THERE is a fair bet that you’ve seen Maude Davey. 

She is a founding member of the group Crying In Public Places, was in the cast of the  movies “My Year Without Sex”, “The Slap” and TV’s “Summer Heights High”, and regularly performs burlesque with Finucane & Smith.

She’s been artistic director of Adelaide’s Vitalstatistix Theatre Company and Melbourne Workers’ Theatre. In short, she is the mistress of alternative theatre and film.

Davey will be at The Street Theatre soon in “The Flood” by Patrick White Playwright’s Award winner Jackie Smith and it’s a complete change for  her.

“I’ve done a bit of naturalistic acting, but not all that much,” she tells “CityNews”. “This is a straight play, a well-structured drama in four acts.”
It’s set around the year 2000 in rural Australia and it happens in real time, observing the classical unities.

“The language is very naturalistic, it comes out of the realistic tradition that started in the 1960s with the search for the ‘Great Australian Play’, not like the ‘90s and early ‘noughties’ with performance-based theatre,” she says.

“The Flood” is set in the Ball family farmhouse. There are three characters, the mother (Shirley Cattunar) and two daughters, Dorothy (Davey) and Catherine (Caroline Lee). As in an Ibsen play, when Catherine comes home after 22 years on a “white knight” errand, she becomes the catalyst for dark revelations.

The two women, who remained behind, live with the consequences of the past, but now the mother  is falling into dementia and Dorothy is drinking too much.

“There’s a prickly relationship between the sisters,” Davey explains, “and there’s the terrible tragedy of one’s mother becoming demented… Shirley puts in a heartbreaking performance.”

No spoilers, she pleads, but I can reveal that Catherine tries to discover what happened to her father. Did mum kill him? The swine deserved it. Did Dorothy kill him? Did anyone kill him?

You’ll have to wait and see.

“It’s a great role, I love it, I get to run the gamut,” she says. “I have to get the audience asking if I’m a murderess… it’s such a treat for an actor to visit this territory,” she says.

The play has been described as “Australian Gothic” and in one Q&A session, a man got up and told the cast: “I thought that was just a wank, but now that I’ve seen it, I think I know what you mean.”

“The Flood”, The Street Theatre,  August 15-25, bookings to 6247 1223 or www.thestreet.org.au