On the offensive

‘I’m an amateur,’ Barry Humphries tells me. The Australian polymath uses the word in its older sense of ‘enthusiast’ rather than ‘bungler’ and he feels no need to point out the distinction. He’s in London to perform a three-week residency at the Barbican — Barry Humphries’ Weimar Cabaret — with his fellow Australian Melissa Madden Gray, who uses the stage name Meow Meow. The show was inspired by Humphries’ fascination with Germany’s culture during the interwar years. ‘It was the last song before the nation slid into moral squalor. And I have a long-standing interest — I won’t say “passion” because one gets “passionate” about deodorants — but I have a long-standing interest in all pre-cataclysmic art. The art of the period just before a major catastrophe takes on an urgency. There are premonitory indications in the music.’

Are we living through a pre-cataclysmic era now? ‘We might be,’ he says, equivocally, perhaps unwilling to impart a tincture of political panic to our interview. He tells me that the Nazis labelled cabaret ‘degenerate’ but he finds it ‘vital’, refreshing and liberating. ‘It’s regenerative,’ he says. ‘There’s a lot of joy and laughter in the music and in the audience as well. What I’m saying to people, is, “Here is something I’ve always liked and you might like it too.”’ This is the basis of his claim to be an ‘amateur’. ‘I only do things I enjoy, and if it pleases me it generally pleases the audience.’

On stage he dispenses with his world-famous characters Dame Edna Everage and Sir Les Patterson and appears as himself. He solemnly tells me that this is a tremendous professional challenge. ‘It’s a difficult impersonation. Playing oneself is the ultimate test of the character actor.’