THE FIRST TIME I tried to cry on cue, in a workshop intended for aspiring young actors, it did not work. It was 2006; I was eighteen years old and performing a rather ambitiousmonologue from Andrew Bovell’s After Dinner,in which forty-something Monika describes finding her husband dead in the living room. Naturally, dead husbands require real tears, and I assumed unashamed effort was the key to achieving them. I listened to sad music before I performed. I laboured every word. I chased – begged – the emotion like a hysterical teenage girl running after an ex-­lover at midnight. JUST COME HERE. PLEASE. By the end of the monologue, I was so frustrated I couldn’t make myself cry that I began to cry. When I finished, the teacher said, ‘I think that play is supposed to be a comedy.’

Soon after, I auditioned for a conservatory-­style acting school in my home town – mosquito-­infested Meanjin, Queensland – and somehow got accepted. In first year, we lay on linoleum in dilapidated university classrooms and sweated out subtropical fever dreams of Shakespeare, Chekhov and Linklater. I was trained primarily in the Eric Morris technique, a derivative of Lee Strasberg’s version of Method acting.