Maeve Dermody, Our Town

Thornton Wilder’s Our Town is the most-produced play ever in the United States, and has been turned into two films, three television specials and one opera. Maeve Dermody’s performance in the Sydney Theatre Company version as Emily, one half of the “most winsome couple in history” has been widely praised for its heart warming celebration of the ‘ordinary’ (which of course upon closer inspection is anything but). Maeve has a string of successful performances behind her, both on screen and on stage, and it’s clear that this talented lass is only just getting started.

Ewen Leslie, The Trial

There’s something oddly titillating about seeing a Helpmann Award-winning actor (for Benedict Andrews’ War of the Roses; also nominated for MTC’s Richard III) stripped down to his jocks. As Josef K in The Trial, Leslie not only had to grapple with a spiralling Kafka-esque riddle of paranoia and absurdity, he had to do so in a way that we implicitly felt and understood. With turns on the screen in both Jewboy, Kokoda and Three Blind Mice to date, 2011 also promises big things for Leslie in the Belvoir production of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck alongside another SMAC contender, Toby Schmitz. Which tousle-haired and tortured thesp will you judge most kindly?

Toby Schmitz, Measure for Measure

Anything with Le Schmitz in it is pure pleasure. Whether as a smarmy office bully in Griff the Invisible (out in cinemas come March), a deliciously depraved Irish villager in Belvoir’s The Lonesome West, or as Brendan Cowell’s drunken alter-ego in Ruben Guthrie, he is pitch-perfect. More mate-next- door than prancey-dancey stage hog, his style is all his own. In Measure for Measure, Schmitz simpers and sleazes across Benedict Andrews’ artfully rotating stage as the Bard’s debauched lord, Lucio. And just like Ewen Leslie, he does so in his tighty whiteys. Your call: how do they measure up?

Charlie Garber, Quack

Why is it that comedy so rarely gets a look-in when it comes to awards for acting? Is it because we think it should just come naturally? Recently named one of Australia’s next big things in theatre, Charlie Garber is easily the funniest guy on Sydney stages at the moment, whether as one third of theatre group Pig Island, or in a range of surreal Shakespearean roles. As the charlatan doctor and weak-kneed lothario in Griffin Theatre’s Quack, Garber spends half the time spouting spurious philosophies, the other half being slathered in spouts of fake blood. So, what’s the secret to comedy? According to Garber, it’s Mozart.

Nathan Lovejoy, Way to Heaven

Griffin Theatre’s Way to Heaven was a tricky – and ultimately, terrific – play. Based around Theresienstadt, the Holocaust-era propaganda internment camp, it had to strike the right balance between full-blown horror and a subtle kind of scathing, bitter humour. As the self-congratulating Nazi Commandant, the full burden of this balance fell most heavily upon NIDA-graduate Nathan Lovejoy. Never hyperbolic, somehow always human, Lovejoy managed to tread this fine line with military-like precision.

Robert Menzies, The End

The End is the theatre equivalent of an endurance marathon, and only someone as experienced, as wily, as quick on his feet as Robert Menzies could’ve coped with the challenge. Based on Beckett’s short story La Fin, this Belvoir adaptation found a solitary Menzies standing onstage for a 65-minute monologue: just him, his shirt, and his tale of heart-shattering sorrow. You may recognise Menzies from his work as the Aussie crime writer larrikin in 3 Acts of Murder, from the Elliot Perlman drama Three Dollars, or even as his real-life stint as the grandson of the Prime Minister of the same name. But it’s this sublimely touching performance that will truly haunt you till the end of your days.

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