Theatre & memoir · 2 min read
The show beyond the curtain
A star’s arrival is only the beginning. Middle Class Fantasies follows the money, personalities and pub troubles that keep a producer busy long after the applause.
Featuring Middle Class Fantasies by Wilton Morley
The audience sees the curtain rise. The producer has already lived through a different show: the decisions, bills, temperaments and small emergencies that make that moment possible. Middle Class Fantasies begins in that less orderly world, in Australia in 1986, as Wilton Morley prepares to collect Rex Harrison from the airport.
Before the famous actor arrives, there is a morning conversation with Murray, a neighbour of the Sydney pub Wilton owns. The shift in scale is part of the memoir’s appeal. A theatre production and a pub can look glamorous from the outside; both depend on people whose priorities rarely align neatly with the owner’s plans.
A producer’s confidence meets a publican’s bills
In the opening chapter, the Geebung Polo Club grows from an apparently affordable purchase into a more demanding proposition. Refurbishment costs rise. The customers who were supposed to arrive have yet to materialise. Experience putting a play on the road offers little protection against the practical problems of keeping a pub open.
These details give the celebrity encounters their setting. The reader is invited into the working life surrounding the names on the playbill: negotiations, misplaced confidence, difficult relationships and the effort of keeping several enterprises moving at once. The humour comes from the distance between the grand plan and the day that actually unfolds.
For readers who want the whole evening
This is a natural starting point if the most interesting part of a theatre night, for you, is the conversation afterwards. What happened before the actors came on? Who kept the production together? What did success look like from the other side of the curtain?
Wilton approaches those questions through remembered exchanges and the circumstances of his own work. The memoir makes room for the theatre and for the life that continues beyond it, where another phone call or another bill can change the evening completely.
Begin with the opening below, then continue into Middle Class Fantasies for the longer view from backstage.
Reading notes on Middle Class Fantasies, beginning with ‘The Rain in Spain’.
From the book
The Rain in Spain — Australia | 1986
“That’s new,” I said, nodding at the box springs propped up against the charred wall. “Some sort of indigenous art sculpture, Murray, or will it actually become a functioning bed one day?”
Middle Class Fantasies · Wilton Morley
