An audience with Dame Edna

It was a Saturday afternoon matinee in the Strand Theatre in London in autumn 1988 and members of the audience were wiping away tears of helpless laughter. Suddenly the basilisk gaze of Dame Edna Everage focused like a laser beam on Norah, a large woman in a bright floral-patterned summer dress, who was sitting in the front stalls. She had travelled up from Southampton by coach with her senior citizens' social club. They have come all the way to London to see Dame Edna Everage's extravaganza Back With a Vengeance! the nine-month sold-out tour de force by the Australian "housewife" – superstar alter-ego of Barry Humphries. It was that part of the show where Dame Edna deigned to spread a little glitz and glamour into the lives of ordinary people less fortunate than herself.

Norah would have curtseyed when addressed by Dame Edna except that she was sitting down, but she croaked to confirm her name, telling Dame Edna where she lived and that she and her husband had a nice bungalow on the outskirts of the city.

“You must have a lovely home, possums, because, let’s face it you obviously have saved on clothes! That floral curtain material you are wearing is so . . . how shall I say . . . so affordable! . . . However did you manage to get so many yards of it in the remnant sale?”

Dame Edna moved on to her next victim. Was it better being gored by Dame Edna than being ignored by Dame Edna? The discussion would shorten the bus journey back to Southampton.

Sadly this year, with Humphries turning 80 next month, Dame Edna Everage is hanging up her boa feathers, sequinned gowns and bejewelled butterfly spectacles after a final British touring show, Eat, Pray, Laugh.

After the matinee and as the audience shuffled out of the theatre drained and exhausted with mirth and laughter, I headed backstage with a mixture of excitement and trepidation for An Audience With Dame Edna I had been granted for the first issue of Irish Stage and Screen magazine in October 1988, an ambitious new magazine edited by Pat Moylan.

I thought I would get ahead of the possums by telling Dame Edna that in anticipation of her appearance in the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin with her show Back With a Vengeance that the first issue of Irish Stage and Screen would feature her on the cover in glorious technicolour.

She rearranged her features into one of benign tolerance of a cosmopolitan celebrity being interviewed for the school magazine. "Well it's not exactly Time magazine, is it?
However it is a nice gesture to welcome Dame Edna to Ireland on her Inaugural Outback
Walkabout.

“The priceless gift of the ability to laugh at the misfortunes of others has been my rock and consolation in the ups and downs of my brilliant career,” confided Dame Edna as though she were imparting the Third Secret of Fatima. “I’m not a Catholic, of course, but a dear friend of mine who is Polish, single and lives in Rome advised me to borrow the Popemobile on arrival at Dublin Airport and to drive around Stephen’s Green showering the natives with gladioli before making my way to the Number 1 star dressing room in your lovely little bijou Gaiety Theatre.”

Dame Edna’s one-liners have become legendary, but they tripped off the tongue as part of that privileged private audience. “My chat show was successful because I treated it as an intimate conversation between two friends, one of whom is a lot more interesting than the other,” she confided.

It was only her sense of duty to her public that kept her going, she said, a sense of caring for the less fortunate. Dame Edna’s own mother, she told me, used to say there were no strangers in life, only friends she hadn’t met. Dame Edna lowered her voice as she shared a family secret, “She is now in a maximum security twilight home in Australia!”

The critic and biographer John Lahr comes closest to defining the universal appeal of Barry Humphries’s Dame Edna Everage and what has made her a legend that sends audiences out of the theatre shaken, stirred, shocked and sore with laughter. He does not see the monstrous creation as owing much to either the traditions of pantomime dame or drag queen. For him the essence of Dame Edna is in the voice and its command which never wavers, the swagger in Edna’s falsetto which remains rigidly consistent and intimidating. He is a man playing a woman waving her magic gladioli wand and sprinkling stardust while transforming us all into children again, caught somewhere between pity and fear, between the catharsis of laughter and the camaraderie of the damned.

Had Dame Edna a special message for her Irish audience at the Gaiety Theatre?

“Never be afraid to laugh at yourself, possums. After all, you could be missing out on the joke of the century!”