Nothing like a Dame

Kafka was right: ‘Strange how make-believe, if engaged in systematically enough, can change into reality.’ But Barry Humphries, at the age of 76, manages much of the time to control his vacillating schizoid tendencies in nice equipoise. In his autobiography More Please, he stated that Edna Everage was a figment of his imagination. In this new ‘unauthorised’ biography of Dame Edna there are Kafkaesque indications that he believes she actually ‘has her being’, as he might put it. Like a ventriloquist’s dummy, she has long enabled him publicly to deride others in malicious innuendo that he would not have uttered in his less frivolous role of kindly Barry Humphries. However, as in other authenticated cases, the subterfuge is fragile: the creation sometimes dominates the creator, no matter how earnestly he attempts to maintain a semblance of normality.

At what may be described as the southernmost extremity of bipolar mood-swings, Humphries writes: ‘I wonder how I could ever have allowed one seemingly shy and uneducated woman to ruin my life.’