Watching Thomas Ostermeier's production of Hedda Gabler - the first of his works I've seen - was unexpectedly fascinating. Through directors such as Benedict Andrews, a stablemate of Ostermeier's at Berlin's Schaubühne, the aesthetic of Ostermeier and his peers has had a profound influence on contemporary Australian theatre. So much of the design language here - architectural spaces defined by mirrors and windows, revolves, projections, pop references - is immediately familiar. I felt as if I were looking through the wrong end of a telescope: in the face of what's followed Ostermeier, Hedda Gabler, which premiered in 2005, feels like a museum piece.


What's immediately striking is its deliberate affectlessness. This is a production which strikes a note of cool anomie, creating a surface elegance that expresses a monumental sense of boredom. The play has been updated, in a light adaptation by Marius von Mayenburg, to contemporary times. As is usual with such adaptations, violence has been done along the way: here Ibsen's play becomes a scathing miniature, a portrait of an emotionally numbed, intellectually trivial bourgeoisie. The problem, as always in contemporary adaptations of Ibsen, is how to make the social imprisonment of his feminine characters believable now. Here the solution is to make Hedda and her peers improbably shallow and stupid. Hedda's destructive actions become endowed with a vacuum of un-meaning: her twisted rebellion against the suffocation of her life becomes the moue of a spoilt child.

At this point, I started wondering if the theatre itself was as cynical as the actions of the characters it portrays. Which is to say, there's something too easy in this act of épater le bourgeoisie: nothing is at emotional risk, and so nothing matters. Compared with other recent Ibsen adaptations - Simon Stone's devastating Belvoir St production of The Wild Duck, for instance, or Daniel Schlusser's recent The Dollhouse - it felt like a one-dimensional experience: there was none of the textual radicality of those two very different productions, and little ambiguity of meaning. I admired the consistency, the almost bloody-minded formalism, of Ostermeier's approach, but coldly: and in the end, I left untouched.

Mayenburg's adaptation follows the play closely: the maid is cut from the character list, but otherwise all the characters and actions remain, albeit slightly updated (for example, the manuscript Hedda burns is changed to a laptop that she hammers to bits). The interpretation here is in the production, beginning with Jan Pappelbaum's design, an evocation of a sleek modernist house with walls of windows and polished concrete. It's set on a revolve and becomes the shifting planes for various between-scene projections. Above the set is a huge mirror, which gives us a voyeur's eye view of the actors when they move off-stage.

The performances are heavily naturalistic, with all the action set around the designer settee or on the verandah. This naturalism clashes with a stylised melodrama that attends the play's climactic moments. There is little sense - except in a couple of moments in Kay Bartholomäus Schulze's performance of the unstable Løvborg - of emotional pressure building under repression: most instances of emotional behaviour are play-acting, as studiedly conscious as Hedda's (Katharina Schüttler) feline restlessness. I don't know whether it's relevant that Schulze reminded me insistently of Julian Assange, but that association might have thrown a different kind of bomb into the action.

Hedda's motivations become almost an abstraction of the Pinteresque: she is solely interested in gaining power over others, and when she finds herself at the wrong end of the machinery, she tops herself. There is little sense of her initial powerlessness to illuminate this behaviour, and almost none of her radical longing for a more glorious, more beautiful world than the one in which she finds herself. Ibsen's Hedda has always been selfish, but has seldom been more trivial.

When the play steps into unreality - especially in its final moments, when Hedda's suicide prompts a ripple of dismissive laughter and shrugged shoulders from her husband and friends - it permits only cerebral response. Hedda and the gang are symbols merely, flattened-out representations of the conscious heartlessness of the middle classes, absorbed in their trivial pursuits as they turn their faces from the blood on the walls.

This insight may contain a general (and deeply angered) truth, but in the particular truths with which theatre deals it lacks any kind of emotional logic. I found it increasingly impossible to believe in people so determinedly shallow. We conclude that all these characters who we've been watching for the past two hours are psychopaths with empathy by-passes, and ... so? As audience members, no matter how selfishly middle class we might be, we all know that we are empathetic creatures, unlike those we've been watching on stage. Why else would we be here, elite beings, enjoying the fruits of culture? So what does this have to do with us?



Pan Pan's good-humoured production of The Rehearsal, Playing the Dane induced similar thoughts, although this production by no means seeks the cool affectlessness of Hedda Gabler. It too transforms a tragedy into a comedy, this time by opening up, Ayckbourn-style, the machinations behind the scenes.

The audience walks into a stage dressed as a rehearsal space, with the actors piled on a big table, like the heaps of corpses that finish most of Shakespeare's tragedies. Local academic Dr Sue Tweg stands forward and delivers a short lecture on Hamlet, one of the most performed of Shakespeare's plays.

The lecture, by Amanda Piesse, senior lecturer at Trinity College Dublin, is about the instability and polysemity of Shakespeare's texts, and introduces the premises of the work of theatre we're about to see. Tweg holds a handsome Great Dane, who tugged her impatiently as she mentioned instability, creating one of several ripples of serendipity that illuminate the performance, before finishing with an ear-rakingly awful rendition of Greensleeves on a recorder.

The instability of interpretation and role is then reinforced by the "director" arranging a reading of a scene from Hamlet, assigning the roles to the most improbable actors: the guy who's obviously Polonius (Daniel Reardon) plays Hamlet, and so on. At this point an audience member is called up on stage to read one of the smaller parts.

We then watch as three actors audition for the role of Hamlet before a table of people which includes the Melbourne Theatre Company's own casting director, Kylie McCormack. Each actor brings his own story and own twist on the role, and these are hugely entertaining comic pieces. They also permit, almost by-the-bye, a look at the different facets of a couple of scenes, as they are repeated by different actors. The upshot is that the audience is invited on stage, to choose which of the three auditionees ought to play Hamlet in the second half of the show.

What follows is a dramaturgically slashed version of the play, watched from backstage by the shadowy production crew. The connections between Hamlet's existential dilemmas and Beckett's Endgame - signalled in the first half by a short performance during an audition of a speech by Hamm - are here hammered (haha) home by a proliferation of dustbins arranged around the set. The action revolves around the players - here performed by drama students in school uniform from Trinity Grammar School - the grave scene, Ophelia's mad scene and the massacre at the end of the play. The show is rounded off with a brief conclusion from the academic.

It all passes pleasantly enough, but feels curiously unsatisfying. It's actually hard to see how this illuminates Hamlet beyond the points made in the introduction: Shakespeare's reflexive games with performance, identity and play; the ambiguities of his meanings; its essentially performative nature as a text. It did feel as if the lecture was a kind of safety net, ensuring that the audience "got" it, and lifting the risk from the rest of the production. And it seemed to me that the meanings given us enclosed possibility, rather than opening it through performance. There are times when it seems - deliberately, I'm sure - like a parody of bad avant garde performance: experiment without the danger of taking it too seriously. The dog provided some moments of anarchic interruption, as animals do, but I still wasn't convinced that it was more than a bad pun.

What I missed was more of the emotional realism Judith Roddy brings to the role of Ophelia, so the production might shift more radically between the realities it represents - rather as happens, say, in Ganesh and the Third Reich. (As a side note: on the strength of his performance as a Player and the Queen, watch out for Trinity Grammar student Tim Dennett.) There are lots of in-jokes for theatre nerds here, lots of audience-friendly invitation, but not, for all the activity around it, a lot of Shakespeare. I'm all for blowing up the classics: but I want the resulting fragments to add up to more than the sum of their parts.

Pictures: top: Katharina Schüttler as Hedda Gabler; below, Conor Madden as a possible Hamlet in The Rehearsal, Playing the Dane.

Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen, directed by Thomas Ostermeier. Set design by Jan Pappelbaum, costumes by Nina Wetzel, music by Malte Beckenbach, dramaturgy by Marius von Mayenburg, video by Sebastien Dupouey, lighting Erich Schneider. With Annedore Bauer, Wolfgang Bauer, Lars Eidinger, Kay Schulze, Katharina Schüttler and Lore Stefanek. Schaubühne Berlin and Melbourne Festival, Arts Centre Playhouse, until October 23.

The Rehearsal, Playing the Dane, by William Shakespeare, directed by Gavin Quinn. Designer Aedín Cosgrove, costumes by Sarah Bacon, dramaturge Simon Doyle. With Andrew Bennett, Derrick Devine, Conor Madden, Bashir Moukarzel, Gina Moxley, Daniel Reardon, Judith Roddy. Also Dr Sue Tweg, the Venerable Eden-Elizabeth Nicholls and students from Trinity Grammar School, Kew. Pan Pan Theatre, Melbourne Festival. Merlyn Theatre, Malthouse until October 22.

Ms TN is now back at her desk, dazed and bizarrely jetlagged after a mega-packed week in Perth. With some cunning scheduling, I managed to see most of the theatre and dance on offer at the Perth Festival. To make things easier, I had already reviewed a couple of events on their premieres in Melbourne - 1927's The Animals and Children Took to the Streets, and Lucy Guerin's Human Interest Story (click for reviews). The only shows I didn't get to were Western Australian Ballet's Dance at the Quarry, Black Swan's Boundary Street and the family show Apollo 13: Mission Control.

Thinking back over the whole experience, what strikes me most is its emotional impact. For her final year as artistic director, Shelagh Magadza put together a diverse program of performance that plucked at a common human chord: from Alain Platel's exhilarating contemporary dance Out of Context to Yirra Yaakin's Waltzing the Wilarra, these were performances about making felt connections. A thread through all of them was humour, but this never elicited empty laughter. They were also, again in very different ways, responses to living in a complex and alienated modern world in which this human contact is marginalised and heavily mediated. It made the past week very rich and, in the best possible sense, heartening. If art doesn't give us courage, what is it for?


The encouragement art can offer isn't, however, about distracting or deluding us: an important part of its power is its unflinching questioning of the world in which we live. The final two shows I saw - Trust, a collaboration between German playwright and director Falk Richter and choreographer Anouk van Dijk from the Schaubühne Berlin, and New York Theatre Workshop's Aftermath, an exemplary documentary theatre work about the Iraq War - are both overtly political works, although they couldn't be more different in their theatrical approach.

Falk Richter is one of the most prominent of the current generation of German playwrights, a leading exponent of postdramatic theatre who creates texts that generate their energies from poetic rather than conventionally dramatic mechanisms. Last year Hoy Polloy premiered his play Electronic City, a work which, typically for Richter, explores the intimate effects of global corporatism on ordinary people. Richter is fascinated by collapse: in particular the intricate connections between economic and social collapse and its pathologies as traced through the details of individual lives.

It's not at all surprising that such a writer should be attracted to dance theatre, and it's fascinating to see what happens when a writer with such a profound understanding of theatrical poetic works with a choreographer. It's clearly a fertile connection: Trust is Falk Richter's second of three collaborations with Dutch choreographer Anouk van Dijk. Together they create a profoundly poetic work of physical theatre, in which the performers trace through text and dance the collapse of trust in a complex contemporary world.

Katrin Hoffman's stage design presents us with cavernous, exposed scaffolding in which items from domestic life - sofas, chairs - are littered on various levels. Musician Malte Beckenbach plays the score live on stage, ranging through acoustic songs to textured electronic noise. The nine virtuosic performers perform the text through microphones, narrating the story of a disintegrating relationship. Although it always seems to be the same relationship, the narrative flows from one performer to another, contradicting itself, becoming more complex and less certain with each repetition.

The opening speech, which like much of the text is repeated by different performers, is a declaration of complete individual paralysis in which choice is a phantom: no matter what choice this individual makes, whether he or she loves or doesn't love, whether he or she leaves or doesn't leave, it will make no difference. This segues into a stand-up monologue which is, more than anything, a comic riff that leaps off the story of the break-up into an ever widening vortex of meditations on the collapse of systems, financial systems, political systems, pressing upon the psyche with a sense of increasing anxiety. In its po-faced alienation and almost myopic attention to detail, it reminds me of some of the early prose of Peter Handke, and it has an intellectual suppleness that itself becomes a symptom of this skittering panic, a sense that certainties are shifting, that the ground beneath our feet can no longer be taken for granted.

This sets the scene for a kaleidoscope of movement and fragmentary narrative that circles around the erosion of private and public ideas of trust. One thing I greatly admired in this show was its unfaltering sense of rhythm, how its constant shifts seemed to spiral into greater intensity through its duration: it's a beautifully judged work, balancing acutely between humour and desolation, movement and stillness, that creates an almost hypnotic harmony. At times it almost becomes something like lucid dreaming.

The dancers fall over, rise, fall over again, their movements somehow counter-intuitive, at times seemingly working against the expectations of the body and gravity. It's often satirical - there's a wonderful dialogue in which an unfaithful lover becomes a kind of avatar of the bankruptcy of politicians like Silvio Berlusconi - but nagging in the centre, coming into focus as the work progresses, is a notion of the suicidal nature of contemporary corporatism, the seed of collapse that the market itself makes inevitable, and the alienated delusion that makes this possible. The finance markets, Richter seems to be suggesting, are the actual terrorists, hypnotised by the beautiful possibility of destruction.

Against this, Richter and van Dijk posit a mute vision of individual connection. It finishes with a fragile and moving vision of the possibility of co-operation. One dancer begins a beautiful succession of sweeping movement which promises collapse but which instead flows into an undulating dance, which is picked up by one performer, then by another, until the whole company is dancing in unison. It suggests another kind of relationship, another kind of trust. Trust was made in 2009, a direct response to the global financial crash; watching it now, as the seismic implications of that collapse still ripple across the world in protests across the Middle East and in America, it seems, if anything, to have gathered more meaning.

The New York Theare Workshop's Aftermath is also a direct response to global politics: in this case, the Iraq War. It poses a fascinating contrast to Trust. The theatre couldn't be more simple: the nine performers enter a bare stage, and speak directly to the audience. When they are not performing, they sit back stage, their backs to the audience, slightly illuminated so we are aware of their liminal presences.

I've seldom seen documentary theatre better done. The text is compiled by director Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen from interviews with Iraqi refugees that they conducted in 2008 in Jordan. As they say in the program, they spoke to as wide a variety of people as possible - Sunni, Shi'ite, Christian, atheist, working class, middle class (although they point out that as Iraq was largely middle class before the war, most of their interviewees are middle class). Their aim was to make a work of theatre that looked at what happened to civilians who, after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, found themselves in the middle of an increasingly vicious war zone.

This work impressed me with its integrity. Although it is quite clearly directed towards an American audience, it scrupulously edits out the Western arguments about the war, pro and anti, in favour of presenting a bald narrative of the human impact of conflict. They've taken a lot of care to give as broad a view as possible of the violence in Iraq: the play includes accounts of atrocities by US military, Iraqi police and sectarian militia. But perhaps its most important message is that these things happened to people who are not faceless victims, abstract casualty figures or disposable Muslims. They are people who wish to live their lives, work, raise their children and make their homes, like everybody else.

Aftermath uses the character of Shahid (Fajer Al-Kaisi), a translator, as a point of connection between the different narratives and between the performers and the audience. Shahid is a young man who learned his English through playing video games, and became a translator and fixer in the early days of the war. He introduces us to the characters, who are carefully chosen to represent a diversity of Iraqis: they include Yassar (Ryan Shams), a disarmingly vain and wealthy dermatologist who boasts about the swimming pool and fast cars he had before the war; an imam (Ted Sod) and Rafiq (Ramsay Faragallah), a pharmacist who lived in Fallujah.

We meet them as the interviewers would have first met them, being welcomed into their houses, offered coffee, drinks, food, being asked if we mind if they keep the television on because of the World Cup match between Iraq and Australia. They begin by speaking of their lives in Iraq, the good and the bad: they tell us some good Iraqi jokes, classic instances of the black humour that flourishes under dictators like Saddam. All of them speak as exiles do of their longed-for and now vanished homes. All of them have photographs which they show the audience, the only traces they possess of homes now vanished, people now dead.

The stories of violence come later in the piece, once we have some understanding of who these people are. And when they do, they are devastating: Rafiq tells of how his nephew was randomly and brutally shot in a house raid by US soldiers; Basima (Leila Buck) how she lost almost her whole family, including her two month old baby, when their car was blown up as they took the baby to have its vaccination shots, suffering horrific burns herself. "Translate that," she says fiercely to Shahid. The imam Abdul-Alyy (Ted Sod) is arrested on false grounds and ends up in Abu Ghraib. When the translator says that many Americans are sorry for what happened there, he explodes in rage: "There are mistakes," he says, "for which apologies are not enough."

All these accounts are delivered with a profound theatrical tact, which saves the play from being a sensationalist exploitation of the suffering of others. The directness of theatre gives these stories an unmediated power impossible in other media, reducing the sense of voyeurism with its direct invitation: and it also, crucially, gives its characters an inviolable autonomy, which prevents them from being merely "victims". Hovering beneath the surface is an acute awareness of the untranslatability of experience: the gap of understanding is permitted to grate rawly. As with life itself, there are no neat endings.

It's impeccably performed by a hugely impressive cast, and the simplicity of its staging and conceptual framework reinforces the complexity of the experience it offers. I thought the dramaturgy wavered a little towards the end, rising to a premature emotional climax that left its denouement to flap in the wind, making it feel a little long. Even so, it's gripping from its opening moments, and makes necessary, unmissable theatre, infused with a knowledge that seems as urgent now as it did when it was made. I wish all documentary theatre were this good.

Picture: Trust by Richter Falk and Anouk van Dijk.

* Alison Croggon travelled to Perth as a guest of the Perth International Arts Festival

Trust, a project by Falk Richter and Anouk van Dijk. Stage design by Katrin Hoffman, costume design by Daniela Selig, music by Malte Beckenbach, dramaturgy by Jens Hillje, lighting by Carsten Sander. With Peter Cseri, Anouk van Dijk, Lea Draeger, Jack Gallagher, Vincent Redetzki, Judith Rosmair, Kay Bartholomäus Schulze, Stefan Stern, Nina Wollny and Malte Breckenbach. Schaubühne Berlin. Until March 2.

Aftermath, by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, directed by Jessica Blank. Lighting by Caleb Wertenbaker, costume design by Gabriel Berry, stage design by Richard Hoover, music and sound by David Robbins. With Omar Koury, Fajer Al-Kaisi, Leila Black, Maha Chehlaoui, Ramsey Fargallah, Rufio Lerma, Ryan Shams, Ted Sod and Rasha Zamamiri. New York Theatre Workshop. Until March 1.