LATIKA M BOURKE: Cate Blanchett misses out on Olivier, insists the real world could learn from rehearsal room

Twenty years after being “patted on the head” for the way she spoke, recognition from London’s theatre elite still eludes Australia’s Cate Blanchett who was overlooked for London’s most prestigious stage award at a lavish ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall on Sunday night.

Australian playwright Suzie Miller also missed out on a gong in her own right for her play Inter Alia which is currently showing on the West End.

But the play stars Rosamund Pike, who beat Blanchett for Best Actress.

Blanchett has won two Oscars, four Golden Globes, four BAFTAs and three Actor Awards for on-screen work. But she has never been recognised before for her on-stage performances.

That was hoped to end with this year’s breakthrough Olivier nomination by The Society of London Theatre for her performance as Irina Arkadina in a revival of Anton Chekhov’s play The Seagull.

The 56-year-old debuted on the West End in the 90s.

Speaking ahead of the awards ceremony, she told an audience at Australia House on Friday night that she was not made to feel welcome when she first arrived in the UK. But she said that it had ultimately been to her benefit.

“In performance, you use the word ‘in the margins’, and sometimes you can see clearer from the margins, and certainly when I came to this country, for better or for worse, I was patted on the head 20 years ago because of the way I spoke, the country I came from,” she said.

“I wasn’t tolerated culturally, and it was brutal. It was brutal.

“I mean, I still worked but I worked hard. I thought ‘every day, I’m gonna have to prove myself’, because I’m not necessarily invited to the table, I’m from the colonies, and that was, I mean, there’s many people, Australians in the room, who would have felt the same.”

Blanchett, who returned to Australia with her playwright husband Andrew Upton to co-direct the Sydney Theatre Company between 2008 and 2012, paid homage to theatre as the “bastard form” of acting.

“There’s so few spaces for genuine play and experimentation and danger in a brutal way. And what I found – what I love about theatre in rehearsal rooms is that we don’t actually find it in everyday life, very often, is that kindness is not a way of evading a problem,” she said.

“And oftentimes you can’t… you have to be brutal with one another and respectful and that atmosphere exists in rehearsal rooms.

“And I wish it existed more in public life where we can have brutally honest ‘come to Jesus conversations’ without the Jesus bit in it, but we can actually look one another in the eyes and go ‘This isn’t working, how the hell are we going to solve this?’

The Hollywood actress, who rarely gives media interviews, was spotted afterwards dining at the popular central London Australian-owned cocktail jazz speakeasy Larry’s beneath the National Portrait Gallery on Trafalgar Square.

The venue, run by Australian businesswoman Prue Freeman and her husband, is a favourite of Australian Hollywood icons, having also been visited by Margot Robbie.

Blanchett was speaking alongside fellow NIDA alumni, the celebrated Australian writer Suzie Miller and Kip Williams who stormed the West End with his inventive reinvention of Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray which starred Adelaide’s Sarah Snook.

Miller said before winning her award that she was excited about taking Inter Alia to Broadway in November with Pike.

She told The Nightly that she loved to present her works in London before New York, but that American audiences could often relate to her works better.

“Here’s like home, here I feel like I know the landscape, its the second West End show that I’ve had,” she told The Nightly.

“So this is where I love to do my work but Broadway’s a whole different beast, its very exciting.

“And of course the Americans have that real understanding of new world because the Americans are like Australia.”

She said of her Olivier nomination that it was “quite surreal.”

“I mean, all of us, when you start out as a playwright you dream of something like that. So when that happens, even though you imagine it into being, you still go ‘Wow it’s actually happening, this is amazing!’”

“And then, of course, like everything it becomes your job.

“I’ve worked really hard but so have so many playwrights in Australia.”

She said Australians succeeding on the West End would only lead to more opportunities for other Australians overseas.

“The success of more Australian artists on the world stage makes people really sit up and think what’s happening down there?”

“My play Prima Facie they started at a tiny theatre in Sydney, the Griffin theatre which has 100 seats.

“It’s a writers theatre so I felt like I belonged there and then of course it went here and now it’s in 50 countries and 30 languages.

“I never ever thought that was possible. Australians are already dreamers, if you put a little bit of air under their wings or a little bit of gold in their pockets they will really use it wisely to make a really big impact.”

Australia’s High Commissioner to the UK Jay Weatherill said it was one of his goals in the job to boost Australia’s creative talent in London.