`It was great! It was funny! It was about this girl, Lep. I think she was Asian, she was shy, she was standing there like this. And her mother had died and she wanted to make a Mother's Day card at school, and the school bully said she was not allowed because her mother was dead, and I was so angry with him! And when Clint got to school and they were calling out the roll for the new kids, they called his name and he just screamed `Muuuu-um'. He and the other new kids were being shown around the school and they got to the toilet and he needed to go but the teacher said `don't interrupt when I'm talking', so he just had to hold it in but he couldn't! And it went all everywhere! All over the chair and on the floor. That was a good scene."
As theatre reviews go it's not exactly high-brow, but neither is the play, and the reviewer is only 11. Lucy Vaczi had just been to see The Small Poppies at the Sydney Theatre Festival earlier this year and her adult co-reviewer had largely deferred to the child's eye view to capture the essence of this extraordinary production.
Opening in the Tivoli Theatre on Wednesday evening (6.30 p.m. to be precise, to accommodate the bed times of its audience!), the star attraction is the appearance by Geoffrey Rush, the Australian actor who scooped an Oscar for best actor in 1997 for Shine.
The Small Poppies tells the ostensibly simple, yet complex, story of the first day at school. Clint, played by Rush, is a typical five-year-old Australian child. His parents are separated and he's not too keen on his mum's new boyfriend. He makes friends with two immigrant classmates, Lep and Theo. Lep, a Cambodian refugee, is taunted over the "foreign food" she brings for lunch. Theo's father is a big hit with the children when he teaches them "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes" in Greek.
The play, like Australia itself, is a multicultural hotch potch. It addresses the issues of growing up, friendships, family life, bullying - the whole gamut of change faced by children venturing out into the big, wide world for the first time.
It's a hot, spring day in the middle of the Olympics. Rush and the rest of the cast are rehearsing in a youth theatre in Erskinville, in Sydney. "Good morning, children", rises a familiar drone of the teacher's voice. "Good morning, Miss . . .", comes the cheeky chant back from the kids.
A break is called for lunch. Rush comes out of the rehearsal room into the foyer, cigarette in hand. He wants to sit outside. "This room's so depressing," he says. Rush brings out chairs and we settle for a spot in the back yard by the outside lavatories to a backdrop of hissing cisterns. This is no Hollywood ego expecting the star treatment.
So here he is, back with the Company B Belvoir, working again with his close friend and associate of 18 years, the director Neil Armfield. The Small Poppies sprouted in the mid-1980s when Rush, then director of an Adelaide theatre, commissioned David Holman to write a piece on the first day at school. After what Rush describes as a lot of "poking around the grubby repertoire of the classics", he needed "a tonic, to do something quite pure, and quite innocent".
The research, conducted in about 12 schools with very different economic, social and cultural backgrounds, was an exercise in watching and listening to children. "The play was always intended, from David's point of view, to give back to them their story," he says. "There's a glow to it without being sentimental."
His own first day at the South Girls and Infants School in Toowoomba, Queensland, in 1957 was a shock. "I went hard. Day one (he slaps his hands) into kindergarten, never been to prep. It was home with mum for four years and 11 months and then `bouf!'. Kids are absorbed into it now. Big school doesn't loom as a major, traumatic thing. But they do go through that steep learning curve of reading and writing and concepts, socialisation and friendship, and bullies. This is a rare play because it addresses all of that, and to be shared by their parents and teachers as well."
Rush would have liked more children to have seen the show at the Sydney Festival. "If it gets a kind of `for kiddies' image then parents sort of think `oh, it's a childminding event'. Kids enjoy the play for what it is: it's got the poo jokes, the bully, the stuff that they just know, and the connection at that level is just immediate." On another plane, kids suss that the play means something to their parents. "You hear them suddenly go `Why's mum weeping?' There's something about how it digs up and stirs the waters of your own childhood, I think."
OVER the past few years Rush has spent a lot of time in Britain, and some in Ireland. "I'm always astonished how there's always some reference to Neighbours and Home and Away when talking about Australia. I don't think the breadth of the society's been appreciated. It's not just a sprawling, sunburnt, far away, slightly yobby, sporty nation. There's actually a whole complex history that's happened since post-World War Two migration that's had a massive impact on this country. It's changed the Australian identity enormously."
While shouting for the home team of Australia, Rush is remarkably modest about his own abilities and achievements. Of The Small Poppies, in which the cast of six play some 20-plus roles, he says: "I only play a kid all the way through; they all double up as other roles."
And when asked if winning the Oscar was the high point of his career so far, he laughs loudly then says, almost quietly: "It was a celebration of a film, and I suppose to a degree a performance." He adds: "I wouldn't even say it's a blessing or a curse. It did certain things to my life, my career, because nothing else I'd done up to that point had had that much attention focused on it. But you move on and try to find new stimuli and don't let that become the benchmark because it wasn't."
Rush had worked predominantly in the theatre until then. "I took a left-hand turn on a road somewhere. I thought I was going that way but I suddenly went the other way, and kept going that way."
A flood of film parts came in after winning the Oscar. The list is impressive: Les Miserables, Shakespeare in Love, Elizabeth, The House on Haunted Hill. Last year he earned an estimated 11.3 million Australian dollars (£5.6 million), putting him in second place alongside Nicole Kidman in a survey of Australia's top-50 earning entertainers. (Cate Blanchett, his compatriot co-star in Elizabeth, ranked only seventh.)
Shakespeare in Love was "the greatest party to be at every day because of the size of the cast and the eclectic cast", he says. And in perhaps another display of modesty, or just reverting to his regional theatre persona, he reserves some of his highest praise for the less glitzy actors, those who played Shakespeare's troupe. "They were all strongly regional and proud of it. They blew the luvvie myth out of the water for me . . . Tom Wilkinson, Jim Carter."
Great memories are made of productions like this, but when The House on Haunted Hill is mentioned his voice tenses as he lets out a loud, Helfgott-type laugh. The Hollywood, schlock-horror remake of the eponymous 1958 movie was panned by the critics. Did he have any regrets about doing it? "No. None at all. It was an interesting American character part that I was quite drawn to." Really? "It did what they (the producers) wanted it to do. They made it for $15 million and it made $40 million in two weekends." Now we're getting down to the nitty gritty. "It's the most commercial taste I think I've ever had and it was", he pauses, "it was to go on that ride and see what that ride's like." He relaxes, and laughs: "But it's not my norm."
The Small Poppies is his first engagement after a five-month break following "three pretty giddy years". His latest film, Quills, based on the writings of the Marquis de Sade, will be released in the US later this year. It's another of those roles he's drawn to - "the outsider rather than the central, heroic figure".
How does he respond to one comment that the film was "Sade without sadism"? "The sadism's there. Everyone expects sadism to be cruel, whereas sometimes sadism is witty. It depends on how you get your kicks in basically humiliating other people. You can do that through wit, or through superiority, or through power and Quills plays it at all those levels."
An ability to play at all levels is what has catapulted Rush to the pinnacle he has reached. "He just throws himself into everything. He has an extraordinary quality. He's extraordinary looking, very talented as an actor and a director, and very intelligent," says Libby Higgins, who worked as a stage manager with Rush in Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney theatre companies. "And he's just not into the money, money, money. He's very dedicated to the theatre."
After Dublin, the show returns to Australia for a run at the Melbourne Theatre Festival later next month, where Rush's five-year-old son will see The Small Poppies for the first time. Then he starts working on a new Australian film Lantana, a "prickly, thorny film about marital fidelities and infidelities" written by Strictly Ballroom's co-writer, Andrew Bovell.
The Small Poppies opens in the Dublin Theatre Festival in the Tivoli Theatre on Wednesday