I've been dithering over this post for days, trying to find a way in to writing about this extraordinary show. As with Back to Back's Food Court, which remains one of the most compelling experiences I've had in a theatre, Ganesh Versus The Third Reich takes an idea which initially appears to be very simple, and then, with cumulative force, systematically unpicks every expectation that you might have formed, until the psyche finds itself at such a point of vulnerability that you are suddenly confronted with - what? The Human Condition? Your own existential solitude? The naked soul as Foucault imagined it, criss-crossed and scarred by the traces of power and authority?


One of the problems in discussing Back to Back, the little theatre company from Geelong that could, is that it creates experiences that defeat description. Outlining a production's shape gives an idea of its characteristics, its morphology, if you like; but this morphology doesn't explain the vitality that inhabits the work. I feel, even more than usual, as if I were attempting to invoke an entire life, with all its incidence, richness, mundanity, conflict and beauty, by dissecting a corpse.

Bruce Gladwin and his collaborators make a work that can only happen in a theatre. It can't be translated into another medium, because it exists so fiercely in its transient present, in the particular moments in which it's witnessed by the particular people who happen to attend. Its transformations are a kind of alchemy, a human magic that ignites in the shifting relationships between the performers and the audience. It's at once transparently simple and profoundly complex.

As those who have followed the mild controversy that greeted its publicity will know, Ganesh Versus The Third Reich is, in part, a fable about how Ganesh, the elephant-headed Hindu god, travels to Nazi Germany to wrest back the swastika from Hitler. A major god in the Hindu pantheon, Ganesh is the deity of obstacles: he not only removes them, but will place them in situations that need to be checked. One of his lesser aspects is as lord of letters and learning, an avatar of stories (which is why I have two small brass effigies of Ganesh on my desk).

Ganesh's aspect as remover of obstacles must have special significance for a company in which most members are disabled. And Back to Back's decision to interrogate Hitler reminds us that, well before their plans to eradicate Jews, homosexuals, Roma and Slavic people, Nazi Germany targeted its disabled population. In 1939, the state systematically began to murder people with mental and physical disabilities, labelling them "unworthy of life", with estimates of deaths varying from 200,000 to 250,000. These murders were the experimental laboratory for what later became the death camps: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka.

Given such a dark subtext, not to mention the questions of cultural appropriation in employing the figure of Ganesh, it's unsurprising that the company discarded their initial idea for Ganesh Versus The Third Reich. "We knew our narrative was morally fraught," says Bruce Gladwin in his program note. "Over time our thinking shifted. Our self-imposed censorship - our reasoning that we should not create the work - became the rationale for bringing it to life."

What is presented instead is a double reality. We see the actors - Mark Deans, Simon Laherty, Scott Price and Brian Tilley - and director David Woods creating their Holocaust fairytale. When we walk in, the stage is a working studio littered with tables, ladders and other miscellaneous mess, with a row of huge curtains tied up at the side of the stage. As the performers argue in a desultory fashion, the director comes in and takes charge.

These glimpses of rehearsal are punctuated by scenes of theatrical spectacle, in which the semi-transparent plastic curtains, painted with silhouetted outlines of trees, houses and other illusions, are drawn across the stage. They are backlit, so performers can be seen in silhouette as well, or are used as a screen for shadow puppetry. The shifts from mundane reality to fairytale are swift, signalled by sound and lighting, and completely transform the stage, so that you are plunged wholly into mythic realities and just as suddenly, almost with a sense of bereftness, dragged out of them.

What is hard to explain is how this rhythm of contrast intensifies into a shattering potency during the show. As in Food Court, the work is an ambush: gestures and relationships which seem of merely mundane importance, or which begin as comic confrontations, inexorably gather emotional force. Subtly and incrementally, connections begin to accrete between the two storylines; for example, David plays Mengele, the Nazi doctor who conducted horrific experiments on, among others, disabled children, and David's very correct treatment of his actors begins to collect sinister undertones.

Perhaps part of this sense of ambush is in how lightly these connections are drawn. The rehearsal scenes are leavened by absurd comedy: Simon, for instance, complaining about his part as one of Mengele's experimental subjects: "It's hard being a Jew." They argue, passionately, about the issue of appropriation. There are sudden and confronting gestures towards the audience: David flinging his hand towards us, as if he is addressing a bank of empty seats, claiming that the audience is just coming to watch "freak porn". As the arguments between the performers intensify, his contempt becomes double-edged, and you begin to wonder if the person most interested in "freak porn" is David himself.

When these arguments explode into violence, the effect is devastating and shocking: the disparate elements and themes of the production suddenly fuse in a wholly unexpected way. The final image is unforgettable. David, tired of his job, tired of these freaks, is left with Mark, who has been the silent focus of many of the cast's arguments. Mark's mother will pick him up later. David, using all his professional skills in people management, deals with the annoyance of Mark by suggesting that they play hide and seek.

Mark hides under the table; David, pretending to look for him, picks up his things, and leaves the room. As the light closes in on him, Mark remains crouched under the table, wriggling with delight at the game, waiting to be found. Even thinking of this moment shakes my heart. It's not simply that this disabled man has been carelessly abandoned by someone who should know better. It's how this apparently trivial gesture becomes, in the deepest and most vulnerable echo chambers of the consciousness, a metaphor for the betrayal of all human hope.

This shows the power and ambiguity, also, of what Back to Back do to the notion of performance. David Woods is the only actor without disability, and his is, in the conventional sense, a brilliant performance. There is no question, at any time, that the rest of the cast isn't making a performance: this is the company's counter-argument to the bitter notion of their being "freak porn". But these actors bring another edge, a sense of perilous exposure that is intensified under Gladwin's impeccably sure direction. I can't think of another company which so foregrounds the knowledge that this work is being made, in each moment, before our eyes: it is a great part of why the audiences becomes so deeply involved.

Back to Back have never had any truck with "special" treatment: their work has a harsh honesty that makes it impossible to patronise. But they also specialise in moments of breath-taking beauty that assert the sheer power of their skills. There are images I won't forget: the impossible poignancy and strangeness, for example, of Ganesh, dressed in a business suit, standing before Hitler, who is played by Simon in a ridiculous knitted Hitler costume. Or an evocation of Indra's net, when a back curtain of stars was lifted to reveal a blazing light, like a sunrise. I've never seen anything like this show, because only Back to Back could make it. They are, simply, our most important independent theatre company.

Picture: David Woods and Brian Tilley in Ganesh Versus The Third Reich. Photo: Jeff Busby

Ganesh Versus The Third Reich, directed, designed and devised by Bruce Gladwin. Lighting design by Andrew Livingston, Bluebottle; design and set construction by Mark Cuthbertson, design and animation Rhian Hinkley, composer Jóhann Jóhannsson. Performed by Mark Deans, Simon Laherty, Scott Price, Brian Tilley and David Woods. Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne Festival and Back to Back Theatre. Merlyn Theatre, Malthouse, until October 9.

Festival Diary #5: Sunday

Food Court, devised by the company, directed and designed by Bruce Gladwin. Lighting design by Andrew Livingston (bluebottle). Performed by Mark Deans, Rita Halabarec, Nicki Holland, Sarah Mainwaring and Scott Price. Music by The Necks, Chris Abrahams, Tony Buck and Lloyd Swanton. Back to Back Theatre @ the Merlyn Theatre (closed). 29-31 January 29-31, 2009, Geelong Performing Arts Centre: Bookings 03 5225 1200

Every now and then a show comes along and reminds you that theatre is a burning glass, that it can be an art that focuses experience into an emotional thermic lance which sears through the intellect into the tissue of deep feeling, right where it hurts. Such theatre reminds you that, as Artaud said in his final madness, being alive is difficult; it reminds you that existence is cruel and painful, and - crucially - that the only way we can experience beauty is if we also open ourselves to pain and sorrow.

It's a rare experience which only occurs when all the different elements of a production click mercilessly into focus, when they expose the simplicity, even the naivety, of performance and so open up the full possibilities of its devastating power. Food Court is this kind of show.


The last time I emerged so shattered from a work of theatre was in 2005, at another festival show: Ariane Mnouchkine's Le Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées). After that one, I had to hide behind some handy rubbish bins at the Exhibition Building until I was able to piece myself together. These responses emerge, after all, from places that one doesn't necessarily want others to see. The land of tears, as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry once remarked, is so mysterious.

Food Court is very unexpected, a quantum leap from Back to Back's hit small metal objects, which premiered at the 2005 Melbourne Festival and catapulted this company of disabled actors into the international theatre scene. small metal objects was exciting theatre, but Food Court is something else. It's this company's first work in a theatre, rather than in a public space, and demonstrates how well Bruce Gladwin and his company understand the dynamics of space and audience: it's visually and technically astonishing. But that's not what breaks your heart.

It is essentially a very simple enactment of a mundane but brutal story of bullying, set in a suburban shopping centre. What is masterly is how it communicates the experience of human disempowerment and humiliation. It's one of the most pitilessly honest pieces of theatre I've seen, driving unwaveringly into the core of the experience it narrates.

It is, in many ways, very cruel. But cruelty alone would not be enough: if we were not acutely aware of the humanity that is damaged, of the ambiguities that twist into human brutality, it would be simply an exercise in sadism. And this show is much more than that: it is also resistance, a cry to what is common between us, to the naked and hurt lives within us all.

It opens in complete darkness and silence. Then we see a torch, lighting the musicians to their pit in front of the stage. More silence. And then the quiet thrum of a bass guitar, slow percussion, a piano, the minimal beginning of a score that deepens and expands with the show, a relentless emotional pulse driving the action.

The lights come up, revealing a forestage backed by a black curtain. A man comes out through the curtain onto the stage, carrying a chair, and places it carefully on its mark. He retreats and brings out another. Other performers emerge, including two women (Rita Halabarec and Nicki Holland) dressed in tight, bright yellow leotards. They are grotesquely fat, but come on like movie stars, posing for the audience.

This is the first moment of discomfort. People laugh, but uneasily. Is it wrong to laugh? The performers are mugging for our laughter, but is it right? There follows a bit of comic stage business involving the male performers scurrying after the women with a boom mic to amplify their lines, which introduces one of the powerful conventions of this show: spoken lines are also projected onto the curtain. Then another woman (Sarah Mainwaring) comes on stage. She curls in a chair, her head bowed. The other women begin to abuse her for being fat. (She isn't fat). She makes no response; she sits on the chair, hunched against the tirade, her hands and head shaking with involuntary tremors. They abuse her again, and it begins to get seriously unpleasant.

The performers leave the stage and the curtains lift, revealing a scrim behind which is a blue light, disconcertingly without perspective. We have left the food court, left the shopping centre: we are now in the "forest". The three women are silhoettes behind the scrim. The bullying gets more intense: the two women order Mainwaring to take her clothes. Slowly, she does. Then, in a moment which made my entire body cold with horror, they tell her to take off her bra. She does. Her knickers. She does. And then, as she stands naked, in a dim pool of light, they tell her to dance. She does, and as she does so people come onto the stage and look at her, one after another, more and more; they stare at her humiliation as she dances, and then they lift their hands and point.

One of the disturbing aspects of this scene is that Mainwaring's dance is beautiful; vulnerable and naked and humiliated, yet oddly free. It scrapes horribly against the visceral mockery and contempt.

After this sequence, the blueish, shifting no-place behind the scrim begins to transform into a forest, with black trees that shift in and out of focus, slowly and dizzyingly, as in a dream. Most of the silent witnesses leave. The two women beat and kick Mainwaring, who curls naked on the ground, lying in a dimly lit space in a grove of nightmarish trees. The other women back away, perhaps afraid of what they have done, and a man comes up to Mainwaring and speaks to her. It's a disturbing conversation, thick with the threat of rape, but deeply ambiguous because the man is also speaking his own damage and longing. And then, without touching her, he leaves.

Mainwaring rises and puts on her clothes. Then she stands and passionately quotes Caliban's speech from The Tempest, the letters scrambling onto the scrim as she struggles to articulate them. She said these words with such longing, such fierce pride, such humility, that something within me broke:

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again.

The final image is of her standing, human and alone, on the bare stage.

In the long silence that followed, before the lights came up and the audience broke into a storm of applause, I think everyone there was holding their breath. "Stunned" is a word that is easily reached for, but in this case, I think it a precise description.

For all its visual splendour and astounding technical accomplishment, Food Court is theatre stripped back to its essentials. The one weakness of small metal objects was its devised script: here the text, under the eye of script consultant Melissa Reeves, is spare and telling, not one syllable out of place. Part of Food Court's power derives from the knowledge that the experience enacted here is one familiar, in one form or another, to its performers; but this potentially sentimentalising knowledge is undermined by the hard recognition that victimhood and brutality are common to every human being. It's one of the most unsparing theatrical explorations I've seen of this universal and tragic understanding, forged from the most ordinary, most mundane of stories.

If I could think of more superlatives, I'd list them. Food Court is the revelation of my festival so far.

Another version of this review appears in Friday's Australian.