My stage fright

A lifetime of pin-ups

Barry Humphries still has nightmares about going on stage. He’s always admired the stars who kept battling on

Fame took longer to reach Australia - even longer than my mother’s Vogue

Iwas 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.

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 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

Clockwise from top left: Coral Browne; Margot Robbie; Max Oldaker & Joy Beattie, The Desert Song (1945); Angela Lansbury

actually say that, but his eyes said something like it.

The worst part of all this was that I was far from certain I really wanted a theatrical life. But it would at least pass the time until I knew what I genuinely wanted to do when I grew up.

Like a character in a Ionesco play, I heard an inner voice repeating, ‘My career is hurting me!’

In my entry in Who’s Who, I put in, under Recreations, ‘Occasionally appearing in shows.’

But this recurring nightmare I have described tells me something else. It says I take my trade very seriously indeed, and demons are stopping me from pursuing my destiny. My beautiful theatre is being razed to the ground.

But I am patron of a new theatre. It is, in fact, a very old theatre. It’s Her Majesty’s in Adelaide, built in 1913 and in continuous use since then. Now it has been gloriously restored and it has become the finest theatre in Australia.

Yet, unlike almost every other theatre in the world, it isn’t haunted. No supernatural occurrence with chill, tenebrous claws has ever attached to its reputation. No ghosts of troubled actors flit about its dress circle.

I can now announce that I have just offered this theatre, in which I have performed many times with invariable success, my post-mortem services. I will become its ghost.

My bones, or their calcified residue, will be deposited in a secret niche in the upper circle, and at curtain fall every night thereafter, my benevolent phantom will roam the auditorium – observing, needless to say, the correct social-distancing protocols in case an audience member proves allergic to ectoplasm.

Because I am a solo act, I know too few of my fellow actors, and see them only at memorial services and benefits. I wish I knew them better, this brave and generous fellowship of players.

My dream dinner party would feature David Suchet, Eileen Atkins, Michael Kitchen, Anthony Sher, Margot Robbie, Angela Lansbury, Rob Brydon, Maggie Smith, David Walliams and Maureen Lipman … and that’s only the B list.

My theatrical anecdotes are few, and mostly relayed to me by Gyles Brandreth. More may come back to me as I stir the murky shallows of memory. But my parents, without much liking the theatre and its myrmidons, often took me to the shows that came to Melbourne. Thus I saw the Oliviers when the Old Vic presented a short season of plays in our town.

I particularly recall Vivien Leigh, piquantly barefoot in Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth. The frisson produced in me by this performance may have been my first intimation of carnal arousal. The Mayor of Melbourne, in a speech of welcome to this glamorous couple, apostrophised them as ‘Sir Laurence Oliver and Lady Leigh’.

At an earlier time, my mother and I attended at least two matinées of The Desert Song, the spectacular operetta by Sigmund Romberg, in which the Sheik, impersonated by the Tasmanian lyric tenor Max Oldaker as the Red Shadow, rides onto the stage mounted on a white horse. Max was to my mother what George Clooney is to yours.

Many years later, I appeared in a revue in Sydney and my mother’s heart-throb was in the cast. Indeed, Max was the star, inveigled from retirement in Tassie to perform, among other songs and sketches, a cruel piece of selfmockery, I’m an Old Red Shadow of My Former Self.

Max, no longer young and unmarried, and with rouged lips which may well have nibbled the occasional pillow, once gave me some memorable advice.

‘How do you manage, Max,’ I once asked him, ‘to smile with such sincerity at the curtain call on a thin Wednesday matinée?’

‘Dear Barry, it’s an old trick Noël taught me and it never fails.’ He demonstrated, standing in the middle of the dressing room in his Turkish towelling gown, eyes sparkling, teeth bared in a dazzling smile. ‘Sillyc*nts,’ beamed Max through clenched teeth, bowing to the imaginary stalls.

‘Sillyc*nts,’ again, to the circle, the gods and the Royal Box.

‘It looks far more genuine than “Cheese”, dear boy,’ said Max, ‘and you’ve just got to hope that no one in the stalls can lip-read.’ I couldn’t help thinking of all my mother’s friends at those Melbourne matinées, their palms moist, hearts palpitating as Max Oldaker, the last of the Australian matinée idols, flashed them his valedictory smile.

As for me, thin matinée or COVIDdistanced, I miss the laughter of all my beloved sillyc*nts.