In conversation with Cate Blanchett

Securing a meeting in Paris with Cate Blanchett is no easy affair. As the Oscar-winning actress embarks on the European tour for Big and Small, a new translation of German playwright Botho Strauss's 1978 play Gross und Klein, she is a woman in demand.

On stage, she dominates the action as the lost but free-spirited heroine. Off, she balances the challenges of being a major Hollywood star with her duties as co-artistic director of Sydney Theatre Company, a role she took up alongside her dramatist husband Andrew Upton in 2009, and as mother to three boys under the age of 11.

The family is in tow on her travels, which bring her to Britain next week, where Big and Small forms part of the London 2012 Festival. "I'm surprised you can't hear them bouncing around up there," she jokes as she enters a hotel suite overlooking the Seine to join her director, fellow Australian Benedict Andrews, and Martin Crimp, the British playwright behind Big and Small.

It's an intriguing confluence of talents. At 56, Crimp is especially acclaimed on the Continent for a body of work that combines linguistic precision with formal daring. Andrews, 39, is also already much feted round the world: his flair for epic, visually stunning productions brings him to the ENO this spring to stage Caligula and to the Young Vic in the autumn to direct Three Sisters.

It's Blanchett, now 42, who has the greatest international status, thanks to an unblemished film CV that includes her dazzling breakthrough performance in Elizabeth and Martin Scorsese's The Aviator, for which she won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar playing Katharine Hepburn.

Q: Dominic Cavendish Cate, is it true that you first acted in Gross und Klein as a student?

A: Cate Blanchett It was floating around everywhere as soon as it premiered in Germany. I first read it in the late Eighties and there was a very naive production I was part of, around 1987-8. My interest in the work was academic - I was interested in the play structurally.

What has been remarkable [with this new production] is uncovering the humanity in the work. Maybe it's my age but I also think it's what Martin has unlocked. It still has this incredible rhythm and asymmetry, and yet it's got a very beating heart.

Q:  Was this a play on your radar, Martin?
A: Martin Crimp Not at all. It was a complete revelation to me. When I read it in an existing translation, even through the fog of that translation I was attracted by it. It's like a road movie in a way - but for the stage. It feels very open as a text and that's what appealed to me.

I also found affinities with this sense of someone being outside and wanting to find their way into the world - there's a sense in my own work of discomfort with the world.

Q:  Did you talk to Botho Strauss?
A: I spent a day with him in Berlin discussing the work, before I started. I made some slight transpositions in the text but the spirit of the original is there. It's as if there's a dirty sheet of glass between one language and the other and you're trying to polish it - so that people can see through it.

Q: There's a trajectory for the heroine, Lotte, who has cast herself out into the world - in the first instance because her relationship with her husband Paul has fallen apart. Some people liken her character to Alice in Wonderland.
A:  What she has in common with Alice is a deep and open-hearted curiosity. You only fall down the rabbit-hole when you don't know how deep it is. The estrangement from her husband - for reasons unexplained - is what propels her down that hole.

Q:  Did you all feel that this was a neglected play?
A: Yes. When a playwright is really connected to a specific period, when that time moves on he becomes unfashionable. I think that's sad.

For me it was very important that it wasn't a museum piece. The action resonates with an energy from the late Seventies but it's very much taking place now. Lotte is falling through a world very much like our own, with a threat of economic collapse in the air and a general free-floating anxiety and a sense of end-times.

Q: How demanding is it for you to be on stage for two and a half hours or so?
 A: I always find leaving the stage distracting, actually! I prefer to stay on. We even talked about running it through without an interval.


Q: Lotte is such a fragmented character - how did you prepare for the role?
A: The only way to prepare for this is to be open. Lotte is estranged from herself, she is spongelike. If she sees something or hears it she will absorb it. That's what is so off-putting to the people she encounters. They find it all-consuming.

There is something special about this in that Lotte is also a clown. Part of the pleasure of the performance is seeing Cate's clown and that's not something I've necessarily seen in her before - that very playful, physical language is unique to this.

Q: Did you have to build yourself up for the physicality of this performance, which is almost balletic?
A: I was certainly quite fit by the end of the Sydney season - I realised when I came back to it that I'd been drinking and smoking way too much! There was no callisthenics warm-up or anything like that, though. It wasn't that considered.

 Q: It's possible to place Lotte in a continuum alongside your film roles such as Elizabeth and Veronica Guerin - a succession of female characters who are at once independent-minded and isolated. Do you see that pattern?
A: Yes, but I think all great roles have a sense of estrangement. They're outsiders even if they don't realise it.

 Q: Does running Sydney Theatre Company offer you a unique freedom as an actor to experiment and explore?
A: It wasn't the reason Andrew and I took the job, for him to further his writing career, or for me to further my career as an actress. It was more about the ability to lead the company in a producing capacity.

Because of the public nature of the job I have found being part of a national conversation really enlivening. The demands have stretched me in ways I couldn't expect. It's not a matter of me taking out a long list of roles I've always wanted to play. It's the opposite.

Q: Do you have to allocate specific chunks of time to different aspects of your career - running the company, acting, film work and so on?
A: The [Theatre Company] is a full-time job. Whenever one does any publicity for a film it's very loud - but I haven't made a film since I've been there, except for the eight days I did on The Hobbit last year.

I think the [Sydney] press like to say that of course I'm never there because I have a film career - but you can't run a company unless you're hands-on. There's a duty of care, you don't just set the ball rolling.

Q: What has been fascinating has not just been the artistic directorship - we're also CEOs so we're responsible for the company's financial health and balancing those things has been a real challenge. We've got one more season left - the board asked us to stay on for another term but we have three young children and even though we job-share, that's difficult to juggle.
A:  Sydney Theatre Company's base sounds rather beautiful - Walsh Bay.

 It's an incredibly beautiful building to make theatre in. You open up the big doors and you're looking across the harbour. It lets a certain air into the work.

 When one thinks of a German play one thinks of Sturm und Drang - but there's an extraordinary lightness of spirit to this work that does benefit from a little bit of sea air.

Q: You had a period during your student days when I gather you headed off, through Europe - a bit like Lotte, you could say?
A:  I didn't think about that until now. But yes, it's a rites of passage trip for many Australians. We do feel we're a long way away and I think what makes our culture unique is that sense of estrangement from the rest of the English-speaking world; geographically we're part of Asia.

I suppose that was quite a shapeless journey, although it wasn't all that eventful. I think it was a period where I was doing the wrong thing. I was at university studying economics - what was that all about? So I was avoiding doing theatre but then I came back and just went to drama school and gave in.

Q: And you also ended up in Egypt, as a film extra?
A: Yes, I was in this cesspit in Cairo called the Oxford Hotel. I had no money and this guy said: "Do you want to be an extra in a movie?" I said: "Do they pay?" He said: "Five pounds and you get free falafel", so I went. I didn't stay long. The director had a huge megaphone with the word "director" on the side.

Q: Did you have an early interest in theatre?
A: Yes, the first play that I wrote was in grade three - Mr Strawberry Goes Shopping. I was always doing plays but this is the thing, fortunately I didn't have a stage mother - there were never any ambitions, it was just play. It wasn't until someone who didn't like me particularly and wanted me to get out of Melbourne suggested I go to drama school in Sydney that I thought to audition.

It was just a dare and even when I was at drama school, it wasn't until third year that I thought "OK, I will give this a go" because I realised it had meaning for the people in the audience. I think for a long time it's just stuff that you're doing and you're in an indulgent adolescent phase and then you think "No - it only has meaning if it's communicating to other people - it has to be a generous act". Once I made that connection it felt like something worthwhile.

Q: Were you yearning to do theatre, while doing film?
A: Film was never a Mecca for me. I wasn't that girl. I didn't ever conceive myself as being that girl, so I went to drama school to work in theatre. I didn't make a film until I was 25 - ancient for a film actress - and I didn't expect it to head anywhere.

One of the interesting things about doing the job at Sydney Theatre Company is actually saying to actors, with some sense of understanding, that I know it's difficult to juggle those different facets of one's career - but if you have a connection to the theatre, you do have to feed it. It enriches you.

Q: Do you think Australian theatre is going through a strong period?
A: Yes. I feel there's been a strong shift - the more well-behaved, well-made notion of theatre has been let go of and there's an interesting generation of young theatre-makers coming through. There's a lot of energy in Sydney.

Q: Is this the first time that Sydney Theatre Company has been to London?
A: Actually we did come once before. Michael Gow, an Australian playwright, wrote a piece called Sweet Phoebe which we took to the old Croydon Warehouse [in 1995]. We stayed in Croydon at the YWCA.

Q: You lived in England for a time, in Brighton. Is this a kind of homecoming?
A:Yes. We do miss it a lot.

Q: Did you also enjoy being in London when appearing in Plenty [in 1999]?
A: That feels like a whole different era, we had no children then - it's like BC and AD!

Q: Finally, are you particularly pleased to be coming back to London as part of the 2012 Festival, in the run-up to the Olympics?
A: Yes, that's it - we're part of a whole swathe of work, we're not just bringing something in. If you look at what's being presented, it's an incredible season as a whole. It feels like a great privilege to be part of it all.