The Best Australian Humorous Writing Page 14

  The high point of Peter’s official agenda was the press conference to launch the festival, a task he shared with Barry Humphries, the festival patron. Humphries appeared in the guise of the salivating, varicose-nosed Sir Les Patterson. It was the big-ticket draw of the day. All the networks sent camera crews and a seething mass of journalists packed the room. When the terrible two walked in, all the photographers popped their flashes simultaneously, triggering a thermo-nuclear explosion. Peter, rendered the colour of cheddar cheese by the glare, and beaded with perspiration from the heat of the sun guns, sat in benign bemusement while Humphries basted him with reminiscences of their early careers.

  At the crack of dawn the next day, Peter and John Clarke headed for the nearest golf course at 11am in deference to Cook’s customary routine. “My driving hasn’t been very good lately,” Cook warned. “But my short game is among the shortest on Earth.” Positively glowing with ill-health, he wheezed his way through 18 holes, club in one hand, Dunhills in the other.

  Although an invitation had been issued by Royal Melbourne, Peter’s stated preference was for somewhere a little less starchy. Clarke took him to Yarra Bend, a public course favoured by off-duty taxi drivers and shift-working bakers. As they neared the clubhouse, Peter spotted a player who had taken off his shirt. He demanded to see the pro. If people were allowed to wander about half-naked, he complained, the course should post a notice to that effect. “Had I known, I would not have bothered wearing clothes.”

  One of the festival’s main attractions was a somewhat anarchic mock trial, organised by a bunch of barristers and conducted in the magistrate’s court. Spirited away by a team of admiring lawyers and fed a persuasive lunch, Peter agreed to appear as a judge one night. He did so in full regalia with a bottle of gin on the bench in front of him. Presented with a farrago of trumped-up charges and fabricated evidence, he had no hesitation in handing down his verdict—half extemporised nonsense, half reprise of his Jeremy Thorpe monologue. “The sentence I am about to hand down is sponsored by Tanqueray gin,” he sombrely pronounced. “You always get a result with Tanqueray.”

  As might be imagined, my minderly duties were far from onerous. They consisted principally of dragging an ever-amenable Peter away from one cluster of admirers and delivering him to another. Then came the “abscess incident”.

  Since early in the festival, I’d been conspiring with Lin, Peter’s partner, to protect his liver from the excesses of Australian hospitality. A few days before their departure, Lin confided that Peter was suffering from a persistent toothache. Self-medication was keeping a lid on his discomfort, but she was worried that his condition would not be improved by the long flight home. Could I recommend a reliable dentist?

  Peter was duly chivvied into a taxi and dispatched to my own dentist in nearby Carlton. Lin remained in their hotel room and I returned to the festival office, awaiting the call to pick him up. Awaiting and awaiting and awaiting. Finally, I gave the dentist a call. An abscess had been discovered in Peter’s root canal, I was told, and he’d been referred on to a specialist in Collins Street. Who, it transpired, had forwarded him to a nearby colleague. Poor Peter, it seemed, was being passed around the fang mechanics of Melbourne, all of them keen to have a dig at his gums. As of last report, he’d been drained dry, shot full of drugs and ordered back to his hotel to rest.

  But according to Lin, waiting in their room, he hadn’t arrived. With a mounting sense of panic, I pictured an anaesthetised Peter Cook, his mandible throbbing, wandering the unfamiliar streets in a daze.

  I sprinted the length of Collins Street, scanning the crowd for a tall Englishman with dribble dripping from his chin, and made my way to the Regency. Still no sign. What I needed was a quick something to settle the nerves. And that’s how I found him, perched at the far end of the otherwise empty cocktail bar, a vodka tonic in front of him and a pensive Dunhill between his fingers.

  Feigning nonchalance, I parked myself on the stool beside him and inquired as to his dental health. He gave a casual shrug, then reached into his mouth and removed what appeared to be a brandnew cricket ball. On closer examination, this turned out to be a huge wad of blood-soaked cotton wool. He took a sip of his drink, a deep puff of his cigarette and allowed that it might be best if he had a little lie down, if only to assuage Lin.

  What was needed, Lin decided, was a day in the country. Exposure to the therapeutic qualities of the bush would do him a world of good. Hanging Rock seemed just the ticket, the perfect spot for an afternoon’s escape from the attention of the press, the importunings of entertainment producers and the attentions of overexcited fans. The autumn countryside was lush with ripening grain and the vines were heavy with grapes. Here, at last, was the pay-off for the trip. A decent lunch was had at Macedon and Hanging Rock was ours alone, the towering boulders looking as eerily compelling as they had in Peter Weir’s film. You could almost hear the pan pipes. A sign at the foot of the hill advised that any wildlife encountered should be treated with caution. Peter wondered if he should have brought condoms.

  He ascended the path slowly, alert for evidence of promiscuous fauna. “If we get to the top and there’s a camera crew waiting,” he muttered, “I’ll fucking well kill you.” But the only camera was Lin’s. As she snapped the view from the top and Peter lounged like a satyr among the boulders, I did my best to rustle up a koala.

  I am not, I daresay, the first of my countrymen to be urinated upon by a marsupial. But I am probably the only one who had Peter Cook there to witness the event. Ten metres above me, with unerring accuracy, a slumbering fur ball opened its bladder. Peter, well out of range, roared with amusement.

  And for that, I will remain eternally grateful to that anonymous arboreal incontinent. Stoned out of its tiny mind on eucalyptus leaves, it probably didn’t even notice the look of satisfaction on my face. So what if I was doused in koala piss? I had made Peter Cook laugh.

  In London a year or so later, I had dinner with Lin and Peter. She was still trying to get him to take better care of his health. But longevity was never a priority for a man who had done everything he ever wanted by the time he was 21 and who tended to the view that a bit of what you fancy does you good. Eventually, in January 1995, his liver threw in the towel.

  Thanks to the publicity boost generated by his presence, the inaugural Melbourne International Comedy Festival was a major success. For 10 days, a kind of delirium gripped the town and any absurdity seemed possible. At the festival’s closing event, the Fools’ Ball, Peter presented the prize for the best costume. One table arrived dressed as the Harold Holt Memorial Swimming Pool, but the winner was a heavily pregnant woman attired as an elephant. Her perfect prize was two dozen bottles of pink champagne.

  It just so happens that that elephant was my wife. Our daughter, born two weeks later, accompanied me to every festival gala opening from the time she was 10. But she’s grown up now, out in the world. On the eve of this year’s event, she sent me an email from Medellin, Colombia. The previous night she had been partying at a club where the waiters were dwarfs dressed as Santa, the bouncers were oiled Nubians in harem pants and dusty substances flowed with carefree abandon. It sounded like a Peter Cook kind of place.

  ALEXANDER DOWNER

  The satire we had to have: Keating

  It’s back! Keating! The Musical returns to Adelaide, updated and slightly more sophisticated than the original. This is good news for that 20–25 per cent of the population who loved and probably still love Paul Keating. It’s also good news for those South Australians who think: (a) Bob Hawke is a terrible spiv who shamefully held on to power for too long when he should have handed over to the flamboyant genius Keating; (b) that John Howard was a hideous, ghastly, cynical megalomaniac unworthy of office; (c) John Hewson was a feral abacus; and (d) Alexander Downer is a sexually ambiguous son of the Adelaide Establishment.

  Unsurprisingly, I don’t happen to think any of those things about those people, knowing all the dramatis personae as
I do.

  But the truth is this musical is fun. It’s a celebration of Keating’s political career combining satire with history wrapped up in music.

  If some people’s political sensitivities are offended by the portrayal of some of our better known, better loved and often loathed politicians, they shouldn’t be. This is satire. It’s not an attempt to portray anyone as they really are, with the possible exception of Keating.

  And let’s face it: It’s funny. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, the great and powerful have been lampooned and ridiculed and it’s good for them and good for society that they are.

  Britain is well served by an often hilarious satirical scandal sheet called Private Eye. It’s disrespectful, iconoclastic, revealing and funny.

  In Australia, we sometimes take ourselves a bit too seriously. People in high office should always take their jobs seriously but not themselves. Australian newspapers and magazines are seldom amusing—although for some reason we have among the best newspaper cartoonists in the world. So Keating! The Musical is a rare and refreshing addition to Australian political humour and satire. And it’s very well produced and presented.

  For a musical which celebrates the Keating years, it does reinforce your prejudices. Some loved the boy from Bankstown emerging in Zegna suits all made in Italy. It was so gloriously … well … stylish. They could identify with a prime minister who wore as a badge of honour his disdain for sport. I remember Keating famously saying that in rugby you “kick a try”. Hmmm.

  Some loved his vanity, which is starkly presented in Keating! The Musical. We are reminded of his self-assessment as the Placido Domingo of Australian politics. This vanity is nicely presented in the song “I’m the Ruler of the Land”. Some loved these Keating characteristics but most didn’t.

  Watching Keating! The Musical made me wonder why Keating made such a public display of his eccentric self-assessment and his passion for the so-called finer things in life. Most successful people have enormous self-confidence and self-belief. They do think they’re pretty clever.

  But they’re clever enough not to tell everyone. Why would they feel they had to? Why would Keating feel the need to tell a bunch of journalists that Australia had never been blessed with a decent prime minister but that he was the Placido Domingo of Australian politics?

  Love of Mahler’s music is not common, but then again it’s not all that unusual. I like Mahler myself and have it on my iPod. But why is it necessary to boast about your love of Mahler and sneer at those who might prefer Silverchair or the Arctic Monkeys (not on my iPod)? I call my children “music fascists” because if you don’t like their music, they laugh at you and turn it up. And they turn mine off. Well, there’s a touch of the music fascist about Keating. Keating! The Musical reminds us also of Keating’s great causes. He became obsessed with the republic and “Asia”; not interested, obsessed. Keating had only been to Asia once as treasurer and that was to Japan. By the time he became prime minister, he decided all these countries he’d never been to were front and centre of our national being. I’ve heard of the zeal of the convert but this was something else.

  It was all about our identity, as though we had no identity at all. People went along with this for a while, feeling that to object would invite abuse, denigration, ridicule and a fusillade of personal insults. That was the thing about Keating: the insults. I had a teacher who used to say that personal abuse was what you resorted to when you had exhausted all your intellectual arguments.

  Well, Keating didn’t even start with intellectual arguments. It was all slogans and abuse. Surely, I used to wonder, he could find some good, some merit in his political opponents. No, he couldn’t.

  The thing about Keating! The Musical is it reminds us so vividly of one of our most colourful and least popular prime ministers. It’s worth making a musical about him because he was such a controversial and unusual character.

  Go to see the musical. It’s excellent entertainment: It’s funny, it’s well performed, the tunes are catchy and it will massively reinforce your assessment of Keating. If you thought he was a great and colourful visionary, it’s all there. He tells you he was. If you thought he was a tosser, the Sir Edmund Hillary of social climbing, a faintly unbalanced personality, that’s there as well.

  Whatever you think of Keating, this is the show for you.

  GERMAINE GREER

  So Ian McKellen drops his trousers to play King Lear. That sums up the RSC’s whole approach

  The most memorable moment, for many of us the only memorable moment, in Trevor Nunn’s latest production of King Lear is when Ian McKellen drops his trousers and displays his impressive genitalia to the audience. To get the full beauty of this sublime coup de théâtre, you have to understand that the 1,000-strong audience is composed of a minority of geriatrics who haven’t got out of the theatre-going habit, and a majority of teenaged school-trippers bussed in from various grim hostelries in the environs of Stratford. Most of the members of the audience don’t have English as their first language. This matters less because the Royal Shakespeare Company long ago gave up simply saying the lines for mouthing, gnashing, yelling, snarling, munching, spitting, gritting, grinding, shrieking, slobbering, snapping and gobbling them. The only actor in this production who dares to speak clearly enough for the greatest metaphysical poem in the English language to make itself momentarily heard is William Gaunt as Gloucester, who, in a mere six lines of recognisable iambic pentameter, reduced this patron to tears.

  McKellen displays his usual astonishing repertoire of gesture and movement; he begins with hand tremors signifying eld, proceeds to spastic arms and rubbery hands, totters and teeters, grunts, gapes and squints, until he is as irritating as any fractious, befuddled, sclerotic old bugger you’ve ever met. McKellen’s method has always had more to do with impersonation than interpretation. His Lear is so tottery, closer and closer to capsizing in every scene, that we watch fascinated by the wrong things. Such virtuosic caricature makes sympathy impossible. King Lear is certainly a play about entropy, about ageing, decay and loss, but we cannot approach its inner meaning through a simple replication of aged behaviour. At the very point when McKellen mightily distracts his audience by exposing himself, Lear is realising that kingship is a delusion, whether it be sovereignty over a state or over oneself. If we do not look with him through the windows of awareness that open in the verse, watching King Lear is a waste of precious time. We love Lear because he is not confused enough to be unaware that he is confused. We will not be the more stirred by his death because of the accuracy of McKellen’s horrifyingly authentic rendition of a death-rattle.

  The production is as perverse as anything Trevor Nunn has ever done. We are back in Ruritania, much as we were in his 1976 production, with operetta uniforms and occasional bursts of operetta music. There is lots of noise, very loud noise—shots, thunderclaps, total war and brain-churning organ chords—anything to stop you hearing the words. The Fool combines rather too much of his wordplay with playing the spoons. The permanent set looks as if it might come in useful for a revival of The Phantom of the Opera, except that the upper galleries are never used. Nunn means Lear’s progress to be a journeying “away from the pampered luxury of the court”, but there’s no getting away from this set. The only way to suggest the heath is to dim the stage to almost black and shower it with water.

  Most irritating is an interpolated scene in which the spoon-playing Fool is hanged on stage. This is the only time that the vertical space was used, thank God. To choruses of grunts and snarls from the Ruritanian cavalry, the Fool’s harness is hooked up, and he is gently hoisted aloft, arms and legs feebly jerking as if to suggest that his neck had been broken. Like the rain on the stage, the fake hanging was better left out, but when it comes to inexplicable dumb shows, Nunn is your man. Shakespeare’s play descended into Grand Guignol so we could all be sent out into the comfortless foyer on some sort of a high. (Dudgeon in my case.) I watched the blinding of Gloucester through m
y fingers, just in case we had eyeballs bouncing round the stage like ping-pong balls, but we were spared.

  Nunn justifies Lear’s dropping his trousers as his bid to become “unaccommodated man”, which he might as well have done by removing his upper garments, you’d think. (When the trick was tried before, in 1997, by Ian Holm at the National, all his kit came off.) Ben Meyjes, as Mad Tom—who, according to the Folio, is supposed to be naked under a blanket, “else we had all been shamed”—wears a breech clout so fixed that it might have been sprayed on with fibreglass. In 1974, when McKellen played Edgar in King Lear for the Wimbledon Theatre, he seized the opportunity for full frontal nudity: “In preparing my disguise as Mad Tom, I flung off all my clothes and stood briefly on stage as the bare fork’d man. This was a simple image to counterpoint the impenetrable obscurity of Edgar’s language.”

  Edgar’s language is our language, our most valuable inheritance. There is no point in our massively subsidised cultural institutions if they devalue our greatest asset by blandly assuming that Shakespeare’s language is impenetrable. Edgar does talk fake visionary nonsense but it has a point, one that Nunn and his minions ignored. No wonder we sat unmoved in the Courtyard Theatre as Edgar/Tom, in a crude version of quack aversion therapy, tricked his blind father into jumping from a precipice that wasn’t there. There’s no way an audience can get the point if the actors are persuaded that there isn’t one.

  ROD QUANTOCK

  Group giggles groovy again

  The First Melbourne International Comedy Festival wobbled around the unpredictable presence of comedy’s Moses, Peter Cook, who was nursed along by an adoring festival patron, Sir Les Patterson. It boasted 69 shows and promised “1,262,148 jokes, japes, punchlines, pranks, guffaws, grins, giggles and a few puns”.