The last time we saw Jean-Marc Russ onstage, he had his hands full juggling a wife and an ex-wife in Queensland Theatre Company's 2006 production of Private Lives. In March he’ll be busy again, this time playing more than 40 characters in the one-man tour-de-force I Am My Own Wife. Here Jean-Marc talks about the challenges and delights of playing so many characters including the defiant Charlotte von Mahlsdorf.
What are the challenges of playing so many characters and how will you approach them?
It’s not an exercise in extreme caricature, my aim is to give them all definition without making them too extremely different from each other. We’re not using props, it’s not like I’m wearing a different hat or I’ve got a disguise or I’ve got glasses on. To a certain extent I use subtle changes of voice. At last count there’s German accent, then actual German, three different types of American, Japanese, Indian, French and English. My voice dialect coach, Melissa Agnew, has been great. But there’ll be nothing other than voice to distinguish between character. It’s an internal attitude – the actor’s belief that they are someone different – that translates to an audience as a change of character. That’s the reason why this piece is so exciting to me and the reason why I think it works and I wanted to attempt it.
What do you like best about the main character of Charlotte?
There’s a few things I love about her – her resilience, her quiet strength, her unashamed sense of self.
The author, Doug Wright plays a large role in the play. Why do you think he wrote himself into the script? In The August Moon you and Adam Grossetti have done the same thing. Is it for the same reason?
It’s exactly the same reason. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Doug Wright heard about Charlotte’s life through a friend and knew there was a story there. He wanted to write a play so flew over and interviewed her, discovering more than he thought he would. He came back and thought ‘How do I write this play?’ It was a friend of his that said ‘The play is you – it’s your experience with this character, your obsession with her, you are in the play’. A while back, Adam Grossetti did a panel with Jefferson Mayes, who played Charlotte in the Broadway production of I Am My Own Wife. As he was listening to Jefferson talk about Doug Wright’s process he was just thinking ‘Oh my God this is the process Jean-Marc and I went through’. I was aware of I Am My Own Wife at this time, but hadn’t been offered this part yet so I’d not put the parallels together.
For The August Moon Adam saw a story in the paper, we went and investigated it, all the time knowing that we were going to write a play, and came back and had to decide what form that play would take. How we would write the play? Which of the many different forms would we choose? What we came to realise, really organically, step-by-step and very reluctantly, was that our experience discovering the story, researching the story, and to an extent understanding what the story was and how to tell it, was the story we had most authority to tell. At fi rst that feels very egotistical to put yourself in the piece, but it adds an enormously interesting layer whereas something else would be a kind of verbatim bio drama.
Is being The Man in a one-man show daunting?
It’s not so much daunting. I suspect it might end up being lonely but, I’ve always been comfortable in my own company. There’s no one to blame if you have a bad show and I’m the one that gives me my cues, so in that sense it’s different, but I’m generally not daunted. At this point I’m too excited about the process to be concerned about it.
I Am My Own Wife plays from 10 March – 5 April at Bille Brown Studio
