“When I was young and working in England, the critics had noticed that a lot of great opera singers came from Australia,” says Robyn Nevin, actor and director with the Sydney Theatre Company, referring to the rich vocal tradition that stretches from Nellie Melba to Joan Sutherland. Nevin’s production of Hedda Gabler, starring Oscar winner Cate Blanchett, will play at BAM from Feb. 28 to March 26, after last year’s smash Sydney run. “And one critic theorized that it was because of the wide open spaces—their voices had developed because there was never any need to contain their vocal expression.”

The same sort of rangy freedom might be seen in Australia’s most high-profile export, its actors and directors. From Mel Gibson to Hugh Jackman, Judy Davis to Rachel Griffiths, Fred Schepisi to Baz Luhrmann, they’re a fearless, independent-minded, globe-trotting tribe, as at home on the stages of their former rulers in London as on the rugged expanse of the American movie screen.

At 62, Nevin has now seen several generations of fellow artists emerge from Sydney’s National Institute of Dramatic Arts (NIDA) as well as from Perth’s Western Australian Academy of the Performing Arts (WAAPA), and she notes that “any young actor in Australia now will be able to speak with a perfect American accent. That has to do with the ambition to work internationally, but also with the fact that Australian actors don’t really have an accent—it’s not very precise or clear or deliberate or defined. In the main, we’re just kind of lazy about it. Which is why I think we can work quite readily in other people’s accents.”

They may be nonchalant about their own heritage, but actors from Oz aren’t slackers.

“We have a very strong work ethic, but at the same time we’re very relaxed about it,” says Nevin. It’s a paradox that can be explained rather simply: “We’re used to working hard. On the stage, union regulations came in a lot later than in other cultures, so we just worked from early in the morning until three in the morning. When I was in an ensemble in the 1950s, we rehearsed in the day and performed at night. The experience here is quite rigorous. At the same time, there’s a less obvious hierarchy; it’s more egalitarian.”

This Hedda Gabler makes a good demonstration of the latter quality. Blanchett is a star of London stage and Hollywood film, to say nothing of the glamour magazines, but like Jackman, Griffiths, Frances O’Connor, and Miranda Otto, to name a few recent examples, she keeps a foot in her home of origin. And when she returned last year to do a play in Sydney, she was insistent that it be business as usual.

“When I was first talking to Cate about a play, she was very definite about the company not providing a vehicle for her to do,” Nevin says. “She was looking for a serious work experience, to be tucked away in a rehearsal room doing something solid. She wanted to come back as a working actress.”

Even so, while Hedda Gabler relies on a strong ensemble, it is very much centered on its mercurial lead. And it has been played by many of the great actresses of their respective generations, from Eleanora Duse and Alla Nazimova to Ingrid Bergman, Janet Suzman, Diana Rigg, Isabelle Huppert, and Fiona Shaw. A 1975 film starred Glenda Jackson. Closer to home, Judy Davis played the role in 1986 at the Sydney Theatre Company.

Nevin herself assayed Ibsen’s heroine “a long time ago,” as she puts it, but that credit “bore almost no influence at all on this experience of the play.” Job description is one reason: “As an actress, you use a certain part of your acting faculty for the time in which you do it, and then you dispense with it; it’s no longer of any use. And acting is so selfish. When I’m directing, I’m using very different parts of my brain.”

But the distinctive slipperiness of the role may be another reason each Hedda is different, Nevin notes: “The narcissism of Hedda does encourage you as an actress to be so self-involved.”

For Nevin, the national contrast between Australia and Norway, the play’s original locale, may finally be less significant than the palpable clash of eras.

“You get a real sense of her living in the cage of the 19th century,” says Nevin of the tamped-down fire that Blanchett brings to the role. “We know that inside that gorgeous gown is a modern woman. And there’s something about that tension of seeing her placed in that setting that is very exciting to watch. You can feel the extraordinariness of this creature held in that cage.”

For tickets, please call the BAM box office at 718.636.4100.