The Season at Sarsaparilla by Patrick White, directed by Benedict Andrews. Design by Robert Cousins, costumes by Alice Babidge, lighting by Nick Schlieper, composition by Alan John, sound design by David Gilfillan. With Martin Blum, Brandon Burke, Peter Carroll, Eden Falk, John Gaden, Alan John, Hayley McElhinney, Amber McMahon, Colin Moody, Pamela Rabe, Emily Russell, Dan Spielman and Helen Thomson. Sydney Theatre Company @ the Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, until March 31.

I have never sat among such a noisy audience as that which packed the Drama Theatre for The Season at Sarsaparilla last Friday night. It was like being in a high school assembly or among a flock of especially loquacious parrots. There was no hint of reverence, no sense that we were entering the Temple of Art for a dose of cultural self-improvement: rather, a diverse bunch of people of various ages were decked out in their gladrags for a night at the Opera House, in full and garrulous expectation of having an enjoyable evening. They were there, gentle reader, for pleasure.


I had to keep reminding myself that it was Patrick White who was causing such excited anticipation: the monstrously highbrow, improper Patrick White, whose works allegedly defeat all common understanding. (Why, he might as well be German). Moreover, he was to be directed by that ferocious enfant terrible Benedict Andrews, who debuted in Melbourne last year with a stunning production of Marius von Mayenburg's Eldorado. While TN loved this show, others seemed to be affronted that such examples of "fringe" theatre should mistakenly stray onto a main stage. Critic Peter Craven, leading the charge of the slight brigade, claimed that Eldorado was so "resolutely anti-mainstream" that it was "excruciating".

So there I was, staring at a classic Howard Arkley brick veneer with a tiled roof and a screen door. In its dark windows the chatty audience members were reflected in ghostly rows, just as they were reflected in the huge window that made up the bulk of Eldorado's set. On either side of the house were ominous signs of fringey-type multimedia: two large screens, now blank. In the far left corner was a Hammond organ. But what a difference an Opera House makes! Everything seemed very mainstream to me.

But enough sniping. This is a magnificent production of The Season at Sarsaparilla, illuminating the complex textures of White's dramaturgy with some ingenious and bold decisions, and the cast moves with astounding suppleness between the play's vivid emotional contrasts. It's funny, heart-breaking and wise, and also, at every level, extremely intelligent. Like most of the Drama Theatre audience, I loved it; it rewards you richly while reminding you that theatre is, as Brett Whitely once said of art, a "difficult pleasure".

A scathing attack on the Great Australian Emptiness, The Season at Sarsaparilla is equally a shatteringly poignant paean to the life that beats within it. At its simplest it's a portrait of sleepy suburbia, woken to its repressed desires by the howls of a bitch on heat who is pursued by a pack of dogs (the "season" of the title). The action follows the mundane lives of three households over a few days: a young girl becomes pregnant and kills herself; another falls in love; a marriage cracks under infidelity; a man loses a friend; a woman has a baby. The sensual heat of desire, acknowledged, abused or repressed, shapes the entire action of the play.

White's ambivalence runs through the core of every character in the play. He makes merciless fun of the rigid respectability of Girlie Pogson (Peter Carroll) and her campaign against nasty "words" and other assaults by reality on feminine respectability; but equally, as with all his characters, he also reveals her essential innocence, the yearning that tremulously glows beneath her starched frock. Likewise, the blazing innocence of Ron Suddards (Dan Spielman) - "a decent fellow", as White describes him - is easily mocked, but it's Suddards who wins the girl from the would be writer Roy Child (Eden Falk).

You get the feeling that White isn't being ironic when he makes Judy Pogson (Hayley McElhinney) passionately defend the value of human decency against the sneers of "clever people" like Roy. Like Kafka, White understood the profound value of kindness; Roy Child is, as his name suggests, too young and too impatient to have learnt what it means, and his cruelty is a defence against its seduction into mediocrity. Even Roy senses that he will not become a true writer until he has acknowledged the tenderness that lives in Sarsaparilla, which is ultimately his own, and which he can neither accept nor wholly reject. As he says at the end of the play, "You can't shed your own skin, no matter how it itches." (That remark is, like everything else in this play, ambiguous: Roy's "skin" might refer to the discontented consciousness that drives him out of Sarsaparilla as much as it does to Sarsaparilla itself.)

White balances the tensions between the men and women very finely. The play is set in the women's domains, the houses full of consumer goods that the men march off to work every morning to pay for, and it's the women who haunt you. White saw, with an acuity which eluded many of his contemporaries, exactly how women were trapped by the mores of their time. He created some memorable portraits: Pippy Pogson (Amber McMahon), the tomboy being anxiously reined into the limits of her femininity; Girlie Pogson herself, and most of all Nola Boyle (Pamela Rabe), the slatternly wife of the night soil man Ernie (Brandon Burke).

Nola, given here a revelatory performance by Rabe, is the apogee of ambiguity; the personification of earthy sensuality, she is nevertheless infertile. For all her barreness, she is the pulse of life in the suburb, its generous, despised heart. Like Roy, she perceives the endless cycle of reproduction with a horrified clarity; unlike Roy, whose response is cruelty, Nola is stung into compassion. Yet the price of her knowledge is pain, and her fall and redemption expose an appalling loneliness: a close-up of Rabe's anguished face at a critical moment shows us precisely what it costs.

Nola's infidelity - portrayed here as a kind of rape - with her husband's "best mate", Digger Masson (Colin Moody), is the axis on which the play turns: it's the moment when young Pippy understands for the first time the darkness of adult sexuality, and the true significance of the howls behind the safe, identical houses as maddened dogs pursue the "hot bitch". To mitigate this horror, she can only retreat into the complacency of domestic animals, the cow-like Mrs Pogson or the passive contentment of the young mother Mavis Knott (Emily Russell). It's a bleak picture, but White gives his characters a stubborn, vital dignity that infuses the play with a strangely joyous illumination.

The Actors Company brings the play to rich life. Rabe's performance of Nola is a stand-out, one of the truly great stage portrayals, and her scenes with both Colin Moody and Brandon Burke are electrifying; but she shines among many achievements. You want to go on and on: every actor (including a couple of cameos from composer Alan John; I didn't know he could act as well as write music) is performing at a pitch and complexity that means you are teetering on the edge of the "perpetual slight surprise" that Coleridge demanded of poetry; you never know what to expect, but when it arrives, it has its own truth and inevitability. Still, I won't forget the Pogson family: Peter Carroll's Girlie, a wonderful mixture of true pathos and comedy, is a piece of inspired casting, and John Gaden as Clive Pogson is a great foil.

In his direction, Benedict Andrews invokes conventions that are instantly recognisable from Eldorado, if subtly inflected for this production. He plays intriguingly with alienating effects like miked voices and windows, using them to both displace and heighten the emotional textures of the text, and he invokes a sense of autumnal desolation with coloured leaves fluttering from the flies onto Robert Cousins' stylish set. His most inspired decision, however, is to locate the action within a single house. Where White specified that the action was to take place in three back yards, Andrews has the different families criss-crossing one kitchen, as we watch them through three huge windows. As in Eldorado - or indeed, Ariane Mnouchkine's Le Dernier Caravanserail - the audience members are enticed into a voyeuristic complicity, peering through the windows like nosey neighbours.

This sense of voyeurism is heightened by cameras dotted, Big Brother-style, inside the house. It permits us to witness moments of almost unbearable privacy: we see characters in grotesque close-up - eating dinner, showering, contemplating their reflections in the mirror - even as we watch them in the flesh on stage. If it were handled with less tact, this could become merely an irritating trick, but Andrews modulates the cameras with superb sensitivity, drawing us into horrified compassion with one shot, invoking disgust with another, heightening the comedy with a third. You will seldom see multimedia used to such precise and powerful effect as here.

This production makes very clear how the investment in the Actors Company has paid off for the STC. There is a certain subliminal sense of ease that can only be achieved by an ensemble, and it is palpable in the general quality of what happens between the performers on stage. As the company lined up for the applause that was their due, a large part of me sighed heavily. I just can't imagine such a production emerging from the rehearsal rooms of the Melbourne Theatre Company. Frankly, I'm envious of Sydney.

Picture: Peter Carroll and Pamela Rabe in The Season at Sarsaparilla. Photo: Tania Kelley.