Black Swan State Theatre presents Kate Mulvany’s The Seed starring sister Tegan Mulvany at Subiaco Arts Centre

Mere weeks before writer and actor Kate Mulvany’s semi-autobiographical play The Seed premiered at Sydney’s Belvoir St Downstairs Theatre in 2007, she phoned her sister Tegan to discuss why she had not included the younger Mulvany sibling in the work. The playwright was understandably concerned about Tegan feeling left out, but the older sister of seven years — who was also performing as Rose in the play that would shoot her to national prominence — need never have worried. “I always understood why it needed to be the way it is,” Tegan recounts. “I remember her saying, ‘It just feels like this is the first story. Then we do The Seed: Part Two and that’s your story.’ In the end, we didn’t need a part two. We were living it through my existence and now even more through my beautiful daughter, Maisie.” As fate would have it, the next chapter will see Tegan play the role of Rose herself, as the Curtin University graduate makes her debut with Black Swan State Theatre Company in The Seed for its final production of 2024. “Auditioning for the role was very surreal,” the Maylands-based actor, voice artist and educator says. “I remember saying to my mum, ‘what if I don’t get it?’ It was a little like auditioning for a role in your own family.” The Mulvany sisters’ story begins in Geraldton, where Kate describes a beautiful, simple country childhood playing softball and soccer, as mum Glenys worked as a teacher and dad Danny built roads. Danny was a “10-pound Pom” from Nottingham who had moved to Australia to work in the Mid West coastal city. He was called up to Vietnam when he was 22 years old and returned with health issues, post-traumatic stress disorder and exposure to Agent Orange, which is suspected to have contributed to Kate’s diagnosis of advanced renal cancer when she was three years old. She had surgery to remove the tumour, one kidney and two ribs, undergoing chemotherapy and high doses of radiotherapy. It took seven years of treatment before Kate was in remission, enduring chronic pain ever since and leaving her with scoliosis. A back fracture in recent years has led her to use a cane for support. “Agent Orange is one of a group of dioxins that were created by chemical companies and sprayed by the US during the Vietnam War,” Kate, 47, explains. “They were a means of herbicidal warfare to ‘expose the enemy’ through defoliation. The contaminant TCDD within dioxin has been linked to various medical conditions in veterans and their offspring, including types of cancer, missing limbs, spina bifida, cleft palate, hydrocephalitis and heart disease, amongst others. Its insidious legacy remains today, especially in South-east Asia where the dioxin continues to affect the environment and its people.” There was not much to do in a children’s oncology ward in the 1980s, so books, stories, puppets and Kate’s own imagination were a kind of escape, or a way to find meaning in everything that was happening. She attributes it to her choice of career, which has featured a seemingly endless list of writing credits, from the play Mary Stuart to co-creating/writing TV series Upright with Tim Minchin, and numerous theatre and screen roles, including courtroom drama The Twelve and playing a Nazi-hunting nun opposite Al Pacino in the Amazon Prime series Hunters. Kate — also in the upcoming Robbie Williams biopic Better Man as his mum Janet — declares Pacino a “gift” to work alongside, as he tolerated being pestered by her constant questions about Dog Day Afternoon, The Godfather and Scarface. “When you’ve gotten through childhood cancer, your family tend to not sweat the small stuff — even if that’s their teenage daughter from Gero saying, ‘I’ve decided I wanna be an actor’,” she quips. The family moved to Perth for Kate to study at Curtin University, where a nine-year-old Tegan at the time would help her sister learn lines at home and watch Kate’s performances at Hayman Theatre, enamoured when taken to explore the university theatre’s backstage areas. “It was a no-brainer that I would end up developing my skills in the same place, I already knew it by heart,” Tegan says. “That literal guidance through the theatre I think is a lovely metaphor for what it’s like having Kate as a sister. You are held, supported and protected. She is tenacity, insight and knowledge personified. “There was never any questioning of the love we felt for each other, through the fights over Barbie dolls, the time I wee’d on her (an embarrassing story made public in a recent Black Swan social media video) or any other sibling disagreement that happened. “In the almost eight years my family had together before I came along, they experienced so much. I was born into a family that had already lived through some of the most intense tests that relationships can go through and survived it all. Together. That’s what I saw when I watched The Seed. Resilience, strength and fierce love. I think the show not only gave me a deeper insight into how trauma had shaped our family, but also how it had shaped me. And that’s not meant in a negative way at all.” The catalyst for The Seed came to Kate at age 24 when doctors told her she was unable to carry a child due to the effects of her cancer. “That made me so bloody angry, that a cancer that was suspected to have come from a war before I was born was taking away my rights to have a baby,” says Kate, who lives in Sydney with husband Hamish Michael. “Luckily, I’d already written a few plays, so I had a platform on which to tell my story. So I did. “I realised that a lot of Agent Orange stories, including my own, were being swept under the carpet generation by generation. I wanted to investigate my story and my family’s story in order to get something out there about the issue. I didn’t want our community to be silenced, and so I put pen to paper. At the same time, I’d just visited my dad’s family for the first time in Nottingham, and so many other wild revelations were coming out about war, family, secrets and lies . . . It was a story ripe for telling, and a great way to investigate a worldwide political issue through the lens of one family in one night.” The Seed follows writer Rose Maloney, who travels to Nottingham with her Vietnam veteran father Danny, to visit his IRA soldier father Brian, where she is confronted by her family’s past and the repercussions of war. Originally conceived as a book, Kate started writing The Seed in 2002 before her laptop got stolen and she lost everything except for a few crayfishing excerpts. She returned to the idea in 2004, pitching it to Belvoir St Theatre, which commissioned it as a play, and spent the next two years researching dioxin, interviewing veterans and their families, and delving into her own Irish heritage. The Seed sprouted and unfurled from there — Kate even managed to weave in those initial crayfishing excerpts — where a huge part of the process involved speaking with her dad. “My dad and I were very close, but there was one thing we didn’t speak about much — the war,” she says. “Obviously, he held a fair amount of guilt about the connection between his conscription and my cancer. When I was commissioned by Belvoir to write the play, I got to ask my father Danny all the questions I’d never dared before. As it was for work, and he was a huge supporter of my career, he finally opened up. Also, because the play hoped to represent all veterans’ families, not just ours, he felt more comfortable speaking. He answered every single question and I’m forever grateful for his courage and honesty.” While Rose may share her scars and history, Kate insists they are completely different people, with Rose existing within a much darker place than Kate likes to visit. This does not prevent the character from connecting with audiences, where Rose’s monologue in the play about truth, secrets, love, hope (and whiskey) has become a favourite in acting schools. “It’s actually a black comedy,” Kate says of The Seed. “People tend to see ‘Agent Orange’ and ‘IRA’ on the blurb and think they’re in for a very dark story but it’s actually the opposite. Humour is absolutely vital in my plays. If an audience laughs, they tend to come with you more readily through the heavy stuff. And I love hearing an audience laugh and cry together — it’s what makes live theatre such a uniquely human experience.” Performing as Rose in the premiere Belvoir season meant Kate was backstage and unable to give her dad some last-minute reassurance when her parents came to see the production in Sydney. “He was so nervous beforehand, truly terrified,” Kate was told afterwards. “But he and Mum had 16 of their Vietnam veteran mates and their partners show up the same night, so they were beautifully supported by their community, and that community only grew as the show went on the road.” The Belvoir St Theatre national tour included a 2009 season at The Playhouse Theatre with Perth Theatre Company, and by then Kate had noticed a real change in her dad, where his guilt had dissipated and he had embraced his own story with a gentle pride. Danny died in 2017 at the age of 69 from oesophageal cancer, and while he had been a smoker, the cancer is also considered a dioxin-related disease. It is just one of the motivations behind Tegan’s desire to take on the role of Rose for this Black Swan State Theatre Company season of The Seed, much to the delight of her sister, who will be in the opening night audience with their mum. “There’s no denying I have a strong connection to Rose through my family. This was/is a story filled with people, places and experiences that I have grown up with or been told of since childhood,” Tegan states. “To see him (Danny) and hear him ‘live’ again through the brilliant (Perth actor) Steve Turner is an absolute dream.” This latest season of The Seed has also happened in the middle of Tegan’s own health journey, as in more recent years she has been discovering the effects dioxin has had on her, being diagnosed with numerous autoimmune disorders, connective tissue concerns and several other minor issues. “It has been a very new revelation for me that perhaps I wasn’t so lucky when it came to Dad’s dioxin exposure,” Tegan says. “Most importantly, this play has grown beyond that of a semi-autobiographical story. There is an ever-growing number of children and wives of Vietnam veterans who are reaching out to one another. “We share stories and experiences that others may not fully understand, just like our fathers do. In the years since this play was first produced, understanding into PTSD, both primary and secondary, has grown exponentially. We have more opportunities to connect and support one another, whether that’s face to face or through social media. “Rose is not just Kate, she’s not just Tegan. She is thousands of sisters, brothers, wives and families.” The Seed is at Subiaco Arts Centre, November 2 to 17. Tickets at blackswantheatre.com.au