Brian Hoad

 Nothing really to do with TV plays but another British person who found himself in an important position when appointed The Bulletin's theatre critics.

His SMH obit

Long-time theatre critic cultivated fuchsias and stoushes

June 28, 2006 — 10.00am

THEY said Brian Hoad was slipping away the night of Donald Horne’s Bulletin tribute party in 2003, but then he returned. Twice he slipped and came back. Now he has slipped away permanently, after a stroke at 68. Hoad being Hoad would enjoy the reference to slippage.

A man of humour, perceived by some as savage, and The Bulletin’s arts critic for 30 years, he had a passion for fuchsias. “He was known as the Once and Fuchsia Queen,” recalls the writer David Marr, whose first job in journalism was as Hoad’s B-string critic. “My God, he put in the hard yards. Can you imagine what it was like covering theatre every night for all those years? What a punishing routine.”

Born in Watford, England, the son of Maud and Albert, a boot shop manager, he went to Watford Grammar, earned a chemistry degree from Luton College of Technology, worked for the Atomic Energy Commission, then turned to science journalism with The Times. He came to Australia as a £10 immigrant in 1967 to be with Max Kelly, a Macquarie University historian and once a male model in Britain. They lived in Paddington for five years before separating, as friends, when Hoad bought a house in Glebe.
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After arriving in Sydney, Hoad walked into the offices of The Bulletin looking for a job. His timing was perfect. Patricia Rolfe, then deputy editor, says Hoad was lucky. “There’d been a stoush with the drama critic, who’d left in a huff, so Donald [Horne] took him on.”

Hoad and the arts editor, Denis O’Brien, found common enjoyment through idiosyncrasies of the place. They discovered an old storeroom full of junk belonging to Charles Higham, now the biographer of US film stars, including a plastic Mac and a left shoe, and roared with laughter. O’Brien found Hoad “a very jovial bloke” at first, but says Hoad ignored him at O’Brien’s 60th birthday party.
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He was secretive about his personal life. He didn’t want to be known, but was very well known himself, as O’Brien put it. A stoush with Richard Wherrett and the Sydney Theatre Company about glitzy productions made headlines, as did swipes at David Williamson, who retaliated with a fax saying, “His right to be subjective has degenerated into bile”. Hoad lapped it up.

The private Hoad loved his garden in Glebe, to which his ashes will return. His friends and carers Doug Evans, Phil Davies and Panos Couros say the house was a shrine to his art collection and books, though dusting was never his strong point. He owned more than 2000 hours of taped music and adored the Beatles as well as Sibelius. He played the cello.

He concocted extraordinary meals from potatoes, bacon and beans. Travel was an obsession, as was its minutiae. “Who is your carrier?” he would ask friends on their way to foreign parts. And “Where’s the loot?” on their return.

Police questioned him once about swimming nude after dark in the Victoria Park pool in Chippendale. “But officer, I’m a ratepayer!” he cried. Thrown off a train for drinking, he hailed a taxi to complete a 250-kilometre journey. At other times he pranced around as a psychedelic Prospero, or gave his midnight performance as King Lear.

After his stroke, with a twinkle in his eye, he said: “My wicked ways have finally caught up with me.” Then, on the winter solstice, June 21, he dropped off the twig. His funeral service was held yesterday. His siblings, Peter and Patricia, survive him.

Daphne Guinness