The issue of "issues"

A bonus for all you happy readers: Victoria Chance from Currency Press has a special offer to TN readers: if you order Power Plays online before Monday (click here) and write "Theatre Notes" in the comment box, you'll get a 20 per cent discount when the order is processed. Note that the discount won't appear until the order is processed but, Victoria assures us, "we will do it".
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Ms TN is surprisingly well after an intense three weeks of theatre. I put this down largely to having severely edited my diary so that I was only doing one thing. Next month I'm back to wearing three hats (I have to do the rewrite on my novel) but I'm beginning to see the point of a singly-focused life. Not that I seem very capable of it.

But today, swimming out of the post-fest haze, comes Corrie Perkin's preview of Hilary Glow's book Power Plays: Australian Theatre and the Public Agenda in the Australian. (Reviewed in Eureka Street here too: link via Ben Ellis, one of the playwrights discussed in the book, who also include Stephen Sewell, Hannie Rayson, Wesley Enoch and Patricia Cornelius).

The book is on my to-read list, so I can't comment on its substance. But a couple of Glow's comments made me pause. She says that under the Howard Government, theatre companies have been forced to adopt a more conservative repertoire and avoid risk. "I think there has been a change," says Glow, of the past few years. "And it's a change in which it's harder for critically adventurous work, challenging work, to emerge."

There is most certainly a truth in this - I've recently criticised the MTC for its conservative repertoire, which to me appears to emerge precisely from various kinds of risk avoidance. But equally, fresh out of a festival notable for its adventure and challenge, and packed with profoundly political works, ranging from Laurie Anderson's Homeland to Athol Fugard's Sizwe Banzi is Dead to Jérôme Bel's anti-spectacle The Show Must Go On, it strikes me that this is a very partial view. On the contrary, in many places I'm picking up an increasing political thoughtfulness, an increasing engagement with contemporary issues, an increasing sense of urgency among artists to connect, to speak, to make.

What's shifted is the idea that theatre is primarily a socio-political document, and primarily the home of naturalism. The focus has moved from issue-based plays to a more multivalent awareness that representation itself, in this media-saturated world, is a deeply political issue, and that it is not nearly enough merely to state the issues. You can see this awareness, to cite a few examples among many, in productions like Stephen Page's Kin or Nigel Jamieson's Honour Bound, both on at the Malthouse, or in independently produced plays like Hélène Cixous's The Perjured City, or Philip Ridley's Mercury Fur. All of them wholly engaged political works which certainly meet the benchmarks of adventure and challenge.

Criticising the controversial Behzti by Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, British critic/blogger Andrew Haydon recently observed: "Plays which 'expose secret, seedy worlds' in my experience often do so at the expense of pretty much anything else that might make a play watchable or indeed, uh, theatrical...The whole play would have sunk utterly without trace were it not for the disgrace of its being rioted off stage." He goes on to comment of "issue-based" plays:

...writers frequently appear to be encouraged to produce what amounts to emotional pornography - moreover: authentic, “urban” or exotic emotional pornography. And lastly, and worse, they appear to be encouraged to do this in a very narrow, restrictive, shallow sort of naturalism, which utterly refuses any use of language, metaphor, or most of the other things that actually make theatre vital.

I'm all for conversation, for art being on the public agenda. But as I said in my review of Sizwe Banzi Is Dead, "political writing, if it is to mean anything, has to reach both higher and lower than the banalities of ideology". That means, among other things, an attention to the form of theatre itself, and not regarding it as simply a vessel into which are poured various worthwhile messages.

Puzzling over the claim that theatre is less political, when it is so manifestly not the case, I suspect that this shift away from naturalistic issue-based plays is the change that Glow notes, and mistakes for a lack of political engagement. And while Glow's book includes a variety of writers, many of whom I admire, it has to be said that some of them have given me the most boring nights I've ever spent in the theatre.