"I'm big," she volunteers, "on the quality of silence in the theatre, and that stems directly from my experience of silence in therapy.
It's one of the most magnificent rivers in the world, with bushland running all the way down to the water and has a particular quality of silence broken only by the occasional lyre bird or kookaburra).
As Esther Mills, in Lynn Nottage's "Intimate Apparel" (2004), an expert seamstress who succeeds in her lingerie business but fails at love, Davis exhibited a particularly arresting reserve, a quality of silence that translates with equal power to her screen performances.
"I have been quite involved with the Quakers, and the walls have a simple aesthetic which brings out that quality of silence and stillness you find in some Quaker Meeting Houses".
There's a quality of silence to the best audiences for theatre – indeed, for live performance in general – this side of the Atlantic that is less frequently found back home, not least in a play-going climate these days, where possible infractions include not just talking or eating during a performance but all manner of technological intrusions.
But The Quality of Silence (Little, Brown, £14.99) is disappointing: thin and frictionless, its anti-fracking message delivered with the limpid simplicity of the Young Adult novel it would surely be revealed as, were scientists ever to test its literary DNA.
What may not be evident from that venture is the quality of silence that attended the show's opening last week: in a London theater climate increasingly given over to displays of catarrh, the press night public barely coughed or sniffled once.
It was as if my apartment were suddenly plunged into silence, or as if the quality of the silence had changed, like the silence of an empty stage versus the silence of a stage on which someone has placed a single, gleaming instrument.
I suspect it has to do with the particular quality of his silence.
A lot can be gleaned about a performance from the quality of the silence after the final chord.
