So, unlike Lewis in Così I had experience of mental institutions. It is difficult to rediscover my motives for involving myself with mental patients. I suspect that the madness of my grandmothers gave me an intense interest in the subject. Madness both frightened and attracted me. This was 1971 and the era of R.D. Laing, a Scottish psychiatrist whose view of madness was oddly reassuring in a decade going crazy. One of his ideas was that labelling people mad was to stigmatise them, and that many mentally ill people should be allowed to go totally mad—once at rock bottom they would again find their true selves. This idea of true and false selves is such a philosophical, let alone a psychological flim-flam, that it is not surprising that someone like myself, at twenty-one, was attracted to it. I even approached the mental health authority and proposed that I write a history of asylums in Victoria. Not having the intellectual rigour to do this, I decided to work with mental patients.

This was also the era when chemicals began to control many of the wilder excesses of madmen and saw the first influx of social workers, who like grass burrs, were attaching themselves onto our social fabric. One social worker asked a friend and myself if we wanted to do theatre with mental patients, ‘to bring them out of their selves’ (I suspect he meant ‘shells’). Having the confidence and certainty of youth I thought that theatre would be therapeutic.

One of the connections I feel with Lewis now is my first day in rehearsals. Instead of feeling cocky, I felt a great terror. Facing so many faces, some earnest, shy and irritated, I suddenly realised I was responsible for these people. I wanted them to ‘come out of their shells’, but at the time feared what would happen.

So who was I then, and how much was I like Lewis? I was a person who was very much removed from what was around him. Working with mental patients seemed to me to be something to believe in, something far removed from the political rhetoric of the anti-Vietnam war protests of the late 1960s. Every day I would turn up at the Mont Park hall, to rehearse Trial by Jury. This was the added burden. I hated Gilbert and Sullivan but one of the patients wanted to do it. Some patients agreed with me and demanded more ‘singable’ songs, so we incorporated Beatles and Bee Gees songs into the show. As we rehearsed I realised that although I was working with the most approachable patients, many were mad. No trendy philosophy can hide the terrifying nature of madness for both the sufferer and his relatives.

Once I had gotten over any impulses to be a do-gooder I began to enjoy rehearsals. There was only one performance. Some relatives of the patients came, but the audience was mostly other patients. Before the performance started a student radical came along. Here was a fellow who preached revolution and the equality of all, and this radical, let’s call him Nick, started to sing into the microphone, as patients filed in, the song about madness: ‘They’re coming to take me away, ha, ha!’ I had never felt such anger towards anyone in my life.