Welcome to show business. Please just throw money | Peter Goers

The vast majority of Australians in this dream career live below the poverty line, writes Peter Goers.

There’s no business like show business. All the others make money.

But you must be self-compelled and highly disciplined to work in showbiz. It must be the air you breathe, or you should do something else.

There’s an old gag about the man whose only job is to clean up the elephant dung at the circus. Someone questions him as to why he doesn’t get a better job and he retorts: “What? And give up show business?”

Show business is the only business in which you are not only exploited but expect it and enjoy it.

You invite rejection, humiliation, unemployment, insincerity and irrelevancy and live on luck, hope and dreams. And joy. But you wouldn’t have it any other way because you have the chance to catch lightening in a bucket.

There is no drug in the world as good as getting a laugh.

If you are an actor you get to take a holiday from yourself, nightly, and twice daily with matinees (although actors are like burglars – they work better at night.)

Adelaide arts and media identity Peter Goers and Samela Harrisat the opening night of 2023’s Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Picture: Kelly Carpenter

Hopefully, you get the abiding joy of pleasing the public and the joy of working with and for people you, most often, love and respect.

You come together in a company and with the audience as intimate strangers. You create something from nothing on a stage and given the financial constraints of the arts – often with nothing.

Let there be dancing in the streets, necking in the parks and drinking in the saloons, the Fringe – Australia’s biggest arts festival cometh.

Incredibly, 1300 shows are being created, from the sublime to the ridiculous, and often venues are being created for those shows.

Fringe venues are shared and currently I’m doing three productions out of the back of my car which is full of props, costumes and set pieces I can’t leave in shared venues.

Showbiz often requires you to do very strange things.

When I started in the theatre in 1971, I never thought I’d be pinning up an elaborate 1980s wedding dress (bought from an op shop for $34.95) for Anne “Willsy” Wills to hem.

I never dreamt my job as a director would be to kill ants on an outdoor stage or collect hundreds of crocheted nanna rugs for a set.

Welcome to show business.

There’s a lot of slog as there is in all work. Show business is always worth the stairs you have to climb because, hopefully, you get to please people out there in the dark and you tell stories under lights – and stories are eternal and crucial.

And, believe me, you don’t do it for the money.

The vast majority of artists in Australia are living below the poverty line.

So just throw money. We live on the need for approval for whatever talent we muster.

Show folk are always grateful for opportunity and even more grateful to and for audiences.

In 1978 I directed Camelot at the Scott Theatre.

At the end of the abysmal dress rehearsal, I was leaving the stage in front of the whole cast and I collided with a piece of the set and snagged a huge hole in a brand new jumper I was wearing.

I raged against everything in my little confected world.

An eight-year-old boy in the cast waited for my tantrum to subside and looked at me and said: “Well, Peter. That’s show business.”

It is (almost) always all right on the night.

See you at the Fringe and Festival. Just throw money.

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Originally published as Welcome to show business. Please just throw money | Peter Goers