Actor Jennifer Ludlam has the distinction of being constantly in work since age 17, and the thrill of acting is just as keen as she takes on Captain Hook in Peter Pan.
Jennifer Ludlam is very excited. She often is. She is playing Captain Hook in the Auckland Theatre Company and Nightsong’s production of Peter Pan, adapted from JM Barrie’s book about the boy who never grew up.
In many ways, she is the girl who never grew up. She is as excited by and as in love with acting as she was when she was a shy 17-year-old from Taumarunui.
She didn’t know what she wanted to do after school. She had a wonderful geography teacher, who was also an actor and drama teacher. He suggested she take a residential acting course in the holidays at Rathkeale College in Masterton. There, she met some actors who were with a touring company called the Children’s Art Theatre. When a vacancy came up, they invited her to join them.
Her father dropped her off at National Park, where she jumped into a van with three gay guys and two gay women. That shy girl from Taumarunui has been working as an actor ever since.
Her mother, Shirley, had told her she wouldn’t help her pack her bags. The idea of wanting to be an actor was completely outside her parents’ ken. They were bewildered, as two working-class people from Taumarunui might be. But she was smitten with acting and remains so, at the age of 73. There are two enduring love stories running through her life and acting is the first of those.
Ludlam has been constantly in work in a country where acting might not be seen as the most stable career choice. She’s been in theatres up and down the country: Mercury Theatre, Theatre Corporate, Silo Theatre, Court Theatre being some of these.
Her telly roles include Shortland Street, Shark in the Park, Hercules and the Amazon Women and, in Australia, Sons and Daughters, Prisoner and a three-year stint as a presenter on ABC’s Play School. Her film credits include Apron Strings and Undercover. Her latest production is with Nightsong, whose artistic directors, Carl Bland and Ben Crowder, are another couple of old-stagers, fond of magic-making and the sometimes absurd. Crowder is co-directing with Bland, who wrote the script (read more here).
How do you play a man? I think you lead from a different part of your body. That’s all I’m going to say.
She likes to pretend to be decrepit. She claims she’s so old she can’t even lift Hook’s sword out of its scabbard. What rot. As good an actor as she is, she can’t quite pull that off. When she’s swashbuckling and slashing about with her sword, you’d be well advised to get out of her way.
She does everything with the utmost enthusiasm. And what actor wouldn’t be excited about playing Captain Hook? He’s a terrible fellow.
“He’s quite black. Also treacherous and nasty and bitter. But because it’s Nightsong, there’s a lot of comedic stuff in there as well. He’s also got a lot of heart. The way Carl’s written it, there might even be people thinking, you know, ‘Maybe he went through a rotten childhood. Maybe he felt abandoned, lost his parents …’”
You can see why he might be bad-tempered. You would be, too, if Peter Pan cut off your hand and fed it to a crocodile. Another cause for excitement: there is an actual “great big crocodile”, she says with relish. Not a real one, obviously. That would be asking for trouble. It might eat the dog playing Nana, the Darling family’s nursemaid. The dog is real.
I asked an idiotic question: Is it a nice dog? She managed not to say, “Of course it bloody well is. What idiot would cast a pit bull?” What she said was: “I hope so. I’m sure she’s very, very friendly. She’s been in an ad. We haven’t actually done any scenes with her so whether she’ll get overexcited or not I don’t know.” If she gets overexcited she might go to the loo on stage. “That has happened, hasn’t it? I think somebody had a goat on stage. As the senior actor, I suppose I’ll be the one to clean it up.”
The real danger is that Hook might go on stage. Ludlam did once. Once? “Oh, for Christ’s sake. Oh, several times probably.” She gets the giggles and away she goes. That is called corpsing and is a taboo. She is a terrible corpser.
She promises that Captain Hook will not go on the stage. Nobody can guarantee what the dog will or will not do.
Playing a guinea pig
She plays Captain Hook as a man. I wanted to know how she plays a man. She thinks she has played about five men; she was thinking about this the other day. She said: “Oh god. How do you play a man? I think you lead from a different part of your body. That’s all I’m going to say.”
She adds: “Last year, I played a guinea pig.” It is my turn to be very excited. How many chances in life do you get to interview an actor who has played a guinea pig? The guinea pig was named Binka and she played her in Nightsong’s 2023 production of I Want to Be Happy, also from the endlessly inventive pen of Bland. Binka lived in a cage in a research laboratory and is experimented on. All she wants is to be free and, yes, happy. This is terribly sad.
Another idiotic question: How did she get inside the mind of a guinea pig? She said she’d have to think about that, then arrived at this: “I find that too difficult to even answer. I didn’t treat it any differently than I would getting into the mind of Hook or any other character. I thought it could be about all sorts of things. It could have been about a woman unhappy in a marriage trying to escape because the whole time she wanted to get out of the cage … So I was really talking about the human condition, wanting to be free.”
She did go on the internet and look up the characteristics of a guinea pig. In rehearsals, she would twitch her nose and hold up her little paws. “And Carl would go, ‘You don’t have to do twitching noses.’”
She wore a faux fur coat that looked as though it had been rescued from a skip, and she had little knots of hair that “could have been my ears”.
I asked, “Did the guinea pig eventually escape?”
She put on the sort of voice you might adopt to read Winnie the Pooh to a 4-year-old and said: “Yes, the guinea pig escaped.”
She had a guinea pig as a child. “I thought they were really boring.”
Hates interviews
It is very nice of her to talk to me because she really hates to do interviews. She was on Shortland Street on and off for about 12 years before her character, the medical clinic’s receptionist, Leanne Miller, was killed off. She once, memorably, took vitamins laced with amphetamines and went cuckoo in the waiting room.
The writers found it hilarious to make Leanne ragingly homophobic. She can’t remember any of Leanne’s homophobic lines but she had no doubt that I could find some “on the internet”. This is funny because every time I asked her about something, she would ask where I was digging all this stuff up from and I’d say, “The internet, Jennifer.”
From the internet then: her character’s daughter, Nicole, was gay. Her mother deemed this to be ridiculous and told her to “put this lesbian stupidity” behind her. By the time she left the show, Ludlam says with relish, “I was a raging lesbian.”
She thinks she did only one interview during the Shortland Street years because she really hates all that gush. Also, she is still shy. She lives, quietly, which is the way she likes to live, on Waiheke Island in an original farmhouse on half an acre above Pūtiki Bay, with her partner of 44 years, actor, playwright and director Cathy Downes. She first saw Downes on stage, performing her acclaimed one-woman play, The Case of Katherine Mansfield. It was love at first sight. She sent her a fan letter.
Did she fancy her? “You can’t be putting that in the Listener! Now, somebody said you were like this.” Oh, why not? We can have a love story in the Listener. “Oh, you put it in and do whatever you like. I’m getting too old to care.” She and Downes brought up a son together, Sam, now nearly 40 and a theatre technician.
One day, in the kitchen of the family home in Taumarunui, her mother was folding sheets and said to her daughter: “I know you’re never going to get married.” She was a bit teary but that was that. She talked a little bit to her mum about being gay but never really talked about it with her dad, Keith. “They were just totally accepting of me.”
Her mum may have refused to help her 17-year-old daughter pack her bags before she headed into the unknown, but both parents flung themselves into supporting her career. They would tootle around the country following the shows she was in. Her dad, who left school at 12 and had his own painting and paperhanging business, said after seeing her in the Roger Hall play Social Climbers at Circa, “There’d have to be something wrong with you if you didn’t like that.” Which is the best review I’ve ever read.
I think I’m allowed to put these things in. I lost count of the things about which she said, “You can’t put that in the Listener!” Too bad. She says she’s not going to read this anyway. Plenty of people say that and I never believe them. I believe her. She doesn’t like people looking at her. Which might sound odd for an actor whose job, you might think, involves people looking at you. No, it doesn’t. An audience is looking at her character. Characters are the perfect places for shy people to seek asylum.
She’s not going to read this because, I think, she’s not very interested in herself, or at least the self written about by other people. She’s not very sociable. “I’m very antisocial. Every time somebody asks me [to their place] I’m going to have to ask them back to my place. And that goes on and on and there’s no end.”
She doesn’t like people looking at her. Which might sound odd for an actor.
Avoids parties
Most of her friends are actors or have been actors. She doesn’t like parties, although she does enjoy opening nights – “when there’s lots of people and I can see all my friends in one go, then that’s it.” One of the things she likes about living on Waiheke is that people leave her alone. “I’m actually quite a loner. I like being home more than anywhere else. I love a lot of space around me. I like to just be.”
She doesn’t like people knowing who she is. “I’d hate to be really famous. I think that would be awful, wouldn’t it? You couldn’t actually just be yourself, quietly.”
She doesn’t believe in a Christian god but she does think there “is something out there”. She believes in spirits who inhabit “the trees and the mountains and the rivers, things like that. Is it an animist? They actually eat people, so I’m not that one.” As far as I know, animists don’t actually eat people. She is just enjoying being a bit kooky, which she is accomplished at being.
She was made a companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2005. “I feel a bit funny, you know, to get the Order of Merit for doing something that I love.” She reckons she got it for “longevity. Maybe for still standing.” This is more rot.
Anyway, I am very glad that she is still standing. She will always be, and memorably so, the cleverest, most fun and cutest guinea pig I’ll ever encounter.
Peter Pan is at the ASB Waterfront Theatre, Auckland, until November 3.