Female Frankenstein

SYDNEY: After a string of revered performances for Bell Shakespeare, Andrea Demetriades is primed for her most challenging, high-profile role yet.

Andrea Demetriades is fast developing a reputation as one of our finest stage actresses. She is perhaps best known for a string of highly-acclaimed performances with Bell Shakespeare: Marina in Pericles in 2009, Viola in Twelfth Night in 2010, and Juliet in last year’s Romeo and Juliet. Those with more of a penchant for the small screen might recognise her from ABC legal series Crownies, in which she played quick-witted prosecutor Lina Badir.

But it is her unforeseen turn playing Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle in Sydney Theatre Company’s upcoming production of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, directed by Peter Evans, that has the industry abuzz with anticipation. It seems Demetriades was destined for the role – Packed to the Rafters star Jessica Marais was signed on to play Eliza, but pulled out when she fell pregnant; and  Crownies didn’t get picked up for a second season, thereby freeing Demetriades’s schedule.

“I spoke to Jess just after I got the part,” Demetriades tells SX. “I remember her saying that she was scared about it, and I said, ‘oh why were you scared?’ Then I started doing it! It’s a big part and I just want to do it justice. It’s exciting and nerve-wracking and wonderful.”

Sitting across from Demetriades in her lunch break at Sydney Theatre Company’s Walsh Bay headquarters, the attributes that make her stage performances so riveting are immediately palpable. There is just so much going on behind her dark, beautiful eyes – when you have her attention, she has that rare quality that makes it seem as though there’s no other person she’d rather be listening to. She physically leans forward when she listens. She is smart, witty and utterly open.
It is these characteristics that make her the perfect choice for a play about metamorphosis and shifting identity, themes that underpin many works in STC’s 2012 season. Pygmalion is essentially centred on the construction of a persona, as phonetics expert Professor Henry Higgins aims to transform the wild Eliza into a star. Eliza is the subject of a wager between Higgins and his friend Colonel Pickering, and fast becomes a lab rat in the process. Shaw’s seminal text has inspired interpretations as diverse as My Fair Lady, Educating Rita, and Pretty Woman.

“Eliza is like Frankenstein,” Demetriades asserts. “She has an identity but is unhappy with it, and wants to be somebody else. But in the process she becomes half-baked with no identity at all. I think what Shaw is trying to say is that you can’t pick up somebody and try to change them, and then not understand the repercussions of that, because Eliza becomes an empty shell. There’s a line that Mrs Higgins says: ‘Look at you two men playing with her like she’s a doll.’”

As Demetriades admits, there are aspects of Eliza that she recognises in herself. “I do react like Eliza in certain ways,” she laughs. “I do get defensive like she does, and I am ambitious, especially as an actress. I’m constantly trying to better myself, and that’s essentially what Eliza is trying to do. You just have to make sure you don’t change yourself fundamentally in the process.

“Eliza is deeply flawed, but I like her. She’s trying to aspire to be like these people, but these people are fucked anyway!”

[Pictured] Andrea Demetriades stars in Pygmalion. Photo: Ellis Parrinder

Pygmalion, Sydney Theatre, January 31 – March 3. Bookings www.sydneytheatre.com.au.