One of Jane Longhurst’s earliest memories is of sitting under the dining table at home in the inner Hobart suburb of Dynnyrne, listening to aunts and uncles telling stories about family folklore.
“Who doesn’t love sitting under a table listening to stories?” she laughs.
It’s a relatable memory, but perhaps also reveals why Longhurst, one of Tasmania’s most loved and acclaimed actors, is so drawn to telling stories in unusual spaces. She has performed in public parks, historic gunpowder magazines – even her own car. “When you do theatre in non-traditional spaces,” she reflects, “the audience is smaller but more committed. Their curiosity is whetted. They’re more engaged and open. And hopefully,” she smiles, “more forgiving.”
Jane Longhurst has forged a brilliant career as an actor, broadcaster, voice artist and presenter. She has appeared in legendary Australian television shows such as Blue Heelers, The Flying Doctors, Neighbours, A Country Practice, and (closer to home) Rosehaven. But for author and long-time friend Danielle Wood, it is Longhurst’s perseverance and adaptability that makes her stand out. “Sustaining a creative career can be a real challenge, but Jane has a boundless energy and capacity for optimism that enables her to continue creating beautiful work, and to keep doing so here in Hobart, even during times when our theatre industry is basically being starved to death.” In recent years, Longhurst has taken up the challenge of a critical shortfall in government arts funding by taking performances into unexpected places, and in the process asking big questions about what – and who – art is for.
. . .
Longhurst was born and bred in nipaluna/Hobart. Her father was a master mariner who was at sea for the first few years of her life. Her mother grew up on Flinders Island and has a deep fascination with Tasmanian history in all its darkness and light. As a teenager, Longhurst was drawn to the visual arts, sang in choirs, played the guitar, and performed in school plays.
“My drama teacher at Taroona High School is still one of my closest friends,” she says. “In fact, I got married in her garden at Fern Tree.”
But Longhurst never thought an acting career was a realistic option, until one day the Salamanca Theatre Company came to perform in her drama class. “I remember going up to one of the actors afterwards and asking, ‘So, I guess you’re going back to your regular job now?’ And he said, ‘This is my job.’ And I thought, wow!”
The Salamanca Theatre Company was one of Australia's oldest “theatre for young people” companies, emerging out of the Theatre in Education movement in 1972. It was one of several Hobart-based theatre companies that toured Tasmania in the 1970s and ’80s, including Polygon Theatre Company (led by Don Gay) and Breadline Theatre Company (led by Charles Parkinson).
“There’s the old cliché that you can’t be what you can’t see”, Longhurst reflects. “I saw it and wanted to be part of it.”
Flipping through the Yellow Pages one day, she saw a listing for Apprentice Theatre. Situated off Wooby Lane in Salamanca Place, it offered acting classes for teenagers. She went along one weekend, and liked it enough to go back the next week. She remembers the first time she did an improvisation that made people laugh.
“That moment of connection through laughter was powerful,” Longhurst smiles. She was hooked.
Longhurst credits Diana Large, who ran Apprentice Theatre for many years, with launching her and many other Tasmanian actors’ careers. Essie Davis was another graduate. “The performances were thick and fast,” she remembers. “Lots of 20th-century European plays, and we were performing on stage at the Theatre Royal – the oldest theatre in Australia – during school holidays. Imagine!”
Longhurst graduated from Hobart Matriculation College in 1983, and spent a year in Denmark on an international student exchange with Rotary (she still speaks Danish). She returned home to Hobart determined to get into one of Australia’s premier acting schools, or none at all. In between auditions she got a job in retail – “selling men’s underwear in Myers, as you do” – and worked on an ABC Children’s Education program that was broadcast nationally. She remembers looking at her first cheque in awe at the thought that, maybe, she could make a living out of this.
It was 1988, the Bicentenary, and Hobart seemed awash with arts funding. She fondly remembers scoring a gig as second props person when Opera Australia made its first-ever fully staged production at the Theatre Royal. It was Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and her job involved running out to buy roast chicken and other delicacies for the feast scenes.
“Even though the work was behind the scenes, it felt amazing to be part of something that big.”
Finally, on her third try, she was accepted into the Victorian College of the Arts and moved to Melbourne in 1988. She graduated at the end of 1990 having been picked up by an agent, and spent the next five years in a whirlwind of TV, regular gigs at small independent theatre companies like La Mama Theatre, and performing Shakespeare in the Botanical Gardens in Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide.
And then, she turned 30. “The work started to dry up”, she sighs. “I was told I was too old to play the young ingénue, and too young to play the mother of three. Your 30s are a wasteland, they said.”
She took this statement to heart. Refusing to put herself through another round of rejections, she and her partner (fellow actor Guy Hooper) decided to move to Japan for an adventure and career re-set. They both scored jobs teaching English in Osaka, and Longhurst also worked as a presenter on a multilingual radio station. She looks back with gratitude on the two years she spent immersed in a culture where hers was not the dominant language. It gave her a new way of seeing herself, her culture, and the role of language in shaping both.
When she and Hooper decided the time was right to return to Melbourne, the housing market collapsed. Then out of the blue, she was invited to join HotHouse Theatre in Albury Wodonga, one of the few regionally based theatre companies in Australia.
“If you’d told me I would have spent seven years of my life doing theatre in rural Australia, I probably would’ve laughed, but it turned out to be exactly what we needed”, Longhurst says. “Albury Wodonga has everything you want from a major city, like great history, great services, great cafés, only you can park right out front!” She remembers it as a fruitful time, “beyond expectation”, both professionally and personally – soon after arriving they had two children, and settled comfortably into country life.
But as her children reached school age, and Longhurst neared 40, she began feeling the call of home. Although she sees the time she spent away from Hobart as essential for her development as an artist and a person, she realised she’d been feeling homesick for some time.
“My husband pointed out that I would cry when the plane landed in Hobart, and I would cry when we left.” So the family moved back to Hobart at Christmas Eve, 2007 – almost 20 years to the day since she had left. “I remember riding home through the familiar streets on my bike and thinking, could it really be 20 years since I left? Surely not!”
Eighteen months in, she wondered if they’d made a big mistake. “It felt very insular, very parochial. We struggled to land ourselves professionally.” Although there were two professional theatre companies, Tasmanian Theatre Company and Blue Cow Theatre, and eager audiences filling the seats, budgets were stretched. “Like any other core social service, like health and education, the arts have to be subsidised by the government,” Longhurst explains. “But the flipside of that is you constantly have to validate what you do and why you do it. It can be exhausting.”
When MONA opened in January 2011, the cultural life of Hobart was transformed. “It changed the way Tasmanians thought about themselves. Hobart suddenly became cool ... but then I remember seeing a t-shirt in Salamanca that said ‘I lived in Hobart before it was hip’, and I related to that.” There was suddenly momentum behind the arts, which made her think they could fashion a life here.
Ten years on, Longhurst feels that optimism has faded. She points out with sadness that, besides Terrapin Puppet Theatre (which has served the education and family market for 40 years), Mudlark Theatre in Launceston is now the only producing professional theatre company in Tasmania. Without any formal company structure left, “you look around and there’s fewer people to play with. Theatre is labour-intensive work, and while individual grants can fund one-off productions, they can’t sustain a continuous program.”
As a result, “professional theatre is a hobby here in Tasmania, not a career.” Yet Longhurst refused to give up. Funding constraints imposed restrictions, but also opened creative opportunities. One of her favourite performance experiences was the Tasmanian Theatre Company’s 2014 production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, staged inside the famous Esmond Dorney House in Sandy Bay, built in 1978 and an icon of Tasmanian modernist architecture. “We moved to the bathroom (to throw up), and to the bedroom (to have a mental breakdown), and the audience were so close to the action I could feel them breathing. It was fantastic!” she beams.
Then she turned 50, and Longhurst felt like she’d hit another invisible wall. “I looked around and wondered what roles there were left for me to play.” Yet this time around, she knew better than to take it personally. “It’s bizarre,” she says, “because women of my age are the demographic most likely to buy tickets to see movies and plays, and they are aching to see themselves on stage.” She felt like a lone wolf, without a company to work and grow with.
But she remembered one of the lessons learned from her time at the VCA: “If there’s no work available, you make your own work”. That meant learning how to apply for funding, “an art form in itself”, she sighs. It was an art she quickly mastered, receiving an Arts Tasmania grant to reboot her skills and learn new approaches to her craft.
She identified three theatre practitioners at the vanguard of performance who she would ask to be her mentors. The first was renowned theatre-maker, director and dramaturg Deborah Pollard; the second was Halcyon McCloud, co-artistic director of the Sydney-based performance ensemble My Darling Patricia (an enchanting name taken from a letter found in an old house); and the third was Elevator Repair Service, a highly collaborative ensemble from Manhattan whom Longhurst had seen perform for Ten Days on the Island in 2013. They invited her to New York “and so, of course, I had to go,” Longhurst sighs with mock regret.
It turned out to be a transformative experience. A chance tip-off one morning sent her racing to Madison Square Park to watch Academy-award-winning actor Dianne Wiest in an open-air performance of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days. “I loved the fact that it was being performed outside,” Longhurst says, “in a space where anyone – not just the regular theatre audience – could encounter it.” She was entranced by the character of Winnie, a woman Beckett describes as “about 50, well-preserved, blonde for preference, plump”, who is buried up to her waist in a mound of scorched earth.
The play is mostly a monologue, with a few interjections from Winnie’s husband Willie, who lives in a mound behind her. Wiest has called Happy Days a “Hamlet for women”. Longhurst hadn’t performed Beckett since she was a teenager, but she decided this was the role she was ready to play.
Longhurst’s Happy Days, directed by Robert Jarman, became the first offering in her Black Bag Trilogy, named for the black bag Winnie has near her, out of which she pulls various household items, “including a hand gun”, Longhurst notes with a sinister smile, “which we see briefly, then never again”.
In the post-Covid years, performing outdoor theatre offered new interpretive opportunities. She performed it for free in various parks in Hobart and Launceston during Mona Foma in 2021, with legendary actor Iain Laing playing Willie. She fondly remembers a woman on a mobility scooter laden with all her worldly possessions rolling by, who stayed to watch and laughed the whole way through (“it is meant to be a comedy,” Longhurst grins).
The second instalment in the Black Bag Trilogy was Request Programme by German playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz, which Longhurst performed at the Old Mercury Building as part of the Beaker St Festival in 2022. Unlike Beckett’s Winnie, who is drowning in words, the unnamed woman in Kroetz’ play offers a silent monologue of loneliness, a topic Longhurst says is more relevant now than 50 years ago when the play was first performed. “Loneliness is a quiet epidemic. Japan and the UK have had Ministers for Loneliness. That’s how urgent it is.”
Once again, Request Programme was directed by Longhurst’s frequent collaborator and friend Robert Jarman, whom she had met in Hobart in the 1980s. “Robert has brought about some of my most cherished performances, especially during Blue Cow Company’s era. I have great respect for his brain.”
For Longhurst, theatre is about problem-solving. She relishes the sense of adventure she feels when embarking on a new project, not knowing where things will end up. “I always look forward to finding the answers to what the work is,” she says. “Collaboration is so critical.”
For her, one of fundamental roles of art is to provoke inner contemplation. “Art provides moments of clarity. An experience of living outside yourself. It’s not escape, so much as transportation. When you’re in the audience, you can feel everyone’s heartbeats synchronise. That moment of inhalation, when the conductor raises his baton to start the music – that’s what it’s all about.” Indeed, one of her favourite gigs of the past 10 years has been narrating the family concerts offered by the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. “Children are hard-wired to respond to music.”
In 2025, Longhurst will conclude her Black Bag Trilogy with Life/Cycle, an entirely original performance held in the atmospheric depths of The Old Mercury Building. It marks an important turning point in her career. “I’m the producer, and I’m directing a concept, which will reference some of the themes of the previous two works, but also stand on its own.” Life/Cycle features a multi-generational cast of performers: 11 women from Mature Artist Dance Experience (MADE), two professional actors (Carrie McLean and Guy Hooper), one internationally-based parkour artist, and two 11-year-olds. It draws inspiration from the life of Marjorie Bligh, Tasmanian recycling pioneer, although it is not about her specifically. “I’m inspired by her resourcefulness and re-purposing. She was so industrious, and so resourceful. I’m fascinated by what it takes, financially and emotionally, to keep the lights on – especially for women.”
Once again, the space has been an important collaborator in its own right. “I'm so grateful to Penny Clive and Dean Ware of Detached at The Old Mercury Building. Being able to rehearse on site has accelerated our capacity to make a truly site-responsive performance. With a crack design team, a fascinating cast of emerging and established artists and an intriguing location, I feel Life/Cycle will make an impression.” While this play will touch on themes of social isolation and vulnerability that were central to Happy Days and Request Programme, it will also offer a hopeful path forward. “What I'm trying to do to close the Trilogy, together with my design and production team, is to collaboratively build an onstage world which is a metaphor not only for women’s struggle against the oppression of domestic violence and patriarchal gender definitions, but also for our collective search for security and purpose in an increasingly fragile world.”
Danielle Wood is excited to see what Longhurst has to offer. “The Black Bag Trilogy, with its three works – that are quite distinct, but nevertheless harmonise with each other – is Jane's really clever answer to the question of how you deepen into yourself as an artist at each new stage of your career. You make the work for which you, right now, are the perfect instrument.”
Rayne Allinson is a writer and teacher with a PhD in History from the University of Oxford. She has worked and travelled in many parts of the northern hemisphere, and is now Assistant Publisher at Forty South.