what are you doing for the rest of your life

The best of the times with French boyfriend Eric were the long drives home from glamorous Indooroopilly to my slack suburb of Mount Gravatt in his Peugeot 505. There was a Jazz programme on the radio and a guy with a mellow voice would incant the names of the instrumentalists and that was of course Theolonious Monk....the  unmistakable sound of Stan getz on clarinet...... The slot was called Round Midnight. They had a sting of Bill Evans playing  'What are You doing for the Rest of Your Life' on a blurry, chime-y electric keyboard. So romantic and sophisticated. So NOT the world of my father lying on the floor in front of the TV watching the Black and White Minstrels - wrong in so many ways.

Well after the three years of the BA, what was I going to for for the rest of my life?

I didn't want to do the Honours year of my BA - there was no more Drama option. I would have to read Milton. Milton. Paradise Lost. What was that going to do for me? (sorry fans of Milton, no one had inspired me with all the reasons why that might be meaningful. Perhaps the meaningfulness actually unnerved me).

I never thought in terms of what I wanted to do - but what I didn't want to do. I was afraid of science, maths, the world of real work. I couldn't think of a single job I wanted to do. I didn't want to dance because I was told it was impossibly hard and lonely to be a prima ballerina and being in a chorus didn't seem to me to offer much chance of self-expression. I wanted to be the one doing that contraction, but doing it so that people were moved and amazed as I had been in that one fleeting moment when I was watching modern dance aged eight.

My mother proposed a European tour - really? God she was amazing. The phrase 'gap year' didn't exist in 1972 Australia. I went with my dear friend who was a professional actor. We sat in the front row and watched Ralph Richardson and Michael Gielgud in something - I remember Geilgud's character was given socks and sandals to wear. I was astonished that my friend fell asleep - these guys are Gods and you're the actor! I could see the quality of these wonderful performers but I didn't have the cultural context to really get the play. In the grand West End building, it's naturalistic staging seemed jarring in the wrong way and just old-fashioned.

By now I had had a taste of epic and ensemble theatre though I didn't know it was called that. The intimacy of La Boite's in-the-round or sometimes thrust space with it's necessarily non-naturalistic settings or skeletally naturalistic settings had woken up my taste for visual and imaginative work. Although I would not have been able to put that in a sentence for you at the time.

I went to the RSC and was shocked. Witty Elizabethan characters behaving like tidy middle class folk. Leafy gobos for the forest - but no atmosphere of a wooded space - and sincerely I could not hear the text. I could have understood the lack of vital physicality if the text were spellbinding in its excellence. Maybe I was unfortunate to see just one poor production.
I saw Terence Stamp - my first movie star onstage. The Lady from the Sea, I think - the hallmark Ibsen formula, after ten years the mysterious character spoken about so much in the first half appears! I was so ready to be astonished by his entrance. My mother had loved Stamp - his blue eyes! she would gasp. He was stunning on the huge cinema screen, but entering into the huge expanse of the old Round house in Chalk Farm, he was poor on his feet and had zero presence. 

My friend  and I diverged as planned, he went up to Scotland and I traveled on to Europe alone. I reveled in the paintings and sculpture I was seeing. I saw little theatre, though, usually too timid to go our at night. I did see an amazing Servant of Two Masters in Berlin. An unforgettable harlequin dressed in a suit like a broken down Frank Sinatra. 

I could weep now to think that I might have been at Le Coq school in those days. But I was an ignorant little Australian girl from a dumb suburb and a very nervy one at that. Signing up at a foreign school with a bunch of hungry strangers would have unhinged me, I think. Instead I stomped the streets of Paris every day. I haunted Pere Lachaise and looked at the graves of the dead greats. I took photographs trying to borrow some artistry from my ex-boyfriend Eric and thinking of Henri Cartier Bresson. With my 2 and a quarter square format Ricohmatic I took photographs capturing the quirky and the bleak and the kitsch, knowing that I would never really become any good with the camera.

After nine months I came back because my mother said that a friend was opening a musical he had written at La Boite.