hair and rocky horror

You couldn't see the musical Hair in Queensland. The nudity was disallowed. 

I saw Hair at the age of fifteen with my parents. We travelled to Sydney to see it. Very exciting to go the theatre in the red light district of Kings Cross (think a sleazier Soho). It was disorienting to be there with my father. After seeing the film Easy Rider (where the freedom loving protagonists end getting their heads blown off by rednecks), his verdict was 'They deserved it.'

It was thrilling to see the songs I had memorised from the album. And wonderful to see the characters of Berger and Woof brought to life. Reg Livermoore had been on children's television and here he was playing Berger 'get-your-pants-off-Berger'. I heard my mother laugh beside me the way she had at the Theatre Royal. 

Then the Be-in scene where the case disappears under a huge parachute silk and then appear with the cloth rolled back all naked. I remember it as a shock. Ok, that's part of being one of the beautiful people, that's the freedom I'm on the side on if I like the music and the jeans and all. if I'd been aware of the concept of dramaturgy, I may have had more of an opinion. The film version cleverly created a plot for the musical. And character arcs. This was just a 'happening', whatever that was. We went to the stage door and I got the boy who played Woof to sign his picture, sigh. He was talking about how he wanted to build a replica of Thor Heyerdahl's Kontiki and take to the oceans. Why? I screamed inside...isn't being on stage in this dazzling city in this unique cultural event with all it's frisson not enough excitement? Well I didn't really think all this - my brain just kind of froze with incomprehension. And fear. And disappointment. 'I'm so timid, I will never be part of the really exciting parts of life.'

It was years later, when I was around 20 - how ridiculous is that that 20 is just 5 years older than 15. We went down to Sydney again to see Rocky Horror Picture Show. It may not have been  banned, it may have been a question of marketing, demographics and economics. I was with Sue Parker (at that time she was considering attending NIDA - we were accompanying her for her audition in fact). I guiltily now register not really acknowledging the enormity of this or supporting her adequately. It was like it was all on the side. I don't remember her speaking about it. I'd like to say more lack of appreciation of the stakes than callousness. Or my usual fear. I would never have had the courage to imagine myself living in another city, studying at a Drama school. And I was sure that Sue could have and do whatever she wanted. My vague memory is that she decided it wasn't for her - and with her multi-talentedness I was not surprised.



 

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. 







 

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.

I don't know what I am doing

I didn't know then and I don't know now. I remember doing a quiz in a women's magazine in my teens.

It was a career-finding tool. You answered all the questions such as do you want to work with people, do you like travel, do you like using your mind, your hands, whole body?The quiz results worked in a table form and in the box corresponding to using both imagination and body there was an empty space. There was no option for this choice of mine.
Mum had sent me to Ballet classes and Piano classes and Jazz dance classes and Art classes - all the things she had never had herself. I could weep now when I think of it. The battles she must have fought with my father to make it all happen. I'd like to go back in time and throttle my nine year old self who gave up the classes. To make more time to play Barbies with a girl called Susan something. For heaven's sake. My mother must have been in despair. I didn't know what privilege was, but perhaps I was also lonely.

Mum had taken me to the old stucco studded theatres of Brisbane a lot. I remember the pleasure and privilege of sitting on the edge of the seat ( the old fashioned flip-down seats. Mum told me to leave mine up and sit on that so I could see over he  heads of the grown ups.

A play about Elizabeth Browning with a live dog onstage. 

Modern Dance. Ah that - I remember a female dancer making a contraction and I was spellbound....oh the emotion to seemed to contain, ah what was the title of the piece, I suddenly wanted to know....what is the story, what is this woman going through, how wonderful a piece of dance that is telling me something emotional...and what a wonderful emotion - at the core of her body, it was compelling. All that ran through my small brain in a bare moment, trammeled up in a flash by disappointment. Because the gesture was fleeting. Just a dynamic to spin her into the next group of steps in a new tangent. Years later when I saw photographs of Martha Graham, there it was, that curve of the backbone - and that hollow space in front of the abdomen, the shape of absence. The grief of something lost or perhaps never found. But I never saw that promise of shape and emotion combined onstage until many years later.

My French boyfriend was widening my horizons - he had me reading Genet and Vian. Seriously, Genet - I was 17 years old. He (Eric, not Genet) had a curmudgeonly critical side which I thought only belonged to the old school Aussie men. We went and saw a Pinter play. I am always ready to be moved and excited when I go to the Theatre. Sometimes my aesthetic tastes go out the window, so strong is my impulse to be excited and swept up in the watching of a show.

Eric thought the Pinter play was pretentious although he didn't use that word. He found the pauses empty. I loved the mystery of it all. The blank emptiness of the space, the sofa and the characters sitting on it.

I saw Kopit's Indians at  La Boite - a wonderful dream-like play with a curious mix of humour and pathos, somewhere. Possibly in a wonderful little architect-designed theatre our English teacher had taken us to . Often architects get theatre design wrong or the building budget ruins their concept with compromise, but this was a little jewell.  La Boite, meaning The Box, was 'theatre in the round', in well, a square. The actors were able to enter from each of the four corners and sometimes via a ladder and a trap door, on a level with the back row and then enter through the aisle steps, or even use the aisles as playing spaces. My mother knew of the  Opera La Boheme but had never been permitted to study languages or even history ( her father said she had to do home economics) and she used to pronounce it La Boh-eet.

I've  just remembered that one May or August break ( August is a short break in Australia and not summertime), I signed up to do a Jazz dance class. I've done classes before, I said to myself, so I'm not a beginner, therefore I must be Intermediate. I had no one to tell me otherwise. A week of pain and humiliation. Actually not a full week. I dropped out. I was staying at Eric's sister's house and working my way through their record collection - Charles Aznavour! Like Piaf, his songs were vivid little movies, and the orchestration so emotional.

While still with Eric I signed on for some workshops at La Boite. We made sculptures with our bodies by running into the circle and striking a pose. One person would start and when the second person entered, their gesture had to be in relationship to that pose, then the first person would change. Each new person that entered, we all would notice the new feeling and possibility in the choice they had made and CHANGE! so the entire picture changed. We were urged to be interesting from every angle - the essential discipline of working in the round.

I've just remembered an exercise the other female teacher at the workshop when I was 17 taught. Standing in a circle, someone had to jump in and become something that would give the opportunity to build an entire picture, hopefully with everyone in the group ending up in the centre. I remember the two women teachers and Salvatore demonstrating. 'Fire!' one yelled and jumped into the circle writhing like flame. 'A hose!' (that was a gently mind blowing moment - ah, not the fireman, the hose), 'Water!' now, 'A fireman!'. Someone became a dog pissing on the fire 'Is this allowed? I probably jumped in as a pointing 'passerby...' with classic adolescent timidity and lack of chutzpah.

There was an audition at La Boite and I got the part - nothing much, nothing much at all. A Yukio Mishima play - a husband and his lover, I think, and much talk of drowned hydrangeas. I played the hysterical, nervy wife, but didn't actually have to play any of that as she was in bed throughout the play. 'In bed' under a sheet on two wooden cubes (classic bare stage design staple). My main acting challenge was to stay awake for my cue and my show stopping ( not that it was great  but I think it was at the end of the show, or before a blackout at least) moment to sit-up-and-scream. I think I wore a calico shift and my long lank blonde hair made me correctly wan.

At some point my french boyfriend ditched me. After much weeping and much wearing of his favourite shirt (out of some kind of rage of appropriation rather than sentiment), opportunity opened in a new way. Another audition at La Boite.
One day (years later) Eric told me this: he has been employed/volunteered into taking photographs of the UniQue (University of Queensland Theatre Company) 'Precious Moments' show. Where are those photographs now? He said that he watched me as I played (among other small roles) a bikini clad lion tamer (the way I recall it, my main focus in this segment was not to be too embarrassed) and that as he watched, he said to himself that he was never going to be able to put that look on my face. It astonished me that a/ he had been observing me so closely b/ that I had anything worth watching about me c/ that he couldn't see that I was just pushing out the performance so as not to fail d/ that he would expect to be able to get that reaction from me (he's a person, not an endeavour) or e/ that he would want it or need it. And I suppose I got a message that, buried under all that was, f/ something that I was enjoyed doing might well make me unviable as a love object.

Going back to a/ and b/. Most things in Brisbane happened with a stoic resignation. As a child disappointment was an old friend. My father's main aim for us children was for us to be invisible, silent and obedient. Timidity was pretty much my middle name. Yelling, railing, anxiety, bitterness and rancour were the unnamed principle actions and emotions for my dad. And my brother and I were encouraged to feel that we were the cause of all unhappiness or at least the salt in life's wound, which helped to prepare my jumpy disposition and an unhealthy self-consciousness in me.

Eric opened my world and also sometimes limited it. I'd say, 'let's go to that art exhibition', he would say 'yes', but not make a plan was given to understand that I would be somehow disloyal if I went on my own.

Somehow or other (My mum looking in the paper for a way to cheer up her rejected daughter?), I found out there was an audition at La Boite. 

The foyer. Normally a place where people in nice clothes stood to drink coffee and eat the amazing La Boite fruit cake slices. Now people are sitting on the hairy carpet tiles, leaning up against the walls. An intriguing girl and a stunning boy. Wow, this is a brave new world. Drama School but an new level. We were to work with a director from Sydney or was it melbourne..he had worked at The Pram Factory, which was in Melbourne. Exciting name. Pram Factory. New possibilities started to be created in my head.

I have zero recall of the audition process. What did he ask me to do? Lindzee Smith. Long black hair. Strong but very present and with you. I'd never met anyone like him. The word sincere seems limp.http://lindzeesmith.blogspot.com/ The next time the chosen cast came together, we sat (what privilege) scattered around in the seats of the La Boite auditiorium. Lindzee looked at each of using turn and called us by our names. Without reference to notes. He called us by our names. It was the first facilitation skill I learned. We were seen, we were present, we were going to do this thing together and he was our leader. So maybe the first good leader role model I'd ever seen, I now note.

Jack Hibberd's ensemble theatre style play, Captain Midnight, with music. We had two aboriginals who agreed to be in the cast. One of the two girls in the crochet blanket from the Drama School played one of the three aboriginal girls...they all work black leotards. Sounds naff, but it was done with as much care as possible. I remember a segment of the play she danced wildly in a spotlight, with her long bushy dark hair making trajectories in the space.

I had a solo song. A woman called Barbara - forgive me! time has erased her last name from my memory - was the MD. She taught me to sing 'Ah' instead of my first hard syllable 'I'. She and Lindzee told me 'hold your head up' and like a petulant moron I said, 'I am'. My posture was almost as poor as my confidence. That terrible way in which a 19 year old thinks they are a piece of shit and god's gift at exactly the same time. And that it's the director's job to get the performance out of them, not their own responsibility. Maybe not all 19 year olds, but certainly me.

I could probably sing you all the songs from the show. The ones I was in. I played the Premier's (?) wife the chauvinist white guy's wife. Again my long hair and ability to wear a long white cotton shift standing me in good stead. 

'I mope around this house all day, 

in search of something to do,

I feel just like a statue in clay, 

or a wingless cockatoo. 

I lounge all afternoon in bed, 

and bathe until my body melts, 

sometimes I wish, I wish I were dead...

there's one consolation though...the wealth!!'. 

I played one of a pack of french prostitutes in one scene - rainbow wig, heightened, cartoonish, camp - and other group roles with quick costume changes. Sue, the intruiging girl, had a larger role and she was playing a guy. I was amazed my her confidence and 'differentness'. I later found out that she had already directed Endgame. Fearless and focused, I found her. Not surrounded by a bunch of limits like me.

I do remember thinking that if I hadn't lost my boyfriend, I would not be able to do this. This. Theatre. It was something.

uni

Okay that's the mawkish youth and childhood stuff out of the way. Now for the embarrassing student years. 

There's a writer called Andrew McGahan who wrote the book (later a movie) called Praise. In his detective novel Last Drinks he described 'Old Brisbane' - a disheartening place - very different to the green, latte-society it is now. Old Brisbane was unfriendly to outsiders, foreigners, basically anyone different.....

Most of the books I read came from the northern hemisphere. 'It was one of those fine May days', I read, and wondered what that possibly could mean.
Brisbane had just two seasons. Hot and PutyourCardiganon.


There was a sense of unreality about the life in Brisbane. It's not the real world. It's not sung about like London town or San Francisco. We are somehow substandard. And we don't speak properly.

I longed to hear foreign languages. My french boyfriend and his wonderful family introduced me to wine (I drank my first glass holding my nose) and music and furnishings that were not covered in vinyl or laminated. There were playful conversations around the table, and poems by Prevert being read out loud. Eric took me to see films by Antonioni, Visconti, Zabriski, everyone with an i-ending name and more. He had me reading Genet and Boris Vian.

At university I learned French (I had studied German up till then) and took French Drama. We did the Absurdists. Artaud, Adamov, Ionesco, Jarry. My major was Drama. There was a practical component. There was a hall half-way along Sir Fred Schonell Drive where we danced to Mars by Gustav Holtz, and impersonated tea bags being immersed in boiling water. Two teachers. Maggie Collins - an English woman in middle life. Black-framed glasses, black and white permed hair. She would lead the classes in a dress and panty hose, taking off her street shoes and slipping on little elasticated slippers that came in a see-thru carrying case called Jiffies. We did the Greeks.....Oedipus. 'It's not dread, it's DRE-E-E-E-E-A-A-A-A-A-D', she resonated from her core.

She had a fantastic teaching technique for Restoration. She dropped a plastic sack full of opaque panty hose on the floor. 'Men you will put these on your legs and roll your trousers up. Women you will bind your upper arms to your ribcage. Now walk!'

We read Endgame and were asked to write a short play in Beckettian style. 

I searched haberdashery stores for fabric samples for costumes I designed for Twelfth night. 

Despite the warm-ups and tea-bag improvs there were no productions. I signed up for a lunch-time production based on the works of William Blake. The project leader lost steam and the rehearsals stopped. I attended workshops led by another student who had us walking around the room 'like we were in warm chocolate'. Or improvising dialogue on chairs.

Then, lo and behold, the amazing Salvatore Marrucci was hired to direct a play called 'Precious Moments from the Family Album.' I think. There was a discussion and most people wanted it to be wild and anarchic and extreme.

We had a giant radio with a scrim that doubled up as a Punch and Judy theatre. There were mad scenes interspersed with random interruptions: men in drag sang Andrews sisters numbers: a liontamer cracked the whip at a deliberately crap-ly costumed lion and men in fishnets and cropped nun's habits (of course) ran roughshod through the audience. Salvatore did the best with us he could and he respected the company in that he took care to serve his brief.

We performed in the 'Cement Box' under the theatre I had seen Greg Rush in. In that theatre I once saw a French company who performed for an audience of four people. The show was good and I was impressed by the privilege of the experience (it helped me know in the future years that performing to a small audience, when it happened, was still a thing of worth and validity). A production of Much Ado was hilarious and the 'we're Australian and can't do it properly so it doesn't really matter how we do it' created a production that was bouncy, imaginative and vibrant. A production of the Bacchae was overinflated, a bit camp and un-intentionally grande guignol. 

In that same theatre, I saw Trevor Stuart (then Trevor Smith) later of Circus and Lumiere company perform Kaspar by Peter Handke. A tour de force. very exciting.

At the QTC I saw Eqqus and loved the horses on their high metal platforms. The more recent London production was not as well-realised in design.

And upstairs in the proper university theatre, I saw a quirky piece of music theatre called Childhead's Doll by Ralph Tyrrell.