It's proverbial that there is a Hamlet for every century. As Jan Kott says, it's a play that absorbs its times. The Romantic era gave us a pale, introspective youth; the 20th century an animal trapped in the pitiless mechanisms of power. In the 21st century, the Prince of Denmark has become the random particle in a corrupted, dysfunctional and claustrophobic nuclear family.


Stripping the play of its larger politics reveals the powerlessness of its two women: Hamlet's mother, Gertrude, and his love object, Ophelia, are starkly shown to be male possessions, objects of exchange whose value rises and falls on their sexual conduct. Ophelia's own brother lectures her on keeping her virtue intact, as her virginity is a commodity by which her family honour and standing is measured. Her father is more explicit while ordering her to avoid Hamlet's wooing, when he tells her to "tender yourself more dearly". Gertrude's lubricity in marrying her husband's brother (and, unknowingly, his murderer) shortly after she is widowed is the ignition point of the whole play.

Female desire in Hamlet is dangerous, a threat to patriarchal authority. "Fear it, Ophelia, fear it!" Laertes says: but, as with all the other men in the play telling women how to manage their sexuality, it's his own fear that he expresses. It's the fear of this female desire, and most deeply, the fear of his own uncontrollable impulses, that leads to Hamlet's incestuous jealousy of his mother and his unconscionable cruelty towards Ophelia; and in the middle of it all, Ophelia, seeking only to be obedient to her father's and brother's will, is herself broken.

In Ophelia Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Daniel Schlusser and his collaborators have picked up this subtext of perilous sexuality to create a work that is part installation, part dance, part performance, part music. An opera, a work, in the broadest sense of its meaning. It's a co-production between Chamber Made Opera and Bell Shakespeare's developmental wing, Mind's Eye, which permits an experimental freedom difficult to find in the pragmatic contingencies of theatre.

NB: This review contains spoilers

"Shakespeare," says Jan Kott, "is truer than life. One can play him only literally." It might seem counter-intuitive to some, perhaps, that Kott goes on to say that to play Shakespeare naturalistically is to butcher his plays. Shakespeare's world is not a mirror held up to mundane life, so much as an intensifier of its significant moments. The spectacle magnifies and absorbs reality, making it "truer". Kott is clearly not speaking of factual accuracy. It seems that to Kott, who demonstrates here a profound understanding of poetic, "literal" and "poetic" are pretty much synonyms.

Bell Shakespeare's production of Julius Caesar is poetic in this sense. Peter Evans examines the literal truth of the play, and forges a contemporary language in which to make it plain. The result is a lucid, profoundly exciting production that intelligently excavates a play for our political times. But first, some reflections on the politics of Shakespeare.

For Kott, Shakespeare was the artist non pareil of the Grand Mechanism of history, a tragic vision which Kott describes as a kind of metaphysical escalator peopled by the kings. "There are no bad kings, or good kings; kings are only kings," he says. As the kings claw their way to power, their actions reveal the contradiction between the world of action and the "moral order", a recognition that implicates their entire kingdoms. The kings step over the bloody heads of their predecessors to take their place at the top, only to be butchered in their turn. History is the amoral mechanism that turns good men to brutal and ruthless actions, and which deprives them of the choice to be otherwise. It is, as Kott says elsewhere, "the situation".

Betraying my intellectual crudity, I have never been sure whether the Grand Mechanism, a phrase so pregnant with portent and abstract agency, might not be more mundanely called "politics". At its most basic, politics (derived from the Greek for "citizens" or "city") is the means of making collective decisions. It is the complex mediation of power, the process of deciding who decides and who is at the mercy of decision.

Where Kott sees a monumental and crushing "reality", a world determined by a tragic mechanism called History, I see a web of intensely complex interactions through which power is produced, attacked and defended. The crux of this political reality is amplification: the kings are the productions, the amplifications, of countless actions, public and private, significant and insignificant, linguistic and military, historical and contemporary. This, however, may be merely a rephrasing for a latter time. The lack of choice that Kott describes as the condition of power remains the same, and the fulcrum of Shakespeare's historical tragedies is this recognition of powerlessness.

Two of Shakespeare's Roman plays - Coriolanus and Julius Caesar - reflect this more complex drama by explicitly bringing the state - the Roman Republic - into the purview of tragedy. As Kott says, the scene shifts from the staircase of kings to the arena of class struggle between patricians and plebians. In these plays, he says, history ceases to be a demonic history of the royal. "It is," he says, "only ironic and tragic". Certainly, Julius Caesar, in its language and dramaturgy as much as in its political insight, remains a startlingly modern play.

As Shakespeare can demonstrate, theatre is a powerful simulacrum of the political. Indeed, politics is often pejoratively described as "theatre", mostly by people with little interest in theatre itself: if politics is mere "theatre", then it is considered to be with without meaning, a dumbshow of empty gesture that has nothing to do with "reality". There is, however, a profound relationship between politics and theatre: theatre, as a conscious simulacrum of reality, mimics how politics itself is a show of simulacra, a series of simulations. Politics is a primary maker of simulations that stand in for reality, claiming to be the thing itself, and which at last infect the real with their own reality. Another is art.

The tension in politics is not between the authentic thing and its forgery, so much as between warring simulacra, those that have invaded the previous reality and themselves become "real", and those which have yet to realise their reality. (As an aside, I invite you to examine the close etymological relationship between the word "real" and "royal". Or that the real was once a unit of Spanish currency. Facing "reality" is not as straightforward as it might seem.)

There is, in this vision, no authentic "real", only a series of simulacra that stretch back through history, producing the reality that will in turn be usurped by the next simulation. In other words, it's elephants all the way down. If you follow this thought, it becomes clear that theatre is as real as anything that occurs in Parliament. It's certainly much truer.


*

So, to Bell Shakespeare's production of Shakespeare's political tragedy, Julius Ceasar. It's one of his shorter plays, based on Plutarch's account of the conspiracy to assassinate Julius Caesar (Alex Menglet), at this time Emperor of Rome in everything but name, by a cabal of plotters led by Cassius (Kate Mulvany) and Brutus (Colin Moody). The action moves swiftly and cleanly to its crisis - the murder of Caesar in the Capitol - and its aftermath, when the plotters lose their battle for power in Rome, and fall on their own swords.

Despite its title, the play is the tragedy of Brutus, the honourable man whose ideals lead him to murder. At issue is the Republic, the state run by citizens (defined as people who were not slaves, or poor, or women). Most of the conspirators, caviling against Caesar's absolute authority, have baser reasons for seeking to murder the proto-Emperor, but Brutus is a true believer, and his motives, as he explains again and again, are disinterested. Caesar must die because he threatens the ideal of Rome, because in his ambition he seeks an Imperial tyranny in which his word is law. The irony is that the blood shed in the Capitol is as fatal to the Republic as Caesar's ambition.

The other major actors in the tragedy are the people of Rome, the plebians whose support is crucial to Republic and tyrant alike. Peter Evans's elegant production approaches the play as both a private and a public tragedy: Brutus's destruction parallels the destruction of free Rome. It begins with the people celebrating Caesar's return after his defeat of Pompey, the first death blow to the Republic, and ends with Brutus alone in the dark, demanding of the audience that someone hold his sword so he might run on it and kill himself.

Evans and his co-dramaturg Kate Mulvany capitalise on the modernity of Shakespeare's language to make a text that moves swiftly and fluidly across the space. Most cuts are in the final acts: the battles are here reported by Portia's ghost speaking into a microphone, and there are no eulogies for Brutus in the final moments: he is left on the brink of death, facing the destruction of all his hopes. It makes a brutal vision.

As in the "real" world, politics in Rome consists of two main means of persuasion: force of arms, and language. The play turns on two speeches made at Caesar's funeral: the first by Brutus, a bluff honourable man who believes in decency and justice, and the next by Mark Antony (Daniel Frederiksen), Caesar's off-sider, whom Brutus's decency has spared against the pragmatic advice of Cassius. Antony understands the art of manipulation far more profoundly than Brutus, who is the kind of man of thinks a spade is a bloody shovel.

Antony's speech is a masterly work of oratory, in which he sedulously keeps to the letter of Brutus's stipulation that he "shall not in your funeral speech blame us". He says only that the conspirators were "honourable men", but in each repetition of the phrase, it becomes weighted with a dreadful irony, until he might as well have proclaimed them bloody murderers to the crowd. The people, who cheer Brutus one moment as a hero, now turn against the conspirators; and from that moment all hope for the Republic is lost.

*

Here we are watching something fascinating: the beginnings of a performance language. If it doesn't quite feel fully developed, it is already a powerful tool. You can see the influence of constructivist theatre in the disciplined physicality of the actors, especially in the choreography as they build a high scaffolding. But a strong and exciting sense of physical theatre imbues the details of the performances, in how they move and relate in space, in their observation of the edges of the stage (when each actor exits, he or she pauses briefly just before they step off). There are two microphones, which are used for private asides or for the voices of the public, and also as elements of Kelly Ryall's sparely brilliant sound design: actors strike the mics or breathe into them to make an earsplitting crowd noise.

There are extremely effective formal gestures as well: the actors use no props, and when Cassius shows his sword, Mulvany simply extends her hand. The murder of Caesar is performed by each actor striking him with their hands, and the violence is represented by white powder, which puffs out and floats in the light (a steal from Benedict Andrews's The War of the Roses, here given a different spin).

Alex Menglet as Caesar is the only actor who doesn't observe these formalities: as Caesar does, he breaks all the rules. His Caesar is huge: generously brutal, charismatic and careless. Moody's Brutus is his dark contrast, bowed by the weight of his conscience, unbending and breaking. As it should be, because it plays out the central meaning of the play, this is a powerful performance: Moody is as good as I have seen him in this role. We get a man in whom all passion is fiercely repressed, only to explode in rage and despair.

Kate Mulvany as Cassius is fluidity against Moody's implacability, all supple determination. It's a fascinating decision to cast her in this role, and it wiggles open the play's politics: she is left ambiguously gendered, the male nouns left unchanged, the pronouns all feminised. (Despite its contemporary relevance, the role recalls Margaret Thatcher rather than Julia Gillard.) The fight between the brothers, in which Brutus rebukes Cassius for taking bribes and betraying the ideals of the Republic, is a highlight, hair-raisingly and viciously passionate. In the supporting roles, Daniel Frederiksen's Mark Antony is in comparison disappointingly monotonal; the language carries him, rather than the other way around. I was especially taken by Katie-Jean Harding as Portia: she found a musical extremity in the language that reminded me a little of Melita Jurisic.

*

The Republic is represented in Anna Cordingley's design by a classical pillar that reaches up to the ceiling, surrounded by workman's railings. In the beginning, it is already a neglected ruin, with weeds growing around it. This reminder of old Rome glowers over the set, which is a performance square marked out by chairs and surrounded by arc lamps that throw a low, yellowish light (design by Paul Jackson) over the action. After Caesar's murder, the column is splashed with blood. 

Just before Antony's speech, the performers begin to construct a scaffolding. As the power struggle rages between the conspirators and the Triumvirate that eventually wins Imperial power, the scaffolding rises until it is the height of the column. In the final moments of the play, screens are let down down over the scaffolding. On them is drawn an anaemic, life-size sketch of the column that conceals the column itself. The simulacrum of the Republic is complete, and now the Empire can begin. It's as devastatingly eloquent an image of what has happened to western democracy as I have seen.

Disclaimer: I am under commission for a music theatre work with Bell Shakespeare's Mind's Eye.

Picture: Colin Moody and Kate Mulvany in Julius Caesar. Photo: Joe Sabljak

Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare, directed by Peter Evans. Designed by Anna Cordingley, lighting design by Paul Jackson, composer Kelly Ryall. With Keith Agius, Rebecca Bower, Daniel Frederiksen, Benedict Hardie, Katie-Jean Harding, Alex Menglet, Colin Moody, Kate Mulvany, Gareth Reeves and James Wardlaw. Bell Shakespeare at the Fairfax Studio, Victorian Arts Centre, until September 17. Opens Sydney Opera House October 25. National tour dates at Bell Shakespeare.

I'm a sucker for Shakespeare's comedies. They reveal his profound knowledge of the stage, and his pleasure in its vulgar tricks and conventions gives us some of the most sublimely funny scenes ever written. In Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare steals freely from a bunch of popular contemporary sources, from Luigi Pasaquaglio's Il Fedele to Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, in which a virtuous woman becomes the victim of vicious intrigue. Transposing the story from tragedy to comedy through the language of courtly wit, he invents two of his most charming lovers, Benedick and Beatrice.


It's a deeply enjoyable play, in which Shakespeare modulates his comedic satire with scenes of real feeling. And John Bell's production for Bell Shakespeare, now on at the Arts Centre, uses his own profound knowledge of stage business to burnish its pleasures to a deep lustre. This is the best production of Bell's that I've seen: exhilarating, vital and surely crafted, with nothing of the fustian.

Stephen Curtis's design sets the action in a quasi-fifties Messina, with full-circle skirts and army uniforms with red sashes. Here the concept runs seamlessly with the play, a fantasia that gives its fantasies life without intruding itself. The action takes place in a basketball court, an institutional setting wrested to other uses of pleasure, with lush Tintoretto-esque wall murals to lift it out of the literal. Alan John's music, performed live, springs organically out of the performances, heightening its sense of carnival. And in the play's tomb scene, a central turning point of death and rebirth, the music becomes ritual itself with a glorious a cappella drawn from male voice Corsican choirs.

Benedick and Beatrice are equals in intelligence and vivacity, sceptics whose condemnation of love arises from their distrust of its sentimental cliches. Their verbal fencing is, as their mischievous friends recognise when they decide to trick the two into marrying each other, the showiest of courtships. They keep each other "waking and in continuall exercise", each pushing the other to more dazzling feats of wit. As in almost every Georgette Heyer romance, all that needs to occur is for each partner to recognise this as attraction, rather than as hostility: what occurs through the play is not a transformation of feeling, but an understanding of it.

This love story runs parallel with the fortunes of Hero (Alexandra Fisher) and Claudio (Sean Hawkins). When Hero is maliciously framed as unfaithful, Claudio mercilessly shames and abandons her in the midst of their wedding. Here, despite his lack of faith in his beloved, he is not portrayed as merely shallow; the insecurity of his passion drives him to a display of cruel machismo. Both couples must negotiate the deception and tricks of others to find the truth of their feeling through the miasma of appearance.

The key is the depth of its casting: every performance is worth the watching. Toby Schmitz and Blazey Best as Benedick and Beatrice create true electric play, the enlivening contrast to the more conventionally drawn lovers of Hero and Claudio. The whole is rich with comic invention: notably Max Gillies's Dogberry, the malapropic watchman, and Sean O'Shea's Don John, a kind of evil Mr Bean in a Mafia suit, the asocial wrench in this otherwise genial machine of sociality. The darker themes of war and malice are threaded lightly, present as shade in a complex comedic texture. A delight.

*

Chris Summers's Crossed was the second of two plays by this promising young writer to premiere within weeks of each other. It consists of five intersecting monologues, all revolving around the same traumatic event - the police shooting of "the smiley-faced boy" - which loosely recalls the fatal shooting of a 15 year old boy in Northcote in 2008. It's hard to imagine a better production, done in traverse in La Mama's Courthouse Theatre under the direction of Matt Scholten with a more than capable cast. And it shows that Summers has a sure gift for demotic speech, and an ability to create contradictory characters that lift out of stereotype into vital life.

There's a touch of the worthily sociological here, however, that the play doesn't quite escape, and I couldn't help feeling that the play trips over its own ambition. Crossed consists of two distinct parts: an interwoven narration that culminates in the climactic shooting, and an afterword in which each character adds a postscript to their experience. Aside from the final scene, which ends the play powerfully, most of the epilogue could have been cut without hurt: mostly the writing here gives an unnecessary sense of ends being tied up, and it certainly has the clunkiest lines.

The most compelling role is that of Lee (Ioan Roberts), the young gay man with a cyber-crush on the absent protagonist. The other characters sometimes fall into a sense of having been constructed rather than imagined. The rebellious Muslim teen, the aging, ill mother missing her son, the bright wog boy, the surfie nationalist, are all carefully - maybe too carefully - turned to avoid cliche. But maybe what I wondered about most was the tense of the writing: it can slide into a prosaic sense of text written firmly in the past tense, rather than unfolding in a remembered present. As a consequence, there are moments when the writing seems more description than gestus. These are marks of an early work: equally clear is that Summers is a writer to watch.

Picture: Toby Schmitz and Blazey Best as Benedick and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing.

Much Ado About Nothing, by William Shakespeare, directed by John Bell. Designed by Stephen Curtis, lighting design by Matt Scott, composer Alan John. With Toby Schmitz, Blazey Best, Max Gillies, Tony Llewellyn-Jones, Matthew Walker, Sean O'Shea, Sean Hawkins, Alexandra Fisher, Nathan Lovejoy, Robert Alexander, Arky Michael, Andrew Tighe, Megan O'Connell, Lizzie Schebesta and Tyran Parke. Bell Shakespeare @ the Playhouse, Victorian Arts Centre, until June 25.

Crossed, by Chris Summers, directed by Matt Scholten. Set and costume design by Kat Chan, lighting design by Lisa Mibus, music and sound design by Pete Goodwin. With Prag Bhatia, Matthew Candeland, Nicholas Linehan, Jenny Lovell and Ioan Roberts. Platform Youth Theatre, Appetite Arts and La Mama, Courthouse Theatre. Closed.

It begins, as all imagination does, in darkness and silence. A door opens at the back of the stage, and we hear footsteps; a single wavering torchlight lights a patch of colour here, an object there. In the middle of the space is a giant pile of clothes, maybe three metres high, thrown together hurriedly for some emergency, perhaps... Then other people stumble in, and begin to explore the space. They're clearly refugees of some kind, their faces black with smuts of ash. Someone finds a television, fiddles with the controls, turns it on, and as snatches of television news begins to buzz through the static, the frame begins to focus.


It's Black Saturday. The actors are people fleeing from the firestorms, waiting in a place of refuge for news, supplies, help. One actor finds a guitar and begins to strum some chords. Another, a young woman, listens to a news story about missing fire fighters, and breaks down. Someone she loves is missing... Meanwhile, an old man (Max Cullen) finds a book, and begins to read it out loud. It's the beginning of Twelfth Night. Someone else picks up another line... and gradually, out of the imagined reality of the bushfires, spirals another reality altogether: Shakespeare's comic fantasy, a gossamer nonsense of which the entire purpose is delight.

The young grief-stricken woman (Andrea Demetriades) becomes Viola, mourning her brother Sebastian, lost in a storm at sea. The other nameless refugees transform into characters from Twelfth Night - Kit Brookman becomes Olivia, the Duke Orsino (Elan Zavelsky, brilliantly doubling as Sir Andrew Aguecheek), Feste the clown (Max Cullen), Olivia (Kit Brookman), and the bluff Ben Wood as an unlikely but compelling Malvolio.

The real gift of Lee Lewis's Twelfth Night, which I recommend whole-heartedly, is the immediacy with which it demonstrates that theatre is an act of complicity between those who make and watch it. Half this production's charm and a great part of its hilarity emerges from its ad hoc theatrical wit: the actors use low-tech props made of cardboard or rags gleaned from op shops, inviting the audience to participate in their transparent manipulations. The laughter bubbles up through the cracks in the credible: the knowing adult and the open-mouthed child sit hand in hand, laughing at the stratagems, and at the same time entirely seduced by them.

The aim of this ingenious foolery is, as Prospero says, to please: but when it's as well done as it is here, the pleasure has an edge of profound poignancy. It's a quality that strikes me as especially actorly, and maybe most of all, in its doubled vision and fragile, ephemeral conceits, especially Shakespearean. Lewis's astounding cast of clowns - there are no weak links in this show - perform the set pieces sublimely. The deception of Malvolio, with his tormentors hiding in plain sight in absurd costumes made of cardboard boxes, is a highlight, and outrageously funny in how it pushes its own conventions to the point just before they break altogether.

The vulgar comedy, and its cruelty (the malice brought to bear against Malvolvio is cruel indeed) plays against some of Shakespeare's most beautiful musings on romantic love outside the sonnets. The poetry is, perhaps, underplayed; certainly, the romances between the various smitten lovers seem little more than occasions for gorgeous wordplay, rather than true feeling. But when Viola and Sebastian reunite, each having believed that the other was dead, it breaks your heart: here, the brother and sister make the true love story. And this brings the tale back to its first reality, the disaster of the bushfires, and the partings that haunted so many families. Beautifully done, and a must-see.

*

Mix Tape, part of Chunky Move's Next Move series, is Stephanie Lake's first full-length dance work. It's a very simple idea - Mix Tape uses fragments of recorded interviews and a straightforward mix tape sound track to explore the idea of romantic love: situating itself, as Lake frankly admits in the program, right in the middle of the cliche. The work has a deliberately domestic setting, with a bookshelf-cum-entertainment centre dominating the back of the stage, on which are various noise-making machines: a reel-to-reel tape, a turntable, a cd player. Each machine turns itself on and off as the soundtrack requires, and the work modulates between differing registers of feeling, from the comic to the sad to the desolate.

The four dancers - Sara Black, Rennie McDougall, Timothy Ohl and Jorijn Vriesendorp - perform with a coruscating energy that lights up Lake's intense choreography with an exuberance that only comes with youth. The movement oscillates between a kind of zombie-mode, where the dancers seem almost asleep or dazed, before an awakening into something wrenchingly violent, in which movement seems to ripple through the dancers's flesh and explode in a flash of kinetic energy from their arms and legs.

The erotic metaphor of a duet is foregrounded to the point where it becomes literal: dancers kiss, as if they are making love in front of us. And about half way through, I began to wonder why the duets were so rigorously heterosexual; the bodies are locked in their genders, locked in their sexes, locked in their roles, in ways that suggest romantic love is, as the ALP would have it of marriage, a matter between a man and a woman. It wouldn't have occurred to me if I had thought these were particular couples, but here they were representative, speaking generally about romantic love. Then I wondered if this question was part of the zombie-movement that plays darkly through the dance, whether, in fact, the heterosexism functioned as self-aware critique or frank oversight. I still can't decide.

In the same way, a couple of the more narrative songs - Bob Dylan's Shelter from the Storm, for instance - dominated the performance so strongly that I found myself above all listening to the lyrics. At these and other times, the dance seemed reduced to mere illustration, a literal representation or playing out of gesture, rather than a dynamic language in itself. Again, I couldn't tell if this was deliberate or not: if it is, it doesn't strike me as an especially fruitful tension. The peril of this whole conceit is of falling into the merely sentimental, the mere cliche, and I'm not sure that Lake wholly escapes it. These reservations aside, all of which are to do with the framing rather than the choreography, Mix Tape is absorbing and often very beautiful: and the dancing is sensational.

Photo: Max Cullen as Feste taunts Malvolio (in the box) in Bell Shakespeare's Twelfth Night

Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare, directed by Lee Lewis. Designed by Anna Tregloan, lighting design by Luiz Pampolha, music and sound by Paul Charlier and Steve Toulmin. With Max Cullen, Ben Wood, Andrea Demetriades, Kit Brookman, Brent Hill, Elan Zavelsky and Adam Booth. Bell Shakespeare, Victorian Arts Centre, until September 18. Touring regional Australia, Canberra and Sydney until November.

Mix Tape, directed and choreographed by Stephanie Lake. Lighting design by Benjamin Cisterne (Bluebottle), sound design, Luke Smiles, costume design by Harriet Oxley. With Sara Black, Rennie McDougall, Timothy Ohl and Jorijn Vriesendorp. Next Move, Chunky Move Studios, until September 11.

If one is an actor, a bare stage must be the most perilous place in the world: it leaves nowhere to hide. In last year's STC production of The War of the Roses, Benedict Andrews showed how this most naked of spaces can act as a burning glass, amplifying language and performance to a charring intensity. But exposure can equally reveal poverty: and sadly, this is mostly what happens in Bell Shakespeare's King Lear.


It's never comfortable reviewing a company when you suspect it is not at its best. After 75 performances around the country, Bell's Lear limped into town last week minus one of its key actors, Leah Purcell, who was forced to pull out two days before the Melbourne premiere. Instead, the part of Regan was played by Rachel Gordon, flown in the day before. Reading from the script, Gordon gave a most creditable performance, but the disruption must have had an impact. I got the feeling I was watching a tired production.

It's easy to see the ambition of Marion Potts' concept. This Lear is almost depopulated: isolated figures play across Dale Ferguson's starkly minimal stage, which features a small revolve in its centre, with a silver backdrop that looks like a screen of mist. Courtly pomp is represented by a suspended marquee above the revolve, a stylised crown that lifts out of sight as Lear divests himself of his kingly power. The simplicity is highlighted by the presence of Bree van Reyk playing her percussive score live on stage.

It's a cold stage, emphasised by Nick Schlieper's pitilessly revealing lighting and the furs which drape each character. At times it functions almost like a screen: there are hints here of painting and film, with visual references from Brueghel and Bergman. The frame is all there: what's missing is not so much the play itself - we hear every word - as the passions which inhabit its freezing void. Shakespeare's Lear is a terrifying portrait of human beings at the mercy of bestial forces in an indifferent and godless universe, and here we're missing at least half of the equation.

The furs and chill can't but recall Peter Brook's film of Lear, which stars Paul Scofield in a bleak, snowy landscape that evokes the existential desolation of Beckett. And the comparison unkindly shows what this production lacks: where Scofield's masterly performance maps the clashing forces - the pride and brokenness, the fierce will and the anarchic madness - of a king who is only, after all, a man, Bell gives us a journeyman's sketch of the soul.

Physically Bell looks the part, and there's nothing wrong with his bodily presence on stage: the problem is all in the language. Shakespeare's text is merely delivered, with a repetitive cadence that encloses the verse rather than opening it into the universe of human feeling. It seems astounding, but not one of Lear's harrowing speeches evoked a single responsive emotion: not the storm scene, nor the heart-rending reunion with his daughter, nor any of his tormented abjurations against madness; most notably not his anguished recognition of his own blindness, in which at last he sees humanity in its naked state.

With no Lear at the centre, the production inevitably splinters. It's left to Peter Carroll as the Fool to show what might have been. The Fool is Lear's other self, his conscience and his confidant; it's no accident that he disappears after the storm scene, when Lear is finally reunited, through his suffering, with himself. Carroll's performance is the most lucid I have seen of this opaque and tragic character: he is at once frail and fearless, comic and heart-breakingly poignant. Most of all, he brings multiple levels of light and shade to his performance, creating a rippling depth that fills the stage's cold emptiness. The show's worth seeing for Carroll alone.

The rest of the cast sits mainly between these extremes, with solid performances from Yalin Ozucelik as Oswald, Bruce Myles as Gloucester, Paul English as the Duke of Albany, Jane Montogomery Griffiths as Goneril and John McConville as Edgar. But for all their efforts, the production is ultimately no more than a competent reading of the play: not a harrowing of the soul, so much as a polite introduction to the idea that a soul might be harrowed.

Picture: Peter Carroll (left) and John Bell in King Lear.

King Lear by William Shakespeare, directed by Marion Potts. Designed by Dale Ferguson, lighting design by Nick Schlieper, sound design by Stefan Gregory, composition by Bree van Reyk. With John Bell, Jane Montgomery-Griffiths, Rachel Gordon, Susan Prior, Peter Kowitz, Peter Carroll, Josh McConville, Tim Walter, Paul English, Anthony Phelan, Yalin Ozucelik, Keith Agius and Justin Stewart Cotta. Bell Shakespeare @ the Playhouse, Victorian Arts Centre, until June 12. Her Majesty's Theatre, Perth, June 18-26.

Fringe shows are now piling up, but not the wherewithal to write about them. Ms TN's got a headache, not of the hangover variety but of the Jane Austen sick-headake kind. I need a shadowed bechamber and some lavender water. But some pointers, all the same, and not only because it's easier to point than to think. If you want reviews now as opposed to later, click through at once to "John Bailey's" excellent new review blog, Capital Idea. It is, as the man says, "a very important blog and should be read frequently". Quite. He's better known to bloggers as Born Dancin', and to others as a Sunday Age reviewer of rare (if condensed) acuity.

Meanwhile, the big talk is women in theatre. After the Belvoir PR disaster, and Neil Armfield's patently inadequate defence, Melanie Beddie has moved the debate south by complaining to the MTC about their lack of the XX chromosone. Blogs and commentaries are catching fire up and down this wide brown land.

What do I think? A lot of things, actually. I have never stepped back from calling myself a feminist, but I hate that thinking feminist ends up imprisoning me in my gender. And I think it's quite right to regard the fact that women are so poorly represented in powerful mainstream artistic positions as a scandal. And I'm also thinking about the essentialist problem (women, being communicative mammals, make a certain kind of collaborative theatre, that is itself marginalised) and the quota problem (it is a step forward for women to be counted on the mainstream stages, even if in aesthetic/ideological terms they do as much for women in general as Margaret Thatcher did for miners).

I'm thinking the question is complicated because of the whole baggage of being a woman, which means millions of signals from babyhood, reinforced if necessary by psychic or physical violence, to stay quiet, to be helpful and selfless and small, to not put oneself forward, to never, ever, ever say how good you are, to speak low and soft lest one be called shrill and monstrous and not-a-proper-woman, to self-efface, to stay away from boring women's business, to hide your intelligence lest a man feel his balls shrink, to remember that to point out that it's a man's world makes you a man-hater, that an outspoken woman will get twice as much shit as an outspoken man, and will have to be twice as smart even to be heard, and that every woman knows underneath, in the reptilian bits of her brain, that the threat of physical and sexual violence is always there to keep her down if all else fails. And so on and so forth in all its infinite variety. And it's not simply about what all this does in the externals of making a career, but what it does to the inside: to what you choose, what your ambitions are, where you flinch, where you don't. And that it's the internals that really count when you're an artist.

And I'm pondering the fact that every woman will experience these things differently, but negotiating them is something every woman has to do. Maybe if a man is gay or black or brown or disabled or lower class, he might have some insight into the insidious effects of this conditioning. But not always. And I think that maybe sometimes, like Frederick Douglass, you have to use the vocabulary of power in order to have a chance of changing things, not the vocabulary of entitled victimhood, and I'm thinking that that is complicated too. And that it takes a long time to change the world, and sometimes those changes aren't as big as they're claimed to be.

Like I said, it's complex.

And while we're on the topic, we might as well give Bell Shakespeare a huge gong, since its 20th anniversary mainstage season - Lear and Twelfth Night - is 100 per cent directed by women. But maybe that's just smart, hip programming.

Anatomy Titus: Fall of Rome: A Shakespeare Commentary, by Heiner Müller, translated by Julian Hammond, and directed by Michael Gow. Designed by Robert Kemp, lighting design by Matt Scott, composition and sound design by Brett Collery. With John Bell, Robert Alexander, Thomas Campbell, Peter Cook, Scott Johnson, Nathan Lovejoy, Steven Rooke, Christopher Sommers and Timothy Walter. Bell Shakespeare and Queensland Theatre Company @ the CUB Malthouse until December 6.

Heiner Müller, the defining post-war playwright of the East German stage, understood power. Its machinations were the obsession of his art and his life. It's easy to see why he was so fascinated by Shakespeare who, like Müller, saw theatre and history as two sides of the same coin. He wrote three major adaptations of Shakespeare's work - Macbeth, Hamletmachine and Anatomy Titus - among a slew of other works that grappled with classic texts.


Müller's motives in approaching classical works were never pure, and expressed his intellectual and ideological restlessness, a certain necessary lack of respect. "A classical literature," he said in 1975, "is first of all a literature of a class". Just as his admiration of Brecht turned him into Brecht's most excoriating critic, so he approached the classics in order to subject them to explosive critique. His version of Hamlet was, as Müller said, "the shrunken head of the Hamlet tragedy", splintering Hamlet's subjectivity in order to expose the "something rotten" in contemporary society. And his version of Titus, which cuts the play and interpolates the text with commentary, exposes the blood-soaked, gratuitous violence of contemporary empire.

Shakespeare's original was an early text, heavily influenced by Seneca. It's gore-drenched schlock, so lurid with ultra-violence - rape, mutilation, murder, cannibalism - that the bloodiness becomes ludicrous. Müller's adaptation historicises Shakespeare's splatterfest. In Anatomy Titus, written in the shadow of the CIA-led coup against Chilean president Allende, the exploited colonies of empire - the Germanic Goths and Africa - take their revenge against Rome, even as Rome, decadent and swollen with power, betrays its own.

After the geopolitical adventures of the past decade, its contemporary aptness ought to be obvious. The amorality of power is here written starkly, a text of violence that inscribes itself on the bodies of its victims and leaves in its wake a pile of corpses. There is no lesson to be learned in this violence, no message to be taken (as Müller said - quite honestly I think - in a 1990 interview, "I'm no ideologue. I use Marxism as a material, in the same way I use a Shakespeare play... this becomes form and is valid as such.")

In the same breath, Müller speaks about the absurd obscenity of the first world's treatment of what was then the third world. His insistence that he was only interested in his writing often is taken as cynicism: in fact it is a form of idealism, an aggressive rejection of the contemporary insistence on looking for meaning behind a work, which he thought a sign of decadence. One cannot escape the political critique of Müller's work: at the same time, to think that political critique is the point is to miss the point entirely.

In Müller's Titus, we can't but be aware that the stage violence, however excessive or ludicrous, has literal analogies in the Middle East, in South-East Asia and India, in the mountains of the Caucasus and Pakistan. No playwright's imagination, not even Shakespeare's, outdoes human inventiveness in actual cruelty. But Müller's primary concern was with the politics of artistic form. "Perhaps Godard formulated it best," he said in a 1987 interview. "The task is not to make political movies, but to make movies politically. What is political is the treatment of the material. In other words, it's the form, not the content. That's the problem with young radical movements when they deal with art. What they end up with is philistinism."

Eager revolutionaries aren't the problem in this production, which is rather an exercise in muting Müller's formal radicality. All the same, it's good to see Bell Shakespeare tackling this challenging text, which is a welcome shift from its earlier, shonkily contemporised productions. Julian Hammond's translation, which includes a good deal of the original Shakespeare, is a tough realisation of Müller's savage and excoriating lyricism. (As an aside, it would be interesting to know whether Müller's play translated Shakespeare's English into contemporary German, or left it in a pastiche of, as it were, Elizabethan German - each would have a very different effect). But you have to listen hard to hear the language through the noise of Michael Gow's production.

Watching this very uneven show, I often felt as if I were witnessing a copy of something, a production that goes half-way. It is as if it begins with the best of intentions, only to waver at the sticking point: it has its moments, but they founder beneath a wider formal uncertainty. When you enter the theatre, the stylistic language looks promising enough: Robert Kemp's set is a simple box, white walls smeared with red. Back stage is a wall topped with books, the intellectual fruit of civilisation, which will be torn and besmirched with blood, and in the centre is an industrial barrel which, we soon find out, is full of gore. The all-male cast is dressed in contemporary casual clothes and, as with Dood Paard's meta-theatrical adaptation of Titus at last year's Melbourne Festival, assign each other their different roles.

Even though I know the play quite well, I found the first ten minutes deeply confusing. Müller dispenses with the first act, replacing it with a bald summary of events, but this is rushed through in the telling. I was so busy keeping up with the chorus work that nothing fixed in my mind. Once I'd sorted out the plot, I still had problems negotiating a mish-mash of theatrical intentions. If the production is so stripped back, why have herald's trumpets suddenly ringing out in isolated scenes? Wherefore lighting changes that transform the naked stage into more conventional theatrical spaces? Why does the Emperor (Nathan Lovejoy) sound like someone from Monty Python's Life of Brian?

There's no doubt (believe it or not) that Müller is funny. His humour is, however, blacker than the inside of a cat, corrosive and subversive. He's a specialist in the kind of laughter that arises from a literal apprehension of catastrophe, from the felt knowledge that there are wounds beyond the help of therapy or redemption. He would be the first to reject a holy reverence towards his texts. All the same, I find it very difficult to think of his work as camp.

But an undeniable campness runs through this production, from the Emperor's lisp to Lavinia's lipsticked pouts. Peter Cook's portrayal of the vengeful Goth queen Tamora, on the other hand, doesn't press so hard on gendered stereotypes, and is the more effective for it. I'm not sure why the decision to have an all-male cast should result in such posturings: one reason given, which suggests some of the problems in the direction, is that the rape and mutilation of Lavinia (Thomas Campbell) is less hard to take if she is played by a man. A major effect is to empty the play of its dark lusts; they become a joke, merely an exercise in pushing the boundaries of taste.

The treatment of the African slave Aaron (a bravura performance by Timothy Walter) pierces through the camp to something more interesting. It is played in crude blackface: when we first see Walker, he is wearing a gorilla mask, and the racial representations become successively more outrageous. Aaron's baby is even represented by a gollywog. Shakespeare's play is nakedly racist, and in this production it's amplified to acute discomfort.

However, even here the effect draws back from reflection on its larger implications - the wealthy world's exploitation of Africa, which is driven in its abjection to nihilistic revenge - to a more personally-sized racism. The action is divorced from its larger political implications and historical context - the very aspects highlighted in Müller's text - and the disturbance stirred by the racism becomes that much more manageable.

The cast, as so often in Bell Shakespeare productions, is uneven; and this text, even more than conventional Shakespeare, demands actors who can deal with complex language. This perhaps accounts in part for my feeling in many scenes that I couldn't quite grasp the words. John Bell plays Titus, and for the first third stalks around the stage as stiff as a board. Once Titus goes crazy, you begin to see why Bell is so respected as a Shakespearean actor: he eats up the role with gluttonous relish.

But all this beautiful language led me back to wondering why, if "poetry is murder", as Müller claims in the play, we have so much lovely enunciation of it. It's as if its beauty remains, at the core, an unquestioned good. I found myself longing for the language to be somehow assaulted in the performances, rather than preserved intact in the midst of mayhem.

In short, Anatomy Titus seems neither one thing nor 'tother. It's caught uncomfortably between radicality and convention, and ultimately blurs to something uncomfortably close to jolly japes about mutilation. In the chaos of gesture, Müller's formal inquiry is obscured, reduced to the merely sensational: punches are pulled everywhere.

It's Gow's misfortune to have mounted this play hard on the heels of Barrie Kosky's potent evocation of Greek tragedy in The Trojan Women, and with Dood Paard's brilliant and funny realisation of Titus still in recent memory. For all their different approaches, both the earlier productions were exemplary in their wrought simplicity, in how each production employed only the elements that were necessary to its purpose. What emerged was a burnished lucidity, a deep lustre in which the original text burned with renewed relevance. The most crucial lack in this production of Anatomy Titus is a concomitant sense of artistic necessity.

Picture: John Bell as Titus in Anatomy Titus.

Just Macbeth by Andy Griffiths and William Shakespeare, directed by Wayne Harrison. Design by Pip Runciman, lighting design by Martin Kinnane, sound design by Tony David Cray. With Patrick Brammall, Pippa Grandison, Mark Owen-Taylor, Tim Richards, Rhiannon Owen and John Leary. Bell Shakespeare. Playhouse Theatre, Victorian Arts Centre, until October 5. Seymour Centre, Sydney, October 8-26.

As anyone with the slightest acquaintance with a 10-year-old boy will know, the children’s author Andy Griffiths is a superstar. He has captured this notoriously book-shy demographic with titles like Bumageddon: The Final Pongflict or The Day My Bum Went Psycho, which feature shamelessly awful puns, bizarre imaginings and disgusting bodily fluids.

Among his most wildly popular books are his Just series (Just Stupid, Just Disgusting, and so on), which star the year 7 schoolboy Andy and his friends. I don’t know which genius commissioned Andy Griffiths to adapt Macbeth in the manner of these books, but they can have a whizz fizz on me.

One of the serious gaps in our theatre has been the lack of main stage theatre for children. Most often it’s hived off into educational programs or other worthy-sounding events, which of course have their value. But it’s crucial to develop audiences from a young age. And that means taking these young people seriously and including them, as European and English theatres do, in main stage programs.

Bell Shakespeare leads the way with this irrepressibly irreverent version of Macbeth, which appeals to the 10-year-old in all of us. Here the characters of the Just series, Andy (Patrick Brammall), Danny (Tim Richards) and Lisa (Pippa Grandison), find themselves studying Macbeth at school.

Andy’s response is, of course, to go to sleep. But under the spell of Lisa’s tyrannical charisma, he finds himself making the witch’s brew (eye of newt and toe of frog) for a school presentation, a scene which evoked all the appropriate ewww. Of course, the friends drink the potion. And then find themselves in mediaeval Scotland, magically transformed into the major characters in Shakespeare’s tragedy.

The serious subtext is that this is a brilliant way to introduce young audiences to Shakespeare. In between the fart jokes, expectorations of marshmallows and pantomime business, Griffiths demystifies the language, explains in simple and hilarious terms the function of soliloquies and outlines the action and motivations of the play.

He unobstrusively brings in Shakespeare’s speeches, so the transparency of Shakespeare’s language when it is spoken gradually becomes apparent. As does its robustness: the major speeches still retain a moving power, despite - or perhaps in part because - of this most disrespectful of treatments.

Any kids who later encounter Macbeth proper will be well primed. Most importantly, as my shining 10-year-old nephew attested afterwards, they’ll know that theatre can be brilliant fun.

It’s directed by Wayne Harrison with ingenuity and theatrical wit, and performed by a sharp and enthusiastic cast without a hint of patronising. For children of all ages.

This review appeared in yesterday's Australian.

Hamlet by William Shakespeare, directed by Marion Potts. Designed by Fiona Crombie, lighting design by Nick Schlieper, composer Sarah Blasko. With Brendan Cowell, Colin Moody, Russell Kiefel, Heather Mitchell, Barry Otto, Chris Ryan, Laura Brent, Joe Manning, Tim Richards, Matthew Whittet, Darren Weller, Paul Reichstein and Sarah Blasko. Bell Shakespeare @ the Victorian Arts Centre until August 2.

Hamlet is the most amorphous of Shakespeare’s plays. As the Shakespearean critic Jan Kott pointed out, there is a Hamlet for each age, reinvented afresh. Hamlet has been called the first modern expression of self-consciousness, a man of inaction writhing in indecision against the feudal certainties of his father. Coleridge said that Hamlet was a case study in “mental philosophy”, which examined “the effect of overbalance of the imaginative power”. The play has been a vehicle for examining the brutal circle of state power, in which the bloodletting goes full circle back to rational authority (represented by Fortinbras) or, more recently, a lens to examine the nuclear family, bringing its incestuous passions and tormented relationships to the surface.

And its subtext of madness has prompted so much speculation that Oscar Wilde felt moved to contemplate an essay: “Are The Commentators On Hamlet Really Mad, Or Only Pretending To Be?” Fair question, really. Hamlet is a text so richly turned, with minefields of ambiguity in almost every line, that it will no doubt continue to seduce critical speculators for years to come.

For all that, it’s still a play, “a project” as Shakespeare says elsewhere, “which was to please”. And there is much to please in Marion Potts’ fine production for Bell Shakespeare, from the moment the lights dim on Fiona Crombie’s cavernous industrial set and Sarah Blasko’s bewitching voice floats out over the auditorium.

This is a contemporary Hamlet which, without the patronising edge that has characterised so much of Bell Shakespeare’s ventures into making the Bard “relevant” to young people, draws on contemporary youth culture to create its aesthetic (even, very effectively, calling on horror movies for the unnerving zombie ghost).

Elsinore is an architecture of urban decay, a space made of concrete and rusted metal. It features a shallow tiled pool of water to one side running beneath a metal crypt that climbs up all of one wall. (Water features constantly in this production: it runs down the rusting slabs of the crypt, a symbol at once of the sacred and of the desire to cleanse blood guilt.) On the other side of the stage is a spectacular three-storey spiral staircase. The castle is hinted by fake arches at the back and an arched door to one side.

The space is furnished with some chairs and a table, and, at the back, as if it has been abandoned by former tenants, an upright piano. The whole creates a stage that is at once flexible - up and across and back - and expressive. This fluidity is helped along by one of the real pleasures of this production, Nick Schlieper’s extraordinarily inventive and subtle lighting, which inhabits and shapes the empty stage as much as any of the performers.

Hamlet is seldom performed in its entirety, and this version is no exception. Potts keeps the initial political frame, with Norway on its way to invade Denmark under Fortinbras, but this is forgotten through the middle acts, and Fortinbras’s appearance at the end amid the corpses might well puzzle those unfamiliar with the play. She also boldly (and effectively) cuts all of the play-within-a-play: our knowledge of it is confined to Hamlet’s commentary and a form of cockney mummery involving a tapdancer and Blasko.

Within this, we get a Hamlet who is a petulant adolescent in open rebellion against authority. Brendan Cowell plays Hamlet as a rock god, with echoes of Michael Hutchence as he sways on stage, a shrug-shouldered parodist of himself and everyone else. (His first gesture is to throw his shoes at his mother and uncle.) This is a wholly legitimate interpretation, harking back to the nuclear family take I mentioned earlier. But the fact is that his performance nearly drove me crazy (thus answering Wilde's question) through the first three acts; I thought Cowell was grievously miscast.

What I missed, more than anything else, was Hamlet’s animating, cruel intelligence. For all its energy, Cowell’s performance seldom gave me any sense of the mercurial, impassioned consciousness that makes Hamlet such a fascinating character. I might have forgiven him anything, had that quality been there. Perhaps what is most frustrating is that it’s present in flashes: there were moments after interval when Cowell’s performance became less mannered, and his performance began to grate less, even began to work for me. But these were all too seldom.

However, he is supported by a very strong cast, and the whole production transcends its limitations. Colin Moody’s Claudius reaches the Shakespearean extremes that in Cowell’s performance are only gestures, and his confession of guilt as he prays is one of the strongest moments of the play. I enjoyed Barry Otto’s movingly camp portrayal of Polonius, and Chris Ryan was a strong and deeply credible Laertes, a character who could easily be all blandness. Tim Richards and Matthew Whittet as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern make an enjoyably gormless double act, and I very much liked Laura Brent’s naive and fragile Ophelia, whose madness touches a terrible pathos. In short, for all its flaws, this Hamlet is well worth a look.

Photo: Brendan Cowell as Hamlet in the Bell Shakespeare production.

Venus & Adonis by William Shakespeare, directed by Marion Potts. Set and costumes by Anna Tregloan, lighting design by Paul Jackson, composition by Andrée Greenwell, sound design by David Franzke. With Melissa Madden Gray and Susan Prior, music performed by Ben Hauptmann, David Hewitt and Ryan Williams. Malthouse Theatre and Bell Shakespeare, @ The Beckett, CUB Matlhouse, until May 4. Bookings: 9685 5111

Reading the scholars on Shakespeare can sometimes be unexpectedly diverting. F.T. Prince, who edited the Arden edition of Shakespeare’s poems, remarks of his early poem Venus and Adonis that “few English or American readers nowadays will respond to such happily wanton fancies”.

Prince says that this explains why, for all its artistic success, Venus and Adonis is considered a lesser achievement in the Shakespearean canon. How times change. It is precisely this pagan lubriciousness that makes it seem so fresh and vigorous in the 21st century.


The poem is based on an episode in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which the goddess of love, Venus, takes the beautiful Adonis as her first mortal lover, before he is killed in a hunting accident. Shakespeare’s innovation was to make Adonis spurn Venus’s advances.

The poem becomes a dramatic paean to erotic desire, frustration and sorrow. Its melding of delicate rhetoric and blunt colloquialism, forged in an urgent poetic vision, presages Shakespeare’s later plays. Marion Potts’ stunning theatrical adaptation, Venus & Adonis, joyously celebrates Shakespeare’s Elizabethan frankness and the sensual eloquence and wit of his language.

As in the poem, the dominant voice is that of womanly passion, amplified through the two performers who play the part of Venus, Melissa Madden Gray (best known by her cabaret nom de plume Meow Meow) and Susan Prior.

Adonis is the audience, whom these performers must seduce. And although the hero remains elusive, we become putty in Venus’s four hands as she finds herself suspended in torment between animal lust and divine love.

Madden Gray and Prior pant, writhe, plead and weep as they prowl around a luxurious 1970s-style hotel room. Anna Tregloan’s stage, gorgeously lit by Paul Jackson, is enclosed in a curtained, low-roofed box. At the back is another curtain which opens to reveal the band playing behind a barred window amid a riot of tropical plants.

The performance moves from self-conscious displays of seduction – the offering of the body, or comically staged tantrums and tears – to a profound enactment of the anguish and ecstasy of love.

This is in no small part due to Andrée Greenwell’s exquisite score, which sets some of the verses to subtly updated Elizabethan harmonies that take full advantage of the vocal talents of the actors. When fused with the opulent artistry of Shakespeare’s language, it creates moments of sheerly bewitching beauty.

Here, as Shakespeare said in a later play, is indeed “art to enchant”.

Picture: Melissa Madden Gray and Susan Prior in Venus & Adonis. Photo: Jeff Busby

This review was published in today's Australian. There's much more to say about this production, but I don't have time to say it; I'm off to Sydney today after a Very Important Interview this morning (of which, I hope, more later), and hoping like hell life returns to what passes for normal next week.

Ms TN has never understood the concept of "writer's block". I agree that sometimes one can't write and, as Orwell said, if a writer can't write, he's not being lazy: he really can't write. Being a devout believer in the work of the subconscious, I think that so-called writer's block means that the work isn't ready to be written. It can take a long time - sometimes a work can take thirty years' gestation. (It's true! I speak from personal experience!) So you wait, and feed that monster within, and one day out it pops, fully armed, just like Athene from Zeus's brow. Well, there's a bit of sweat involved and, as poor Zeus demonstrates, it can give you a bit of a headache. But, as one of the greater writers commented, ripeness is all. For a writer, patience is more than a virtue. It's a necessity.

So I see with a mixture of puzzlement and alarm that Michael Gow has written a play about writers block. Toy Symphony - which "attempts to capture that terrible thing that stops the act of writing" - follows his 1991 play Furious. Furious was about the same playwright (Roland, presumably Gow's alter ego), this time in the throes of inspiration. I don't know about you, but when I saw Furious it confirmed my growing suspicion that plays about writers ought to be banned. Writers are not good dramatic material. Let's face it, all that fussing about with paper and keyboards isn't exactly exciting. A play about a writer not writing might be even worse than one about a writer writing. I don't know. (One shouldn't, of course, prejudge, but I'd be trotting along to Belvoir St with some trepidation). I'm more interested that Gow is directing Heiner Muller's adaptation of Titus Andronicus for Bell Shakespeare later this year. Heiner Muller. Now, there's a writer.

Serendipity rules. Hot on the heels of a debate in the comments on my review of Bell Shakespeare's Othello, in which Anon outlined his objections to an Aboriginal Othello and his regret at the passing of blackfaced, classically-trained white actors, Mr Excitement alerts me to a Los Angeles Times article by US playwright Neil LaBute in which he calls for "colourblind" casting. "In these troubled times," opines Mr LaBute, "the man [Olivier] would never be allowed to put on blackface and play that role. Hell, he wouldn't be allowed to perform it if he went out in a strawberry-blond wig and clown makeup."

LaBute finishes up appealing to the imaginative autonomy of theatre, an argument with which I have some sympathy.

This is not an argument about opportunity or imbalance; all I'm asking is that you let the theater, that last bastion of illusion — a place of magic and hope and imagination — remain exactly that. The stuff that dreams are made of.

But the fact remains that theatre is an impure art, deeply embedded in its time and place, and LaBute's appeal reflects - as several others point out - his own privileged time, place and social position, and not the transcendent and universalist notion of Art that he seems to claim. As you might imagine, his article stirred up a nest of hornets, one of the stingiest being Asian-American blogger Bamboo Nation.

LaBute seems to think that one of the creative community's greatest travesties of justice is that Brad Pitt can't paint his face black and star in A Raisin in the Sun. Is this what we're really concerned about in the arts? In reference to Laurence Olivier playing Othello in blackface in the 1960s, LaBute laments, "In these troubled times, the man would never be allowed to put on blackface and play that role." I know, Neil, and while we're at it I might add that, in these troubled times, we would also never be allowed to have racial segregation and have people use different drinking fountains.

It also sparked a bunch of angry letters to the LA Times, including this doozy from LA actor/writer Ken Narasaki:

Neil LaBute's made a living as a misogynist (and misanthropic) playwright, skewering "political correctness" by asserting his right, as an angry male, to be a jerk. I suppose it was simply a matter of time before he decided to stand up for white actors against their colored oppressors. After all, who can argue that "when great actors are denied great roles on the stage because of their skin color, there's a problem"?...

White people have played people of color for generations, and look what they've done: For every Olivier, there are dozens of Mickey Rooneys; for every Othello, there are hundreds of minstrel shows, Charlie Chans, Mikados.

I too wish for a day when our stages could be truly colorblind. Maybe that'll be commonplace in American theater in our lifetimes, and maybe then American theater truly could be called American theater. But for now, I'd have to say that the "caste system" in American theater is still very firmly in place, and white actors are most definitely not on the bottom.

Which all-in-all gives a pretty fascinating glimpse into racial politics in US theatre. I'm quite certain there are parallels here, while at the same time I can't help thinking that there are crucial differences. One being, for example, the specificity of Indigenous experience in contemporary Australia.

However, to get back to theatre: it got me thinking about whether it would be at all possible now to cast a white actor as Othello. I hesitate to claim it would be impossible - art has a way of instantly disproving sweeping statements - but it would be, to say the least, very difficult. Quite apart from the question of so-called PC sensitivities, it couldn't but look ridiculous to contemporary audiences - something the RSC seemed to recognise, for instance, by not performing the play on its main stage between 1985 and 1999, because it wasn't prepared to black up a white actor. Social mores change, and theatre conventions change with them.

And thinking back, the only time I've seen blackface on stage recently was in Russell Dykstra's outrageously offensive piss-take of Australian racism in Michael Watts' Not Like Beckett. And in that performance, blackface was instantly recognisable as the code of an outmoded racism (I'm not saying that racism is outmoded, sadly; simply that the cossies change). It's hard to see it working in any serious performance. I'm curious to hear further thoughts...

Othello by William Shakespeare, directed by Marion Potts. Set design Ralph Myers, costumes by Brice McKinven, light design Nick Schlieper, composition and sound design Max Lyandvert and Stefan Gregory. With Bob Baines, Wayne Blair, Mitchell Butel, Anni Finsterer, Marcus Graham, Michael Habib, Ron Haddrick, Chris Ryan, Leeanna Walsman and Tom Wren. Bell Shakespeare @ Arts Centre Playhouse (closed), Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, until July 28, Orange Civic Centre August 2-4.

Enlightenment by Shelagh Stephenson, directed by Julian Meyrick. Set design by Ralph Myers, costume design by Miranda Flynn, lighting design by Paul Jackson, composer Tim Dargaville. With Nicholas Bell, Caroline Brazier, Grant Cartwright, Beverly Dunn, Lewis Fiander and Sarah Pierse. Melbourne Theatre Company @ the Fairfax Studio, Victorian Arts Centre, until July 21.

Othello has long seemed to me to be one of Shakespeare's potboilers, like The Merchant of Venice or The Taming of the Shrew: an ultimately flawed play, rescued by passages of Bardic brilliance. And I swore a while back, after walking out of Romeo and Juliet, that I'd never bother with Bell Shakespeare again. So I can't say that I approached this production, which I saw late in the season, with high expectations.

It just goes to show that you should never trust your prejudices. I came out of the theatre glowing and silenced, wrenched by the extremities that only tragedy can invoke. I still think that Othello is flawed - that crucial scene in the third act where Othello is consumed by jealousy doesn't really bear heavy scrutiny. But only the stoniest heart could fail to quicken to this classic story of love and betrayal, of the Noble Moor who has transcended his own slavery, only to be undone by the hatreds projected onto his black skin.

Marion Potts has created a production which nakedly reveals the power of the play. Ralph Myers' set is Elizabethan in its simplicity. In the centre is a wooden platform, behind which stretches a concrete wall, of the kind that have become familiar in pictures of Baghdad. On each side of stage are racks on which are placed 44-gallon drums, and high above the wall, giving an air of threat, are banks of theatre lights. If they are not in the scenes, actors either leave the stage altogether or sit on a motley assortment of chairs to either side of the platform. They play the music live, using a variety of instruments: guitars, a mandolin, tambourines, the 44-gallon drums, even bottles.

While it's not as beautifully austere as Rex Cramphorn's Hamlet, which I saw in the same building longer ago than I care to remember, this production works on the same premise. It emphasises the play's theatricality, focusing attention on the actors and the text. I'd be churlish now to deny the power of the script; and there are some truly remarkable performances which explore the playfulness and emotional dynamic of Shakespeare's language. Potts' decision to perform the whole play, leaving in the Fool and musicians and other scenes that are usually cut, intensifies its theatrical power and complexity.

Crucial to this production, but in the most sub-textual and subtle of ways, is Wayne Blair's Aboriginality in the role of Othello. It changes the dynamic of the play, and sends subterranean echoes into present-day Australia. For centuries Othello was played in blackface - the white actor taking on the mask of blackness. This, as the critic Joseph Roach argues, served both to express and erase contemporary social fears about race and sexuality.

Certainly, the play's theme of miscegenation provoked powerful responses. Roach quotes the essayist Charles Lamb, who argued that the "revolting" appearance of a "coal black Moor" offering "wedded caresses" to "this Venetian lady of highest distinction" offered unanswerable evidence that Shakespeare's play ought to be read, but never staged. Speaking of Thomas Betterton's famous performance of Othello in the early 1700s, Roach comments: "Here is the doubleness of the actor's art, a black mask covering his white face, a European general's uniform covering his history as a slave.... In a world predicated on African slavery, the actor in blackface stands astride the theshold of social death. As death and its rituals offer occasions to mark and question boundaries... so miscegenation and its representation enact the fears of some that those boundaries will collapse."

Casting a black actor as Othello removes that level of irony and erasure, and at the same intensifies the expression of its anxieties. Othello, the enslaved child who grows up to be a great general in the Venetian army and who secretly marries the daughter of a Venetian Senator, presents his blackness without irony. When he speaks of his suffering (the same sufferings with which, ironically, he snares first Desdemona's attention and then her heart), or when Brabantio (Bob Baines) spits with repulsion and rage at the thought of having a black son-in-law, it can't but ripple up against the racism that still infects contemporary Australia.

I ought to emphasise that this is not in the least the kind of production that seeks to impose anachronistic homilies onto an unwilling text. Rather, Potts' direction permits the questions of race and gender that live in the play - and I was surprised, in fact, by how directly Shakespeare addresses both these issues - to resonate through the production with their proper, complex unease.

Blair's Aboriginality extends beyond the colour of his skin, informing his entire physical presence on stage: this Othello is not, like Olivier's, more noble than the nobles, whiter even than they are, but rather the assimilated Other, whose origins are evident in his every gesture. Blair speaks with a gravity and precision that expresses the care and containment of an outsider who must watch his every word and act, lest he transgress; and yet his stance, his movement, is inflected throughout the play with the tropes of Aboriginal dance. An echo merely, no more, woven into the performance as a texture, which informs it more deeply as the story darkens, as Othello begins to brutalise Desdemona (Leeanna Walsman) and to plot the murder of Cassio (Tom Wren), and which erupts in the final operatic scene, when Blair attains an authentic grandeur in his pride and despair.

He is well matched by Marcus Graham's Iago. I have not been a great fan of Graham, but this performance made me a convert: this is a remarkable Iago, charismatic and dangerously attractive, who woos the audience with his asides into uneasy complicity with his revenge upon Othello. Where Othello is contained, Iago is a core of dynamic energy, an evil clown whom we can't but unwillingly admire, a Mephistophilean seducer who winks to the audience, provoking our horrified laughter as he explains his jealousy and hatred of Othello, and boasts of his ruthless ingenuity at working the Moor's downfall and his own promotion.

When, at his most wicked, Iago pledges himself to "wronged Othello's service", his statement that "I am your own forever" is heart-stopping: not because it is a lie, but because we know it is the truth. By making Othello his victim, Iago has chained himself to Othello forever with his crime: but there is a deeper resonance. Iago is also Othello's other self, the voice that articulates the slanders that he has internalised, despite his pride, about his colour, and which confirms everything he fears. Othello is so eager to listen to Iago only because he already suspects, at some level, that what Iago says is true.

These two performances dominate the play, as they should: but there are many fine moments in this production. The heartbreaking scene where the doomed Desdemona dresses for bed with her maid (and Iago's wife) Amelia (Anni Finsterer) was one of those moments of theatre where the entire audience was spell-bound, utterly silent: not a cough, not a rustle, not a breath. In this scene, Desdemona's vulnerability and fatalism are shocking, as if she is already a ghost, and her pure voice singing the words of a dead woman shows the true power of pathos: not as melodrama, nor sentimentality, but as measure of the desperate human need for hope against the certainty of doom.

It is a powerful production, rather than a perfect one; earlier in the play, for example, Walsman's Desdemona seems to be caught in a strangely hieratic mode of speaking, which mitigates against the nuances of sexual passion she might otherwise express, and some other actors similarly waver in and out of focus. And, especially early in the play, I felt that the convention of the playing platform could have been more rigorously used to better effect; the staging of some scenes both on and off the platform dissipated the energy that such a convention can generate.

But it's fair to say that no one gives a weak performance. I especially enjoyed Ron Haddrick's brief but important cameo as the Duke of Venice, Chris Ryan's melancholy Clown, and Anni Finsterer's wickedly radical speech to Desdemona about letting "husbands know / Their wives have sense like them". If Bell Shakespeare continues to extend itself in this direction, placing its faith in the plays themselves rather than in superficial bells-and-whistles interpretations, it will be a deeply exciting development.

AFTER the heights and depths of Othello, it is perhaps a little unfair to turn to Shelagh Stephenson's domestic drama about grief, Enlightenment. And in truth, I find myself with not much to say about it. It's a perfectly competent play, written in the tradition of Alan Ayckbourn without quite his skill or technical ingenuity, and while there's not much to object to, there's not much that grabs your interest, either.

It concerns Lia (Sarah Pierse) and Nick (Nicholas Bell), a middle-aged, middle-class couple whose son Adam has been missing for four months, after disappearing on a back-packing trip to South East Asia. The lack of certainty about his fate intensifies their grief, creating conflicts in their marriage: Lia consults a psychic, Joyce (Beverley Dunn) whose vague wittering enrages Nick but gives her some comfort, while Nick takes refuge in his work. Meanwhile, Lia's father Gordon (Lewis Fiander), a slightly disreputable MP, inviegles her into making a documentary about her grief with the morally dubious television journalist Joanna (Caroline Brazier). And then they hear, at last, that Adam (Grant Cartwright) has been found, albeit with memory loss: but is it actually Adam whom they meet at the airport?

Writing all this down makes me almost go to sleep with contrariness. I suppose I have a deep failing, in that I don't really understand why this is theatre instead of television. It looks like theatre, I suppose. Julian Meyrick gives Enlightenment a perfectly decent, if somewhat slow, production: Ralph Myers' set reflects the play's process of shedding, as Lia and Nick's painful process of understanding is underlined by the gradual removal of their possessions, leaving them without protection against the uncertainty of life.

Meyrick employs a fine cast, and I enjoyed watching the performances, even as I lost patience with the play. From its initial domestic premise, it devolves into melodramatic silliness before ending on a grave note of philosophic resignation that explains everything that has gone before. Sarah Pierse in particular plays the complexities of fragility and toughness, guilt and grief, that inhabit her character, and Lewis Fiander is always enjoyable to watch on stage, a virtuosic performer in control of his space. And you feel that if Grant Cartwright's character made more sense, he'd be a magnetic presence on stage.

In short, there was enough going on to prevent acute anguish, and I never wanted to do the Dorothy Parker thing and shoot myself. But, gentle reader, it's very difficult to write about a play which neither offends you nor particularly interests you, that is neither stupid nor particularly intelligent, that seeks to explore, neither dishonestly nor with especially profound veracity, certain truisms about the transience and uncertainty of life. How do you write excitingly about indifference?