To my fourteenth attendance of Debt-Defying Acts, the seventeenth Wharf Revue, at five o’clock tonight with Annie and Jock Buzo, Alex’s widow, and Anton, my chiropractor. Asked why I go so often by people who think me barking mad, I explain how it’s only thus that I might make others go with me, who might otherwise think this vast exuberant soul-altering experience an optional, not an essential one, to show them how far high happiness on earth can go without chemicals or fundamentalist unhingement, how good it can seem for a while to be alive.
And the result is always the same. They have a superb time. They thank me profusely. They buy me food. Faded, abeyant friendships rekindle. They realise I am a good person, and a kind of moral guide, at least when it comes to entertainment, they should henceforth heed.
Al Clark, who produced Chopper, Priscilla and Nineteen Eighty-four, came on Wednesday night and said how youthful it made him feel, as did Monte Python at first sight, how thoroughly engaged and besieged in his intellect every four or five seconds, and how educated he became in those ninety minutes in the folkways of his adopted country, and in that wild collusive rush of heart and brain, that open door to knowledge it provided.
I thought about this a bit on the drive home to Palm Beach through washing rain and beating windscreen-wipers; and I realised there was something else as well. It was an enlargement of Australia and its politics by the level of exhilarating art and music and dance which Biggins, Forsythe, Scotty and Mandy Bishop — surely the most talented foursome in one room since the Beatles were like them jointly struck by lightning –uproariously, abundantly, lavishly fling back at it.
A proof, too, that Australia is not such a bad place. Though Alan Jones was crucified, Bob Brown coarsely mocked, Barry O’Farrell rudely lampooned, and, in the Phantom of the Opera sketch and the nursing home sketch, four living Prime Ministers reduced to Stoppardian pantaloons, no Commonwealth Police arrived to arrest and punch the actors, trash the set and immolate the theatre, no libel writs were issued, no questions asked in the House or the Senate. For we were a democracy. We let laughter occur. We gave thought free rein.
And Barry O’Farrell came; and Gladys Berejiklian; and Bob Carr; and Mike Rann. Nathan Rees is coming on Thursday, and Wedderburn and Hawker, and Bill Shorten when it comes to Moonee Ponds, as he did last year, complaining only that it ‘let off Rudd too lightly’. Bob Hawke, Frank Sartor, Walt Secord and Reba Meagher in other years.
But Simon Crean, the Minister for the Arts, has never heard of it for twelve long years thus far, which is much like saying Walter Ralegh missed thirty-four Shakespeare opening nights, and I’m sure he did. He’s going instead, he proudly and perkily asserted, ‘to Yes, Minister for my light entertainment.’ And Gillard of course, that perpetual tabula rasa, that impenetrable Terra Nullius, would never come, she does not like the live theatre, nor understand it, I imagine, even for a minute. What was this French Revolution? Why wasn’t I told?
I have written about the Wharf Revue in my books and columns for a decade now, calling it ‘my spare religion’, calling this one ‘the best thing of its kind in world history, but no better than that’ in these pages two months ago. And the grief I feel for those, and those friends of mine in particular, who imagined they had something better to do on the four or five hundred nights they could have seen it, driving to Gosford or Lismore or Bathurst or Wollongong or flying to Hobart or Nunanwading, grows to murderous resentment sometimes and I want to waterboard the lot of them, and speak to them severely while they choke and plead and suffer.
But what can you do. There are pearls, and there are swine. There are wise men and women, and fools. And never the twain shall mingle on a joyous night like this, of pure champagne of the spirit, of uplift and pleasure and ribaldry. They have better things to do.
And it’s a pity.
Name:
I saw it recently Bob. And it is excellent. Of its type, superb.
Everyone within range should aim to see it at least once.
“And Gillard of course, that perpetual tabula rasa, that impenetrable Terra Nullius, would never come, she does not like the live theatre, nor understand it, I imagine, even for a minute. What was this French Revolution? Why wasn’t I told?”
Bob Carr didn’t like sport, wouldn’t have known Dale Cherry-Evans from a Bavarian merkin farmer but so what. He presided over one of the greatest ever Olympics and didn’t care if he ever saw a mad bloke scampering with a 3 metre pole ever again.
So Ms Gillard doesn’t like your brand of theatre. She likes films and regularly watches DVDs. I saw her at Manuka Greater Union with her partner queing for Red Dog. In a line, like regular folk, buying a ticket! Her bodyguards off to the side waiting to get their own. Ever see Hawke do that? Beazley, Rudd, Carr, Rann? Stand in line and not even ask for a union discount?
Is this the prerequisite for economic management and job creation – going to see these revues? How many Wharf’s did Beazley attend? Numbers please?
Please stand at the next election Mr Ellis. Please try to run the country while balancing the public demands you go to the theatre. Not the flouncy pole type stuff, not the fat lady’s singing, not the modern dance bizzo with their bunkum and claptrap either, and certainly not David Williamson, God forbid the Pm should stoop to see one of his plays, why you’d probably have a fit if that happened.
Beazley … Wharf Revue … attendance record. Take your time.
I saw Hawkie tonight at the Wharf bar queueing like everyone else for a drink. Said it was the best such show he had ever seen.
Fuck you.
I asked Beazley what play he had liked most. ‘Arthur Dignam in Diary of a Madman in the Hole In The Wall,’ he said. Keating when I asked him favoured the plays of Brian Friels.
It’s not my style of theatre Gillard dislikes. It’s theatre altogether. She never goes. She didn’t even see Keating, The Musical.
Is this true of Whitlam, Hayden, Hawke, Keating and Beazley? No.
What then folows in your mind? That she is right not to have done so? Or wrong?
Please answer this.
Not right or wrong, just irrelevant. Theatre is one aspect – an important one – but just one aspect of cultural production and the arts.
Who cares what style or artistic flavour Ms Gillard enjoys. Who cares if she likes film noir or Shaving Private Ryan. Nobody votes for a PM because of their taste in stage productions. (Sorry, you might, I apologise if this has proved me wrong)
My point, minus your expletive thank you very much, was that you find any excuse to attack Ms Gillard. Thus a revue of Wharf revue is an attack on the PM for not attending.
You know where she was today you single minded toffee? In QLD meeting victims of floods that wiped out their homes, their workplaces, their lives.
“Oh sorry flood victims,” said the prime minister, “I should have been at the Wharf with Bob and Bill and Barry and Kilgore Trout hob-knobbing with them, silly old me, wasting my time on people in need.”
Hawkie said she should see it and he will use what pull he has to get her to it. He’s wrong too, is he? Please say so. Say why Labor’s best Prime Minister is wrong to go to it and she is right to stay away.
Have you seen it? Why have you avoided it? How dare you speak of it if you have not? If I said I was NEVER going to read Catch 22 because I’d heard it was contemptuous of those brave bomber pilots who died fighting Hitler what would you think of me?
Please explain to me and Hawkie and Bob Carr and Wedderburn and Nathan Rees and Bill Shorten why you are boycotting this show. What is it that so revolts you about it? Why you have seen The Sound of Music but missed all seventeen Wharf Revues? Why you are so angry at me for praising it? Why you think it impertinent of Bob Hawke to want his successor to see it? How you have got yourself into this mess? Why you gave up thinking?
Just asking.
I doubt that Napoleon ever saw a wharf review. Perhaps FDR missed out as well. But consider how much better they might have been if they had guffawed at the antics of Bob Katter and Julia Gillard up there on stage!
It matters little to me when people see the Wharf Revue, only that they spend ninety minutes a year at it. The evidence is strong that the Prime Minister spent one of those ninety minutes watching Miss Marples and another styling her hair.
Napoleon would have greatly benefited from the French Revolution sketch which pointed out the dangers of too aggressive a centalised socialist economy, FDR from the Hawke-Keating nursing-home quarrel over Free Market and Keynesian economics.
Ms Gillard could become a stevedore and review every wharf in Sydney Harbour and you’d still despise her. Why is this?
No. I wouldn’t.
While my hangover recedes …
Theatre attendance isn’t a badge of honour or a mark of worth or status. If you had written the screenplay to Jaws, it would have gone something like this:
Quint (Robert Shaw): [referring to a cut on Brody's head] Chief… don’t you worry about it, Chief. It won’t be permanent. Wanna see somethin’ permanent, boom-boom-boom?
[Quint pulls out a false front tooth and laughs]
Hey, Hoop, you wanna feel somethin’ permanent? You just put your hand underneath my cap… and you just feel that little lump. Got that at the Globe trying to get Reserve seats for ‘Richard III’.
Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) : I got that beat.
(Hooper lifts his shirt to reveal a long thick scar across his torso)
Hey Brody, I got this fighting a scalper outside the Royal National Theatre for front Row seats at ‘Othello’ – Laurence Olivier and Frank Finlay as Iago. Mind you, I bled through most of Act One.
Quint: Ha! See this!
(Quint lifts his pants and shows a 15 inch scar running the length of his calf)
Globe Neuss, Germany 1968. ‘Death of a Salesman’. The bloke next to me said Miller was overrated.
Brody (Roy Scheider) lifts his shirt and sees a small pencil thick scar where his appendix should be.
‘The Mouse Trap’ … ran into the side of the sink in the men’s room …”
Hooper: [singing] Show me the way to go home / I’m tired and I want to go to bed…
Hooper, Quint, Brody: [all singing together] I had a little drink about an hour ago and it got right to my head / Wherever I may roam / by land or sea or foam…
Don’t quit your day job.