Picture: The miraculous, auspicious, lone boob that I found in front of my car on Saturday morning as I went to drive into Darlinghurst at 7:30am to set up for the first day of Festival Fatale. Why it chose my car and how it got there I will never know, but it started my weekend on a high and it only got better from there.

This lone, water-bomb of wonder greeted me on the exact one year anniversary that I decided to create a women's theatre festival. Had never done anything like that before. Am absolutely, completely unqualified to do it. But I thought if no one else is going to seize that golden opportunity then it might as well be me. And I might as well make it outrageously ambitious.

Cut to a year later and I'm now sitting on the other side of WITS' Festival Fatale. It closed 10 hours ago in fact and I've been awake now for 46 hours.

Why?

I just saw 13 hours of theatre over 2 days at an 18 hour event. Created by 98 women and 11 men. The stories were all original and all proudly autobiographical - sometimes wild, sometimes playful, sometimes thoughtful, sometimes painful, sometimes genius. Often genius. Arguably entirely genius.

All the stories were written by Australians who happened to be women. All of them.

Yes, I was the Festival Director and am supported by an incredible team of organisers (all of us volunteers) but the credit is entirely due to the artists and creatives. Artists many of us haven't seen on a stage like the Eternity Playhouse before. Artists from all around Australia, all shapes, sizes, ages, abilities, colours, perspectives, sexual preferences and experiences.

Over those 13 hours of performance I was inspired, moved, challenged to my core, heartbroken, healed and grateful to be made to feel alive by the power of live performance. And by artists, writers and creatives with something new to say. It was 13 hours of theatre that has changed me.

The saying that popped into my head as the Festival came to a close last night was my favourite carpe-diem-esque quote - 'Rise to the occasion of your one and only heart.' That's what I saw people do on the stage this weekend and it was so exquisitely, outrageously, fucking beautiful.

The sun's just started to rise out my window on a new day. It fills me with dread and overwhelming excitement. I'd like to find a way to wind down now and get some sleep. And then wake up and start the next chapter for myself - whatever that might be. Perhaps starting with creating a shrine for my auspicious boob.

Also I'm SO excited to see these women on our stages again. And again. And again. And again. And again.

When they are - make sure to pay for a ticket and see them. Find out how you can stay in touch with what they're doing and support them. Trust me. You'll be doing yourself a favour.

#destroythejoint #makingHERstory#putyourmoneywherethewomenare #bywomenforeveryone#intersectionalfeminismistheonlykindoffeminism #festivalafatale #wits

At 4am a few weeks ago, I decided to push myself into a challenge that I knew I would find extremely confronting, but would do me a world of good. I made a new post on Instagram everyday for a week celebrating a role I had played and saying what I loved about it. You can see the original posts on my instagram at https://www.instagram.com/p/BLY0EZHjCta/ or you can read them all together here:

Warning: Please just go ahead and unfollow me now if you hate self-indulgent, sentimental posts.

Self-promotion makes me vomit in my mouth a little bit. It's my in-built tall poppy syndrome. But I also know I can be mercilessly, distortedly and irrationally hard on myself as an actor and I wanna make small little steps towards being kinder to myself. Because when opportunities to work are few and far between and the financial strain of this risky life choice is starting to drag you down, the last thing you need is to be adding your own self-deprecating insults to injury.

I heard a beautiful saying the other day, 'rise to the occasion of your one and only heart'. Being an actor has always been at the centre of my heart. And recently it's felt like my heart is Pepe Le Pew; bounding blindly in the direction of an ever elusive furling furry black tail of unattainable dreams. So this week I'm forcing myself to show a skerrick of bravery and make a post everyday that celebrates work that I've been proud of and reminds myself that I have plenty to be thankful for.

This post doesn't count. This is just a warning. Please forgive me in advance for my obscene displays of sentimentality this week. Sometimes you just need to put a little sugar in your own bowl.

“To know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility.”

That’s a quote by Flannery O’Connor that Dear Sugar writer Cheryl Strayed used in a letter to an aspiring writer called ‘Write Like A Motherfucker’. It may seem like a strange place to start my week of unashamed self(ie)-love. But for me this challenge is about self-reflection; looking at my achievements, pulling out the negative self-talk and then having the courage to share that on social media.

Lisa Scott Murphy once told me (when she found me crying in the corridor during my first year at WAAPA) that sometimes the weight of your dreams can get so big they threaten to crush you. This has been a continual challenge for me in my battle with high-functioning performance anxiety as an actor.

It’s something I’ve really tried to tackle this year by seeking to ‘make a hard stop at self-knowledge’s first product: humility’ (as Cheryl wrote). I started this year by giving up beta-blockers, alcohol, bitchy-bitter gossip and any other prop I’ve used to dull that hyper-critical, high-achieving voice in my head. And I started meditating. Just for ten minutes a day. Letting that voice shout and rail inside me and then choosing not to engage with it.

So this is a picture of me as Bianca in Taming of the Shrew at the Seymour Centre. It was the first time I performed since making that change. It was also the first time in a while that I started to enjoy acting again. When I felt the panic start to rise in my chest as I waited backstage at the beginner’s call on opening night, I allowed myself to breath through it and somehow turn that voice into background music in my head. It was a huge step for me and I’m so proud of it.

‘The poet’s heart, in a fine frenzy rolling, is fated still to love and groan. Always and everywhere the constant dream and one habitual wish and longing and one habitual melancholy.’ - Pushkin

Unfortunately, I don’t have a production shot from this show, but this is Adele Querol and I getting ready to perform Uncle Vanya in second year at WAAPA. It was the first time I’d been cast in a role that I’d really wanted to play. A role I loved so much that she threatened to bowl me over.

It was also the first time I came up against a massive gap between what I wanted and what I was doing. It was my first experience of that thing Ira Glass famously spoke about; that as a creative person, you’ve probably got good taste and for maybe even a long while your work won’t measure up to it. It was actually a pretty fitting discovery to make in Uncle Vanya - a play about our battles with idealism and realism - and one I didn’t take on gracefully.

The main thing I remember from doing this show was some advice I got from our voice coach Leith McPherson. She said performing good writing like Chekhov is like looking through a murky window that looks out onto Paris. You’ll never be able to know the full picture. It cannot be ‘nailed’ or done one ‘right’ way. Instead there’s just endless depth and possibility.

She also told me to treat the audience with compassion rather than apprehension. They’ve come to the theatre to know themselves better, so we’re all in this together. If you treat them like a stranger they’ve got nowhere to go. If you extend your world a little bit further to them then they can share in it and they will thank you for it.

“I know now, I understand that in our work – doesn't matter whether it's acting or writing – what's important isn't fame or glamour, none of the things I used to dream about, it's the ability to endure. To be able to bear one's cross and have faith. I have faith, and it's not so painful now, and when I think of my vocation, I'm not afraid of life.”

This is from Siren Theatre’s production of The Seagull at Sidetrack Theatre in 2010.

There’s something about this play that just directly hits you as a performer and taps into your personal experiences. I related so strongly to Nina’s aspirations and her fears of failure. 6 months before I’d met someone pretty extraordinary. Meeting this person was and still is the single most wonderful thing that’s ever happened to me. It seems crazy now but I was genuinely terrified that what happens to Nina with Trigorin would happen to me.

Chekhov loves to explore how mediocrity corrupts people over the course of time and he captures so well the comedy and the heartbreak of people’s unfulfilled desires.

During rehearsal, our director Kate Gaul focused on finding the details of simple physical actions; how we so often don’t say what we feel and what’s really going on tends to creep out some other way. I watched a Russian production where in her first entrance Nina ran on stage like a whirlwind and then completely stacked it. It was such a brilliant and telling choice - her excitement about where she’s going being undone by what’s in front of her. I can’t remember if I stole that idea or not…

Its unclear at the end of the play if Nina’s lost her mind or if she’s a survivor. What you decide changes the meaning of the play and I suppose the volatility of either possibility is what makes it so compelling. The audience must decide for themselves based on their own bias towards hope or disappointment whether she’ll be okay when she runs back into the night.

I loved playing this role. I’ve always thought she was a survivor. Standing on stage and delivering that quote above - it was impossible for me think that was the end for her.

‘We must risk delight. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of the world.’ - Jack Gilbert

Just finished reading Liz Gilbert’s ‘Big Love’ and loved this quote! Reminded me of my favourite scene from As You Like it, where Rosalind totally annihilates the melancholy Jacques’ worldview that it’s good to be sad just for the sake of it.

Spending the week working with a group of year 7 girls and introducing them to Shakespeare. Absolutely loving exploring the world of As You Like It with them and seeing them get inspired by the courage and nouse of Rosalind and Celia. For me, ‘As You Like It’ is a play about possibilities; about what happens when you take away the givens in your life and let yourself bravely go after your big dreams. So despite the outrageously complicated plotlines, I thought it would be the perfect play to inspire a group of young girls.

One of the girls said to me today… it’s so amazing that Shakespeare wrote such strong female characters back then.

The first time I discovered Shakespeare was when I was 15 and going through a tough time at school. My drama teacher got me to perform a scene between Isabella and Angelo from Measure For Measure. I remember feeling so empowered; so many things that I felt but didn’t have the words for, Shakespeare’s characters had the words. It gave me a little extra courage just to step into their shoes for a little.

Obviously I was major drama nerd, but hoping these girls get something special out of this week too... more than just extending their vocabulary!

'Even though people may be well known, they hold in their hearts the emotions of a simple person.' - Jackie Kennedy

Setting out to play Jackie Kennedy is an almost impossible task. To play a woman ten years my senior, an icon of her era who was so deeply private and guarded, who lead a life of such epic contradictions; of privilege and hardship, of fame and misfortune, of dignity and humiliation, of iron-will and deep seated insecurity, so seemingly naive and yet so cunning, who when she spoke sounded eerily like her great rival Marilyn Monroe, who grew up in such a different time and place to myself, a mother, a wife and a first lady... and to explore what she felt on a day so awful, so shockingly horrific that I can't even begin to imagine it. As she said herself, 'Can anyone understand how it is to have lived in the White House and then, suddenly, to be living alone as the president's widow?'

It is an overwhelming task. Being blonde, pale and blue-eyed, it is a task I never imagined myself stepping into. But one that I would willingly fail at, if it meant I got to risk taking on that incredible challenge, even in the small and pokey Tap Gallery, with only two weeks of rehearsals and a new script. And having just opened last night, I can safely say it is a challenge indeed. In my research, I read two biographies, I watched every documentary, I listened to eight hours of tapes she recorded four months after the assassination over and over and over in my car... and yet I still feel I know nothing about her. Noami Watts recalled that Princess Diana came to her in a dream and gave her permission to play her, but in all my dreams despite my many requests Jackie has remained aloof and obstinate... I pity poor Katie Holmes.

Everyone knows her image, but what she felt and thought she kept to herself. Listening to her unfailingly polite and high pitched voice, it is so fay and breathy and feminine, it gives nothing away. Most of all, it disguises her intelligence, a particularly threatening and undesirable attribute in a woman at the time.

But the most baffling contradicton about this woman is her relationship with her husband.

She willingly stood in the shadow of a remarkable man, an icarus-like figure who in aiming for liberty, democracy and civil rights found himself shot down so unceremoniously in Dallas. He was a man of great insight and determination. An idealist without illusions. He reigned during a brief period in American history when change really seemed possible. 'The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans-,' he said, in his stirring inaugural address, 'born of this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of their heritage and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of these human rights to which this nation has always been committed.' As a disaffected and comfortable Australian, I find it hard to really fully imagine how significant the potential of that time was and how much this man was passionately loved and hated by Americans, and how that small window of possibility was suddenly and shockingly shut when Jack's brains were splattered all over Jackie's Chanel outfit in Dallas that day.

But Jackie was witness to the great polarisations of this man; equally as remarkable as he was caddish and despicable. An incredible president, but an devastatingly disappointing husband.

Her love for him was total. His was not. A serial philanderer who claimed he needed 'a strange piece of arse once a day or he'd get a headache' who felt no guilt about the anguish and humiliation he caused his wife. His womanizing was shameless. It nearly even threatened to end his presidency when he recklessly slept with a call-girl slash German spy. But it was an era that took the male's side and as long as he was an effective leader, what he did in his own time was his own business. Jackie suffered alone. Almost every woman in the White house below a certain age had slept with Jack. He literally had every woman he laid his eyes on. He would desert Jackie at White House parties and functions to duck upstairs with another woman and have pool sex sessions with multiple women when she was absent. Unable to stop him and not one prone to self-pity, Jackie barely spent anytime in the White House and took frequent trips overseas. She would feign innocence to keep face or pretend she didn't care, but Jack's faithlessness tore her up inside. Despite everything, she adored him, he was the love of her life and she was unfailingly faithful to him.

'I think I should've known that he was magic all along. I did know it- but I should have guessed that it would be too much to ask to grow old with and see our children grow up together. So now he is a legend when he would have preferred to be a man.'

She was also a devoted mother. She loved her children more than anything else and defended their right to live normal, healthy lives as they grew up in full view of America. But life dealt Jackie blows even in this department. While her sister-in-law Ethel delivered 8 healthy babies with catholic ease, Jackie suffered miscarriages, delivered a still-born Arabella whom she grieved for alone while Jack galavanted on a yacht in Cannes. She successfully gave birth to Caroline and John Jnr, but then most tragic of all, she prematurely gave birth to Patrick who lived barely two days struggling to breathe with a lung condition before finally surrendering his little life. This was just three months before that fateful day in Dallas when she held Jack in her arms all the way to Parkland Hospital, trying to keep his brains in and stop the bleeding. At least she was spared the death of her son John Jnr, who joined the Kennedy's historica list of bad planes flights and died in a plane crash with his wife a few years after Jackie's death.

In Love Field, which plays till the 2nd of November in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of JFK's assassination, Ron Elisha's Jackie is a departure from your expectations. In this play, he has sought to take down the mask she held up so tightly to the world, and expose the myriad of potential emotions she must have felt on that day and have her say all the things to Jack that she never could while he was alive... and all in the space of 70 minutes. It is a wonderful and wild flight of fantasy, a fictional exchange between this woman and the man who suddenly replaced Jack as president, as they fly back to Washington with the casket. The only plane flight in American history to carry two American presidents.

It is an incredibly juicy moment in history and excellent material for a play. Despite the daunting challenge of taking on Jackie it has been a delight to work on this project with the generous and gregarious, bold and beautiful Ben Wood, playing Lyndon B Johnson and our talented and wonderful support network with bAKEHOUSE Theatre, our director Michael Dean, our dramaturg Dino Dimitriadis and our producers Suzanne Millar and John Harrison. I encourage you all to see it. Xx.

'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 perfect rehearsal process. 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 an innovative 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 definitely mixed up in some illegal activity (in the context of the Jacobean age anyway, witchcraft was punishable by death) 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... I was scared, because I was afraid 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. I'm scared of the dark. Its scary for me 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.

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, irresistible and dangerous. And 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 ones 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 witch 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 the story definately captured my imagination, about 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.'

This was something we posted on our wall in the rehearsal room. It seemed to sum up an important theme in Macbeth that our production was particularly exploring. And it became a central point to the witch for me. I found my solution to the witch, in that she was a complete 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 our potential for good and evil.

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. It seemed right, under this interpretation to roll all three roles into one and create this one fractured, shape-shifting and very vulnerable character. There's an 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.

'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)