by Barry Oakley
At 7.30 on a morning in August, the caravanserai leaves Peckham in two cabs for Heathrow, where we’re told the flight has been delayed seventeen hours. We make camp in various corners of the terminal, and at 3.30 next morning we leave, feeling jetlagged already. By the time we reached Sydney we were vegetables. But when I manhandled the gigantic trolley out of the airport, the warmth came at us like a greeting. We were jobless, but all things seemed possible. There was something narcotic in the atmosphere’s blandness; soon I’d be unaware I was breathing it in.
Then we crossed the bridge, with our kids (now down to four—Madeleine, our eldest, opting to stay in London and Justin, our second, preferring Melbourne) and sixteen suitcases, to a flat my agent Tim Curnow had found for us. We had it for six weeks, while its occupant, a well-known Australian writer, was in the south of France. I’ll give him anonymity (he’s dead now) because two of our kids found a bedroom drawer containing erotic photographs and what was either a dildo or a large rubber clothes peg (which is how I described it to the narrow-eyed and suspicious children).
It was only mid-August but the sun shone and Manly beach beckoned and the kids rushed over the road to it, like long-leashed dogs suddenly released. They ran, they yelled, kicked sand and paddled. Then there was the excitement of the ferry—the spray and the seagulls, the heeling of yachts, hydrofoils getting up on their hands and knees and gathering speed—and at night the Luna Park ferris wheel like a huge starfish, sparkling, as if just lifted out of the water.
We found a shabby bungalow in Bondi Beach. I was still in culture surprise—the low frontier skyline, the liver-brick flats, dragonfly TV aerials, the Neanderthal lope of the surfies, with their waterlogged blue eyes, the sagging fences, the who-cares beachfront shabbiness. Carmel’s response was to paint the kitchen, despite my protests that we were only renting. It was done in Chinese red, which made the cockroaches look infernal. Never, especially if you’re from London or Melbourne, go into a Bondi kitchen in the middle of the night. Turn the light on and the whole room seems to move.
There was also the Australian workman to get used to, after relative English deference. After we’d unpacked, there were so many boxes out the front of the house it resembled a fortification. There was a knock on the door early the following morning. It was the dustman, in navy-blue shorts too big for his skinny legs and a singlet bulging like a spinnaker in the wind. ‘Fair crack of the whip, mate,’ he said. ‘You’d need a bloody pack of camels to move that lot.’ Naturalised at last.
We were running out of money fast. Plays of mine were going on in Melbourne and Adelaide, but I couldn’t crack it in Sydney. One day, Max Suich, editor of the then-feisty National Times, met me in the pub for a drink and offered me the job of theatre critic. I tell him I’ll think it over, but he knows I’m bluffing. When I leave, he calls out after me: ‘National theatre critic.’
Before I decide to take it on, I go one night with the playwright Alex Buzo to see Patrick White’s Big Toys. The director concentrates on externals (flashy Sydney décor) while the central weakness is untouched—the working man (Max Cullen) adrift in a comedy of manners. He stands there lost, as if he’d blundered in off the street. ‘What did you think?’ asks Alex afterwards. ‘Terrible.’ He agreed, but added that if judgments have to be made, a facade should be preserved ‘to prevent knocking’.
Facades? Knocking? Favouring the local product? Was this what I’d have to do? Once you become a drama critic, writers, actors, directors—people you’d known in the theatre—regard you differently. You’ve gone over to the other side. People say nasty things to you at parties. Did I want to end up like Harry Kippax, standing alone and unsmiling in foyers? I took the job.
Joining the enemy
My first review—I have the Dead Sea scroll still—appeared in the National Times for 28 November 1977, and it was of Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land. Here’s how it ends: ‘Stewart Chalmers as Foster and Tom McCarthy as Briggs are soundly cast, but as Spooner, Alexander Archdale is not. It is not too much to expect an actor of his experience to modulate his reading into a lower key, so that we’d have the chilling Pinter chamber music at its best.’
That absurd headmaster’s tone! The augustness of the admonitions, the guarded dispensing of compliments! It wasn’t just Alexander Archdale who needed to lift his game; it was me.
The next week I flew to Melbourne to review a play by Richard Beynon—not The Shifting Heart, his best-known work, but another, which I’ve forgotten. But I remember the flight back to Sydney. A gale was blowing. We’d taxied out and stopped, and as we waited, we rocked. We were getting turbulence even while on the tarmac. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ said the pilot from the cockpit, ‘we are about to make the fastest trip to Sydney ever—forty-nine minutes. If you’re okay, we’re okay, and here we go.’ After we took off the wind hit us from the side, whacking us with its bear’s paw, and we were whipped sideways again and again. Coming down was just as frightening. We lurched and jerked, and our wings flapped like a bird’s. After we bounced down into eighty kilometre-an-hour winds, the captain got more enthusiastic applause than Richard Beynon.
I became a neurotic in the air, and a neurotic on the ground. I dreaded first nights. My wife in Sydney, and various friends in Melbourne, soon realised there was no such thing as a free ticket. Afterwards, they’d be questioned about plot points or characters, and sometimes they wouldn’t be any more certain than I was.
But theatre critics have to be certain. And for those of them who’d written plays themselves, the problem was worse. Because they know they were about to witness a production that had been shaped and honed, in which every movement, every nuance, had been considered. Months of writing and weeks of rehearsal have come down to this frightening moment: triumph or turkey?
Usually neither, a mix—a triumphant head on a turkey body, with feet that work but wings that don’t—and exactly what kind of creature that emerges shining out of the dark it’s the critic’s job to determine.
I was bearable to sit with reviewing the classics (I knew the plot) and at my worst with new work, where one must peel back the flesh of performance to find the bones of the script, and then work out if this particular incarnation was doing it justice. For two hours one peers into the play taking X-rays while at the same time pressing the flesh for a diagnosis—doctor and radiographer at once. Watch, listen, scribble, scribble in the darkness, and later find most of it illegible.
All this was daunting enough, but having to review a work by a friend was worse. If you’re not a critic you can mumble a few half-truths in the foyer and rip it apart later with your wife. These reviews took me the longest: softening the punches, searching for redeeming features, but also, impossibly, trying to tell the truth.
I lost David Williamson over The Club and Alex Buzo (knocker!) over Coralie Lansdowne Says No. Would I end up like Bob Evans, who had wine thrown over him, or Len Radic of the Age, hanged in effigy in the foyer because of the bad review he gave Manning Clark’s History of Australia? Or Harry Kippax, dean of them all? I once saw this grim elder statesman lose his balance and cartwheel down the dress-circle stairs of the Seymour Centre, while the two actors in the row in front of me clapped in glee. At last! They were reviewing him.
Certainly the best, and probably the worst, of my reviewing experiences both took place in Adelaide. The best: a Polish theatre company’s performance of Tadeusz Kantor’s The Dead Class in 1978. The dead class was a dead society. Poland was a schoolroom filled with cadavers sitting immobile at school desks, in black, the men in butterfly collars and bowler hats, their faces white, their eyes green-shadowed, as in death.
At the front, presiding, a buxom figure leans on a broomstick under a medieval hunter’s hat, a nightmare charlady. At the side of this grotesque tableau moves the director and creator of the play, Kantor, acting as a conductor, modulating the action with subtle flicks of his fingers.
Suddenly the class erupts into life, putting up their hands, pleading
for the attention of a teacher who doesn’t exist. Some at the back stand on the seats, then the desktops; the class becomes a pleading pyramid. There’s no confusion—every movement is orchestrated. It’s like a ballet of automatons.
A flick of Kantor’s wrist and the class rise, leave their desks, exit, and then return, to waltz music in a grand parade, as the figures bring their childhoods back with them. Each carries a doll-child, black marionettes that cling to their older selves and will never let go.
The classroom is life, where the inmates are condemned to be kept in until the hunter-charlady makes her re-entrance, swinging her broomstick like a scythe: death.
In the program, Kantor defined his work as ‘a theatre of concrete reality and not the art of stage illusions’. But in this fusion of gesture, dance, speech and music, concrete reality is left behind. We were in the realm of overpowering imaginative truth.
At the same Arts Festival I had to review a performance of Oedipus Rex, the most creative I’ve ever done—I had to make most of it up. The plan was to attend the opening of Writers’ Week at the Orlando Vineyards, and then get back for the play. Because of the company and white wine I left late. There was still time, but Dinny O’Hearn, drinker and academic, was driving. He sang Irish songs, and passed everything on the road except the pubs, and as he overtook each car Morris Lurie, the other passenger, shouted encouragement and banged the car door.
Now there was no time left, and more minutes were wasted while Lurie emptied his bladder in the middle of a floral plantation on the edge of the city, his technicolour jacket for once unobtrusive. I got to the theatre after the doors had closed. One was grudgingly opened, and after knocking a row of knees I fell, first into a seat and then into a doze just as the Chorus of Theban Elders were letting loose. I was disturbed by Oedipus and Creon shouting at one another. (Jocasta: ‘What is the meaning of this loud argument?’) I scribbled some notes, paid attention, then nodded off again, to be jolted awake by Oedipus’s roaring as he blinds himself. My review drew considerable praise: ‘authoritative’ was the favoured word.
Lecturer takes off his clothes
A writer-in-residence is someone funded by the Literature Board of the Australia Council to stay at a university college or some other institution for a couple of months to help students with their writing and perhaps do some of their own. A writer-in-residence is by definition a poor writer. No one would run workshops by day and retire to a cramped room at night unless in desperate need of the modest funding provided.
The most spartan accommodation I ever retired to was at Mannix College, when I was in residence at Monash University. It consisted of a small bedroom and study, both totally bare. I’m out of town, have no car, and the campus at night is dead. Nine weeks of this, I thought, and I’ll go nuts.
The college rector, an urbane Dominican, foolishly entrusted me with a key to the senior common room. Depressed by the austerity of my cells, I’d wait for the staff to retire, tiptoe down the corridor, unlock the door, and decant a schooner of red from a cask.
But I was being watched. A portrait of Daniel Mannix witnessed my nightly siphonings, the piercing blue eyes taking it in with amusement. ‘Now,’ the late but legendary Archbishop of Melbourne seemed to be saying, ‘it’s my turn. It was you, crouching cravenly over your stolen alcohol, who wrote that play about me for the Pram Factory in 1971, which had me in a bath, in a bed, and in tights in a wrestling ring? Look at you now, your hand shaking over the tap. Straighten your back like a man.’
After a monastic week, Mary Lord, a Monash tutor in English, takes pity on me and allows me into what she calls the literary bedroom of her house, which had earlier accommodated Christina Stead and Dorothy Hewett. I’m saved.
Soon the manuscripts come in. One student, almost blind, feels his way into my office and leaves a playscript. Another offers a short story which has worrying sentences: ‘Simon flung an arm towards a corner of the room.’ A third, a Chinese student, leaves a long and laborious allegory in which Australia is subtly called Moronia. The poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe, the author claims, has likened it to Swift. What to say to these people? How does one encourage and discourage at the same time? I had to tell the Chinese satirist that there was one problem with his manuscript. It wasn’t funny. But other readers say it hilarious, he insisted. He then read out choice passages, having small convulsions while he did so.
‘Still not funny?’
‘Still not funny.’
‘When I famous,’ he said at the door, ‘I not forget you.’
Mary Lord is preoccupied organising the first conference of the newly formed Association for the Study of Australian Literature, for which academics and writers are converging from all over the country. She is nervous, and has to be fortified by gin & tonics, which she’s taught me how to mix.
As well as innumerable lectures, there’s a program of readings at the Alexander Theatre. May they be ambushed? I ask Mary. She says they may. I’d written a monologue called Scanlan, given by a lecturer who gradually loses his marbles during his address. It was first performed by Tim Robertson at LaTrobe University, Melbourne, where it was advertised as a straight lecture on Henry Kendall, given by a visiting lecturer. For the first few minutes all seemed normal and the students took notes. Then Scanlan becomes erratic, sipping from a hip flask, abusing his audience and taking off his shirt as he heads for a nervous collapse. The most remarkable thing was not so much Scanlan’s behaviour as that some of the students scribbled down his ravings almost to the end, including the absurdity ‘Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth, a firm of solicitors, crossed the Blue Mountains’.
And now, in the person of Max Gillies, Scanlan was to be let loose again. Many in the audience—Max had performed the play elsewhere—knew it was an imposture, but not its victim, A.D. Hope. During a somnolent reading by the eminent poet, a manic figure scurries onto the stage, thumps his briefcase onto the table and ferrets for his notes. Gillies apologises briskly, hustles the bewildered figure from the platform and launches into his lunatic lecture (it was one he was to give all round the country, playing to packed houses wherever he went). There’s enthusiastic applause—from everyone except Frank Moorhouse, who gets far less, and complains that I cheated by bringing in a professional to do what I should have done myself. He sulks for the next two days.
It’ll be right on the night
Despite the fact that by becoming a critic I was a theatrical quisling, the Pram Factory politburo agreed to do The Ship’s Whistle, my play about the inflated English poetaster Richard Orion Horne, who came out to the goldfields to seek his fortune—and as colonial correspondent for Charles Dickens’s Household Words.
Horne, as keen on physical fitness as he was on pentameters, was made for Max Gillies who, in velvet cloak and top hat, filled the part with the swagger and braggadocio he does so well. The props included an incredibly heavy set of parallel bars, which required six of us to bump up the theatre stairs, and a bust of Shakespeare, which I had to bring down from Sydney on the plane, and which I nursed on my lap.
Flight Attendant: ‘Is that a fossil or what?’
‘It’s Shakespeare.’
‘I’ll take him up to First Class.’
‘With me too?’
‘Unfortunately not.’
There were many scenes (too many, I later learned) and a bulky traverse (a wheeled platform that had to be trundled up and down the space according to requirements). The cast have trouble moving it. Barry Dickins, one of the performers, complains that it has run over his teeth, and the rehearsals are rough—normal for the Pram Factory. (‘It’ll be right on the night.’)
I had the usual first-night nerves, and at dinner in Carlton beforehand red wine wasn’t enough to quell them. I went into the lavatory, took a Valium and sat on the bowl and waited. Was there an earthquake? The black and white tiles on the toilet floor seemed to be moving.
But it all goes well—the traverse doesn’t roll off into the audience, Dickins rem
embers his lines, and Gillies, riding his ship to the colonies and roaring Horne’s terrible poetry, is unforgettable. The old world meets the rough-and-ready new one on the Melbourne docks in the person of Alf the carrier, which I only mention because he’s played by the great character actor Reg Evans, who rode his motorbike from Kinglake every night and who later died in the bushfires there.
The hard-to-please first-night audience liked it, and so did the Age’s Len Radic—not enthusiastic (when was he ever?) but positive: ‘uneven but enjoyable’ (how many plays are even?) and ‘should keep the Pram Factory audiences happy for weeks to come.’
Alas no. The Ship’s Whistle was too long and unwieldy (a cast of ten, with thirty roles between them). It closed a week early, maybe because a petrol strike crippled attendances (theatre maxim number one: always put the blame on someone else). But it lived again in Adelaide, where the South Australian Theatre Company did a polished and popular production.
Most boring man in Sydney
My agent, the ever-helpful Tim Curnow, tells us he’s moving from his Paddington terrace—would we be interested in renting it instead of him? Probably not, he thought, ‘—it’s sixty dollars a week, and you wouldn’t be able to squeeze in your kids.’
Our kids were down to four and they were squeezed in quite well. And so began nineteen years of inner-suburban life, in what my father, who’d condemned our Richmond house, called ‘a tenement’. There’s a back lane, where cricket can be played, and where a grumpy old gutter-pisser named Bully lives in a van. There’s damp that rises as inexorably as the rent. Each year, I am soon to discover, the elderly landlord knocks on the door, wishes us a happy new year and raises the rent. I then must shake his hand—not easy, since he has Parkinson’s Disease, and his hand moves up and down. I must dart mine out to catch his, and then his trembles do the rest.