1991

The Life and Death of Sandy Stone

Barry Humphries

Her Majesty’s Theatre, February, 1991.

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Barry Humphries once described Sandy Stone as a decent, humdrum little old man. It remains an apt assessment. Drab, suburban, habitual, Sandy epitomised the prosaic domestication of the Anglo-Australian male. When Barry Humphries held a mirror up to nature it was the obsessive, sexless, life of Sandy Stone which appeared in the glass not the gangly, heroic fiction of Chips Rafferty. When Ava Gardner said in 1958, during the making of On the Beach, that Melbourne was the ideal location for a film about the end of the world, she might have been talking about a visit to 36 Gallipoli Crescent, Glen Iris, home of Beryl and Alexander Stone.

Sandy Stone is one of that  distinguished collection of twentieth century non-entities which includes Eliot’s Prufrock and Phillip Larkin’s Mr Bleaney. His droning cadences belong to the experiments of Gertrude Stein and other prose minimalists. His vacuous life is a cheerier version of Watt or Krapp, or the boarding house codgers at Harold Pinter’s birthday party. Barry Humphries knows all this but it is his gift that he can take an existential stereotype and return him to the  vaudeville revue where Beckett and others found him in the first place.

With The Life and Death of Sandy Stone, Humphries has for the first time given his most downbeat character a show of his own. In the past Sandy popped up, or more precisely- since he invariably played the scene of his demise- popped off, somewhere on the agenda between Neil Singleton and Lance Boyle. More recently he has been overshadowed by the vulpine Edna and the effusive Les Paterson. Until now, the Sandy Stone set piece was the adagio movement (to use his creator’s term) within a larger, more turbulent construction.

I can only say that Sandy Stone’s shuffle to centre stage is a welcome event and proof to anyone left doubting the idea that Barry Humphries bridges perfectly the territory between the theatre and burlesque. He is a consummate writer and performer whose precision and detail continue to place him at the forefront of Australian theatre. No one can work an audience with his effortless timing, nor write lines that insinuate with such comic complexity.

The Life and Death of Sandy Stone is a deliberate museum piece especially the first half. The opening monologue is note-perfect from 1958 -“I went to the RSL the other night and had a very nice night’s entertainment…” Sandy’s curious blend of euphemism, officialese and suppressed innuendo charts his suburban odyssey, shaped by tedium, obligation and bleak resignation. Sandy’s life is full of tribulation-such as  where to park vehicle and  what to do about the curried egg on the axminster. But it is also not without epiphany, captured in Humphries’mock-poetic line -“By the time I got home it was that blowy, the Herald was all over the front lawn.” Sandy in dusty aspic.

When he first described the Wild Life in the Suburbs of the 1950’s , Barry Humphries, dadaist, aesthete and cultural terrorist, was annotating Robin Boyd. Here were the Australian Uglies in their habitat – complacent, Anglophile, oblivious to the European upheavals which had brought new migrants and old cultures to Melbourne. Here were Edna and Sandy living in such tiny universes they wouldn’t know if their arses were on fire. For audiences now , the writing flickers with nostalgia. The times they depict may have been anaesthetised but at least no-one felt pain. Without such knowledge what blissful ignorance. When Sandy glories in the Astor radio and sits peacefully in the dark listening to the bakelite cooling down, audiences secretly envy him. He is the apotheosis of the couch potato.

From his armchair Humphries navigates the known world of Sandy Stone. With a litany of brand-names and torpid cliches, he hints at the nearly three decades of social change which have passed him by. If not a black joke, it is a very grey one. Humphries understands exactly the equivocal Australian reaction because increasingly he shares it. This is not so much a shift in his politics (he always voted tory anarchy as far as I can see) as due to the fact that when he started, Edna and Sandy were portraits by the artist as a young man. Now he is their contemporary the comedy has become more intricate.

Sandy, as we are told after interval, is  now a shade on the dead side. I am deceased he announces, adding drily – with the resultant consequence that there has been a considerable change in my life-style. The joke, of course,  is that he is more lively as a phantom in his own soap opera than he ever was when actually inhabiting the Jason Recliner. Although there are none of the sorties into the

crowd which distinguish Edna there is more conspiratorial audience address. Sandy is more searching , about the wife, Beryl, her interloping paramour, and about life in the Foodarama and the Repat. Sandy has a good old recherche about the temps perdu, and the people as well- Nurse Younghusband and her young husband, the Nettletons , the shadowy Valmai Clissold and the likes of Returned Men, Les Bullock and Pat Hennessy.

Whether describing the inert chemistry of the crumpet or apostrophising paper lanterns as tomatoes, Sandy is a remarkable comic creation -a filigreed miniature in contrast to the vehement vulgarity of the rest of the Humphries bestiary. The Life and Death of Sandy Stone summarises thirty-odd years of a way of life that is plainly presented as a joke and yet we are edgily reminded that its assumptions continue to seep into our political, social and imaginative lives. As Sandy says of the air raid shelters in Melbourne backyards during wartime – people think nothing happened in those days, when in point of fact, it nearly did.

“Sandy Through the Hour Glass” The Adelaide Review, No.86, March, 1991. p.34.