Much of Barry Humphries & Friends – Back With A Vengeance! has the feel of a greatest-hits concert. Dame Edna can still effortlessly embarrass audience members, and Humphries’ grasp of his old home town is remarkable for a man who has spent most of his life away from it. And Les Patterson’s crassness can still raise a hearty laugh. But these characters, hilarious as they are, did not have the contemporary political and social bite that they once did. The joke, these days, is partly about the incongruity of the characters themselves; when seemingly half the British arts world is run by Aussie expats, Sir Les is a chance to laugh at the Australia we once were, not the Australia we like to think of ourselves as today.
But Humphries hasn’t lost his touch, sliding in between the light-hearted frippery a piece of theatre as savage as anything you’re likely to see done at LaMama, and with all the skill that 50 years on the stage can bring. The ghost of Sandy Stone delivers a gentle, wistful monologue about the fate of his wife, who after Stone’s death loses all her money in a telemarketing scam, succumbs to Alzheimer’s, and ends up in a “federally-funded aged care institution as depressing as one can imagine. Humphries evokes an institution as loathsome as the asylums of the 19th century, with the most exceptionally devoted relative visiting once a year, devoid of kindness, and little more than a cattle yard for those waiting to join Stone himself. Stone’s gentle tones bely an savagely angry indictment of the federal government, centre managers, their staff, but especially the adult children of those “cared for” in these centres, and judging by the uncomfortable shuffling in the chairs of the mostly middle-aged, middle-class audience, Humphries exposed more than a few very raw nerves.
I have to wonder what keeps Humphries dressing up as Edna, now that he is comfortably into his 70s. At this stage, money can hardly be the motivation, and he hardly needs to put himself through the gruelling schedule of a touring one-man show (he is onstage for over two hours) if he needs the adrenaline fix of applause every now and then. I have to think that things like the Sandy Stone routine, more than anything else, is what motivates him to continue performing. The prankster of the 1950s is still hitting his targets, on topics that few of Australia’s younger comics would ever think to examine.
Humphries is taking the show to Sydney, Brisbane, and Adelaide later in the year. It’s hard to know whether we’ll get the chance to see him perform at this length again. If not, it’s an entirely fitting farewell, and well worth your hard-earned in my view.
I suspect a lot of people under 40 don’t understand the humour – it just comes across as something coarse and savage. But it relates, as you suggest, to an earlier Australia – of the 1950s and 1960s.
I think he is a genius with a photographic memory for exquisite detail – his humour as much as anything pinpoints memories. He makes us laugh at ourselves and, if it wasn’t so funny, it would hurt.
I once saw him do a Sandy Stone retrospective – fascinating to see it move from the initial sketches, which were brutal satire on the boredom of suburban life, to the quite moving nostalgia for Sandy’s lost world in the later sketches.
I think he still uses Edna because he likes dressing as her. Les Girls were always funnier as drag acts.
Rubbish, Robert. The only genuinely comic character Humphries has ever been involved in creating was Bazza McKenzie, and that was because he took a boring, middle-of-the-road comic strip and ruined it. All the rest of the Dame Edna routine is just reaction, schlock and single-entendre; it’s the Carry On genre for people too up themselves to admit to enjoying smut jokes.
The boys from Pizza did a vastly superior job in the line of ‘contemporary political and social bite’. Yalla!
TDD: Have you seen the show?
I haven’t seen that much of Humphries’ broader career (heck, I wasn’t born for the first 20 years of it). However, completely absent any outside consideration, the Sandy Stone routine was one of the best pieces of theatre I’ve seen. Full stop.
Very nice piece. I live in Los Angeles, and Barry has never performed Sandy or Sir Les onstage in America, so I’ve only seen Les in videos and I’ve only seen Sandy Stone once, in the video of 2003’s “Back to My Roots.” I’ve heard tapes of some of Sandy’s other monologues, and read the published compendium of them, “The Life & Death of Sandy Stone”, and I think Sandy is an amazing creation.
When Barry last performed here, I sent him a letter complaining that he never did his other characters for us, especially Sandy Stone, noting how when I played tapes of Sandy for my friends, they were captivated by this amazing, moving yet funny creation, with it’s rage expressed through resigned sweetness. I asked him to trust America to get Sandy.
Barry sent me a lovely email back, saying he appreciated my interest in Sandy, and how he himself was very fond of the character. (He was engaged in writing the monolgue you reviewed at the time, as he mentioned in his email.)
Let us hope we get many more opportunities to debate whether Barry is still a relevant artist or not. I think he is.
And here’s something odd to contemplate: As Barry presents his version of Australia to the world, a vision often severely criticized as “Letting the side down” in his home country, he has raised both my awareness and my opinion of Australia. If Australia can turn out such a versitile genius, what a great place it must be.
Thanks for that interesting perspective, Douglas McEwan.
Humphries is a brilliant performer who reads his audiences with great accuracy. He probably knows how much effort it would take to acquaint an LA audience with the shabby gentility and parochial pieties of a moribund eastern-suburban Melburnian.
Peter Cook and Dudley Moore faced and evaded the same problem with their Pete and Dud.
Sometimes the cultural gap is too wide to make the trip worthwhile in the course of an evening’s entertainment.
As to Edna. Humphries’ genius is to convince us that her journey from Moonee Ponds housewife to monstrous international celebrityhood is possible, indeed natural.
Long ago Edna stopped representing anything about Moonee Pond, Melbourne, Australia, or even the normal world.
Instead, Edna pays visits to that world from a mythical world of celebrity. She is utterly convinced that she visits from a real place.
The deeply ironic element of the performance is that the audience have no way of disproving her claims, and don’t want to anyway.
And isn’t this the essence of being a celebrity?
Hello, my names jamie, im trying to contact Mr Humphries in regars to a photograph i have of my grandfather and who i believe is Mr Humphries during WW2. I need to contact Mr Huphries, please give me his email adress for his fan club or something like that, thanks.
James,
I believe you will find Barry’s London address in a copy of ‘Who’s Who’.
It’s a shame more people don’t appreciate his persona of Sandy Stone. In my opinion, he is the epitome of 50’s Australia and it’s a shame more young people don’t understand the humour. Australians are supposed to laugh at themselves, not take themselves so seriously, and knowing as I do that young Australians still share the boredom of suburbia that Sandy Stone so adequately portrays, it’s a shame they’re not prepared to laugh at themselves, as their parents do. Are they afraid of getting older?
Humphries is still sharp, but I think his schtick is dated. He’s brilliant, but Australia is not in the 1950s anymore. My mum saw the show (she’s 70 next birthday) and she had a hoot.
Perhaps the Libs could draft Sir Les Patterson as candidate to be PM. He couldn’t be as inauthentic as the incumbent. And it would get the annoyingly predictable and passe Barry Humphries off our stages and TV screens. And let’s face it. Sir Les would be a much better representative at gigs like APEC.
Anyway…
Cheers…
hc
That is taking it too far. However, it is true that those whose education started once the school and university curricula had been cleansed and made politically-correct show an historically unprecedented ignorance of and insenstivity to irony!
Indeed. Exhibit A.