From the office of ROLAND ROCCHICCIOLI

I wager — London to a brick — Bob and Betty Basic and Uncle Tom Cobley and all — could not give a tinker’s cuss about binary, nonbinary, queer, hetero — or any other of the litany of sexual classifications — which so muddle and bedevil our lives.

Being a minority is challenging. In the finest Panglossian tradition our collective aspiration should be for happiness and personal fulfilment — however; and in accord with many — I have no yearning to be part of an acrimonious crusade. Questa è la vita!

2026 marks my 60th year in the theatre — and before anyone gets their proverbial testes in a tangle — I have worked all over the world — mostly at the top of the tree — and I have learned to engage with — even cajole — a cavalcade of complex personalities and eye-widening anomalies. Never once have I missed a beat.

It has been said — and I am flattered — I have impeccable manners. I strive to be mindful of sensitivities and sensibilities. The career has been about making people feel good. I learned from experience — diplomacy was always the tool; however, my patience — and I do not profess to be Job — is being tested.

If the cat has kittens in the oven it does not make them biscuits! Artifice notwithstanding, postulating personal identify as something other than the assigned birth gender does not — ipso facto — gift an unassailable entitlement to foist that notion on society — particularly in the area of women’s sport.

Several participants — built like the corrugated tin lavvy down in the corner of the chook house where I grew-up in the North-eastern goldfields of Western Australia — are wittering-on ad nauseam following their defensible exclusion from a women’s netball team.

My sister — 8 years my senior — played basketball/netball — and she took no prisoners. The girls played on the Gwalia State School court which was made from coarse gravel. I need hardly tell you what happened when they hit the dirt. I suspect even she — who was no shrinking violet — would hesitate to play defence goalie against these two particular persons.

This whole episode puts one in mind of Theatre of the Absurd — which is not dissimilar to much of the public discourse to which one is relentlessly subjected. Extrapolating to the absurd: I was a good Catholic boy — I remember the words of Father of Fathers. Still I can recite the Mass in rusty Latin and — to my advantage — it has been said I look good in costume. Certainly, I know how to work a balcony — and I have perfected the Apostolic greeting. So — why can I not be the pope? The answer is obvious: “because you can’t — you idiot!”

It is time for the silent majority to make clear to the vocal minority we are sincerely compassionate but back-teeth grindingly fed-up with the shenanigans. The narcissism of histrionic public disclosure is tedious. Why would we have an interest in your personal pronouns? I do not know you — and there is a possibility I am not interested.

Stop — enough is enough! God knows — life is difficult — and this is not a rehearsal. I blinked, and recently had a birthday involving a 7 and a 9! None of us lives forever — “the sands of time”. With God’s good grace I might — if lucky — get another 15 years. That prospect fills me with a profound sense of horror.

Just get on with it. Stop the bloody twaddle! Contact: [email protected]