Mug Shots (14 page)

Frozen family found

When winter comes round again (we'd only just seen it go) the interest cheques arrive irregularly, and as Christmas approaches none arrive at all. Nervous days are spent waiting for the postman. Each time the front door's sphincter rattles we rush to the hallway: Christmas cards and bills, TV Rental threatening removal if payment not forthcoming, the gas company demanding money forthwith.

A box-less, gas-less Christmas! The central heating failing, our breaths condensing, real frost on the tree, our movements slowing until in the new year we're found, kids glazed in wrestling positions on the carpet, mother wedded to the stove, father's fingers fixed around a biro writing a last message. Time to cross Peckham Common and face the bank manager.

An Australian, asking for an overdraft? Again he peers at me. Things are worse than he thought. It's the socialists! Spend, spend, spend! And it's going to get worse before it gets better! You'll see dole queues the length of Rye Lane!

Yes, yes, yes. Take the money and run—to the shops! All Southwark seems to be Christmas shopping in Rye Lane; the South Londoners, cloth-capped, pouched-and-pink faced, shrewd cockle eyes behind National Health glasses—unchanging, untrendy, the service people who clip the tickets, a world of bingo and Wimpy bars, almost as far from Kensington as Soweto is from Johannesburg.

We take a groaning bus to Hamley's, the greatest toyshop in the world—five floors packed with people and toys. Then we stand in the bus queue with games, plane-building kits, a glowing yellow Frankenstein's monster and a whoopee cushion, while little old ladies with hatpin tongues wait behind us, ready to race past. Here comes the Number 12, and here they come from behind. We form a phalanx and clamber aboard. A ­termagant is forced back and yells abuse, then with a volley of afflatuses (a son is playing the cushion like an accordion) we lurch forward.

Just like home

In the new year our remittances arrive, three at once, so we buy a second-hand Volvo station wagon. The travel urge stirs again in my wife—now that we're settled—and we go on expeditions. She does the planning and the driving. I do the navigating and worrying.

We do Cornwall, the Cotswolds, Scotland, Carcassonne (a remodelled nineteenth-century Disneyland, where the pensione sheets hadn't been washed. I complain, but what's the French for pubic hair?). We couldn't get accommodation in the beautiful village of Domme in the Périgord as we'd planned and at nightfall had no choice but Milhac, perhaps the world's dullest hamlet, at the very bottom of La France Profonde, where the locals, who spoke the language so slowly even we could understand them, stared at us mystified: why would anyone holiday here?

In the depths of La France Profonde.

Memorably, we did Ireland. Five kids wanted to come, so in the station wagon we had to go across and up. Us in the front, four smaller kids in the back, the biggest positioned laterally behind them, cases in the rear and on top in two storeys.

The Volvo was then pointed toward the ferry port of Fishguard, but it behaved like an overloaded camel, and we lost time. When we crossed into Wales, it started raining, and the cases had to be covered with plastic sheeting which, in the wind, turned into a spinnaker. Whey-faced villagers laughed and pointed as we tacked in and out of the breeze, and we reached the port just as whistles were sounding and the loading bay about to close. After a rough ride over the Irish Sea, with our kids placed along the side to accommodate their vomiting, we arrived at Rosslare. The sun hadn't set, even at half past nine in the evening, and as we headed south-west down deep green lanes it flashed out at every turn. Little did we know that it was saying goodbye to us for a week.

A soft, misty, intangible rain began and the next morning, after we'd overnighted at Clonmel (‘known the world over for its bacon') it had set in. The Rock of Cashel materialised out of it, as if it were floating on its hill. The ancient seat of the kings of Munster, with a lonely tower and high ruined roofs, it was burned by Fitzgerald, Earl of Kildare. When upbraided by Henry VII of England, he excused himself by saying, ‘I thought the Archbishop was in it.'

Ireland seemed like the end of the world to the Romans, but I felt completely at home. The places we drove through were like Australia's provincial towns, except for the inhabitants. The people in the rain-soaked streets spoke in accents so musical it sounded like recitative. And in the pubs it turned into bel canto.

We spent a week in a village called Myross Squinch, welcomed by Margaret, a crimson-cheeked landlady, in yellow beanie and gumboots. Our cottage was modest, but not when compared to the tiny stone one nearby where, Margaret told us, she had grown up with fifteen brothers and sisters.

She also said that the English family who had rented the house before us had gone home early. One Sunday they'd seen a group of men hurling balls along a side road. It was a local game, a combination of boules and bowls, but the English thought they were practising bomb-tossing and left.

At night the inhabitants emerged from hibernation and gathered at the local pub. It was presided over by an enormous ancient who, though it was only nominally summer, scorned a shirt or a singlet. We were welcomed, Guinnessed, and invited to sing our national anthem. Hoping to be let off, I said we didn't have one. The tent of flesh replied that we did indeed, and if we wouldn't sing it, he would. An accordion whined from a dim corner, and ‘Waltzing Matilda' was rendered to applause.

Our cottage had an unusual feature. Every time our bedroom door was opened or closed, a fine shower of paint specks fell like dandruff from the ceiling and our children soon looked like lamingtons.

At the week's end, we drove up to Dublin in the rain. In the 1970s, Dublin was definitely not swinging. We had a terrible meal of grey fish and green chips, inspected the Book of Kells, and made the mandatory pilgrimage to James Joyce's martello tower in Sandycove. We breasted the parapet and felt the wind coming off the sea. We were standing on the spot where, on 16 June 1904, his novel
Ulysses
begins. How did Joyce manage to turn this bleak and uninspiring prospect into something as reverberant as anything in Homer's
Odyssey
?

Carmel and Josephine go Irish in the wilds of Connemara.

Later we retreated to a couple of spartan rooms in Donnybrook, a suburb that could have been transplanted from Melbourne. I took out the tourist map, and as I said the rippling place names to myself—Knockaboy, Kilcormac, Cloonbannin—I realised that ‘Ireland' is a fiction, a lyrical and lilting lie. The Irish have bemisted their sombre land with a gossamer web of language. Ireland should be heard and not seen—it's all talk, all wayward and wonderful words.

Large rubber clothes peg

By June 1977, with my grant running out and a wife and six children to support, it was time to go home—not to Melbourne, where we had many friends, but to Sydney, where we had few. Why? asked some of the former, puzzled as to why we could abandon depth and intensity for the sybaritic and superficial. To quote Fats Waller when someone asked him what was so good about jazz—‘If you gotta ask, you'll never know.'

At 7.30 on a morning in August, the caravanserai leaves Peckham in two cabs for Heathrow, where we're told the flight has been delayed seventeen hours. We make camp in various corners of the terminal, and at 3.30 next morning we leave, feeling jetlagged already. By the time we reached Sydney we were vegetables. But when I manhandled the gigantic trolley out of the airport, the warmth came at us like a greeting. We were jobless, but all things seemed possible. There was something narcotic in the atmosphere's blandness; soon I'd be unaware I was breathing it in.

Then we crossed the bridge, with our kids (now down to four—Madeleine, our eldest, opting to stay in London and Justin, our second, preferring Melbourne) and sixteen suitcases, to a flat my agent Tim Curnow had found for us. We had it for six weeks, while its occupant, a well-known Australian writer, was in the south of France. I'll give him anonymity (he's dead now) because two of our kids found a bedroom drawer containing erotic photographs and what was either a dildo or a large rubber clothes peg (which is how I described it to the narrow-eyed and suspicious children).

It was only mid-August but the sun shone and Manly beach beckoned and the kids rushed over the road to it, like long-leashed dogs suddenly released. They ran, they yelled, kicked sand and paddled. Then there was the excitement of the ferry—the spray and the seagulls, the heeling of yachts, hydrofoils getting up on their hands and knees and gathering speed—and at night the Luna Park ferris wheel like a huge starfish, sparkling, as if just lifted out of the water.

We found a shabby bungalow in Bondi Beach. I was still in culture surprise—the low frontier skyline, the liver-brick flats, dragonfly TV aerials, the Neanderthal lope of the surfies, with their waterlogged blue eyes, the sagging fences, the who-cares beachfront shabbiness. Carmel's response was to paint the kitchen, despite my protests that we were only renting. It was done in Chinese red, which made the cockroaches look infernal. Never, especially if you're from London or Melbourne, go into a Bondi kitchen in the middle of the night. Turn the light on and the whole room seems to move.

There was also the Australian workman to get used to,
after relative
English deference. After we'd unpacked, there were so many boxes out the front of the house it resembled a fortification. There was a knock on the door early the following morning. It was the dustman, in navy-blue shorts too big for his skinny legs and a singlet bulging like a spinnaker in the wind. ‘Fair crack of the whip, mate,' he said. ‘You'd need a bloody pack of camels to move that lot.' Naturalised at last.

We were running out of money fast. Plays of mine were going on in Melbourne and Adelaide, but I couldn't crack it in Sydney. One day, Max Suich, editor of the then-feisty
National Times
, met me in the pub for a drink and offered me the job of theatre critic. I tell him I'll think it over, but he knows
I'm bluffing
. When I leave, he calls out after me: ‘
National
theatre critic.'

Before I decide to take it on, I go one night with the playwright Alex Buzo to see Patrick White's
Big Toys
. The director concentrates on externals (flashy Sydney décor) while the central weakness is untouched—the working man (Max Cullen) adrift in a comedy of manners. He stands there lost, as if he'd blundered in off the street. ‘What did you think?' asks Alex afterwards. ‘Terrible.' He agreed, but added that if judgments have to be made, a facade should be preserved ‘to prevent knocking'.

Facades? Knocking? Favouring the local product? Was this what I'd have to do? Once you become a drama critic, writers, actors, directors—people you'd known in the theatre—regard you differently. You've gone over to the other side. People say nasty things to you at parties. Did I want to end up like Harry Kippax, standing alone and unsmiling in foyers? I took the job.

Joining the enemy

My first review—I have the Dead Sea scroll still—appeared in the
National Times
for 28 November 1977, and it was of Harold Pinter's
No Man's Land
. Here's how it ends: ‘Stewart Chalmers as Foster and Tom McCarthy as Briggs are soundly cast, but as Spooner, Alexander Archdale is not. It is not too much to expect an actor of his experience to modulate his reading into a lower key, so that we'd have the chilling Pinter chamber music at
its best
.'

That absurd headmaster's tone! The augustness of the admonitions, the guarded dispensing of compliments! It wasn't just Alexander Archdale who needed to lift his game; it was me.

The next week I flew to Melbourne to review a play by Richard Beynon—not
The Shifting Heart
, his best-known work, but another, which I've forgotten. But I remember the flight back to Sydney. A gale was blowing. We'd taxied out and stopped, and as we waited, we rocked. We were getting turbulence even while on the tarmac. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,' said the pilot from the cockpit, ‘we are about to make the fastest trip to Sydney ever—forty-nine minutes. If you're okay, we're okay, and here we go.' After we took off the wind hit us from the side, whacking us with its bear's paw, and we were whipped sideways again and again. Coming down was just as frightening. We lurched and jerked, and our wings flapped like a bird's. After we bounced down into eighty kilometre-an-hour winds, the captain got more enthusiastic applause than Richard Beynon.

I became a neurotic in the air, and a neurotic on the ground. I dreaded first nights. My wife in Sydney, and various friends in Melbourne, soon realised there was no such thing as a free ticket. Afterwards, they'd be questioned about plot points or characters, and sometimes they wouldn't be any more certain than I was.

But theatre critics have to be certain. And for those of them who'd written plays themselves, the problem was worse. Because they know they were about to witness a production that had been shaped and honed, in which every movement, every nuance, had been considered. Months of writing and weeks of rehearsal have come down to this frightening moment: triumph or turkey?

Usually neither, a mix—a triumphant head on a turkey body, with feet that work but wings that don't—and exactly what kind of creature that emerges shining out of the dark it's the critic's job to determine.

I was bearable to sit with reviewing the classics (I knew the plot) and at my worst with new work, where one must peel back the flesh of performance to find the bones of the script, and then work out if this particular incarnation was doing it justice. For two hours one peers into the play taking X-rays while at the same time pressing the flesh for a diagnosis—doctor and radiographer at once. Watch, listen, scribble, scribble in the darkness, and later find most of it illegible.

All this was daunting enough, but having to review a work by a friend was worse. If you're not a critic you can mumble a few half-truths in the foyer and rip it apart later with your wife. These reviews took me the longest: softening the punches, searching for redeeming features, but also, impossibly, trying to tell the truth.

I lost David Williamson over
The Club
and Alex Buzo (knocker!) over
Coralie Lansdowne Says No
. Would I end up like Bob Evans, who had wine thrown over him, or Len Radic of the
Age
, hanged in effigy in the foyer because of the bad review he gave Manning Clark's
History of Australia
? Or Harry Kippax, dean of them all? I once saw this grim elder statesman lose his balance and cartwheel down the dress-circle stairs of the Seymour Centre, while the two actors in the row in front
of me clapped
in glee. At last! They were reviewing him.

Certainly the best, and probably the worst, of my reviewing experiences both took place in Adelaide. The best: a Polish theatre company's performance of Tadeusz Kantor's
The Dead Class
in 1978. The dead class was a dead society. Poland was a schoolroom filled with cadavers sitting immobile at school desks, in black, the men in butterfly collars and bowler hats, their faces white, their eyes green-shadowed, as in death.

At the front, presiding, a buxom figure leans on a broomstick under a medieval hunter's hat, a nightmare charlady. At the side of this grotesque tableau moves the director and creator of the play, Kantor, acting as a conductor, modulating the action with subtle flicks of his fingers.

Suddenly the class erupts into life, putting up their hands, pleading for the attention of a teacher who doesn't exist. Some at the back stand on the seats, then the desktops; the class becomes a pleading pyramid. There's no confusion—every movement is orchestrated. It's like a ballet of automatons.

A flick of Kantor's wrist and the class rise, leave their desks, exit, and then return, to waltz music in a grand parade, as the figures bring their childhoods back with them. Each carries a doll-child, black marionettes that cling to their older selves and will never let go.

The classroom is life, where the inmates are condemned to be kept in until the hunter-charlady makes her re-entrance, swinging her broomstick like a scythe: death.

In the program, Kantor defined his work as ‘a theatre of ­concrete reality and not the art of stage illusions'. But in
this fusion
of gesture, dance, speech and music, concrete reality is left behind. We were in the realm of overpowering
imaginative truth
.

At the same Arts Festival I had to review a performance of
Oedipus Rex
, the most creative I've ever done—I had to make most of it up. The plan was to attend the opening of Writers' Week at the Orlando Vineyards, and then get back for the play. Because of the company and white wine I left late. There was still time, but Dinny O'Hearn, drinker and academic, was driving. He sang Irish songs, and passed everything on the road except the pubs, and as he overtook each car Morris Lurie, the other passenger, shouted encouragement and banged the
car door
.

Now there was no time left, and more minutes were wasted while Lurie emptied his bladder in the middle of a floral plantation on the edge of the city, his technicolour jacket for once unobtrusive. I got to the theatre after the doors had closed. One was grudgingly opened, and after knocking a row of knees I fell, first into a seat and then into a doze just as the Chorus of Theban Elders were letting loose. I was disturbed by Oedipus and Creon shouting at one another. (Jocasta: ‘What is the meaning of this loud argument?') I scribbled some notes, paid attention, then nodded off again, to be jolted awake by Oedipus's roaring as he blinds himself. My review drew considerable praise: ‘authori­tative' was the favoured word.