Miss Jean Batten is a new play that revolves around the tempestuous life and record-breaking achievements of New Zealand-born aviatrix Jean Batten. We talked to performer and co-producer Alex Ellis about what drew her to Batten and why New Zealanders should be more proud of her.

When I heard Flaxworks would be doing a show about Jean Batten, the record-breaking New Zealand-born aviatrix that was at one point dubbed ‘The Garbo of the Skies’, my interest was piqued immediately: not only was the company returning to the same super-specific well that had lead them to success with Drowning Veronica Lake, a show which has toured on-and-off since it premiered in 2011, it would be a solo show about a woman who actually existed, and a woman who hadn’t led a particularly happy life.

The first time I saw Alex Ellis onstage was at the end of 2013. She was wonderful in the play, playing another woman who had actually existed, and a woman who also hadn’t necessarily had a happy life: She was playing Gerda Wegener in A Model Woman, the real-life story of Einar Wegener, the first man to undergo gender reassignment surgery.

There was always something going on under the surface, like she was playing against something within herself, like she was her own co-star. When you meet Alex in person, she has that same quality. She is warm and engaged to the point of being disarming. You want to talk to her and more importantly you want to hear her talk, which is a helpful quality for an actor performing in a solo show.

The idea to do a play about Jean Batten came because she and Phil Ornsby, the playwright and co-producer, were travelling through Auckland Airport a lot. They would look up and see a wooden plane in the departure lounge, and eventually Phil recognised it as Jean Batten’s plane.

Alex recalls this with bewilderment. “That’s the thing – you don’t really even know that, when you walk into the main departure area, there’s this big plane hanging from the ceiling and that’s hers.”

They then asked themselves the question: “Why isn’t she much more famous?”

“So then we decided to do the show, and the more research you do about her the more you realise that she lived this pretty weird life, really.”

She’s not wrong.

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Jean Batten was born in New Zealand, and moved to England at the age of twenty to join the London Aeroplane Club, making her first solo flight a year later. She broke many records over the next six years, the most notable of which being the first ever direct flight from England to New Zealand; a hazardous trip which involved sixteen fuel stops.

After she broke that record, she drifted in and out of public life, and was largely a recluse until her mother’s death. She died in the eighties in Majorca after complications from a dog bite, a fact which was only publically revealed five years later, long after she’d been buried in a pauper’s grave.

The story of Jean Batten isn’t so dissimilar from Veronica Lake’s, from a top-down level. Both were women who had an intense amount of fame in a short amount of time, Alex calls Batten ‘a superstar in the world’ at the time, and both had sharp declines into obscurity.

Both she and Ornsby are drawn to stories where people don’t fit into the box that society gives them. “Veronica Lake was kind of forced into this image and this box, and maybe her way of fighting was to turn to alcohol.”

“Jean is trying to – she did something that was not what society would call normal at the time, and I guess she sort of fought back, she fought the system.

“People are always doing that. There’s always people in the world who are trying to either find their place or society or they just want to be able to do the thing they want to do without anyone trying to stop them.”

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Alex’s performance in Miss Jean Batten is the best I’ve seen her give. Where the script gives her a skeleton, a genre-defined outline, she fills it out. The play is set on the second-to-last stop of Batten’s record-breaking flight from England to New Zealand, where she waits in a Sydney hotel room for the weather conditions to improve, and tells us about her lives, her loves and her struggles.

The Jean Batten that Ornsby’s script gives us is tempestuous, intelligent, and proud. It is Ellis’ brilliant performance that links these together into a human being; she shows us the human, flawed sides to all these qualities. Her tempestuousness is tempered with a sadness, her intelligence with arrogance, and her pride with a constant chip on her shoulder.

When she recalls the flights of her past, it’s Ellis performance that takes us there. She is as thrilled as we can imagine Jean Batten being, and as sharp and flinty as anybody with Batten’s prodigal, era-defining talent had to have been. It’s a star performance, one that the legend that is Jean Batten more than deserves.

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When I ask Alex what attracts her, and Phil, to these stories, she circles the proverbial airport. “Sometimes those kinds of stories, they’re more… you can’t believe they’re real, because they’re so weird and sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, and also because–”

There’s a flash of frustration here. “She should be huge, you know. Everybody should know about the thing that she achieved and what she did, and how she did it.”

Then she’s defensive, but it’s not an act of self-defence, it’s like she’s defending a friend that somebody’s been talking about behind their back. “It’s weird, the more people we talk to about her, when we say we’re doing a show about Jean Batten, people often go, “Is she the one who died?” and we go, “No that’s Amelia Earhart.”

And then that warmth again. You can feel that she wants to share the story of Jean with the world, not the Jean that died in obscurity or the one that was regarded as a pretty bizarre person, but the record-breaking aviatrix.“I feel like New Zealanders should be proud of her, and they should know what her story was and they should celebrate her.We want to remind people of her achievements and get them to really appreciate her.”

In that moment, you can see what makes Alex Ellis a perfect fit for Jean Batten, and what made her perfect for Gerda Wegener and Veronica Lake. These are three engaging, exemplary women that had an indomitable fire to them. Whether it was Lake’s performance in Sullivan’s Travels, Wegener’s art nouveau paintings or Batten’s record-breaking flights, a fire drove them to accomplish that.

Alex has that same fire, and it’s a privilege to watch her, both in performance and in person. Her Jean feels like a living, breathing, bleeding person. Whether it’s in a moment where she reads weather reports, or cries in frustration over a world that neither approves nor understand her ambition, it is deeply and truly felt.

Miss Jean Batten runs at
The Basement Theatre
from March 29 - April 9
For tickets and more information, go here.