Review: The Spook, Homebody/KabulGreen Room AwardsReview: The Nature of ThingsOn DanteRound the webReview: Detest / Chocolate Monkey / Rage BoyContemporary Australian Drama 2TN blanks outAdvertisement for myself ~ theatre notes

Monday, February 26, 2007

Review: The Spook, Homebody/Kabul

The Spook by Melissa Reeves, directed by Tom Healey. Design by Anna Borghesi, lighting by Richard Dinnen, composition and sound by David Franzke. With Alison Bell, Kevin Harrington, Margaret Mills, Denis Moore, Tony Nikolopoulos, Luke Ryan and Maria Theodorakis. Malthouse Theatre @ The Beckett until March 10.

Homebody/Kabul by Tony Kushner, directed by Chris Bendall. Designed by Peter Corrigan, lighting by Nick Merrylees, sound by Jethro Woodward. With Tyler Coppin, Ernie Gray, Shelly Lauman, Wahibe Moussa, Osamah Sami, Shahin Shafaei and Majid Shokor. Theatre@Risk at Trades Hall, until March 11.

Theatre is a many-splendoured thing, and much of it operates way outside the four walls of a building. After all, the biggest theatre at present, and certainly the deadliest, is the return season of Evil Brown Dictators with WMD, presently playing to packed houses in Washington. Astoundingly, it has the same plot as season one, although there are a couple of cast changes: one of the stars of last season, for example, retired to spend more time with his money, and of course the guys in black hats are, if not quite ambiguous, dizzyingly interchangeable.

Meanwhile, over in the Kodak Theatre in LA, Al Gore stepped forward to accept the Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth, and the boundary between showbiz and politics again dissolved into a terminal blur. Though, thinking over the traditional pageantry of power, it has to be said that such a division is often a mere courtesy, permitting politics the "seriousness" that theatre, being imagined, does not possess. PT Barnum himself stood for Congress, after all; former Oil Peter Garrett is a respectable Parliamentarian and Maxine McKew has announced her intention of standing against Howard in the next election. And so on.

The increasing public synonymity of celebrity and political power is a piquant symptom of the The Society of the Spectacle, which Guy Debord described in his influential 1967 work. He elaborates a capitalist world in which being is mediated and finally negated by representation, in which people are fatally alienated from their own experience. "The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered," says Debord. "Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudoworld that can only be looked at. The specialization of images of the world evolves into a world of autonomized images where even the deceivers are deceived. The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving."

The spectacle, crucially, "is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images." (My italics). What Debord means in part is that the Western project of understanding the world has been cast primarily in the mode of one sense: sight. And that what we perceive - always, necessarily, at a distance - with our eyes has begun, not only to replace, but to obliterate the possibility of more fully sensual and connected ways of being in the world. As the Homebody says in Tony Kushner's extraordinary play, "All must be touched. All touch corrupts. All must be corrupted."

Homebody/Kabul and The Spook are both political works which seek to interrupt, in very different ways, the on-going theatre that constitutes the larger political world. Debord himself would no doubt consider all bourgeois theatre - of which both of these plays are examples - as fatally corrupted by its embeddedness in the very economic and social forms they seek to critique. But, given that, as Debord says, "consciousness of desire and desire for consciousness are the same project" and that the polar opposite of consciousness is the spectacle, one can argue that it is possible for the sensual realities of theatre, even bourgeois theatre, to lift the work out of the aura of undead commodity, and to shock us out of the alienated deathliness against which Debord argues so passionately.

I am tired of the political framing that places art simply at the service of one rhetoric or another, "left wing" or "right wing", as if that were all that is at stake: and here, however clumsily, I am attempting to signal how art might be most crucially political. When Debord claims that "the history of different ideologies is over", and that ideology - which crucially seeks to enslave and negate "real life" - now so saturates every social relationship that it is, effectively, without difference within itself, something in me leaps in recognition. And I look to art to spring this trap and, however contingently, to escape it. Both these plays, while overtly political in the sense in which the word is generally understood, strike me as political in this more profound way. They seek to escape, or at least to expose and question, the deadly spectacle that dominates our social discourse.

Homebody/Kabul was written by Tony Kushner before September 11 redrew global geopolitics. It famously opened in New York in December 2001, mere weeks after the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. As a play which explores the West's ambivalent fascination with Afghanistan, mordantly predicting the violence that would ensue, it established Kushner's reputation as the prophetic child of American theatre. With this in mind, it is probably worth reflecting that one definition of "prophet" is he who sees the present clearly.

Read More.....

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Green Room Awards

In my new guise as Green Room Awards theatre panellist for 2007, I took more notice than usual of the nominations for the 2006 Green Room Awards, announced yesterday at the Princess Theatre. Quite a few of my personal favourites in the three theatre divisions (and very good to see the sadly underrated Eldorado getting a few deserved nominations) but it beats me how anyone could think Jason Donovan's catatonic face-pulling in Festen is noteworthy acting, or that It Just Stopped shouldn't have been quietly filed away in a bottom drawer and forgotten. I guess if everyone agreed, life would be a sight more dull...

Sunday, February 18, 2007

Review: The Nature of Things

The Nature Of Things, Season 1: Relics and Time, directed by Renato Cuocolo. Concept by Renato Cuocolo and Roberta Bosetti, media by Warwick Page, visual art by Andree Gersberck. With Roberta Bosetti. Undisclosed location (revealed at booking) until February 25. Bookings 9416 9447 or 0416 42 75 86.

The uncertain border between art and life permits art its special extremity, and life its proper respect. If it were true that, as George Steiner speculates, it is as morally culpable to murder a fictional character as it is to kill someone who exists in the "real" world, what novelist would dare to write the first page of a story?

But who polices this border, and where is it to be found? If the artist lives in the world, the world too lives in him; she, like everyone else, moves through quotidian existence. The artist is a human being like everybody else, neither above nor beneath the world, but simply in it. And if this is true, how can what an artist makes not be part of the world as well, how can an artist's work be separate from the materiality which is, in fact, the condition of its existence? How can there be, in fact, any border?



You see the lamentable effects of having a literal mind: it brings one bang up against contradiction. Art is literal, perhaps most literal in its ironies (as Hamlet says, "Madam, I know not seems") and The Nature of Things seems to me to be literal-minded to the point of the poetic. In this work, the duo who make up IRAA, Renato Cuocolo and Roberta Bosetti, draw as close as they can to the border between art and life; and the closer they come, the clearer it seems that a border does, in fact, exist: a shadowy border, to be sure, and open to constant dispute, but all the more perplexingly visible for its closeness.

Read More.....

Friday, February 16, 2007

On Dante

My review of Barbara Reynolds' Dante: The Poet, The Political Thinker, The Man was broadcast on ABC Radio National's The Book Show today. My rather unsuccessful Simon Schama imitation is presently audible at The Book Show's site, with a handy transcript for those who can't stand it any more.

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Round the web

Over in London, our favourite anonyme Theatre Worker has been doing some serious renovating. The indispensible Encore Theatre Magazine now has a hip new style and its very own domain name. It kicks off with an excellent overview of the Royal Court under Dominic Cooke's direction. Check it out, and then check out David Eldridge's report on the Court's production of The Seagull. TW might have reservations about this kind of hit programming, but some of us down here by the Antarctic, enviously reading rave after rave about this production, are feeling the tyranny of distance.

Closer to home, welcome to Nicholas Pickard, a Sydney arts journalist who has recently picked up the blogging baton and is whipping up (presumably with said baton) a tasty froth of news, reviews and commentary that already looks promisingly useful for southern types who don't get to the Harbor City as often as they would like. And welcome too to Chloe Veltman, the chief theatre critic of SF Weekly, (that's San Francisco, bozos, not Isaac Asimov), who is demonstrating with her class blog that she's a class act.

And lastly - well, it's got nothing to do with theatre, but what the hell. It made me laugh. A spoof on mediaeval hi-tech.

Saturday, February 10, 2007

Review: Detest / Chocolate Monkey / Rage Boy

Detest (This Thousand Years I Shall Not Weep) created by Angus Cerini, with music by Kelly Ryall, Courthouse @ La Mama until February 17.

Chocolate Monkey, written and performed by John-Paul Hussey, directed by Lucien Savron. Original music and sound design by Kelly Ryall, photography and visual design by Natalie Lowery, lighting design by Remo Vallance, Mark Benson and Luke Hails. The Amazing Business, presented by the Store Room Theatre Workshop at Full Tilt, the Victorian Arts Centre, until February 18.

Rage Boy by Declan Greene, directed by Susie Dee. Set and costume design by Emily Barrie, lighting design by Katie Sfetkidis, video design by Nicholas Verso. Midsumma Festival at the Beckett, Malthouse Theatre, until February 10.

It's been a dislocating week. Not for any traceable reason, but still, discombobulating enough to scatter my neurones over a wide field. Permit me some bloggish indulgence as I attempt to gather these oddments into some semblance of coherency, in the hope that a random skitter through last week might get those neurones firing, or at least talking to their Team Leader. This will be long, so arm yourself with your liquid drug of choice, and then listen and attend, O my beloved, as I relate to you the banal marvels of ordinary life.

So: last week I managed to deliver my youngest boy to his first week at high school, complete with uniform, lace-up shoes, bus ticket and mobile phone. I agreed, after deep contemplation of the word "no", which does exist in my vocabulary somewhere, to be on a panel of the Green Room Awards. I read Robert Musil's Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One and George Bataille's Story of the Eye. I finished a review for the Book Show of Dorothy Reynolds' gigantic book on Dante and sat in a studio trying to imitate Simon Schama as I read it into a microphone ("It is common to compare Dante Aligheri’s epic poem the Divine Comedy to a cathedral: VAST, SOARING, sublime...") I considered the many reasons why I have never had the slightest impulse to be an actor. I worried about the reviews I wasn't writing.

I didn't go (although I put it in my diary) to David Williamson's John Sumner Lecture, which I idly thought to attend last Thursday. I just wanted to stay home with my new best friend, a box of Anti-Viral Facial Tissues that apparently "kills 99% of Cold & Flu Viruses, in the tissue". (Virucidal tissues seem to me a piquant symptom of the paranoia of contemporary middle class life.) I bored several people to catatonia talking about my Novel. (Formal apologies to all thus buttonholed, You Know Who You Are).

In the midst of all this, I saw three pieces of theatre, all by men and all, in various ways, exploring the dilemmas of masculinity. Two of them were monologues - Chocolate Monkey and Detest - and one, Rage Boy, had 10 cast members. Somehow all these works added to my general subjective scatteredness. It is as if I've been trying to listen to a conversation that is running at the back of my mind, a kind of shadowscape of thought which flickers past and refuses to coalesce into anything as concrete as mere words. So, as reviews often are, this will be an attempt to recuperate some fugitive impressions, to pin the butterfly to the wheel and see if it sings. Only more so than usual.

The above excess of confessional detail is, I suppose, prompted by the monologues. The performers so embed themselves - or perhaps more accurately, fictions of themselves - in their work that they call up similar self-reflection in response. So, if you're still reading, blame Angus Cerini and John-Paul Hussey (and, no doubt, their mutual musical collaborator, Kelly Ryall). Detest and Chocolate Monkey are, in very different ways, intensely personal works: they directly tangle with the vexed question of the self in art, foregrounding the performer's body to confront the audience with the discomforting, confronting fact of an actor's ontological existence.

Read More.....

Contemporary Australian Drama 2

Quick note - Julian Meyrick, associate director at the MTC, has a review of Leonard Radic's Contemporary Australian Drama in today's Age. Very different take to mine, and I hasten to say that I respect Meyrick's opinion. Just one quibble, for which I beg your indulgence, because it's close to home; but I do think it matters beyond the personal. Meyrick notes that "[Radic's] overview of Daniel Keene is particularly valuable, giving a sense of the range and stylistic variation this brilliant stage writer has achieved."

Perhaps this is so. But it's kind of distressing that this chapter will probably be a first port of call for those interested in Keene's work, because it is shockingly incomplete. Although it considers many shorter works, it doesn't mention several major plays, including what many (admittedly French) critics consider his most significant play, Terminus. Terminus premiered in Adelaide, as part of the decade-long collaboration between Keene and Tim Maddock of the Red Shed Company (also not mentioned at all, although the equally significant, if shorter, collaboration with Ariette Taylor is discussed at length).

It wouldn't matter if the book didn't claim to be comprehensive; but it does. I just note this rather sadly as a corrective: once something is framed between the covers of a book, it tends to gain the holy aura of fact. And this is how people get unjustly written out of history.

PS I just remembered a response I wrote to Terminus after its premiere in 1996. Nobody would publish it because it is not done to respond to work involving one's spouse; but hey, back then nobody else would do it. The play itself is available from Salt Publishing in the collection Terminus and Other Plays.

Thursday, February 08, 2007

TN blanks out

This by way of apology. Yes, Ms TN has had a horrendous fortnight. My excuses are extreme financial panic, the beginning of the school year and something that is either hayfever or a distant cousin of bird flu. (Wren flu? It makes me sneeze two dozen times in a row every night at precisely 9pm. Very embarrassing in a theatre. Also, large parts of my brain have gone missing. Have I thrown them away with my used tissues?) All this excitement has left me interestingly wan and unable to do much more than wiggle my fingers over the keyboard as I call feebly for the butler to bring me a snifter of brandy.

Chris Goode, poet at large and theatre wizard of notable musical taste, writes this kind of nonsense much better than I do; so while you're waiting for the two reviews delayed by my cerebral shortcomings (on the way, I promise), hare off to Thompson's Bank of Communicable Desire, where he speaks of many interesting things. Lately, Robert Wilson and Chris's recent visit to Sydney, where his show Kiss of Life was part of the Sydney Festival. He now has a President for his fanclub. Chris, meet Avi; Avi, Chris.

Thursday, February 01, 2007

Advertisement for myself

Yes, I have a new chapbook out, I must be a real poet. It's almost a slim volume, running to 40 pages, and is beautifully made by Cusp Books in LA. The design, which features details from Durer's Melancholia, is by Susan Guntner. I'm well pleased. Advertisement follows:


birds are returning line by line
near the river their shadows gather

black and still where water sifts
silver on ash ash on silver

lovely the creatures of light springing down
from cloud to home

neither suspended nor in motion
brick and wood are things of flame

fire remembered and foretold
making and ending

(from: Translations from Nowhere)

Ash, poems by Alison Croggon, is now available from Cusp Books. US $10.00 (UKP 5.00, EU 8.00, AU $13.00), including postage. Contact David Lloyd at davidcll@usc.edu.

Also available from Cusp Books: Sill, by David Lloyd ($8.00, incl. p&p). Forthcoming this (northern) Spring: I ran from it and was still in it, by Fred Moten; and Act Zero, by Alfred Arteaga. ($8.00 each, $30.00 for the set of 4).

And while I'm at it, I might as well plug Angel Exhaust 19, which is just out. It's the latest issue of the legendary (at times even mythical) British poetry magazine. Edited by Charles Bainbridge and Andrew Duncan, it includes some of my work among a tasty menu of contemporary poetry, mainly from the UK but also, obviously, from further afield. 140 pages available now for £7 from Andrew Duncan at aduncan@pinko.org, 12 Eliot Hill, Lewisham, London, SE13 7EB.