Lisa Armytage – Ex-Neighbours Star

2:14They pinned the curtain together at the bottom. arrived on stage as the angel Gabriel flat on my face that's the wrong way around this is gonna be fun so what did you crawl on stage how did you well I just lay there I think and then when I was um 11 a few years later the head master put me in the school play called the oatcake and he gave me the lead and And I had to sing as well. Did you audition for that role? Did he just chuck me in? He just chucked me in. I think he just chucked me in. He kind of felt it would be good for me. I was extremely shy. Oops.

2:57So I've got to keep this level with the ground. I was extremely shy and I was so shy at one point. I stand with my head to the wall in the playground. the playground, I was that shy, and yet he put me in the school play. I guess he thought it would be good for me, which obviously it has been. I'm not doing this very well, am I? It's not terribly surprising, really, when I'm trying to remember bits and pieces about the long-distance past and light fire at the same time. It is like what you said, it's like patting your head and rubbing your teeth. It is, absolutely, they say. Which is quite good, really, because it doesn't give you a chance to get too self-conscious.

3:40So before we get on to neighbours, like what was the build-up, what was the prelude to neighbours, what was kind of happening in the run-up to you being Beverly? I had a one-year-old baby, if I had two children by that time, I had a four-year-old, a five-year-old and a one-year-old and I decided that I wanted to go back to acting by the time the youngest was a year old and I actually... So you've taken a bit of a break up to now? I had taken a break for that year and I got the role. I started two weeks before her first birthday. This isn't going well.

4:27We'll cut this bit and we'll make it look like you started fire. You took a year off of acting. He started getting off into it. So how did the neighbors thing come about did you was it an ad in a paper oh no no no you have an agent everything is it's you can't get auditions uh-huh still in television without an agent and you can't identify without keep your own playing and the audition for neighbors was it not pressured I remember being terrified I won't get you through it determination are they?

5:22Are they like what you've got now? No, I want to get it I want to get it going really I just I haven't um I haven't got the twigs organised. How did neighbours impact your life? I mean what changed? It must have been such a huge shift. It was a huge shift um for the first six weeks when I wasn't on air it was just a question of getting up going to the the studios every morning often very early at seven o'clock so I had to arrange to have a nanny thought for the children and that was a big change. It was, it was hard but it was also exciting. I was ready to get back, ah come on, I was ready to get back out to work.

6:05You do have to, I'll help you. Remember the power of editing. Yes absolutely. So now you know properly how to make a fire and stoke one up. Do you feel powerful right now? I feel very pleased. Please. I don't know about powerful, but I feel excited, I feel like all I need now is a night to be coming in and... And a pig. Yes! I was in a pigeon, apparently. Pigeon. We'll go back in a bit. Is it a pigeon? No, it's not a pigeon. It's... So what was it? It is a pigeon. It is a pigeon. It is a pigeon. I'm getting a nod from Adam. So you played Beverly in Neighbours in 1987. Yeah.

6:48What impacted your life from neighbors? I mean, what was the big change that... Well, as I was, after about six, it took six weeks from the day I started to when it came on air, and suddenly I couldn't walk down the street without people stopping and, you know, staring at me. I couldn't walk into a shop and just buy things without... More twigs! More twigs! or twigs without somebody saying, oh, what are you doing here? And it's like, if you had a job on television, you kind of weren't expected to have an ordinary life. You became an instant celebrity, I think. It was, it was an instant celebrity.

7:34But one thing I discovered was that if I took my kids out with me and I had one child in the pushchair, I was invisible, which says a lot about being a mother, which is a bit scary. And I found I couldn't go shopping after 3.30, when children were out of school. And I tried once and I had to wear dark glasses. And have you ever tried going shopping for clothes, wearing dark glasses? No, I hate shopping, so I'm coming in and out. You can't see the colours. No. No. So how would you do what you want? So you go shopping before 3.30 and not during summer holidays, not or any holidays. Don't you just trust your husband, make him go out for you?

8:19No. Very bad idea. Very bad idea. So you're in Neighbour's for the best part of two years. Yes, it was a year and a half and I resigned because I was exhausted. By that time I had a mid-tooth teething two-year-old. Were you missing your kids? I was missing them. I was also missing them. Nathan must be one of those shows where you're just kind of always in the studio, you're always on location shooting. Yeah, I was working between three to five days a week but those days could be 12-hour days and I was missing them a lot and by the time I made the decision to stop I felt that the youngest was becoming more of the nanny's child than mine and I really wanted to be with them and also I knew I was getting exhausted and if I went on I wasn't going

9:16to be doing a good job so I thought it was better to quit while I was ahead. So what was the job like with the producer where you've decided enough's enough, I want to be there for my kids now. Well you sat the producer down and said look I'm done. He sat me down because he wanted to persuade me to carry on. And I was surprised how determined I was, really. And then see where we are. And how did they try and tempt you? Did they offer you more money? No! You didn't! No, I didn't! He was just trying to convince you. He just tried to convince me. You stand. Please stay. How much? No, no, just please. That's the whole......ofish.

10:00Yeah, absolutely. You know what? even occurred to me until now yeah no you didn't you didn't even offer me any more money you just pleaded a lot yeah and yeah the art of begging yes I'm do you ever look back in at your career and wonder where you might be if you stuck with neighbors um not really no I I think I could have got I think I could have got very stuck I mean who knows really who knows it wasn't it wasn't easy coming out of it because for a couple of years after you've been in a role like that, you're so identified with the character that nobody really wants to know.

10:42So you're pigeonholed in a certain sense? Well you're just too recognisable, you're just too recognisable as that character. Yeah, you're pigeonholed as Beverly Marshall as opposed to an actor who can do, you a big range of things and I came back to England at the end of 2003 and I've been doing a lot of comedy and in theatres since then so I realised that when you look at my show reel I look like such a serious person but actually I'm not at all and I love I love doing comedy I love creating ridiculous characters and I love doing ridiculous things like trying to start fires is this for you real few We were having a chat in the car and we were talking about a theatre production that involved a box of vibrators.

11:33No, not theatre, no film. Or was it a film? It was a film. Yeah. It was a film. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now I've never seen a film with a box, well, there's been a couple of films, but a proper film with proper actresses, I've never seen one like that with a box of vibrators. I had a small comedy role, it was a comedy called Rabbit Fever and I was next to this enormous Perspex box about that wide full of vibrators and the idea was that I was an Australian customs lady and I had been charged with checking out the luggage of people coming through and removing vibrators and just about every woman had one.

12:22Everyone had one. That was kind of... And why won't vibrators allow three? Well, the story was that they'd been banned in Australia. Gosh. I'd be pretty miffed if I was a woman and I had my vibrator taken away at customs. I'd be pretty, pretty upset. Yes, it wasn't true. Do you mean Greer was in this, wasn't she? Well, she was. But she didn't expect to be in a comedy, I don't think. I think she expected that she was having a legitimate interview about her views on feminism. And she was very upset when she realized the whole thing in context, that it really wasn't what she thought it was at all I mean there was it there were a lot of gags but it's it's not what she would have chosen no no not at all a bit of food now you need somewhere to keep

13:22yeah I'm not taking you well it looks so easy when Adam did it I did didn't it yeah so aside from acting Lisa you also teach acting right yes I I actually started, in Australia I used to teach with the WEA, which is the Workers' Education Association, I taught teenagers at the Sydney Theatre Company, at the Australian Youth Theatre, and I've recently started learning how to teach voice, or teaching voice, with a company called Funny Women Limited, so I did a workshop for them. Let me help, I'm just asking you, I'm going to help you, please.

14:08Yeah, in what they call an accidental conference, they focus on getting women to do stand-up comedy. So we did that in London at the end of February and that went well. Oh, you don't stand up. No, I haven't. I'm not a stand-up comedy person for sure, but I can help people get their voice so that they can use their voice and do the stand-up comedy, so they create the material. You mean in terms of projections? Yeah, projection, yeah, and feeling comfortable warming up your voice and looking after your voice. So what kind of tips do you give me, Lisa? Breathing is really learning how to breathe properly, to relax and breathe, and to warm up the voice so that...

14:53What kind of warm up? I never do a focal warm up. Well, you probably don't need it. I mean, it depends if you're going to be working in a big space or working over a long time although I mean it does it does make the voice sound more relaxed and warmer and a better tone if you can warm it up yeah um at the moment my voice is sounding quite gruff because uh because I haven't been well for a couple of weeks but it's getting there so uh yeah take us through an exercise how well for you if you if you got to the point where you'd relaxed your body, you'd done a bit of a physical warm-up, you focused on your breathing and you were connecting your voice to sound and then the next place it would be to to warm up your voice

15:44and you can do that very simply by by humming slightly above your natural pitch and then playing around with it you might start playing with a tune you might start um what they call siren-ing going how do i do that no a small of a cat like that something like that in the ball park okay it's in the kind of the area yeah articulation exercises but basically things that would take about 20 to 30 minutes to give give a good warm up for a performance would be good.

16:32And also I look at what goes on in your head, so building a sense of confidence when you walk out onto a stage. Okay. And imagining that the audience are within a bubble which you've created within your own imagination and you're within that bubble of energy with them. Yeah. And that you're creating a feeling of safety yourself. So how do you do that? What are the... Well I do it by visualising a bubble of some warmth and confidence and energy around me and then imagine that growing out over the space in front of me. I thought you was going to say I imagine the audience is naked. I thought you'd No, no.

17:16And that as much as I'm giving to them, they're giving, they're giving energy back to me. Yeah. So that's another things that I do. I also look at connecting up with, with the words and exploring the words of the text. So in this workshop, we're using some poetry and connecting imaginatively with the words that that are used in the poems and the images and getting people who aren't used to doing that because I'm, I'm working with people who are non actors. So connecting, so like a connecting with the... Connecting imaginatively with, with the words.

18:00Okay. So it might be the word cold. Yeah. Sounding out the consonants, that c, l, d and then the word cold. And if you really play around that for a few minutes, what kind of images come up and feelings come up and I can imagine there's going to be a perfect place to feel cold right where we are now. Now this should be at the bottom, isn't it? Do you ever come across people who you just can't train for one reason or another, maybe they're just really resistant or they just think they know the best way to do it? For sure, I mean, I thought about when I was in Australia, I thought about doing some acting workshops for people who were in amateur theatre and this particular group of people were really resistant to that, which is a shame because, I mean, it's, I

18:54wasn't trying to say they couldn't act. All actors tend to benefit from doing some ongoing classes of different kinds. And what do you reckon they were so resistant? Ah, I think they felt that they may have just felt very defensive and I mean if people don't feel there is a need for something or they're not aware of any problem, well then why would you do any classes? Yeah. So you have to be aware of needing to get somewhere before you set out. Yeah, why turn up to a class in the first place if that's how you're going to... Well, that's right.

19:39Yeah, for sure. That's it, they don't, they didn't. So I didn't run that class. What kind of tongue twisters can you lay on it? She stood upon the balcony. She stood upon the balcony, inimitably beckoning him in. She stood upon the balcony mimicking him hiccuping and inimitably beckoning him in. Whoa, go on then. She stood upon the balcony mimicking him hiccuping and inimitably beckoning him in. And inevitably. Inimitably. Inimitably. Beckoning him. Beckoning him in. Okay, I've got one for you. Ready? One smart fella, he felt smart. Two smart fellas, they felt smart.

20:23Three smart fellas, they felt smart. They all felt smart together. Boom! Try that. One smart fella, he felt smart. One smart fella, he felt smart. He felt smart. That's him! That's him! Every time, every time him. He managed it, he managed it. Well done.