live by night

It's not that I didn't like working in advertising. As proper jobs go, copy writing was creative and fun. Luckily I escaped most of the excesses and chicanery as shown in Mad Men. But you can't compare writing radio ads to playing Shakespeare, or Beckett or Brecht.

I can't remember who alerted me to the La Boite castings. Pre-twitter, facebook and mobiles, Brisbane had a good 'bush telegraph'. You heard about events by ear. At the moment of writing, even the order of the shows is foggy and making a record of this involves an act of deduction and approximation.

I did another show or possibly work in progress with the very daring and creative Sue Parker. It was based on Lenny and George from Of Mice and Men and I was asked to play a grotesque platinum-wigged character with cartoon hips the size of a 18th Century French courtesan's dress. It was set in a boxing ring. I have no memory of any performances of this.

Next must have been Grease. This was a huge adventure back into the culture of the 60's. We learned American accents, we learned to dance together -jive. The boys had their hair cut in DA's and as mine was not ponytail length again yet, mine was cut short for a hopefully gamine look. I played the annoying and unlikeable cheerleader Patty Simcox. I remember the rehearsal to get Greased Lightning set up in a short music intro with the guys bringing the car in four sections on from the four corner exits. There was a big fantasy jukebox that came on and off, too I remember. This was a joyful time - there was an ensemble theatre feeling as for Captain Midnight, but all the more joyful. Being Australia we would meet at people's houses for after-show parties and dance jive and end up in the pool.

Some how, someways I had the happy fortune to be given the part of Juliette. Jennifer Blocksidge directing. Thrust stage use, with a series of levels on the back wall. A chess board for the stage design and Indian fabric details on cheese-cloth shifts and renaissance shirts for the men. I still had short spiky hair, I think we thought we were being very bold with that. The actor playing the Friar was a Czech, I think. He had a delightful accent and once told me not to 'burn my candle at both ends....Cut it in half and burn it at all four ends.' Incandescent advice.

I remember learning the lines in the living room of my flat on Latrobe Terrace. And rehearsing 'Gallop apace' with Jennifer asking me questions and answering mine. The puzzle of playing the thoughts in Shakespeare, allowing the quick succession of images to play inside one's head and body. Shakespeare is like ballet - so much to manage all at once. You can immerse in it, a joyful rigour - that's me putting into words what I never could have imagined saying then. I was learning dumbly and blindly. But learning nonetheless. I'd had none of the emotional stretching and research they prepare students with in Drama Schools. I remember with compassion and annoyance, my resistance to expressing some of the things Juliette says in this speech. And how hard it is to play fresh and innocent and sexually alight all at the same time. The balcony scene was easier. A lovely warm-hearted young man was my boyfriend at this time and he was my Romeo (Doody in Greece). And the morning scene ('it was the lark') even better.

For the first time in my life I developed hayfever which manifested itself with the worst of all symptoms - an irrepressible cough. In the tunnels under the seating I had places stashed with throat sweets and tissues. The scene where Juliet's father thunders at her, I spent bent double on the floor suppressing the urge to cough and basically, choking. An allergically-produced teardrop splashed on the stage and remained after my exit. The woman playing my nurse said she found it very poignant to focus her speech on.

 Sean Mee, now the director of the relocated La Boite Theatre played Mercutio. He gave me my first mimetic tip. 'Stab, then react', he showed me the difference and he was right and I wondered why I didn't know that.

In She stoops to Conquer, I played Kate Hardcastle, my boyfriend the prankster Tony Lumpkin and our friend Paul, recently Kenickie in Grease and Benvolio in R&J played the tongue-tied Charles Marlow. My memories are of an empire line dress, a bonnet in one scene - had to be clever to point it so each four sections of the audience got to glimpse my face. I vaguely remember a bit of RP happening in rehearsal and possibly learning how to use a fan - folded and opened and fluttered and snapped shut.

One evening, during Kate and Charles big scene, I could hear the audience laughing. Great, I thought, they are really finding it witty. What was actually happening was a large (Queensland size) cockroach was stealing the focus by climbing my dress. The audience could see what I could not. Once it reached my peripheral vision and almost my decolletage, I snatched it up and flung it away. I feel ashamed not to be speaking of a lengthy and deep rehearsal process - but the community of the production gave us all a sense of play. Increasing I am hearing of people writing PhD's about the importance of play in performance. We had it as a given - friends working and socialising together brought so much trust and bounce to the shows and directors who had to work quickly in the evening calls employed good humour and intuition as well as craft to achieve well-reviewed productions. Not just because I was in a few shows there, I felt La Boite was producing the best and liveliest theatre in the city.

 

I also had the huge great fortune to play The Good Person of Szechuan - Shen Teh -Shui Tah. Paul as the Pilot and Graeme as the water carrier. I imagine it was something like being in a repertory company. In my uninformed state I found it hard to understand the air of reverence that people always had in their voice when they spoke Brecht's name. I didn't understand the mystique. Something in me felt the rightness of it. The short episodic scenes, the songs. The humanity and humour.
I'm just reading a book called Durov's Pig by, about Clowning and politics (sadly out of print), which tells how Brecht loved cabaret and had a famous clown as his friend and mentor-of -sorts.

I am not sure how well I played Shen Teh, probably without sufficient bite. In the love affair with the airman, I felt more at home with the emotions of hope and disappointment. The moment of her determination seemed a foreign beast to me, good to imagine living like that. Shui Tah had  a half mask made out of felt, a hat and a big white suit. The final courtroom scene was a gift to play. It's making me wish I could go back and do these roles over again, with full awareness of the privilege and opportunity.

All this time I had been watching the career of Peter Kowitz in production after production at the QTC. He was also in two plays at La Boite also. 'Da', an Irish play and a gritty and disturbing Australian play about police violence by David Williamson, The Removalist. This last had so much stage fighting in it, Peter's leg was a mass of bruises and swelling. I had first seen him in QTC's Toad of Toad Hall. He played Toad and I loved his physicality and elan while at the same time being slightly ashamed that it was a children's or family show I was enjoying and not proper drama (these were pre-physical theatre days, remember) - but I can see now I was seeing something I liked. Toad's motorcar was two chairs and I was hugely impressed by the way he 'crashed ' the car. Lifting the chairs seemingly out from under himself and throwing them as if the vehicle had exploded. He was also extremely charismatic onstage.

At some point Graeme and I were in a site-specific ( we never called it that)  production of The Ancient Mariner at a Cathedral in London. G was a sailor, climbing with the other young men on rope rigging set up on the back wall. I made a processional entrance/appearance as Life-in-Death coming up the aisle in the centre of pieces representing the bow and stern of her ghastly boat. I remember trying to fulfill the brief by imagining what Life in Death could possibly mean. My mother exclaimed to me afterward 'Your eyes!' she was quite chilled by me, which seemed strange to me . But such is the power of suspension of disbelief. Combined with white makeup and staring eyes heavily ringed with black.

I got given the part of Marianne in Tales from the Vienna Woods. Rod Whistler directing. It felt like a more mature and complex production. I was not surrounded by my usual 'team'. I think by now G had a job in La Boite's TIE company, under Sean Mee's direction. A tall man with a huge hand used to slap my jaw every night. I could feel it swing and resettle. I guess we couldn't fake it in the round.

The production was a tour de force with a tiny stream running through it to represent the Danube. Other areas of the space were a bedroom and a row of shop fronts (must have been thrust). The river had a tiny bridge and a small tree. I had a scene in a living room, where I sang 'Da draussen in der Wachau' but even the living room was somehow part of the mini countryside.

The actor playing Alfred took me for a drive one night before rehearsals, so we could get to know one another. That strange thing of intimacy on stage. He used to actually tongue kiss me, until another woman in the dressing room gave the simple advice: 'Keep your teeth shut'. The piece was dispiriting as well as rewarding to play.

When I went to Europe again with Graeme, I visited to St Stephens Dom where Marianne knelt and prayed in the play. I guess I was hoping it would feel amazing for some reason. It felt if anything slightly less real to me than the shaft of light in that corner of the stage had felt. And I found and bought the play text in German...which I never read. I must have been missing performing...

act without words

Pre advertising, I had come back from Europe and Sue Parker, the talented and fearless performer director I had met on 'Captain Midnight,' asked me to be in Samuel Beckett's Act Without Words. I read the opening stage direction. Something like 'he is thrown onstage backwards.'

I had done yoga at high school. After several terms I was discovered bunking off from dreaded sports and amazingly was asked what I would really like to do. Dance, I said, or Yoga. In the Yellow Pages my mother helped me find a woman who taught us the ancient vedic art of physical and spiritual harmony and health in black fishnet tights and leopard print leotard. But I hadn't done Yoga for a few years now, nor dance.


Standing on the rush grass matting tiles in my flat on Latrobe Terrace Brisbane, I bent over, tried to touch my toes and didn't get very far. I started to piece together some kind of routine from any dance and yoga exercises I could remember and that seemed relevant. I had no thought that I was 'warming up' or 'training'. We had no concept of 'improvising' or 'devising' or even 'playing'. We improvised in the most old-fashioned sense of the word as in we made do.


La Boite was in the round. That was never going to work for this piece. Nor thrust. We decided to play in one corner of the square. La Boite had no flies. Sue got an aluminium A-frame ladder and we had the wonderfully exuberant Sheldri Weston (art school) sitting at the top of it with the props that were delivered down to me by a fishing rod fitted with a butchers hook.


We had an all-female team. Our stage manager was Jo Hardy. One evening, rehearsing late in the theatre, we had a near mishap trying to strike the ladder. 'Hold it! ' said Sue. 'I've got it!' said Jo. 'Get a man!' shrieked Sheldri while I said with my trademark anxious conservatism: 'Put it back the way it was!'

We decided for whatever reason that I would be best dressed in black tights, a striped top (genuine sailor's matelot top - part of the spoils from the French boyfriend who rejected me) and fingerless white gloves. I had my first encounter with white face makeup. And my first struggle to control my lank hair on stage.


I have zero memory of the performances. The number of shows (one, three?), the quality, my sense of satisfaction, any accomplishment of anything like an emotional journey, post-show comments. Potentially more people were watching Sheldri than they were me.

at la boite/proper job

The last two chapters jump around in time a bit but there you go, such is memory.

I still had no idea what to do with my life when I returned from Europe. My friends from the 'Captain Midnight' production were at film school or art school. My proper jobs to date had been: a Saturday morning job during high school in a high street lingerie shop - before Victoria's Secret, don't get excited, I was selling comfy cotton sleeping shifts. Later my boyfriend got me a job working for a photography business, cleaning slides with toxic fluids. Back from Europe, my actor friends mentioned a casting agent. I got a commercial for a used car commercial. Yup. The director of the commercial was nice, an articulate man and not a mysogynist. Sorry to be so blunt about it but in Old Brisbane there was a lot of it about. Old Brisbane was a pretty scary place for females and people who didn't like football and beer. Even a decade later I saw a man in a florist shop - ah Brisbane has changed, I sighed to myself only to watch him ask , in hushed tones and a gesture for the bouquet to be fully encased in brown paper, as if it were a leg of ham. 
Bill, the commercials director spoke to me over a sandwich lunch on seating inside the used car dealership. We sat and spoke about Europe. He'd hated it but at least spoke about it . A rare thing. Normally just mentioning the continent would dry the conversation up. People perhaps felt defensive or felt you (I) were being arrogant. Or both.

Through my art school friends I drifted into artists modeling. A privilege to sit immobile and be with your thoughts for half-hours at a time. One student had been to my high school - a year or two below me. I'd spot him in the playground. He was beautiful and charismatic. Now he behaved with anarchy - painting in bold slathers over the sketches he was abandoning. He became a painter of witty, intriguing, colourful and distinctive works that fetched high prices. I don't think he ever liked me specially but I have him to thank for me getting my first proper job.

There have been a few key moments in my life that seemed quite accidental but which had huge impact:  English teacher David Sutton handing me a brochure. Gary Carsley pointing me to a job I didn't even know existed. Pauline Walsh meeting me by chance on the Kings Road and leading me to a whole career path. More about that later.


Gary said: there's a job going with that commercials director you did the advert with. I hadn't remembered even mentioning that to him. For a copywriter. I had no idea at all what that was. I went for an interview and was lucky enough to be taken on. I had a tiny offfice. I pored over the advertising awards books and was amazed by the screenings of British cinema and television commercials. The wit, the photography. For two and a half years I wrote commercials and I also provided free recording talent from time to time. And I got to direct a few commercials. Mostly starring inanimate objects such as shoes. But a couple with real people in them. I also got to experience Christmas parties with the receptionist being required to sit on the leading partner's knee. A board room with a pool table complete with a decoration of a woman's breast mounted on a small wooden plaque like an antelope's head. It has a bell in it and they would ring it when they won a round or pot the black or whatever marks a triumph on a game of billiards. Parties where the main voice talent of the day would fill a pint glass with ashtray contents and drink it for possibly money but I think just for the hell of it. Endless sexist racist and homophobic jokes in the office. My direct boss was an island of civilisation and calm. It was his partner to whom all these behaviours were I guess seen as essential to good Client relationships or simply droit de siegneur.  He used to call his secretary, a welsh woman named Susan, 'Chop'. Sue, Suey, Chop Suey. Chop. My name is Susan she would say to no avail.

But in the evenings the antidote. I cultivated my bohemian life. Vintage clothing, mattress on the floor. La Boite.