Beginning with King John and ending with Henry VIII, the ten works known as Shakespeare’s History Plays dramatise five generations of brutal power struggle in mediaeval England. Although they were never written to be performed as cycles or as single epic works, the contemporary stage has seen a number of notable versions of the history plays as epic theatre. Peter Hall inaugurated the Royal Shakespeare Company with a cycle of eight plays, The Wars of the Roses, in 1964; again with the RSC, Adrian Noble made The Plantagents, an adaptation of the second tetralogy in 1988. Michael Bogdanov directed another famous seven-play adaptation, The Wars of the Roses, at the English Shakespeare Company in 1987. And so on.

Less illustriously, Bell Shakespeare did their own version, Wars of the Roses, in 2005. That production begged the question: why should 21st century Australians be interested in plays that are so crucially concerned with the question of Englishness, and which in fact have been formative of the fiction of English national consciousness? Can our staging these plays be anything more than a colonial gesture of defiance or obsequiousness, either being different sides of the same cultural coin? Or is there something else going on in these plays that can elicit a proper contemporary attention? Is there still something they can reveal?

Tom Wright and Benedict Andrews answer these questions authoritatively with their adaptation, The War of the Roses. Rendering eight plays in four acts over eight hours, this is a work of massive intellectual and theatrical ambition that will be impossible to encompass properly here. Trying to think about it is rather like a pleasurable version of Hercules's adventures with the Hydra: every time I address a thought, another two spring up and demand attention. But, as Wittgenstein so comfortingly says, one has to begin somewhere.

The War of the Roses is theatre of a rare and desolating beauty. It generates its startling visual richness from a poverty of illusion. Andrews strips the stage to its back walls and finds for each of the four acts a single informing (and utterly transparent) theatrical metaphor. This lyric simplicity has the effect of framing and foregrounding Shakespeare's language. It highlights the literary beauty, wit and power of the speeches, not by reverent attention to their formalities, but through excessive physical demands on the performers, which excavate the visceral truths of poetry.

In these plays, The War of the Roses is no longer plural. It is a single war, an Orwellian total war without end, a war in which peace is only war by other means, a war very close to that within which we live. And yes, in this intellectually epic realisation, Wright and Andrews demonstrate that there is indeed a reason to mount these plays in this day and time. Yes, they are parables that concern themselves with much more than narrow questions of British nationalism or pretty kings. Yes, in these old stories of English kings we can see, reflected in their faces, our own complicities, our own shames. They reflect for us the nightmare of our history, the blind, murderous tragedy that continues in our own time.

Power never goes out of fashion.


Power

Giving it the proper capitals, Shakespearean critic Jan Kott called it the Grand Mechanism: the eternally revolving machine of History that raises high and casts low, so that he who at first believes he makes history becomes at last history’s plaything, the executioner executed. In the History Plays, the primal violence that inaugurates the State is laid bare; the illusions that conceal its bloody origins are torn roughly aside. Pomp and ritual, the notion of justice, the vision of an “anointed king” whom God blesses, or a President with a personal phone line to the Almighty, all fly up like the painted scenery on a stage to reveal a bleak world driven by the machinery of power, in which the only thing that counts is who is stronger. In this world, the world that Shakespeare brought to artistic fruition in the dark, bestial universe of King Lear, history is Godless and bereft of meaning.

The wheel turns: the pretender murders the king and seizes the crown, only to become himself a victim. Thus, as Camus sardonically observed, you might witness the true meaning of Revolution. Hegel thought history had a deeper and rational purpose, the evolution of the human spirit towards freedom and enlightenment: Marx, following Hegel, thought it a mechanism that would generate freedom for the masses enslaved by capital. But Shakespeare’s view of history is altogether starker.

It is, in many ways, a pre-Christian vision. As a young man, Shakespeare encountered the Latin poets, in particular Seneca, whose bloody tragedies influenced works like Titus Andronicus, and Lucan. Marlowe's translation of Lucan’s Pharsalia, his epic poem about the Roman Civil Wars, was popular in Elizabethan England when Shakespeare was writing the Henry VI plays, and may in fact have been their model. In this poem, Lucan describes the cosmos as a malfunctioning machine facing inevitable collapse under its own weight, a universe without meaning or purpose. Certainly in both works, ruinous civil wars lead to the creation of a tyrant – Caesar in one, Richard III in another.

Like Lucan and Seneca, Shakespeare saw history as an endless wheel of pain, a cycle of suffering that serves no purpose but its own continuation, and whose only production is corpses. The wheel turns and turns again: blood oils the axle, its iron rim crushes the human body under its irresistible weight, the next king rises and murders and falls. And for what? For the golden circle that is without beginning or end, the empty crown of state, the beautiful delusion that, once it has seduced its victims, reveals its true face:

...for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court...

Time

Eight hours, eight plays, one hundred years. Shakespeare’s medium was time, his tool was language. He used language to sculpt time, revealing the sinews of History, its dynamic, dramatic form. Andrews and Wright have sculpted Shakespeare, cutting back the eight plays to their essential speeches, laying bare the bones of language and time that underlie the flesh of history.

The War of the Roses is an oratorio, a series of soliloquies made by people in agonising solitude. The protagonists are caught outside historical action, in the isolating interstices when they become conscious of the implications of their acts. As the audience, we become their silent witnesses, their co-conspirators, their allies and enemies and subjects. It's a bold reworking that seems to create theatre at its purest and most essential, and yet the result continuously demands comparison to other arts, demonstrating its essential impurity: you think it is pure music, pure sculpture, pure poetry. Pure vision, pure dream.

Wright and Andrews have loosened the self-consciousness of the Renaissance stage, summoning an earlier idea of theatre. As the Shakespearean scholar Anne Richter noted, mediaeval drama implied both audience and player in one transcendent reality: the Easter plays were originatory rituals, where time future and time past were resolved into an infinite present. Shakespeare’s plays were part of a reality that splintered this holistic pageantry: his plays were the culmination of the secularisation of the dramatic stage, the zenith of the self-contained, self-conscious, articulate world that was the great invention of the Elizabethans.

Yet when the fire-curtain silently rises on the first stunning image of the cycle – Cate Blanchett as Richard II seated in a throne, surrounded by her unmoving courtiers, while an endless fall of gold leaf rains down onto the stage – what we see is not a Renaissance image, nor even a modern image. It is a mediaeval image, recalling in its hieratic formality nothing so much as the famous portrait of Richard II that is now in Westminster Abbey. And like the mediaeval pageants, this is a theatre that directly addresses us, which seeks to makes us implicit in its world. Through the four acts, we are begged, importuned, commanded, rebuked; we weep and laugh and are bewitched. We are not apart from this world. It even makes us flinch in immediate, visceral fear at the end of Part One, in an extraordinary coup of lighting: a huge shadow seems to fall from the top of the theatre as the curtain closes, as if a wall of darkness is falling onto us, a winged omen of dread. This theatre is more than a mirror. It is us.

There are of course still dialogic scenes – most notably the brilliant scene in Richard III when Richard (Pamela Rabe), the killer of Anne’s (Cate Blanchett) father and husband, seduces her as she follows the corpse of Henry VI, whom Richard has also murdered; or the scenes between Falstaff (John Gaden) and the wild, contemptuous young Hal (Ewen Leslie) in Henry V. But these play out in relief against a frieze of grinding existential solitude, and call into question the very basis of human communication. This is what makes The War of the Roses a contemporary production, rather than a nostalgic glance back to a romantic history: each character here is as pitilessly exposed, as cruelly alone, as any character in Beckett.

The War of the Roses begins and ends with two tragedies, Richard II and Richard III, which between them comprehend the decadence of power. They rhyme in more than name. Where Richard II is accompanied for more than an hour with a rain of gold, Richard III is performed on a children’s playground on which falls, silently and mercilessly, an endless rain of ash that blurs and conceals the corpses that accumulate about the stage.

In Richard II, we witness something more profound than mere regicide: we see the death of the idea of the king, the humanising of the sacred mouth of God to a mere mortal man, a foreshadowing of Lear’s realisation that he is but a “poor bare, forked stick”. In Richard III, we see what happens when desacralised power is put into conscious action. Richard II believes, up to the moment of his death and despite his forced abdication, that he is a king by divine right; Richard III knows he is king by right of his own malice, deception and violence. Richard II is a melancholy dream of a vain but sacred illusion that is ultimately destroyed by the concealed power that sustains it; Richard III a terrifying vision of amoral brutality.

In between the two tragedies, six plays are compressed into two acts. These follow the histories of three King Henrys, IV, V and VI. We witness the remorseless mechanism that is the engine of historical tragedy: an abattoir, an endless parade of death played out across the rich garden of the kingdom, ultimately reducing it to the final desert of ash, an endless winter of discontent.

In Part One, Act Two, a conflation of Henry IV and V, the stage is utterly bare, the only decoration to the action the guitarist Stefan Gregory, who stands by a giant amp, his back to the audience, picking out a growling lyric on his guitar. This act plays out the crisis of royal legitimacy, reminding us that the etymology of the word “royal” is the same as the word “real” (and that the Real was also a currency of the Spanish realm: gold and divine authority, the ultimate realities, were – and still are – closely linked). Henry IV (Robert Menzies), the murderer of Richard II, the anointed king, is haunted by doubt in the legitimacy of his power. He rules a realm riven by rebellion and is shamed by his wastrel son, Hal (Ewen Leslie), a stark contrast to the bellicose young Hotspur (Luke Mullins), who is fomenting rebellion against the monarch.

Henry IV's desired legitimacy only comes after his death, when Hal, now Henry V, forswears his debauch. The state demands sacrifice for its inauguration and legitimation, and Henry expiates the sin of regicide with French blood. Defeated France marries Henry V in the person of Katherine of France (Luke Mullins), who, in one of the more chilling images of the play, rises from the floor as a French corpse covered with blood, and is washed and dressed in wedding clothes before being offered to Henry V.

This foreshadows the mechanical violence of Part Two, Act One, which follows the conflicts between the houses of York and Lancaster, symbolised by the white rose and the red. This slaughter takes place on a ground of flowers, a garden that becomes a battlefield. Each character plucks out their assigned colour in the legendary scene in the garden, when the nobles chose the red rose or the white to indicate their loyalties. But the colours are given a darker meaning: they are echoed in the blood spat into the face of actors, to signify murder, and the flour thrown over their bodies as corpse pallor. The flour hangs in the light like the phosphorous bombs hung over Gaza at Christmas time.

The Players

A hundred years, five kings. Outside the Globe Theatre, a sign read Totus mundus agit histrionem: All the world’s a stage. It’s a sentiment as ancient as Petronius, who is credited with its invention, and it was a commonplace of the Elizabethan age, when theatre was considered the mirror of the times. No one worked this metaphor with more variety, wit and point than Shakespeare.

This metaphor is woven through the entire production, but there are telling moments when it steps into the foreground. One is in Richard III, when Richard is plagued by nightmares before the Battle of Bosworth Field, assailed in his dreams by all those he has murdered. Each ghost curses Richard – Pamela Rabe in bloodied t-shirt and black trousers, her hair curtaining her face like an evil Joey Ramone – and blesses his enemy, Richmond (Luke Mullins). And then they all gather front stage, as actors do when the show is finished, and bow. And we see that the stage is Richard’s mind, a macabre playground where at first he is king of the castle, the playground bully and liar murdering his way to the top of the class with macabre glee. When the ghosts bow to us, heedless of death since the worst has already happened to them, Richard discovers that he is no longer playing history. Now, like all his forbears, all those kings who thought they were the authors of their own action, Richard finds that he is merely history’s plaything, after all. The role is playing him.


In this moment and others like it, we are also made pricklingly aware that Richard is an actor, a player who is, moreover, a woman, Pamela Rabe, who after the play is over will walk off the stage, strip off her costume and take a shower. This double consciousness of performance is a particularly Shakespearean trope, and Andrews has exploited it to the hilt in The War of the Roses. The ambiguity of the Player King – the king whose pomp is all performance, the actor whose performance is all kingliness, each reflecting the perilous illusions and realities of the other – is a constant motif through the History Plays and the tragedies, and its double meaning expands still further in this production in the ash-strewn playground of Richard III.

The metaphor generates its power from the compelling reality of the performances: if we did not believe in the cruel grace of Richard II, if we were sceptical of the grief opened on the whetstone of Bolingbroke's ambition, if the lewdness of Hal and Falstaff played false or Anne’s tragic death were laughable instead of pathetic and sad, then the mundane reality beneath the playing would have no power to enrich our watching, and to unite our quotidian and imaginative worlds into a single complex reality.

What does it mean to “believe” a performance? This production gives plenty of occasions to consider this question: the acting is superlative, as good as you will see anywhere, with performances of breadth and disturbing depths, with nuance and skill and delicacy and the kind of passion that hooks the heart on barbed wire. To "believe" an actor means, I think, to become more conscious, to open the imagination to the full scope of emotional possibility. It means to understand better the meaning of our own humanity. It is not always comfortable.

This is the final production of the STC’s Actors Company, the beautiful dream of a permanent ensemble that foundered on the Scylla and Charybdis of Sydney public opinion and uneven programming. To my mind miraculously, the Actors Company produced some unforgettable work along the way. And it seems to me that if it took three years to make this show, and The War of the Roses were all that the Actors Company produced, it was well worth the bother. After all, there are companies in Europe – much lauded by critics here who have been very quick to claim that the Actors Company was a waste of resources – who have done no more than work on a single production for three years.

Every time I’ve seen the Actors Company, I’ve been impressed by the fluidity of its performance, the depth of the ensemble's dynamic on stage. The War of the Roses takes this several steps further, with Andrews’ direction springing off those relationships to generate the terrifying alienation that is the harsh lesson of this production. Above all else, one is watching a practised group at work, by now polished by three years’ daily intimacy. The stage glows with the genius of the ensemble, which generates a lucidity of performance that you simply cannot attain in the job-to-job schedule of normal acting work.

A month into the season, I didn’t see a single weak actor, and the two guest actors – Cate Blanchett and Robert Menzies – sit brilliantly within the cast. And this show features individual performances that are simply remarkable, portrayals that deserve to be lauded and remembered years hence as moments when greatness graced our stage.

Images that remain with me: Cate Blanchett as Richard II, luminous and sly, the image of arrogant wit and grace, heartless and heartbreaking, walking over broken glass to the crown; Robert Menzies as Bolingbroke, Henry IV, driven by anger, grief, regret and bitterness, surrounded by his likenesses in a macabre dance that stirred real horror; Ewen Leslie as Henry V, a revelatory performance, charismatically sexual, violent, his body drenched with honey and oil and blood in a diabolical anointing of royalty; John Gaden, brilliant and desolately moving as John of Gaunt and Edmund Duke of York, wickedly knowing and irrepressibly lustful as Falstaff; Marta Dusseldorf, terrifying in her hatred and ambition as Margaret of Anjou, teaching Queen Elizabeth (Amber McMahon) how to curse; Eden Falk, fumblingly innocent and somehow frightening as the child king Henry VI; Pamela Rabe, wickedly juvenile, blackly witty, clumsy, terrifyingly amoral and charismatic as Richard III. But none of these individual moments would be possible without the context around them.

And now, having reached this pitch of real greatness, the Actors Company is to end, to be replaced by a humbler workshop version of fresh faces that, according to the 2009 program, will be mainly working behind the scenes, “refining new work in the rehearsal room”. No doubt it is a sensible decision, given the controversy that has surrounded the Actors Company; perhaps Sydney will heave a huge sigh, to be relieved of such difficult and expensive beauty. But I can't help wishing that Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton had held their nerve and persisted in the grand folly of the Actors Company. Having seen the brilliant work that is The War of the Roses, dropping the company that made it seems like nothing so much as a terrible failure of imagination.

The War of the Roses Part 1 and Part 2, by William Shakespeare, adapted by Tom Wright and Benedict Andrews. Directed by Benedict Andrews, designed by Robert Cousins, lighting by Nick Schlieper, music and sound design by Max Lyandvert, musician Stefan Gregory. Performed by Narek Armaganian, Cate Blanchett, Brandon Burke, Peter Carroll, Marta Dusseldorp, Eden Falk, Holly Fraser, John Gaden, Louis Hunter, Michael Kilbane, Ewen Leslie, Steve Le Marquand, Hayley McElhinney, Amber McMahon, Robert Menzies, Luke Mullins, Pamela Rabe, Emily Russell, Billy Shaw-Voysey and Leo Shaw Voysey. Sydney Theatre Company @ Sydney Theatre, season closed. Perth Festival, Her Majesty's Theatre, February 27 - March 8.

Read More.....

The Serpent's Teeth: Citizens and Soldiers, by Daniel Keene, directed by Pamela Rabe and Tim Maddock. Set design by Robert Cousins, costume design by Tess Schofield, lighting design by Nick Schlieper, composer/sound design Paul Charlier. With Brandon Burke, Peter Carroll, Marta Dusseldorp, Eden Falk, John Gaden, Steve Le Marquand, Ewen Leslie, Hayley McElhinney, Amber McMahon, Luke Mullins, Pamela Rabe, Emily Russell and Narek Armaganian/Josh Denyer. STC Actors Company @ the Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, until May 17.

1.

There is something about the act of theatre that can annihilate language. It can silence the critical voice that runs in the head, that background chatter that is continually questioning, taking notes, making impatient comments. Despite itself, that voice finds itself wholly absorbed in the present, its attention held, its sceptical distance destroyed. All sense of the passing of time vanishes.

It’s a rare experience, but that total absorption is what I seek in the theatre. And it’s what happened when I watched The Serpent’s Teeth, a diptych by Daniel Keene that opened last week at the Drama Theatre, performed by the STC’s Actors Company. When the lights came up at the end, I found in its immediate aftermath that I had nothing to say, that what I had just experienced had emptied my mind of anything so superficial as an opinion. I felt that the only proper reponse was to write a poem.


Yet it is probably true that I have never devoted so much thought to writing about a work of theatre. Ever since I heard, in the middle of last year, that The Serpent’s Teeth was to be programmed by the STC, I’ve been debating the ethical question of whether I should write about it. (Those interested in that internal debate can find it here: I would ask anyone who wants to attack me for writing about my husband’s work to consult this document, to save me the trouble of defending things I never asserted in the first place).

But in the end, all the laborious justifications fell away, swept aside by the theatre itself. More than anything else, I think this production is its own magnificent justification. Yes, my response – afterwards, if not in the intense experience of watching it – is conditioned by a certain personal pride. This is an ambition, a possibility, that I have believed in now for so many years – and not only in Daniel’s writing (I have long been aware, for example, of the austere integrity of Tim Maddock’s directing).

I know such work can call out of other artists their most serious and principled thinking, and permit the expression of their most ambitious art. I know this ambition is possible because I have seen it realised, but most often thousands of miles away from here.

But last week I saw it at the Sydney Opera House: a work of theatre in which every aspect held the others in a profoundly delicate formal balance, a work in which the differing disciplines of lighting, performance, direction, sound and text were each suspended in synthesis, bent towards a common desire.

At its most profound, theatre is always about the dissolution of the individual ego, which seeks instead a more permeable expression of its soul. The one and the many cease to oppose each other, and become the necessary elements of a complex, living dynamic. To achieve this is difficult: it is why failure is and must be part of the lexicon of theatre (“Fail again. Fail better.”) But on the rare occasions when this ambition is fully realised, it offers a brief glimpse of human possibility: a larger, more generous way of being.

2.

“Beauty,” said Ezra Pound, “is difficult”. It is difficult to see, difficult to create, difficult to negotiate. Yet at its core is always something very simple: one human being perceiving with newly rinsed eyes the world that he or she lives in. Beauty is something that only belongs to human beings: it is an aesthetic order we make out of the chaos of experience, the vulnerability of truthfulness. There is always an ethical aspect to representation, a moral question in the making of beauty, which is why, when it is most terribly honest, it is sometimes considered neither ethical nor moral.

Beauty is what artists make. Very often the beauty they create is not considered beautiful at all: it is too full of human sorrow, human flaws, human danger and violence. Artists take the unbeautiful world and show us its beauties. In order to do this, they sometimes destroy our cherished ideas about what we consider beauty to be. That is as it should be: flux and change and ambiguity are all we will ever know of certainty.


Artistic beauty emerges from structure: artists make things. Daniel Keene has offered, in Citizens and Soldiers, two objects made out of words. They are sculpted with a stern, even fierce poetic, austere and plain and finely honed as a surgeon’s scalpel. They are two very different explorations of the formal possibilities of theatre, but each rhymes with the other to make a third thing: a diptych that meditates on different aspects of the price of living with war.

It is possible to read these plays and experience them as you might any other work of literature, as autonomous worlds made out of language. But they are plays, designed to be expressed by the breath and bodies of actors, to be choregraphed in the three-dimenional space of a stage. They are words written for theatre, designed ultimately to be written on the air and to vanish in their saying, into the past, into memory.


Citizens and Soldiers are plays about love. Not love as it is understood in romance novels or Hallmark greeting cards, but love as it is: the generous wound of need, the binding that draws people together, the anguish of the understanding that we are not alone, and that our fate depends upon others. It is love that makes one face more precious than another, that makes us understand that our private selves are embedded in other lives, that we are larger than we realise. In love lies the seeds of hatred and betrayal and sorrow; it contains all the trivial and mundane irritations of human relationship, the silences of what cannot be expressed, the gulfs that open between people, the desire that speaks across these gulfs but can never close them. The possibility of love is the only thing that gives me hope for the human race.

Everyone in these two fictions – one set before the wall that bisects Palestine, the other in an aircraft hangar in Australia where five families wait for the remains of their men to be flown home from war – acts out of love. A man takes his mute grandson on a long walk to swap an olive tree for an orange tree, a token of peace exhanged for a token of beauty. A woman seeks schoolbooks so her daughter can study. Each person present in the hangar is there because they loved the man who is now dead and must now face the anguish of his absence. And it is this difficult love that illuminates the tragedy and comedy of these humble stories about war, that gives them their meaning, that invites us towards understanding.

One can moralise about war, but these plays do not invite such moralising. It is impossible to moralise about love. It is too complex, too contradictory, too necessary. This is not art that seeks to moralise. It simply says: on either side of this stage, we are all human. All of us.

3.

The central character in Citizens is a wall. It has been built hurriedly out of concrete blocks, a raw fact that bisects the world between here and there, ours and theirs. It looms at the front of the stage, defining a narrow strip strewn with rubble. The actors may only enter from the right or the left: all other choices are forbidden them. The wall has a voice that rises and falls. It might be surf or the low rumble of a hidden city. It might just be the wind.

It pulses in the light.

***

When we return for Soldiers, the wall has vanished. In its place is a cavernous, industrial space. We cannot see the ceiling. In the first play, we are confronted by the brutal, horizontal line of the wall. The second is dominated by a high vertical, the huge double doors of the hangar at the back of the stage, which the actors open and close, letting in sharp diagonals of light.

There is no sound except the actors' voices and footsteps and the metallic clang as the doors close.

***

Narrative here is about place. Light sculpts the narrative, binds it together, gives it meaning. It shapes time into the measure of a human breath. It carves the emotional spaces through which the actors walk, so we are aware of the darkness that surrounds them, of the shadows that stir in their hearts and spring behind each gesture of their hands. Light heightens the intimate vulnerability of their bodies, mercilessly illuminating every nuance of expression, and then it dwarfs their human measure, and they vanish into its harsh brilliance.

***

We are always aware we are watching a stage, on which actors are performing. There is no pretence otherwise. The few objects we see -- an orange, a shopping trolley, a toy plane -- become richly imbued with our attention. An orange is simply an orange, but it is also a metaphor. What that metaphor means is up to us.

We are watching a dance. In Citizens, it is a dance of bodies restricted to a narrow strip, "contained, pure, narrow, human", in which we briefly witness fragments of very ordinary lives: a married couple painfully squabble as they rest from an exhausting journey, or a man and his daughter journey to a funeral beneath an absurd yellow umbrella, or a young woman takes her injured dog to the vet in a cardboard box.


In Soldiers, we are watching a theatrical liturgy, a meditation on grief. The empty stage is stripped to its most essential elements -- actors, light, space. The space is alive: it breathes, changes, swells and shrinks. In one moment we are watching a man alone in a strip of light that knifes across the darkness. He is weeping. The single action of his grief fills the theatre:

The man we surround, the man no one approaches
simply weeps, and does not cover it, weeps
not like a child, not like the wind, like a man
and does not declaim it, nor beat his breast, nor even
sob very loudly—yet the dignity of his weeping

holds us back from his space, the hollow he makes about him
in the midday light, in his pentagram of sorrow,
and uniforms back in the crowd who tried to seize him
stare out at him, and feel, with amazement, their minds
longing for tears as children for a rainbow...

In another moment, almost without our noticing, the stage inhales: before us is a chorus from a classical tragedy that echoes our own witnessing, that stands and watches as we watch. In each moment, a sense of absolute, razor-sharp spatial intelligence, a restraint that releases emotional pressure only when it is most telling, when it will break our hearts.

Echoes everywhere, fragments of our theatrical past: the ghosts of Beckett, Miller, Kroetz, Chekhov, flit across the stage and vanish.

***

It is not real: it is a work of theatre.

What is real is feeling. Every detail of voice and breath, each gesture, each step, is shaped into the communication of feeling. Within the stark formality of the direction and design is the discipline of the performances, and welling within each of those is a vast generosity, an ocean of tears veined with laughter.


We recognise each gesture, each expression, each voiced nuance of emotion. If we do not know what it is to live with war, we understand thirst and weariness. We might not have mourned a dead son, but we all understand loss. The performances enter embodied experience and pierce the membrane of imagination. We recognise, with pained delight, the shape of our own own sorrows. And our joys.


4.

I haven't yet named anybody except the writer. This is a true ensemble production: there are no stars, nor even any major roles, and it is impossible to pick out a single aspect of production or performance without feeling that I am doing an injustice to the rest.

But credit must be given. Nick Schlieper's lighting design is revelatory: I am not sure that I have seen lighting so richly expressive, so deeply integrated into text, design and performance. Robert Cousins' stark staging eschews any hint of naturalism. He offers the integrity of a theatrical space, employing an absolute minimum of elements to maximum effect. As crucial as Cousins' spare vision are the acutely noted details of Tess Schofield's costumes and, in Citizens, Paul Charlier's unobstrusive but pregnant soundscape.

The performative depth of this production would not have been possible without the Actors Company ensemble. These plays are demanding, formally and emotionally, and the slightest misjudgement would smudge their delicacies. They give actors no time in which to establish character: they must be immediately present in all their fullness, or they will not be there at all. Only a group of accomplished actors who have worked together for years could attain the richness, complexity and emotional honesty these plays demanded. Perhaps for the first time, this production exploits the full capacities of this remarkable company.


Citizens and Soldiers are beautifully directed, by Pamela Rabe and Tim Maddock respectively; they reveal two different visions of theatrical possibility, each of which profoundly understands how the larger dynamics of space and time interact with the detail of performance and text. In each, the meanings and formal shapes of the plays emerge organically through the action on stage: nothing is inessential, nothing is signposted. Together, Rabe and Maddock have created a stern and deeply gentle beauty, a pure act of theatre that uncompromisingly reveals the impure complexities of human beings.

Pictures from top (left to right): Josh Denyer and Pamela Rabe in Soldiers; Peter Carroll and Hayley McElhinney in Citizens; cast, Soldiers; Steve Le Marquand and Marta Dusseldorp in Citizens; Brandon Burke, John Gaden and Steve La Marquand in Soldiers; Josh Denyer and John Gaden in Citizens. Photos: Brett Boardman.

Other views
Australian Stage Online
The Sydney Morning Herald
The Australian
Daily Telegraph
Nicholas Pickard (Sydney Arts Journalist)
Variety
Kevin Jackson's Theatre Reviews

References
Worstward Ho by Samuel Beckett
The Second Duino Elegy by Rainer Maria Rilke
An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow by Les Murray

Read More.....

The Season at Sarsaparilla by Patrick White, directed by Benedict Andrews. Design by Robert Cousins, costumes by Alice Babidge, lighting by Nick Schlieper, music by Alan John, sound design by David Gilfillan. With Martin Blum, Brandon Burke, Peter Carroll, Eden Falk, John Gaden, Hayley McElhinney, Amber McMahon, Jessica Marais, Colin Moody, Luke Mullins, Pamela Rabe and Emily Russell. STC Actors Company @ at the MTC, Playhouse Theatre, Victorian Arts Centre, until February 16.

Returning to a show that you loved on first viewing can be a nervous experiment: will it live up to your memory of it? And what does it mean if it doesn't? If you are someone who re-reads books - and for me, the greater pleasure of books is in the re-reading - you can be certain that any shifts in response will be in your own perceptions. Crime and Punishment read at 45 is a different book to Crime and Punishment at 16; the words might be the same, but the imagination that animates those words has changed.

Not so with theatre, where every performance is, in a sense, for this night only. Theatre might have been invented to illustrate Heraclitus's admonition that you can't enter the same river twice. Place a show in a different space, with a different audience and a slightly different cast, and the variables spiral into infinity. So it's no surprise that the Actors Company production of The Season at Sarsaparilla, which I first saw at the Sydney Opera House almost a year ago, is a different show in Melbourne. But it remains just as impressive on a second viewing: this is a must-see, a magnificent realisation of Patrick White's theatrical vision.


Another, purely personal, problem with revisiting a work is that I've already said quite a lot about it. To avoid repeating myself, I urge interested readers to check out my earlier review, where I teased out my responses to White's play and Benedict Andrews' production. My major feelings still stand: Andrews' bold, contemporary attack on the script shows a director at the top of his form, and produces a powerful and lucid interpretation of White's fluid dramaturgy.

The differences between the Sydney and Melbourne productions lie in the nuance of space and performance. The Arts Centre Playhouse is a very different theatre to the letterbox stage of the Sydney Opera House, and Robert Cousins' set - a 1950s brick veneer on a revolve - looks a tad squashed. The major aspect I missed was a subtle sense of alienation created by the Opera House stage, as if the audience were looking through a giant screen; a set-up that, I realise now, rhymed pleasingly with the screens either side of the stage, where we see intimate close-ups of the performances. The Playhouse stage has a slight thrust into the audience, which compromises the screen metaphor.

However, this is a minor problem, as are the fluctuating sound levels, which will no doubt be resolved as the season progresses. There are very great pleasures to be had in this production, and the greatest of them are in the performances. In The Season at Sarsaparilla, we can see an ensemble at work, and it's a fine and rich experience. There is a rare fluidity and ease in the relationships on stage, and the performances in the show, which seem to me to have deepened since last I saw it, are about as good as you will ever see.

The first thing that strikes you is the depth of the cast: there are no weak performances, and no minor roles. Even the smallest part, like the disarming innocent Ron Suddards (Luke Mullins, taking over from Dan Spielman's role in the last production) glows with integrity and depth. And while the stage itself seemed a little constricted, the opposite seems true for the cast: there is a feeling of air around the performances, that permits the subtleties and nuances of White's text to breathe.

Certainly, I found myself more aware of the writing this time (and not always, it must be said, to the text's advantage): this production has been tightly focused, with small tweaks here and there that allow an almost unreal clarity to illuminate what is essentially a simple story about life in 1950s suburbia.

In an ensemble where everyone ought to be mentioned, it seems unfair to single anyone out, but there are a couple of great performances I'd be remiss not to note. Pamela Rabe is bewitching in the role of Nola, the slatternly wife of the nightsoil man Ernie Boyle (Brandon Burke); it's a courageously honest performance, poignant and tragic, and here driven by a throbbing anger that echoes the baffled, ambivalent anger of White's play. And in what is still one of the most inspired casting decisions I have seen, Peter Carroll plays the housewife Girlie Pogson. There isn't a trace of camp in this performance, which somehow evades caricature through the force of Girlie's loneliness, but there is a great deal of comic pathos. And Carroll has some of the best lines.

For all its comedy, this play lays bare the intense loneliness and essential innocence of all its characters. It is deeply moving, intelligent theatre, and beautifully realised. You'd be mad to miss it.

Read More.....

Update: Lyn Gardner at the Guardian weighs in on the critic/blogger question with a typically thoughtful post which claims that blogs have given criticism a new lease of life. Notably, both she and Billington are running these debate on blogs...

THE blogosphere is humming like a bottle full of bees, so a quick whip-around of various buzzes seems in order. Our favourite topic - the whys and wherefores of theatre criticism - has been given a twirl by the Guardian's Michael Billington, who briskly draws the line between blogging and professional theatre criticism. (Me, I am that line...) It's prompted a fair bit of chat from both bloggers and print critics and Andrew Haydon, another line-dancer, has his own thoughts on the question. Closer to home, over at Minktails, Ming-Zhu Hii asks what keeps critics inspired, prompting some self-reflection from tyro-critic Avi Lipski over at The Rest Is Just Commentary.

Meanwhile, the Sydney/Melbourne convo is in full cry in the comments after my sermon (I've now taken off my clerical collar), and Nicholas Pickard at Arts Journalist suggests that we should have the Actors Company down here. I'm not sure that I follow the logic (and there may be one or two logistical problems) but yes please...

Read More.....

For the past few days TN has been a dull bunny indeed. I lay prostrate on my chaise lounge feeling sorry for myself and canceled all my theatre tickets. So no reviews: I hit the wall this week and was barely able to stir out of the house. On the other hand, having plenty of time on my feeble hands, I've been thinking. The big picture. That kind of thing.

These meditations were further prompted by a couple of things. My one outing this week was to participate in a forum hosted by Theatre@Risk as part of their New Writing Season, which included a stimulating conversation about the possible futures and various presents of theatre in Australia. And this morning, Diana Simmonds alerted me to some editorialising of her own on Stage Noise, where she has written a stinging summation of the first two years of the STC's Actors Company.

Simmonds's feature might be read as a companion piece to my reflection earlier this week on the Actors Company. In retrospect, that post may have sounded a little like a phone conversation with half the dialogue missing. Simmonds provides the other side of the conversation, and pretty much summarises the criticisms I've heard from Sydney.

Asking "what's the point?", she compares the Actors Company with the repertory companies that have long died out in England. She articulates the - I would say, rather Australian - resentment that comes with the formation of any elite group (unless it happens to be a group of sports people). The logic runs that the full-time employment of 12 actors in a high profile company shrinks the pool for other, equally able, actors.

Rather than the English rep (or, as it was once charmingly named by a cadet journalist in the Herald, the "old rope" system), a more accurate comparison might be with the Comédie-Française. The only state company in France and one of its few full-time ensembles, the Comédie-Française was formed by Louis XIV in 1680, and so has had rather longer to establish itself. Of course, it is also a by-word for theatrical conservatism in France. Quite rightly, we expect more of the Actors Company. But can we really expect it to be reaching its full flowering after only two years' work?

It's a little difficult to follow the argument that the Actors Company is swallowing up jobs for other actors. It is, after all, only one of the STC's activities, which includes this year seven other main stage productions and the studio activities of Wharf 2 Loud. It is more than likely that, should the Actors Company ultimately disappear, so would the opportunities that go with it; which is to say, its disappearance wouldn't free up any jobs, but would rather make the whole pool smaller.

More damagingly, to my mind, it would shrink the nimbus of possibility created by the existence of such an ensemble. There is a larger self-interest at stake here than the narrow question of professional jealousy or competitiveness: some people might find this hard to believe, but in the arts, the success of others makes one's own success more possible, whereas failure - especially of ambitious institutional enterprises - is a loss for everyone.

Australia's theatre history is littered with the wrecks of possibility, with enterprises of great pith and moment whose currents turn awry, smashing against the rocks of indifference or conservatism or simple envy. More than anything, we are suspicious of ambition.

In his 2002 Rex Cramphorn Memoral Speech, Nick Enright noted Robyn Nevin's then fruitless attempts to raise the funding for a full-time ensemble. It's worth remembering what he said then:

Actors are marginalised in our culture, and the development of new work suffers for the lack of the resources of a permanent ensemble. And so our national repertoire is increasingly solipsistic - we are the land of the one-person show, the small cast play, the domestic issue.

Twenty years ago, Jim Sharman at Lighthouse in Adelaide created an ensemble which, in the way of these things, seems more remarkable now than it did then... Would a program and vision like Jim's be possible now? Not likely. Would the 1980 Shakespeare experiment be possible in 2003? Even less likely...

Sharman's transformation of South Australia's state theatre company into the Lighthouse lasted a mere two years before it collapsed, leaving a teasing glimmer of what might have been. That gleaming possibility was, of course, one of the influences behind the formation of the Actors Company. And it occurs to me that if we're not careful, we'll end up in 20 years' time making much the same noises about the Actors Company as are now made about the Lighthouse.

Too often in this country, criticism is either a knife or a cushion; our commentary either puffs work up beyond reasonable expectations, providing the "supportive" criticism demanded, for example, during the Playbox years (still an overriding desire in some quarters); or, like bored children destroying sandcastles, it kicks the whole edifice over. In neither case does it seem very concerned with the examination of a work - or, most crucially of all, a process, for art and culture are living things - which is, after all, the real work of criticism. Rather, the point seems to be to measure against a reductive and arbitrary binary of total success or total failure.

To make things stranger, we have a weird glitch in our cultural memory: things that were attacked fiercely in their time become hallowed emblems as they fade into the past. A classic example is how Age feature writer Robin Usher used the "heritage" of former MIAF artistic director John Truscott as a stick to beat the present incumbent, Kristy Edmunds. I remember very clearly how Truscott was attacked in his own time, for exactly the same reasons that Edmunds is attacked now.

Let me be clear: I think there are legitimate questions to be asked about the ensemble, and no one is or should be above criticism. I am no friend of empty praise, which I think is as damaging (and perhaps ultimately more damaging) as sensationally destructive criticism. But is it true or fair to say that, as Simmonds claims, the Actors Company "has been sold a pup"?

A company that in its first two years produces an epic experiment like Barrie Kosky's The Lost Echo and a reconsideration of a classic as brilliant as Benedict Andrews' The Season at Sarsaparilla isn't, in my view, doing too badly. Two years is a very short time for any serious artistic enterprise. In employing directors like Barrie Kosky and Benedict Andrews amongst an admittedly ill-mixed bunch, Robyn Nevin has obviously imagined radical possibilities for the Actors Company. And while the question of the company's vision and purpose is now urgent, next year's challenging program may well go some way to addressing this.

"What has been totally lacking in the Actors Company," says Simmonds, "is an over-arching, questing creative imagination. What this idea needed to make it truly worthwhile were theatrical minds and ambitions such as are to be found (or were found) in the likes of Peter Brook, Pina Bausch, Ariane Mnouchkine, Nikolai Akimov, Darko Tresnjak, Craig Walker, Deborah Warner and Peter Sellars. This is a partial and personal list of creative minds and the sharp-eyed will have spotted no Australians names on it; no youthful names either. If you can add directors/creators whose names it is possible to link with a description of 'visionary, experimental, questing' - please do."

I heard similar plaints at the forum on Saturday, probing other contexts. But let's get real for a moment. If Ariane Mnouchkine were running the Actors Company, they mightn't even have premiered their first work yet, because she makes a new show every two or three years. Imagine the screams if the STC countenanced such a timetable! The outrage about the waste of public money, the self-indulgence of artists!

Here in Australia, we are impatient. We have little time for the idea of process. We look at companies like Théâtre de Soleil and wonder why we don't have an equivalent here, forgetting that it is the product of literally decades of work that has taken place in a culture that supports its theatres with generous funding and is proud of what its artists achieve. In France, the death of a great philosopher or composer is literally front page news, not a paragraph on the arts pages. In Germany, the education system turns out young people who are musically and theatrically literate, and who therefore enthusiastically patronise their culture. We expect results straight away, with neither the funding levels nor the educational support, and if they're not forthcoming we send out the long white envelopes. And then we all enjoy a spicy glass of schadenfreude.

Art doesn't work that way. Cultures don't evolve overnight. If we want artistic vision - and sometimes I really doubt that we do - we have to be prepared to nurture it, to give it both time and money; and we must take the time to be properly critical, which includes seeing virtues as well as flaws.

A culture that is dazzled by novelty rather than by achievement, that throws away a toy when it is bored and then complains that it has nothing to play with, betrays its parochiality. If we do lack artistic vision in this country, then it's our fault for not wanting it enough. It's our fault for not understanding that - for example - learning to write well takes more than a couple of months of masterclasses and a nice author photo. (Along with other things, such as ability and suicidally stupid determination, it usually takes about 30 years of hard and mostly ill-paid work).

My question is: what in Australian culture supports the nurturing of ambitious visions? For years I've watched as talented people battle on stubbornly in obscurity. Robert Draffin is one name that springs to mind; others are Tim Maddock, former artistic director of The Red Shed in Adelaide, whose last big show was the 2000 world premiere of Howard Barker's gigantic epic The Ecstatic Bible, or Margaret Cameron. There are many more. Yes, we have people of vision here. I'm not sure that they've been especially encouraged.

In all but the toughest cases, artists finally bow obediently to the pressures of the "arts industry". They face "reality" and dutifully turn out what they are told is required. Some give up, realising the cost is too great; some end up broken and cynical; some find other ways of working in the culture. A lucky few get out of the country.

Is this the kind of culture we want? When I look at young artists like Ming Zhu Hii, now in the middle of exhilarating self-discoveries, it's hard not to wonder what the future will open up to them. I wonder what they will be offered besides discouragement. I wonder if their refusals to compromise, their ambitious desires, will find any purchase or recognition. And it seems to me that there is a direct link between what happens on our main stages and what becomes possible in the loungeroom of a young artist, or in the tiny venues on the edge of town. A culture that hasn't any space for the larger enterprises will scarcely countenance the smaller.

Of course it's tough to be an artist. There are ways in which it should be tough: art is a demanding and rigorous discipline, and it's not for everyone. But being an artist in Australia - "in the cold," as the poet Michael Dransfield said so memorably, "of something as pitiless as apathy" - has particular challenges of its own; here it seems too often that artistic ambition, as opposed to the smaller ambitions linked to a "career", is considered a disability, an embarrassment. In other places, this isn't necessarily so: the unconventional, the stubborn, the difficult, the questioning, can attract attention and even admiration.

Is it any wonder that a director like Barrie Kosky chooses to base himself in Europe, where he can find the resources and intelligent critical recognition that are so thin on the ground here? If Daniel Keene can get gigs on the biggest stages in France, where he is hailed as one of the most significant contemporary playwrights in Europe, why should he be bothered that mainstream Australia has ignored his work? It's not, after all, his problem. But it is our problem, and ultimately our loss.

At the moment there are some seriously interesting developments on our mainstream stages. The Actors Company is one of them; others are the Malthouse Theatre, and the Melbourne Festival as it has evolved under the artistic directorships of Robyn Archer and Kristy Edmunds. Interestingly, all three of these are roughly contemporaneous. All these institutions have the potential to enlarge the possibilities of our theatre culture, and offer us a vision of a cosmopolitan, sophisticated and diverse Australia, an Australia that can be a unique part of the continuum of international theatre practice. For Australians do have something unique to offer the world.

But sometimes I wonder if these developments will fade and pass, leaving only the ghosts of unrealised potential behind them. And whether, in two decades' time, we will be having the same conversations we had in the 1990s. It seems to me that if we don't recognise and embrace what is possible now, if we don't perceive those possibilities and extend them, that could be very likely. And it will be all our fault.

And here endeth the lesson.

Read More.....

On Friday, TN flew out of a Melbourne where the skies were blue as a robin's egg, clear as lark's eye, etc etc etc, and journeyed along the coast to the twinkling harbour citadel, only to find that Melbourne's spring squalls were holidaying up north themselves. Reader, it was cold and grey and raining. This is not what this black-clad Melburnian expects of Sydney, that hedonist capital where even old ladies wear flowery bikini tops and lotos eaters loll around under pink umbrellas discussing the price of harbour views.

Sydneysiders themselves were mainly invisible. Perhaps they were participating in a crime wave in the outer suburbs: there can't have been any police officers left, since every security officer in town was issued with riot gear and posted to Walsh Bay to guard the shiny new water cannon against bands of marauding anarchists. And it was wise for the humble citizen to be wary: APEC turned out to be a parallel universe in which crossing the road for yum cha with your 11-year-old son was a sure sign that you were planning to assassinate the Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea.


But as theatericals know, the show must go on; and even APEC, the biggest - or at least, the most expensive - show in town couldn't stop the theatre. As soon as I arrived, flocks of emails advised me that I had to see Version 1.0's Deeply Offensive and Utterly Untrue. This was backed up by several individuals pressing my hand and urging the same thing. Alas, I was already booked for two shows and couldn't stay any longer, so I'm just hoping that this show will travel down to Melbourne.

I was officially up to see Belvoir St's much-praised production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, directed by Benedict Andrews, of which more in a month or so. And while I was there, being presently on a Shakespeare jag, I booked in to see the last night of the STC's A Midsummer Night's Dream, performed by the Actors Company at the swisho Sydney Theatre at Walsh Bay.

There was a more personal reason for seeing the Dream. Ever since I saw Dan Spielman in Daniel Keene's Half and Half at the Playbox in 2001, I have been waiting to see him play Puck, a role so obviously tuned to his talent that it seemed to me to amount to typecasting. And here was my chance. Before I discuss the play and sundry issues around it, let me say that it was worth the wait. I am not generally given to gushy statements, but lately something seems to have gone twang in my head: last week I rashly claimed that Luke Mullins was looking fair to be the best actor of his generation. Well, Dan Spielman is the other best actor of his generation.

More generally, I enjoyed this production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, directed by young UK director Edward Dick. Set in a neo-classical ruin floored by "dank earth", it eschews an easy prettiness, foregrounding the amoral wickedness of faerie. Here the mischief of the fairies has a cruel and uncanny edge: their heartlessness is by no means harmless.

The doubling of roles make much of the symmetries between the waking, rational Athenian world, ruled by Theseus (Brandon Burke) and Hippolyta, his captured Queen (Pamela Rabe), and the night-world of Oberon and Titania, the quarrelsome King and Queen of the Fairies played by the same actors. The mechanicals (also doubling as fairies) are the underworld of the aristocracy of Athens, the crudely comic mirrors of their desires.

Mainly the production tracked a process of disintegration and reformation; as the star-crossed lovers suffered under the irrationalities of primitive lusts, they became progressively more smirched by the earth of the stage floor, their costumes more ragged, until at last, in a highlight scene that signified the sane coming of dawn, they were cleansed by a shining shower of rain.

What gave this production its particular quality of enchantment was its choreography, by associate director Jane Gibson (also associate director at Cheek By Jowl), and the sound design, played live by composer Max Lyandvert. There was a lot of introductory ballet before a word was spoken, which made me feel a little impatient for the first 20 minutes or so; but after that, the energies began to focus: the stage became a site of restive, unpredictable movement, in which the transitory order of humans was disrupted by the fairies. The effect was as if eddies of wind were swirling chaotically across the set, transforming the world into a place of darker amoral passions and cruelties.

There are certainly criticisms to be made of the production - it struck me as a slightly woolly version of a Declan Donnellan show, lacking a wholly achieved sharpness of focus and metaphorical depth. But it's by no means a failure. On this point, I found myself in the interesting position of being at odds with many of the artists who made it.

This rather undermines the common idea that theatre artists are narcissistic monsters who are only interested in flattery. Frankly, my experience is generally the reverse of that; of course artists like to please, but any good artist is also highly self-critical. I was prepared for this, since I'd heard a number of negative reports from various sources about this show. It's no secret that this was a problematic rehearsal process after a difficult and demanding year - seven shows without a break - and Sydney is boiling with gossip about possible changes in the company's line-up next season.

So I was variously told that the design and concept of the production were unsuccessfully integrated; that the production did not sufficiently explore the psychological or intellectual depths of Shakespeare's play; that the performances were inadequate to the poetry of the text; that the strengths of the Actors Company concealed the problems with the production. There are varying degrees of justice in these criticisms, and none of them are baseless; but I began to feel that the general success I had perceived in the production had been lost in these particularities.

In fact, I came away from Sydney feeling slightly troubled. Perhaps it was simply, as another director said to me, that the company "had fallen out of love" with the show. But the negativity I encountered chimed with what seems to me, as an outsider, a surprisingly unenthusiastic view of the Actors Company in Sydney itself; more often than not, when speaking to Sydney people about the company, the response is critical. There's no doubt that the Actors Company has been facing a number of crises, including the real and abiding question of its purpose and vision. But I'm beginning to wonder if Sydney knows what a jewel it has in this extraordinary ensemble.

Part of this is no doubt the criticism that goes with an underfunded and often struggling arts sector looking enviously over its shoulder at those they perceive as fat cats, the false sense of competition fostered by an economy of lack. Some of it might simply be that it's now part of the theatrical furniture, and familiarity breeds contempt. But I am of the view that - to use terms I would rather avoid - a strong theatre culture depends, in great part, on having a strong mainstream. If the mainstream is vacuous, cynical, bereft of ideas and vision, then those who react against it will remain unchallenged by its achievements - to their detriment. It's no accident that many of our most interesting artists hone their skills in Europe, where mainstream theatre practice is diverse and high quality.

With a change of artistic leadership with the Blanchett-Upton team next year, it's fair to say that the STC is at an interesting point of its development. From TN's perspective, the Actors Company - the only full-time ensemble in this country - is one of the most exciting developments in mainstream theatre in recent years, a welcome exploration of artistic seriousness on stages which have too often been wholly concerned with fiscal survival. And while its existence is in no immediate danger - its funding has been confirmed until 2009 - it seems to me that there is a danger of passing over its achievements by wholly focusing on what is wrong, and thereby losing sight of its possibilities altogether.

By this I don't mean that criticisms are mistaken or wrong. After two years of near-constant performing, there is clearly a leadership crisis in the Actors Company, and the question of its artistic focus now seems urgent. But let's not, in the sound and fury, lose sight of what a fine thing it is to have it in the first place. As Berkeley says, to be is to be perceived; conversely, in Australia we have a sorry history of erasing what we have, simply by refusing to see it.

Picture: Dan Spielman as Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream, STC

Read More.....

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.

Read More.....