Paul Capsis’ Canberra fans will doubtless be delighted by the weird characters he’ll be playing on stage at the Canberra Theatre soon in Peter and the Starcatcher, a spectacle bursting with 100 characters, music and technical wizardry.

I first saw Capsis playing and performing in an Indonesian play called The Cockroach Opera in 1992 but later in the 90s he appeared at the School of Arts Cafe in Queanbeyan channelling Shirley Bassey and Janis Joplin, and later in the hit show about his Maltese grandmother, Angela’s Kitchen, at the Street Theatre in 2012.

Since that, Capsis has hit the big time, starring flashy shows like Rapture: A Song Cycle of Desire, Ecstasy, Murder and Mayhem, at the 2021 Sydney Festival, while often coming back to straight plays like Ionesco’s The Chairs, as he did last year.

When I catch up with Capsis, he’s on dinner break from a tech-dress rehearsal at the Canberra Theatre, where the show will premiere.

He faces the approaching season with a mixture of joy and melancholy – joy because he’s in the first Australian production of such a huge international work and melancholy occasioned by the recent death of his mother Mary after a short battle with cancer.

“I’m still coming to terms with that,” he says, explaining that earlier in the year he had been in Louis Nowra’s Lewis Trilogy at Sydney’s Griffin Theatre, where his mum came to see him in Cosi.

“Literally the moment that season finished, mum started to get sick and she went very quickly,” he says.

“Because of this, Peter and the Starcatcher has been very healing to me,” he explains.

“It is,” Capsis says in understatement, “quite a complex plot.” It’s set well before either Captain Hook or Wendy Darling appear, although Wendy’s mum Molly is centrestage on board the good ship The Neverland, carrying Molly, her nanny and three orphan boys, including a nameless orphan known only as Boy. Guess who he’s going to become?

“It’s a beautiful story which got a lot of comedy and a lot of funny business going on,” Capsis says. “The territory of this work is familiar to me… I’ve worked a lot with Windmill Theatre in Adelaide on productions of Pinocchio and Rumpelstiltskin, so I feel genuinely comfortable being in a show that involves singing and moving and being evil and innocent.”

As usual, Capsis gets the weird parts, “a very nasty sea captain — I’ve never played a pirate before— lots of other delicious roles and in Act 2, a passive-aggressive clam.”

Otis Dhanji plays Boy/Peter, Olivia Deeble is Molly, while comedians Colin Lane, Peter Helliar and Capsis play Black Stache, Smee and Slank. The director is co-founder of the Dead Puppet Society, David Morton.

“I’m having a ball,” Capsis reports, “and I get to be a puppeteer, handling fish and birds and having all sorts of fun using a variety of different puppets.”

Central to this production will be an extraordinary design that helps the story unfold.

“I was already very familiar with the Peter Pan story,” he says, “but this one is a surprise. It’s magical. You go on this journey with these characters and you meet lots of other characters who are not in Peter Pan.”

One who does appear in both stories is Mr Grin, the crocodile.

“Yes, we have a giant crocodile on stage,” Capsis says. “It’s absolutely massive and I get to play its tail.”

Peter and the Starcatcher, The Playhouse, October 15-27.