Neighbours actor Ryan Moloney takes on new role

He’s famous for his three decades as Toadie Rebecchi on the TV soap Neighbours. Since it finished last year, Ryan Moloney has been working in farm management, enjoying manual labour and the outdoors, a world away from the studio. Now, he is taking on a new challenge – directing and acting in a play.

He is about to appear in Soapboxed alongside several former Neighbours cast members at Melbourne’s La Mama Theatre. The show, opening this week, riffs on soap stereotypes, cultural cringe and life in the arts.

“People jump to conclusions as to what the soap genre is about and the level of talent those actors have,” he says. “It’s jarring for the audience when we see them as something else. If Toadie was the serial killer, all of a sudden people would go, ‘Oh shit, what’s that?’”

He doesn’t play a serial killer in the play – rather a veteran soap actor who grew up on screen, who is pragmatic, worldly-wise and struggling with a marriage breakdown.

Soapboxed was written by long-term Neighbours writer Megan Herbert – now a cartoonist for this masthead – and co-created with former cast member Lucinda Cowden, who also appears in the show.

The art form of the soap is really well appreciated in other parts of the world, Herbert says, but not here. “It can be a bit of a kiss of death to your career. It’s such a frustrating thing because you’ve got these incredibly talented people in every department working at their highest level, and the thing that results in a what people might consider to be a slightly soapy result is usually time constraints and production constraints,” she says.

To her mind, their skills are second to none. “What happens when you’ve had a career on a show that, on one hand, has given you a huge amount but, on the other hand, especially in a country like Australia, typecasts you as a hack?”

The original concept for Soapboxed came from Cowden, who played Melanie Pearson on Neighbours, appearing in the early days alongside Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan, and then returning about 15 years later. Former cast members joining her on stage include Takaya Honda, who played David Tanaka, and Sally-Anne Upton, who played Vera Punt. Actor John Voce from Goolagong and Downton Abbey and actor and vocal coach Martine Halliday are also in the show.

In the mid-2000s, Herbert applied for a job at EastEnders. “I’m going to be brutally honest with you,” she told the producers. “I don’t have whatever channel EastEnders is on in Australia, I’ve never watched it. But give me two weeks, I’ll learn the characters; I can do this show.”

They hired her on the spot – because they knew the iconic Australian soap and the writing talent required to produce it. “In Australia, if you mention Neighbours is a big part of your experience, it is a black mark against your name. That’s for actors and writers alike,” Herbert says.

There are some notable exceptions to that, of course: Neighbours launched several high-profile careers. Margot Robbie, for example, came onto the show with a specific strategy: to appear on it for a few years and learn everything she could, then head to America. Which she did.

“She still talks really fondly of Neighbours whenever she’s interviewed about it because it was her acting university. But that’s the experience of so many people who worked on that show, and it is a huge loss,” says Herbert.

When originally encouraged to try out for the Neighbours writing gig, Herbert was reticent because she didn’t watch much television. She soon realised that wasn’t the point. “It’s just about storytelling and empathetic storytelling and finding ideas and being able to take parts of your own life and turn them into something. And it ended up being a great fit.”

A tutor at the film and television school at the Victorian College of the Arts, Herbert worries about where students will learn their craft once they graduate.

“Apart from Home and Away in Sydney, there are no long-running dramas. That means there are no middle-class art jobs,” she says.

“People were quite content to allow Neighbours to slip away, and there are a lot of jokes about it, but it was a really vital part of the industry.”

Soapboxed is at La Mama Courthouse, September 15-19, as part of the Hope Punk Climate Festival.

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