Ms TN is slipping away incognito for a week's actual holiday. She'll be lounging in a secret location on the Bellarine Peninsula, reading and checking out the local botany and squabbling comfortably with her family. Bliss. Please continue debating if you wish, but play nice.
Read More.....At what point does politics move beyond parody? Maybe when you have a Prime Minister who looks as if he belongs in a Lego set, and who ought to be reported to the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to English.
Kevin Rudd can shift mid-sentence from warning of "incremental bifurcation" in the Asia-Pacific region (while, of course, needing to "work within the extant political vocabulary with China's national discourse") to his notorious manglings of outdated Australian slang ("fair shake of the sauce bottle").
Weld these together with cliches ("working families", "decisive action", "at the end of the day"), acronyms and buzz words ("synergies", "outcomes", "reverse engineering") and mixed metaphors ("preglacial position"), and you have a Teflon-coated PR machine that evades satire by overtaking it.
Its effectiveness can be seen in Godzone, Guy Rundle and Max Gillies's political satire now playing at the Melbourne Theatre Company. "Let's go for gold!" says Gillies's Rudd. "Let's optimise programmativity!" And it sounds just as boring and incomprehensible as Rudd himself.
It's a measure of the hyperreality of contemporary politics that satire in the noughties moved to featuring the politicians themselves. American comedians Steve Colbert and Jon Stewart invite politicians to be interviewed on their shows. The Chasers were regulars at Canberra press conferences.
The show that most successfully captures the white noise of the political machine - the brilliant ABC series The Hollow Men - doesn't feature politicians at all.
It's a dilemma for a satirist who, like Gillies, has made his name by impersonating politicians. The humour of his mimicry of Bob Hawke, Andrew Peacock and John Howard depended on both the startle of recognition and a recognisable gap between the reality and the portrayal.
The absurd exaggerations reflected back on their originals, prompting us to see them in a different light. But when impersonation can't prompt this frisson, it loses its bite.
It's why The 7.30 Report satirists John Clarke and Bryan Dawe, who don't rely at all on mimicry, still hit their targets: there's a cognitive dissonance at play that spikes their wit with the necessary unreality.
Godzone, on the other hand, seems like an 1980s television skit expanded to the stage. It is as if theatre is where television goes to die.
The set-up is a feel-good public conference, rather like Rudd's 2020 Summit but with added religiosity, where the PM introduces a brace of contemporary political figures to address the audience.
In between perorations from the lectern from Rudd, Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott and various commentators such as Andrew Bolt and Christopher Hitchens, Gillies rushes offstage to apply a new false nose and funny wig. We are then treated to a series of video sketches, "live" interviews with Malcolm Turnbull or Noel Pearson, or ads from the "sponsors".
The best of these was a vision of hell, or Liberal Party HQ, complete with shadowy Ku Klux Klan figures and swinging light bulbs. There was a YouTube aesthetic here - perhaps stemming from budgetry limitations - that rather undermined the effectiveness of others. Corporate PR gloss doesn't come cheap.
The blandness of the New Left - impregnably smug, impeccably coiffed and upholstered in incomprehensible jargon - creates a smooth, all-reflecting surface that simply doesn't give the purchase for this kind of satire. It's telling that the most successful sketches - Barnaby Joyce as a used car salesman, Gerard Henderson arguing with his local video store - are of the rough-hewn conservatives.
Gillies's impersonations don't always hit the mark either. Rudd is reduced to a pout, Abbott to a pair of Billy McMahon ears, and Julia Gillard - the least successful of all - is a spinsterish school teacher with "man hands" brazening out her secondary role as Rudd's henchwoman.
The portrayal of Bolt made me reflect that parody always includes a modicum of homage. Rundle's script made Bolt seem the most intelligent of the lot: its scathing caricature of left-wing inner-city suburbanites possessed a wit Bolt's columns signally lack.
The most mystifying - nay, bizarre - was Hitchens, who tells a meandering Boys Own story of meeting Osama Bin Laden in the Hindu Kush (didn't I read something like that in Robert Fisk's book The Great War for Civilisation?) and finishes with an account of being raped by Arabs. Which is why, he declaims, it was right to invade Iraq.
Hitchens as Lawrence of Arabia? Well, maybe - at a stretch - there's something in that, but here it's just a cheap punchline. And those allusions - if that's what they are - have no force at all in the format of sketch satire.
None of this is helped by Aidan Fennessy's static direction. Rundle and Gillies's last collaboration, The Big Con, featured Eddie Perfect crooning a series of cabaret numbers ("Don't be so damn September 10!") and was a lot more dynamic. Here the switching from lectern to screen gets monotonous and most of the set is simply flashy decor.
For those who have enjoyed the Gillies-Rundle combo before, this is a disappointing outing. It's a bad sign when the program is funnier than the show.
This review is in today's Australian.
Godzone, by Guy Rundle, directed by Aidan Fennessy. Set and costumes Shaun Gurton, lighting design by Matt Scott, sound design by Darrin Verhagen. With Max Gillies, Melbourne Theatre Company @ the Sumner Theatre, MTC Theatre, until January 17.
In the past week or so, the Age has been running a series of opinion pieces on criticism that amount to a mini-forum. Check out The changing role of the critic by Norman Lebrecht (recycling the usual guff about blogs being the end of cultured debate but making a couple of interesting points nonetheless); Peter Houghton on reviewing (can critics be friends? Only if you're a masochist); Stephanie Bunbury on spoilers; and Karl Quinn on star ratings (it's just snobby to say opera and ballet can't be reduced to three stars).
To the last, I don't like stars because it's reductive. But then, I don't want to write consumer guides. There's nothing wrong with consumer guides - well, maybe there is, but that means swinging in Adorno and his fulminations against the cultural machine and I've got things to do - but they're hardly the whole game. Or if they are, we're in trouble. (OK, we're in trouble).
Meanwhile, I often reflect on Robyn Archer's statement earlier this year at the Theatre Forum that she never takes any notice of her reviews. It struck me because I don't take any notice of my reviews either. Go figure.
Richard Watts reports on the National Play Festival web page debacle on Arts Hub. PlayWriting Australia AD Chris Mead declined comment, saying that the fuss diverts attention from the NPF program. Yes, it does: and isn't that the point? A series of someones decided that this was the image to sell our theatre writing culture. As if it doesn't have enough problems already.
Even a gracious acknowledgement that a mistake was made and nodding towards the concerns would be nice: but as David Williams of Version 1.0 commented darkly on Twitter, "people are rarely interested in disussions of dominance, esp their own. That's what dominance means, the opacity of power".
While I'm at it, check out David's searchingly illuminating post on the The Pleasures of Patriarchy.
In one of those interesting synchronicities, there is a rash of contemporary theatre examining the foundational Christian myths. As Hayloft's BC - a rewriting of the Annunciation - plays in Melbourne, the STC is hosting Genesis, a contemporary look at the first chapters of the Bible performed by the Residents, their new ensemble. Black Lung last week put Christianity on the rack of its traumatic anarchy in Glasoon. Looking further back, two years ago Uncle Semolina & Friends reworked the Old Testament in OT.
It suggests that religion, especially Christianity, is an acute locus of both anxiety and curiosity among those companies exploring the outer edges of theatre. I guess it's unsurprising, given that God has risen from Nietzsche's grave to stalk modernity like a brain-eating zombie in a splatter movie: the rise of mediaevalist fundamentalism is the dark story of our time. As the sublime Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski said in the 1980s as he witnessed the disintegration of the Soviet Empire, the three great challenges to world peace in the following decades were religion, nationalism and racism. In the past few years, we've seen that prophecy playing out in our global politics.
But this focus on religion is also a curiosity about the foundations of western culture. Christianity shaped the West: it has been a defining force in its art and thought for hundreds of years. It's influenced our metaphysics, philosophy, law and social conventions. And for those raised in the shadow of that tradition, it is a primary expression of transcendence and the divine.
It's this last aspect that debut playwright Rita Kalnejais explores in BC, which takes the story of the Immaculate Conception and sets it in an outer suburb of a nameless Australian city. After attacking the modern classics - Chekhov, Stravinsky, Wedekind - it's good to see Hayloft taking on the risks of new writing, with Benedict Hardie's Yuri Wells earlier this year and now BC.
Here Mary is the teenage daughter of Joachim (Tyler Coppin), a depressed real estate agent, and Anne (Margaret Mills), who is in recovery from cancer and is perilously on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Her learning-challenged brother, Gabriel (Dylan Young) is obssessed, not entirely healthily, with birds, the angelic possibility of flight. Elizabeth (Yesse Spence), in the original story Mary's confidante and the first to recognise that Mary's pregnancy is the fruit of God ("Blessed are you among women!") becomes a pleasant, well-meaning neighbour. There are disturbing threads running through it: foremost the suggestion of incest between Mary and her father and, more directly, her brother.
It's an interesting idea that, despite some moments of coup de theatre and an outstanding cast, doesn't quite come off. Kalnejais can certainly write: she has the gift - perhaps because she is also an actor - of understanding direct dramatic action, and of creating characters who immediately assert their reality. And there's no faulting her ambition. However, the play falters in its formal balance between the naturalistic and the surreal: the naturalistic scenes are not nearly as focused as the others and often are simply too long, creating longueurs. And there's a more basic problem with the larger structure, which leads to a couple of false endings.
The play aims to illuminate moments of ordinary grace, investigating the divine immanent in quotidian existence, but a conceptual muddiness gets in the way. For instance, it's not the angel who impregnates Mary, but God: Gabriel merely announces the fact. I simply didn't understand the point of the brotherly incest or why God was absent from the shenanigans. And the Christian idea of grace is actually deeply interesting: the simple idea presented here of unmediated grace fudges its sternness and beauty, and begs the question of why Christianity is introduced in the first place. This kind of fuzziness means that the writing doesn't escape the problem of conjuring sentiment rather than real feeling.
All the same, director Simon Stone and his team create moments of genuine comedy and theatrical power. The immaculate conception itself - in which the angel and Mary unite as reflections separated by glass - is a beautifully thought and realised image of transcendence. And although some of the characters - Ashley Zuckerman's Joseph, for example - veer dangerously close to caricature, they are strange and individual enough to escape the worst perils.
Claude Marcos's set, an evocation of a suburban house bisected by a diagonal window that can turn into a mirror, vividly recalls Benedict Andrews' obsession with windows and mirrors, but works well on its own terms. Stone elicits some excellent performances, with a stand-out role by Dylan Young as Gabriel. I'm not sure Kalnejais could have asked for a better production of her first play. What she needs is some sharp dramaturgy.
Bagryana Popov's Progress and Melancholy is also a nice idea laid low by uncertain dramaturgy. It's one of a number of recent shows that reworks a classic, in this case, Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. The idea is to excavate its subtext, radically resituating the play in the present - not only the contemporary present, but in the immediate present of the performers and the audience. Maybe the test of this kind of exercise is whether you're sitting in the audience wondering why the company doesn't just do the play: and in this case, I would have preferred to see Chekhov Uncut.
Popov has the chops here: her 2005 physical movement piece Subclass26A, which explored the realities of asylum seekers in detention, was riveting, sharply thought political theatre. So how come this one went so wrong? The play's subtext - focusing on personal, social and economic change - is shallowly explored, the connections made between the present of the actors and the imagined past of Chekhov are generalised and even sentimental, and when the physical movement aspires to the condition of dance, it is sometimes embarrassing. As a work, it seems frustratingly half-formed, and the informing ideas - the economic rise of China, the oncoming disaster of climate change, the feudal/capitalist exploitation of workers - all seem to operate at the level of naivety.
And yet there's the core of a great idea inside it. For all my reservations, the show features a couple of excellent performances. Natasha Herbert's Ranevskaya is (when it is allowed to occur) a moving and accurate performance of a middle aged bourgeois woman in denial of her disintegrating present. But the highlight - the performance that made this show worth watching - was Todd Macdonald's electrifying Lopahkin, the former-serf-turned-businessman who buys and destroys the cherry orchard, revenging the humiliations of his humble birth. In Macdonald's performance the intersecting realities - the big-talking developer, the ambitious nouveau riche serf - united and made sense, and the actor himself took a back seat. Given this, I wondered why the show didn't focus on Lopahkin, filleting that ambiguous character out of the play and attending to the realities that he both embodies and represents. But hey, it wasn't my show.
At one point they stopped the show and handed cake around the audience. It was good cake. It was well-meaning. And this was a well-meaning show. But I do think Chekhov would have threatened to shoot himself.
Picture: Dylan Young and Nicole Da Silva in BC. Photo: Jeff Busby.
BC by Rita Kalnejais, directed by Simon Stone. Set and costumes by Claude Marcos, lighting design by Kimberly Kaw, sound design by Stefan Gregory. With Tyler Coppin, Nicole Da Silva, Margaret Mills, Yesse Spence, Dylan Young and Ashley Zuckerman. The Hayloft Project @ Full Tilt, Black Box, Victorian Arts Centre, until December 19.
Progress and Melancholy, directed by Bagryana Popov. Design by Adrienne Chisolm, lighting design by Richard Vabre, composition and sound design by Elissa Goodrich. With Natasha Herbert, Todd Macdonald, Majid Shokor, Sara Black, Paea Leach, Christophe Le Tellier, music performed by Ernie Gruner. Fortyfive downstairs. Closed.
As several appalled women have pointed out: with the marginalisation of women playing the theatre headlines, could there be a worse time for the 2010 National Play Festival to feature a suspender-clad nude-buttocked gal on the front page of its website? Click on her bum and you find out about PERFORMANCES. Way to go, guys.
Read More.....Ms TN is back in Melbourne listening to the gentle patter of the rain, after a packed couple of days in sun-drenched Sydney. The major event was, of course, the hotly anticipated forum on women in theatre at Belvoir St, where I was part of a panel of "powerful women" (thank you, SMH, my family is now making Dragonball Z noises again) ably conducted by journalist Monica Attard. The panel - see holiday snap below - consisted of me, Gil Appleton, a Belvoir St pioneer and integral to many feminist arts initiatives of the 1970s and 80s, emerging director Shannon Murphy, Bell Shakespeare's associate director Marion Potts and the Sydney Opera House director of performing arts, Rachel Healy.
As everybody knows, the issue is to do with main stage seasons. It's not endemic through the theatre culture - independent theatre, the crucible of Australian theatre culture, has nothing like the same issue. As in every profession, the problem exists in the high-end, well-paid, high-profile jobs.
Everyone on that panel was nervous about the event. Partly it was a desire to do justice to some of the complexity of the question; partly it was because of the heat that has been around much of the discussion. This was naturally exacerbated by Caleb Lewis's withdrawal from the Philip Parsons Young Playwrights Award in protest against the "radical politicisation" of the prize, which is announced simultaneously with the Philip Parsons Memorial Lecture and which that afternoon was announced first, due to the controversy. I am still struggling with Caleb's stand. Does he mean that theatre ought not to be politicised? Is he suggesting that the male-dominated status quo is apolitical? Does the mere discussion of the marginalisation of women really "taint" everything around it? (I get sudden flashes of menstruating women banned from churches).
Ironically enough, Caleb was a co-winner with Tahli Corin, prompting some cynicism around the traps, and not unincidentally, putting Tahli in an uncomfortable spotlight. Which, I may say, she negotiated with considerable grace. But this very response illustrates some horns of this hydra-headed dilemma. The mass reaction to the Belvoir St debate has been a restless and impatient demand for concrete "solutions": among others, Crikey's Steve Dow was scathing that the "ethereal seemed ascendant over the practical". (Although, unlike Dow, I do recall an insistence on mentoring.)
I guess it's possible that the Parsons prize committee was in part influenced by the on-going debate - by a consciousness that women ought to be encouraged as much as men, and that this ought to be pro-active - although this was hotly denied by Neil Armfield, who said the plays were chosen entirely on their merits (and went so far to explain what those merits were). Yet is it such a bad thing if the committee was forced to think about the issue of gender and act on those thoughts? Isn't such action precisely what the unsatisfied are calling for, when they demand "practical" solutions, even quotas? But as soon as it's even perceived to have happened, all hell breaks loose: the prize is "compromised", notions of artistic integrity are in shreds, and women are back in their familiar roles of second-rate wannabes, merely riding the coat-tails of male genius.
Which is to say, there are different issues in the arts to other professions. Theatre is not only an "industry": it is a culture. Artistic merit is a central and thorny question. It's often used by artistic directors and others to evade the knotty questions - all candidates, we are routinely told by main stage companies, are chosen on merit, which given the figures can leave us to reflect on the general mediocrity of womankind. On the other hand, artistic merit is, in the arts, a real issue. That's why it can be so successfully used as a smokescreen: if artistic merit isn't the first aim of our striving, what are we there for?
But how do we measure merit? It is unarguable that merit is read through gender. And that is heinously complex: women can be as rigorous defenders of the privileges of the status quo as men. Their mere presence won't necessarily guarantee equity: as has been pointed out many times, even though women are meagrely represented in main stage creative roles, they mostly run our theatres in managerial roles. More, as the Brontes well knew, the same writing will generate different responses if it is perceived to be by a man than if it is thought to be by a woman. And I'm afraid that, however we like to congratulate ourselves on being more advanced than the 19th century, that is still the case.
The "ethereal" ("ethereal"?) discussion that Dow was so critical about was precisely what I thought valuable about the debate. As the distinguished feminist Eva Cox said to me afterwards, it was "one of the more vigorous discussions about dominant cultures and the difficulty of even identifying them let alone shifting them". (And added acerbically, "John Huxley missed that bit in today's SMH! Why am I not surprised?")
The discussion around gender (as it is around any sort of endemic bigotry) is conditioned by the fact that we've all been here before. Quotas have been tried: they simply created a lot of resentment, even from those supposed to be the beneficiaries, who justly felt their achievements were demeaned; and they also generated a lot of bad, "ticking the boxes" art. This kind of solution is in fact one of the major complaints about the funding processes of the Arts Council in Britain: the focus moves away from making great art to social engineering. I think the major failure of quotas or any other simplistic "solution" is that they permit people not to think: they provide a simple answer that evades the real work.
The real work is changing the complex of ideologies that situates the white, abled, middle class male subject as the normative consciousness, and which constitutes anyone else as Other. The real problem for women is that we are considered to have a gender, while men can be neutral. Men can speak for all of "mankind", while women (or people with the wrong-coloured skin, sexuality, body) speak only to their own kind. The "human condition" has, for centuries, been considered to be a male state.
And the real issue for theatre is that protecting the privilege of a minority means that its culture stagnates.
Marginalising 53 per cent of the population means limiting access to a huge pool of ideas and energy. As any ecologist knows, a population without diversity loses genetic vigor and eventually dies out. Why, to take one example, is the MTC so worried about its aging subscriber base? Is it because of a blindness towards the realities of a large part of their potential audiences? And it's not as if these energies aren't already present. You just have to get out and about in Melbourne's thriving independent theatre scene. I'd be fascinated to see gender figures for non-mainstage theatre: my bet is that gender inequity there is small to non-existent.
In other words, if theatres don't recognise and deal with this broader issue they won't survive. What is required, as in so many things, is clear-sighted leadership, a recognition of the problem that goes beyond token gestures that don't actually challenge entrenched positions.
No way could a single panel discussion come up with quick-fix solutions. There aren't any, and we're fooling ourselves if we think there are. How, in an hour-long discussion, does one justly address a hugely complex problem that permeates not only the entirety of Australian society (where men still occupy the majority of the top jobs and top pay), but which reaches far beyond our sea-girt shores? Remember that Original Sin happened when Eve tasted of the Fruit of Knowledge. We all know we only scratched the surface.
But that doesn't mean that action can't be taken, or that nothing can be done. Identifying a problem is always the first step to doing something about it. But let's get that right first, or else we'll still be stuck in the same circle of hell decades hence.
Picture: From left: your faithful blogger, Gil Appleton, Shannon Murphy, Marion Potts and Rachel Healy at Belvoir St Theatre yesterday. Photo: Dean Sewell
Ms TN pushed her delicate nose right onto the grindstone this week (hey, it's hard doing all that heavy-duty ratiocination), but for all the nasal flattening I'm still behind the eightball. I've yet to write about Progress and Melancholy, which I caught on one of its final nights, or Hayloft's BC, which opened at Full Tilt last Wednesday (as I dutifully twitted, a curate's egg but well worth seeing). And on Thursday I saw Meryl Tankard's Oracle at the Malthouse (closing Sunday), which features a performance by Paul White that rewrites the laws of gravity.
I will write about all these events, but I fear this week time is against me. This weekend I am flying up to Sydney for the Belvoir St panel on women in theatre, which is attracting lots of media attention; especially after playwright Caleb Lewis withdrew from the Philip Parson's Young Playwrights Award to protest against its "politicisation" by the discussion. (The debate is this year's Philip Parsons Memorial Lecture, which is routinely presented at the same event as the award).
I'm hoping for an enlightening and open debate that excavates some of the reasons why gender politics in theatre has become such a problem. The figures - in our main stage culture, at least - are brutally clear, but that doesn't mean that identifying the causes and ways of dealing with it are simple. Looking forward to seeing some of you there.
Black Lung Theatre and Whaling Firm's eight-day season of Glasoon is the hot ticket in town. It sold out in five days after its announcement on Facebook, so if you're not already booked, you'll have to resort to blackmail, robbery or espionage to get a ticket. To give it even more an air of samizdat, the location is "undisclosed": you have to phone to make a booking, whereupon you're told to head for a certain bar in East Brunswick at a certain time, buy a drink, and wait, like someone out of Smiley's People, for the Sign.
Which is all cool enough. The actual site is a warehouse music venue scrawled with graffiti art from floor to ceiling, with rugs on the floor and battered laminex kitchen chairs and ancient sofas as seating. And then there's the performance, which won't disappoint any Black Lung aficionados. It begins with a Christ figure stumbling through a door, covered in blood, and being revived by an operatically-attired and voiced mother figure who offers him her ample breast to suckle. It continues with a vicious parody of fatherly advice to a young man and then descends into a kind of sexual hell, a dizzying, blackly funny and relentless parade of bodily incontinence, perversity and violence, where people fuck and vomit in each other's mouths and dance even though they're dead, where a zombie doll in a dress is playing an electric guitar, where God is a man with a beard in a Britney Spears wig and lace panties who lounges carelessly to expose his testicles.
In fact, there is plenty of opportunity in this show to contemplate the fact that the Black Lung fellas really have balls, some of them startlingly waxed.
You could just go ZOFMG!!!! and leave it at that, but it seems inadequate (Oh, those bad Black Lung boys!) The alternative is to flail in several different directions at once, since the show is sort of indescribable. It makes a guerilla foray on the conventional wisdoms of rocknroll death art, attacking the glamour of those impeccably masculine acolytes of Thanatos, Jim Morrison to Nick Cave, fake Rimbauds the lot of them. Rebellion here is is stripped back to its egocentric adolescent defiance, exposing the incontinent holes in its skin, its deadly cunt envy. What rock critic Anwyn Crawford describes as the "bodiless despair" of the male rock god is given back its body. And it's not pretty at all.
If Glasoon were pretty, it would become seductive; for all the nudity and sex, it's not sexy. It's an assault, mostly on the male body. Though it certainly has a kind of beauty: that of the abject body unsexed and pinned to its mortality, like the dead Christ in 17th century Spanish art where the god is so embodied, so corpse-like in his meticulously rendered wounds and green-mottled skin, that it seems shockingly blasphemous and perverse.
Glasoon isn't merely sensational épater le bourgeois. If it were, it wouldn't be nearly as interesting as it is. It's certainly obscene, but it makes you realise that the obscene is of a different order than the pornographic. The obscene, even if it violently rejects the idea of God, is on the same spectrum as the divine, while the pornographic is monodimensionally of the order of capitalism: cummodity for the masses, rather than ecstatic nightmare. Think of the 17th century saint, Margaret Mary Alacoque, who wrote of licking up the vomit of her patients, a "pleasure" she wished she could repeat every day, or of St John of the Cross, cleaning out the sores of lepers with his tongue.
Mere sensation wouldn't sidle into your subconscious like a slow-release toxin. It wouldn't create this riveting theatre, sharp and loose, galvanically in the present. Glasoon plugs into an inner urgency, a neurotic anxiety that spirals into a excoriation of the murky solipsism of the self, an unforgiving massacre of internalised social authority. It employs the vocabulary of now, but its circling gods seem to be Nietzsche and Freud: Civilisation and Its Discontents, Beyond Good and Evil, thrown on the pyre of its malicious laughter.
*
I googled "Glasoon", and found no definitions, aside from it being a surname about as rare as Croggon. Warming to my search, I looked it up in Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (no entry), the Oxford English Reference Dictionary (nothing between Glasgow and Glasnost) and a series of online maritime dictionaries (nada). Nor is it mentioned anywhere in the play itself, which is, despite all appearances to the contrary, a tightly scripted work from Thomas Henning.
Glasoon is, it seems, a word that means nothing, and refers nowhere. It's a nonsense coinage, empty of semantic meaning. It is a perfect Dada word. As Tristan Tzara said in his 1918 Manifesto: "Dada means nothing". Dada expresses, he said, "the knowledge of a supreme egoism, in which laws wither away". It's worth pursuing Tzara a little further here, from his 1922 Lecture on Dada:
The beginnings of Dada were not the beginnings of an art, but of a disgust. Disgust with the magnificence of philosophers who for 3ooo years have been explaining everything to us (what for?), disgust with the pretensions of these artists-God's-representatives-on-earth, disgust with passion and with real pathological wickedness where it was not worth the bother; disgust with a false form of domination and restriction en masse, that accentuates rather than appeases man's instinct of domination, disgust with all the catalogued categories, with the false prophets who are nothing but a front for the interests of money, pride, disease, disgust with the lieutenants of a mercantile art made to order according to a few infantile laws, disgust with the divorce of good and evil, the beautiful and the ugly (for why is it more estimable to be red rather than green, to the left rather than the right, to be large or small?) Disgust finally with the Jesuitical dialectic which can explain everything and fill people's minds with oblique and obtuse ideas without any physiological basis or ethnic roots, all this by means of blinding artifice and ignoble charlatans promises.
As Dada marches it continuously destroys, not in extension but in itself. From all these disgusts, may I add, it draws no conclusion, no pride, no benefit. It has even stopped combating anything, in the realization that it's no use, that all this doesn't matter. What interests a Dadaist is his own mode of life. But here we approach the great secret.
Dada is a state of mind. That is why it transforms itself according to races and events. Dada applies itself to everything, and yet it is nothing, it is the point where the yes and the no and all the opposites meet, not solemnly in the castles of human philosophies, but very simply at street corners, like dogs and grasshoppers.
Like everything in life, Dada is useless.
If anything is palpable in Glasoon, it is the solipsism of disgust. The Black Lung Theatre and Whaling Firm's reliably uninformative press release for Glasoon quotes writer Thomas Henning, self-described as "a reasonably mediocre personality":
The great dramas of my life are enacted majorly within my mind. My experience of hardship, of politics, of social change is thin on the ground. My ideas are lofty but my world is small. I retreat habitually to my mind, where the world is an exciting place... The way I convince myself to sleep, is with violence. Dreams of violence and guns. I think it’s a focus for me. Death. Is this something key to a sense of mediocrity, or weakness, or failure? That I convince myself to go to sleep with war fantasies and dreams of slaughtering dozens of people? Is this a common male thing?
The focus of disgust here, as in so much of Black Lung's work, is maleness itself, projected out in a phantasmagoria of loathing. Glasoon is an adolescent nightmare, a solipsistic excursion through the dark edges of male desire, a murderous excorcism. It's pure, like acetylene is pure.
Does it mean anything? Does it matter?
*
Among others, Hennings' text also calls to mind the British writer Heathcote Williams, whose 1972 play The Immortalist was described at the time - and from this end of things, quite justly - as "the first play of the 21st century". Williams' anarchic radicality seems, like his American poetic contemporary Ed Dorn, a darkly prescient foreshadowing of the mediated, consumerist, corporatised war machine of the 21st century. Like Williams, who spiralled out of the Vietnam and Cold Wars, or Tzara, who was writing in Switzerland while Europe was razed in WW1, Hennings' Glasoon springs from a reality predicated on war, the matrix of the petro-chemical-military-industrial-Disney-Murdoch complex.
It's a woman-hating paradigm in which the leaky, penetrable feminine body is the site of deathly denial and loathing. In Glasoon the female love object is, in an obscene joke, dead. (It's perhaps worth commenting here that exploring the pathology of misogyny isn't the same as being misogynistic. If this work were misogynistic, the female body would be naked and abject, not the male.)
In this reality, utopia is as extinct as the thylacine and the broad-faced potoroo. The nowhere of utopia depends on there being a place to go to: if the planet is burning up and drowning in its own waste like a plague victim, then the only refuge is inside your own head. There is no utopia even hinted here. Glasoon is an assault on given wisdom, on history, religion and social authority, which are minced into nonsense and funnelled into the central character's head, like a goose being force-fed to make fois gras.
Translated into performance, it's like being in someone else's nasty dream. Its insistence on now is a hatred of mediation. Its characters, or phantoms, all speak a debased language of pre-formed mass media cliches. Like a dream, Glasoon generates its own inescapable logic. Its power depends on the extraordinary cast, who without exception take the text and run through the pain barrier: they are not characters so much as embodiments of extremity, caricatures who joylessly fuck, bleed and die like creatures in a mediaeval depiction of hell. Only I, played with what you can only say is startling courage and honesty by Vaczadenjo Warton-Thomas, contingently approaches the status of character: he is the subject to whom all this humiliation is happening, the passive eye in the storm.
There's a kind of hope, if it can be called hope: when his abjection is compete, when the ritual is over, I kills everybody and goes away, like the teenager in the story. Where does he go in his new suit? Into the sober disillusion of adulthood? A new, sane life? Who knows?
Like the poet said: True, the new era is nothing if not harsh...
Picture: top: Simoncee Page Jones, Vaczadenjo Warton-Thomas and masked guitarist in Glasoon. Photo: Max Milne. Below: Dead Christ by Gregorio Fernández
Glasoon, by Thomas Henning. Performed by Sacha Bryning, Rima Hadchiti, Simoncee Page Jones, Lily Paskas, Vaczadenjo Warton-Thomas and Thomas Wright, with Liam Barton, Angus Kenny, Joseph O’Farrell and Keith Oakden-Rayner. Black Lung Theatre and Whaling Firm, location undisclosed, season booked out.
Love is a wondrous state, deep, tender, and rewarding. Because of its intimate and personal nature it is regarded by some as an improper topic for experimental research. But, whatever our personal feelings may be, our assigned mission as psychologists is to analyze all facets of human and animal behavior into their component variables. So far as love or affection is concerned, psychologists have failed in this mission.
The little we know about love does not transcend simple observation, and the little we write about it has been written better by poets and novelists. But of greater concern is the fact that psychologists tend to give progressively less attention to a motive which pervades our entire lives. Psychologists, at least psychologists who write textbooks, not only show no interest in the origin and development of love or affection, but they seem to be unaware of its very existence.
So begins Harry Harlow's classic paper The Nature of Love, delivered to the Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association in Washington DC in 1958. And so begins too The Harry Harlow Project, James Saunders' fascinating theatrical examination of Harlow's controversial experiments on baby rhesus monkeys.
The irony - more, the perversity - of Harlow's experiments is that, while they were driven by Harlow's almost lyrically expressed desire to understand something as unscientific as love, they were exemplary in their cruelty. He radically demonstrated the importance of maternal love - the security of physical affection - to the physical and psychological development of an infant by showing what happened to monkeys that received no affection and no socialisation. The result, unsurprisingly, was psychotic monkeys.
Then he went further, producing babies by forcing female monkeys raised in isolation - and who were so asocial they couldn't mate - into what he unblinkingly called his "rape pack", a wire restraining device which he used to force-mate females. Finally, he created his most notorious experiment,the "pit of despair", a cage of total isolation in which monkeys were sometimes confined for two years, with which he deliberately engineered clinical depression.
Aside from their ingenious cruelty, it's not difficult to discern a disturbing subtext of misogyny beneath some of these experiments: Harlow's "hostile mother", a machine of teeth and spikes that shot cold air on the unfortunate babies, seems like a caricature of a pathology. Yet these experiments revolutionised contemporary attitudes towards child rearing, changing practice in orphanages and rewriting the book on infant psychology. And he initiates a theory of fatherhood - "It is cheering ... to realize that the American male is physically endowed with all the really essential equipment to compete with the American female on equal terms in one essential activity: the rearing of infants," he noted at the end of his paper - which still has reverberations today.
In Harlow's day, childrearing authorities recommended that one should never kiss a child good night, but shake his or her hand. A generation of mothers listened in anguish to their crying babies, sure that should they obey their instincts and comfort them, they should be bad mothers. Harlow changed all that, legitimising human affection as more than mere "indulgence". For all that, it's hard to contemplate these experiments with any sense of ease. And it's hard to escape the thought that, by scientifically proving that maternal love was necessary to develop a healthy child, Harlow convinced the men in white coats of wisdoms that women in so-called "primitive" societies have known since, well, the beginning of time.
It's an ambiguous heritage, and James Saunders accesses much of its bleak emotional resonance in The Harry Harlow Project, which manages to be at once harrowing and funny without either cancelling the other out. The stage becomes a slapstick simulacra of Harlow's psyche, with some deft video work by Martyn Coutts and a subliminally disturbing score by Kelly Ryall framing a bravura performance by Saunders. The conceit - a just one, since in later life Harlow had ECG treatment for depression - is that in his increasingly sadistic experiments Harlow is enacting his own mental distress.
As a theatrical evocation of the hell of alienation, parts of this show are hard to beat. The stage - a white box scattered with minimal props - is fronted by sound and lighting boards, with the artists, their backs to the audience, orchestrating the show like lab technicians. A sequence where the actor interacts with his life-size projection - reaching out, like Michelangelo's God, to his fleshly human image, but finally unable to touch - is masterly. It's set up by an earlier sequence where Saunders is interviewed by a television, a device that works seamlessly through split-second timing but which here is comedic. Saunders' performance invokes the damaged monkeys through physical movement, which itself also presages Harlow's death through Parkinson's disease.
The narrative is told through fragmentary episodes that examine the experiments in tandem with glimpses of Harlow's personal life. At one point Saunders puts on a wig and becomes his own biographer; at another, he becomes Harlow's son. Curiously, in both these enactments he doesn't cease to be Harry Harlow: these other characters seem like mere projections. Perhaps what I found most interesting is how Lipson's direction coins a kind of dramaturgy of anxiety: from the beginning the comedy is uneasy, and despite the explosive release of laughter the tension subliminally winches up, not permitting any release, until the show is over. It left me with all that anxiety still in my body, bleeding out a slow release over the following days.
Perhaps because its black and white aesthetic so successfully evokes the sixties, it got me in personal places that I wouldn't have predicted from its set-up or subject. It made me think of how my father was sent to boarding school when he was four years old, and of my mother's unhappiness, raising babies alone in a mining village at the same time as Harlow was torturing monkeys. It made me think of the post-war scientist-god, certain that all human knowledge can be dissected and measured, sure in his march towards the ultimate good of Progress. It made me ponder again how such smart animals as human beings can get things so wrong.
Picture: James Saunders as Harry Harlow. The Harry Harlow Project, written and performed by James Saunders, directed and designed by Brian Lipson. Composition and sound design by Kelly Ryall, video art by Martyn Coutts, dramaturgy by Kate Sulan. Full Tilt, Fairfax Studio, Victorian Arts Centre until December 5.
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All writing on Theatre Notes, except that specifically attributed to guest authors, is copyright Alison Croggon 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009. 
Theatre Notes by Alison Croggon is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
