My mini-essay on Antonin Artaud in my review of Jet of Blood, in particular my (yes, provocative) speculations on the connections between extremist politics and Artaud's writings, has provoked some interesting discussions in the blogosphere. George Hunka at Superfluities has a couple of thoughtful responses here and here. I also got a nice note from Pierre Joris of Nomadics, saying he thinks I'm a bit unjust to Artaud. He included a soon-to-be-published essay in which Pierre considers the Theatre of Cruelty as the basis for a contemporary poetics and extends a useful Deleuzian distinction:

This ... distinction between combat-against (which is war, is will to destruction, is judgment by god proclaiming destruction as something “just,” is mutilation, reduction, will to domination) and combat-between which is the on-going expression of a powerful vitality that is involved in change, in becoming (Deleuze uses the example of the baby). Turn the word “war” around and you get “raw” — the crudo, the cruel is the opposite of “war.” As I put it in the Nomad Manifestos: being is on the side of death, becoming is on the side of life, is always a violent action, “cruel” in the terms we are using right now. Becoming is also an, if not for me the, essential incarnation of the “nomad war machine.” The prevailing new-agy, peace-loving, peace-nicky, p.c.-y sit-down, sit-in approach to both external conflict and internal struggle refuses to make the distinction between combat-against and combat-between and is therefore unable to acknowledge the sheer violence — cruelty —that inhabits & is the growth-vector of all living forms, of life. And so the life that is creative, that is a becoming, will be “cruel” — it will be involved in what the Islamic mystics have called a “jihad” — here is another term that was kidnapped by judgmental Islamic (i.e. monotheistic) clerics in an effort to change its meaning from combat-between to combat-against.

It's a distinction I ignored in my comparing Artaud to Osama Bin Laden and Pol Pot. However, I'm not entirely convinced that it's a distinction Artaud is careful to make himself, although some of us might want to: it seems to me that Artaud, in arguing against the objections to his conception of the Theatre of Cruelty, made a different argument. "Cruelty," says Artaud, "is not synonymous with bloodshed, martyred flesh, crucified enemies. This identification of cruelty with tortured victims is a very minor aspect of the question. In the practice of cruelty there is a kind of higher determinism, to which the executioner-tormenter himself is determined and which he must be determined to endure when the time comes. Cruelty is above all lucid, a kind of rigid control and submission to necessity. There is no cruelty without consciousness...It is consciousness that gives to the exercise of every act of life its blood-red colour, its cruel nuance, since it is understood that life is always someone's death." Artaud is not saying that torture, for example, is a distortion of the Theatre of Cruelty: he is saying that it is only a minor part of it. What mattered to Artaud was not brutality, which is too brutish to call up in him anything but distaste (although he does not reject it), but the consciousness which understands its own suffering in practising it.

Nick at Rat Sass went off the deep end:

Alison Croggon at theatre notes has obviously read more criticisms on Artaud than actual writings by Artaud. She parrots the negative critiques that have always been attached to this singularly important theatre theorist. So nothing new in her attempt to marginalize Artaudian theatre by classifying it to the experience of the lunatic asylum, war zone and concentration camp. However, Alison extends this old criticism to new a level by outrageously and unconscionably comparing Artaud to violent terrorist killers Osama bin Laden and Pol Pot. She goes so far as to suggest that Artaud would have celebrated the 9/11 attacks as “the greatest work of art there has ever been!”

Nick read my review again, calmed down, and in his comments we're having an interesting coversation. My (slightly polished) answer, in part, to his objections, might be of interest here:

What is a terrorist? It’s a word that is almost meaningless, given that the same acts (randomly killing people in order to manipulate a civilian population through fear) are labelled terrorist in some cases and legitimate warfare in others. An artist like Artaud illuminates the hypocrisies of these false divisions. I wouldn’t apply Bush’s false definitions to an argument about Artaud: Artaud is a better tool for applying to Bush.

Of course revolutionary artists are, in a crucial and profound sense, activists, and many actually are activists, although artists always fit uncomfortably in political worlds. Artaud was not interested in social revolution (though there are very few modernist artists who did not flirt with the huge ideologies of the time, whether communism, socialism or fascism), but he was still interested in changing the world. And his ideas, from the point of view of a State that wishes to exert absolute control, are as dangerous - maybe more dangerous - as any social activist. And he meant them to be, he wanted them to exert real effects in a real world.

What worries me about what you’re saying here about separating “poetic” from “political” activism is that they are not so easily divided (from the Romantics to the Modernists on) and you run the danger of doing what the State wants, ie, of claiming that art is “above” politics and has no relation to or purchase on the “real” world. This is a very complex argument, and I don’t have the space or time to make the proper distinctions here. Art is an enactment, of course, and creates its own alternative and virtual space, which is a different space to that in which those acts which we call terrorist (and those other acts which are not called terrorist) exist. It is a space of possibility. That is what is dangerous about it as far as the State is concerned; it does not want certain possibilities to be articulated. That is also, of course, why the State objects to terrorism. It does not object to people being murdered or tortured or having their homes or families destroyed, although this is what it claims is wrong about terrorism. If it did object to these things, it wouldn’t practice them itself. As far as the State is concerned, terrorism is wrong, as art is wrong, because it suggests other worlds than this one are possible.

The difference between terrorism and art is that terrorism, unlike art, is almost wholly nihilist and so, unlike art, kills people. I don’t think even Artaud is nihilist: no artist can be, because he or she practises art, which makes as well as destroys. The best description of terrorism I ever read is in Blaise Cendrars’ amazing short novel, Moravagine, where he describes the anarchists in Russia: it’s a terrifying description, because he shows the attraction of the pure act. But again, this is where I come back to Artaud, because the pure act is what he wanted to achieve, and I personally have problems with the whole idea of purity.

Some of your objections seem to me to come out of fear. Well, I guess there’s good reason for that. My country has passed new Sedition laws that mean that I could go to prison for seven years for things I have already written. Even, perhaps, this post. As far as the State is concerned, Artaud’s ideas and Osama bin Laden’s are equally threatening. Hence the bizarre and otherwise reasonless prosecution of the Critical Art Ensemble. But what if they are equally dangerous, even though one is art and the other is “real”? I think the State is pretty good at identifying threats to its pursuit of absolute power. And make no mistake, that kind of State is what we’re getting, in Britain, the US and here.

Which brings me to the question of Sedition. Via the excellent Freedom of Expression blog, and of course Ben over at Parachute of a Playwright, the latest on Attorney-General Phil Ruddock's summary rejection of any changes to the Sedition provisions in the Anti-Terror Bill, despite the recommendations of the Senate Committee last year and a review by the Australian Law Reform Commission.

As media organisations, lawyers, artists and anyone interested in human rights have all pointed out, repeatedly, the Sedition laws are a fundamental and serious threat to freedom of speech, since they do not distinguish between legitimate dissent and incitement to violence, and they are already having pernicious effects as the culture self-censors to avoid breaking the law. And here's the rub: in order to defend freedom of expression, must we claim that art has no political or social agency at all, that it exists, in effect, outside the world we live in?

Read More.....

Jet of Blood, adapted from Antonin Artaud, directed by Olivia Allen. Designed by Adam Gardnir, lighting by Luke Hails, sound by Hayley Forward. With Simon Stone, Amelia Best, Lara Tumak, Austin Castiglione, Katherine Tonkin, Julian Crotti, Roderick Cairns and Grant Cartwright. Ignite @ Theatreworks, until October 15.

This production of Antonin Artaud's rarely-performed Jet of Blood reminds me of the joke in Educating Rita. Q: How do you solve the staging problems of Peer Gynt? A: Do it on the radio. How does one realise Artaud on stage? By doing something else.

To be fair, not even Artaud could realise Artaud; his own productions in Paris in the 1920s were dismal failures. He is, however, the most influential failure in theatrical history: his mark on 20th century theatre is indelible and profound, and is only rivalled by Brecht. The ideas articulated in Artaud's writings inform the work of groundbreaking directors as diverse as Roger Blin, Judith Malina and Julian Beck, Joseph Chaikin, Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski and, more locally, Barrie Kosky. Edward Bond, Howard Barker and Sarah Kane are unimaginable without him.



But Artaud straight is a phenomenon that is, ultimately, unassimilable. The first and last thing you notice about his writing is its anguish: all his life, Artaud delineated a landscape of pain, in which the agony of the body is indistinguishable from the agony of the mind. This, he says again and again in his acute self-analysis, is a result of his mental illness. From his adolescence, Artaud was periodically incarcerated with a condition that looks very like schizophrenia.

What makes Artaud different from most mentally ill people is that, in what is almost a contradiction in terms, he was coldly conscious of his madness, and was capable of describing it with an almost savagely clinical intelligence. He never romanticised his sickness: he experienced it as horror and obliteration, and his experiments in theatre and mysticism were in part driven by a desire for transformation, for a resolution of the polarities that tormented him. His entire desire was to transform dualities - art and life, spirit and flesh, rationality and irrationality - into a unified consciousness; and the means he proposed was violence. The "cruelty" he demanded from theatre had an austerely moral purpose.

The second thing you notice about Artaud's work that's it's revolutionary. However, Artaud was completely hostile to any idea of social revolution, breaking in disgust from the Surrealists when they briefly embraced Communism. His revolution was solely cultural: a stance that, as Susan Sontag points out in her marvellous essay Artaud, is inherently conservative. Like many modernists, Artaud was only interested in individual transformation: for him, social revolution was worse than meaningless.

Artaud envisioned a theatre was, at its core, religious: what he sought was an experience which, like the "chemical marriage" of the Alchemists, would resolve his warring dualities into a coherent whole. Sontag is correct when she points to the extremity of his "moral rigour", commenting that Oliver Cromwell and Girolamo Savanarola might well have approved the theatre he proposed.

Certainly, Artaud shares with figures like Osama bin Laden or Pol Pot a singular and apocalyptic moral vision that seeks purification through destruction and violence. It is not hard to imagine Artaud following Stockhausen, who in a widely reviled remark shortly after the 9/11 attacks, called the destruction of the Twin Towers "the greatest work of art there has ever been!" "I am not a madman," Artaud said, late in his life. "I am a fanatic." Like all Artaud's self-diagnoses, this statement has the cold coruscation of truth.

What, then, to make of competing claims for an "authentic" experience of Artaud? Outside a lunatic asylum, a war zone or a concentration camp, I am not sure whether there can be such a thing. It is possible to think of the theatrics of torture in Abu Ghraib - the posing for photographs, the obliterating of the human body, the totalising word, the sexual loathing - as the ultimate Artaudian theatre. Like many poets, Artaud was lamentably literal.

I can't think of anyone who has taken Artaud's ideas in toto and realised them in the theatre; and in my heart, I can't imagine why anyone would want to. He is a catalyst and a provocation, rather than a model. Grotowski's actor-centred quest for sacred truth or Brook's aesthetic sensuousness are far too humane to be genuinely Artaudian. Making Artaud is, in many ways, also an unmaking of Artaud.

Which leads me, finally, to Ignite's production of Jet of Blood. Ignite is a company of young theatre artists drawn mainly from WAAPA and the VCA, and their ambition in choosing to work on this inscrutable and unperformable text is admirable. Jet of Blood, written in 1925, contains some of the most blackly comic, extreme and misogynist stage directions ever written. They culminate in this nightmarish vision: "an enormous number of scorpions emerge from under the WET NURSE's skirts and begin to swarm in her vagina, which swells and splits, becomes vitreous, and flashes like the sun. The YOUNG MAN and the BAWD flee like victims of brain surgery."

It's fair to say that nothing like that happens on the Theatreworks stage. Ignite has made, I think, a brave and sometimes successful attempt at surrealist theatre; but what it lacks is Artaud. It must be said, however, that in freely adapting the text, using it as an occasion for their own imaginative explorations, director Olivia Allen and her cast have taken an Artaudian approach - as Artaud said himself, "Subservience to the author, dependence on the text, what a dismal tradition!"

Allen has framed the performance with Death (Grant Cartwright) in whiteface and top hat, who evilly welcomes the audience into the theatre, promising - or threatening - a life-changing experience, and throws us out afterwards, forbidding applause, as the performers light up post-coital cigarettes. He introduces the first scene of the play, a Young Man (Simon Stone) and Young Woman (Amelia Best), sitting up in twin beds, proclaiming their love for each other and their satisfaction with the state of the world.

The world is torn apart almost at once: the Knight (Austin Castiglione), dressed in a breastplate, nappy and cheese-grater, and the Nurse (Lara Tumak) erupt screaming from the couple's single beds like bad conscience. The Young Man, the only character costumed in ordinary clothes, is spilt into a world of bewildering confusions, populated by a Priest with a Swiss accent (Roderick Cairns), his canine Sexton (Julian Crotti) and a Whore (Katherine Tonkin).

Allen has taken her lead from the Surrealists: a series of oneiric scenes sweep through the theatre to the accompaniment of a bruising soundtrack by Hayley Forward. The tableaux she creates are often comic as well as dreamlike: the Knight tosses dead birds out of a paper bag, in a parody of feeding pigeons; the nurse attempts to breastfeed a baby, which spills to the ground as a bag of grain; the Priest eats baked beans while his Sexton snuffles at his feet like a dog.

Allen and designer Adam Gardnir use the perspectives and cavernous spaces of the Theatreworks stage to advantage here, creating blacklight theatre that is lushly and precisely lit by Luke Hails. The strange characters emerge from darkness and vanish in a vortex of dream images. The performers are impressive, meeting the challenges of this production with polished physical skills and commitment.

However, there is a certain clumsiness in the mise en scene, a repetition of thought perhaps, that even in a show as short as this (50 minutes) begins to be felt as a numbing of surprise: actors too often arrive on stage in the same way between "scenes", for example. But more problematically than that, the show demonstrates limitations of imagination, rather than its liberation. Turning the lights up on the audience, for example, felt like an obvious gesture, whereas the same action in Stuck Pigs Squealing's Lally Katz and the Terrible Mysteries of the Volcano, a show that scraped the raw nerves of the subconscious, was genuinely discomforting.

Perhaps the most telling symptom is the lack of disgust in this show. The other half of Artaud's exhortation against subservience to the author is: "The spirit of the text, not the letter!" Here there is none of the spiritual anguish or the passionate sexual loathing that winds through Jet of Blood. The parade of theatrical images, interesting or beautiful as they may be, are too often detonated by laughter, and they never add up to the exhilarated revulsion or shock that Death promises us at the beginning of the show.

One reason might be that the whole is enclosed in a narrative of dream. The Young Man is afflicted by these visions of a demented world while he is asleep; this leaves an exit for all of us, since all he has to do is to wake up. Artaud, on the other hand, claimed he was recording intolerable realities from which there was no escape. Ultimately this is a polite and untraumatising imagining of Artaud: no tormented naked flesh, no seminal fluids or shit, no spurts of blood from the wrist of God.

For all that, Jet of Blood is never boring and gives us glimpses of true theatrical flair. It certainly marks the debut of a promising new company, and I'll watch their evolution with interest.

Picture: (Right to left) Lara Tumak, Amelia Best, Roderick Cairns, Katherine Tonkin, Austin Castiglione and Grant Cartwright in Jet of Blood. Photo: Ponch Hawkes.

Read More.....

East: Elegy for the East End and its Energetic Waste by Steven Berkoff, directed by John Bolton, lighting by Toby Bolton. With Andre Jewson, Simon Morrison-Baldwin, Sarah-Jane St Clair, James Re and James Ballarin. La Mama at the Carlton Courthouse until April 1.

This marvellous production of East reminds you how powerful language can be in the theatre. In his first, and to my mind his best play, Steven Berkoff forged an outrageous poetry from the collision of Shakespearean rhythms and cockney slang, creating a heightened theatrical vernacular that is at once obscene, audacious, dark and beautiful.

East premiered just over 30 years ago, but Berkoff's brash originality shines as freshly as ever. Its language is reminiscent of Anthony Burgess' s A Clockwork Orange, in the film of which Berkoff acted shortly before he wrote East: there is the same extreme metaphoric pressure and kinetic energy, the same ecstatic violence. But unlike A Clockwork Orange, East is a celebration of the "energetic waste" of youth, an exuberant aria of damage and desire.

Set in London's East End in the late 1960s, the London of Berkoff's own adolescence, the play is, as he says, "a scream or a shout of pain. It is revolt. ...East could be the east side of any city where the unveneered blast off at each other in their own compounded argot as if the ordinary language of polite communication was as dead as the people who uttered it... The acting has to be loose and smacking of danger ... it must smart and whip out like a fairy's wicked lash..."

What's most striking about this language is its unabashed carnality: it is arousing, in every sense of that word, demanding the immediacy of physical response. Like his contemporaries Maria Irene Fornes and Richard Foreman, Berkoff is an auteur director, who wrote and directed his own plays with the London Theatre Group. He situates his theatre in a variety of performing traditions and techniques, including vaudeville, Brecht, Artaud and Le Coq, but the emphasis is always on the text and the actors.

The tension between writerly and performative excess and an ascetic simplicity of design makes a theatre that is at once elegant and rawly affective. Berkoff's production of Salome, which toured here many years ago, featured highly stylised and expressive performances of Oscar Wilde's heightened language. In a way, it's the obvious thing to do with such naked theatrical poetry: but the obvious is not necessarily easy. It's a question of holding one's nerve, of following the gesture through, blasting past the fear of creating mere parody or shallow pastiche towards an Artaudian possibility of revelation.

VCA head of acting John Bolton has directed a copybook production that fully exploits the talents of his young ensemble, and it's as enjoyable a production of East as you'll see. The Courthouse space is draped on three sides by black curtains, which fortuitously go a long way to solving many of the acoustic problems of this space and permit very precise, black theatre lighting. The set consists of five chairs, a piano and a table set for a meal. Toby Bolton's lighting is at once subtle and bold, creating maximum effect with a sparely chosen pallet that caresses the bodies of the actors as they emerge from or vanish into darkness.

What centrally matters in any production of Berkoff's work is the performances. In East, the play depends on a sense of explosive youthful anarchy married to a high level of actorly skill: it's essential that you can hear every word of Berkoff's thick, viscous language, that every gesture is precise and measured. The length and complexity of the monologues means that sustaining energy and focus is an almost athletic challenge. These performances are remarkably detailed, reflecting months of work (the luxury of a student production): every phrase is lovingly incarnated and articulated through the bodies of the actors, and performed with an infectious relish.

East is at once a celebration and critique of the performance of masculinity. Les (James Re) and Mike (James Ballarin), the two young thugs perpetually on the hunt for a fight or a fuck, play their parts with a swaggering machismo that is so excessive it turns into a hilarious parody of itself. Arrogant and amoral, they live for the spilling of bodily fluids, blood or sperm: the moment of ecstatic release that permits them to transcend the banality and poverty of their lives. But beneath this extremity is a corrosive isolation: "I was lonely...' says Les, "basically I think, like one is born that way, I always felt lonely as if it was something like a habit..."

Their racist, misognyist Dad (Andre Jewson) simmers in a constant brew of suppressed rage, laced with a poisonous nostalgia. The high point of Dad's life, and in Jewson's frenetic performance a high point of the night, is his memory of a march with the Fascists of Oswald Mosley, beating up the "Kikes". But it is a memory of failure - the marchers were beaten back, England was not saved for the English - and Dad's only recourse is to bully his children and his wife. Jewson is 30 years too young for the part, but makes up for that by bringing a quality of grotesque caricature to the role that emphasises the play's theatricality, its play of masks.

Against this aggressive masculinity the two women, Mum (Simon Morrison-Baldwin) and Sylv (Sarah-Jane St Clair) launch a bruised but vitally resistant femaleness. The relationship between the sexes is agonistic all the way. Sylv's potent sexuality is a weapon to goad and mock the men: "So thou, bitch," says Mike, "seeks to distress my Johnny tool with psychological war, humiliating it into surrender shrink". But for Sylv, and for Mum, it's a battle that cannot end in victory: Sylv is clear-sighted enough to understand the conventions that imprison her, even if she can't do more than rebel against them.

Mum has retreated into numbness; she no longer reacts to anything except the fantasies in her head, fed by the cliches of popular culture. Morrison-Baldwin plays her, in contrast to the heightened energies of the other performances, as a centre of unnatural calmness, stilled perhaps by Valium, no longer even reacting to her husband's unpredictable rages.

Berkoff isn't going to allow the audience the luxury of easy empathy with any of these characters: even Mum doesn't coalesce into a figure of pity, but reveals her own surprising resistances. Neither does he suggest any way out of the dilemmas the characters reveal. East is joyously amoral, leaving the audience to wrestle with its contradictory empathies and revulsions.

This production gets these emotional and aesthetic complexities just about spot on. It's an exuberant and sexy rendering of what is, in the end, a paean to life, venereal warts and all. It's rarely done here, so don't miss it.

Read More.....

The Ham Funeral by Patrick White, Journal of a Plague Year by Tom Wright. Directed by Michael Kantor, designed by Anna Tregloan. Lighting by Paul Jackson, costumes by Fiona Crombie. With Marta Dusseldorp, Julie Forsyth, Robert Menzies, Lucy Taylor, Dan Spielman, Ross Williams and Matthew Whittet. Malthouse Theatre.

As Michael Kantor's first presentation as Malthouse artistic director, this double bill is a provocative signal of intention. It offers an alternative means of imagining Australian theatre, outside the narrowly nationalistic or topical concerns which have dominated the Playbox aesthetic since the early 1990s. And although I don't feel it's an unqualified artistic success, I left feeling more hopeful about Melbourne theatre than I have for many years.

For a long time, mainstream plays in Melbourne have been presented under various aegises: as bearers of social issues, education, political commentary or, perhaps least offensively, as mere entertainment. As for theatre itself, it has sometimes seemed to be the Art That Dares Not Tell Its Name, a shameful embarrassment that has had to be decently cloaked in more palatable imperatives.



So it's a relief to be offered works that place themselves unapologetically in the culture and history of theatre itself. The paradoxical effect of this is to make theatre immediately less parochial in its concerns, to engage its tentacular ability to grasp social, literary and philosophical concerns and to thrust them onto the vulgar carnality of the stage. It's an aesthetic that is far from apolitical, but this is a politics which doesn't earnestly explore "issues", in order to coax from them a masochistically satisfying (but temporary) inflammation of the liberal conscience. Rather, it's a politics which begins by attempting to address some of the complexities of existence.

These two productions, presented in repertory with an ensemble cast, look back to major movements in 20th century theatre: the existential theatre of Beckett, the absurdism of Arabal and Ionesco, the revolutionary theatre imagined by Artaud. It's a truism that Australian theatre has marginalised these influences in favour of naturalistic conventions, but it seems to me that the truth of that story is much more complex than a simplistic naturalistic/non-naturalistic division. Our theatre has also ignored naturalistic writers like Peter Kenna; and some of the significant playwrights of the '70s, Jack Hibberd and John Romeril, for example, were certainly influenced by White and his contemporaries.

I suspect that the work which has been most marginalised over the past few decades is any theatre which refuses easy sentiment and pierces, instead, to the marrow of complex emotion. Which is to say, a tragic theatre. There is something in the Australian psyche which flinches against such difficult surgeries, preferring instead the "relaxed and comfortable" vision of life that was so attractively peddled by John Howard. All the same, I perceive a great and increasing hunger for this kind of work, as the world has darkened over the past few years. This cathartic emotional affect is also difficult to achieve. The Ham Funeral shows triumphantly how it can be done; the Artaudian Journal of a Plague Year how easily the grandiose gesture can flail and miss its mark.

The Ham Funeral was written in 1947 but was not produced until more than a decade later; astoundingly, this is its first professional production in Melbourne. It emerges from the formally adventurous theatre which grew out of European modernism, exemplified by playwrights like Arabal, Beckett and Ionesco. Watching The Ham Funeral, it seems strange that it is not mentioned in the same breath as Waiting for Godot (which it predates by two years) or Rhinoceros. Part of the answer might be in its stubborn Australianness; from its poetic cadences to its irreverent eclecticism to its joyous vulgarity, it's a profoundly antipodean work. But in Australia, it was simply considered too odd, or too obscene. We do not have a good record with our best artists.

The Ham Funeral is a post-romantic work written by an artist deeply uncomfortable with his own romanticism. It's about a young poet (Dan Spielman), who lodges with Mr and Mrs Lusty (Ross Williams and Julie Forsyth) in a boarding house full of "everlasting furniture". Mr Lusty suddenly drops dead, and Mrs Lusty takes the opportunity to give a lavish feast, "an 'am funeral", in his honour. Mrs Lusty, a woman driven by incontinent appetites, attempts to seduce the young poet, with comically tragic consequences. There's a fair bit of Jungian symbolism - the house as the self, the anima behind the door, the carnal desires in the basement - but this is merely a single strand in a play which works on a multiplicity of levels. One of its major obsessions is the insufficiencies of words in the face of life, the question of how language might escape its own imprisonments.

White's theatrical language is superbly dynamic, and imbued with a fearless vitality. It's resonant with allusion, prefiguring not only the slapstick of Beckett and the absurdist freedoms of Ionesco or Arabal, but also echoing poets as bizarrely diverse as Arthur Rimbaud and Walter de la Mare. Ultimately, the sophistication of White's linguistic skills works to evoke feeling at its most subterranean and mysterious. For all its vulgar comedy - among many other delights, it features a terrific fart joke - this is a play which reveals above all the anguish of consciousness, the pain and release which underlies any honest moment of self-recognition, and the price of risking the barren self to engage with the beauty and violence of the world. It's the kind of work which moves you to tears, without being quite sure why.

Michael Kantor's production is a beautiful realisation of the play. It's notable for its clarity: in one sense, Kantor has merely presented the text as simply and elegantly as possible. But this is a deceptive simplicity, gained through some thoughtful problem solving. Anna Tregloan has designed a flexible but evocative playing space: the boarding house is represented by a stage with a row of curtained windows backstage which can be lit or concealed, and fronted by the bare floor. The stairs - the liminal place between rooms where various characters pause to utter their uncertain thoughts - are indicated by bars of light. A red curtain drawn back by the Young Man foregrounds the artifice of the play, just as the text does. There are moments of memorable visual richness: a lyrical glimpse of Dan Spielman and Robert Menzies in overcoats, running through the rain with their umbrellas; the landlord's relatives, boxed behind windows, grotesquely attired in pyjamas like characters out of Endgame.

But ultimately the success of the production stands or falls on the performances; in particular, on the roles of the Young Man and Mrs Lusty, since this play is almost a two-hander with some extra characters. Dan Spielman and Julie Forsyth are up to the task. Spielman, always a performer notable for his emotional fearlessness, portrays the solipsistic romanticism of the Young Man and its violent fracture with scarcely a missed beat. If sometimes he subtly falls into what look like actorly habits, we can forgive him for his unfudged clarity of feeling and intelligent irony.

Julie Forsyth is a comic delight, always just this side of grotesque caricature: on the one hand in incandescent rebellion against the bleakness of her life, and on the other imbued with a touchingly innocent longing. The violent climax of the play, an extraordinary scene of miserable sexual violence between Mrs Lusty and the Young Man, is played by both of them with a raw passion that makes it devastatingly tragic. They are well supported: in particular, Ross Williams, one of the more underestimated actors in Melbourne, portrays the silent landlord with a deft tragicomic touch, and Robert Menzies has some gloriously black comic moments. Max Lyandvert's sound, a mixture of pre-recorded soundscapes and live piano music, also deserves mention.

The same cast also plays Tom Wright's Journal of a Plague Year. For this production, Kantor capitalises on the cavernous spaces of the Merlyn Theatre to create a huge black canvas on which he projects a series of tableaux. The cast creates a series of dramatic or grotesque images, some of which are strikingly memorable: the black-cloaked narrator (Robert Menzies) emerging from darkness, illuminated only by the lamp he is carrying; a plague victim (Matthew Whittet) crucified on a moveable panel, tormented by disembodied hands; Nell Gwynne (Lucy Taylor) in busty Restoration garb, singing '70s pop songs.

The major problem with this work is that these images, however striking, never amount to anything substantial; they are grotesquerie without emotional force, and so can never approach actual horror or tragedy. The problem begins with Tom Wright's script, which merits some discussion.

The pretext for this work is supposedly Daniel Defoe's 1722 novel A Journal of the Plague Year, an account of the plague that struck London in 1665. Defoe's novel is a early example of fictional journalism; it purports to be the memoirs of a pious Protestant merchant, H.F. It's a somewhat disorderly narrative, but all the same told with a meticulous attention to detail - Defoe researched the public records, and items like the death figures or public health measures are set down with an almost bureaucratic zeal. For all his piety, H.F.'s manner is free of pompous moralising or overblown religiosity: he is a practical and materialistic man, recording a tragic human phenomenon with an insatiable and sceptical curiosity.

Aside from its 17th century setting, its quotes from Defoe and the theme of the plague, Tom Wright's version has in fact very little to do with the original. A Journal of the Plague Year is essentially about survival; Defoe is fascinated by the endless ingenuity of human resistances against both the plague and its catastrophic economic effects. The novel ends with a rhyme about the plague which "swept an hundred thousand souls / Away; yet I alive!" Wright's Journal, on the other hand, is about apocalyptic extremity and exploits a religious fervour that Defoe's text pragmatically eschews. Its actual genesis is the avatar of the Theatre of Cruelty, Antonin Artaud.

Some artists are perilous influences; they tend to be innovative geniuses whose work is so idiosyncratic that imitators without equal abilities can only seem mannered. I'm thinking of writers like Dylan Thomas or Gerard Manley Hopkins; among theatre artists, Artaud is probably the most dangerous. Howard Barker's Theatre of Catastrophe or the plays of Sarah Kane are successful examples of the contemporary application of some of Artaud's ideas; both are fiercely moral writers who launch full-frontal attacks on the humanistic tradition of reason.

One problem with Artaud is that he means it, and any artist who decides to pick up on his ideas had better mean it, too. Another problem is that the logical end of Artaud's idea of "absolute revolt" is Pol Pot and Year Zero (Pol Pot was, it must be remembered, educated in Paris). Like Rimbaud, Artaud insisted on the collapse of any boundary between art and life: thought and act were to be completely identified. He despised empty formalism. "If there is one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time," he wrote in The Theatre and The Plague, "it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signalling through the flames." He insisted on a carnal theatre, a theatre that reinstated the poetry that had been corrupted by modernity and reason, a theatre that "recovers the notion of symbols and archetypes which act like silent blows, rests, leaps of the heart, summons of the lymph, inflammatory images thrust into our abruptly wakened heads".

Wright, unlike Kane or Barker, is altogether too cerebral to answer this kind of visceral demand. The contrast with Patrick White's theatrical language is stark; where White is dynamic, tactile and supple, Wright is static and abstract. But the work suffers also in comparison to writers who shape the banalities of language, playwrights like Michel Vinaver or Thomas Bernhard: neither of them speak in generalities, where Wright seldom escapes them.

Oddly, for all its gestures towards unreason, Wright's text seems tame; it is much more orderly than Defoe, who is quite happy for most of his book to ignore the demands of chronology or even literary logic. The details of urban life that swarm in Defoe's text are filleted out in favour of apocalyptic religiosity, and events taken from the novel are simplified and exaggerated into grand guignol melodrama. One example is the scene about plague victims being nailed into their houses; the actuality, as reported by Defoe, was both more complicated and less absolute. The victims in fact had their keys taken and a watchman set outside their door: and they often tricked the watchmen and escaped out the back. I personally find myself more attracted by the subversion of the original tale. And the constant equation of women with infection and sexual delirium has more than a whiff of misogyny. I think what bothers me most is that Wright has what poets call a "cloth ear"; a problem closely aligned to the lack of tactility or carnality in his language. He might get away with a lot more if he had more intuitive sensitivity to the cadences of a line.

The text is organised in a kind of modular prison, with Brechtian signs traversing the stage signalling each month (it's only a matter of time before you start calculating that there are five months until December). Each month ushers in a different theme - contagion's genesis, evil visions, interpretration of dreams, the pit of death - which the actors duly illustrate. But perhaps where Wright most inverts his apparently anarchic intentions is at the end, when he encloses the narrative with a moral homily about the essential bestiality of human nature. This is, despite its crazed dress, humanistic theatre after all.

I can't say I was bored, even if sometimes I was impatient. There was enough visual interest and flashes of wit to keep me from wanting to lay violent hands on myself. I particularly liked the philosopher's chat show, where Hobbes, Artaud and others seated at microphones dispute the nature of reality. Robert Menzies as the narrator generates enough energy to keep it together, despite what sounds like an almost unperformable text, and the rest of the cast does its best, which is in moments more than enough. It's a shame that all this effort amounts to little more than a procession of images.

Despite my reservations, it is a breath of fresh air to see mainstream theatre with ambition and intellectual clout, and that takes itself seriously as an art. I have no doubt this shift in artistic direction will generate a lot of controversy; Helen Thomson's bitterly hostile reviews (here and here) in the Age this week are probably symptomatic. I also have no doubt that this new phase at Malthouse is the best thing that's happened there in the past decade; and as a theatre goer, I am hoping that this is only the beginning of a more generous imagining of the Australian stage.

Picture: Matthew Whittet in Journal of a Plague Year
Malthouse Theatre

Read More.....

"Art has no duty" - Howard Barker

English playwright Howard Barker must be in the zeitgeist. Just last week, Barker's play Wounds to the Face opened at Theatreworks in Melbourne (review next week) and his dystopian fantasy Victory closed after a sell-out season at the Sydney Theatre Company. I found myself again browsing his book of essays, Arguments for a Theatre, and the following day noticed an extraordinary attack on Victory in the current issue of Quadrant.

Victory aroused the ire of one Geoffrey Partington. I am unable to find out much about Mr Partington; I assume he is the same Geoffrey Partington who has written other articles for Quadrant and who describes himself as "a South Australian educationalist". He writes as if he is seated in a manorial chair in tweeds, puffing on a pipe and lamenting the rise of the split infinitive, and his spluttering is the sort of thing which would warm the cockles of any old radical's heart.

On the evidence of his essay, Partington's only knowledge of Barker is what he has read in the mainstream media - his one sourced quote is from an interview in The Australian - and it is impossible to determine if he has actually seen the play he is attacking. This seems a rather poor basis for an "educationalist" to launch an attack on a writer even The Times refers to as "one of the UK's greatest living playwrights". He is entitled to his apoplexy, which mainly agitates around Barker's cavalier treatment of historical fact (more of this later). What most concerned me about his article was, in fact, this statement: "I do not wish to prevent others from spending time and money on travesties such as Victory, but I resent it bitterly if public money subsidises them in any way." ¹

Since a production of the scale of the STC's would not be possible without public money, his is a call for such theatre to be effectively banned from our main stages. There have been too many calls to censor art lately, from too many quarters; and Partington's essay is in fact an attack on the basis of art's freedom, imagination itself. So perhaps it is worth examining in some detail.

Barker's plays have had occasional productions in Australian theatres over the past couple of decades, but the relative popularity of his work since the late '90s is largely due to the former director of Adelaide's Red Shed Company, Tim Maddock. He introduced Howard Barker to a new and young audience when he directed The Europeans and Uncle Vanya for Brink Productions in Sydney and Adelaide. This culiminated in an extraordinarily ambitious production of Barker's six hour epic The Ecstatic Bible, a co-production between Brink and Barker's own company, The Wrestling School, which premiered at the 2000 Adelaide Festival. Since then, the most high profile production has been the STC season of Victory, which featured a return to the stage by Judy Davis, and which attracted Partington's displeasure. I was green that I could not see it myself, but a lot of Sydneysiders did.

Partington is as peeved by Victory's full-house success as he is by its existence, and sneeringly mentions "the paucity of performances his plays receive in Britain" to suggest that those Sydney theatre crowds were sadly misled in their enthusiasm for the play. He drags out the usual abusive labels. Barker is apparently "postmodernist", a term which isn't defined, though it could be argued that his work is actually closer to the individualistic modernisms of playwrights like Jarry and Artaud; and it is heavily implied also that his work is "PC", surely one of the more bizarre criticisms of Barker's iconoclastic ouevre. Even stranger when you consider than Partington is also exercised by Barker's celebrated usage of obscene language (especially that "c" word).

But Partington's major objection to Victory is that Barker gets his history wrong. After pointing out Barker's historical errors - that certain incidents didn't happen, and that certain people never in fact met - he goes on to claim that Barker "purports that the events displayed on the stage, or something very like them, actually took place" and that he is exploiting his audience with "a tissue of sheer lies". This is, to say the least, disingenuous, since even Partington notes that Barker purports nothing of the sort, and least of all historical verisimilitude: his whole artistic credo revolts against such a conception of theatre. It also assumes that the audience of Barker's work is ignorant, malleable and credulous, which seems more than a little patronising.

If Partington takes his own strictures on historical accuracy seriously, he must disapprove of Shakespeare even more vehemently than Barker. It is generally accepted, to take an obvious example, that Richard III is a base libel of the historical Richard; for one thing, Richard didn't have a hump and, as English kings go, he was relatively just. As the director Richard Eyre says, "Shakespeare treats historical incident with little reference to fact - incidents are conflated, characters meet whose paths never crossed".² A historian who based her research on Shakespeare's history plays would be on somewhat shaky ground, and anyone who tried to argue his tragedies were historically accurate would be considered frankly insane. The verisimilitude of Shakespeare's play lies elsewhere, in what Barker describes as "emotional truths".

Barker openly and aggressively defends his right as an artist to make things up, to imagine rather than to represent reality; and he is clearly accurate in intuiting that this is a contemporary heresy. In this, he reflects Theodor Adorno's critique of the culture industry and its effect on human imagination. Speaking of boredom, Adorno says: "it is symptomatic of the deformations perpetrated upon man by the social totality, the most important of which is surely the defamation and atrophy of the imagination...those who want to adapt must learn increasingly to curb their imagination." ³ Clearly, Barker is maladaptive; but he is seldom boring.

Partington's defamation of imagination is not novel; after all, poets were to be banned from Plato's totalitarian Republic for their moral irresponsibility in fictionalising the truth. In Partington's world, the proper reasons for attending theatre are "to improve ... historical knowledge or cultural range", and he castigates Barker fiercely for refusing to fulfil at least one of these aims (I assume that a broader "cultural range" is a landscape which does not include such "travesties" as Victory).

Barker's view of theatre's function is rather more interesting. He doesn't believe theatre is there to convey messages, or to teach, or to entertain. Rather he sees theatre as a place which makes demands on an audience, in order to lead them into moral and emotional conflict and, through this conflict, to encounter a "hard won" freedom. "In a society disciplined by moral imperatives of gross simplicity, complexity itself, ambiguity itself, is a political posture of profound strength," he says. "The play which makes demands of its audience, both of an emotional and interpretive nature, becomes a source of freedom, necessarily hard won. The play which refuses the message, the lecture, the conscience-ridden expose, but which insists on the inventive and imaginative at every point, creates new tensions in a blandly entertainment-led culture. The dramatist's obligation is (to) his own imagination. His function becomes not to educate by his superior political knowledge, for who can trust that? but to lead into moral conflict by his superior imagination." ⁴

In the service of this idea, Barker has written plays which range from the mythic landscapes of classical antiquity to official and unofficial histories of the great massacres of the 20th century. He advocates a tragic, confrontational theatre, the "theatre of catastrophe", which is partly derived from Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty. It is a theatre in open conflict with the rationality of the humanist philosophy which has come to dominate British theatre practice, and which Barker has contemptuously labelled the "theatre of journalism".

The "theatre of journalism" is currently the major vehicle for left wing political dissent on the British stage. Companies like Max Stafford-Clark's Out of Joint and the Tricycle Theatre have dusted off the concept of documentary theatre, pioneered by companies like the Joint Stock Theatre Group in the '70s, and given it new life. Last year Out of Joint produced a documentary play by David Hare on the privatisation of British railways, and Tricycle have developed what they call "tribunal theatre", in which they theatricalise issues such as the Hutton Inquiry or the Stephen Lawrence murder, using only words which have been uttered by the participants. Their latest production, which closed a week ago, is Guantanamo: "Honour Bound to Defend Freedom", written by Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo from interviews with prisoners and others connected with Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay. These have all been extremely successful examples of political theatre, popular and critically acclaimed, which have brought debate on issues such as the Iraq War squarely into the theatrical arena.

This strand of British theatre derives from the English Brechtian tradition, via a dose of Shaw. It is also a dominant philosophy behind much Australian play writing, from the productions of the Melbourne Workers Theatre to the mainstream plays of Hannie Rayson, who herself started in community theatre. And it is the kind of theatre which launches Howard Barker into his most provocative polemic mode.

He fulminates against "the drama of conscience", "a spectacle of relentless harmony" which he sees as merely preaching to the converted at the expense of artistic freedom and invention. "There is great safety and security to be enjoyed in the exchange of conscience-ridden observations, affirmations of shared values, humanistic platitudes," writes Barker. "But the stage remains essentially sterile, and the insistence on the representation of what passes for the real world only enhances the decadent sense of social responsibility while devastating the landscape of dramatic invention." Elsewhere in the same essay, he observes: "We swim in a tepid bath of humanistic accord, writer, actor, audience, an alliance of foregone conclusions which diminishes the possibility of innovative practice." ⁵

This deeply challenges Partington's strange claim that Victory is a polemic for the Australian republic because, in its unhistorical portrayal of the English Civil Wars, it seeks to expose the nastiness of English monarchs. The play is, in line with Barker's stated aesthetic, a rather more complicated experience than this simplistic agenda suggests (a major reason why I wonder whether Partington has actually seen it). In Barker's dystopia no one - monarchist or reformer - comes over well, and no message is parcelled out for theatre consumers to take home.

Barker's politics are by no means conservative, and Partington's attack is a not-untypical right wing reaction to Barker's work. And given that most mainstream British theatre is broadly liberal and humanistic - that is, precisely the kind of theatre on which Barker unleashes his hostility - perhaps the reasons for the relative paucity of productions of Barker's work in Britain become clear. Although his theatre is profoundly political, it is antagonistic to most shades of the ideological spectrum. He remains a radical and exciting playwright, a necessary grit in theatrical vision, a provocative inspiration. The only real question is why our own uncomfortable and innovative talents - writers, for example, like Margaret Cameron - remain marginalised within our theatre culture, while an artist like Barker is widely celebrated. If what we seek is a vital, exciting theatre, work like this is precisely where public money ought to go.


Links

Howard Barker
LIFT inquiry on theatre, Independent

Notes

1 Pyrrhic Victory, Geoffrey Partington, Quadrant, June 2004
2 Utopia and other places, Richard Eyre, Vintage 1994
3 Free Time, TW Adorno, The Culture Industry, Routledge Classics, 1991
4 The Politics Beyond the Politics, Howard Barker, Arguments for a Theatre, Manchester University Press 1993
5 A bargain with impossibility: the theatre of speculation in an age of accord, ibid.

Read More.....