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By Miriam Cosic
The Weekend Australian, Edition 1, Saturday 11th March 2000
Having spent 10 years muttering into her lapel, "Zero Oscar, 181 receiving'' as Norika on the popular television series The Bill, English actor Seeta Indrani is now exploring other, edgier aspects of her craft.
Last year she toured England and Italy with the acclaimed Rambert Dance Company, playing the Spanish Woman in Cruel Garden, a piece based on Garcia Lorca's poetry, devised in 1979 by Lindsay Kemp and Rambert's Christopher Bruce. "I had a huge monologue, in Spanish, which had to embody the grief of all those women who lost their sons in the civil war,'' says Indrani. Before that, she danced at Glyndebourne in Peter Hall's production of Orfeo ed Euridice. And she has just played Prince Orlovsky - narrating and singing in German, not a language she knows - in Die Fledermaus for the Carl Rosa Opera Company. Not a bad curriculum vitae for a girl who got her first show-business break dancing in feline costume in the hit musical Cats.
Now Indrani has her eye on the Australian scene. She has visited twice in almost as many months, seduced by the weather and the lifestyle, and is sussing out collaborative possibilities here. "One of my ambitions before I die is to live in a country, for a while at least, where the weather's good,'' she says wryly. "I could get used to seeing blue sky most of the time.'' She has thrown herself into Australian life. She modelled a hip young designer's clothing at Melbourne's fashion festival, was co-opted into a photo shoot with the St. Kilda AFL team, and rode the police float at the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.
A self-confessed workaholic and inveterate class-taker, she has staggering reserves of energy. Within hours of arriving in Sydney - before zigzagging between Auckland, Melbourne, maybe Queensland, maybe Central Australia - she had found a yoga class near her hosts' house in Bondi and spent three hours folding and unfolding herself before getting her first Australian sleep. The next day she found a ballet class. "I'm a bit of an eternal student, which is a really hackneyed phrase, but there are loads of things I want to learn,'' she says. "And I don't just skim the surface of something, I really like to learn something properly. I'm not interested in doing things I'm not very good at, that I don't have a flair for, and once I do have a flair for something, I pursue it to the limit of what I can do with it. "Sometimes it's just to see how good I can be. I am quite good with flamenco; I do professional classes when I'm in Spain. And there was a point when I was thinking: `See how good you are, Seeta. See how far you can take this.'''
The seeds of her perfectionism lie in her past. She came from a humble background. Her parents were immigrants - her mother from Ireland, her father an Indian from Guyana - and she was a swot at school, excelling academically while keeping more or less to herself. For a while, she intended to become a mathematician - her sister did instead. Rare for a swot, Indrani was also an athlete, representing London in meets, and she attended a youth club where acrobatics, yoga and African dance were taught. She fell in love with movement. "At the time the London School of Contemporary Dance, also known as The Place, was taking people who did not necessarily have a very strong dance background, but who they thought would be interesting,'' she recalls. "They obviously saw something in me, and I spent a couple of years training there, danced for a bit, and promptly became an actress.''
The Place gave her grounding in arts she had not been exposed to as a child. "I had hardly ever listened to classical music before, and we were not only listening to classical music, we were listening to contemporary music - Ligeti and Aaron Copland and all those very difficult composers. "I trained in the Martha Graham technique. It's a very dramatic technique so, in a way, it was a perfect preparation to be an actor. One only then had to do voice training and learn how to find your way around a script. Graham called her pieces dance dramas.'' Her first job, in Cats, was something of a shock after her rarefied artistic education. Six months after leaving that, however, she was working at the Royal Shakespeare Company - which she attributes to good fortune as much as hard work. "If you dance, you are not taken seriously as an actor in England - I don't know if it's the same here. Certainly, you aren't taken seriously as a serious drama actor,'' she says. "It was the same being in The Bill. I had to re-establish my credibility a bit.'' She was doing musicals at the RSC - Poppy and Peter Pan - but they were highbrow musicals. "And I did loads of little plays. I was this young thing with all these actors and intellectuals. It was amazing, but really terrifying.''
During the next few years she did all kinds of work, including radio drama, which she particularly loved. Seduced early by flamenco dancing, she had her own company throughout her time on The Bill. For a whole season she pegged away at her day job, then performed in a tabla, a Spanish cabaret, at night. "Sometimes I'd be at work at 7am, and I'd still be dancing at 11 o'clock at night.'' The Bill was bread and butter, and a lot of fun, but eventually it had to go. Unable to stop herself taking on new projects, addicted to taking class, and working long hours on the set every day, she found herself missing out on a private life.
Though she is still seen on cable reruns of the show, she has moved on to wider pastures. She is returning to England for a regional tour of Die Fledermaus, and then, who knows?
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