In his long and celebrated career, Henri Szeps has shown a passion and commitment to performing solo plays. To date, he has performed four well received monologue shows, all at the Ensemble Theatre, loyal to the school from which he originally graduated from in 1966.

First, in 1990, there was his performance in ‘Double Bass’, a German play co-translated by Henri and Timothy Daly. The play dealt with a nondescript double bass player who works in the orchestra pit of the opera. What we saw was the frustrations of ‘the little man’, the nobody of the orchestra. ‘Double Bass’ was an allegory of the downtrodden crying out to be heard, set to the elegant world of classical music.

In 1992 Szeps performed the piece ‘Sky’, a play written for him by John Misto, one of Australia’s leading scriptwriters. ‘Sky’ followed a father’s journey through grief, collapse into insanity and finally acceptance of the loss of his son after his son mysteriously dies in a light plane crash.

Since then, Szeps has gone to perform two self devised autobiographical solo pieces. With ‘I’m Not A Dentist’, Szeps shared his remarkable life journey from his birth in a World War 2 refugee camp in Switzerland to his position of eminence in the Australian theatre, the pinnacle of which was reached when he received the Order of Australia Medal (OAM) in 2001. In his Christmas 2003 piece ‘Why Kids?’, Szeps wrote about family life, his other great passion aside from acting.

Now he has a new solo show at the Ensemble. In ‘Wish I Said That’ ‘Szeps plays Joe Bleakley, an aging, failed actor who has recently been moved into the Foggadieu Retirement Village. It’s a case of once a performer, always a performer! Instead of quietly living out the last stage of his life, Bleakley prepares and puts on shows for his fellow residents. He takes the opportunity to perform some of the favourite characters and speeches that he didn’t have the chance to perform during his stifled career.

‘Wish I Said That’ turns out to be one of his less assured solo ventures. Szeps has written a creative, fictional piece that isn’t strong enough to hold its own. As the play proceeds, over ninety minutes without interval, neither the play’s dramatic scenario nor a defining character for Joe Bleakley are convincingly established, and the pretext becomes more confusing than anything!

In essence, this show was best appreciated as another evening with Henri Szeps show. We even get to see Szeps play the character of Sakini, the charming Japanese interpreter out of ‘The Teahouse Of The August Moon’ (novel by Vern Sneider, play adaptation by John Patrick), a role that he is credited as playing as a schoolboy at Randwick Boys High School.

The show featured a mix of Szeps playing some of most loved scenes, when copyright allowed!, plenty of sharp jokes, lots of anecdotes, especially show business related, and sharing some of his philisophy and outlook on contemporary life. Szeps the singer is also on show and at one time he sings ‘Patterns’, one of his own compositions’, about how just as the cells in our body are constantly changing, so are we as people.

A high point in the show was Szeps’s impeccable delivery of the song poem ‘The Big Black Giant’ from a little known Broadway musical ‘Me and Juliet’ written by Oscar Hammerstein 2. The poem, describing how a performer sees the audience in the dark as a temperamental giant, is a favourite of the Ensemble theatre, and was quoted in full in its publication celebrating its fiftieth year.

Through ‘Wish You Were Here’ there is the constant refrain where Szeps attempts to give a good rendition of a song clearly close to his heart, ‘The Impossible Dream’ from ‘Man From La Mancha’, until he finally achieves it. It’s a fitting motif with Szeps’s life and career being about constant striving and commitment to his craft.

Henri Szeps play ‘Wish I Said That’ opened on Wednesday 15th December and plays the Ensemble Theatre, 78 McDougall Street, Kirribilli until Saturday 22nd January, 2011.