In one of those interesting synchronicities, there is a rash of contemporary theatre examining the foundational Christian myths. As Hayloft's BC - a rewriting of the Annunciation - plays in Melbourne, the STC is hosting Genesis, a contemporary look at the first chapters of the Bible performed by the Residents, their new ensemble. Black Lung last week put Christianity on the rack of its traumatic anarchy in Glasoon. Looking further back, two years ago Uncle Semolina & Friends reworked the Old Testament in OT.

It suggests that religion, especially Christianity, is an acute locus of both anxiety and curiosity among those companies exploring the outer edges of theatre. I guess it's unsurprising, given that God has risen from Nietzsche's grave to stalk modernity like a brain-eating zombie in a splatter movie: the rise of mediaevalist fundamentalism is the dark story of our time. As the sublime Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski said in the 1980s as he witnessed the disintegration of the Soviet Empire, the three great challenges to world peace in the following decades were religion, nationalism and racism. In the past few years, we've seen that prophecy playing out in our global politics.


But this focus on religion is also a curiosity about the foundations of western culture. Christianity shaped the West: it has been a defining force in its art and thought for hundreds of years. It's influenced our metaphysics, philosophy, law and social conventions. And for those raised in the shadow of that tradition, it is a primary expression of transcendence and the divine.

It's this last aspect that debut playwright Rita Kalnejais explores in BC, which takes the story of the Immaculate Conception and sets it in an outer suburb of a nameless Australian city. After attacking the modern classics - Chekhov, Stravinsky, Wedekind - it's good to see Hayloft taking on the risks of new writing, with Benedict Hardie's Yuri Wells earlier this year and now BC.

Here Mary is the teenage daughter of Joachim (Tyler Coppin), a depressed real estate agent, and Anne (Margaret Mills), who is in recovery from cancer and is perilously on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Her learning-challenged brother, Gabriel (Dylan Young) is obssessed, not entirely healthily, with birds, the angelic possibility of flight. Elizabeth (Yesse Spence), in the original story Mary's confidante and the first to recognise that Mary's pregnancy is the fruit of God ("Blessed are you among women!") becomes a pleasant, well-meaning neighbour. There are disturbing threads running through it: foremost the suggestion of incest between Mary and her father and, more directly, her brother.

It's an interesting idea that, despite some moments of coup de theatre and an outstanding cast, doesn't quite come off. Kalnejais can certainly write: she has the gift - perhaps because she is also an actor - of understanding direct dramatic action, and of creating characters who immediately assert their reality. And there's no faulting her ambition. However, the play falters in its formal balance between the naturalistic and the surreal: the naturalistic scenes are not nearly as focused as the others and often are simply too long, creating longueurs. And there's a more basic problem with the larger structure, which leads to a couple of false endings.

The play aims to illuminate moments of ordinary grace, investigating the divine immanent in quotidian existence, but a conceptual muddiness gets in the way. For instance, it's not the angel who impregnates Mary, but God: Gabriel merely announces the fact. I simply didn't understand the point of the brotherly incest or why God was absent from the shenanigans. And the Christian idea of grace is actually deeply interesting: the simple idea presented here of unmediated grace fudges its sternness and beauty, and begs the question of why Christianity is introduced in the first place. This kind of fuzziness means that the writing doesn't escape the problem of conjuring sentiment rather than real feeling.

All the same, director Simon Stone and his team create moments of genuine comedy and theatrical power. The immaculate conception itself - in which the angel and Mary unite as reflections separated by glass - is a beautifully thought and realised image of transcendence. And although some of the characters - Ashley Zuckerman's Joseph, for example - veer dangerously close to caricature, they are strange and individual enough to escape the worst perils.

Claude Marcos's set, an evocation of a suburban house bisected by a diagonal window that can turn into a mirror, vividly recalls Benedict Andrews' obsession with windows and mirrors, but works well on its own terms. Stone elicits some excellent performances, with a stand-out role by Dylan Young as Gabriel. I'm not sure Kalnejais could have asked for a better production of her first play. What she needs is some sharp dramaturgy.

Bagryana Popov's Progress and Melancholy is also a nice idea laid low by uncertain dramaturgy. It's one of a number of recent shows that reworks a classic, in this case, Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. The idea is to excavate its subtext, radically resituating the play in the present - not only the contemporary present, but in the immediate present of the performers and the audience. Maybe the test of this kind of exercise is whether you're sitting in the audience wondering why the company doesn't just do the play: and in this case, I would have preferred to see Chekhov Uncut.

Popov has the chops here: her 2005 physical movement piece Subclass26A, which explored the realities of asylum seekers in detention, was riveting, sharply thought political theatre. So how come this one went so wrong? The play's subtext - focusing on personal, social and economic change - is shallowly explored, the connections made between the present of the actors and the imagined past of Chekhov are generalised and even sentimental, and when the physical movement aspires to the condition of dance, it is sometimes embarrassing. As a work, it seems frustratingly half-formed, and the informing ideas - the economic rise of China, the oncoming disaster of climate change, the feudal/capitalist exploitation of workers - all seem to operate at the level of naivety.

And yet there's the core of a great idea inside it. For all my reservations, the show features a couple of excellent performances. Natasha Herbert's Ranevskaya is (when it is allowed to occur) a moving and accurate performance of a middle aged bourgeois woman in denial of her disintegrating present. But the highlight - the performance that made this show worth watching - was Todd Macdonald's electrifying Lopahkin, the former-serf-turned-businessman who buys and destroys the cherry orchard, revenging the humiliations of his humble birth. In Macdonald's performance the intersecting realities - the big-talking developer, the ambitious nouveau riche serf - united and made sense, and the actor himself took a back seat. Given this, I wondered why the show didn't focus on Lopahkin, filleting that ambiguous character out of the play and attending to the realities that he both embodies and represents. But hey, it wasn't my show.

At one point they stopped the show and handed cake around the audience. It was good cake. It was well-meaning. And this was a well-meaning show. But I do think Chekhov would have threatened to shoot himself.

Picture: Dylan Young and Nicole Da Silva in BC. Photo: Jeff Busby.

BC by Rita Kalnejais, directed by Simon Stone. Set and costumes by Claude Marcos, lighting design by Kimberly Kaw, sound design by Stefan Gregory. With Tyler Coppin, Nicole Da Silva, Margaret Mills, Yesse Spence, Dylan Young and Ashley Zuckerman. The Hayloft Project @ Full Tilt, Black Box, Victorian Arts Centre, until December 19.

Progress and Melancholy, directed by Bagryana Popov. Design by Adrienne Chisolm, lighting design by Richard Vabre, composition and sound design by Elissa Goodrich. With Natasha Herbert, Todd Macdonald, Majid Shokor, Sara Black, Paea Leach, Christophe Le Tellier, music performed by Ernie Gruner. Fortyfive downstairs. Closed.

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In his stories and plays, Anton Chekhov is a pitilessly intelligent observer of human beings. A writer of enormous moral scrupulousness, he lets fall a cruel light on the excesses of his characters without ever losing sight of their frailties and contradictions. He’s most often seen as a poster boy for naturalism, but this is inevitably reductive. A play like Three Sisters, for instance, can be seen as a moral tale about the decadence of the pre-Revolutionary bourgeoisie, or a nostalgic evocation of a society on the brink of collapse. But like any simple interpretation, this is far from the whole truth.

Its real fascination is in its details, how it is constructed as a kind of collage of social performance: each character’s self-insight is questionable, conditioned and repressed by his or her consciousness of the presence of others, and each is ultimately trapped in a state of existential solitude. It is this aspect of Chekhov which makes him so attractive to successive generations of artists, among whom must be counted Samuel Beckett. In last year’s drop-dead beautiful production of his early play Platonov, the Hayloft Project, one of Melbourne’s most vital new companies, began an excavation of his work.


Under the restless direction of Simon Stone, they’ve continued their exploration with 3xSisters, now on at the Meat Market in repertory with a remount of the Belvoir St version of their first show, Spring Awakening - a performance so radically changed (different script, different design, different concept, different cast) from its original Melbourne outing that it is effectively an entirely new production. Hayloft's take on Chekhov is an attractively ambitious conceit: three directors - Benedict Hardie, Simon Stone and Mark Winter – oversee different acts, effectively giving us three radically different interpretations of the play. But it's telling that the names of the writers who feature in this mini-Hayloft retrospective - Franz Wedekind and Anton Chekhov - figure nowhere on the program credits.

3xSisters is fascinating and frustrating in equal measure. The production shifts neurotically through three different sets, costumes and interpretations. Stone, who begins and ends the play, sets it in a place like a waiting room in an airport, under a row of clocks showing the time in Buenos Aires, Johannesburg or Moscow, with the characters in formal dress, as if waiting for some festive event. The actors speak straight out to the audience, their more intimate thoughts sometimes whispered through a microphone, their movements constrained by the narrowness of the stage. It suggests a promisingly stern aesthetic - Stone even inserts the famous quote ("Fail again. Fail better.") from Samuel Beckett's Worstword Ho - but, in the major problem that runs through this entire production, neglects to follow this promise through. The hint of Beckett remains merely decoration, and peters out in the end, disappointingly, into the borrowed emotion of Cat Power.

Hardie directs a deftly choreographed rehearsal of the play, complete with actorly interpolations. It's a reminder of the performance heritage that has so conditioned western interpretations of Chekhov: Chekhov's first and most famous interpreter was Stanislavski, one of whose most famous acolytes was Lee Strasberg, father of the Method. In Hardie's first scene, the black slacks and casual shirts evoke the 1950s cool of the Actors Studio; in the second, the actors have evolved into brainless noughties dweebs, dressed in "I heart Chekhov" t-shirts. This permits a metatheatrical shifting, a consciousness of artifice overlaying the moments when the actors step into character. It's not that new as an idea - David Mamet's film Vanya on 42nd St features actors workshopping the play, similarly shifting between their "real" and performative characters - but it's still effective, and perhaps in its minimalist approach the most satisfyingly thought-through of the evening.

The middle acts, courtesy of Winter, are a psychotic explosion seen through the mind of Solyony, an asocial soldier with Romantic delusions who ends up killing his only friend. Here Chekhov collides with Taxi Driver, with Travis Bickle’s slaughter presaging the Revolution’s murders of the Romanov family. This middle act is at once the most interesting and the most problematic of the lot: there are moments of genuine power, moments when the wholesale destruction of Chekhov suggests wider implications - the repressed violence and sexuality squirming beneath bourgeois social conventions, the classist cruelty that led to the Russian Revolution, even a reflection of how a production can be a forensic dissection of a cultural corpse.

But these possibilities are undermined by cheap gestures: its excessive bath of sexual transgression and violence ends up being brutalising and boring (and sometimes - what was with the Indian head-dress? - simply baffling). As with the rest of the production it's full of quotations, most obviously from Martin Scorcese, but also from a menu of pop cultural and theatrical references. Again, a directorial quote from Romeo Castellucci will mean nothing without the aesthetic rigor that underlies Castellucci's practice: and a swipe at Benedict Andrews is simply a gratuitous in-joke which illuminates nothing except the director's insecurities. At its worst, it justifies the outraged criticisms of those who claim this kind of theatre is simply self-indulgent bullshit only interested in generating offence, in the absence of doing something more challenging (such as engaging with Chekhov); which is a pity, because at its best it has the potential to be something far more substantial.

In short, the line between intellectual provocation and gratuitous shock-value is crossed too often, and the whole production oscillates between genuine insight and shallow gesture. It's interesting to compare these explorations, for instance, with Daniel Schlusser's recent production of Peer Gynt, or more directly, Chris Goode's transcendently beautiful ...Sisters, both of which radically dismantle a classic text. The difference is intellectual rigor, and an illuminating respect for the source text. All the same, I found 3xSisters riveting. The performers are astoundingly good (and very well cast - you can't help reflecting that a straight production with this cast would be really something), and Chekhov, tellingly, survives the rough treatment. It’s well worth seeing, if only for the arguments you’ll have afterwards.


Simon Stone's production of Spring Awakening is a far less problematic prospect. I was expecting a polished version of the show I saw at fortyfive downstairs three years ago, and found very quickly that I was mistaken: the Belvoir St version is a complete rethink, with Adam Gardnir's chicken-coop set literalising the social barriers that confine and destroy Wedekind's young characters. Stone solves some of the problems of the original text - most notably, the Man who appears at the end - by simply editing them out, transforming the play into a series of impressionistic dialogues and monologues.

The most compelling aspect of the initial production was the tension it established between sexual desire and childish innocence, a collision that was ultimately tragic. Literalising the subtleties of physical interaction between the actors, and perhaps even neatening up the original messiness of Wedekind's play, has a concomitant cost: it's undoubtedly more elegant, and perhaps more impressive, but it has lost something important. Innocence, perhaps.

A shorter version of this review is in today's Australian.

Pictures: top: rehearsal shot of 3xSisters. Photo Pia Johnson. Bottom: Production shot of Spring Awakening.

3xSisters from Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov, directed by Simon Stone, Benedict Hardie and Mark Winter, additional text from the directors and cast. Set design by Claude Marcos, lighting design by Danny Pettingill. With Gareth Davies, Angus Grant, Thomas Henning, Joshua Hewitt, Shelly Lauman, Eryn Jean Norvill, Anne-Louise Sarks, Katherine Tonkin and Tom Wren.

Spring Awakening by Franz Wedekind, adaptation and direction by Simon Stone. Set design by Adam Gardnir, lighting design by Niklas Pajanti. With Andrew Dunn, Amanda Falson, Angus Grant, Shelly Lauman, Aaron Orzech, Russ Pirie and Edwina Wren.

In repertory at the North Melbourne Meat Market, 5 Blackwood St, North Melbourne, until May 10. Bookings: 9639 0096

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The Lower Depths by Maxim Gorky, directed by Ariette Taylor. Designed by Adrienne Chisolm, lighting by Emma Valente. With Adam Pierchalski, Bessie Holland, Alex Menglet, Chloe Armstrong, Denis Moore, Genevieve Picot, Evan Jureidini, Greg Stone, Luke Elliot, Heather Bolton, Malcolm Robertson, Marco Chiappi, Paul English, Natalia Novikova, Stewart Morritt and Syd Brisbane. Ariette Taylor Productions @ fortyfive downstairs until November 29.

Although there are persistent rumours that he was murdered on Stalin's orders, the Russian writer Maxim Gorky, the founder of social realism, was the literary poster boy of the Bolshevik Revolution. His early life was of exemplary harshness: born Aleksei Peshkov in Nizhny Novgorod in 1868, he was orphaned at an early age and sent out to work. He ran away from home when he was 12, and became an itinerant worker, barely escaping starvation. His teenage experiences prompted the adoption of his pseudonym Gorky, which means "bitter".

Among many other temporary jobs, he worked as a dishwasher on a Volga steamer, where the cook taught him to read, fostering the passion for writing that ultimately shaped his life. As a rising young writer he met Anton Chekhov, who urged him to write a play. He subsequently wrote two for the Moscow Arts Theatre, the most famous of which is The Lower Depths. The characters in this play are supposedly inspired by real people Gorky met at the Bugrov Homeless Shelter in Nizhny Novgorod. The Lower Depths is an unsparing portrait of Russia's underclass, a wretched and doomed group of people who scrabble for a living by whatever means they can - thievery, prostitution, piece work - and whose savagery is most often turned against each other.


It's also an essay on the choice between facing harsh truths or embracing delusions that make life bearable. The play itself reaches no conclusions: in the brutal social order that sifts some human beings to an irredeemable bottom, political or social insight can bring with it a crushing weight of despair, to which fantasy might be preferable. A delusion, says Gorky, can be life-saving, bringing hope where none exists and prompting action where despair brings only self-destructive apathy and cynicism. Only the strong and free can face the truth.

In many ways this production is a logical evolution, both in practice and philosophy, from the late '90s work of the Keene/Taylor Theatre Project, which was founded by director Ariette Taylor and Daniel Keene. This is reinforced by the cast; seven of the 17 performed with the KTTP, and several are founding members. And, as with the KTTP, this production is graced with some astounding performances from some of our best actors.

The KTTP began its work in 1997 in the Brotherhood of St Laurence Warehouse in Fitzroy. The plays were performed as poor theatre, using the furniture that was available in the warehouse for their sets. The company's early and most successful work was about people who seldom reach our main stages, those forced, because of circumstance or birth, to the invisible edges of society. As with Gorky, the plays Keene wrote for the KTTP examined the dehumanising processes of poverty and social marginalisation.

Keene and Gorky's work is certainly fuelled by social anger, but neither observe a simple politics. Gorky's Marxism led him to believe that culture was a redemptive force in social revolution, and he protested strongly to Lenin, whom he knew personally, against the Bolshevik persecution of intellectuals. On its premiere, his unsentimental portrayal of poverty in The Lower Depths caused revulsion for what was seen as its dark pessimism. Neither Keene nor Gorky traffick in the politics of empathy, the easy pity that is as easily forgotten: rather, they insist on the difficult and mutual recognition of humanity in even the least sympathetic and most brutalised of their characters. Ultimately, both are interested in the erasure of the line between Them and Us, the pitied and the pitying.

The Lower Depths is presented in a robust collaborative translation from a text by Alex Menglet, which sounded very good to my ear. Rather like Chekhov's early play Platonov, it's an exercise in realism. Beyond a couple of events which occur with a kind of random melodrama, nothing much happens. There is little attention to the dramatic shaping of plot: rather, Gorky is concerned with the disorderliness, the inartistic lack of purpose, which informs life itself. The play consists of the various characters arguing, playing cards or drinking; merely passing the time in ways that were later aestheticised in Beckett's Waiting for Godot.

What plot there is revolves around the arrival at the boarding house of Luka (Alex Menglet), an apparent innocent who believes, unlike any of the other characters, that every human being matters. He is a kind of derelict Pollyanna, spreading light among the inmates by recognising what each of them needs to believe to bear his or her life (or death, as the case may be); but it becomes clear that his comforting stories are not the fruit of naivety, but rather of a clear-sighted compassion, even a certain stark realism.

Meanwhile, a squalid domestic drama emerges between the miserly and exploitative landlord Kostylyov (Denis Moore), his vicious wife Vassilissa (Heather Bolton) and her lover the thief Vasska (Stewart Morritt). Vasska is in love with Vassilisa's sister, Natasha (Chloe Armstrong), who will have nothing to do with him. His passion arouses Vassilisa's jealousy, and she constantly beats her sister, and meanwhile plots the murder of her husband.

These events flow through the daily life of the boarding house, which is peopled by a various cast of characters. The Actor (Greg Stone) is a hopeless alcoholic whose memory has been largely erased by his addiction, the Baron (Marco Chiappi) is a man who has known better times ("I used to drink coffee before I got out of bed!") A locksmith, Klestch (Malcom Robertson) works constantly on a lock that can't be fixed while his wife Anna (Genevieve Picot) dies pathetically of consumption close by. The capmaker Bubnov (Syd Brisbane) and other characters provide a chorus of brutal scepticism (when Anna dies, Bubnov comments that at least that means she will stop coughing).

With 17 characters and a sprawling structure, the challenges of mounting this play ought to be obvious. Ariette Taylor's production demonstrates her directorial weaknesses as well as her strengths. For all the quality of the cast, the acting is uneven, with the less experienced performers tending to fall into mystifying caricature. Even deeply capable actors such as Heather Bolton or Chloe Armstrong seem oddly subdued.

On the other hand, there are superlative performances from Syd Brisbane, Paul English, Stewart Morritt and Marco Chiappi. It is a particular pleasure to watch Alex Menglet accessing his full abilities, rather than merely providing comic relief in a cameo role. His portrayal of Luka is multifaceted, detailed and moving. Greg Stone is at the top of his considerable game as the Actor; he lights up the stage with a performance that is almost an essay on acting, creating a role that is itself a role, a man whose transparent facade constantly crumbles into pathetic self-realisation.

This is acting as good as you will see, and it often transcends the limitations of the production. When it does, the result can be electrifying. But for the first half, the direction is distracting, seldom achieving the moment-to-moment focus that Gorky's writing requires to maintain compelled attention. Adrienne Chisolm's design doesn't help: the pillars in the midst of fortyfive downstairs - which have been craftily avoided in other productions - stand in the main performing space, causing acute problems with sightlines: actors are constantly disappearing behind them in the midst of speeches. Moreover, some of the action occurs in a kitchen behind the stage, obscured from most of the audience.

The intrusion of such mundane irritations might have worked if there was a sense that they were more than ad hoc. But there was little feeling until after interval that the production was more than a series of brilliant individual performances strung together with some pretty choreography. The stage action was all too dislocated in the opening scenes, a problem emphasised by the uneven acting. Once the stage focused on a more conventional mise en scene around a table in the second half, the play livened up. Unlike Chekhov's Ivanov, which Taylor directed in a revelatory production three years ago, Gorky's play is too unwieldy for a show to rely solely on performance and text: it needs a stern intelligence creating theatrical shape around it.

For these and other reasons, the production doesn't wholly escape romanticising its subject. Its Russian protagonists are sufficiently distanced for their realism to remain historicised, even exoticised, rather than making them uncomfortably present in their human dilemmas. It's worth seeing for the acting, some of which is remarkable; but it ultimately seems a decadent and swollen shadow of the beauty and complex political power of the first KTTP productions in that Fitzroy warehouse.

Picture: Chloe Armstrong in The Lower Depths. Photo: Jeff Busby

Disclosures: I am married to Daniel Keene and was a member of the Board of the KTTP for the length of its existence.

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…Sisters, adapted and directed by Chris Goode from Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov. Designed by Naomi Dawson, lighting design by Anna Watson. With Gemma Brockis, Catherine Dyson, Julia Innocenti, Helen Kirkpatrick, Tom Lyall and Melanie Wilson. Headlong Theatre @ The Gate, Notting Hill Gate, London, until July 5.

When last we spoke I was in a state of high irritation after seeing Anthony Neilson’s Relocated at the Royal Court. But a theatregoer’s unkillable optimism led me on Saturday to the wilds of London, or at least to Notting Hill Gate, where I climbed yet more stairs to see, this time, a matinee performance of …Sisters, a version of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters adapted and directed by Chris Goode. And I gave thanks, for the karmic gods saw to it that there was balance. This production stands with one of the best Chekhov experiences I’ve had.

First, a confession: I’m a bit of a Chekhov fangirl. When I get to that big dinner table in the sky, I hope they seat me next to Anton for at least a few of those eternal moments. His letters reveal him to be a man of great personal charm: he was funny and lively and, which is perhaps most rare, he possessed a coolly humane social conscience, a wholly rational and sceptical compassion that, for example, informed his report on health conditions on the penal island of Sakhalin, and is one of the defining qualities of his work.

It’s this quality, I think, that makes Chekhov one of the more poorly understood playwrights of the modern age: the realisation of his texts demands a special kind of wisdom. The mantel of reverence – or, alternatively, the machismo of anti-reverence – often obscures the intense fragility that animates the strength of his drama. Worse, a grey miasma of contemporary naturalism tends to rise about his work, snuffing out the poetic vitality at its heart.

Goode’s version of Three Sisters has been billed as a “deconstruction”, but this seems like a cold word for what strikes me more as an organic reanimation, an attempt to recover (or perhaps, more accurately, to create) a Chekhov who is continually invested in the raw presence of the moment. At first glance, this appears a quixotic approach to a classic four act naturalistic play, but in fact it is an ambition peculiarly apt to Chekhov’s work. What has always moved me most about Chekhov’s plays is their tragic consciousness of the present, a profound sorrow and comedy that stems equally from the moment’s unbearably beautiful transience, or its crushing boredom, or its pain. For this reason among others, I have often thought that Beckett owes a great deal to Chekhov.

Writing about this production, as is true of all the best theatre experiences, is very difficult. To write it down is inevitably a kind of falsification, as it shifts something that exists almost entirely in the present into the past tense. And memory has its own filters and connectivities, selecting and fictionalising and shaping as it rewrites the experience. All that remains of this production now is what exists in the memory of those who were there.

This acute awareness of mortality (“Each thing once. Only once.”) is the informing feeling of …Sisters, and the reason why it’s so intensely moving. Because of the chance elements Goode and his actors have introduced, each performance is different: no one knows at the beginning who is going to play what parts, or even which lines will be said. However, these variations are played over a deeply thought structure: not only the play (which still preserves its four acts and its language) but in the shape of the production itself. It’s a show that teaches you how to watch it as you watch, profoundly intelligent but also, crucially, profoundly felt. When a character asks: Do we exist? the question resonates intimately in the auditorium: suddenly I felt as fictional – or, conversely, as real - as the characters on the stage. And who’s to say I am not?

Goode has adapted the play into contemporary English and gathered an exceptional cast (it clearly had to be exceptional) of six actors, all of whom learnt the entire text. Then he asked them, as he says in the program, to “dance”. And dance they do. One of the things that took my breath away about this production is its beautiful and subtle choreography, its creation of a continually dynamic space.

…Sisters maintains an exquisite tension between the scripted play and the anarchies of chance. From the moment we enter the space – designed as a comfortably cluttered green room with 19th century touches, complete with electric kettle, walls covered with post-it notes and framed collections of dead butterflies - we see the actors, half costumed, leafing through scripts or wandering idly about the stage, preparing for the show. The emphasis is from the beginning on performance in all its meanings, an awareness which implicates the audience. We are always conscious – we are never permitted to forget – that we are watching a work of theatre.

Goode uses a number of Cagean techniques: the actors choose straws, play spin-the-bottle and pick up at random envelopes containing instructions that drop from the ceiling. Anyone could play any character, and at any point might become someone else. Despite this, it’s a production very strong on clarity: clues are given from the beginning – in costuming and dialogue – to show who is who, although these clues are instantly destabilised. For this reason, it demands close attention. But although my memory of Three Sisters was very vague (I resisted the impulse to reread the play, and merely reacquainted myself with the character list), there was no point where I found myself utterly lost. Perhaps those who don't know the play might be lost, but I suspect what is fruitfully destroyed here is a certain kind of dramatic expectation.

The four acts are very distinct. Act I establishes the play, and sticks most closely to the text as written. Act II stretches the conventions: at one point, for example, there are three Mashas. The love scene between Masha and Vershinin gains a skin-prickling poignancy by being performed in a kind of chorus, the dialogue shifting from one couple to another with no attention to gender. Act III, the dramatic climax, is the closest thing I’ve ever seen to play-as-opera, and is the point where the play's emotional subtext surges rawly to the surface of the performance.

Act IV is a return to stasis, with performers seated staring out at the audience, but now the play is in pieces, literally scattered over the floor for one of the actors, continually circling the others, to pick up and read at random. In a rather Castellucci-ish touch, two rabbits hop onto the stage and lollop around, behaving, as animals and babies do, with a hypnotic lack of self consciousness. I thought it a tribute to the actors that I found myself watching them as closely as I watched the rabbits, which ended up, bored, fast asleep under a desk at the end of the scene. But for all the random elements, the performance begins and ends where the play begins and ends: it still, rather miraculously, attends to Chekhov's dramatic and emotional arc.

I don’t know whether, if he had seen this production, Chekhov would have advised his friends (as he so often did) to “shoot him in the head” if he ever thought about writing another play. But I like to think he might have been pleased: for all its robust approach, ...Sisters seemed to me to be deeply true to him. Certainly, in its peculiar and evanescent transparency, it's a work of exemplary integrity. No wonder people here think Chris Goode is God.

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Chekhov Re-Cut: Platonov, by Anton Chekhov, adapted and directed by Simon Stone. Design by Evan Granger, lighting by Danny Pettingill, sound by Jared Lewis. With Jessamy Dyer, Amanda Falson, Angus Grant, Adrian Mulraney, Eryn-Jean Norvill, Meredith Penman, Simon Stone and Chris Ryan. The Hayloft Project @ The Hayloft, corner Harris and Whitehall Steets, Footscray, until March 16. Bookings 0435 165 117 or online

Platonov is Anton Chekhov’s first play and, in ways that recall Georg Büchner’s unfinished work Woycek, has a rather curious history. It was written in the 1880s when Chekhov was 20, living with his parents on the edge of the Black Sea in the village of Taganrog. He abandoned it when it was rejected by the Maly Theatre in Moscow and the play was forgotten until someone discovered the manuscript in a bank vault in 1923, 19 years after Chekhov’s death. It was first published in 1933, under the title Fatherlessness, but it didn’t premiere in Russia until 1957.


By all accounts, the original is a sprawling mess that runs for more than five hours. As the Russian critic Mikhail Gromov put it: "The play was put together with a profligacy that was inexcusable, and conceivable only in the writer's youth. At one and the same time it is a drama, a comedy and a vaudeville; or more accurately, it is not any one of these three. But that said, it is chaotic in a way that bore a remarkable resemblance to the reality of Russian life."

For a play generally regarded as juvenilia, Platonov is produced more often than you might expect. A full-length version was a hit at the 2002 Avignon Festival, and (perhaps ironically, given its rejection a century ago) the Maly Theatre of St Petersburg toured its celebrated production, now a decade old, to London last year. It inspired a celebrated film, An Unfinished Piece for Mechanical Piano, made by Nikita Mikhalkov in 1976, which in turn inspired Trevor Griffiths’ 1990 play, Piano. Michael Frayn adapted it in 1984, and David Hare in 2001. Which isn’t doing too badly.

Like Woycek, which was found in Büchner’s papers after his early death and has been the subject of endless dramaturgical speculation, it might be Platonov’s very disorder, this unfinished quality, which has ensured its continuing life more than a century later. Or perhaps the age has caught up with Chekhov’s instinctive dramaturgy: it could be that the play’s mimetic sense, the chaos that Gromov remarked as so realistic, appeals to contemporary sensibilities.

Certainly a sense of contemporary realism illuminates the Hayloft Theatre Project’s extraordinarily beautiful production, its first at its newly opened warehouse theatre in Seddon. As with this company’s impressive debut, a passionate production of Franz Wedekind’s Spring Awakening - itself opening at Belvoir St later this year - Chekhov Re-Cut: Platonov is elegantly poised between fidelity to the 19th century origin of the work and a very 21st century aesthetic.

Simon Stone’s adaptation cuts the play to a swift two and a half hours, with eight speaking parts instead of 20. I haven't read the original text, so I can’t comment on the details of the adaptation (in passing, it was brilliant to experience a Chekhov play with no idea of what was going to happen). But even so, Stone demonstrates – as he did with Spring Awakening – a sure instinct for filleting out essential action; and he certainly hasn’t messed with the original four act structure.

Platonov (Simon Stone) is the first of Chekhov’s disillusioned provincial intellectuals. He is the local school teacher, an idealist in his (very recent) youth, but already, in his late 20s, soured and bored by the comfortable meaninglessness of his life. He is fascinating because he is a totally passive protagonist: he permits events to happen, always taking the most yielding option, permitting the desires of others to dictate his flaccid will. For all his appearance of profundity, he is a man who takes on the colours of those around him. He most startling lack is an interior life: he is all surface, all reflection. And his inner emptiness has disastrous results for everyone around him.

None of the men in the play is immune to his charisma - even those he cuckolds still love him. And as he is desired by every woman in the play - even the chemistry student Maria, whom he treats with sadistic contempt - his love life is complicated. In a curious reversal of gender roles, he is the blank screen on which these women project their frustrated desires. He is a different lover to each of them – to Sascha, his wife, he is a faithful husband and father; to the general’s widow Anna (Meredith Penman) - an amazing character for the time, being both intellectually and sexually forceful - he is the image of a grand passion; to his former lover Sofia (Jessamy Dyer) he represents freedom from a stiflingly respectable marriage.


The play's melodramatic elements reflect the theatre of its time, but in this adaptation they are at once absurd and realistic, winding out of the tragic aimlessness of the characters' situations. Platonov demonstrates that Chekhov's gently merciless insights into human behaviour were there from the beginning: more than anything, it reminds you that in its less pleasant moments, life tends more to melodrama than to the grave horror of the tragic. Chekhov's enduring attraction lies in how he traces the absurd sorrow of modernity; he understood, with Oscar Wilde, that “the dreadful thing about modernity is that it puts tragedy into the raiment of comedy”.

The play is written with a youthful passion that makes it a peculiarly apt choice for this young company. Stone has collected a very fine cast, and elicits performances that impress on all levels - technical accomplishment, emotional accuracy, courage and nuance, the last being perhaps the most important element in acting Chekhov. They're so good that they rather show up Stone himself in the central role: although he is effective as Platonov, the original hollow man, he only just gets away with it, and certainly doesn't reach the lustre of his colleagues. The one problem with this production is that it's difficult to understand why Platonov is so irresistible: of course, it's understood that in a more exciting context he might not be desirable at all, that these destructive desires are frothed out of ennui; but as a man of surfaces he might glitter more fascinatingly. Stone might have to settle for merely being a brilliant adaptor and director.

Perhaps the greatest compliment you can pay the actors is that they aren’t overwhelmed by the set. Evan Granger’s design, sensuously lit with an air of fin de siecle decadence by Danny Pettingill, is spectacular. The huge stage is defined by the ruinous walls of an elegant house, and filled with about a foot of water, in which are placed the tables, chaise lounges and standard lamps of a 19th century bourgeois home. The immediate effect is jaw-droppingly beautiful, but the set is much more than a gorgeous background: the water becomes an expressive part of the emotional action in ways that recall (forgive me, but it’s true) how water is used in Tarkovsky's films. As the actors wade across the stage, the ripples create a constant susurrus, and the splashing underlines the violence or gentleness of bodily gestures, just as the water's reflections suggest the deceptive, shifting surfaces of Chekhov’s characters.

It's an exquisite production and, as everyone is telling everyone else, you'd be mad to miss it. On a purely personal note, I'm delighted that it's happening on my side of town, and I'm hoping that all exciting theatre will now move westwards. The one disadvantage of the Hayloft space is the band that plays next door, mostly destroying Jared Lewis's delicate sound design all through the first half. Again, it's a tribute to the performers that they were both audible and unfazed, even weaving the ambient noise into the dialogue, and the band wasn't nearly as intrusive as it might have been.

I'm told that the space will be soundproofed soon: in the meantime, don't let a little unprogrammed music put you off. With Platonov, The Hayloft Project proves that it's the real thing, and that it's here to stay. This is a show that people will be talking about years from now.

Pictures: (Top) Chris Ryan and Meredith Penman. (Below) The cast of Platonov by The Hayloft Project. Photos: Jeff Busby

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King Lear by William Shakespeare and The Seagull by Anton Chekhov, directed byTrevor Nunn. Designed by Christopher Oram, lighting design by Neil Austin, music composed by Stephen Edis, sound design by Fergus O’Hare. With Ian McKellan, Frances Barber, Monica Dolan, William Gaunt, Romolo Garai, Richard Goulding and other members of the RSC. Royal Shakespeare Company @ the State Theatre, Victorian Arts Centre, until August 5. Bookings: 1300 136 166.

It’s fair to say that your expectations can sometimes obscure what you are actually watching on stage. When I excitedly donned my gladrags to see Trevor Nunn’s production of King Lear, I was expecting a polished, if no doubt conservative, example of English classical theatre.

The last thing I expected of one of Shakespeare’s most unrelentingly grim tragedies was a kind of comic opera, complete with Gilbert and Sullivan costumes, overblown set and arch winks at the audience. From the moment the Vincent Price organ music swelled up in the auditorium, signalling a starched procession of regal costumes across the stage, my heart sank into my pointy little shoes.

Sir Ian McKellen’s Lear should be the culmination of a distinguished Shakespearean career which includes Nunn’s stunning 1970s RSC production of Macbeth and his famous performance in Richard Eyre’s Richard III (both, fortunately for us antipodeans, available on DVD). And you can see gleams of a great performance here, a moving portrayal of a powerful man brought to impotence and madness through age and his own folly.

But it is obscured by a mystifyingly mannered production. It is as if Nunn is terrified of ambiguity: every single line in the play seems to have been scoured and then expanded on stage into vignettes of gratuitous detail that distract from the drama, the poetry – and, ultimately, the truth – of the play.

If a letter is referred to, it must be unfolded and perused, whether the text demands this or not. When Edmund (Philip Winchester) is wounded after his faked swordfight with Edgar (Ben Meyjes), not one but two serving maids must emerge from the wings to bandage his arm as he speaks. If someone mentions the gods (which happens a lot in this play) eyes must be cast upwards to the flies. Goneril’s (Frances Barber) poisoning of her sister Regan (Monica Dolan) is signalled by her stealing a vial from a doctor’s case, and rolling her eyes in mock innocence as she showily spikes the wine. Notoriously, if we are speaking of man as a “poor bare forked animal”, Lear has to get his gear off (and Poor Tom, on his back, has to imitate a fork).

And if a Fool is to be hanged, then he must be hanged on stage just before interval, thus destroying what is for me the beautifully tender ambiguity of Lear’s later lament “And my poor fool is hanged!” Which you could argue refers more to Cordelia than to the Fool (and most fruitfully, that it resonates with both meanings, since it’s suspected that originally both parts were played by the same actor).

It’s not at all clear why Nunn decided to set Lear in a Russian court - it adds nothing to the meaning of the play – but it does mean rowdy cossacks having rowdy cossack revels. And also those gold-braided cossies. Nunn’s penchant for leaden illustration is matched by a stunningly literal soundscape that does all but bark when they mention the dogs of war, and which wavers schizophrenically between sound effects like drums and horses neighing, light opera music and the obligatory thundercracks.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that many of the performances seem constrained. They’re even at times difficult to hear. McKellen’s Lear is by no means bad, although sometimes McKellen inclines to ham, but its moments of pure power and pathos – such as the scene where, on the verge of madness, he curses Goneril and stutters into impotence – make the production only the more frustrating.

At its worst, Shakespeare’s great meditation on mortality and the carnal ruthlessness of power is reduced to a comedy about a mad old man. The performances all have their moments – this is no mean cast, after all – but for the most part, only the smaller roles – John Heffernan’s Oswald or Ben Meyjes’s Edgar – give us glimpses of more profound possibilities.

It seems like Shakespeare-lite, a chocolate box production for the tourists. I sat through one of the most traumatising plays in the canon with barely a flicker of feeling, wondering if I was witnessing the decadence of the contemporary British stage.

The following night, I approached The Seagull with some trepidation. Although it’s generally considered an early masterpiece overshadowed by Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard, it stands with Lear as one of my favourite plays. Perhaps it’s purely personal: I think that, in The Seagull, Chekhov gets it right about the pursuit of art. He mercilessly exposes the futility, vanity and pettiness of its pretensions, while at the same time revealing the unforgiving demands of artistic vocation, which require the courage to resist cynicism, even when all illusions have been burned away and when faith rests on nothing at all.

Luckily, Nunn redeems himself with a superb production. Where King Lear is silted up with fussy detail, The Seagull ripples with light and clarity, bringing Chekhov’s lyrical masterpiece to passionate life. Perhaps Nunn is more comfortable with Chekhov’s tough but humane vision than with the brutal bleakness of Lear: certainly, he directs this play with a fluent hand, acutely judging its balance of light and shade, tragedy and comedy.

Christopher Oram’s set, overbearing and inflexible in Lear, becomes an airy thing of light, wood, water and stone, both a cosy domestic space and rural idyll. And Fergus O’Hare's soundscape is a delicate counterpoint to the action, rather than a disconnected series of sound effects. Strangely, since this is a naturalistic production of a naturalistic play, there is much less fussing about with props. Or perhaps it’s simply that Nunn’s obsessive detailing here unobstrusively plumps out the action, rather than being pasted on top of it.

There’s one lapse; no doubt wanting to rhyme his staging of the hanging of Lear’s Fool, Nunn decides to ignore Chekhov’s tactful dramaturgy, in which Konstantin’s suicide attempt occurs off-stage. Nunn enacts it for us just before the interval, cuing a bunch of stage rhubarb as shocked peasants crowd on to the set. But given the deft handling of the whole, and in particular its reading of the complex feeling of the text, I’ll forgive him.

In The Seagull I saw the McKellen I was hoping to see – the virtuosic actor at the full stretch of his abilities, glowing in the midst of a distinguished ensemble. McKellen’s ruefully aging Sorin is irresistible, performed with delicacy, feeling and superb comic timing, and, if he were not matched by his colleagues, McKellen would be in danger of stealing the show.

There are no small parts in Chekhov, and the cast is uniformly strong; but Monica Dolan, as the hard-bitten and heartbroken Masha (“I am in mourning for my life”) stands out for the nuanced irony and restrained pain of her performance. And the night probably belongs to Frances Barber, who gives us an Arkadina of profound complexity. She’s a monstrously narcissistic aging actress whose vanity breaks into shards of vicious wit or sheer panic: manipulative, ruthless, charming and vulnerable. And very funny.

As the young artists whose ideals collide brutally with experience, Konstantin (Richard Goulding) and Nina (Romolo Garai) carry the tragic passions of the play. Goulding’s Konstantin is a young man trapped in childhood, still at the mercy of his mother’s capricious approval, and is at once petulant, absurd and tragic. And Romolo Garai is a thrillingly fearless Nina, whose innocence blazes even as her sanity shatters against a cruel and indifferent world.

In her throbbing musicality, Garai reminds me of Melita Jurisic’s unforgettable performance of Sonya in an MTC production of Uncle Vanya in the early 1990s. The difficult final scene, where Nina is almost mad with the extremity of her anguish, is performed with a beautiful modulation, revealing at once Nina’s joy at her discovery of the true meaning of her vocation and its bitter, almost fatal, price. She’s a tough Nina who, for all the damage she suffers, refuses to be a haplessly broken victim. And, although it’s an impertinence, I’ll take the liberty of claiming that Chekhov would have approved.

Picture: Sir Ian McKellen as King Lear. Photo: Manuel Harlan

A shorter version of this review appeared in today's Australian

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Last Sunday, Daniel Keene delivered the 2006 Rex Cramphorn Memorial Lecture to around 300 people at the Malthouse. It was a grand afternoon. Lindy Davies, who worked with Cramphorn, introduced the lecture with a remembrance of this influential theatre artist, and there was much animated conversation and drinking afterwards.

Those who missed out can download a pdf of the speech from the Malthouse website here (scroll down). Or you can simply read on:

Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares

Hebrews (13 . 2)

We must not fall into the error . . . of judging a people by the politicians who happen to be in power.

Walter Murdoch

REX CRAMPHORN was someone that I never knew. I never saw any of his work. That meeting simply didn’t happen. I heard of him, of course, from actors who were inspired by working with him and from people who had seen his productions and couldn’t forget them. But no, I wasn’t there; and I’m certain that I’m the poorer for not having experienced his work. That’s the thing about theatre: you have to experience it, you have to be there when it happens.

Of course Rex Cramphorn’s ideas, his vision of the theatre, still exist. But you won’t necessarily find these things written down in books. You might be more likely to find them in the way that an actor moves on stage, in the way in which an ensemble chooses to work together or in the attitude of a director towards a text. Rex Cramphorn’s work as a director continues, transmitted through the work of those he influenced. He is still there when it happens.

This is not unusual in the theatre; the living always share the stage with the dead. Because the theatre is a place of both memory and presence.

In the Kabuki theatre of Japan, an actor can be given the name of a famous predecessor. This is considered a great honour and is celebrated by a special performance, a shumei. In this way, Kabuki actors’ names are handed down from generation to generation. The actor who takes on the name of an illustrious predecessor also takes on a responsibility; he is keeping alive the work of that predecessor, and his own work will be judged in the light of his predecessor’s achievements.

Throughout the performance of a Kabuki play that I attended last year in Tokyo, the audience voiced their approval of an actor’s work by shouting his name. This happened several times during the play, whenever the actor (playing the lead role in a traditional, well known play) did something that demonstrated his skill, his command of the stage, his courage, his energy. The name they were shouting – Kanzaburo – had been recently given to the actor; he was Kanzaburo XVIII. The name was generations old. Each time his name was shouted a palpable thrill went through the audience. This joy, this excitement was generated not only by what was happening on stage, but by what had happened before, perhaps generations ago, when a previous Kanzaburo had graced the stage, delighting the audience. It was an extraordinary experience.

Here in Australia, we are a little more reticent in our expressions of approval of an actor’s performance. But for me, every Sally Banner that appears on the stage with a clap of thunder carries with her the memories of all the Sallys that have stood in The Chapel Perilous before her. When Sonya promises Vanya that the two of them will one day find rest from their labours, she is speaking with and for the generations of Sonyas that have despaired and loved and hoped. She is a new Sonya, a different one, but she is the same.

I may seem to be confusing the actor with the role she plays. They are of course different things. Sally Banner was imagined and created by Dorothy Hewett: she is a character out of literature. But she is also a character of the theatre. Theatre has its own language, of which literature is an important part. But that language is not limited to literature. As Jean Cocteau once stated, he was dead against poetry in the theatre, but all for a poetry of the theatre.

Theatre is not merely the recitation of a given text. For Sonya’s words to move us she must be embodied by the actor playing her, she must live and breathe on the stage. When we remember a Sonya we have seen we remember two things: the character created by Chekhov and the actor who played her, who took on the burdens of her grief and the radiance of her hopes, whose voice trembled with love or despair, who touched the hand of Vanya to comfort him.

We have on the one hand, the permanence of Chekhov’s creation, the text, and on the other we have its ephemeral manifestation, the performance of the actor. One is fixed in time, the other is, as it were, sculpted out of time: each moment is created in front of us in time and space, never to be repeated in exactly the same way, never able to be captured except by what about it persists in the memory, which can never be the entirety of the performance, but only those moments, those gestures, that certain rise and fall of the voice that touch us deeply enough to be retained within our hearts. And Chekhov is there when that happens.

We can in fact perceive two views of history in this situation: one that is the guardian of the past and speaks of the changeless; the other that speaks of constant impermanence and never ceasing change.

The first kind of history is one that a state might like to write for itself (a clear narrative of its achievements) because it is almost invariably a history that confers power on those who write it, it confirms their permanent place in the world; it is a history of the supposedly inevitable. It is a history of the powerful for the powerful.

The second kind of history is a constant reminder of our ephemerality, it is a history that embraces our mortality. It cannot confer nor confirm power. It is a history in which all human beings are equally fragile. Or comic. Or guilty. Or lost.

I am chiefly interested in the kind of theatre that embraces change and is a reminder of our mortality; theatre that does not confirm power, but rather admits fragility, acknowledges failure, that recognizes tragedy and is disrespectful enough to create comedy. That’s the theatre that I keep imagining and that I write for. I write for it in order to create it. A playwright must do this; the play that he or she writes is always a new proposal for the theatre. It is an imaginative act that suggests something beyond the play itself and contains the possibility for new forms of theatre. It does this because the content of a play demands the clearest expression possible. This clarity is necessary because of the nature of the theatre event itself: it is ephemeral. It happens before our eyes and then it is gone. The performance of a play must present its comedy, its tragedy, its life, in the time during which it is created on stage in front of the audience. It can do nothing else. Each time it does this, it is particular, it is unique; in this it is theatre created anew, and within that fact lies the possibility of a new kind of theatre. At least this is what I imagine. I imagine the kind of theatre where it might be possible to capture what is immanent or nascent in a society and not only that which already exists in apparent permanence; it might confront unpleasant memories, it might stare catastrophe in the face and not be afraid, it might take arms against a sea of troubles, it might find secret joys buried in the solid walls of a joyless conformity, it might scratch words in a diary that must not be kept, or be the place where a man transformed into a beetle might lament his fate. It might be wilful and perhaps mutinous. It might be the kind of theatre that asks difficult questions or makes remarkable promises; the kind of theatre that does not forget the past, yet refuses to accept the lie of permanence created by those who demand the ownership of power.

It seems to me that at present the powerful have very little to teach us, except how to cope with their failures and crimes, and absolutely nothing to teach the future.

I am of course assuming that I’m speaking to the powerless. Or should I say rather, that I am speaking to equals. I assume this because I am standing in a theatre. To step into a theatre is to accept a certain kind of equality. The actors on stage and the audience in the stalls are each the master of one another, each the servant. For a short time, the audience places their fate, metaphorically at least, into the hands of the actors, who in turn do the same; their fate also depends on the audience. Both the audience and the actors are about to go on a small journey together. When the play sets sail, everyone on board hopes for a good outcome, that when the curtain falls they will have landed on a distant shore richer for their journey together. When the actors bow in thanks at the end of a play, the applause that they receive is the applause of equals, which is the most meaningful kind of all.

A theatre, for me, is a kind of common, an open space, a town square, circle of stones. Here is where we gather, to hatch our plots, to lament, to celebrate, to be idle, to display ourselves, to remember, to dream and to demand; an empty space that offers a freedom available to all.

If we are to defend our right to this empty space, and I think that, unfortunately, we need to, then we must be clear about what we are defending, what we are demanding.

When a place like La Mama Theatre is under threat of losing its federal funding, you know that something is drastically wrong. La Mama is the very embodiment of that democratic public space that theatre can be; its central focus is on the making of theatre, on creating those ephemeral constructions of desire that theatre artists are determined to make. La Mama isn’t restricted to any one type of event. It thrives on difference, as all democracies do; that’s how they both sustain and renew themselves.

It is not nostalgia for what La Mama has achieved in the past that fuels the anger over its current uncertain position; it is the outrage felt by people who consider the act of making, of all kinds, the crucial thing.

To make is to manifest a possibility; to propose a different arrangement of reality, to introduce the never before into what has always been, to stretch the imagination. It’s a disturbance. There was theatre before Hibberd’s Monk O’Neill. Since he crawled on stage on all fours, Australian theatre hasn’t been the same. There was theatre before Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis, that unnerving black diamond that cuts to the spiritual quick; that play changed the theatrical landscape. To make these things, to make anything for the theatre, requires labour and skill; these things are born out of anger, or joy, or love or despair. And it’s their making that matters. Especially now, in a time when we seem to be surrounded by destruction, the urge to make, to add to the world’s store of beauty rather than to reduce it, whether that beauty makes us weep or laugh, seems to me of terrible urgency and importance.

What do we want to make? Why do we want to make it? Since human beings tumbled into consciousness from the silence of hunger and sleep we have told stories, sung songs, lamented our losses and celebrated our loves. We have done these useless things whose only purpose is to make us more aware of who we are, to console us beneath the void of eternity, to bring us joys difficult to name, but without which we would be adrift on the sea of existence without understanding its depth, its dangers or its beauty.

We crave to know who we are and what it is possible for us to be. But we must be prepared for the possibility that the answers to these questions may be further questions, ambiguities and inscrutable puzzles. We may have to welcome unanswerable questions, and love the beauty that refuses to flatter us.

I have never believed that theatre is merely a mirror held up to society, as if its sole purpose was to satisfy some monstrous vanity in the audience, as if its only justification was that it show us what we already know or are prepared to accept about ourselves. If this was its only purpose it could never really question, never actually oppose, never openly suggest an alternative to what already exists; it could never offer anything new; it would be safe. It would be culture’s Fast Food. It would be deadly. It would almost invariably be a narrow and nationalistic reflection, trapped within its borders both real and fearfully imagined, unable to admit difference and forever wary of strangers.

On the other hand, the theatre might be considered a lens through which certain propositions can be observed, propositions about reality; a place where a negotiation takes place, between everyday perceptions and imagination, between what is obvious and what is hidden; between what has been forgotten and what persists in the memory, between fear and recognition. It would be a place without borders, that welcomed strangers without fear, a place where a truth could be told that was not the accepted truth. It could offer alternatives.

It could be a place of wilful, mutinous separation, which is the meaning of the Latin word seditio, which is the root of the word sedition.

This possible theatre that I am suggesting does not depend only on the courage and skill of writers. Writers, when they enter the theatre, and they must enter it, must learn how it works, and how it may fail, must enter it humbly. Their texts, those marks made on the blank field of paper that they face each day, are only where theatre begins. Their texts are not where theatre ends.

To create theatre is to practice an art that is always pragmatic, always collaborative. It requires people, time, money. It has to be made from what is available. And the people making it must eat, they will probably argue, they need to take a piss, they have forgotten their lines, they arrive late, they have personal problems, they have lost their wallet, they don’t understand the designer’s drawings, they think the writer has made a mistake, they smoke in the stairwell, they refuse to change a line of the text, they are worried that people won’t come to the performance, they are tired, they are terrified when they realise that the play opens next Thursday. More often than not, they get there in the end. The audience take their seats, thinking everything is under control. The lights go down. The stage is lit. The audience place a couple of hours of their lives in the hands of the artists who have made something that they want the audience to see.

I think that’s a completely wonderful thing, a very particular and very human meeting of risk and certainty, of labour and hope. It’s all a little bit uncertain, but it can often be a beautiful occasion. You have to be there when it happens.

But no, the theatre is not a museum that merely preserves the labour of writers. Theatre can be created without writers. Anyone who writes for the theatre should understand that, and it should be both a warning and an invitation. What they write should be something impossible to achieve without them. Because the theatre is a place of extremes. Something has to happen in the theatre that cannot happen anywhere else and at no other time. That’s why the audience comes to the theatre in the first place.

To write for the theatre is a task that is imprisoned by the theatre’s technical limitations and illuminated by its metaphorical possibilities. Language might be able to sing in the theatre, but it cannot explain; explanations are too slow. Theatre has no footnotes. In the theatre, language must happen, it must be an event. To quote Jean Cocteau again: it must be like the rigging of a great ship, visible from a distance.

To write for the theatre requires a shipbuilder’s skill and a poet’s imagination.

Theatre is not an artefact, not a dead thing on display. It is not a pork chop or a pop-up toaster, It is not, and can never be honestly considered to be the product of any that you might call an industry. It is too chaotic, and too insistent on its chaos, too individual and all too human. It depends on chaos. Industry depends on the opposite. As Baudelaire once famously said: a poem must be a debacle of the intellect. An act of theatre is a poem. The initial impact of a poem is never on the intellect. It isn’t something that needs to be wrestled into submission before you can admit to understanding it. It’s something that you have to experience before you can possibly comprehend it. Perhaps it’s like love, but who would dare say that?

Theatre can do very similar things to poetry; it can disturb our vision of the world, it can happily disappoint the literalists, and it can confound the critics (as it often does) who understand theatre as nothing more than the evidence of social engineering, as merely a reaction rather than a creation. Theatre can drag us into the funny or the tragic worlds of imaginary people; people who may be so unlike us that it is impossible to say that they are not the same as us. Theatre can be disturbing in that way. It can brighten the path through the darkness of conformity and fear that has been so carefully laid out for us, that reduces us to predictable numbers. Neither comfortable nor relaxed, theatre can be quite frantic; alert and also very alarmed. It can be quite dangerous, seditious in fact; wilfully mutinous, suggesting a separation from the accepted norm. It can offer another way of looking at things. Perhaps.

In Australia, a few centuries ago, artists of all kinds swallowed the then current notion of the arts being an ‘industry’ they were employed in, rather than something that they freely practiced. It was a very bad mistake. It allowed the powers that be to treat the arts as a product of society’s labour rather than an expression of society’s desires. Desires make no profit. They cannot be entered in the ledger; they are neither debit nor credit. And they may be wilful, they may disagree with the truth chosen by the powerful as the only truth.

Of course it costs money to make theatre. The money spent to create it is always in the form of a wager, a risk. Basically, will people turn up? Will tickets be sold? I think it’s always a risk worth taking. But of course I would think that. A percentage of the money a play earns puts food on my table.

It’s also possible to think of the money spent on the creation of theatre as an investment, not in material things, and without the expectation of a material return. There are certain things within a society whose solvency, whose sustainability, are questions of spirit and not of finance. Their profit might be a deeper understanding of compassion, a small hope generated, a truth better understood or a grief or a love more lightly borne. These kinds of things have no material value, they won’t make headlines, they can’t be accounted for. But to quote William Carlos Williams:

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

In Australia, government funding for the arts remains at the minimum required to sustain an at least credible amount of artistic activity; it remains at a level just high enough sustain the idea that we are a ‘cultured’ society. At present it seems that corporate fundamentalism guides arts policy in this country. That democratic public space that the theatre represents must always return a profit. It is a profit not defined in human terms. Humans are too chaotic. Humans are too unreliable; they insist on remembering, they insist on telling stories and singing songs, on doing useless things, they insist on counting their dead.

I’m being theatrical, yes. I’m exaggerating, yes. Yes, I’m being mutinous. I’m poking fun. And I’m quite serious about all of it. I’m making the riggings of a ship, one that I think should set sail as soon as possible. I’m being naïve. I’m wishing for things to be as they were, when Australia was a different place, before we were needlessly involved in wars of aggression, when we had a union movement that could defend the rights of workers, when student unions were empowered to defend and express the rights and desires of students, when we didn’t turn away the refugees that came to us, when we didn’t allow shiploads of desperate people to drown off our coastline, when past wrongs were admitted and we were graced with forgiveness, when we defended the rights of our citizens imprisoned by foreign governments, when we lived in a country whose reality wasn’t created solely by current political reality but by the unchanging reality of its citizens’ desires.

When was that? you might ask. It was never, really. It was in an imaginary time, when we were lost in the myth of ourselves, guided by aspirations, not driven by fears. With respect to indigenous peoples, it was a time of dreaming, when we were making our world, not dismantling it to fit the moment’s political contingencies or the market’s greed. It was a dream.

This notion of dreaming is crucial to the theatre. The theatre is where we come to dream in public. None of us can decide what we dream. But here in this room is where what is unconscious, collectively and individually, can be made visible, can be heard, can frighten or delight us, can remind us of our hidden griefs or awaken our secret joys. Here the mysterious is made welcome, here the stranger in us all can be embraced.

Against this possibility is the growing pressure to conform; to all dream the same dream. From school children being required to salute the flag (flying from a government approved ‘working’ flagpole) to citizenship tests that propose to measure the patriotism of those seeking to make their lives here, this pressure to conform is driven, as it is always driven, by fear, fear of the stranger, the outsider, the other.

That common ground I mentioned is being classified ‘Australians Only’ while the definition of what it means to be an Australian grows narrower and narrower.

Those appalling bumper stickers of the Australian flag with the words ‘love it or leave it’ printed beside it might as well say ‘Big Brother is watching you’. I’m talking about Orwell’s Big Brother, not a television show. Both ‘love it or leave it’ and ‘Big Brother is watching’ carry the same threat: you must conform. To criticize is to do so at your peril.

You cannot tell human beings what to love; but you can teach them what to hate.

That town square that I mentioned can also be a place where people are ridiculed, where difference might lead to violence, where the worst instincts of human beings can be unleashed.

But on that town square, I believe that our differences can unite us. We are, most of us, a nation of immigrants, of boat people. We walk on land that has been held sacred by peoples who have been wiser and perhaps gentler than we late comers in their care of it. Now they too are often treated as strangers, refugees on their own soil.

It is difference that unites us; not differences of nationality, which are ultimately superficial, but our individual differences, which are obvious and infinite. In the theatre, perhaps more than in any other place, it is possible to celebrate difference, to honour it with our labour and our attention.

I wrote some parts of this lecture sitting under a tree on the banks of the Yarra. While doing this I understood, not for the first time, but with a new clarity, how much I love this city where I was born. This feeling was all the stronger because I also began to understand how much I demand from it, how much I want it to give me. Freedom, certainly, and peace; a safe home for my family. And I want it to be brave. I want its artists to be courageous in their endeavours, fearing no failure but failure of heart, I want audiences to be open and curious; not uncritical, but willing to take risks. I want these things because I think they are possible here. They are difficult as well, of course, and sometimes bloody impossible. But even failure can be useful. Success, after all, teaches us nothing. I want this city I live in to not be afraid of difference, to welcome strangers so that it might perhaps be blessed by angels. Because there are as many kinds of theatre as there are people determined to make it. That’s what’s astonishing about it. And the only thing that keeps theatre alive is curiosity, curiosity and hunger, a hunger to see, to know what lies just outside our everyday experience, what lingers just beyond our reach. The immense sadness of existence or perhaps its exhilarating possibilities.

This public space I keep talking about, is an open invitation to participate in the life of a society, and it is crucial for a particular reason; it creates in the mind and the heart of the person who uses it the ideas of freedom and belonging. This freedom is what Winston Smith in Orwell’s 1984 risked everything to have. It was this space inside that Winston was desperate for; a place where he could know that 2 + 2 = 4, that war was not peace, where he could be free to be, if he had to be, a minority of one.

I have to confess, yes, this late in the piece, that I’m never happy theorising, talking in abstracts. It’s out of my depth. My correct depth is just under the skin of the characters I invent. I don’t mean that I hide beneath their skin (although of course I do) but rather that I abide there for a while. I inhabit their world and they inhabit mine. It is a peculiar symbiosis that I cannot exactly explain. But while I am writing a play, the characters in it become my companions for a time, sometimes for only a few weeks, sometimes for months. Once the play is finished, we part. I will never experience their presence again, not in the same way as I did during their creation. Once a play is finished, the characters in it no longer belong to me. They exist, there on the page, waiting for the breath and the body of an actor to bring them to life. I meet them again when they are on the stage. They are old friends of mine; they have changed, they are no longer as I imagined them, and they can never be. They exist for an audience in a form which is never the form in which they existed for me. In this there is a loss, a certain grief, but there is also much more than this. There is the knowledge that they are free of me, that they have escaped my perceptions of them; now they belong to the actors who play them and to the audience which witnesses them. They will remain in the actor’s memory of his or her performance. They will remain in the memories of certain members of the audience perhaps. By others they will be forgotten. That’s as it should be. No one is obliged to like, to understand, to feel compassion for or to be amused by the characters that I invent. They are offered to the audience in the hope that they will be embraced by the kindness of strangers, that they will add something to the sum of an audience member’s experience, that they will seem to be real. It is all seeming to be in the theatre, it is all pretending, all illusion. These things are, for me, necessary things. They are the beautiful and unique collusion of the real and the imagined, and sometimes of the wished for and the lost.

The stage is always shared by the living and the dead. We are everything the dead are not. We are what is for them impossible. They are, for us, what is inevitable. The impossible. The inevitable. Yes, that’s what I mean about theatre. Theatre is what connects these two things; theatre is where our lives are stretched tight across this gap, a gap as narrow as a fingernail, as broad as an ocean. And when our lives are struck, by the footfall of an actor, or by the applause of an audience, it makes a sound ‘like the distant sound of a string breaking, as if in the sky, a dying melancholy sound’ as happens at the end of a comedy both sad and funny.

Yes, Chekhov again. I don’t know why I return to him so often, but I find myself constantly doing so. He called The Cherry Orchard a comedy; perhaps because, like Oscar Wilde, he thought life too important to take seriously.

As a theatre artist I know the importance of collaboration. I know what it demands, which is always too much; and why it fails; because it demands the wrong things. I have been mostly fortunate in my collaborations. Those that have not worked have been painful, as failure always is. The guiding principal behind collaborations that succeed must be that each person involved works alone, but in the company of others. This is a delicate balance to strike. It depends on the acknowledgement and the active encouragement of difference, a constant insistence on retaining the integrity of the individual. It’s hard work; it demands certain kinds of courage, it rejects vanity, it respects nothing but the endeavour to make something happen and to make it happen truly; it asks for love, and it insists on joy.

It is this integrity of the individual that must be defended, this right for the individual to speak his or her mind, to make what she will make, to respond as he will to the beauty or the tragedy of our lives.

I think that in Melbourne theatre at the moment a generational change is taking place, a shifting of the cultural plates. This is as it should be. New theatre artists are emerging who are articulate, dedicated and skilled; their references are broad, their practice ambitious. Many of them have been nurtured by artists who have been marginalised, who have had to wait for this new generation to confirm the boldness of their original work. These new artists are driven by curiosity and a hunger for new forms. They are not caged in the trap of parochialism. They are immediate and local, their work happens here, now. But their work is also larger than that. They are not simply reflecting the current state of this particular society, as if theatre’s only justification was that it be a record of social conditions and attitudes in the society in which it was created. If it were only that it would be nothing more than a kind of journalistic panto, whose only value would be as a reminder, a reference to something more important. Theatre itself is important, it is more than the sum of its parts, it expresses more than the current state of affairs (which of course it may do, which may be what it does necessarily, no matter what form it takes). To think of the theatre only as a kind of litmus paper dipped into the soup of society is too crude and too narrow a view. There are of course plays that do nothing more than repeat what can be read in a newspaper, or record what dinner guests spoke about over their crab claws and dry white. These are the deadly plays that have been boring audiences stupid for a long time, or stroking the vanity of those it apes, eliciting the hollow laughter of identification without the shock of recognition.

But Melbourne’s theatre culture grows far richer than that. The pity seems to be that the companies and individuals who make it rich grow poorer. As theatre practitioners become more skilled, more ambitious and daring, their capacity to realize their work diminishes. In real terms, there has been a fall of 24 per cent in Federal funding for small to middle size theatre companies since 1998. And it continues to diminish. But it’s the place where most of this new work is happening, where new energies are being born. As one thing grows, the other shrinks, as if there is a limit to how much creative energy there is allowed to be.

The cultural mask we wear, I suppose, must not alter too much. It must not be allowed to become too different from the one we have decided that we are supposed to wear.

But if you train artists to be articulate, then you create the possibility of articulate dissent. I keep coming back to this idea of dissent. I keep coming back to it because I cannot avoid it.

I approached the writing of this lecture as I approach all of my work: with a blank sheet of paper. I decided nothing before I sat down to write. I wanted to see what emerged, and I would follow that. I had to trust myself. I have been working in the theatre and thinking about the theatre for almost thirty years. But I seldom speak about it; I don’t make statements. This lecture was a chance to make a statement, but I wanted that statement to emerge from what had accumulated in my thought, what rose to the surface, what seemed necessary to say.

I suppose that I hoped to talk about what is brilliant and brave and essential about theatre, but I kept worrying about attitudes that seem determined to stifle these things; that is, that are determined to stamp out difference. I kept coming up against the fear of dissent, as if this society was so fragile that it cannot be questioned, as if our culture was so weak it cannot be challenged, as if the artistic forms that now exists cannot admit the creation of new forms. All of this is about fear.

The sedition laws are laws created by fear. Any law that is created by fear is a dangerous law, and it will create more fear. But perhaps that’s the point: if people are kept afraid then they are kept quiet, they are kept in their place, they will offer no threat to the powers that have created that fear. There will be no need to censor them; they will censor themselves.

That is the real danger of the sedition laws. If it is unlikely that artists will be prosecuted under those laws, it is almost certain that they will be too afraid to test them.

The sedition laws fall over the arts as a whole like a terrible shadow. Their purpose is too vague to allow us any comfort. No one is safe from them, especially people who support and create difference.

There are those who insist that there is such a thing as a ‘central culture of our time’. The films of Antonioni for example, or the music of Brahms. These things exist, yes, and they are vibrant, they speak clearly and strongly, they have meaning. They are also secured safely in the past; because they have been chained there by those who insist that culture is fixed and unchanging, challenges nothing, and that it is part of a clear narrative of achievement. But when these things were first made, this film, this music, they were quite different to what had gone before. They created unease. They were perhaps considered mutinous, they were not well received in some circles. Their life in the present can be either as cultural monuments, objects of a fetish blind to their context, or they can be rediscovered in the light of what they have made possible, in the radiance of those things created by their rude inheritors. The suggestion that anything that exists outside of these permanent manifestations of a ‘central culture’ is to be considered marginal, is to deny the arts their life and to set culture in concrete. I don’t particularly want to live in a museum, or in a prison, no matter how interesting the bars might be. I don’t want to be that safe. I don’t want cultural policemen guarding the cell of my experience. I don’t think that new artists and the forms that they create, with all of their disruptions and frankly disturbing ideas, should be locked in a box labelled marginal. Or seditious.

What an artist is always trying to do is to make something that has never been made before; and as Alberto Giacometti once said ‘that it succeeds, that it fails, after all, is secondary’.

Those who make can’t be ignored, safely or otherwise. Because they are very stubborn people.

It is the making that matters. The making of new stories, the retelling and reinterpreting of old ones, the bringing into the light, out of the shadows of the old forms, new ways of seeing the world, other perspectives, new blessings and gifts. We must try to be open to these things, we must be ready to embrace them if they move us, to question them if they ensnare us in the traps of false security or the lies of power. We must ‘speak what we feel, not what we ought to say’. Both makers of theatre and those who choose to witness it. Now is the time to be brave, to make what we will, to respond as out hearts tell us to, freely and without fear. It is the time to insist on our right to that common space, that town square, that circle of stones where each of us may arrive as we are, not as we must be, where we can show our faces to each other without fear or shame masking them; it is time for a theatre of difference.

To quote Les Murray, from his poem, The Breach:

now I’ve said my ideals

And to close, again with something from Mister Chekhov, who still sits in my heart, not as a reminder of the past, but as an urge to continue breaking the rules that he created by breaking the rules that he encountered.

It’s Nina speaking, approaching the end of The Seagull. She says:

In what we do – whether we act on the stage or write – the most important thing isn’t fame or glory or anything I used to dream about – but the ability to endure. To know how to bear your cross and have faith. I have faith, and my pain is less, and when I think about my vocation I’m not afraid of life.

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