Jennifer Steyn, one of the UCT drama school’s 1980s `wunderclass’ and currently acting in Skylight, tells HAZELFRIEDMAN about her lessons in life
`ACTUALLY, I know nothing about anything.” Jennifer Steyn runs a momentarily flustered hand through her hair. With an extraordinary combination of dizziness and down-to- earthness, she has just bee n providing me with some equally strange insights into concepts of simplicity and progress, getting vrot and passionate at parties, alternative healing and the soul of a “centre leftie”.
Right now she’s in dizzy mode. Soon she’ll slip into feet-cemented-on-ground mode. It is this chameleon-like ability to metamorphose into whatever the moment demands that has made her such a consummate performer. Onstage, offstage – there seem to be few contrived, artificially constructed bones in this waif-woman.
In many respects Steyn is the embodiment of a fantasy in a field whose dreams are kind of running dry these days. “Theatre is dying,” says Clare Stopford, who directs Steyn in David Hare’s award-winning play Skylight. “The situation is truly desperate for everyone involved.”
Yet during her career spanning 13 years, Steyn seems to have been relatively impervious to drought. A graduate of University of Cape Town (UCT) drama school, she was part of that early 1980s wunderclass of students from Johannesburg and Cape Town who are at the forefront of today’s theatre.
She’s been likened to Glenda Jackson, Michelle Pfeiffer, Grace Kelly and Ingrid Bergman – all of whom, apart from other commonalities, possess cheekbones you could dive off. She reminds me of an offbeat composite of Audrey Hepburn and Vanessa Redgrave – a comparison she unashamedly enjoys (“I adore Hepburn, and Redgrave possesses this um, seething intelligence …”).
Her acting biography could earn her instant membership of a high achievers club. She’s assumed so many contradictory characters onstage – from Lady Macbeth to Sweet Phoebe – you wouldn’t blame her for suffering from multiple personality disorder. She’s also straddled television and film and won numerous awards. Jennifer Steyn is the undisputed darling of her discipline.
But while she clearly enjoys an occasional meander in many directions simultaneously, paradoxically she exudes a remarkable sense of self-cohesion. And even though she seems to be adept at keeping the messier bits of her life intact, she has clearly danced a duet or ten with pain. Maybe that’s why in David Hare’s Skylight she brings a contained intensity and almost skinless realism to the part of Kyra, the idealistic schoolteacher in love with her ideological opposite.
“Kyra is the closest I’ve ever played to myself. I don’t have to create a character or voice, I simply have to speak the lines,” she explains. “In many ways she holds all the struggles one constantly goes through.”
Referring to the emotional conflict between her character and Tom, the male lead played by Ron Smerczack, she says: “Ultimately two people with different value system can’t connect. The tragedy of their loss is that they don’t hear each other’s values.”
“I asked Jenny to bring every failed relationship – all the scraps of emotional baggage – she’s ever had into the role,” says Stopford. “She’s very disciplined and controlled. But she’s also extremely instinctive. She will evoke a quality and not remember how she did it afterwards. Sometimes I have to put down markers for her.”
“I remember the first reading I did of Angels in America,” says Steyn. “And it was all totally there. I spent the rest of the rehearsals trying to recapture that quality.” She adds: “I get pretty obsessive during rehearsal. The wonderful thing about Clare is that she gives me the space to make a mess. With her, I never stop working because she keeps on giving me things to hold in place to keep the role of Kyra honest.
“I had opportunities to live a lifestyle that would lead to wealth,” she says, matter-of- factly, “but I believe that to be an actor one has to have a sense of hunger during the developing years. But as you get older, hunger starts making the edges too jagged. You start needing the comforts to relax into, like a stable home and family.”
Steyn isn’t a “talk about my work not my life” interviewee. She’s married to Nicky Rebelo – one of those rare species of actor that combines full-on testosterone “okeness” with Sixties idealism and Nineties sensitivity. And Steyn seems to revel in these sensibilities. She is clearly, romantically, in love with her life.
She also speaks about her recent miscarriage with a candour typical of the self- accepting. As Rebelo’s wife, she has taken on the responsibility of a ready-made family in the form of his three children.
And while she doesn’t claim to have been born to step-momdom, she is clearly at ease with her role. “Sometimes during insecure moments, the pragmatist in me emerges and I wonder what we are going to eat,” she says, before spinning off again. “But then I think: `What the hell. I just love all of this.'”
Skylight is on at the Market Theatre until December 21