Any play with "poet" in the title is going to catch Ms TN's attention, although I have to admit that poetry doesn't necessarily fare well on the stage. Some of the worst nights of theatre I've suffered through have been misguidedly romantic imaginings about famous (and satisfactorily tragic) poets. Oh, the sins that have been committed in the names of Akhmatova and Mandelstam...

Ben Ellis is, however, far too tactful a writer to do this to us. The poet of his title is nameless: he has reached a truly poetic state of anonymity, and has even forgotten his own name. When X, a character driven mad by war, love and psychotropic drugs, takes his hand in greeting, the poet is dismembered by a bomb. X runs in a blind panic through burning GM crops (grown for military purposes) holding the poet's hand. "and i realise", says X, "that i have been running / for several kilometers of corn / with a dead man's arm / still shaking my hand".


This fragment of poet represents the fragment of poetry that informs the structure of this play - the idea that the light of stars is, literally, the manifestation of different times. As X says, the poet tells him that "that star there / that's three million years ago / and that star there / that's four years ago / what you are witnessing / is all different times / converging upon you". For Ellis's poet, this is a sign of hope. Andre Schwarz-Bart's brilliant novel on the Holocaust, The Last of the Just, works with a similar idea - "our eyes register the light of dead stars" - but more bleakly. For Schwarz-Bart, starlight is the touch of death, the irrevocable past that is only now news to us, but which in our belated present we can we can neither enter nor correct.

Nevertheless, like Schwarz-Bart (whose novel has other resonances with this play, including a character who turns into dog), Ellis is concerned with a series of apocalyptic presents, at once individual and global. Poet No. 7 is a series of four interwoven monologues that come from different fictional times and collide in the present of the stage. The four voices are Ella (Edwina Wren), a librarian who has fallen shatteringly in love; Mark (Merfyn Owen), a corporate executive in love with a younger woman who is selling patented indigenous crops to a big US company; Gillian (Georgina Capper), a woman who investigates the deaths of isolated people and who has to deliver a eulogy for a dead woman, and X (Simon King).

Through these monologues, Ellis creates a fictional world a micro-step away from ours. Australia is torn apart by some undefined war, its indigenous berries patented and genetically modified by corporate interests to make deadly military weapons. And in this imagined world, as in ours, people fall blindingly in love and die alone in apartments to be discovered weeks later.

It is an ambitious work, written in a plainly poetic vernacular that segues to moments of almost surreal lyricism. And as part of the Arts Centre's Full Tilt program, it's given a fascinating production by Ellis's long-time collaborator, Daniel Schlusser. The disappointing thing is that the writing can't sustain the pressure of the production: for too much of the play, the production and text are working at cross-purposes.

The first ten minutes or so, before any words are spoken, are riveting. Meg White's design, a thrust with audience on three sides and the sound and light technicians visible at a raised desk on the fourth, is plunged into darkness. What we see is a series of shrouded shapes, briefly illuminated by deep amber lights that pulse up to an unbearable brightness and then at once sink back into darkness. Then there is a camera's flash, illuminating three performers in face masks and rubber gloves and a fourth lying on the floor, a corpse draped in a plastic sheet. As we watch the performers scrutinise and file the objects on stage, we begin to understand that this is a forensic investigation.

The performers draw plastic sheets off the shrouded objects and turn on lights, revealing a strange landscape of glass tanks with a miscellany of things inside them: stuffed animals, a plastic penguin stranded in a desert of sand, even a live white mouse. It's unsettling, sinister and mysterious. One performer (Simon King) is creeping around the edges of the stage, hiding from the others. Later we discover that he is X, at once marginal and central to the action, the character through which the emotional action flows through madness and violence towards forgivenness.

By the time the performers begin to speak, we are already in another world. The transition to the text, which is already fragmented, is confusing: it takes quite a while to work out that the four monologues are autonomous, even if (as we discover) related, and to sort out their various stories. For the next fifteen minutes or so, I found my concentration constantly shifting, and mostly away from the text: I was so busy watching the various performers (and, at times, the very sanguine mouse) that sometimes I forgot to listen to the text altogether.

Then it began to come together in a different way, and the voices in this richly detailed production began to resonate against each other and drive its splintered narrative. This generates moments of real theatrical power, a poetic suspension of everything except the present moment. And in these moments, the whole thing begins to flower as a wholly integrated work of theatre.

There's much to see here, not least some astounding performances. The actors are totally focused for the duration, bringing a coherence to their stage presences that binds their often inscrutable actions with a compelling intention. There are three sound designers - Darrin Verhagen, Martin Kay and Nick van Cuylenburg - that provide collectively an elegantly evocative sonic environment. And Kimberly Kwa's lighting design, which uses both theatre lights and found lighting turned on and off by the performers, is stunningly good.

All the same, I suspect Ellis's play might have been better served with a production that tried to do less with it, with minimal staging and without the meta-narrative that Schlusser weaves around it. A lucid introduction of the different monologues might have solved a lot of my initial confusion. But then, perhaps the text's weaknesses would have been more exposed: I'm not entirely sure it could sustain a barer production. In any case, I had to go away and read it afterwards in order to understand better what the play was doing.

It's by no means badly written, and it's an interesting and ambitious take on a difficult theme: or maybe more accurately, many difficult themes (it's kind of like Ellis is dealing with Everything That's Wrong With The World, refracted through intimate moments of passionate human interaction). But I think that the text has dramaturgical problems: the voices, despite their differing narratives, are all too rhythmically similar to generate the electrifying contrasts that otherwise might have more clearly driven the play's emotional arc.

What I missed most was the steely language and rhythms that are the heart of lyric, a certain torque in the language itself. There are too many lines like " i look at flowers and cry / once i cried for longing / now i cry for sharing the beauty", lines that signal emotional intention but are too poetically generalised to rise past the bathos of cliché. And Ellis's writing can fall jarringly into didacticism. As soon as the torque in the language loosened, it ceased to be amplified by the theatrical context, but rather disappeared behind it.

Which makes it a deeply interesting production to think about, especially given the contemporary arguments about the relationship between writing and theatre. And, for all my reservations, it's well worth a look.

Picture: Edwina Wren in Poet No. 7. Photo: Daisy Noyes

Poet No. 7 by Ben Ellis, directed by Daniel Schlusser. Designed by Meg White, sound design and composition by Darrin Verhagen, Martin Kay and Nick van Cuylenburg, lighting design by Kimberly Kwa, costume design by Jemimah Reidy. With Edwina Wren, Merfyn Owen, Simon King and Georgina Capper. Full Tilt @ the Black Box, Victorian Arts Centre, until June 20.

Direct your cursors now to Parachute of a Playwright, where Ben Ellis responds to the reviews of his recent play The Zombie State. Aside from being an excellent read, it's an object lesson in a playwright gracefully responding to his crrritics.

The Zombie State by Ben Ellis, directed by Daniel Schlusser. Set and costumes designed by Kate Davis, lighting design by Niklas Pajanti and Danny Pettingill, sound design by Darrin Verhagen. Melbourne Workers Theatre and Union House Theatre @ the Union Theatre, Melbourne University, until September 27.

For all my enthusiasm for popular culture, I am not hugely au fait with the genre of horror films. I can cope with the arty, Henry Jamesian end of things, but hard-core schlock horror has far too powerful an effect for me to watch it with any kind of pleasure. One of my more embarrassing moments, back in the days when I was a wage-slave journalist, was being sent to write my one and only film review for the now defunct tabloid shocker, The Sunday Press.


In those pre-DVD days, the half-dozen or so Melbourne crrritics were assembled in a mini-theatre at Hoyts for the preview. The film happened to be a remake of the old classic The Fly, starring Jeff Goldblum. I'm surprised I remember anything about it: I spent a lot of time with my hands over my eyes, moaning "you mean, people pay to watch this stuff?", while the hardened hacks regarded me with deep perplexity. In a mini-cinema, everyone can hear you scream.

That was, quite rightly, the end of my film reviewing career. Since then, the only time I've dared to watch horror films is on the back of plane seats, where the screen is six inches wide and I can switch to a deeply unfunny Gwyneth Paltrow comedy when the music begins the shrill violin thing which means that the wide-eyed woman who is creeping down a dark hallway in her nightdress is about to die horribly with the maximum amount of splat.

And so it is that I've never watched a zombie film (well, not all the way through, anyway), which means that there are aspects of The Zombie State that are lost on me. For all that, it's not difficult to see the subversive possibilities of zomboid metaphors in critiquing contemporary society. The dehumanising power of corporatism seen through automonic workers was first explored in Karel Čapek's 1921 SF play Rossum's Universal Robots, and has been a hardy theme through radical 20th century writing. And it's a cue Ben Ellis and Daniel Schlusser have picked up with enthusiasm.

The Zombie State, which has been developed under the aegis of the Melbourne Workers Theatre, is maybe the first play to have a go at the clean, mean team of Kevin '07: the impeccably coiffured, business-friendly "third way" socialism you have when the Left as a governmental force as shrivelled and died, leaving in its place what is effectively a one-party state. It is also one of the first Australian plays which attempts to deal with a political landscape in which designations like "Right" and "Left" are increasingly meaningless, and in which traditional theatrical politics are drastically alienated from the social forces that they allegedy embody.

Ellis developed some of the dialogue from transcripts of workers' testimonials in the Howard Government's Commission for a Living Wage, and originally envisaged a piece of verbatim theatre, before deciding that a zombie play would be more fun and just as pertinent. The result is one of this year's more fascinating failures: a text that falls between straight satire and a more poetic impulse that never quite comes into focus.

The play opens in a waiting room - perhaps a Medicare office, perhaps Social Services, perhaps a hospital - in which a row of people sit in plastic chairs. On the left are those whose blank, dead eyes are deeply shadowed with zombified exhaustion; on the right are a group of people in smart suits, wearing phone headsets. For some time nothing happens, and we watch a smartly choreographed comedy of institutional boredom.

Then a woman demands robotically of a young man: "I'm sorry to ask this, but do you have private health insurance?" The lack of private health insurance means the young man can't afford to save an infected tooth. Instead, he has it extracted in an exquisitely carnal operation, and turns into a zombie: despite his pain, he insists on working his shift as a waiter in a nightclub, covered in blood and drugged to the eyeballs. And so zombiedom spreads it undeadness...

The neatly suited man is Kevin, the Prime Minister (Syd Brisbane). Kevin is visiting Melbourne with his team of four identical diary secretaries, for the 2021 Summit: he needs the best and brightest brains to power his new economy. What he intends to do with those brains becomes, of course, bloodily clear during the course of the play.

Spouting the groupspeak of think tanks and focus groups, the Canberra visitors move through the undead of Melbourne, marvelling at the effect of the brave new economy. They are staying at the casino, which is notable for its huge gas flames that used to roar up and roast unlucky seagulls before they introduced subliminal sound to keep the charred corpses at bay. The hellish gouts of flame are recurring images, flaring up and hypnotising the zombies, just as governments and people are hypnotised by the lure of fast cash.

Of course, the zombies (and seagulls) wreak their revenge, and it turns out that the head zombie is the PM himself, sacrificing his human vitality for the good of the country or, at least, for its corporate sector. And a fair bit of mayhem goes on in between, with dark plots involving bus drivers and bargain basement shopping centres and seers in wheelchairs.

Some of the more powerful moments are monologues from zombies, surreally fragmented descriptions of mundane suffering (tooth ache, mortgage panic) that perhaps are the shadows of the verbatim genesis of this project. This sits uneasily with the more didactic political satire, which amounts to a straightforward condemnation of the alienated and self-serving government-speak spouted by the politicos. The political fable overshadows the human experience that drives it, making the whole, finally, less than the sum of its parts.

There is a feeling that the production and text are straining against each other, and at times cancelling each other out. Certainly, the production dominates the play. Director Daniel Schlusser has assembled a hugely impressive team and uses it to good effect. Kate Davis's design features a screen that lifts to reveal a foreshortened hotel lobby/hospital space, with glassed boxes on both sides that be used as performance spaces or, with blinds drawn, for projections, which include scenes filmed in black and white.

The set is lit with the requisite bloody flair by Niklas Pajanti and Danny Pettingall, and features a brilliant soundscape by Darrin Verhagen. Schlusser has 23 performers, whom he directs in a constantly changing and always interesting mise en scene. It amounts to a hugely ambitious project that somehow loses sight of the trees in the thick of the forest, but which is still well worth a look.

Picture: The Zombie State, by Ben Ellis. Photo: Ponch Hawkes