Brisbane, summer in early December, 1989
IN MY BOOK, theatre is a foreign country. The only Greek tragedy I know is Australian television’s alleged comedy Acropolis Now. Which is why I pretended to be mesmerised by the form of the horses for the Dalby races when Natalie spoke.
‘You’ll have to go to Bub’s opening night, Steele.’ Nat often speaks in absolutes. There are facts and there are instructions. I kept my head down, searching desperately for a dead cert for Dalby and a way out for me. The last thing in the world I wanted was to go to some play. Especially if Bub was in it. Nat’s little sister and I had pretty much exchanged only frosts since I refused to help Jane – Bub’s formal name – paint her room. Black.
Now, you will say that anyone born Jane is entitled to adolesce into art, gothic-rock music, theatre and a black bedroom. I would be the first to agree with you, but I reserve the right of refusal to be an accomplice. A hard-nosed handicapper of horses like me is entitled to a tiny travelling satchel of the gambler’s basic baggage: superstition.
Natalie repeated her order for me to attend the theatre. I had that dull ache in the pit of my stomach that attacks me when I lose a photo finish, or when a domestic looms from a corner of the lounge. Strange how fighting words erupt when a blue is the last thing you want. ‘I heard you,’ I growled, though I knew there were extremely long odds of me winning this blue.
‘There’s no need for that tone,’ Nat admonished, in a beautifully modulated tone of her own now that she had me on the defensive. ‘I can’t go to Jane’s opening night because I’ve got a three-day managerial course at Noosa. I don’t want to do the course, but I have to. You know how the juniors are breathing down my neck at work.’
Yair, I know. Life in 1989 is tough for a 21-year-old assistant manager, fruit and veg, in a large supermarket chain. Sometimes – quite a lot actually – I’m grateful that I haven’t had a regular job since I was warned off all racetracks for life, over what everyone, including punters who don’t know what the word means, call the Brisbane Handicap ‘fiasco’. Good to know your partner is always there for you when you are short on vocational stress.
I grabbed at a long shot. ‘I’ll fall asleep. How embarrassed will you and Jane be then?’
‘I don’t care,’ Natalie said. ‘This is Jane’s big chance. La Boite is almost a professional theatre, you know. Who knows where she will go from here?’
‘Yair, right, an 18-year-old first-year student at Kelvin Grove campus of the Brisbane College of Advanced Education in a play nobody ever heard of. Be very afraid, Nicole Kidman.
I could see it though. Bub had that erratic, volatile quality that you could imagine splashed across the front page of some tabloid rag one day. CRAZED STARLET THROWN OUT OF NIGHT SPOT could be a good fit for Bub.
At least her college might become a star as there was talk it would be taken over by recently evolved Queensland University of Technology which added to Brisbane other universities, Queensland and Griffith. I had been to all three as each put on free rock concerts from time to time.
‘You’re joking,’ Natalie said. ‘Waiting for Godot; nobody’s ever heard of Waiting for Godot? Everybody knows Waiting for Godot.’
‘Is that what the play’s called? I couldn’t remember. Come on, Natalie, three months ago you’d never heard of Waiting for Godot either. Admit it.’
‘Well, I’ve read about it since. He got a Nobel Prize, you know.’
‘Who did – Godot?’
‘Don’t be silly. The man who wrote it, he won the Nobel Prize.’
‘What’s his name, then?’
Natalie changed tack in the face of forgetting the playwright’s name. ‘You know you can use my ticket, so it won’t cost you anything. And because it’s opening night, they give you free food and wine after the show.’
Why did Natalie always do this: leave the significant details till last?
‘I’m there,’ I said, and returned to prognostications of the races at Dalby, a rural town I suspect most of Australia has never heard of.
I had almost been to a play once. I’d been planning to buy tickets for Natalie and me. It was about Sid Vicious, former bass player of seventies British punk band the Sex Pistols. Nat didn’t want to go.
‘A play where someone dies of a heroin overdose in the last act? Boring,’ she declared.
I had to protest. ‘But that’s what happened.’
Vicious died in February, 1979, but it was not until two years later, when I left the orphanage, that I caught up with this news. At the time of his death, Vicious was awaiting his day in court, facing a charge that he had knifed his girlfriend Nancy Spungen to death. Some people, including his former Sex Pistols’ bandmate, Johnny Rotten, thought him innocent. Vicious, being heavily under the hammer when Spungen died, was not sure whether he had done the dark deed. All this was fodder for a pretty good play, I thought, but Natalie was not having any of that.
‘It’s not art; it’s just a cliché.’
The condescension returned. ‘The artist’s job is to ignore the sordid banalities and find the extraordinary in the mundane; to give us something fresh and different.’ Ah, Nat, with your hands on your hips, cheeks slightly flushed, a wisp of that dark hair slightly out of place, setting the world’s moral compass straight. Is it some schoolteacher fetish of mine that places me under your spell?
‘Buddha, I thought a writer’s job was to tell us what’s really going on outside our own front door. Or is that another cliché? I don’t know why I’m even arguing about this. I’d probably be bored to death at having to watch a play anyway. It just sounded interesting, that’s all.’
Natalie put her arms over my shoulders. ‘And I love you for trying to broaden your horizons, Steele. Don’t worry, we’ll find a play we both want to see.’
___o0o___
SO NOW there I was, on my way to see Waiting for Godot, a play Natalie wanted me to go to because she could not. I am not really a play person. There is some evidence I am John Lennon’s lovechild, conceived during the Beatles 1964 Brisbane concert. Well, not during but after. Or maybe before. Whatever, I did not inherit my Dad’s theatrical bent.
I fronted up to the ticket booth at La Boite, on the border of the inner city suburbs of Petrie Terrace and Milton. I grabbed a program, thinking it was free. It wasn’t. The first-year drama students of the Kelvin Grove campus of the Brisbane College of Advanced Education took me down for a dollar.
The form guide in the program told me La Boite was French for The Box, and that the venue presented theatre in the round. Round theatre in a cubic box sounded more like a geometric challenge than an artistic one.
I looked through the cast list for Jane Applebee. There she was, playing a character called Lucky. Three other actors made up the main cast. They all appeared to be women: Caitlyn Meares, Suzanne Lu and, of course, you all know Alison Kahn. I had never heard of Kahn, but they rarely put the arts pages beside the racing guide.
Alison Kahn was a professional actor, about twenty-five by the look of her photo. She was a graduate of Kelvin Grove campus and had done the college proud by appearing in plays, a television cop show and even a feature film. Well done, Alison. The director’s notes said it was a coup to have Kelvin Grove old-girl Kahn return to assist the new chums of the drama school.
Director Sandra Blaine was a drama lecturer at Kelvin Grove. Blaine wrote to us, in the program that, as far as she knew, women making up the entire cast and crew of Samuel Beckett’s Nobel-Prize-winning play was an Australian first. Even the cameo part of Boy was played by a Girl, Blaine herself.
The director also wrote the first Australian production of Godot had a woman of sorts in one of the leads. The play had a two-week run at the Arrow Theatre, Melbourne, in September 1957, and Barry Humphries, 23, played Estragon. Humphries went on to stardom as the comic Dame Edna Everage, a character he had created two years before doing Beckett. Ah, don’t say any of us would not wear lilac hair, silly glasses and a sparkly dress for a crack at fame.
___o0o___
GIRL, YOU KNOW IT’S TRUE. Or at least that’s what Europop duo Milli Vanilli was telling us during their glory year of 1989, before proof of onstage lip-syncing to pre-recorded vocals sank their career like the Titanic Two. In 1990, during a live performance by Rob and Fab at a Connecticut theme park, the track Girl You Know It’s True jammed in a groove, repeating the line Girl You Know It’s True over and over.
Smart management might have said the glitch was a remix, but one thing led to another and out came the admission the lads had not sung any of the songs on their hit album.
This career-ending confession served as a lesson to all of us: life is not always as it seems. A night at the Box would not end as uneventfully for me as Natalie would have hoped.
___o0o___
I RAISED my glass of cheap red to an Australian first for the sisterhood, translating this Beckett stuff into the language of belles. Bells rang.
And they’re off. Trumpets, bugles or bells, I know when an event is about to start. I was caught up in the crowd surge, and swept up a circular staircase into the theatre, with raked seating in four blocks forming a rectangle outside the curtainless stage. It looked like someone had pinched this theatre-in-the-round from the boxing ring. I took a seat near ringside, the prized spot for Hollywood royalty, from what I have glimpsed on television.
It was not half bad, this play, once you realised what it was about. Nothing. Nothing was something I could appreciate. The first scenes were like alt-comedians HG Nelson and Roy Slaven doing their routines about bugger all. The only difference was that Suzanne Lu and Caitlyn Meares were spruiking their nonsense as clowns with bowler hats, like those worn by the ancient comic duo Laurel and Hardy.
Lu was a Stan-Laurel simpleton called Estragon, who came out with some childish wisdom when you least expected it. Meares was an Oliver-Hardy clown called Vladimir.
They were waiting for someone called Godot, though most of the audience were waiting for Alison Kahn to appear, as a character called Pozzo. I was waiting for Lucky Jane.
Bub came on as Lucky, shackled by ropes and weighed down with travel bags. Kahn followed, cracking a whip and firing a pistol. It could have made a lasting impression on all of us in the audience, had Suzanne Lu not dropped down dead. Quite an exit.