at a bus stop.

We first see Lotte in Morocco, sitting on the edge of the all-but-blank stage (except for a white strip under her), listening to two men walking outside her room in the hotel she’s staying at. Their conversation sounds “amazing” to her, and Blanchett proves her considerable skill as an actress as she narrates the proceedings and adds her own commentary, breaking only to have a sip of her cocktail, or to snatch a cigarette from its packet, or to adjust her undergarments in full view of the audience. Indeed, in the first scene alone Lotte manages to flash the audience more times than a kilted Scotsman playing with a hula-hoop. Yet by the end of the play we’ve observed far more intimate and ego-unraveling aspects of her – we’ve seen beyond the facades she doesn’t even know she has, ignorant as she is of the revelations.

Cate Blanchett delivers the bravest and most surprising performance I have seen from her to date as Lotte, the central figure in Botho Strauss’s episodic study of one woman’s estrangement from husband, family and the world.

Blanchett constructs Lotte from a wealth of uninhibited-seeming yet carefully choreographed physical tics. At her most eccentric, she is terribly funny (dicing with apartment door buzzers in an attempt to see an old school friend, for example). At her most vivacious, she is threatening (as short term boyfriend Alf finds out when he attempts to dilute her romantic ardor with minor office chores). It is a performance of uncanny detail and riveting in its unpredictability.

But when played by an actor of the extraordinary emotional agility and range of Cate Blanchett, the role of Lotte dazzles as a star vehicle, reverberates in the ear as a prose poem, and touches us deeply as a meditation on the squirming position of a single human being. The Sydney audience does feel a tingle of role-reversal recognition watching our most glamorous thought leader pretending to be a frumpy bogan starstruck in the presence of a local celebrity (Belinda McClory), but Blanchett's art is so strong that she soon transcends her Hollywood reputation and becomes, convincingly, a hopeless nobody.

Against the odds and the run of play, Lotte's predicament is very funny - thanks to the extraordinary performance of the extraordinary Blanchett. And the outcome is scorchingly, painfully sad as dreams and possibilities crumble; are seen to be ridiculous, unattainable or simply never there in the first place.

The second is the star turn of Cate Blanchett as Lotte. There is a vulnerability to her persona, and a sensitivity to her portrayal, that means that even our laughter at her myriad of absurd comments only adds to the pathos. Blanchett throws herself completely into the part, touching her breasts, spraying perfume up her skirt and dancing wildly as if possessed, but it seems that she finds it easy to do so because she genuinely believes in the piece.

The difficult plot is underlined by a bleak, cold and skeletal set design and, most centrally, an aggressive and daring performance from Oscar-winner Cate Blanchett – an actress who, when in character, is astonishingly devoid of attachment to glamour or vanity. So intensely, relentlessly convincing as woman-on-the-edge Lotte is she, that, after three unpredictable hours, you'll likely leave the Barbican Centre feeling more disorientated than you came in (hands up if you ALWAYS get lost in there?). This show will leave you feeling tired and vaguely uncomfortable. Doesn't sound like a fun ride, does it? That's because it's not. If you're merely looking for the opportunity to gawp at a film star – and you could be forgiven for that – we'd advise waiting until another, lesser actor hits the London stage.

Boosting the sense of Alice in Wonderland-esque surreal is the use of humour: for such a challenging and upsetting theatre-going experience the producers are damned if not a minute goes by without fits of uncontrollable laughter sweeping the audience. We really shouldn't laugh – Lotte is losing her grip on reality, as such the behaviour she exhibits is going to be, shall we say, unusual. And yet, as she tries and fails to reconcile connections with long-lost friends or self-absorbed family members, or forge completely new ones with strangers on the street (or whose homes she randomly invades), it's often the wild, garish silliness that's to blame. We can't help but giggle, but feel guilty afterwards; an emotional response is manipulated out of us.

With the lion's share of the dialogue, Blanchett uses every zingy one-liner to full comedic effect (her ridiculously over the top repetition of the word "AMAZING!" quickly becomes a fail-proof running joke), underscored by fidgety, drunk-like body language and gurning, awestruck facial expressions (ALL traces of brooding sophistication and refinement from the actress's own personality are banished here). We're all familiar with the drunk uncle at a wedding analogy; Lotte is the female equivalent, someone you're torn between feelings of respect and disgust towards; warm and cold sentiments simultaneously; someone you're inclined to help, but, on other hand, want to retreat from so as to spectate from a safe distance the unfolding car crash. In this case, of course, you've no choice but to sit and watch and wonder if and when said car crash is coming, and it is at times excruciating. You fear for Lotte, because she seems so ground down and weak, but there in her optimism and faith in human relationships there's a strength that could prevail.

In fact, by the play's gruelling, physically-demanding climactic sequences, Blanchett's alone on stage once again – and she fills it completely. Productions this powerful don't come around very often, as such this one's not to be missed...just don't expect to enjoy it.

Thanks to the wondrous, constantly changing colours of Cate Blanchett’s performance as Lotte, Big and Small becomes transfixing. She’s an utterly magnetic, magnificent performer, and has a magnifying effect turning Big and Small’s series of alternately mundane and terrifying small vignettes into a big journey.

There’s an unmissable boldness and physical freedom to her playing that’s raw, exposed, vulnerable and haunting. Yet for all the artistic risk it represents, it’s also amazing to think that there was a time when work like this got houseroom in the West End - in 1983, Glenda Jackson starred in a production of the play at the West End’s Vaudeville in one of her last ever stage roles before she swapped acting for politics. In Blanchett, who is co-artistic director of Sydney Theatre Company, you can see an actress with the same kind of commitment and integrity.

But while it would be wrong to suggest that this is an enjoyable evening, it is an often riveting and thrilling one, blessed with a sensational performance from Blanchett that combines dramatic virtuosity with truth, humour tenderness and an aching vulnerability.The play opens with Blanchett sitting on the edge of the stage and delivering a twenty-minute monologue that brilliantly captures the characters mixture of hope, desire, and self-doubt as she eavesdrops on the conversation of two businessmen in a Moroccan hotel. In lesser hands this would be a windy bore, but Blanchett’s mesmeric delivery proves spellbinding. What makes the play genuinely moving is the way Blanchett beautifully captures the character’s resilience as she suffers repeated rejections, from her former husband, her brother, an old school friend, her flatmates and various strangers she buttonholes in the course of her travels. She is so needy, so desperate, that despite her beauty and manifest good will, people recoil from her. As a result Lotte becomes ever more isolated and lonely, until in one magnificent scene she starts raging at God.

Strauss probably intended his play as a glum satire on the cold complacency of the German bourgeoisie and there are also passages recalling the Third Reich and impending global apocalypse. His supporting characters are stereotypes rather than individuals, and though they are efficiently played by the supporting cast there is an alarming lack of detail and compassion in the writing.

Yet somehow Blanchett, who is on stage almost throughout, triumphantly transcends the limitations of the script. She is wonderfully alive in every scene, by turns, funny, sad and touching, and there are extraordinary moments when she abandons language altogether and communicates instead through dazzling movement and dance.

This is a punishing play, but Blanchett’s radiant performance creates many moments of pure wonder amid the gloom.

Blanchett’s performance has an inspiring quality that is constantly surprising, often quirky and occasionally moving. Her Lotte is not a bloodless existential cypher, but a lonely and puzzled woman who is palpably lost. Her quest for a home, for a meaningful language as much as for a satisfying relationship, calls to mind the more recent heroines from the movies of David Lynch and Wim Wenders. Blanchett’s charisma and bravura acting — an impressive array of styles that swings from irritated itching to wild dancing, and from momentary radiance to gutsy feistiness — is compelling, and she gives real presence to ideas about existential angst and alienation in a materialist society. You can easily see why she chose to produce the play.

vettus