GRAHAME BOND IN MY IMAGINARY FAMILY
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May 3-5
Illawarra Performing Arts Centre
Tickets: 4224 5999
Grahame Bond became an actor by pure accident.
Just like he accidentally became a writer, an advertising executive, an archaeologist and an architect.
"It's been a lot of accidental careers, I've bounced all around the shop," he laughs.
"My father used to claim he was a 'calathumpian'; in other words he didn't want to belong to anything that was institutionalised. That's how I sum up my life in a way.
"Architects thought of me as an actor, actors thought of me as an architect and advertising, I didn't really want to belong to their club anyway, so I found myself an outsider, a 'calathumpian' just like my dad."
Bond's chop-and-change attitude to his career luckily makes for a good story, which he is bringing to the stage with the one-man show My Imaginary Family.
The production charts his life, from growing up in Marrickville as the son of two "battlers" to the fame he found appearing on our screens in roles as varied as the famous transvestite Aunty Jack to the resident architect on Better Homes and Gardens.
The production is based on his memoirs, published last year, which were written at the suggestion of his grief counsellor as a way of dealing with the death of his mother, Lorna. "I was writing my memoirs and had about 230 pages and thought this could be a really nice one-man show," he says.
He says that acting out his life on stage is a soothing experience that has helped him deal with some of the more horrific experiences.
"It's confronting, but cathartic, healing in a way," he says.
In particular, he discusses his relationship with his Uncle Jack, whom the character of Aunty Jack was partly based on. "The first thing I wrote was about this hideous uncle I had. He mentally tortured me. He was a bully," Bond says.
Just one of the incidents he mentions involves his uncle forcing three teenage boys to fight the eight-year-old Bond to teach him self-defence. "The play's not all horrific like that, but it's about the things that mould you when you're a kid."
Of course, the production would be incomplete without a mention of Aunty Jack. When Bond created the infamous character, there was nothing quite like her on television.
He recalls how after the first episode, the ABC received more than 1000 complaints, especially about the use of the phrase "I'll rip your bloody arms off!".
While Bond was happy to let the old girl go after just 13 episodes back in the '70s, it seemed his audiences weren't quite ready.
"At one point I couldn't bear being in the same dress as Aunty Jack, I hated playing her," he says.
"It became something I couldn't escape, everyone wanted it."
But he has realised that the golden-gloved lady provided him with a lot of opportunities in the entertainment industry.
"Aunty Jack opened a lot of doors for me, but I didn't particularly enjoy playing it later on because I wasn't getting anything out of it. I was getting more delight out of doing other things," Bond says.
"Aunty Jack is sort of mythological and I can stand outside it now and say she was an important character in the scheme of things, that she broke all the rules."
