By Helen Musa

When actor Lainie Hart first read Joanna Murray-Smith’s Bombshells around the dinner table at director Jordan Best’s home, she found herself unexpectedly moved.

“I could hear the voices of all the women,” she says. “I felt moved, but not sad, because I could relate to their experiences on some level.”

Now Hart takes on the role of Winsome Webster, the oldest of the women in Echo Theatre’s remount of its 2024 production before it heads off on an ambitious NSW tour.

Historically, Bombshells, described as “the six ages of woman,” has been a one-woman tour de force. Caroline O’Connor created the role in the original Melbourne Theatre Company production, playing six vastly different women. Jordan Best has chosen instead to stage the monologues with just five performers.

Hart’s role in the previous show, the glamorous, world-weary American cabaret singer Zoe, has been dropped from this touring version. Sometimes the part of musical theatre hopeful Mary O’Donnell is dropped too but not in this case. 

Hart inherits Winsome, a role memorably played by Alice Ferguson in Echo Theatre’s earlier production. While Winsome is a widow, Hart is keen to challenge assumptions about ageing.

“Yes, I’m playing an old woman,” she says, “but Jordan and I have been having very interesting conversations about what it actually is to be older.”

She recalls that a decade ago her mother tried to introduce her to a man 10 years her senior.

“I accused her of trying to fob me off on to an old man,” she tells me. “Now I’m the same age as that man and I don’t feel old.”

Hart believes many women begin feeling invisible long before old age.

When I tell her many women say they start to feel invisible at 40, she says: “I know what they’re talking about.”

Having spent recent years training professionally in screen acting, she has often found herself auditioning alongside glamorous younger performers.

“But older faces are more interesting,” I suggest, pointing to the remarkable later career of Jacki Weaver.

“True enough,” Hart replies. “It matters who’s in control.”

For Hart, Winsome’s story is less about age than about reawakening.

“There’s a sexual element,” she says, “but I think it’s really about longing and libido in terms of life energy. When you’re widowed you can fall into a repetitive pattern, a full life with a busy schedule but without pleasure, without really seeing beauty.”

Winsome’s life changes through an unexpected encounter with a blind man.

“He’s the one who actually sees something in her,” Hart says. “She’s been in a holding pattern for a decade and suddenly this unexpected longing appears.”

Murray-Smith’s play remains one of Australia’s sharpest portraits of women negotiating the unreasonable expectations society places upon them. Across six richly contrasting characters, it explores motherhood, marriage, loneliness, ambition, ageing and reinvention.

Newcomers to the line-up include Yanina Clifton as the exhausted young nursing mother Meryl (Amy Kowalczuk’s role in the earlier production), Louise Bennet as Tiggy, whose lecture on cactus growing gradually becomes a metaphor for a failed marriage, Sally Taylor as schoolgirl Mary singing the CATS spoof showstopper “O’Shaughnessy”, and Ella Buckley as bride-to-be Theresa, whose romantic idealism fast evaporates.

Hart declares herself excited by what comes after their Queanbeyan opening. The production will tour extensively through regional NSW, visiting centres including Byron Bay, Coffs Harbour, Port Macquarie, Dubbo, Griffith, Albury and Sydney.

Already an Echo travelling veteran, having toured with Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage last year, she praises Best’s initiative in moving the company into the real, yet affordable touring world.

“It’s such a wonderful opportunity to visit towns and places and perform for audiences where you don’t know a single person,” she says. “That took me by surprise. There’s a real freedom in it.”

Touring with five women could have its challenges, she suggests, but Best has already laid down one important ground rule.

“Jordan gave us good advice,” she says. “Let’s be an ensemble, a team together… and talking politics is probably not a good idea if we want to make it sustainable on the road.”

Bombshells, The Q, Queanbeyan, August 27-29.

News all day, every day at CityNewsQBN.com.au.