When Nikki Shiels was growing up she dreamed of following in the footsteps of the leading ladies of the stage. “I really looked up to Robyn Nevin as a performer ... she was a theatre woman, you know? She had a career in the theatre, and I grew up watching her on stages in Sydney and there was just a theatricality to her that I found really inspiring.”

This year Shiels held the stage solo for two mainstage shows: Melbourne Theatre Company’s searing Girls & Boys and the epic feat that was The Picture of Dorian Gray. She’ll play the title role in MTC’s first production next year, Sunday, and in recent years she’s become a mainstay in the calendars of MTC, STC, Belvoir and Malthouse.

Is it too much to suggest that she herself is now a theatre woman? “I’m a theatre woman, I am! I’m a theatre woman!”

She laughs as she says this, but by any objective metric Shiels now occupies the same rare space as the women she once admired from the stalls. In the 13 years since graduating from VCA she’s performed in dozens of mainstage productions as well as working with some of our most esteemed independent theatre companies. She sometimes appears in film and TV but is in the enviable position of sustaining herself as a full-time stage actor. Even as 2020 dealt a crushing blow to the industry, she still managed to headline two major productions – MTC’s Home, I’m Darling and Belvoir’s My Brilliant Career.

Shiels may have entered the theatrical stratum once commanded by the likes of Nevin, Cate Blanchett and Judy Davis. Those actors are masters of the imperious glare and the withering one-liner. By contrast, Shiels excels at playing characters who are more vulnerable, accessible and uncertain of themselves. For all the strengths of her predecessors, no one ever walks out of their shows exclaiming “she’s just so relatable!”

That’s why it’s difficult to imagine a Nevin or Blanchett or Davis pulling off Girls & Boys the way Shiels did. The sole character is a potty-mouthed working class mother with a career on the rise, but the play’s harrowing final act asks the audience to bear witness to a suffering few of us could endure. The Age reviewed Shiels as delivering “a five-star performance”, while elsewhere she was described as “extraordinary” and “nuanced and mercurial”.

It’s also hard to picture Nevin or Blanchett or Davis holding down a hospitality job. But throughout the pandemic, when Shiels wasn’t lighting up the country’s biggest stages she was enjoying work at a Sydney restaurant. Even now, despite her impressive CV and upcoming roles, she describes her restaurant job as “on hold.”

“I would definitely consider going back there. It all depends on time and when things align, but it was a great group of people that I was working with in Sydney.”

It seems unlikely she’ll have to call up asking for a shift anytime soon. At what point did she realise she’d graduated from the role of ‘aspiring actor’ and actually cemented for herself some kind of viable career? “I remember in about 2017 after I’d just moved to Sydney I sat myself down and said: I’m not going to do any small jobs just to make money anymore. I’m only going to do acting. That kind of talk with yourself can be quite powerful.”

Theatre is the kind of job that devours your nights and weekends: “the repetition of it, eight times a week, that’s athletic in its discipline and its emotional investment.” Shiels has always tried to squeeze the other demands of life into the nine-to-five timeslot, but has come to realise that some roles intrude on the schedule. “You have to just relinquish yourself to the rhythm of whatever the job demands at the time, and then around that create space to fill your cup with things that make you peaceful and rested and restored.”

It’s a delicate balance. As her star has ascended, she’s become more aware of the dangers of burning out. “I used to be that busy person, not stopping much and swinging from vine to vine, project to project. Then I hit a point in my early 30s where I was like, oh, I make my economic sustainability through my psyche. Because I am my work, I have to take care of that. I wasn’t someone that would schedule my own holidays or break time for a long time, and now I’m really across that.”

You’d hope so, given the demands asked of her by some of her recent roles. The final act of Girls & Boys was so bleak that Shiels found herself taking showers as soon as rehearsals would finish. “Just to metaphorically wash off, and put on my clothes again and that would be it. That was an action of demarcation or something. And I’ve been riding my bike home a lot, actually, which is a lovely decompress. It’s physical and the cold air’s on your face and I transition back into life.”

In most shows you have fellow performers to lighten the mood backstage, but “there is no backstage when you’re a solo performer. There’s before and after.”

It’s a shock to hear that Girls & Boys was only Shiels’ second outing as a solo performer. It’s an even bigger one to realise her first was this year’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. She was invited to alternate the titular role with Eryn-Jean Norvill for the production’s Melbourne season.

“It was the first show that I saw out of lockdown in 2020 and I was just sort of: what? Everything stopped for almost a year and then I saw the most amazing piece of art I’d seen in a long time and I was gobsmacked.”

The show is easily the most ambitious melding of live performance and state-of-the-art technology seen in Australia for a long time, and it requires millimetre-tight accuracy to pull off. For Shiels, accepting the role probably felt like taking her first driving lesson in a 747.

“I got that phone call at the end of 2021, and I’d just been through a period of having work cancelled and being in lockdown and it was probably my lowest point in the pandemic. I was really raw and questioning the fragility of what we do, and whether it’s viable and is it going to happen again and what is my place in this landscape?”

When she took the call, her immediate reaction was two-sided: “Absolutely, I have to do it, no question,” and “how will I ever do it?”

She did it, though, and her back-to-back solos in 2022 pushed her to grow as an actor. “The fear levels are pretty high when it’s just you. You’ve only got yourself out there so I’ve had to develop a strong sense of trust in my own abilities this year. That hasn’t been easy. But with practice, it’s growing. And of course, I’ve had incredibly supportive teams around me ... when you’re the single performer you’re still surrounded by a great team. They just can’t say the words for you.”

Shiels’ respect for the people who make her job possible seems an extension of the seriousness with which she takes theatre. She grew up in Wollongong, and in her final year of primary school saw a theatre performance and thought: ‘I want to do that.’ She enrolled at a performing arts high school and travelled to Sydney twice a week to put on plays as part of a schools ensemble. Those years fostered a deep love of live performance and provided the foundation that led her to be accepted into an acting course straight out of year 12.

“I went to VCA and experienced the extreme stress of 40-hour weeks and drama school. I was so young and pretty naive to what it meant to be an artist. I was across what it meant to be a performer but VCA really opened up an artistic practice for me.”

Shiels was a “nerd” at drama school, throwing herself into her studies. “VCA was such a rich fertile institution for exploring yourself as a performer and finding your voice and understanding how you engage with material. What’s important to you, how to prepare. It was a really special time.”

She began landing plum roles straight out of school – as a member of Daniel Schlusser Ensemble she delivered memorable turns in Dollhouse, Peer Gynt and M+M, quickly picking up work with other indie darlings such as The Rabble as well as big companies like Bell Shakespeare.

If it seems Shiels’ has achieved what so many actors only dream of – a secure career in theatre – she’s also built for herself an equally improbable side hustle in the lucrative world of TV commercials. For some years she’s had a recurring role in Budget Direct’s ongoing campaign.

Ads pay well, but an ad series? “Actors that engage in commercials, it’s the lotto in our line of work,” she says. “You don’t know why you get one or if you’ll get one and I’d never done an ad until that one, and I feel very fortunate to have been included in that campaign, particularly through the pandemic.”

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She thanks her theatre skills for landing the job, “it was a sort of physical comedy commercial audition, and it’s become a little community of people that work on those ads together. They’re probably the biggest set I’ve been on, they’re huge. We work with an international director and it’s been a really lovely side project, I suppose.”

She has no intentions of turning her sights away from the stage, however. “I don’t intend to stop performing because I love it, and it’s something I’ve always wanted to do,” she says.

“I wanted to work on the mainstage, that’s what I wanted to do, and from a really young age that was my goal.”

Sunday opens January 16. www.mtc.com.au

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