Review: The City/Bare Witness

I'm loath to say this, for several reasons, but nevertheless: sometimes you have to point out the obvious. (In Ms TN's case, pointing out the obvious is my raison d'etre). The City at Red Stitch and La Mama's Bare Witness at Fortyfivedownstairs are productions which demonstrate that our indie women directors can be as ambitious, imaginative, intelligent, out-there theatrical and aesthetically tough as any man.


As soon as you write it down, it looks ridiculous and patronising. And, given that last week I saw Lee Lewis' Twelfth Night at the Arts Centre, and next year am looking forward to a Malthouse season curated by Marion Potts, it even sounds redundant. The problem is that if you don't write it down, this fact gets too easily erased. Anyone mumbling that women have a specifically feminine aesthetic that forbids them from the main stages, or that there aren't many woman directors around, or that only exceptional women have what it takes to fill a stage, or any of the other weasel reasons which add up to women, in defiance of demographics, being a "minority" in the decision-making arts, should get out and see these shows.

In the directorial hands of Nadja Kostich, Mari Lourey's play Bare Witness becomes an outstanding piece of physical theatre: a punishing, sensually immersive investigation of trauma that never forgets to be intelligent. The story tracks the career of a photojournalist, Dany Hall, from her induction as a naive rooky during the Balkans war of the early 1990s to the desert wars of the present day. There's an irresistible romance, even among journalists, around war reporting, and the subject matter is an ethical and aesthetic minefield. Bare Witness, to its considerable credit, avoids almost all the traps, from the first deadly sin of theatre - earnestness - to the Hollywood-style romanticising of journalists to the thoughtless exploitation of atrocity.

It's a seamless marriage of its various parts, which add up to an overwhelming work of theatre. Kostich has a first-class technical set-up: Marg Howell's bare but sensual stage design, seemingly made of crumpled paper; a broodingly punishing electronic and percussive score played live by Jethro Woodward; Emma Valente's ad hoc lighting, created on stage by the actors and Valente herself, with fluorescent strips, flash-lights and swinging lamps lifting a claustrophobic darkness; and Michael Carmody's fluidly abstract video, which combines footage of wolves (a ruling image of the press pack, who are both hunters and hunted), projected numbers or place names, or dissolving animations that recall the decaying charcoals of William Kentridge.

Against this richly suggestive theatrical field, the bodies of the five performers - Isaac Drandic, Daniela Farinacci, Adam McConvell, Todd MacDonald and Maria Theodorakis - play and transform. This is among the most exciting physical theatre I've seen - inventive and exhilarating, demonstrating how the precision of actors' bodies is quite different from the miraculous accuracy of dance: more vernacular, perhaps, in its comparative coarseness, but when as passionately and skilfully performed as here, every bit as compelling.


As Bare Witness argues, war reporting is very like an addiction, and perhaps stems from the same kinds of emotional poverties and alienations as drug addiction does. And it can be just as fatal. Meanwhile, are journalists self-interested predators, or idealistic seekers of the truth, or adrenaline junkies? What difference does getting the news out actually make, in feeding the ravenous maw of a media machine hungry for the next image of atrocity and human suffering? In an image-saturated, media-manipulated world, how truthful can a photograph actually be? And what is the personal cost of a restless fascination with violence?

These questions are, for the most part, lightly raised, and the show evades moralising and sentimentalising its subject matter. In questioning the media, it also keeps in play the equally knotty question of artistic exploitation, which is no less distasteful. I found that its emotional impact registered just as the lights went down at the end, not during the course of the show. Its pace gives no time for reflection or thought, which, given its subject matter, seems wholly appropriate. Kostich's production is perhaps most exciting in its unapologetic seriousness: it's a relief to see a work that so directly, without naivety or cynicism or face-saving irony, addresses the complexities of real world calamity.

I thought the show around 20 minutes too long - there was a narrative detour around East Timor that edged the text into an earnestness and expositional looseness that it otherwise avoids. And work of this unrelenting intensity is difficult to sustain for more than around 90 minutes, without its effects becoming simply numbing. Even so, this is ambitious, smart, beautifully realised theatre. And quite unlike anything else that is on in Melbourne.

*


The City might be the best production I've seen at Red Stitch, even though, as ever with Martin Crimp, I came away feeling deeply ambivalent about the play. Adena Jacobs offers an uneasily stylised production which emphasises the brittleness and fractures of Crimp's dramaturgy, transforming the small space of Red Stitch into a haunting shadow box of middle-class nightmare.

I found The City intriguing, but perhaps not in the ways Crimp intended. (Although, who knows?) Ostensibly a play about an emotionally sterile marriage, it extends into a self-reflexive discussion of art. Clair (Fiona Macleod) is a literary translator, married to Christopher (Dion Mills), an office worker in the city who loses his job and ends up at the butcher's counter in Sainsburys. A third character, Jenny (Meredith Penman), is a neighbour - a nurse married to a doctor who is away at an unspecified and apparently secret war. There is a brief and unsettling appearance by a spooky daughter (Fantine Banulski/Georgie Hawkins), who has the alienated air of a demon child out of a horror movie.

By the end, I was all but convinced that this play is a confession by the playwright of his own psychic damage and aesthetic limitations. I would normally resist any such interpretation of a work as fatally impertinent: but here it's irresistible. The play progresses as a kind of self-interrogation, a dismantling of its own inabilities, until by the end its characters are questioning each other's reality. It finishes with a description of a war-devastated city, bombed flat like Fallujah or Grozny, that is the simulacrum of Clair's writerly imagination; and its final scene is of a child mangling a piece of piano music, presumably an illustration of what writers do to reality.

Clair's confession of her creative sterility, of her inability to create living realities, is too close to my major problem with Crimp's own plays not to give pause. Whether this is a fatally self-indulgent premise for a play is moot: in the hands of this director and cast, it creates some startlingly strange and unsettling moments of theatre. Yet even in this production, which brings everything possible out of the text, it never strikes deeply. The work is as it says it is - emotionally and intellectually cauterised.

What's troubling about this is that Crimp's confession of writing as an act of emotional nihilism is generalised to embrace all literature. Clair, for instance, is (as Crimp himself has often been) a translator rather than maker of texts. At the beginning of the play, she describes a chance encounter with a writer whom she later translates, Mohamed. Mohamed possesses all the authenticity that Clair, in her white middle-class comfort, feels she lacks: he is ethnically exotic, and has been imprisoned, tortured and exiled.

Yet this authenticity, as Clair recognises to her dismay, is as emotionally dead as Clair's. He can't work with his young daughter around, and so palms her off on his sister-in-law (a nurse, who regards him with contempt), and when he hears news of his daughter's accidental death, he feels not grief but exhilaration. Not only is he liberated from his responsibility, but he now has even more authenticity to throw into his creative mill. It's a bleak view of writing that is, in fact, a toxic romantic cliche: the problem is that you think that Crimp believes it.

The City opens with a domestic scene between a husband and wife that introduces one of my major problems with Crimp - that he so often seems like a cut-price version of Harold Pinter. Using a number of Pinteresque techniques - fragmented conversation, non sequiturs, declarations of emotion that in fact convey their opposite, narrative leaps and disjunctions - Crimp generates a sense of unease and anxiety. But I can't help asking, to what end?

Pinter miraculously (as in, say, Ashes to Ashes) uses these techniques to pierce through the protective carapace of denial to a place of real feeling, a moment of disturbing, sometimes shattering insight when perception suddenly and irrevocably shifts. Crimp clearly aims to do the same thing: but he mistakes nihilism for realism. If he's a lesser playwright than those he mimics - Harold Pinter and Howard Barker, in particular - it's because his plays lack the imaginative largeness to embrace human possibility: joy as well as pain.

For all their bleakness, neither Barker nor Pinter forget that love or justice are human realities, and that these realities are the only things that invest our crimes - intimate or global - with their proper outrage. (Echoes of Beckett: "But I do give a fuck!") After all, who cares what happens to numb puppets? Crimp, on the other hand, cannot seem to believe that love and justice, being human inventions, exist at all, which is quite different from writing about their lack or their failure: and in this, he shows himself to be a cynic. A carefully polished pessimism is, after all, seldom going to be proved wrong. On the other hand, it seldom has the foolishness that permits belief in fictions: and without that belief, a writer will never create a living imagined reality. Poets, as Heiner Mueller says, must always be a little bit stupid.

Clearly, this play intrigued me; in so frankly embodying its own imaginative and emotional failures, isn't it, by sleight of hand, retrieving a kind of success? It's certainly difficult to imagine a more intelligent production. Dayna Morrissey's design and Danny Pettingill's lighting tricks the eye, so that the tiny stage at Red Stitch suddenly has several extra dimensions, functioning as both a poetic and naturalistic setting. Jacobs shows a bold theatrical imagination, unafraid of stillness or of extending performative gestures, so there are moments of pure, abstract, theatre - Penman being eaten by a piano in the background of a bleak marital dialogue; the spooky child reciting obscene limericks.

And in this Jacobs is helped by her fearless cast, who handle the warped naturalism of the production with unfaltering assurance. The dialogue - which largely consists of fractured monologues spoken past the other characters - is addressed directly to the audience, its delivery switching between mannered excess and bitten precision. The result is often comic, in tandem with an increasing upwinding of tension that opens a sense of menacing estrangement. That this doesn't actually amount to much beyond a generalised expression of middle-class anxiety is the fault of the play, not the production. I noticed in the program that Jacobs is planning a production of Anne Carson's Elektra at the Dog Theatre later this year: it will be fascinating to see what she will achieve with a text that actually does something.

Pictures: Top, middle: images of Nadja Kostich's Bare Witness. Photo: Marg Howell. Bottom: Meredith Penman, Fiona Macleod and Dion Mills in The City. Photo: Jodie Hutchinson

Bare Witness by Mari Lourey, directed by Nadja Kostich. Composer/musician Jethro Woodward, set and costumes Marg Howell, video Michael Carmody, lighting Emma Valente. With Isaac Drandic, Daniela Farinacci, Adam McConvell, Todd MacDonald and Maria Theodorakis. La Mama Theatre @ Fortyfive Downstairs, until September 26.

The City by Martin Crimp, directed by Adena Jacobs. Set design Dayna Morrissey, lighting Danny Pettingill, sound design Jared Lewis. With Fiona Macleod, Dion Mills, Meredith Penman and Fantine Banulski/Georgie Hawkins. Red Stitch until September 25.