Robyn Malcolm

In Top of the Lake (2013) she is Anita, one of the women camped in shipping containers at Paradise under Holly Hunter's GJ, and she is handed a speech about an ex-husband that is meant to be funny and sad at once. It is neither, and the fault is on the page: the line reads as written, and no amount of standing in the New Zealand cold can make it sound overheard. It is an odd first proper look at an actor whose reputation rests on making that kind of woman sound like nobody wrote her.

The reputation was built at home, on television, over a long time. Five years and hundreds of episodes as Ellen Crozier on Shortland Street (1994 to 1999), then the part that made her: Cheryl West in Outrageous Fortune (2005 to 2010), the matriarch of a criminal working-class family, directed by Simon Bennett, a role that asked her to be funny and to mean it in the same scene for six years. Australia followed, with Rake and Upper Middle Bogan, and the odd international credit, Hostiles (2017) among them. In 2023 she co-created After the Party with the writer Dianne Taylor and played its lead, Penny Wilding.

What she does is fairly easy to describe and apparently hard to cast. She plays outspoken women in middle age and after, working-class or thereabouts, whose anger and appetite are their own business and not the plot's. The theatre training shows in the body: she stands and speaks like someone who has had to fill a room without a microphone. She was told early on that her career would be mothers and whores, and she has spent it making the first category as difficult and as interesting as the second. She put it this way herself: "Women our age have lived a life, and have got quite angry. They're post-menopausal, so they're in the middle of a whole storm of stuff. They're not living in the middle of a happy ending."

We were disappointed by Paradise, and a little annoyed on her behalf. Campion's series is patient and strange and mostly sure of itself, and it parked Malcolm in the one stretch that is not, alongside Genevieve Lemon, giving both of them lines that wanted to be aphorisms and came out as dialogue. It is not a performance to judge her by. It is a performance to explain why, ten years later, she stopped waiting for someone else to write the woman and wrote her instead.

We have not reviewed After the Party, so we will not pretend to. The account of it, a raw and unsentimental turn at the centre of a six-part drama, is the account of what she has been good at all along, with the speeches taken out.