By Helen Musa

The Street Theatre is hosting a contemporary play about wartime heroine Nancy Wake, known to the Gestapo as “The White Mouse” (La Souris Blanche, in French) and rightly claimed by NZ and Australia.

Originally written in English by Australian playwright Christine Croyden, the play was later translated into French by Véronique Duché and will be performed here as La Souris Blanche with English subtitles.

The production, which opened La Mama’s Festival of Mother Tongues in 2024, is directed by Louise Howlett, a French teacher at the Victorian College of the Arts Secondary School. 

This curious theatrical linguistic exercise has the advantage of plunging us straight into the world of the French Resistance, where Wake experienced a wartime career she was never able to match in later life.

Wake only received a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2004 and the Badge in Gold from NZ in 2006, when she was in her 90s. As the play shows, jumping backwards and forwards as the older Nancy, played by Ioanna Gagani, looks back on her life and the very different circumstances of the young Nancy, played by Natalia Nour.

I was able to catch up with both of the Nancys by phone to Melbourne.

Gagani, who plays the older Nancy, was born and raised in Athens by a writer mother and a film director stepfather. After studying at the National Theatre of Greece Drama School, she completed a master’s degree in theatre studies at the Sorbonne in Paris before studying psychology and psychodrama.

Emigrating to Australia in 2016, she has rediscovered her love of stage and film. Coming from a family where French was regarded as the international lingua franca, she is comfortable with the language, although she declares herself a little rusty these days.

She plays Wake as she prepares to receive her Companion of the Order of Australia in 2004. From that perspective, the action takes us through her life as the younger Nancy surfaces in memory.

“Sometimes I’m present on stage just as the watcher, but at other times I’m there,” she says. “Although when she received Australian recognition Nancy was over 90 years old, I’m playing her as a timeless older woman. I don’t make up like a 90-year-old. It’s more the feeling. The young Nancy was fearless, but I experience the older Nancy as much more fragile.”

Gagani does not think Wake had many failings. “But there’s one scene where she reflects on saying goodbye to her French husband, Henri Fiocca, who was tortured and killed by the Gestapo, not realising it would be the last time. There, perhaps, she could have given him a more proper farewell.”

As for the violent act Wake is known to have committed, Gagani says, “She did what she had to do. She reacted according to her personality and character and didn’t regret it. If she had been born today, she would have done great things.”

Natalia Nour, who plays the young Nancy, is a good match for the role. Born into a Moldovan family, she moved to France at the age of four and grew up speaking French at school and Romanian at home.

“My natural accent is French,” she says. “I wasn’t familiar with Nancy’s work, but I found out about the audition, went along, got the role and studied up on her.”

Although Nour holds a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from a university in Besançon in eastern France, she changed course. After moving with her husband to Adelaide in 2020, she began acting studies at the Adelaide College of the Arts, then won a place at the Victorian College of the Arts, prompting a move to Melbourne. She has just graduated and this is her first professional production.

She sees many parallels with Wake. “I’m married; she was too. She moved from New Zealand to Australia; I made the reverse move from Nice to Adelaide. I experienced what she must have experienced, the changes in air and birdsong, the feeling of an exotic flavour.”

Nour also speculates on what Wake’s French might have sounded like. “We decided against giving her an Aussie or New Zealand accent. It was too complicated.”

All aspects of Wake’s life are presented in a kind of biopic, she says, adding, “Most people haven’t gone through a quarter of what she went through.”

The older Nancy, she agrees with Gagani, is an observer in a dark place, while the young Nancy is in her youth.

“The play shows only the good side of Nancy and peels back the layers of the woman who became The White Mouse,” she says.

La Souris Blanche, The Street Theatre, February 18-20.