“I am a famous liar,” boasts Johnny, the swaggeringly vulnerable teen protagonist of Adam Cass’s fascinating one-man play I Love You, Bro. He is, he hints, a bigger liar than Shakespeare himself.

Certainly Johnny sees himself as a tragic hero, or perhaps heroine. He might be only 14, he tells us, but that doesn’t mean his feelings are childish; after all, Juliet was 14 when her love for Romeo drove her to kill herself. And you don’t doubt for a moment the truth of Johnny’s emotions, although he reveals a bizarre story of cyber-deception that can have few parallels.

I Love You, Bro tells the story of extreme obsession: Johnny’s crush on the popular but slow-witted schoolboy Mark. Truth and fiction are entwined from the very conception of this intriguing one-man show, which is about much more than the shadowy perils of cyberspace and teen sexuality.

This play was an award-winning hit of the 2007 Melbourne Fringe and garnered a swag of rave reviews at the Edinburgh Festival. Its return season at the Malthouse allows those of us who missed it the first time round to see what the fuss is about.

Perhaps the strangest thing about it is that it is closely based on a true story about a 14-year-old Manchester boy, who was convicted of inciting his own murder by his best friend. Although the actual case is even crueller and more sad than the story presented here with such actorly élan by Ash Flanders, Cass sticks pretty closely to the reported facts.

That this is more than a piece of documentary theatre is largely a function of Cass’s stylised writing and Flanders’s brave performance, which is elegantly directed by Yvonne Virsik on a bare, raised stage with minimal lighting. Johnny’s invented characters seem to possess him: he claims that they have lives of their own, and that while he is pretending to be the different characters, he believes in them totally. His behaviour raises profound questions about the nature of identity and the essential amorality of human imagination.

Cass’s language, a motley vernacular reminiscent of Stephen Berkoff’s argot of Shakespearean language and cockney slang, is a striking fusion of chatroom slang and poetic invention. As the monologue unfolds, Johnny's cockiness and aggression become more and more infused with bewilderment and loss, until the show is finally about the longing for emotional contact that drives him to such furious and destructive invention.

It’s a dense text, and the decision to perform it with a midlands accent means that for the five minutes or so, until the ear adjusts, it’s sometimes hard to catch its complexities. The play doesn't escape the odd feeling of longueur; just after half way, once everything has been revealed and all that remains is a nightmare of repetition, it loses dramatic energy. But this picks up swiftly. It’s certainly a show that demands attention; but it also rewards it.

Poupée, a short dance work choreographed by Trudy Radburn at fortyfivedownstairs, is a light but sharp-edged exploration of feminine identity. The two dancers, Sally Smith and Trudy Radburn, first appear as four legs emerging from a huge mass of white tulle: above the tulle arms pop up and vanish, like puppet birds casing the landscape.

The bird motif returns often through Poupée, which moves lightly through different phases that explore various rites of feminine passage - birth, childhood, awakening sexuality, marriage, loneliness. At times the bird gestures throw human agency into serious question, as they recall territorial or mating behaviour, trapped in the shapes of instinct; sometimes they are simply joyous or absurd; sometimes they celebrate our closeness to the natural world, and and others seem sinisterly reductive.

It's funny, moving and multifaceted performance. Like last year's enchanting Care Instructions, it explores the dilemmas of gender with grace and wit and lightness. The dance is rich with constant surprise, of which perhaps the coup is the appearance (apparently from nowhere) of the pianist and composer, Madeleine Flynn.

As its name indicates, the other major motif of the dance is that of the doll, the plaything that is all outer appearance and has no inner life. The dancers are, at different times, warring aspects of the self, mirror images, enemies, rivals. Ultimately, they are doleful and exhausted, their desire for friendship or communication thwarted by the feminine selves that hide them from each other (or themselves). So for all the frou frou of Emily Barrie's simple but lush design, it's ultimately a rather bleak show. But no less beautiful for that.

Part of this review was in Monday's Australian.

Pictures from top: Ash Flanders in I Love You, Bro; Trudy Radburn in Poupée.

I Love You, Bro, by Adam Cass, directed by Yvonne Virsik. Design by Jason Lehane, music by Nick Wollan. With Ash Flanders. Three to a Room and Malthouse Theatre @ the Tower Theatre, until February 28.

Poupée, choreographed by Trudy Radburn. Design by Emily Barrie, lighting design by Efterpi Soropos. Danced by Trudy Radburn and Sally Smith. Fortyfive downstairs. Closed.

Axeman Lullaby, choreographed and directed by Phillip Adams, score by David Chisholm. Lighting design by Paul Jackson and Niklas Pajanti, costume design by Doyle Barrow. Musicians: Aaron Barnden and Peter Dumsday. Dancers: Joanne White, Clair Peters, Carlee Mellow, Stuaty Shugg and Jacon Brown. Axeman: Laurence O’Toole. BalletLab @ Chunky Move Studios until August 17. Bookings: (03) 9685 5111

When you enter the studio, it is filled with an edgeless darkness: a spotlight shines aggressively on the audience, forcing you to blink, and the air is soft with smoke, so you can’t see where the walls are. And then the lights go out and you are sitting in impenetrable darkness. For a moment, nothing happens: and then, unbelievably, you hear the rhythmic fall of an axe, and the woodchips from the blow skittering to the ground.

That can’t be right, you think. Nobody could be chopping wood in this darkness, they’d chop their own feet off. But the steady strokes continue, and the lights slowly rise, deep red, like a murky dawn or a dream of blood, and there is indeed an axeman, steadily braced before a log thicker than a man, bringing the axe down on the wood again and again. And you can see that the edge of the axe is fine and dangerous, he lands his axe and the chips fly out and land on the floor with a sound as light as rain, the blade goes deep into the wood and is lifted and falls again and again.


This is no mimesis of work, but the work itself. The axeman is world champion woodcutter Laurence O’Toole (which is why he can chop a log in the dark without dismembering himself) and his constant physical presence at the back of the deep stage is a present reality that pins Phillip Adams’ dancework Axeman Lullaby to the heavy work of manual labour. And it reminds us that the settlement of Australia was as much a war against trees as against the indigenous inhabitants. The forests of early European Australia rang with the music of axe on wood.

And, as in the story of Jimmy Governor, a half-caste Aboriginal who went on a murderous rampage in 1900, sometimes the axe, the weapon of conquest, was turned against the conquerors. Jimmy Governor’s life was the basis of Thomas Keneally’s novel The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, which was made into a film by Fred Schepsi in 1978, and also inspired Les Murray’s poem The Ballad of Jimmy Governor.

As a symbol of settler anxiety and buried white guilt, it’s hard to go past the resonances of this story. It has crucial elements of Australian bush gothic: the murder of women and children, left vulnerable in the bush; the sexual stain of miscenegation and its bloody revenge; the brooding hostility of the landscape itself. Phillip Adams has loosely – and sometimes not so loosely – drawn on this story for Axeman’s Lullaby, which in its various movements works up to a climax of violence, with a brief denouement of lament.

Most of the sound is made by the dancers and the axeman. At the beginning, the floor is covered with a square made of different lengths of wood, which the dancers with their (blunted) axes work in stylised representations of labour, and which are then thrown into a disordered heap – a movement that sounds, as my partner remarked, like a glockenspiel exploding. The whole studio becomes an instrument, played by the bodies of the dancers. This percussive inventiveness is counterpoised against a minimal score by David Chisholm for piano and violin.

The dance is a precise, anxious phsyical language that moves between tropes from classical ballet and contemporary dance, with a thrilling explosion of indigenous dance from Jacob Brown, who also advised on the indigenous themes for the show. Adams is a profound exploiter of melodrama, walking a narrow edge between naive passion and stylised sophistication; his shows have a rough and direct emotional quality belied by the precision of the choreography and its fine expression by the dancers. It’s a quality, for what it’s worth, that strikes me as very Australian: you sense something similar in the ballads of Nick Cave.

It makes Axeman’s Lullaby a wholly absorbing experience: it’s a short but densely packed work that annihilates any sense of the passing of time. It's constantly surprising: the only moment I returned to earth was when some scenes from Schepsi’s film were projected onto the back wall, which introduced a more literal language that seemed tautological here. A brilliant, uneasy work.

Fringe Festival: Cake by Astrid Pill, directed by Ingrid Voorendt. Designed by Gaelle Mallis, lighting design by Geoff Cobham, composition by Zoe Barry. With Astrid Pill and Zoe Barry. Vitalstatistix and Malthouse Theatre @ The Tower until October 7.

Kin, directed by Stephen Page. Design by Stephen Page, lighting design by Glenn Hughes, videography by Douglas Watkin. With Isileli Jarden, Sean Page, Ryan Jarden, Josiah Page, Samson Page, Hunter Page-Lochard and Curtis Walsh-Jarden. Malthouse Theatre @ The Merlyn Theatre until October 6. Bookings: 9685 5111.

There's a beautiful synergy in the pairing of these two shows at the Malthouse this week. It goes further than the pleasing alliteration of Cake and Kin: like those racing horses Montaigne once admired in Italy, they're both "small but exquisitely formed". And both are stylishly realised devised productions that explore delicate reaches of the human psyche with tact, humour and honesty.


Cake comes to the Malthouse from a hit season at the Adelaide Fringe. It's easy to see why this show attracted attention: it irresistibly combines the erotic attractions of eating and sex, and seductively tickles your senses - taste and smell as well as eyes and ears. (Even touch, if you're lucky enough to get a cupcake). But it is more than a sensory feast: in ways that remind me of Margaret Cameron's brilliant show Things Calypso Wanted To Say, a fond memory from around 1990, Cake is an excoriatingly honest, funny and sometimes bleak examination of subversive feminine eroticism.

The first thing you notice is Gaelle Mellis's design. When you enter the Tower, you walk to your seat across a stage sprinkled with icing sugar, trying not to trip over small piles of cupcakes that are piled on the floor. The two performers, Astrid Pill and Zoe Barry, are already present, softly singing the nursery rhyme "Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker man".

The show is performed in the round to a small audience. In the centre of the stage is a wooden kitchen table, and in the corners are a table with tea things, a glockenspiel and a chair. The feeling of intimacy is heightened by Geoff Cobham's subtly fanciful lighting design, which mostly consists of a raft of classic Australian kitchen lights hung low over the table.

Under Ingrid Voorendt's precise direction, Cake becomes a detailed integration of text, music and physical theatre. Pill narrates two parallel narratives, one in the first person and one in the third. The first follows a woman's hopeless passion for the baker in her local cake shop, from whom she purchases unseemly numbers of cakes, while never daring to tell her love; the other is a piercingly exact - even at times brutal - examination of a relationship, that explores the grief of losing a baby.

The narration is interspersed with songs, including a wicked version of This is the House that Jack Built. Zoe Barry, dressed identically to Pill in a demure skirt, shirt and stilettos, is Pill's wordless counterpoint: she performs the lush score live, becoming Pill's inner, witnessing self.

It could all be too cute for words, but the show's intelligence and wit - and its slyly obscene subversion of the apparently inhibited femininity it explores - ensures that it never is. Such a show could be in great danger of simply confirming the diminutive of the feminine; instead, its artists gracefully steer it to a surprising affirmation of the female self. Who can bake her own cakes.

Kin, on the other hand, is yang to Cake's yin. This show is an exploration of maleness: in particular, it looks at the fertile, delicate period of prepubesence, when boys are poised between childhood and manhood. In particular, and with a gentleness that is the best kind of tact, it explores the issues faced by Indigenous boys. It's advisedly named: the performers, all aged between 10 and 14, are the nephews and the son of its director, Bangarra Dance Theatre's Stephen Page.


Like Mellis, Peter England has designed this show with great care for the spatial relationships between performers and their audience. Except for a row of seats at the back, the stage is surrounded on two sides by a bench arrangement, which immediately gives it a pleasant informality (a quality heightened by the number of children present on the night I went - I wish that children were seen more often at the theatre).

The show opens with the boys casually gathering together for a jam under a spill of light on the wide Merlyn stage. It's an ingenious opening that unobstrusively harnesses those young, potentially chaotic energies. And, as the familiar Led Zeppelin chords echo across the stage, it is immediately and charmingly recognisable to anyone who has had anything to do with teenage boys.

As you would expect, Kin is exquisitely choreographed, moving between several loosely-connected scenes that enact different aspects of the boys' lives. They muck about in a beaten-up car; they stun themselves into insensibility sniffing petrol; they dance - both rap and traditional dance - for us and for each other.

The show deals with serious issues with a light touch, exploring domestic violence, racism and land rights. In a highlight, the boys perform a rap version of Oodgeroo Noonuccal's (formerly Kath Walker) 1962 poem, Aboriginal Charter of Rights, reminding us that Indigenous activism has a long and distinguished history that is still very much alive.

Perhaps what is most striking about Kin is how these young performers own it: it is very clear that their performances emerge from their individual physicalities and experiences. It's an exemplary example of sensitive collaboration with young people, which expresses their worlds without exploiting them. The show is short - around 35 minutes - but length is no synonym for substance: as it shifted to its final scene, a videoed projection of an initiation into adulthood, I felt I had come a long way.

I hope it is not merely sentimental to say that around halfway through, I found myself in tears. I think what moved me was the freedom of a particular gesture as a boy danced, a piercing moment of joyousness that exquisitely expressed the vulnerability and pride and tumultuous anarchy of boys on the threshold of manhood.

It was one of those moments when theatre justifies itself, when it reveals our connections as well as our differences. In such moments, theatre becomes an intricate dance between audiences and artists, between our social and private selves; a place of fleeting but profound communion. In this sense, the most generously human, both Cake and Kin are profoundly political works.

Picture: Astrid Pill in Cake. Photo: Jeff Busby