Mug Shots by Barry Oakley Page A

work, but there was no chance of that at home. In 1966 Eugene, our fifth, had arrived, and every morning, as I took the St Kilda Road tram, I was escaping from work rather than going to it—but Carmel, the most efficient person I’ve known, managed superbly—so much so that I was able to write at night, once we’d got the quintet to sleep .
    With two-and-a-half unpublished and unpublishable novels behind me, I turned to drama. My first effort was a one-acter about, predictably, a misfit trapped in the Public Service. It was called Eugene Flockhart’s Desk , with the protagonist a research officer whose lifelong investigation of the poultry industry has led to uncontrollable outbreaks of arm-flapping and chook noises.
    My theatrical effort got a single line in Peter Holloway’s Contemporary Australian Drama : ‘A reading of Oakley’s first play in 1966 was the last theatrical performance at the Emerald Hill Theatre in Melbourne.’ Hidden in this innocuous sentence are the kinds of embarrassments that, I’d later learn, seem to go with the nature of theatre itself.
    The Emerald Hill Theatre had kept Melbourne dramatically nourished for five years. Its driving forces were Wal Cherry and George Whaley who mixed Sophocles and Ionesco with original Australian work, beginning with Bill Hannan’s Not With Yours Truly , whose innovations included a dog on stage. Emerald Hill received insultingly modest funding from the Elizabethan Theatre Trust and worked in a climate that banned the newspaper advertising of one of its productions— You’ll Come to Love your Sperm Test , directed by George Whaley. The theatre mocked the censorship by changing the title to You’ll Come to Love your Whale Test , directed by George Spermley.
    The Flockhart one-acter appeared with Tony Morphett’s I’ve Come About the Assassination . Friends and relatives were summoned. Some of the latter thought they were going to The Theatre and dressed up instead of down. I did too, with my Department of Trade blue suit laughably incongruous amidst the rollneck sweaters of the Morphett camp.
    Never mind. Interval’s now over and here we are assembling for Eugene Flockhart’s Desk , our formalities mercifully concealed as the house lights go down. The actors, who seem to have been costumed out of St Vincent de Paul bins, take their seats, consult their scripts, breathe in and begin—and, right on cue, a downpour thundered onto the tin roof. The actors’ lips moved, but no words seemed to come out of them. The first half of the play disappeared, and the theatre itself soon followed.
    Undeterred, I wrote another play, about another tormented figure, a teacher called Mr Stone. It was called A Lesson in English , and in it Stone tries to take his pubescent class through Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress . The literary niceties are soon lost as the poem unleashes their primal urges, which take over the room.
    It took the fancy of William Bates, who ran the modestly titled William Bates Theatre. Once again, family and friends were invited, and we trooped up the stairs to a small draughty space over a Carlton garage.
    What awaited me was a humiliation rivalling that of Stone himself. Bates played the part of Stone, but didn’t know his lines, and there were frequent whisperings from the wings. The ensemble work of the class he was meant to be instructing suggested they’d been brought in at random from the street. The chill wind that cut across the audience’s legs was as nothing compared to the frigid spectacle on the stage. I spent most of the time with my head down, waiting for the anarchy to finish.
    After the charade I was led, a condemned man, to an area divided off by a torn emerald drape. The green room. Sherries were served by a man in a dinner suit. I was asked to speak, but would not. Two old ladies who had come all the way from Ballarat asked me to sign their programs. I