Seated by the glass sliding door looking onto the greenery and gravel of her Hobart home, actor Pamela Rabe is feeling a little “thick-headed” with a cold. Tissue tucked in one hand, she is not surprised she has fallen sick while finally allowing the harsh, erratic matriarch Violet Weston to “disappear” from her daily life.

Rabe has just flown back from the Perth Festival, where she was, in fact, energised by the cruelty of a family angrily spilling secrets about each other in US playwright Tracy Letts’ renowned 2007 play August: Osage Country.

The production premiered at Sydney’s Belvoir St Theatre late last year, with Rabe winning the 2024 Sydney Theatre Award for Best Performance in a Leading Role in a Mainstage Performance for her searing portrayal of Violet. She shared the award with Tamsin Carroll, who played Violet’s eldest daughter Barbara. (Hayley McElhinney played Barbara in Perth.)

“Everybody would always ask us as we were performing it, ‘You must be tired?’ But no, it’s such an energising piece of theatre to perform in that the visceral reaction of the audience, as the performance works on them, is exhilarating,” she says. “There were a few cast replacements in Perth and their delirious enjoyment of feeling [the] play work was delightful . . . but obviously it takes a toll, because I’m whacked!”

Violet’s savage, sarcastic disposition, fuelled by opioid addiction and her instinct for survival at any cost, as well as the inherited trauma unleashed around her by her family, seems particularly apt to Rabe in the current epoch. Certainly, Eamon Flack’s production suggested a contemporary metaphor – if America is taken to be a big, dysfunctional family with irreconcilable differences.

“In this particular time of current events in America reverberating through the world, I feel the play [gained] a whole other terror that lurks around it,” says Ontario-born Rabe, who relocated to Australia in 1983 with Hobart-born theatre and television director Roger Hodgman, whom she married.

“When Charlie Aiken [played by Greg Stone] finally appeals to his wife Mattie Fae [Helen Thomson in Sydney and Caroline Brazier in Perth], ‘I just don’t understand this meanness, the way you and your sister talk to people,’ in a funny way that’s also something of the gloves-off, truth-telling, counter reaction to ‘fake news’ that’s going on in America, where people feel they can beyond-troll people who do not share their view. The annihilation [of] ‘If you don’t agree with me, you are the enemy.’”

Now, after a breather to shake off her lurgy, Rabe is gearing up to play Winnie in Samuel Beckett’s 1961 absurdist, existential masterpiece Happy Days for Sydney Theatre Company.

Winnie is a determinedly optimistic woman, despite her body being mired, literally and metaphorically, in a mound of rubbish, reaching up to her waist in Act 1 and her neck in Act 2.

Rabe is co-directing the production with Nick Schlieper, who is also the set and lighting designer.

I tell Rabe I remember seeing and enjoying the play at Belvoir in 2009, when Julie Forsyth played Winnie and Peter Carroll played her little-seen husband Willie. I recall how a fellow audience member slapped his hands down on the arm rests and proclaimed sotto voce, “I can’t take it anymore” – presumably in response to Winnie’s seemingly infinite verbal repetitions – and left the auditorium mid-play.

“Oh, thanks Steve,” Rabe says in a droll tone. “You’ve just added to my vault of stories about people who’ve had extreme reactions to Beckett!” she laughs.

“I have a great memory of Ruth Cracknell [who played Winnie for STC, in 1991]. I adored Ruth. [She was] an icon, an idol. We worked quite a bit together in the last decade of her life.”

Rabe raises both hands with palms facing out in veneration of the late Australian character and comic actor, who died in 2002.

“Of course, it was at the height of Ruth’s television fame with [sitcom] Mother and Son, and here was a play called Happy Days with a lovely big picture of her, a painting, on the front of the program. She said that in one performance, about 20 minutes in, someone stood up in the audience and yelled, ‘Say something funny!’”

“So, I’m bracing myself, now that you’ve told me that story. I’m hopeful that anyone coming to the theatre with any awareness of my contribution to live performance in Australia, won’t be expecting an hour [two, including interval] of stand-up.”

Despite her sunny-side-up disposition, Winnie is “raging against the dying of the light, against the loss of words,” says Rabe, while the mostly silent Willie, who will be played by Markus Hamilton (recently seen at STC in Lynn Nottage’s play Sweat), calls out occasionally from behind the rubbish mound.

“It is a daunting piece, a huge challenge to take on, but, God, every time I read it, it is so extraordinarily moving, because, in the end, like the Weston family, it’s about a marriage, and it’s about what it is to live a life, knowing that in the end . . . what does Barbara say in August: Osage County? ‘Am I here, or am I here?’ – which is a very Winnie/Samuel Beckett statement.”

Rabe first directed theatre in 2008, taking on Citizens, one of the two one-act plays comprising Daniel Keene’s The Serpent’s Teeth for STC. She also directed Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play, in an STC and Melbourne Theatre Company co-production in 2011, and most recently directed Anna Ziegler’s Photograph 51 for MTC in 2019, starring Nadine Garner.

Is Rabe aiming to direct more now? “Some people claim I’ve been directing from the back seat in rehearsal rooms my entire career,” she jokes. “Certainly, it was [former STC artistic director] Robyn Nevin who gave me the opportunity when she said, ‘Just do it,’ and pushed me over that precipice. That was also my first creative collaboration with Nick [Schlieper], because Nick was the lighting designer on The Serpent’s Teeth, and we have collaborated several times since.”

“So, there’s a natural progression [to directing]. I am responding to the projects and the things that excite me, and whether that’s performing or directing, that’s immaterial.”

Does her husband Roger offer any salient advice on directing? “Every director I have worked with gives me salient advice, whether it’s explicit or just experiential, both good and bad, and if anything, that’s one of the things that stopped me directing for a very long time. I’ve worked with so many wonderful directors, and I felt unequal to the task in a way.”

“Some of the extraordinary directors I have worked with, and I would certainly include Roger in this, [have] qualities that a good director needs – passion and patience, knowing when not to speak . . . [Those qualities] guide the choices of the things I would direct.”

As for Rabe’s acting, she has often played formidable women, be it Violet Weston, Maureen in Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane or Joan ‘The Freak’ Ferguson in the television series Wentworth. Later this year, she will play the domineering Mrs Danvers in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca for Melbourne Theatre Company, directed by Anne-Louise Sarks.

Indeed, theatre critic Alison Croggon once noted that Rabe is an “Actress with a capital A” who has the sort of presence “that makes shy people swallow hard and lesser mortals involuntarily bow”.

Rabe offers that being tall is a factor in her impact. “Certainly, I’m aware now of a quality that I suspect is me riffing on my father, a tall man [who] knew how to kind of use [his physical presence] and wield it.”

“There’s a lot of fodder there that, for a long time, I think I was trying to avoid. Other people would see it [but] you’re not particularly aware of it, and when people [kept asking me] to tap into it, I’d get angry and think, ‘That’s not what I am.’”

“I’m coming to a point in my life, an age, where I go, ‘Well, f**k it, if that’s what people see, let’s use it!’”