~ the elementary tastes of children

As strange as it may seem, I think I’m growing into the role of the BFG. With every performance I’m understanding more about the elementary tastes of children and what they expect from a performance. I think I had my best day yesterday, particularly during our second show. My projectile vomiting was faultless and my farting beyond compare. I believe I’m learning at last how to endear myself to a younger audience. Afterwards, when we farewell the kids in the foyer (still in costume naturally) I’ve noticed that they are approaching me more readily now. I’ve dispensed many thousands of high-fives and yesterday I even received some hugs.

My natural inclination has always been to appal and horrify an audience, but that’s simply out of the question in a kids’ show, and though I’ve suppressed these tendencies it has only been during the last week that I’ve eradicated them entirely. I am a silly, smiling, weeping, dreamy, farting, giant with not the slightest residue of scariness.

Whether my achievement is of any value is a question that only time will answer, but for now I’m having an unadorned, effortless good time – and there is something to be said for that, given the bleakness of my wider life.



On top of this I’ve returned Polly’s faulty DS to Nintendo for repairs, I’ve cleared my slate with Centrelink, purchased a widget that will bring my laptop back to life and dropped off an overdue library book. I’ve organised my eye and tooth appointments and tomorrow I’m getting a haircut. I seem to be more functional than I would previously have thought possible – but there are biting yellow-toothed rodents on my heels giving me all the impetus I need to keep things together …

~ justice

Australia is commonly thought of as a reasonably fair and equitable place to live, at least compared to the rest of the world. It’s considered a place where government is unlikely to commit atrocities or human rights outrages, where miscarriages of justice are inevitably righted in the face of our abiding sense of decency.

But I wonder if such attitudes are complacent, if not wildly erroneous. There has been the case of Andrew Moore, who, though apparently a rather dubious character, was separated from his family and deported to an unfamiliar land where he promptly died. Then there was Farah Jama, an immigrant, presumably from Somalia, who spent fifteen months in jail wrongly convicted of rape due to a contaminated DNA sample. And, of course, the outrageous behaviour of our state government in directing the police to make protestors’ personal files available to the company responsible for the construction of Victoria’s new desalinisation plant … and these three examples, with others, all appeared in one edition of the daily newspaper.

And of course there are the stories we never hear about.

I can imagine the plights of these victims, inured in the cold concrete labyrinth of officialdom and jurisprudence … evaluated by clerks and functionaries and faceless enablers performing their ordained duties regardless of the human cost, holding to temporal laws, guidelines and directives as if they were the underpinnings of the universe, unwilling to deviate from the code that permits them to go home at night to their secure and comfortable loungerooms to watch Packed to the Rafters in the company of their well-groomed children and their clean, functional wives and husbands … while those they have judged are marched through the cold night to meet their fates…

I guess I’m dwelling on this subject because of my own current entanglement with our legal system. In case you didn’t know, I have dropped myself into a pretty sticky situation due to a combination of ignorance and stupidity. And unfortunately the charges with which I am faced seem designed for wealthy Mafiosi from Griffith, rather than a poor sod from the suburbs who needed something in the evenings to help keep body and soul together.

I never dreamt I would find myself in jail as a result of my wrongdoings. I didn’t think anyone would be particularly fussed. But that’s where I found myself. For sixteen days. With the potential for more on the horizon. Not only that, but my family home – home to Polly for all of her seven years, home to my partner Jenny, home to my dear departed parents for most of their married lives – is at risk. Our justice apparatus, horribly, may be regarding it as equivalent to the cigarette boat of a Floridian cocaine importer …

I just hope that we don’t become one of those sad, terribly unfair stories you read in the paper and then, with time, forget.

~ with chicken head and tutu

We’ve performed the BFG more than ten times now before hundreds and hundreds of screaming children. It’s beginning to become second nature: thwacking myself on the head with an inflatable hammer to the beat of John Farnham’s ‘The Voice’, feeding snozzcumbers to an entity called Bloodbottler, interpreting a military operation in dance with chicken head and tutu …

If one wasn’t in the right state of mind, it could be a hellish thing to face every day, but I’m honestly enjoying it. Judging from the state of my costume once it’s over, I must be sweating out litres of fluid per show. Though it probably doesn’t matter to the audience, I’m polishing my act with every performance and keeping thoughts of the Grublets from Blades of Glory far to the back of my head, (along with other black black clouds which I am better off not dwelling on).

Polly is proud that her dad is the BFG, which is a nice ancillary benefit. Yesterday, we traveled out to Ringwood to see her end of year dance concert. What a massive production… There must have been nearly a hundred performers from the steppes of middle suburbia… And what costumes! The sequins, the tulle and the tiffany! The non-stop rippling, flouncing procession of wild colours, demi-pliés and flourishing nubility. It was impossible not to be entertained. There were men who were indistinguishable from women. And vice versa. There was even a titillating wardrobe malfunction. A nipple, which through the course of one particularly energetic number, crept in and out of its cup as its gangly smiling blonde owner jetted obliviously about the stage.

It was a vaudevillian banquet: dance that ranged from the seemingly accomplished to the pitifully incompetent … and, inevitably, to wandering toddlers, smiling broadly in their profound bewilderment or picking their noses and wiping them on their gorgeous Arabian Nights outfits.

There were three two-hour performances to a huge auditorium, packed each time with adoring friends and relatives. As for myself, I had tried to ignore the preparations for this event, but tyrannical organisers continued to demand my concentration with their complex and exacting procedures. The costumes situation became a yawning gyre of confusion and uncertainty. For my own sanity, I had to palm off the task to other members of Polly’s support cabal.

Polly doesn’t want to do dance next year, thank goodness. Something simple and straightforward like Guides or swimming lessons will do nicely.

~ here I am

Life has been a tremendous challenge lately. All manner of threats and obstacles have been presenting themselves and I have had little choice but to face them, grim-faced and dour. I’ve been unable to update the Sails of Oblivion – or to do much writing at all for that matter. For this I’m really sorry. This blog has, somehow, become central to my work and my life and I’m a fool to neglect it.

My last month has been consumed by rehearsals and performances of Lynne Ellis’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The BFG in which I’m playing the title role. We opened late last week after the fastest, most intensive rehearsal period I’ve ever experienced. I lost at least a stone in the process, but it was worth it. The show is very funny, even for adults I think, and I recommend it robustly.

There’s a ‘gala-night’ on Tuesday December 15 which you can inquire about at RMIT Union Arts. Otherwise the public season runs from Jan 5 to 22. (Book at M-TIX 9685 5111]

On top of my theatre commitments, I’ve been enduring the usual swathe of life-related challenges. I’m looking after Polly by myself just at the moment and my confused, absent-minded habits when blended with a child’s natural anarchy make for a very messy house and a very messy head. What’s more, Polly’s ballet concert is looming and involves an unlikely amount of concentration, organisation and driving. Thankfully, I’ve been able to palm off the sequin-sowing to Polly’s female antecedents.

As regards my ongoing legal problems, my effort to have the charges reduced to something more in keeping with the wrongdoing have been flushed down into the grease-trap of cruel mechanistic legality. I will be facing another year of fear and uncertainty, but I will continue to fight. I just wish I was the only one who was suffering. To say that my partner does not cope well with tension and anxiety would be an extreme understatement and Polly, of course, though she does not know what’s happening, is already affected by the changes in our circumstances.

I would really like to thank Jenny, Lynne, Dolores, Andrew, Robert. Sara and Di for their support the other day in court. I love you all.

You’ll hear from me soon.

~ titus andronicus

Yes, I live on. My pale yellow bones still tread the Earth. My time has been fully allotted – an equal split between productive periods, recuperative periods and periods spent in bewilderment and disorientation. The school holidays have been and gone And, of course, there’s been the Grand Final and the nerve-wracking weeks preceding, which consumed and then bitterly spat out all my emotional energy. There’s nothing to say St Kilda can’t win next year, but we came so close, so close … and blew it.

I wonder to what extent cuticle condition is an indicator of mental health? Just now my bitten down nails and knurled, nibbled-at cuticles are returning to a semblance of health. In the bad times I might wear two, three or more band-aids on those fingertips where I have gnawed too far …

I’ve been rehearsing for a production of The Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus, which opens on Wednesday. It’s become a bit of an annual event for me, doing these plays at RMIT with Lynne (Ellis). Last year it was Under Milk Wood, before that The Tempest and The Bible. It’s always an agreeable time. I like the students: sweet, sparkling with enthusiasm and growing younger every year (I’m older than a lot of their parents now). Above all, I find it pleasing to leach their health-giving youthful energies and employ them towards my own questionable ends.

Doing the play also helps keep me in focus; inevitably I have a huge amount of lines and blocking to recall - and my brain does respond, though sluggishly, to the challenge. And with so many unfamiliar individuals about, I get plenty of practice acting normal, which is a talent I begin to lose if I spend too much time in my cloud castle. On stage, however, Lynne gives me license to ham it up to my heart’s content. Last year I channeled Peter Lorre; in Titus, as the outrageously wicked villain Aaron –a green-fleshed alien from the Sculptor Galaxy (at least in this production) - I’m trying to draw inspiration from Bill Nighy’s Viktor in Underworld.

Oh, and I also like coming home late at night from the city by train, too – it almost feels like I have a real job.

If it piques your interest, Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare’s Festival of Gore), runs for four night - Wednesday through Saturday (7-10 Oct) at the Kaleide Theatre at RMIT in Swanston St, Melbourne. It is part of the 2009 Melbourne Fringe Festival. Tickets are $5/$10 and it starts at 7.30. To suit modern attention-spans, it’s been edited down a fair bit and features excepts from Christopher Dunne’s bizarre film adaptation. The two female leads are composite beings, each played, at all times, by five girls.

Titus is thought to be Shakespeare’s earliest tragedy and brims with murder, rape, villainy, revenge, general barbarity, a complex web of deceit and evil deeds of every ilk. (Note well that my character is progenitor of most of these.) It’s ‘by far his bloodiest work’. Indeed, this bloodthirstiness caused the play to remain out of favour for long periods of its history, regardless of its literary quality which, though not of the level of his greatest works, is outstanding.