Late Dame Edna Everage creator Barry Humphries had a lasting impact in New Zealand
Barry Humphries, 1934 - 2023. Photo / Rex Features
In his long, brilliant and Technicolor career, the late great Barry Humphries sometimes had a bit of a funny time in New Zealand. In the first of his two memoirs, More Please, the Australian polymath wrote about one tour that had to cancel its Christchurch season. A local paper didn’t like the sound of his show, “An Evening’s Intercourse with Barry Humphries”. It refused any ad with the word “intercourse”. Without the Garden City dates, the tour suffered financially.
He also had a bit of a funny time with some New Zealanders. Humphries was inspirational in creative lives from this side of the Tasman, including those of CK Stead and John Clarke, and he collaborated with many other Kiwis along the way.
Humphries came here early in a theatre career which he’d begun as a dandy Dadaist provocateur in his student days at the University of Melbourne. Edna Everage first appeared on an Auckland stage in 1962 when she was still the shrill, dowdy housewife from Moonee Ponds and a work in progress.
Humphries brought Edna and other characters like doleful widower Sandy Stone and permanently soused cultural attaché Sir Les Patterson here for the last time 50 years later.
NZ had been a Humphries early adopter, even before Edna’s television mega-stardom.
“We’re on the same laughter fault line,” he told the Listener in 1984 as Edna prepared to present that year’s Feltex Television Awards.
Edna made fun of us. As Max Cryer wrote in this magazine in 1988: “Her comments about New Zealand are fairly frequent with a kind of acidic affection – though often leaning more heavily on the acid than the affection.”
And, of course, there was Edna’s glum, silent sidekick Madge Allsop, who was first mentioned in her early monologues before being made flesh on stage and television. Originally from Palmerston North, she was Edna’s bridesmaid. Edna had taken Madge under her wing after her own husband, Doug, died on their honeymoon. He had fallen into a Rotorua mud pool, and, wrote Humphries, “his tandoori’d remains were found weeks later”.
During Edna’s television stardom era of the 1980s and 90s, poor mute Madge was there as a figure of fun, played mostly by the unprovokable English actor Emily Perry. She made a very dull little brown Kiwi alongside the boisterous flaming galah. A little slice of kiwifruit atop the giant Edna colonial-cringe pavlova.
When this writer talked to Humphries ahead of his final NZ tour, he suggested in all seriousness a statue to the then dearly departed Madge should be erected in Palmerston North. After all, Hamilton had erected one to Rocky Horror Show creator Richard O’Brien. “Madge is no better-looking than Richard O’Brien. But she is rather famous and a much-loved Kiwi.” Humphries’ appeal fell on deaf ears, possibly due to Madge being neither an actual Kiwi nor a citizen of the real world.