The Age from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia • Page 14

14- THE AGE, Friday 11 February 1983 i edited by Anthony Clarke Capitalising on a talent to abuse From the absurd to the silly 4 1 THEATRE INTERVIEW actor Richard Huggett: capitalising on Waugh's talent to abuse. I MET Waugh just once. Once was enough," says the British actor Richard Huggett, who starts a season at the Universal Theatre next week of his one-man show 'A Talent to Abuxe', in which he slips into the guise of Evelyn Waugh on the last day of his life. "I was aged about 14 or 15. 1 had read just about everything Waugh had written up till then.

I idolised him. "One day my father decided to take me to the Savage Club. He warned me not to say a word. 'Just he said. 'You may learn So Master Huggett sat, listened and absorbed, when suddenly the door opened and in walked Waugh, wearing one of his famous rumpled tweed suits and looking pudgy and jowly and thoroughly discontented.

"He sat down and proceeded to talk in the most waspish and vitriolic manner about everything and everybody, including a most sarcastic account of a recent dinner aboard the Queen Mary with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. I noticed that everybody around the table was keeping quiet while these nasty and obnoxious things poured forth from this awful little man." After an hour Waugh rose to go. Huggett decided that he had to say something, and get some sort of So he developed his one-man Waugh show, which he has now played with great success in Edinburgh, London and New York, and which will probably reopen in London after the Australian tour. Before I met Richard Huggett, his publicity agent told me that Huggett actually believed he was Waugh, so deeply had he got into the part My reaction was that there is a place for someone who believes he is Evelyn Waugh, but it's not on the stage. "In fact," said Huggett, "if you play a part long enough and examine a character deeply enough, something has to rub off.

And after a few months I found that certain of his attitudes were becoming my attitudes. "I was becoming rude to waiters, becoming rather anti-Semitic, rather snobbish, and saying things I don't normally say. I realised what was happening and said to myself: 'This is nonsense. This is unprofessional and ridiculous. This must not Fortunately, it hasn't." I can vouch that it hasn't.

Richard Huggett is an immensely theatrical person larded with humor, who erupts with laughter at the drop of an anecdote. If he has adopted any of the Waugh persona, it's not from the abusive side of Waugh's character. "I think there was a real schizophrenic element in Waugh," Anthony Clarke reply from the great man of letters, he suddenly blurted out "I say, Mr Waugh. I've just read 'Brideshead Revisited'. It's The great man turned.

"Oh God!" he snarled. "Another worshipper at the shrine. "I have written other things, you know. Maybe you did not know that." He stamped out, leaving everyone terribly silent and Huggett crushed. Years later Huggett recounted this to Nancy Mitf ord.

"She pealed with laughter. 'Dear she said, 'when you meet a famous author, never talk about their most successful book. Talk about his least known. This will please him because it's bound to be his "What I should have talked about was his novel 'Helena', which was a complete commercial disaster. He, perversely, thought it was his best work but it is in fact a terrible bore." Three years ago Richard Huggett, who is now in his mid-50s, started putting on a lot of weight, and developing jowls and double chin.

"The physical resemblance to Waugh was handed to me on a silver platter. I had to do something with it." was a great honor. "The scandal wasn't as exciting as you might think. He had just found out that in one of my out-of-work periods I had spent a month working as butler for Lady Rother-mere. The things an actor sometimes has to do riously wicked style, he attempted to demolish both Huggett the man and his play.

"I had purposely not contacted Auberon while doing my research. Families of the late great are bad news, and there was nothing Auberon could have told me which I did not already know. "I think this annoyed him. His article was wonderfully libellous; a piece of unalloyed vituperation. I replied in kind.

It was the best possible publicity for the play and was great for business. "Even 'Private Eye', the satire and scandal magazine, got into the act. The actor Peter Cook, who was on the magazine's board of management dug up a bit of 'scandal' from my past and I was pilloried in the magazine's gossip column. It BRIEFLY A "Stop the Drop' concert in aid of the campaign for nuclear disarmament will be held this Sunday at 3 pm at the Myer Music Bowl. Those appearing will include Bruce Spence, Slim Whittle, Jonathan Coleman, Bryan Brown and Lee Simon, and the bands Midnight Oil, INXS, Goanna Band and Redgum will provide five hours of message rock.

Hit and a miss at festival THE Melbourne Theatre Company's double-bill programme of one-acters at Athenaeum 2 goes from the absurd to the silly. Fortunately the silliness is quite funny. The absurd(ist) play is 'Strip-, tease', by Slawomir Mrozek, a Pole living in Italy. It is set in a smog-filled room into which two bowler-hatted clerks have been abruptly introduced. They appear to be men, but are acted by women (Jan Friedl and Catherine Wilkin).

They spend their time behaving like long-lost Siamese twins, contradicting each other or being terrified by a giant hand. There is much debate about the nature of freedom and the virtues of being passive or active. Plays of this kind have some value if the talk is intelligent, naggingly cryptic or funny, and if they offer some intriguing view or exploration of the absurdity of being human. 'Striptease' is merely dull or pretentious, often both at the same time. The programme's director, Tony Watts, has better luck and shows more skill with 'Magnetic North', by Michael Gurr, a 21-year-old Melbourne writer.

It is also in the absurdist But more often, as in a majestic version of 'I Remember Clifford', or a brilliant medley of songs that Miles Davis used to perform in the fifties. Murphy's performance was a very rewarding melding of technique and feeling. Local pianist Tony Gould provided superb accompaniment His partners in the rhythm section, the bassist Stephen Hadley and the drummer Virgil Donati, began uncertainly but played with more drive as the night progressed. The night finished on a high note when Murphy invited the local singer Vince Jones on stage to trade scat choruses and ad lib lyrics. Jones survived the test admirably, and such unexpected spontaneity was a delightful bonus for the fans.

Wednesday's performance by the German bassist Eberhard Weber and the American guitarist WlNNEK M1TH TH with im ST 1 gufc fV fir A Neil Jillett mould, but instead of opting, as Mrozek seems to do, for some form of cosmic stateme-. Gurr is content to be engagingly loony. The play is set in a bathroom which may be part of a judge's chambers, a house in working-class suburbia or a mansion owned by a rich woman who plays practical jokes with bombs. Its three characters are Arthur, a reclusive slaughterman, Scott, a young murderer with a retentive bladder, and Louis, a butler who would like to be a magician. Gurr has a nice way with the idiosyncracies of Australian speech and a flair for exploiting the comic value of nan se-quiturs.

His short play fizzles out, just as it promises to surprise us with an outrageous ending. Still, 'Magnetic North is a fairly satisfying triviality, and the cast John Bowman, Peter Kowitz and Douglas Hedge negotiate its inconse-quentialities with the proper absurdist air of deadly earnestness. JAZZ Adrian Jackson Jack Wilkins was a much less memorable affair. A small crowd of devotees turned out to hear the duo perform a programme chiefly comprised of Weber originals numbers like 'Colors of Chloe and 'Silent Feet' that typified his intelligent but unemotional amalgam of jazz and classical elements. Wilkins had little chance to justify his reputation as an exciting jazz guitarist.

Like Weber, he played with expertise and care, but was unable to inject much vitality into the music. The Melbourne Jazz Festival at Jackson Square continues tonight and tomorrow night with the Mel Lewis Quartet Mark Murphy will return there next Thursday. by Lynn Johnston by Brant Parker and Johnny Hart yot sorfcrebia.nn IT by Tom Ryan tea jvn t- 7 I THIS week's Melbourne Jazz Festival at Jackson Square got off to a strong start on Monday night when the American singer Mark Murphy thrilled a large audience with his vocal virtuosity. Murphy's performance showed why he is regarded as the archetypal bebop vocalist: displaying remarkable range and agility, not to mention daring, he took great liberties with his material, often emphasising notes rather than lyrics, and proving that it is possible for a singer to be as improvising as an instrumentalist. The greatest risk he ran was that the performance could become a mere display of technique, and there were times when it seemed that there was little point to all the vocal acrobatics for instance, in his breakneck speed version of 'As Time Goes HETZOKflKEftfU-V IT I9N TftE SAME XI plane -so we'll be wiTHexTDfloctf 4 dessert ffisssK- Tm Evelyn Waugh and (inset) Richard Huggett said.

"Snobbery was the key to his personality. "Waugh was born into a humdrum middle-class and slightly boring family and he yearned for the life of the nobility, which was why he always liked to associate himself with that class and why he adopted their attitudes, such as their contempt for the niceties of clothing. "Those people I met who had known the bad side of Waugh could not believe there was a good side. And the converse was true. I think I manage to show both sides." Evelyn Waugh's son Auberon disagreed.

After seeing a London preview of 'A Talent to Abuse', he contributed a full-page article to 'The Times', in which, in his deli Ifkk FOR BETTER OR WORSE THE WIZARD OF ID Y0M MX, Of W'UfflrOH THE- 10m MOU)'S TUG Bp COLD 9 1 iji i ftu)FUL 7 TUMBLEWEEDS WHAMMO INC. PROUaY HAS DflDDV 3 Gom uSsx; i mmi rmiiniiaBiiMinnnmr.i his moopkkmnA HAVE HIS SIGftlAlUKE seTlS OW V. on rr? nthb dimiy ITS NeWGAVBU mamv pvouvek waweu. mkQ lake, i i i 1 i i 1 1 KOUMESJ SOLUTION 11.904 A lAfAVfl a flat. vwuiu a uayv me nquia was an abluent.

Does this mean it was a detergent? a blueing agent? an insecticide? a deodorant? Answer far right. PUZZLE 11,905 ACROSS 1 Frailness (9) 8 Soon (4) 9 Involved (9) 11 Die (6) 13 Prompt (5) 15 Encounter (4) 16 Feat (S) 17 Rapid (5) 18 Elicit (5) 19 Summit (4) 20 Bewildered (5) 22 End (6) 25 Agitated (9) 26 Money (4) 27 Care (9) DOWN 2 Circle (4) 3 Attic (6) 4 Clear (5) 5 Carry (4) 6 Neat (9) 7 Promise (9) Most radio stations are big on small talk. But who really cares about fab fun with fondues. Or the fighting Fondas. And why settle for the gee-gees when you can have the Bee Gees.

Who needs radio that sounds like a boring guest at a dreary dinner. When you can swap articulation, for an orchestration. And the personalities, for the stars. Like Sinatra, Streisand and Sedaka. Well just glide on by the yaks until you reach 1500.

Where you'll find beautiful sounds, beautifully paced, beautifully performed. Maybe you need a little more 3AK in your day. 3AK Beautiful Music. A word a day ANSWER: An abluent (a b'lu-ent) is a detergent. From the Latin abluere.

10 Live (5) 12 Faulty (9) 13 Identify (9) 14 Cede (5) 17 Banquet (5) 19 Pill -(6) 21 Saunter (5) 23 Harm (4) 24 Unfasten (4) I.