Mishima in the City: Duets of Desire. 2: The Damask Drum, adapted from the plays by Yukio Mishima and Zeami, directed by Robert Draffin. Film by Ivanka Sokol, set design Ina Indira Shanahan, lighting design by Luke Hails, sound design and music performance by Jethro Woodward. Performed by Alan Knoepfler and Mary Sitarenos. Film acting, voices and stage business by Paul Robertson, Raffaele Rufo, Claire-Larisse Nicholls. Liminal Theatre, 70 Nicholson St, Abbotsford (between Gipps & Langridge St; opposite Sophia Mundi School) until November 26. Bookings: 9539 3669

With the international richness of the Melbourne Festival still fresh in my mind, The Damask Drum is a salutary reminder that we have our own visionary directors close to home. Robert Draffin has been working quietly in Melbourne, evolving his unique practice, for around three decades. And his production of Yukio Mishima's play, now on in an anonymous warehouse in Abbotsford, deserves to stand with the best of the work I saw at the festival.

In the countless productions he has overseen, Draffin has never been afraid of ambition. In 1991, for example, working with the young troupe Whistling in the Theatre, he created a magnificent six-hour adaptation of The Thousand and One Nights at Anthill (one of the small-to-medium theatres that disappeared in the Australia Council's last orgy of cultural vandalism). Or there was his epic 1992 Theatreworks production of Dostoevsky's novel The Idiot. More recent work includes a celebrated production of Genet's Le Balcon at the VCA, where he has been teaching some of the young theatre artists who are putting so much zap into the Melbourne scene at present.

I confess, gentle reader, that it's been a long time since I've seen Draffin's work. More fool me. Like Peter Brook or Ariane Mnouchkine, he works with a committed ensemble of artists, creating the long-term relationships that are the core of great theatre: this particular production is the result not only of short-term rehearsal but of year-long workshops. Funded, perhaps it ought to be noted, by no one except the artists themselves.

Again like Mnouchkine and Brook, his work is deeply concerned with cross-cultural exchange: in Draffin's case, a long history of exchange with Asian theatre artists and practice. And as with Mnouchkine, entering his theatre is to be welcomed into a democratic social space where, until the performance begins, no distinction is made between artists and audience. When you arrive at The Damask Drum, you are ushered to a carpeted space at the back of the warehouse, behind the stage, with cushions, low tables and flowers. Where Mnouchkine provides dinner, Draffin makes you green tea.

And there, perhaps, the resemblances end. Unlike these two theatrical superstars, Draffin's company, Liminal Theatre, is not extravagantly funded; and Draffin's practice is all his own.

The Damask Drum is, in fact, the second instalment of a larger work, Mishima in the City: Duets of Desire, which aims to perform all eight of the plays Mishima adapted from the classical Noh canon.

Mishima's play updated Zeami's Aya No Tuzumi, which tells the story of an old gardener who glimpses a princess and falls obsessively in love with her. Mockingly, she gives him a drum made of damask, and says that if he can make it sound in the palace, she will visit him. Of course, the old man can't make any sound at all from the drum, and drowns himself in despair. After this, the "angry ghost" of the old man "possessed the lady's wits, haunted her heart with woe".

In Mishima's version, the woman, Hanako, lives in an apartment block opposite the old man, Iwakichi, and he has to make the drum sound above the city traffic: but the obsession, the mockery, the vengefulness of the old man's ghost and the woman's regret remain. Draffin has fused Mishima's and Zeani's texts to create a kind of collage, in which sound and song play as significantly as semantic sense.

When the plays were first performed in Japan in the 1950s, they were produced in a naturalistic style: a totally revolutionary decision in the context of the Japanese theatre of the time. Instead, in this production Draffin draws from a range of classical Asian theatre techniques, skilfully combining them with images projected from a hand-held cyclorama and an amplified sound score. Black-clad stage hands operate the projections, fabrics, mirrors, smoke and other stage business. This is certainly not Noh, but it's impossible to overlook its Noh ancestry.

The design exploits the length of the warehouse, seating the audience at one end. The set consists basically of a small stage made of black polished wood that is set immediately before the audience, from which stretches a narrow walkway to a door in the back wall. It's a free adaptation of the hashigakari, or bridge, by which actors sumptuously enter the stage in traditional Noh.

Jethro Woodward's soundscape is astoundingly good. It combines sometimes thunderous electronic sound with a collage of amplified voices that fill the space - mostly inhabited by one actor - with unseen people. The Asian orchestra and chorus are embodied in Woodward himself, who stands in the performance space, to the left of the wooden stage. He plays live electric guitar, singing some parts of the story.

The opening scene demonstrates the potency of the elements Draffin is exploiting here. The play begins in blackness, with Woodward bowing haunting melodies from his guitar. Very gradually, a dim light rises on the far end of the stage: a white figure is partially revealed in the distance. It seems to float in a globe of light through the darkness, like a ghost or a goddess, and moves towards us with hieratic slowness.

It is impossible to tell whether the figure is male or female until he is quite close: then you see it is a half-naked man (Alan Knoepfler), who is wearing a long, white, very full skirt that is held up on either side, like royal robes, by the stage attendants. He collapses before us face forward on the small stage, the skirt like a foaming wave that has washed him up from the darkness.

Knoepfler's performance of the old gardener devastated by obsessive erotic love is utterly compelling. He is on stage, mostly solo, for the whole play, and maintains without wavering the physical, vocal and emotional extremity of his performance. His body is the expressive site of his ecstatic torment and self disgust: he is in turn grotesque, abject, ennobled, despairing, tender. He is well met by Mary Sitarenos as the woman, whose entrance late in the show is almost as beautiful as Knoepfler's.

There are more than a few moments of breath-taking mise en scene in the course of this show. If it has flaws, they are of the kind that are hard to pinpoint: slight hesitancies, perhaps, that may manifest in an overdressed moment here or there. Its strength, as in the writing it is manifesting, is in its simplicity, the courage of both restraint and passion that underlies formal artistic beauty.

The Damask Drum is not only theatre that has poetry in it - which is one thing - but something rather more rare: a poetic theatre, working transformations rich and strange.

Festival Diary #5

As we enter the third week of the Melbourne Festival, TN finds herself a little alarmed by how easily she fades these days. I had to pass on Lucy Guerin's Structure and Sadness and Kota Yamazaki's dance company Fluid hug-hug's Rise:Rose out of sheer exhaustion. Dammit. Mind you, I have never been much good at wholesale cultural consumption: there's always the danger of the experience becoming undifferentiated artistic sludge, like mixing too many colours on a palette. So, with the idea of stringing individual jewels along the MIAF narrative, I will stop regretting what I haven't seen, and get on with what I have...

I La Galigo, from the Sureq Galigo, adapted by Rhoda Grauer, directed by Robert Wilson. Music by Rahaya Supanggah, co-set designer Christophe Martin, lighting by AJ Weissbard, dance master Andi Ummu Tunru. State Theatre, Victorian Arts Centre

It's impossible to underestimate the influence of Asia on modern Western theatre. Ever since Antonin Artaud reviewed a Balinese theatre troupe at the Paris Colonial Exposition in 1931, its theatre has been a major stimulus for the avant garde. Artaud was inspired by the Balinese dancers, who for him articulated the possibility of a theatrical language free of the chains of literature, and his rewritten review later became one of the key essays in his hugely influential book, Theatre and Its Double. A little later, in 1935, Bertolt Brecht saw the Peking Opera in Moscow, and his experience of "strangeness" profoundly underlaid his Epic Theatre and its theory of verfremdungseffekt, most often translated as the "alienation effect".

In 1978, Edward Said published his ground breaking (and much misrepresented) work about the political implications of Western portrayals of the East, Orientalism. By the time Peter Brook undertook his extraordinary nine-hour adaptation of the Indian epic poem, The Mahabharata, in 1985, the issue of cultural appropriation had entered the intellectual mix. Intercultural artists like Brook (and Ariane Mnouchkine, for her epic production of Les Atrides) were accused of a kind of neo-colonial banditry, "raiders across a frontier", according to one critic, who brought back "strange clothes as their loot".



In assuming that cultural influence only runs one way, this rather ignores Said's argument about the mutuality of cultural influence in colonised societies. Even more problematically, it can encourage a museum-mindset around minority cultures, preserving them in a kind of motionless prehistory that is hermetically sealed from the present. Some of the complexities around this question can be seen from the arguments sparked by Wesley Enoch's appropriation of Medea in his production of Black Medea: as Enoch himself said, "I've been amazed how many 'purists' have come out of the closet saying that this kind of appropriation is 'not allowed'."

Given this history, it's easy to see why Robert Wilson - one of the major innovative directors of our time - was so attracted by the Sureq Galigo, an epic poem from the Bugis people in South Sulwesi in Indonesia, and also why he has been so careful in his approach, consulting extensively with the culture to whom it belongs. The original epic runs to something like 6000 pages and exists in innumerable versions, making it one of the longest literary works in the world. In realising this text on stage, Wilson has pulled off a considerable aesthetic coup: he has created a work of breathtakingly sensual splendour that neither compromises his practice nor traduces the Asian traditions on which he is drawing.

Anyone who saw the National Theatre of Cambodia's production of the traditional Cambodian epic Weyreap's Battle at MIAF last year will be familiar with the theatrical traditions at work here: the narrative is chanted or sung, while dancers, masked and unmasked, enact the story with stylised, even heiratic movement. It's theatre that combines elements of the sacred and profane, beginning with a blessing and including elements of vulgar comedy.

Librettist Rhoda Grauer has adapted what are generally understood to be the most significant characters and events of this creation myth. The Middle World - the realm in which we live - is created and populated when the gods of the Upper and Under Worlds, in an irresistably Blakean observation, realise that they are not gods if there is no one to worship them. Patotoqe, boss god of the Upper World, sends down his son Batara Guru, and Guru ri Selleq, god of the Under World, sends up his daughter We Nyiliq. The two marry and, in a festival of fertility, everyone gives birth except the Queen. That's because her twin son and daughter have decided they like the womb and don't want to be born.

Bissu priests are brought in to help the Queen, and after a blood sacrifice in which the people battle, she gives birth to Golden Twins. Sawerigading, the warrior king, is born like Athene in full armour, while We Tenriebeng, his sister, destined to the priesthood, is born in Bissu regalia. After this difficult birth, an oracle tells the parents that their children must never meet, as they are destined to fall in love, and incest would destroy the kingdom. The princess is hidden in the palace, while Sawerigading is sent out to explore the world with his clownish cousins.

Of course, the twins meet and fall in love: but despite Sawerigading's bloody tantrums, which involve killing most of the population, they are not allowed to marry. Trying to forget We Tenriebeng, he marries We Cudaiq, a proud and stubborn princess in Cina, and begets I La Galigo. Eventually Sawerigading returns to his home kingdom and meets his sister again, at which point the gods announce the purging of the Middle World. The gods return to their worlds, Sawerigading's son and We Tenriebeng's daughter are sent down to the Middle World to be its new rulers, and the gates between the realms are closed forever, leaving the young royal couple alone on the godless earth.

When we enter the theatre, we see the blank stage, obscured with a scrim that is decorated with the original script of the epic. The show begins with the entrance of the orchestra, who settle themselves stage right, and a figure dressed gorgeously in yellow silk, Puang Matoa Saidi, who sits cross legged on a small hanamichi at the front. Puang Matoa Saidi is the main chanter and also a Bissu priest: he sits motionless through the entire show, slowly turning the pages of a book that lies in front of him on a wooden rest. Then the scrim rises and we witness the emptying of the Middle World: a procession of people carrying a miscellany of objects - pots, musical instruments, spears, baskets - cross the stage from right to left, silhouetted against the blank screen that is the major feature of the stage, and which now is a deep blue brightening to sunrise. The slow, heiratic movement introduces the pace of this production, which induces a deep, contemplative attention.

The show itself lasts for three hours, but it seems somehow appropriate that I lost all sense of time while I was watching it. Wilson orchestrates the rhythm beautifully: long ritualised scenes, such as the first meeting of the royal couple, when We Nyiliq Timoq rises in royal splendour from the sea, are contrasted with the burping-and-scratching vulgarity of Sawerigading's disreputable cousins or the comically beautiful entrance of the animals - masked monkeys and frogs, deer with antler and an unlikely-looking giraffe, each with its own musical signature. Wilson's cast of more than 50 Indonesian performers enacts the stylised dances and mimes with a precise and compelling expressiveness. This is the kind of performance that flowers from a core of stillness and contemplation, making each gesture and each change of rhythm charged and meaningful.

The costumes are, like the set design, elegant contemporary adaptations of traditional Asian designs. Perhaps what is most striking in the production is the colour: it is at once lush and spare, employing a palette of clear, luminous colours, like those used in dyeing silk. It didn't surprise me afterwards when I read that the costume designer Joachim Herzog adhered strictly to traditional Indonesian notions of colour use and heraldic symbology in his designs (yellow for royal, for example), as the colours in both the lighting and costumes have a deep coherency, which works even for those who do not understand the codes.

Likewise, Rahayu Sapanggah's original music, which draws on traditions from all over Indonesia and beyond, sounds at once deeply ancient and modern, and features some thrilling drumming as well as songs of heart-stopping poignancy. One of the instruments sounds exactly like a cello, but in fact no Western instruments were used.

Wilson escapes the trap of making a patronisingly anthropological treatment of a fascinating but obscure text: this is utterly contemporary theatre that dynamically reworks this ancient epic, bringing it freshly alive. All the various elements are seamlessly woven together to create a work of profound elegance that, like the myth it enacts, is at once lucid and mysterious. It epitomises the kind of intercultural exchange that Said himself would have welcomed; if all meetings of East and West were this fruitful, the world would be a different place.

Michael Roloff, Handke's English translator, has some noteworthy comments on the Handke controversy at this colourful Handke web page, where he talks about the cancelled play. (For what it's worth, I agree with his high opinion of Voyage to the Sonorous Land, which is disturbingly strange and beautiful as only Handke can be):

The play "DIE KUNST DES FRAGENS, oder die Reise in das sonore Land" happens to be a truly great play; it creates a profound and delicious sense of deep puzzlement in the audience, something that, ordinarily, is achieved only after years of psychoanalysis.

I have known Herr Handke since 1966, personally feel some considerable justified ambivalence about him, little ambivalence if any about most of his work ... and have written extensively on various aspects of Handke, including his involvement in matters Yugo-Slavian. It appears Handke was following his grandfather's road in hoping for a continued federation, also as a counter model to the current European federation. Best as I can tell from this distant perspective that depends entirely on written texts and documentation, he is not guilty of denial of anything, but of not speaking in platitudes.

Last year he published an essay in the German magazine LITERATUREN, in which he detailed why he would not appear as a defense withness at Slobodan Milosovic's trial, where I especially liked how he made fun of his own sense of self-righteousness. That he came out in simple defense of the Serbian people against the orchestrated attempt, in Europe and in the United States, to make them solely responsible for the disintegration of Yugo-Slavia I find worthy of the highest praise, as compared to no end of writers, such as Salmon Rushdie, who were only too ready to join the lyinching mob, or band wagon, as so many pret a porter intellectuals frequently are. Having disassociated himself from the defense of the more and more indefensible Slobodan Milosoviscs - as the trial proceeded and his entire history became available -- I don't think Handke needed to show up at the funeral, have his photo taken in front of a huge flag-like photo of Milosevics, or make any kind of funeral oration. Herr Handke can be as petit bourgeois, exhibitionistic and obnoxious - the German word is BORNIERT - as Bozonnet. THE ONLY THING THAT COUNTS in this instance is THE PLAY. I am glad that there is a controversy over a great play!

Onya Michael. I love that plague-on-both-your-houses irritation at the end... also, writing this in Australia, one can't but reflect that such a controversy would never happen here, since aside from fringe productions of Offending the Audience and other early plays, Handke is seldom done, and certainly never on main stages. Maybe that should be the larger scandal.

Also, the competing petitions for and against M. Bozonnet, both headed by their own Nobel Laureate, continue to be circulated. According to Literary Salon: "It wouldn't be France if there weren't now a counter-manifesto: Olivier Py's A plus tard, Peter Handke (which can be translated as: 'See you later, Peter Handke'). The manifesto in support of Handke had its Nobel laureate supporter -- Jelinek -- , and this one has its -- Gao Xianjian. Among the 150 others who have signed it, agreeing that part of artistic freedom is the freedom to censor (well, some bizarre idea like that anyway) are Hélène Cixous and Ariane Mnouchkine."

Hmm. One question: if this is French theatre people being reticent...

Le Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées): Part One - Le Fleuve cruel (The Cruel River) and Part Two - Origines et Destins (Origins and Destinies), devised by the company, directed by Ariane Mnouchkine, music by Jean-Jacques Lemêtre. Théâtre de Soleil, Royal Exhibition Building, Carlton Gardens.



17th October 2005

Dear Ariane

I hope you will forgive me for addressing you so familiarly, since I have never met you. Writing a letter seems, perhaps not so strangely, the only fit way to address Le Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées). I saw both parts in one long and dizzying Sunday and it makes me want to say many things that you must already know. Principally, I wish to say that I witnessed something beautiful, a work of theatre that left me moved and shaken.

But this is already inadequate. Beauty is so often taken to mean the anodyne, the conventional; to be moved suggests a surfeit of sentiment. The work of your company is so far from the anodyne and sentimental, the deadliness of the worthy, that in writing about it I fear misrepresenting the breathtaking honesty and directness of its aesthetic.

The Odyssées began with a letter from you to Nadereh, one of the asylum seekers whom you interviewed for the work. It was projected across the back of the stage, like much of the spoken text, in a cursive script. It was a powerful preface: not only because of the letter itself which, pregnant though it was with unspoken stories of loss, was like many other letters - how are you? how are our friends? have you heard? It was also because the lights dimmed so slowly across the empty stage, introducing the play with a gentle limpidity that was heightened by the vast and lonely poignancy of Jean-Jacques Lemêtre's introductory music.

When the second part finished, I found that for the previous three hours I had been sitting next to Nadereh herself. She had been watching, among other things, events that had happened in her own life. I would have loved to have asked her what she felt, but sadly, she speaks no English, and I do not speak her language. Her presence reinforced what your letter had already made clear: that your company was dealing with what we call so easily "real life".

Your letter to Nadereh signalled both an intention and a refusal. The intention was to expose the genesis of this work, the reality of the people whose stories were turned into this work of theatre by you and your company. The refusal was of the betrayal of art, which so easily exploits the suffering of others to make a beautiful object that is nothing more than a plaything of the privileged. There are many cheap criticisms that might be made of this - isn't it, for example, hypocritical to speak of the poor in this expensive artform? - but the achievement of Le Dernier Caravansérail is its own answer.

Yes, this artfulness, this beautiful illusion and play that is theatre, can serve without dishonour something as humble and profound as human longing. You do not have the hubris to think that your play will change the world. A little bit, perhaps; an illumination here, a heartening of courage there. Art's work is not the same as that of the politician's, and you understand very well the limits of its power. And you love those limitations, also, as its strengths and freedoms.

Your importation of the whole Théâtre du Soleil into the Royal Exhibition Building - not only the set, but the bleachers, the actor's changing room, the dining tables where people could sit down and eat the food prepared there, the intimate lighting - prepared me for the experience of the play. As I walked up the stairs to my seat, I could peer down at the actors as they prepared for their performance. In between the shows, I saw them eating together outside in the sunshine. I could stare at the instruments in the sound area next to the stage - the various drums, the huge string instrument made of a turtle shell, the gong, the sound decks, the lovely wooden violin shapes hanging from a rack at the back. Before the play even started, the barriers between the theatre and those who came to watch it were already unstable and permeable.

In a way, I don't know how to talk about the work. It is not enough to say it was beautiful, as I have said; I don't wish to speak of it as if it were merely some aesthetic object, although a superb aesthetic judgment informed its every aspect. As everyone knows, it is about the dispossessed, those driven out of their homelands by war or persecution or poverty to seek a decent life somewhere else, and how they are treated by the countries they ask for help.

It was the stories of these "voyagers" which you and your company collected and shaped into this work of art. They are the stories of human beings in exile - Kurds, Afghanis, Russians, Chechnyans, Bosnians, Africans... there are so many wars, after all, and so many famines of different kinds. And you know that as well as being full of grief and love and generosity, human beings can be murderous, cruel, weak, ignorant and stupid. That they might be cruel or stupid doesn't mean that they might not be also victims of forces beyond their control. We still hold an idea of victimhood as entitlement, which is linked to the "deserving poor", the dichotomies of good and evil. But a person might be wicked, and still suffer.

It seemed to me that you made a whole world, and invited me to be part of it. From the beginning, I was aware of the sky, of the weather, of the elements: earth, water, light. And the very first story you tell is of a river crossing. The river is invoked by huge lengths of blue-grey silk that actors by the side billow frantically, the way you make the sea on stage when you are at primary school. But I believed this terrifying river. I understood when the ferryman refused to take the people across, understood their desperation when they argued with him and tried to cross despite the danger; I gasped when the ferryman fell in the water and wished frantically for him to be rescued... It is the simplest magic, made with the greatest degree of sophistication imaginable.

All the performers, all the little sets, even the trees, were on platforms with wheels. They were pushed on and off the huge stage by the other performers, who watched the actors, as we did, as they crouched by the platforms. It meant, among other things, that the actors could be at once still and in motion. The stage was always live: between scenes, people ran from one side to another, or pushed the props in readiness for the next scene. And as story followed story, the constant movement created an increasing sense of ephemerality and transience; against the blankness of sky and earth, these stories left no trace, save their resonances in those who heard them.

Many scenes occurred in small interiors, illuminated boxes wheeled from behind the curtains at the back of the stage. We peered through the lighted windows like voyeurs. And what we overheard were fragments, said in many languages: a nurse upbraiding a man for not looking after his his leg, from which his foot had been amputated; an old woman remembering her grandchildren when they were little; the people smuggler speaking to his small son, who barely remembers him, on his mobile phone; an asylum seeker struggling violently and being brutally subdued as she is deported on a plane.

Some American critics - Robert Brustein, for example - claimed that this was theatre as martyrdom, intended to make you feel "not just emotionally responsible for man's universal inhumanity to man, but physically uncomfortable as well". And he castigated you for not working with a writer, as you have previously with Hélène Cixous, who would have shaped it into a proper "drama".

Mr Brustein is an intelligent man, but he seems to have grievously missed the point. You exposed the working of the theatre, to show that there were here no "tricks". And in the texts you used, you chose not to misrepresent the messiness and fragmentariness of the lives you portrayed by imposing upon them a false unity. The secret corners of life itself, its always unfinished stories, its fractures, its contradictions, its mundanities, its cruelties and beauties, opened up inside us their own truthfulness. I think that this is the reason for the work's overwhelming emotional impact.

Le Dernier Caravansérail makes you understand the profound importance of simplicities: things like shelter and food and love, the fragile stays that people make against the indifferences of the world they inhabit. As is very clear, it is not only the natural elements that are cruel. The voyagers have fled their homes - and who would leave their home voluntarily? - because they have lost hope of finding there the possibility of a decent life. Yet everywhere they go, they are non-citizens, people without a place, whose voices are not heard and not wanted. They are often, as here in Australia, herded into camps or prisons, deterritoralised places of exception, in which they exist outside the juridical space of legitimate citizenry. They are treated like criminals, and yet they have done nothing wrong except to ask for help.

With the new Terrorism Laws now all over the newspapers, it can't but occur to me that the space of the camp is growing all the time, that this state of exception is becoming the normal pulse of our times. Even in our democracies, for which we are sacrificing so much to protect, we could soon all potentially inhabit this space outside the law, where the State might do anything to us with impunity. If the natural justice of mercy can be withheld from any other human being, it can be withheld from us as well.

This is only to say the obvious, and to suggest that the work has a moralising effect that it does not, in fact, possess. Its politics exist outside the gross generalisations of power as understood, for example, in the public world of the mass media, reaching instead into the intimate and complex space of our own lives. It is here that we can understand longing and desire, love and hatred, hope and betrayal and despair. And it is from this place that we can begin to demand the freedoms that might make us whole, that allow us to live our lives to their potential fullness. For all of us must have this right.

You say that the theatre is part of the world, and that when it doesn't cut itself off from the world, it is "one of those places that can make the world better, like an orange grove makes the world better". You have no illusion about the importance of art: in the face of real loss, real grief, real atrocity, art can offer only its humility. It has no power against manifest injustice: it can express the intolerable, but it cannot solve it. This does not, however, make it a waste of time. As John Berger says, "The naming of the intolerable is itself the hope." But, perhaps most movingly, you do not only show what is intolerable: you also name the things that make life worth living. Companionship. Laughter. Wine. Beauty. Love.