A lifetime of pin-ups

Barry Humphries still has nightmares about going on stage. He’s always admired the stars who kept battling on

- Barry Humphries

I was there again last night. It looked a bit like old Sydney as I remember it from the fifties, before they pulled it down in the name of progress. But wasn’t it more like the badlands of San Francisco, that once beautiful city that is infested by beggars and muggers and is sadly now past redemption? It was only vaguely familiar, yet the neighbourhood was strange and inimical. In my dream, I am always in an unknown part of town, well off the beaten track, a no-go area of half-demolished buildings and menacing tatterdemalions. I am very frightened.

Then a stranger approaches me and whispers, ‘Haven’t you got a show tonight?’

Of course I have! It hits me like a thunderbolt.

But what time is it? And how far away is my theatre?

I rush out into the street, brushing aside those clawing hands of the canallas which want to keep me there. Taxis slow down, then at the sight of me speed off. I look down at my clothes. My feet are bare and I am wearing filthy rags. But at last I hitch a ride and ultimately, at the slow pace of nightmare, I reach the theatre.

But it’s unfamiliar. Moreover, it’s being demolished. There are workmen on scaffolds hammering at the remaining masonry, exposing what was once the stage and half a stuccoed proscenium.

A man up a ladder in a yellow hard hat (for a change, not Boris) calls out to me, ‘Where were you? We waited!’

And then, covered with sweat, I wake.

We don’t need what Nabokov called ‘that Viennese quack’ to help interpret this nightmare.