Working a Miracle

Clare's love affair with acting has brought her a diverse range of roles but perhaps one of her more intriguing and demanding roles is that of the heroine mentioned in the prelude of this feature. For those unfamiliar with Helen Keller's story, Helen lost the use of her sight and hearing due to a bout of Scarlet Fever when she was just 19 months old. The aftermath left an angry Helen submerged in a world of darkness and silence unable and unwilling to connect with anyone. This was until she met Anne Sullivan, a school teacher who mentored Helen and taught the wilful young girl how to communicate by touching the lips of other as they spoke and by spelling letters of the alphabet into the palm of Helen's hand. Through determination, Helen Keller became a well renowned speaker and author, drawing on the experiences of her own life to motivate others and to make her name in history as one of the most inspirational figures ever. In 1962 playwright William Gibson wrote a moving drama entitled The Miracle Worker about the astonishing life of this astonishing woman and during the course of her extensive theatrical resume, Clare found herself with the undoubted honour and challenge of playing the lead role as she took the play on tour. "There were two different approaches actually three different approaches for preparing for a role like Helen Keller," Clare explains when asked what steps she took to take on such a task, "one is you have to take into account that she was a real person so your performance is a biography of her life and you want to make sure that you do that person justice. It's not someone you’re creating, you don't have the liberty to decide 'well she felt this way here or she felt that,' so you need to study her life and the stories and literature that she wrote that's been left behind to really understand her personality and her character."

"The second part, obviously she is deaf and blind so you have to think as an actor how are you going to make yourself, and the audience and the other actors around you believe that you're deaf and blind for this two-hour period while you're performing," she continued, " and with that I would walk around and I had sunglasses that I had painted black on the inside, and would do things like go to meals, go to classes, walk around New York city with a friend where I really couldn’t see to deprive myself of that sense. With the hearing, it was a little more difficult. The thing I found best that worked for me to kind of mimic being deaf was going under water and when you're under water and your eyes are shut and you can't really hear, you hear muted noises and you can maybe see glosses of things when you open your eyes. So I would just try to spend time under water like in the bathtub you know and think about how that would feel and that may sound bizarre but that was the closest I got to depriving my own senses with the resources that I had. The third aspect of playing her was just you know through studying her life gaining an understanding of where she was emotionally and the different points in the script because the story chronicles her going from this wild child that doesn't understand what anything is in the world around her to like actually learning to talk you know, to sign with her hands and to sign speak. Every once in a while there are characters you really connect with and you can't necessarily put into words why, she was always a character that I connected with."

Stepping up to the plate to play such an important character must go down on the Clare Kramer CV as one of her proudest acting moments to date surely, "Oh definitely!" Clare enthuses, "That was the first time I remember my parents came and saw it and my mom was like that was when I realised that you should be an actor and that I knew I had made the right decision to choose acting over dancing. Roles like that are few and far between and I still have yet to have a role of that intensity on film or on TV and maybe I never will but I knew I had to play that part since I was growing up and I was growing and I wasn't going to be able to pull off you know twelve or thirteen much longer so it was really important to me that I got the chance to do that and definitely one thing off the list that I wanted to do."