Black Swan State Theatre Company presents Mandy and Hayley McElhinney’s Dirty Birds at Heath Ledger Theatre

Mandy and Hayley McElhinney have made a living out of pretending to be different people, their desire to be somebody else driven by a curiosity to figure out how others tick. Both sisters have forever felt a real bliss stepping into other people’s shoes, whether playing dress-ups together during their childhood in regional Western Australia or as they forged highly successful careers on stage and screen. A curious spirit evidently runs in their family, with Mandy recollecting their Irish father Andrew and English mother Rosemary as always being up for an adventure, which had a large part to play in the sisters’ formative years growing up in the small town of Leeman, just south of Geraldton. “It was a really lovely little community set on the coast and we had a great freedom there as most kids did, just riding around town on our bikes and disappearing for the whole day, coming back sunburnt and hungry,” Mandy, the older sibling by four years, says. “We spent a lot of time together and a lot of time in our imaginations. It was an idyllic kind of childhood and when we were teenagers, we moved back to Perth, and then we were in the suburbs and things weren’t quite as fun.” According to Hayley, the move to the Perth suburb of Kelmscott proved to be a different kind of isolation from the one they had come from. “It was going from knowing everyone in the town, to going into a suburb where you know no one,” Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts graduate Hayley says. “It really meant that all of that expansive imagination that we had out in the world all of a sudden turned inward, and we were watching movies, staying in the house while our imagination became fed by all this art. “Mandy had come back from a couple of years in boarding school in Geraldton and had an amazing teacher there. I remember her returning with Shakespeare, with poetry and music. So all of a sudden we started feasting on anything we could get our hands on, from TV to the radio to high art, and couldn’t get enough of it. “When Mandy went to Curtin University, I was still at high school, so I was seeing some of the first theatre I’d ever seen, with my sister in it. Curtin University had this great course. They were doing absurdist theatre, pantomime, musical theatre, and I got to see them all. Sometimes I got to be backstage with her, just hanging out with her uni mates. So that was my introduction into this world where I realised ‘these are my people, this is where I should be’.” Both have had successful careers on screen; Mandy shot to national recognition as “Rhonda” opposite “Ketut” in ads for insurer AAMI, and played Gina Rinehart in House of Hancock, while Hayley has had roles on The Babadook, Mystery Road: Origin, and Doctor Doctor. With a tendency to know each other’s thoughts and finish each other’s sentences, it is remarkable to think it has taken this long for the siblings to share the stage for the first time, when they appear in their debut play Dirty Birds, presented by Black Swan State Theatre Company and directed by Kate Champion. It is a return to the theatre company for both sisters after Hayley’s seasons in Oil and The Cherry Orchard, while Mandy adds to her Black Swan stage credit in The Glass Menagerie. Described as a culmination of 20 years of their dreaming and inspiration, they stress Dirty Birds is not at all autobiographical, or a retelling of their childhoods, but the comedy does very much come from the life they have shared, with the spirit of their parents ever present, including their father, who died in 2010. “We have a section in the play where we explore our Irish heritage in a kind of creative imagined world of Ireland,” Hayley says. “It comes from a lot of the stories that Dad would tell about the place and just even the way he sounded. He had a very strong accent. They’re both very present in the room, and Mum is just so supportive of us that we couldn’t really do this without her. There’s just their spirit all over this.” The new Australian work features the sisters playing siblings Mary (Mandy) and Martha (Hayley), two middle-aged women who are big-time procrastinators, stuck in their own limitations with an inability to be comfortable in their own skins. In a prison of their own making, they must find the courage to break the pattern to find freedom. “It’s about shedding, changing and accepting yourself,” Mandy says. “They’re pretty unsure who they are and have a problem being authentic. They’re constantly adopting other personas, so they are, over the night, many different people.” Voice and accent coach Jean Goodwin has been assisting the McElhinneys, who cover Irish, English and American accents, along with their own Australian articulation, throughout the course of the 70-minute production. “They’re really committing to pretending to be others. It’s a wonderful exercise as an actor because we’re getting the opportunity to really explore all these different characters in the one night. I mean, we haven’t made it easy for ourselves,” Hayley laughs. “They’re like bowerbirds that collected things throughout their life, and then they put them on and instantly they’re another character or another person or persona.” Many years in the making — and already in discussion with Champion before she moved to Perth to became Black Swan’s artistic director — the sisters feel everything has truly aligned for Dirty Birds to be happening at the right time, in the right place, finding serendipity in having the premiere in the city where they grew up, after both establishing their careers working nationally and internationally. “We didn’t really have a story when we thought about it 20 years ago, but we had a premise, and that premise was two women who are isolated, who are living in a bit of a fantasy world,” Mandy says. “It wasn’t until COVID-19, and we were all isolated, that the idea began to develop into something bigger. That then seemed like the perfect time in our careers for us to come together. It’s just been a joy to sort of discover each other as colleagues because we’re already friends and sisters.” Working a lot on Zoom — with Hayley in Perth and Mandy in Sydney — they refer to their writing experience as incredibly humbling, each now having even greater respect for playwrights. “We also had some really great spooky experiences where we would come up, in different States, with the same idea,” Hayley says. “We’d Zoom with each other and say, ‘Oh, what about this?’ and the other would go ‘You’re not kidding, I thought exactly the same thing’. Those little moments have encouraged us to keep moving forward. “We’ve always wanted to do it and I think maybe there was a part of us that was waiting for others to give us permission, waiting for others to say this was a good idea. It’s taken this long for us to back ourselves. “We’ve never had the opportunity to work together, which has been something we’ve wanted to do since we can remember. We have such a deep love and respect for each other’s work and I could not wait to get into the room with Mandy. It has not disappointed. Being on stage with Mandy, it’s like the whole world falls away because I’m working with a brilliant actor, but also someone who I really know.” A constant at all their opening nights, Rosemary will be there with bells on to support her daughters’ momentous collaboration on stage, while they insist they can share Mum’s customary bunch of flowers. Dirty Birds is at Heath Ledger Theatre until December 10, tickets at blackswantheatre.com.au. Styling and makeup: KT Crocker Hair: Julie Duplock