I walked out of the opening night of Lally Katz's new play Return To Earth with my stomach in a knot. Readers, I have seldom seen a production which was so utterly wrong. It's wrong from the ground up, wrong from the first moment, and goes on being wrong all the way through to the end. Every flicker of life in this play is wrestled to the ground and throttled to death.


Any text, if it's at all interesting, invites a multiplicity of interpretation, and it's always possible merely to disagree with a take on a play. In this case, the wrongness goes beyond disagreement to a fundamental misunderstanding of the very being of the writing, to the point where the play itself is terminally obscured. It can happen to any play - I've seen it done to Shakespeare. It's as if a mistaken decision were reached early in the process, and every step afterwards led inexorably to doom. How this happened with the cast and production team that director Aidan Fennessy had to hand is a case study in artistic car crashes. On paper it's impeccable, some of the best talent that our theatre has to offer.

I should say that I am already familiar with this play. Back in 2008, I was one of three judges who unanimously gave Return To Earth a RE Ross Playwright's award for further development. The following year I saw it read in Hobart as part of Playwriting Australia 2009, and saw no reason to revise our judgment that this was one of Katz's best plays so far. Not that it's visible in this production; if I hadn't read the text, I might have thought it one of her worst.

Katz's early work, from the closely observed suburban absurdity of The Eisteddfod to the wildly theatrical dislocations of Lally Katz and the Terrible Mystery of the Volcano, created a riveting tension between a stern, even cruel emotional truthfulness and the dizzying vortex of her imaginative world. As her work has developed, from plays such as Goodbye Vaudeville Charlie Mudd to A Golem Story, the writing has become sharper: more theatrically crafted, less anarchic. But those desolating absurdities remain at the centre of the work: an obsession with death, loss and love, refracted through a self so splintered it can be scarcely said to exist. Katz is, crucially, a playwright of surfaces: her characters are performances of themselves, role-players in the most profound sense, and the emotional abysses that open beneath their emptiness and lostness can be vertiginous.

Return To Earth is an apparently simple fable that preserves Katz's unstable realities, but here locates it firmly in a - supposedly - naturalistic suburbia. There's not much in the way of plot. Alice (Eloise Mignon) returns home to her family after an unspecified time away, searching desperately for something real. Her parents Wendy (Julie Forsyth) and Cleveland (Kim Gyngell) welcome her home with claustrophobic solicitude.

Alice attempts to reunite with an old childhood friend Jeanie (Anne Louise Sarks), reconnects with her widowed brother Tom (Tim Ross) and her terminally ill niece Catta (Allegra Annetta) and has an affair with local car mechanic Theo (Anthony Ahern), a man whose skin is disconcertingly covered with shellfish. Alice finds she can save her niece's life by donating a kidney, but at the same time discovers that she is pregnant, which means the life-saving operation can't be done. Her niece dies, but Alice has her baby. Finally she tells her mother where she has been - in outer space, where she has lost her self but discovered the marvellous.

What counts is the slippages and ellipses in the texture of the play, how it lurches from apparently banal reality to strangeness in the space of a sentence. The result can be, as in Borges's story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, an increasingly disturbing feeling of the known world losing its moorings, becoming strange and perilous. In this production, we get quirky instead of strange, and emotional insight becomes mere whimsy.

Alice is played as terminally naive: there is no sense of interstellar alienation in her performance, no sense of almost irretrievably damaged adulthood. Her unvarying tone sets the pitch for the rest of the performances: somehow these characters, despite everything that happens in the play, are curiously static. The performances are generalised caricatures, rather than detailed investigations of emotional states. Claude Marcos's design, an abstract revolve mimicking a planetary system with a diorama of a night-time suburb in the background, exacerbates the problems: the actors all seem lost in the space. The set almost acts as a spoiler, leaving nothing to reveal about Alice's travels: we know from the beginning that she has been in outer space. Everything looks slick, but feels empty.

The major problem in this production is that the play's emotional realities have been flattened or simply avoided; certainly, I very seldom felt any emotional connection with what was happening on stage. Once or twice - interestingly, when the everyday realities were allowed to play without an overlaid theatrical self-consciousness - you could feel a flicker of life in the text, but otherwise its comedy and poignancies are all but destroyed. One feels that the MTC has tried to "make sense" of Lally Katz, closing up the centrifugal polarities of her work in the process, when her real gift is to use emotional truthfulness to destroy such enclosing rationalities. Without that truthfulness at its heart, the felt realities of loss and lostness, the play makes no sense at all.

Picture: Anthony Ahern and Eloise Mignon in Return To Earth. Photo: Jeff Busby

Return To Earth, by Lally Katz, directed by Aidan Fennessy. Set and costumes by Claude Marcos, lighting by Lisa Mibus, composition and sound design by Kelly Ryall. With Anthony Ahern, Julie Forsyth, Kim Gyngell, Eloise Mignon, Tim Ross and Allegra Annetta / Talia Christopoulos / Matilda Weaver. Melbourne Theatre Company at the Fairfax Theatre, Victorian Arts Centre, until December 17.

"Complaining," said Rilke, almost a century ago. "The eternal vice of poets." But consider the poet in the 21st century! The digital age has amplified whingeing to a remarkable degree. This means, for instance, that Ms TN can now alert almost 5000 people instantly via Facebook and Twitter that she is having the vapours. The fact that I always feel embarrassed afterwards for megaphoning such trivia never seems to stop me. Ah well. My hope that what TN lacks in breadth is made up for in depth is coming up hard against the fact that presently I am managing neither. The only positive sign is that my nearest and dearest seem to have caught the same insidious lurgy that's pole-axing me. Nothing is so reassuring as a virus shared.


As a result, I am horribly behind on reviews, and still feeling deeply incapable. I thought of taking a leaf from the Liveable Cities people, who today rated Melbourne as The World's Most Liveable City Of 2011 (although, it seems, our culture is merely "tolerable"). It seems the top rating given by whoever measures these things is "acceptable". So, with this level of lively engagement firmly in mind, I can tell you that the three shows I have managed to see in the past two weeks - Circle Mirror Transformation at the MTC, Chunky Move's It Sounds Silly, and Interface, a short dance piece that was part of Melbourne University's Mudfest, were all "acceptable".

Admittedly, that doesn't quite cut it, so following are some brief explanatory notes. (Carved, I hope you understand, out of my actual living brain.)

Circle Mirror Transformation is one of two plays by US playwright Annie Baker presently running in Melbourne - the other is The Aliens, at Red Stitch, which I hear from various sources is worth worth a visit. Aside from noting the fine cast - Deidre Rubenstein, Roger Oakley, Ben Grant, Kate Cole and Brigid Gallacher - I trotted along with no sense of expectation. On the whole, I haven't done too well with the contemporary American playwrights we've had on show here. But Circle Mirror Transformation is, in the best sense, a charming play, and unexpectedly disarming. Its conceit - five misfits meeting during a six-week acting class at a community college - is written, performed and directed with a luminous simplicity that makes it cumulatively moving.

The narrative unfolds obliquely through acting exercises and mundane conversations. Almost incidentally, as is so often the case in these kinds of workshops, we learn all about the five characters, their vulnerabilities, fears, dishonesties and histories. We watch relationships develop and collapse. They finish the workshops, and then head off into their different lives. That's all there is to it.

What makes it shine is Baker's inexorably gentle but completely unsentimental excavation of the loneliness of each character, his or her desire to make contact with others, their different failures. Directed with an invisible hand by Aidan Fennessy, the performances are models of actorly clarity, modestly exemplary in their nuance and feeling. Bucking a trend, Circle Mirror Transformation is much more than it appears to be.

It can bring out the worst in an audience, if there happen to be any wannabe actors present. I've never heard so much ostentatious I'm-in-on-the-joke laughter as on the night I went, to the point where some of its quietly moving moments were in danger of being terminally trampled. I think a marksman in the auditorium, armed with one of those guns used to sedate polar bears, might well be the thing.

Chunky Move and SIGNAL'S It Sounds Silly was performed free over two nights in a public place - by the Signal box behind Flinders St Station - and solved the problem of ambient noise by both incorporating the sounds of, for example, passing trains, and by amplifying Alisdaire Macindoe's sound design (complemented by some spectacular lighting and multimedia) to the point where it didn't matter. It unfolded on a chilly but clear night before a seated audience and a gathering crowd of curious passers by, which gave it the edgeless feeling of a flash mob.

Choreographed and directed by Adam Wheeler, the 28 dancers consisted of four young professionals and 24 dancers from Signal, an arts studio for young people aged 13 to 20. The kind of energy this created as the dancers spilled out onto the performance space was electric. It was almost a dance version of Belgian company Ontroerend Goed's Once and For All We’re Gonna Tell You Who We Are so Shut Up and Listen, an irresistible show by and about young people that toured to the Arts House a couple of years ago. Very different in discipline, it had a similar kind of emotional impact.

The performance opened with four dancers emerging in hoodies from what appeared to be a kind of cubby house constructed of mattresses. The dancers exploded into a short and spectacular introduction of hiphop-based moves, using the mattresses to cushion themselves as they flung their bodies to the ground. Then the rest of the company joined them, and the dance evolved in all sorts of unexpected ways, away from the mass culture vibes of hiphop to various explorations of movement, both collective and individual.

The costumes were variations on an identical uniform, colourful t-shirt and pants, but the emphasis here was on the individuality of each dancer: their faces were projected on the signal box, or they spoke to the audience. At one point, every dancer told us the thing of which they were most afraid. Their confessions varied from climate change to being afraid they would never find anyone to love to a strangely shaped tree outside the bedroom window.

It was only half an hour long, but It Sounds Silly was a rich and detailed performance, moving and exhilarating. Exemplary youth art.

Lastly, the single performance I managed to make for Mudfest before I hit the wall was Interface, a short dance work performed by Jacqui Aylward, Laura D’Augello and Carla Lusi at the Guild Theatre. I was surprised by the ambition of this work, which explored the world of online identity with multimedia projections and a soundscape by Brenton Aylward and Daniel O’Keefe. The performers integrated classical ballet with contemporary dance in ways which were sometimes naive but were also inventive and aware of the present moment. With the barest of resources but some big ideas, they generated some powerful moments. It made me sorry about everything else I missed.

Picture: (from left): Deidre Rubenstein, Roger Oakley, Brigid Gallacher, Kate Cole and Ben Grant in Circle Mirror Transformation. Photo: Paul Dunn

Circle Mirror Transformation by Annie Baker, directed by Aidan Fennessy. Sets and costumes by Marg Howell, lighting design by Philip Lethlean. With Deidre Rubemstein, Roger Oakley, Ben Grant, Kate Cole and Brigid Gallacher. Melbourne Theatre Company at the Lawler Studio, until September 17.

It Sounds Silly, choregraphed and directed by Adam Wheeler. Multimedia by Robin Fox, lighting design by Benjamin Cisterne, sound design by Alisdair Macindoe, costumes by Benjamin Hancock. Performers from Chunky Move and SIGNAL. Signal, two free performances, August 19 and 20.

Interface, performed and choregraphed by Jacqui Aylward, Laura D’Augello and Carla Lusi. Music composed by Brenton Aylward and Daniel O’Keefe. Mudfest, Melbourne University.

Last Wednesday, Lally Katz's A Golem Story and Robert Reid's The Joy of Text premiered at the Malthouse and the MTC. The same week, the Malthouse opened its remount of Declan Greene's 2010 hit, Moth. Meanwhile at the MTC, Joanna Murray-Smith's The Gift is running at the MTC's Sumner Theatre, and tonight Ian Wilding's new play The Water Carriers opens at the Lawler Studio. At the moment, Melbourne's main stage theatres are exclusively devoted to new Australian work.


Has this ever happened before? If it has, I missed it. For this reason, and not without a certain astonishment, it's worth sticking a small, patriotic and ironically tasteful flag in June 2011 and admiring the view from the hill. Well done, MTC and Malthouse: despite all the commercial wisdoms that mitigate against producing contemporary Australian plays, together you've curated a mini-showcase of new writing, flung a spotlight on it, and put it out there.

Last week's openings are noteworthy: they're all well worth seeing, and they're all very different from one another. (Discussion of A Golem Story will follow in a separate post, because it started going on, and on...) Katz, Reid and Greene all grew up in Melbourne's independent theatre scene: Katz developed most of her early work with Chris Kohn and Stuck Pigs Squealing, while Reid had, and Greene has, their own companies, respectively Theatre in Decay and Sisters Grimm.

It's a point worth noting: these playwrights learned how to do it just as Shakespeare did, by writing plays, finding collaborators and putting them on. They put them on in carparks (and sometimes in cars), in tiny alternative venues, under the umbrella perhaps of institutions such as Theatre Works or the Melbourne Fringe or the Store Room, sometimes with money, often with no funding at all. They didn't ask permission, and they created audiences.

Moth, a co-production by Malthouse and Arena Theatre, is unquestionably the pick of the bunch. This is exquisite theatre: in my view one of the most accomplished new plays of the past few years, here given a superbly restrained and devastatingly powerful production by Chris Kohn. This is a remount of last year's sell-out production, and what I said the first time round still holds: it's a play notable for its needle-sharp accuracy, its sure theatricality and its unforgiving emotional honesty.

Its conceit - a retelling by two friends, Claryssa (Sarah Ogden) and Sebastian (Thomas Conroy) of a traumatic incidence of schoolyard persecution and subsequent breakdown - is both ingenious and cleverly maintained, but its heart-cracking power exists in our understanding that this retelling is impossible: reality, it tells us, is different from what we hope.

As enactment, Moth has a sense of the un-illusioned redemption Allen Ginsberg grasps in Kaddish, his great poem of mourning for his mentally ill mother Naomi: "Work of the merciful Lord of poetry, / that causes the broken grass to be green, or the rock to break in grass - the Sun to be constant to Earth - sun of all sunflowers and days on bright iron bridges..." Suspended in the force of this impossible longing, the tragedy of madness - in all its horror, obscene comedy and abjection - opens as an unhealed wound. The truth of that unhealedness is the only redemption there is: it's the ferocity of the desire that things be otherwise that most tellingly reveals its pain.

This production demonstrates the value of remounting work. The premiere was hugely impressive: this time round, with a new cast member replacing Dylan Young, I was struck by the beautiful detailing of Ogden and Conroy's performances: every moment thought through and articulated, every gesture accurate. Each aspect of the design - Jethro Woodward's soundscape, Jonathan Oxlade's set, Rachel Burke's lighting - unobstrusively strokes in texture and contrast. I don't remember the script well enough to know how it's changed, but its fragmentations seemed sharper to me, the comedy more telling, the action more lucid. Small, but perfectly formed.


The Joy of Text, on at the Fairfax, is another kettle of sardines altogether. Robert Reid has clearly considered a major problem of contemporary art: how do you deal with complex ideas and simultaneously find a wide audience? "It is not enough to simply preach to the converted," he says in a program note. "If it is not kept open and accessible to us all, cultural discussion risks becoming obsessively self-referential and irrelevant to all but a narrow band of self-elected cultural elites." Quite.

Reid's solution is to take a popular generic form and remodel it to his own ends: in this case, farce. The Joy of Text is a satire on language and authority, and examines how language, far from being a vehicle for truth, creates its own destabilising realities. Here traditional reason and authority grapple with irrationality and inauthenticity. It's no accident that it's set in a school, where authority and anarchy regularly meet and attempt to discipline each other: nor that the play's title spins off a famous 1970s sex manual.

From its opening scene, in which the acting head master Steve (Peter Houghton) and English teacher Diane (Louise Silverson) have an argument about syntax, it's clear that we are in a parallel reality close to, but by no mean identical with, our own. For one thing, people speak in perfect sentences, like Samuel Johnson. I've never been a teacher, but somehow I doubt that most of the staff-room conversation concerns itself with the finer points of grammar, debating favourite authorities. They're mighty creaky ones too - Fowler's A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926) and Strunk and White's Elements of Style (1918) - which place the arguing teachers in a fustian, outmoded matrix of authority, of certainty shored up by textual jurisdiction about correct modes of behaviour.

This mode of authority meets its nemesis in the persons of a bright student, Danny (James Bell), and an ambitious young teacher, Ami (Helen Christinson), both of whom represent different models of inauthenticity. Danny appears first in an argument with Ami, where he is heatedly accusing her of humiliating him in front of the class. Asked to deliver an essay on satire, his assignment consists of a copy-and-paste of the Wikipedia entry on Jonathan Swift. Ami is not impressed by his argument that his essay is a performance of satire itself ("We are all Lilliputians!) and Danny retires, hurt and vengeful.

Meanwhile, Ami's identity is called into question when Diane decides to put The Illusion of Consent - a book written by a 16-year-old schoolgirl which details her alleged affair with a teacher - on the school syllabus. Ami is fiercely against it, claiming that the book is a fiction by a girl seeking attention, and pointing out that the publication of the book led to the teacher's suicide. When Steve casually gives the book to Danny to read, Danny (in an unlikely feat of textual scholarship) deduces that the book's author is Ami herself. And then, pursuing his performative method of learning, he re-enacts scenes from the book with various teachers, spreading chaos and confusion.

Farce, the most self-conscious of theatrical modes, is in fact the perfect form for a satire of language - it is all about confused identity, self-destructing authority and sexual shenanigans. Joe Orton took farce to a logical conclusion, becoming, as the critic CW Bigsby said, a "crucial embodiment of the post modernist impulse": "by means of farce he gives expression to the conviction of a dislocated self, of a reified experience, of a brittle and contingent language". Here Reid takes that post modernist impulse and makes it explicit.

Marx's famous dictum about history repeating itself, "the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce", is not wholly inappropriate here: the first time the teacher shoots himself, the second time the teachers, as a result of the first event, find themselves lost in a maze of bureacracy, definitions of "appropriate behaviour" and uncertainty.

Reid's play is an often brilliant, and very funny, enactment of all these ideas: the first act steps through a minefield of uncertainty with a deft theatrical wit. The second act, in which all these energies reach their various climaxes, collides with an impulse hostile to the suspensions of farce and somehow collapses under its own weight.

Behind this is a desire that these characters be relatable, that we identify with them and feel sympathy with them: a laudable desire for human emotion to emerge from these alienating language games. Characters in farce provoke interest and hilarity for different reasons: because they are absurd, because the unremitting logic of their behaviour inexorably leads them into chaos. Act Two changes gear into something more akin to naturalism (with the odd reference to tragedy), and Reid hasn't quite managed the marriage of these opposing impulses in his text or, I suspect, in his ideas. It feels grafted in, rather than an evolution from the premises of the first act.

For all that, it's a very enjoyable production. Aidan Fennessy's direction straddles, somewhat uncomfortably, the contradictions of the text, approaching it primarily as farce; the actors deal with the stage business very well, but then are left with the difficulty of creating empathic characters out of these brittle theatrical constructions. Houghton as the morose acting head master, both panic stricken by his temporary authority and longing for its status, manages this best of all the cast, although I liked Louise Siversen's astringent Diane. And Andrew Bailey's multilevel institutional set places the action gloriously in a mundane, utterly recognisable present which, fascinatingly, works best of all in the dislocations of the first act.

Pictures: top: Sarah Ogden and Dylan Young in Moth; bottom, James Bell and Peter Houghton in Joy of Text. Photo: Jeff Busby

Moth, by Declan Greene, directed by Chris Kohn. Designed by Jonathan Oxlade, lighting design by Rachel Burke, video design by Domenico Bartolo, composition and sound design Jethro Woodward. With Thomas Conroy and Sarah Ogden. Malthouse Theatre and Arena Theatre Company, Beckett Theatre at the Malthouse, until June 25.

The Joy of Text by Robert Reid, directed by Aidan Fennessy. Sets and costumes by Andrew Bailey, lighting design by Matt Scott, composition by David Franzke. With James Bell, Helen Christinson, Peter Houghton and Louise Siversen. Melbourne Theatre Company @ the Fairfax Studio, until July 23.

One for your diary. The MTC's Cybec Readings, developed under the watchful eye of associate director Aidan Fennessy, offers an eye-catching series of playreadings by Raimondo Cortese, David Tredinnick and Tom Holloway. Sadly, the programmers clearly forgot that AussieCon 4 (the 68th World Science Fiction Convention) is on in Melbourne this year on exactly those dates. It causes all sorts of conflicts for Ms TN, who'll be louchely masquerading as an SFF author at the Con... But those without such conflicts should be at the Lawler Studio with bells on: this is a classy program featuring some fab artists. Details after the fold.

The Dream Life of Butterflies
by Raimondo Cortese, directed by Heather Bolton. Featuring Natasha Herbert, Margaret Mills and Anastasia Russell-Head.

Two middle-aged women talk in a room. One is recently returned. One has always been there. Between them sits their past. The Dream Life of Butterflies is a beautiful dissertation on the illusion of memory and the impossibility of retrieving what has been lost. In a seamless single scene, award-winning writer Raimondo Cortese exposes their delusions about themselves and each other, hinting at the terrible taboo at the heart of their relationship.

This is How
An adaptation of the MJ Hyland novel by David Tredinnick, directed by Aidan Fennessy. Featuring Katrina Milosevic, Richard Piper and Luke Ryan.

Patrick, a young motor mechanic, escapes to an English seaside village to lick his wounds after a relationship break-up. However, he soon discovers that his demons have followed him, and he will end up doing a very, very bad thing. This is How traces the journey of a man through Britain’s criminal justice system in the late 1960s. It’s a waking nightmare where fantasy and reality co-exist.

You Won’t be Seeing Rainbows Anymore
By Tom Holloway, directed by Matt Lutton. Featuring Julie Forsyth, Jan Friedl, Francis Greenslade, Bruce Kerr, Thomas Wright and Dylan Young.

Within the world is a city. Within the city is an apartment block. Within the apartment block are six very ordinary human beings. One is on the roof looking back at the world, which seems, in a way, that it’s perhaps, well … dying. With deft humour and his typically distinctive style, Tom Holloway’s genre defying new work guides us through the human condition as it enters its death-throes.

The Dream Life of Butterflies: Thursday September 2, 7pm
This is How: Friday September 3, 7pm
You Won’t be Seeing Rainbows Anymore: Saturday September 4, 7pm
Venue: The MTC Theatre, Lawler Studio
Tickets: Adult $10 (or 3 plays for $24)* / Under 30s $5
Bookings: The MTC Theatre Box Office (03) 8688 0800, mtc.com.au or at the door.

At what point does politics move beyond parody? Maybe when you have a Prime Minister who looks as if he belongs in a Lego set, and who ought to be reported to the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to English.

Kevin Rudd can shift mid-sentence from warning of "incremental bifurcation" in the Asia-Pacific region (while, of course, needing to "work within the extant political vocabulary with China's national discourse") to his notorious manglings of outdated Australian slang ("fair shake of the sauce bottle").


Weld these together with cliches ("working families", "decisive action", "at the end of the day"), acronyms and buzz words ("synergies", "outcomes", "reverse engineering") and mixed metaphors ("preglacial position"), and you have a Teflon-coated PR machine that evades satire by overtaking it.

Its effectiveness can be seen in Godzone, Guy Rundle and Max Gillies's political satire now playing at the Melbourne Theatre Company. "Let's go for gold!" says Gillies's Rudd. "Let's optimise programmativity!" And it sounds just as boring and incomprehensible as Rudd himself.

It's a measure of the hyperreality of contemporary politics that satire in the noughties moved to featuring the politicians themselves. American comedians Steve Colbert and Jon Stewart invite politicians to be interviewed on their shows. The Chasers were regulars at Canberra press conferences.

The show that most successfully captures the white noise of the political machine - the brilliant ABC series The Hollow Men - doesn't feature politicians at all.

It's a dilemma for a satirist who, like Gillies, has made his name by impersonating politicians. The humour of his mimicry of Bob Hawke, Andrew Peacock and John Howard depended on both the startle of recognition and a recognisable gap between the reality and the portrayal.

The absurd exaggerations reflected back on their originals, prompting us to see them in a different light. But when impersonation can't prompt this frisson, it loses its bite.

It's why The 7.30 Report satirists John Clarke and Bryan Dawe, who don't rely at all on mimicry, still hit their targets: there's a cognitive dissonance at play that spikes their wit with the necessary unreality.

Godzone, on the other hand, seems like an 1980s television skit expanded to the stage. It is as if theatre is where television goes to die.

The set-up is a feel-good public conference, rather like Rudd's 2020 Summit but with added religiosity, where the PM introduces a brace of contemporary political figures to address the audience.

In between perorations from the lectern from Rudd, Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott and various commentators such as Andrew Bolt and Christopher Hitchens, Gillies rushes offstage to apply a new false nose and funny wig. We are then treated to a series of video sketches, "live" interviews with Malcolm Turnbull or Noel Pearson, or ads from the "sponsors".

The best of these was a vision of hell, or Liberal Party HQ, complete with shadowy Ku Klux Klan figures and swinging light bulbs. There was a YouTube aesthetic here - perhaps stemming from budgetry limitations - that rather undermined the effectiveness of others. Corporate PR gloss doesn't come cheap.

The blandness of the New Left - impregnably smug, impeccably coiffed and upholstered in incomprehensible jargon - creates a smooth, all-reflecting surface that simply doesn't give the purchase for this kind of satire. It's telling that the most successful sketches - Barnaby Joyce as a used car salesman, Gerard Henderson arguing with his local video store - are of the rough-hewn conservatives.

Gillies's impersonations don't always hit the mark either. Rudd is reduced to a pout, Abbott to a pair of Billy McMahon ears, and Julia Gillard - the least successful of all - is a spinsterish school teacher with "man hands" brazening out her secondary role as Rudd's henchwoman.

The portrayal of Bolt made me reflect that parody always includes a modicum of homage. Rundle's script made Bolt seem the most intelligent of the lot: its scathing caricature of left-wing inner-city suburbanites possessed a wit Bolt's columns signally lack.

The most mystifying - nay, bizarre - was Hitchens, who tells a meandering Boys Own story of meeting Osama Bin Laden in the Hindu Kush (didn't I read something like that in Robert Fisk's book The Great War for Civilisation?) and finishes with an account of being raped by Arabs. Which is why, he declaims, it was right to invade Iraq.

Hitchens as Lawrence of Arabia? Well, maybe - at a stretch - there's something in that, but here it's just a cheap punchline. And those allusions - if that's what they are - have no force at all in the format of sketch satire.

None of this is helped by Aidan Fennessy's static direction. Rundle and Gillies's last collaboration, The Big Con, featured Eddie Perfect crooning a series of cabaret numbers ("Don't be so damn September 10!") and was a lot more dynamic. Here the switching from lectern to screen gets monotonous and most of the set is simply flashy decor.

For those who have enjoyed the Gillies-Rundle combo before, this is a disappointing outing. It's a bad sign when the program is funnier than the show.

This review is in today's Australian.

Godzone, by Guy Rundle, directed by Aidan Fennessy. Set and costumes Shaun Gurton, lighting design by Matt Scott, sound design by Darrin Verhagen. With Max Gillies, Melbourne Theatre Company @ the Sumner Theatre, MTC Theatre, until January 17.