Number 96 will be remembered by many for its raunchy sex scenes and its nudity.
The Australia soap opera that ran from 1972 to 1977 was set in an inner Sydney apartment block and was the first in the world to feature an openly gay regular character.
But for Margi Brown Ash, playing the character Shanie for fourteen episodes, she remembers it as beautiful time in her acting career.
“It was ‘the’ first soap. Everyone was an actor,” Margi said. “Everyone on set were professional performers, rather than TV stars.”
But for the 64-year-old performer Margi recalls it being a time of great mentorship amongst her colleagues.
“We didn’t call it mentorship back then, it was just someone being nice. I was looked after so beautifully. I had no idea how to do TV. I was given rehearsal space, I was given actors to work with. It was just the way it was done. It was a very generous industry. We were not part of the corporate sphere back then. You’d never see an artistic director dressed in a suit. Now we all dress in suits.”
Margi grew up in country towns in Australia with schools who didn’t do plays. It was while in the US on a scholarship that she discovered her passion for theatre. “Had I not done that I may never have been an actor. I just fell in love with it.”
Margi got her first, and last, tv role through working with Hayes Gordon, an American actor who founded and ran the Ensemble Theatre in North Sydney. “He really was one of those mentors. It was out of that that I got a role in Number 96. He was a colleague of one of the producers. What it did was give me the means to leave the country and study in the States. As soon as that finished, within six months I had left. I didn’t build on TV, I was far too interested in theatre.”
That passion for theatre still remains, with still Maggie writing, performing and coaching others, and currently working on a new production, or two.
“Forty years later, it’s just crazy. I think you do what you know and I know it. It’s the way I discover meaning, by creating a show. I write theatre and I perform it. I feel my audience. That feel, that laugh, that sigh, that breath. It’s a finely tuned dance. ”
Margi is working on a double bill to hit the stage in Brisbane later this month; He Dreamed a Train and Eve. She described them as two exciting stories about characters who refuse to accept the status quo. She will be joined on stage by her 25-year-old son, Travis.
“The thing I do as a writer is awaken other people’s stories. We all deal at all different times of our lives with belonging and not belonging, with what is home and what is un-home. We all come across these major themes. Particularly as you reach 60 you are in a massive transition. Because you have gone from the workplace, maybe working part-time now, maybe thinking of retirement, maybe there is no such thing as retirement. How do you deal with that?”