Maggie Kirkpatrick is a wonderful choice for the final show at the Tilbury, partly because she has done so much. She was The Freak, the sadistic screw, in Prisoner - now a camp legend in the context of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.  She has sung in J.C. Williamson musicals, played Shakespeare, acted in the Left theatre scene at Sydney’s New Theatre and performed some of the great female roles in our national repertoire - most notably Aggie Cassidy in Peter Kenna’s trilogy, The Cassidy Album. With a larrakin personality, a wonderful deep voice and a nicely cynical style as a raconteur she is perfect for the genre that the Tilbury has created - the intimate self portrait of a star. She has street cred for the Mardi Gras, having performed with Carlotta when that pioneering drag queen was, as Kirkpatrick says, “at the cutting edge”; and bush cred in the straight theatre as one of the tough battling mums of the Australian tradition. It is not often in one of these Tilbury shows, that you get a speech from a play - in this case one of Aggie’s great ones from A Hard God, the first of the trilogy. If there was any justice in the world of theatre then Kirkpatrick would have played many more of these wonderful types, and we would now remember many more of the plays. She created a similar character with great success recently in John Misto’s The Shoe-Horn Sonanta.

She grew up a Legacy ward, in a country pub and moved to Newcastle, where she began a life of cheerful rebellion, at least as she tells it here. She sings a moving version of Bob Hudson’s hymn to growing up lonely in Newcastle, Girls In Our Town, before breaking off to say, “but I would have none of that”. She recounts stories from her professional life so well that you keep wanting to hear more. In the second-half she becomes self-mocklingly personal, in the ironically maudlin A Bottle Of Wine And Patsy Cline, and reveals her romantic side, equally ironically, in The Lies Of Handsome Men. Rather wearily she then introduces The Freak - “If that is what you’ve come to see” - and does the obligatory trot through the audience in character.

The Tilbury shows are about to end. The hotel has been sold and this is the last of a series of fine tributes to some of the great stars of our theatrical past. Proprietors Geoffrey Williams and Michael Freundt found a simple, magic formula: let them tell their own story and strut their stuff. Kirkpatrick sends herself up when she first comes on and says that she is here “to undo all the good work they’ve been doing”. But she is terrific - a star whose mixed career represents so many aspects of our theatre, whose personality engages our emotions and our sense of humour, and whose role as a representative of battling Australian womanhood is an inspiration for us all.

Reviewed by John McCallum for “The Australian”
February 1987