A lifetime of pin-ups Barry Humphries still has nightmares about going on stage. He’s always admired the stars who kept battling on
I
was there again last night. It looked a bit like old Sydney as I remember it from the fifties, before they pulled it down in the name of progress. But wasn’t it more like the badlands of San Francisco, that once beautiful city that is infested by beggars and muggers and is sadly now past redemption? It was only vaguely familiar, yet the neighbourhood was strange and inimical. In my dream, I am always in an unknown part of town, well off the beaten track, a no-go area of half-demolished buildings and menacing tatterdemalions. I am very frightened. Then a stranger approaches me and whispers, ‘Haven’t you got a show tonight?’ Of course I have! It hits me like a thunderbolt. But what time is it? And how far away is my theatre? I rush out into the street, brushing aside those clawing hands of the canallas which want to keep me there. Taxis slow down, then at the sight of me speed off. I look down at my clothes. My feet are bare and I am wearing filthy rags. But at last I hitch a ride and ultimately, at the slow pace of nightmare, I reach the theatre. But it’s unfamiliar. Moreover, it’s being demolished. There are workmen on scaffolds hammering at the remaining masonry, exposing what was once the stage and half a stuccoed proscenium. A man up a ladder in a yellow hard hat (for a change, not Boris) calls out to me, ‘Where were you? We waited!’ And then, covered with sweat, I wake. We don’t need what Nabokov called ‘that Viennese quack’ to help interpret this nightmare.
30 The Oldie July 2021
I have it every night, always with small variations. I find myself in what used to be called ‘the stews’ of a great city. The inhabitants are progressively becoming less threatening, more friendly. I recognise some of them from previous nightmares – as one does repertory players – but although they are as horribly malevolent as before, they greet me as one of them; they regard me with expressions of lewd complicity. That’s even more terrifying. I might easily have told you about this dream before because I have related it to quite a few people, but it doesn’t matter; after all, it is a recurring dream. Last night I went to the theatre for the first time in a couple of years. It was the magnificent Lisa Dwan in Beckett’s Happy Days at the Riverside. This is theatre as it’s meant to be and so rarely is. I sat in the socially distanced audience, watching a play about isolation (among other things), and gazed longingly at the stage I might never again inhabit. If lockdown didn’t exist, and COVID were merely a nightmare, would I ever again step fearlessly before an audience? Losing one’s nerve is the actor’ s greatest fear. If today I had to audition for a show, and if age didn’t disqualify me, I would be told by a voice from the darkened stalls to come back when I’d had more
Fame took longer to reach Australia even longer than my mother’s Vogue
experience. For such occasions I wrote a clever audition piece inspired by those shifty-looking men selling plastic wardrobes in Oxford Street. They were a common sight when I first came to London, and for auditions I impersonated one of them and sang a little song extolling my wares: ‘I sell plastic wardrobes, rubber rainwear, Mrs-Norris-changes-train wear…’ The arch reference to Christopher Isherwood’s deviant character was rather lost on my auditors, and invariably I skulked back to my real job on the night shift in Wall’s ice-cream factory (Raspberry Ripple division). I still remember with a wince and a shudder the time, long ago, when I told my mother and father that I had decided to become an actor. It must have been like the experience of a gay man announcing his sexual vocation to his bewildered parents. The first thing my mother said was ‘But we don’t know any theatre people.’ ‘What about Coral?’ croaked my poor father. ‘You mean my school friend Coral Browne?’ exclaimed my mother, who had stopped arranging some camellias. ‘Coral always talked about going on the stage, but she went to England, and no one’s heard of her since.’ They were to hear much more of Coral, the future wife of Vincent Price, star in her own right and later muse of Alan Bennett, but in those days Fame took longer to reach Australia – even longer than my mother’s Vogue, dispatched surface mail. ‘But what about all that money I spent on your education?’ My father didn’t
