A View of Concrete by Gareth Ellis, directed by Lauren Taylor. Design by Adam Gardnir, lighting Richard Vabre, composer Tom Spender, sound design by David Franzke. With Peter Houghton, Richard Pyros, Alexandra Schepisi and Lauren Urquhart. The Tower @ The Malthouse, until May 21.

"Without alienation," Arthur Miller said famously, "there can be no politics". But what if alienation is all there is? What politics can happen then? A View of Concrete suggests the only possiblity is narcissistic self-destruction.

Gareth Ellis' award-winning play is a far cry from Miller's rational liberalism. His characters are trapped in a world of simulacra, Baudrillard's "desert of the real", where the image precedes reality and itself becomes murderous. The natural world is a nostalgic dream: there is nothing beyond the man-made. And this reality is psychotic.



Ellis's hallucinatory world is given feverish life in Lauren Taylor's fast-paced, high-octane production. I suspect I might not have enjoyed the play half so much without Taylor's uncompromising treatment; she gives the text a heightened edge that makes the most of its sinister vaudevillean comedy and pushes open its anarchic possibilities.

A View of Concrete is about four young people, incapable of communicating for all their almost aphasic ability to speak, who retreat into darker and darker fantasies until they cannot but wreak them on each other. James (Richard Pyros) is addicted to television, obsessively watching the news at the expense of his relationship with Jacquie (Lauren Urquhart); Jacquie herself is too afraid to admit that the inner violence she senses in James sparks her masochistic fantasies.

Jacquie's friend Billy (Alexandra Schepisi) dreams of becoming a fairy, of making herself smaller and smaller until she can ultimately disappear, but violently rejects the label "anorexic". Neil (Peter Houghton) deals out escape with the drugs he sells. He is a compulsive reader who refuses to finish any books he reads (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Lewis Carroll, Nietzsche) and keeps himself in careful ignorance of their titles and authors - if he finds out, he throws the book in the bin. He is the ultimate in free-floating, contextless consumption of knowledge.

None of these characters is stupid. Each is perfectly capable of seeing the delusions of the others, but utterly unable to persuade others that they are mistaken, or of perceiving their own self deceptions. So while the women mock James' increasing obsession with his next door neighbour, whom he is convinced is a terrorist, Jacquie can't shake Billy's faith that fairies live in the jacaranda tree. None of them sees the real story which is occurring before their eyes: a young girl is being brutalised by drugs, for which crime a terrible revenge will be enacted.

But these abberent behaviours, Ellis suggests, are all merely symptoms of a reality that is fatally sick. In a reversal of agency, the domestic animals are committing suicide: a cat hangs itself, a pigeon flies deliberately into a window. This is a post Twin Towers world, says Ellis in his program note, that is not "safe", "where the definition of 'humanity' can only be found in the dictionary...it is an exact replica of our world".

Ellis's nihilism is perhaps a little easy: the callousness he portrays is in some ways no more than the egocentric cruelty of small children. And certainly this play isn't quite as radical as it thinks it is. Fernando Arrabal or Heathcote Williams (especially Williams' immortally weird AC/DC) go much further on all counts - in visceral extremities of violence, political anarchy or hallucinatory realities. But Ellis has an ear for tough dialogue that is accurate and bleakly comic, especially for his male characters, and a real lyrical gift. He is certainly an imagination to watch.

This incubation of emerging talent is possibly the most important aspect of the new Malthouse, which is drawing strongly in its programming on Melbourne's vital but under-resourced independent scene. It's great to see what Lauren Taylor can do with a budget of more than two dollars. Adam Gardnir's set runs the length of the Tower Theatre, with seating two deep on three sides, and is dominated by a tree-like chandelier of fluorescent lights that is spookily lovely. Richard Vabre's lighting score is sharp and precise, allowing the instant shifts of realities and locations the direction demands.

The play goes like a train, rushing headlong to its desolate conclusion. Taylor and her excellent cast create an almost operatic interpretation, which never slackens in intensity but remains nuanced, shifting deftly from humour to surrealness to moments of sheer anarchy which are at once comic and frightening. The performances are stylised, sometimes even neurasthenic in the artifice of their gestures, and carry off the conceit with complete physical conviction.

Each actor finds a physical correlation for the individual tics of his or her neurosis. Lauren Urquhart's brittle portrayal of Jacquie is an increasingly hysteric constellation of truncated gestures. It gives her a dark, neurotic comic quality heightened by the artifice of her delivery: at times she almost sings her text. Richard Pyros slides imperceptively from suspicion to violent, drug-fuelled paranoia, falling apart in front of our eyes.

Peter Houghton's deadpan delivery almost makes him seem like the only point of sanity ("I'm a professional," he boasts at one point, speaking about his dealing: like all organised crime, he is the dark face of capitalism) but the disconnections in his performance betray that he is as dysfunctionally unselfaware as the others. Alexandra Schepisi portrays Billy's obsessive desire to shrink with such intensity that I swear that she visibly loses weight during the two hours of the play.

The extremities of the performances as they evolve through the evening become ever more compellingly believable. It makes visceral, exciting theatre, and certainly gives the lie to those who claim that new Australian plays are in the doldrums. If this is a doldrum, it's been getting bad press.

Picture: Richard Pyros, Lauren Uquhart and Peter Houghton in A View of Concrete