Waking To The Future
The Age
Thursday August 30, 2007
From Sydney to London, Genevieve O'Reilly's leap of faith is paying dividends. By Bridget McManus.
IT TAKES a skilled actor to work with a premise as far-fetched as the one on which British miniseries Time of Your Life hinges. For a start, people rarely wake from 19-year comas. If they do, they certainly do not get out of bed, lock themselves in the bathroom, emerge to address their anxious family and friends with "Who the f--k are you?" and then pick up where they left off, dancing to acid house and wandering around London by themselves.But Genevieve O'Reilly's character Kate does exactly that in Time of Your Life and somehow her behaviour is believable. With subtle nuances and a fierce commitment to the story, the 30-year-old Irish-born NIDA graduate deftly portrays a tempestuous teenager trapped in a 37-year-old body.Speaking from London in her lilting brogue, O'Reilly says: "There was a wealth of discovery (in the script). I have experienced that on stage - that wonder and sense of play. Television is often a lot more structured, whereas this is something quite innovative. There was a little bit of music under (the waking scene) which is a clue to the audience that this is television magic here, if you will. We ask the audience to take a leap of faith with us. In my research for the role I watched a lot of footage of people's rehabilitation, people who had been in long-term comas or vegetative states and who have emerged, and the physical and cognitive rehabilitation that's involved . . . If we were to have been true to that we would have spent the whole six episodes in the bed just building up muscle structure and learning motor skills. What the writer and the director were interested in was the emotional journey and this seismic event of Kate emerging from this coma - not just how it affects her emotionally but how that ruptures through her friends and her family and the other lives that are involved."Time of Your Life, produced for ITV, marks O'Reilly's first lead television role since she moved to London with her Australian husband, a chiropractor, in 2005. After NIDA, she was a fixture of the Sydney theatre scene, before appearing on Seven's All Saints. Lured to Britain, "to be honest with you, because of the work", she immediately landed a role opposite Kevin Spacey in Richard II at the Old Vic Theatre. That led to parts in BBC series Mary Bryant and The State Within.Most recently, she played the title role in Channel Five's Diana - Last Days of a Princess. She says the irony of an Irish-Australian woman playing a former member of the British monarchy was not lost on her."I was quite apprehensive about playing Diana. In fact, when my agent sent me the script my first instinct was to say no. I met with the producers and the director and I bombarded them with a load of questions. "I think there's a responsibility to any character that you play that was a living persona. Diana is still very much alive within people all around the world. I had never been a huge fan. I'd seen her on the cover of the New Idea and the Women's Weekly but I have never bought a tea towel or a cup."What interested me about that piece was not that it brought a new angle or that there was a conspiracy theory linked to it but that it strips away a lot of the rumour and innuendo and myths that perhaps we have digested over these last 10 years, and presents the story in a simpler light."Diana polarises people - there are people who see her as very manipulative or a bit mad but (the film) finds a line somewhere down the middle and you see her just as a woman - a woman with an intricately complicated life."The wigs and replica Diana dresses in the docu-drama are impressive but it is O'Reilly's perfectly plummy tone that seals her immaculate impersonation of the people's princess. Theatrical training has no doubt honed her gift for accents but it was in an Adelaide primary school yard where the 10-year-old O'Reilly learned the art of inflection. "I had an Irish accent at home and an Australian accent at school to try and fit in. But there were so many families at school who did that. There were people who spoke Italian or Greek at home with an Australian accent at school. We used to speak Irish - Gaelic Irish - around the dinner table but over the years we lost that. "I think moving from Ireland to Australia, you couldn't get a more different accent on the palate. The Irish accent is very muscular and involves a lot of tongue and cheek-muscle work, whereas the Australian accent is really flat, the palate is quite broad. They're at almost opposite ends of the scale, so I feel it was good training."For the role of Kate, O'Reilly revisited her 17-year-old self and came to the conclusion that, like Kate, she hasn't changed much at all. "Essentially, I'm still the same person. Personally, it wasn't that much of a leap."Time of Your Life screens Thursday at 9.40pm on Seven.Diana - Last Days of a Princess premieres on Saturday at 7.30pm on Seven. Critic's View, page 40.
© 2007 The Age