Obituary & Archive: Margaret Cameron

Margaret Cameron, Opera for a Small Mammal

photo Daisy Noyes

Margaret Cameron, Opera for a Small Mammal

Unforgettable—whether when we first saw her in 1986 at Performance Space in Ulrike Meinhof Sings, directed by Nico Lathouris, or on the mainstage in Jenny Kemp’s productions of Call of the Wild (1989) and Joanna Murray-Smith’s Nightfall at the Sydney Theatre Company in 2000 or, above all, in her own Things Calypso Wanted to Say (1990) and Knowledge and Melancholy: An Autobiographical Fiction in 2004 at Performance Space. We wish we’d seen her later performances and more of her acclaimed directing, which we first glimpsed in Aphid’s 2003 puppet-play trilogy A Quarreling Pair and last witnessed in Chamber Made Opera’s Minotaur The Island, for which she also provided the text for David Young’s composition, in the Aurora Music Festival in 2012 in Sydney’s west. Acting, directing, writing or just being, Margaret was a dynamic presence, at once authoritative and intimate. Her idiosyncratic weighting of words, the lateral lilt of her sentences and that distinctive tone, all at one with her art, will long be recalled and treasured. – Keith & Virginia

The RealTime archive includes responses to Margaret’s work and an article by her, “Art & care: where life and death connect,” which she wrote for us in 2013.

Virginia Baxter’s un-archived 2000 interview, “The other side of Nightfall,” with Margaret and fellow actor Ian Scott, also appears in this edition of Profiler. It’s a wonderfully incisive account of the nature and complexity of acting in general and in response to a particular text, Joanna Murray-Smith’s Nightfall, and Jenny Kemp’s direction.

The text of Margaret Cameron’s Things Calypso Wanted To Say is included in the Currency Press volume Performing the Unnameable (1999).