You can tell it's spring, because the ants are co-ordinating a spirited insurgency in the bathroom, and bare branches everywhere are bursting into blossom. Most tellingly, the Town Hall in North Melbourne is overrun with young people in black eyeliner, who are spilling down the steps and colonising the pavement cafes.


Ms TN has been slapping on her eyeliner with the rest of them and thronging the halls, albeit in a sober fashion suitable to her advancing years. I read a couple of years ago that Guardian critic Lyn Gardner sees six shows a day during the Edinburgh Fringe. I couldn't do anything remotely like that without the inside of my skull turning into something like mashed banana. So there's inevitably a chance element to the few shows I see out of the several hundred on offer, and they can hardly be thought of as representative: for those contemplating Fringe visits, the wisest strategy is to grab a program or browse the website.

Also, the performing arts continue outside the Fringe. I saw Bangarra Dance Theatre's Of Earth and Sky on the weekend: if you can beg, borrow or steal a ticket (or possibly buy one at the box office) before it closes next Saturday, do so. It's extraordinarily beautiful. I'm hoping to write more on Of Earth and Sky later this week, if I can think of the words: but today, let me briefly bring you up to speed on Ms TN's Adventures at the Fringe So Far. And I mean briefly. Ms TN is unseasonally under the weather today.

The Arrival


Shaun Tan’s moving graphic novel about the experience of immigration, The Arrival, is adapted for the stage by new company Mutation Theatre, under the eyes of emerging directors Sam Mackie and Patrick McCarthy. Getting to the venue was an adventure in itself: as the skies darkened over the surreal landscape of Docklands, half industrial chic and half just industrial, we encountered lonely bowler-hatted figures waving signs in the dark, to guide us to Shed 4. It almost - but not quite - felt like being on a strange film set, half Coppola, half Tati.

The show takes place in a gigantic metal warehouse, in which is erected a tent-like structure. Around 18 bowler-hatted young actors enact - now with carnivalesque excess, now with lyrical poignancy – Tan’s simple story of a man arriving in a strange country, having left his family behind. Tan's drawings are projected onto the ceiling of tent, as a counterpoint to the performances on stage. The result is an ambitious work of physical theatre that is often completely enchanting. Its strengths make you forgive its unncessary length and lack of focus as youthful excess. If this is the new generation of theatre makers, the future is looking good. Sadly, closed.

Home?


Written and directed by Jono Burns, Home? must be one of the slyest shows of the Fringe. An unapologetically autobiographical account of Burns's time at New York's Actor's Studio, it is a hilarious take-down of the pretensions and absurdities of the acting life and, in particular, method acting. Burns gives a tour de force performance, embodying around a dozen unlikely characters, from Phillip ("Do you know how many red-haired Jewish gays there are in Minnesota? Eight!") to an abrasive busker in Central Park. It gradually becomes clear, however, that Home? is more than a fond satire of an interesting and sometimes confronting time: it's also a moving account of coming to terms with loss.

Ably supported by musicians Sunny Leunig and Cathryn Kohn, Burns gices a virtuosic performance: turning on a dime from hilarity to real poignancy, he compels your unwavering attention for the hour-long show without missing a beat. Given the similarities to some of Peter Houghton's one-man shows, it's not surprising that Houghton's collaborator Anne Browning should have directed it with such a deft hand. Small, but perfectly formed. Fringe Hub, until October 1.

The Endarkenment

The Endarkenment, a post-apocalyptic musical by young writer/actor Fregmonto Stokes with score by Angus Leslie and Julius Millar, is the sort of rude, disorderly show that embodies the spirit of the Fringe. It makes almost no sense at all, has some of the most absurd costumes I've seen, and is powered by a rough, irreverent energy (and three cyclists, who every now and then cycle up the watts for a couple of torches). A spirited piss-take of online worlds such as Second Life, here called Corporate Life, it takes the form of a liturgy in which the high priest, Bugsy (Peter J. Reid) conducts a ceremony designed to appease the angry post-capitalist gods Imacdonald, Harvey Norman and Old King Coal. His three acolytes Swatch (Amy Turton), Flappy (Rueben Brown) and Zak Pidd (Goose) enact their fall of from grace and the subsequent Minor Economic Correction that saw the world fall into darkness.

Accompanied by a band of what appear to be pixies playing some very wonky pop, the performers belt out some fun numbers with ferocious gusto. Its satire of 21st century excess is limited to a basic attack on the alienation of virtual life, and some (admittedly enjoyable) wordplay on internet acronyms, but there are a couple of moments that pierce through the nonsense into something genuinely uncomfortable. Fringe Hub, until October 1.

Testimony


Testimony opens with a riveting image: we walk into the theatre to see a grotesque figure, dressed in what appear to be filthy white rags, standing on a podium, his back to the audience. When the lights go down, he turns to face us, and we see that he is abject indeed: his testicles, the size of grapefuits, dangle between his legs, forcing him to stand bowlegged, and his face is marred with what appears to be some terrible skin disease. This creature is, we learn, Octavio Asterius, the degraded modern remnant of the minotaur, the monster in the labyrinth of the contemporary imagination. Here, using an old convention of the theatre, he is on trial, with the audience as his jury and judge.

Graham Henderson's monologue was originally written as prose, and despite the best efforts of performer Matt Crosby and director Suzanne Chaundy, its transposition to theatre isn't entirely successful. The staging is simple: Crosby is framed by projections manipulated live on stage from a light projector, which are ingeniously various. Crosby's performance is detailed, brave and physically impressive; but his undoubted commitment is let down by some indifferent dramaturgy.

Testimony shows little grasp of dramatic structure, which means its energy really begins to sag in the final 20 minutes. Worse, the prose segues without warning from epiphanies of soaring poetic to moments of bathetic banality that recall nothing so much as a yoga meditation. If the text could be excised of its increasingly turgid repetitions, and could solve its problematically simplistic relationship to the audience, it might make a brilliant, albeit rather shorter, show. As it is, it founders under its own weight. Fringe Hub, until October 9.

Yes, Ms TN has been whinging heroically this past fortnight, but that hasn't stopped her getting out to the theatre. Writing about it has been a different matter. But this morning she awoke from her slumber, brutally thrust aside the heap of used tissues that had accumulated overnight, and cried out: "Now or never!" Or something of the sort. (Witnesses differ: another report claims she actually said "Oh no! Not again!" Which reminds me of the Belgian theatre director who wakes up every morning, walks to his window, flings open the shutters, and shouts "Help!")


Existential angst is all part of life's rich whatsit, and it must be admitted that Ms TN does it exceptionally well. She does it, in fact, so it feels like hell. But it doesn't get the reviews done. So after a salutory kick in the arse from her alter ego, Ms TN will finally report on last week's theatre going. These reviews will be a little briefer than usual, for which Ms TN's better self apologises: but it's been a full week of mundane dread here, and that all takes up space.

First up was a production of Maxim Gorky's The Lower Depths at Theatre Works, which was on for a mere four days. I wanted to see this because of the personnel involved: it's a collaboration between John Bolton, Brian Lipson, Bagryana Popov and Joseph Sherman, with lighting by Shane Grant, and the cast included people from the St Kilda Uniting Care Drop in Centre. I expected something special, and I wasn't disappointed. Gorky's unsentimental expose of the Russian underclass had a production last year at 45 downstairs directed by Ariette Taylor (and there's more about the play itself in that review). Unlike Taylor's production, however, this company brought Gorky's preoccupations unflinchingly into the present day.

Bolton and his collaborators presented a savagely cut-down version of the play which lasted a little over an hour. It was promenade theatre, with the audience milling around with the actors in the large space at Theatre Works. The set filled the theatre with found objects that were probably rescued from rubbish dumps or skips, and bits of cardboard boxes, torn newspaper and rags covered the floor in a convincing simulacrum of squalor. In the centre was an area cordoned off by a walkway, in the centre of which was a bed where the consumptive Anna (Bagryana Popov) lay dying. Around the edges of the theatre were a series of booths or miniature stages. Phrases from the play and other kinds of graffiti were chalked onto the black walls.

It was one of those events which interlocked the fictions of the play with present-day realities, a decision reinforced by the qualities the non-professional actors from the drop in centre brought to the production. Working with non-professionals is a honourable tradition in realist art: neo-realist film directors such as Ermanno Olmi, for instance, worked with non-actors in films like Il Posto or The Tree of Wooden Clogs, bringing an unactorly authenticity to the performances which reinforced the political anger behind his films.

The effect of using non-professional actors in theatre is slightly different. On the one hand, it brings a direct immediacy of experience to the production; and in fact several of Gorky's monologues are replaced by the performers' own stories. But unlike film, theatre can't forget its own artifice. The performative effect is almost the opposite of authenticity: it's an unconscious artifice, a certain naivety, that paradoxically reinforces the emotional reality of the play.

Here these qualities - professional and non-professional - are skilfully woven together in a sharply contemporary work that seems very true to Gorky's bleakly humane vision, however radically it departs from the text. The Lower Depths has an organic vitality: the actors and audience occupy the same space, the actors watching as attentively when they're not performing, and emerging into focus when required. It seemed to me an exemplary work of community theatre, bringing together social and artistic ethics in a rare integrity.

It reminded me more than anything of the work of the British film and theatre director Lindsay Anderson. I never got to see Anderson's theatre (wrong age, wrong continent) but films such as If, O Lucky Man or This Sporting Life are brilliant examples of radical art. Like this production, Anderson's films examine human experience with a kind of tender democracy of vision that's underlaid by a clear-eyed social anger.

"Fighting means commitment, means believing what you say, and saying what you believe," said Anderson memorably. "It will also mean being called sentimental, irresponsible, self-righteous, extremist and out-of-date by those who equate maturity with scepticism, art with amusement, and responsibility with romantic excess. And it must mean a new kind of intellectual and artist, who is not frightened or scornful of his fellows." The Lower Depths reflects this kind of intelligent artistic commitment. I'd like to see more of it.

The following night I went to the opening of Peter Houghton's The Colours at the MTC's Lawler Studio. The Colours is the conclusion to a trilogy of monologues, made in collaboration with Anne Browning, that began with Houghton's hit satire The Pitch and continued through The China Incident (performed by Browning). The earlier two are concerned, in different ways, with the global US empire: The Pitch hilariously satirised the film industry, while The China Syndrome was about the PR spin of global realpolitics.

In this unexpected conclusion to the trilogy, Houghton summons the ghosts of the British Empire. He plays the reality-challenged Colour Sergeant Tommy Atkins, who is the final solitary remnant of Empire in a forsaken African outpost. Ventriloquising a dozen characters gives Houghton the chance to display his virtuosic comedic skills, and he’s a delight to watch. But the play’s more serious intent - an attempt to pay homage to the footsoldiers of colonial power – is undermined by sentiment: an edge of savagery is missing here, tipping its premise into naivety.

It's a fine line between paying homage to the bravery and belief of those who laid down their lives - usually unwillingly - for the British Empire, and sinking into a nostalgia that insidiously ignores some of the lessons of post-colonialism. Despite his parodic intent, Houghton falls off the tightrope here, although his evocation of Atkins, haunted by his dead comrades, is at times undeniably moving. And you can't but admire his control of the stage, shifting from pathos to comedy with razor timing. This is a brave play, if only for its defiant unfashionableness, but it left me feeling uncomfortably ambivalent.

Partly it's a feeling that I've seen this before, and done better: the 60s saw a lot of work which excavated the myths and price of the empire. Plays like John Arden's Sergeant Musgrave's Dance or films such as Joseph Losey's searing King and Country, which follows the court martial of a shell-shocked infantryman in the trenches of World War 1, tore apart the ideologies of empire building with intelligent anger. It's an anger that's missing in The Colours, for all its satire. And maybe the British Empire is still too close to home for me to forgive it so easily.

Finally, I saw Yumi Umiumare's En Trance at the CUB Malthouse. As its title suggests, En Trance is a work about liminal states, the thresholds of transformation between one mode of being and another. And it’s also a work that reaches for an ecstatic dissolution of the self, the loss of self-consciousness that occurs in a state of trance. Umiumare achieves these ambitions in a fascinating and complex one-woman piece that defies classification. Part dance, part theatre, part multimedia immersion, part dream, En Trance inexorably reels you into Umiumare’s subjective world.

Umiumare was a member of the influential Japanese Butoh company DaiRakudakan and moved to Australia in 1993. Here she extends the anarchic tradition of Butoh – a form of modern Japanese dance that emerged after the chaos of World War 2 – by introducing text and filmed images into what is ultimately a deeply personal narrative about shifting between different cultures.

En Trance begins with an almost classical simplicity. Dressed in a white shift, Yumi Umiumare enters a bare stage adorned with slim white columns, and tells us a surreal domestic story about her cat. Suddenly, in a moment that is like Alice’s fall into the rabbit hole, we are plunged into another reality. The stage is drowned in the harsh sounds and images of a city street, as Umiumare writhes and twists in a kind of panic, her body almost invisible behind the images that are projected onto her. This sequence is like an assault: the noise is alienating, the images confusing to the eye.

Just as suddenly, the performance transforms again. Umiumare changes on stage into a black, flowing costume, and becomes a whirling cat-like creature. This dance is where the performance began to come to life for me: Umiumare is riveting. Her body seems to defy its physical limitations, as if she is possessed by a spirit of transformation.

En Trance moves through several more sequences, each of them wholly unexpected yet each deepening the meaning of the others. In one, she explains the many Japanese words for tears. In another, she pounds out a hilariously kitsch Japanese pop song. In yet another, she combines Aboriginal and Butoh dance, reprising her earlier cat-dance, this time as a feral creature in a new landscape.

Bambang Nurcahyadi’s projected images and Ian Kitney’s sound design seamlessly combine with Umiumare’s performance into a singular unity of expression. It makes En Trance an impassioned and beautiful piece, constantly rich and surprising in its emotional range, and finally very moving.

Picture: Yumi Umiumare in En Trance. Photo: Jeff Busby

The review of En Trance was in Monday's Australian.

The Lower Depths by Maxim Gorky, directed by John Bolton. Designed by Brian Lipson, lighting by Shane Grant, music direction by Bagryana Popov. With Brian Pigot, Brett A. Walsh, Stewart Weir, Tom Moleta, Joseph Sherman, Maree Wesol, Brian Lipson, Pat Nyberg, Abdul Hay, Rodney Dean Mcleish, Ant Bridgeman, Bagryana Popv, Sharon Kirschner and John Bolton. Theatre Works and participants from St Kilda Uniting Care Drop in Centre @ Theatre Works. (Closed).

The Colours, written and performed by Peter Houghton, directed by Anne Browning. Design by Shaun Gurton, lighting design by Richard Vabre, composer David Chesworth. Melbourne Theatre Company @ the Lawler Studio, MTC Theatre, until September 12.

En Trance by Yumi Umiumare. Dramaturge and collaborator Moira Finacune, media art by Bambang Nurcahyadi, installtion artist Naomi Ota, costumes design by David Anderson, lighting design by Kerry Ireland. With Yumi Umiumare. Malthouse Theatre @ Tower Theatre, CUB Malthouse until September 13.

Comedy Festival: Heard It On The Wireless: The Kransky Sisters, with Annie Lee, Christine Johnston and Carolyn Johns, Athenaeum Theatre (season over)

The Jinglists, directed by Ansuya Nathan, with Warwick Allsop and Tamlyn Henderson, Bosco Theatre, Federation Square until April 13.

The China Incident, written and directed by Peter Houghton, sound design by David Franzke, performed by Anne Browning, The Tower, CUB Malthouse, until April 12. Bookings 1300 660 013

Sometimes it dawns on me with disconcerting clarity that I am not the girl that once I was. It is a sadder and a wiser face that greets me in the mirror each morning. At least, I hope it’s wiser. It’s certainly more tired, which means I must have been doing something, and I should hate to think all that effort might have been for nothing.

What has induced this gloom? The Melbourne Comedy Festival, that’s what. It’s a young person’s game, and it forces me to admit that those halcyon days of yore are all kaput. When I’m stuck in an unmoving, sweaty mass that is attempting, step by tiny step, to escape a theatre, something in me begins to hate humanity. Humanity’s all very lovely at a decent distance (say, a metre or so) but those crowds around Collins Street or streaming in and out of the Town Hall bring out all my innate misanthropy. (I guess I should file these reviews under a heading like “reflections of a middle aged misanthrope”, but the fear that they might inadvertently enter an irony-free zone - Andrew Bolt, for instance - gives me pause.)



Festivals fill me with panic on principle: one look at a program with 200 shows in it and I begin to hyperventilate. I lack the stern fibre of proper critics, who stick out their chins and head off, elbows akimbo, to cover six shows a day. Even at my most self-deceiving, I can’t pretend I am actually covering the Comedy Festival. So here are reports on the three shows I managed to see; all of them, serendipitously, illustrations of the thesis that laughter is deeply related to the human instinct for cruelty.

The Kransky Sisters - Dawn, Mourne and Eva - are three black-haired, pale-skinned singers from “Esk, in Queensland”. They tour the rural roads in their father’s red Morris Major, bringing to eager audiences their idiosyncratic arrangements of songs that they’ve heard on “the wireless”. This evening begins with a slideshow of just such a tour – happy snaps of the unspeakable orange-coloured food in roadside diners, or roadkill, or the three grim-faced sisters squeezed into their car.

In their prim, high-necked costumes, they quiver with sibling hatreds (mostly directed at their half sister Dawn, the tuba player, who is held responsible for their father’s departure) and throbbing, repressed sexuality. The Kranskys are spookily innocent – television was forbidden by their mother, and they still sleep in their childhood beds. But the passions within them have never been quite extinguished, which results in some bizarre behaviours. And has incidentally fatal consequences for several small animals.

Their cruel and painful story unfolds between a song list that is as unlikely as the sisters themselves. Theirs has clearly not been an easy childhood, and their eccentricities are the scars of trauma. “Sticks and stones will break your bones”, says Mourne at one point, looking blackly at her sister, “and words hurt too”. If they weren’t so funny, it would be the saddest thing you’d ever heard.

Annie Lee, Christine Johnston and Carolyn Johns are fantastically inventive musicians: their instruments include an old 60s keyboard, a toilet brush, tambourines, a saw and a saucepan, all accompanied by the lugubrious baseline of Dawn’s tuba. With these unlikely tools, they attack AC/DC, The Eurythmics, Russell Morris and (perhaps my favourite of the lot) Talking Heads, unpacking the tropes of popular music with a deadpan wit that, in a true theatrical paradox, somehow stays true to the anarchy in the heart of rock and roll.

Sibling passions and frustrated sexuality are also at the heart of The Jinglists, the second show from Warwick Allsop and Tamlyn Henderson. They brought us the surreal cabaret A Porthole Into the Minds of the Vanquished, which premiered at the Comedy Festival in 2006. While Porthole was a kind of riff off the subconscious, like entering someone else’s dream, The Jinglists is almost recognisably a play. At least, it has a recognisable narrative, and even characters.

The Jinglists is at once more serious and more ambitious than their first piece. In its evocation of agoraphobic childhood, it irresistibly recalls Lally Katz's play The Eisteddfod, which also explored the fantasy lives of two isolated enfants terribles. In this case, the two brothers Loman and Leigh haven't moved outside their apartment since their mother died. They make their living by writing advertising jingles, and the rest of the time live a distorted version of childhood, dictated by nursery routines of eating, bathing and sleeping.

In their own strange way, the brothers are quite happy in their hermetically sealed world. That is, until love knocks on their door and adult passions are wakened within their childish psyches. Performing in white-face, Allsopp and Henderson are sad clowns exposing the infantile emotional manipulativeness and barren realities of the world of advertising.

This show requires a more sympathetic venue; it's theatre rather than knockabout standup comedy. But Allsopp and Henderson are consummate performers, and against the odds they bring to their strange, absurd story a compelling poignancy. And some fatally catchy jingles.

Like Peter Houghton’s one-man comedy hit The Pitch, The China Incident originated at La Mama. It’s effectively a companion piece, this time with Houghton in the directorial seat and his partner Anne Browning, who directed The Pitch, as the performer. Anne Browning plays Bea Pontifec, a high-powered, emotionally explosive diplomatic consultant walking an increasingly narrow line between career triumph and personal disaster.

The play consists of one side of an increasingly frenetic series of phone calls. Bea has five different telephones, a mobile and an intercom, all of which ring constantly. She juggles calls from a blood-thirsty African dictator, the President (who wants to know about her underwear), her lover at the UN and her PA. As her job rockets into hyperdrive, so does her family life. Her counter-cultural daughter Penny is getting married, but Penny’s idea of table decorations gives Bea conniptions.

The basic danger with this show is a lack of range: on its first outing, there was a sense that, for all its energy, it was a little monotonal. Much of the comedy in The Pitch, a satire of the film industry, evolved from Houghton’s virtuosic performance of entire casts of popular movies, but here Browning has the challenge of performing a single – and rather unsympathetic - character.

But the show has developed from its initial outing last year, and Browning has invested Houghton’s monstrous invention with a little humanity. Even a touch of poignancy. Bea is a bigoted, cynical control freak, a woman to whom image is much more important than substance. She doesn’t care if her daughter is miserable at her own wedding, as long as the table settings communicate the right messages about power, privilege and elegance.

As a diplomatic consultant, her job is about spinning image to hide reality, an agenda she follows with ruthless cynicism. White guilt, she advises the brutal African dictator, will protect him from the criticism of the world community. Meanwhile, a little sexual blackmail ought to keep the Koreans under control… But, like her dysfunctional family, reality keeps intruding, with increasingly chaotic results.

And as her polished professional veneer begins to crack, Bea almost becomes a tragic figure, helpless in the face of the reality she has spent her life denying. It’s not as laugh-out-loud hilarious as The Pitch: the satire here is more bleakly savage. But it’s well worth a look.

Part of this review appears in today's Australian.