Baal, pagan Lord of Heaven, god of rain and fertility. Baal, the first king of the Christian Hell, best known to us as Beelzebub. Milton's Baalim, one of those evilly ambiguous demons who, "when they please / can either sex assume". In the hands of the young Bertolt Brecht, he's the archetypal rebel poet and criminal anti-hero, a voracious appetite on legs, epic hater of womankind. The original title of the play was "Baal eats! Baal dances! Baal is transfigured!" What, asked Brecht, is Baal up to?

Baal was up to no good, that's for sure. The titular hero of Brecht's first play, written when he was only 20, he's a savagely ironic portrait of the ultimate Romantic outsider, stripped of his romantic dress. He's modelled on a range of sources. Perhaps the first is the Chinese poet and famous carouser Li Po, whose work Brecht devoured in his teens. Another is the 15th century French poet, thief and vagabond François Villon, whose contemporary equivalent might be Shane McGowan of The Pogues. Another strong influence is Arthur Rimbaud, the teen genius who horrified and intrigued literary Paris with his defiant lack of hygiene, and whose scandalous affair with fellow poet Paul Verlaine, which has echoes in this play, sparked the masterpiece A Season in Hell.


Perhaps most intriguingly, in 1926 Brecht himself named a real poet - Josef K, a car mechanic (perhaps a precursor of Ern Malley?) and the bastard son of a washerwoman - as the biographical model for Baal. Who knows if this had anything to do with the publication of Kafka's novel The Trial in 1925? All the same, the echo is suggestive: Kafka's Josef K is, like Baal, a passive character around whom events happen, but otherwise almost precisely his negative: where Josef K is sick with sexual guilt, Baal is sick with the lack of it.

What's unarguable is that Baal derives from an ancient genealogy of exclusively male poets: he is the archetypal troubador, the dark glint of male violence and amorality that inhabits the allure of every bad boy rock star. In Brecht's play, here given a starkly intelligent production at the Malthouse by Simon Stone, he remains as deeply problematic as he ever was, with his ugliness upfront. Whereas in the 1920s his deepest crimes would have been the outrage of bourgeois social mores, a century later it's his misogyny.

For my part, I don't believe the portrayal of misogyny is the same as its endorsement, and I'd argue strongly that this production is critique rather than advocacy. For art to ignore the existence of misogyny would be risible, given, say, the recent behaviour of football clubs or the Australian Defence Force: nothing Baal does is without its contemporary precedent. All the same, there's no getting past the sexism of the play, even given the reflexive nature of its argument, and because of the amoral (or perhaps, to pick up on Bataille, the hypermoral) light in which Baal is cast, its misogyny remains its most confronting aspect. The character of Baal reflects back in magnified form the society in which he lives, erasing its softening hypocrisies, and his use and abuse of women is brutal. Worse, although he is always culpable, he remains innocent.


Another thing worth keeping in mind in approaching this production of Baal is Brecht's own estimation of it: the play is not meant to provoke empathy or identification. As Brecht said in 1922, in an early version of the artistic intuition that later become Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect): "I hope in Baal... I've avoided one common artistic bloomer, that of trying to carry people away. Instinctively I've kept my distance… The spectator's 'splendid isolation' is left intact; he is not fobbed off with an invitation to feel sympathetically, to fuse with the hero and seem significant and indestructible as he watches himself in two different versions. A higher type of understanding can be got from making comparisons, from whatever is different, amazing, impossible to overlook."

Stone's production, co-translated with Tom Wright (not to be confused with Thomas M. Wright, who is playing Baal), is a serious and often brilliant attempt at Brecht's play. Although the script is hugely cut, it sticks closely to the original text, transposing its obscenities and undeniable beauties into contemporary colloquial English. Likewise, Brecht's songs are set to electric guitar by Stefan Gregory, but remain ballads rather than rock'n'roll. Baal is no Thyestes or The Wild Duck, in which a new text is spun out of the bones of the original, so here the estrangements of poetry are added to the alienations produced by its lead character.

The word that resounds through Brecht's text like a knell is "nothingness". Baal is the eye of the storm, the passive genius who absorbs the vacuum around him, and - in parallel with his hideous description of childbirth as the agonised expulsion of something that was received with pleasure - ejects it as a monstrous nullity. The poetry he creates, lyrical celebrations of disgust, is almost a by-product of this process; it neither redeems nor excuses him, and in fact he asks neither of it. This is where his innocence exists, and is why even towards the end, despite his vile behaviour, his friend Eckhardt calls him a child: his one virtue, if he can be said to have any, is that his actions, however selfish, lack the pettiness of self-interest.

All these complexities are given savage life in this production. There are aspects that remained (at least on opening night) unresolved; there were moments when the action was unclear, and when its physicalisation - notably the violence - was awkward, although these are minor points. Perhaps the biggest problem lies in how the production addresses the knotty gender question.

Stone has replaced all the secondary characters with a chorus of women taking multiple roles, who end up representing the broader society brutalised and challenged by Baal. Out of a cast of nine actors, three are (ambiguously) male. I suspect that this might have been conceived as a way of giving voice and weight to the women who are otherwise largely present as objects to be consumed and destroyed by Baal, but the immediate and (I hope) unintended effect is that women become the custodians of social mores, their traditional role in patriarchal societies.

Despite this, the show generates a compelling, chilly brilliance that I think is absolutely correct for Brecht. It's performed by a cast unafraid of its challenges, and delivers scenes of astounding poetic theatre. Wright as Baal carries the weight of performance, at once charismatic and abject, knowing and blind. As the composer Eckhardt, his friend, lover and victim, Oscar Redding is an assured (and relaxedly nude) presence: he is the troubled satellite drawn into and destroyed by Baal's presence, who attempts nevertheless to wake him to a consciousness of his crimes. And Geraldine Hakewill gives a luminous performance as Johanna, the young innocent who is Baal's first real victim.


This is followed through with an extraordinary design, a Manichean world of white and black designed (lighting and set) by Nick Schlieper. Human beings, often naked, move through these unrelenting abstractions, their bodies ever more exposed, more abused, more abject. It opens with a white rectangle, the antiseptic world of Baal's bourgeois admirers, the only object a black amplifier and guitar; as Baal continues his Rake's Progress to oblivion, the walls collapse and expose a black, featureless earth on which falls a punishing, endless rain, the manifestation of the godhead. Some of the visuals create arresting contemporary echoes of Renaissance images of crucifixion; still others recall Robert Mapplethorpe or Lucien Freud.

In short, Baal is a discomforting production of a deeply discomforting play. I've no doubt it will divide audiences; it certainly refuses a lot of easy options. As a work it wears its antecedents on its sleeve, and yet there were goose-bumping moments during the show when I realised that I had not seen anything like it. That's a rare feeling. One thing is for sure: those who go expecting titillation will be disappointed, because they'll get poetry instead. And what breath-taking poetry it is.

Pictures: Top: Thomas M Wright as Baal; middle, Shelly Lauman and Thomas M Wright; bottom, Wright and Oscar Redding. Photos: Jeff Busby

Baal, by Bertolt Brecht, translated by Simon Stone and Tom Wright, directed by Simon Stone. Set and lighting Nick Schlieper, costumes by Mel Page, composition and sound design Stefan Gregory. With Bridig Gallacher, Geraldine Hakewill, Luisa Hastings Edge, Shelly Laumann, Oscar Redding, Chris Ryan, Lotte St Clair, Katherine Tonkin and Thomas M Wright. Malthouse Theatre and Sydney Theatre Company. Merlyn Theatre, Malthouse, until April 23; Sydney Theatre Company, May 7-June 11.

Fame, so the proverb goes, is a calamity. To be sure, it's the kind of calamity that looks like a privilege, a disaster that masquerades as respect. But consider what happens when perhaps the greatest calamity of all befalls a writer and he turns into an adjective. A lifetime of work - diverse, idiosyncratic, speculative, contradictory, above all contingent - freezes into a single epithet. The words Chekhovian, Kafkaesque, Dantesque, Pinteresque, Beckettian, Shakespearean, become a deadly row of bullets the critic shoots into the blank wall of cultural regard.

It's part of the endless conflict between the cultural machine and art. Both need each other - without the cultural machine the artist might as well hide in a box, and without the artist, the cultural machine would have no reason to exist. Yet both are mutually hostile, waging a covert war that neither can really win. The machine likes its cultural product categorisable, recognisable, marketable: above all, it needs art to be tame. Artists - which is to say, artists who make any art worth the candle - resist cultural pigeonholes with every fibre of their being.


Naturally, the cultural machine likes its artists best when they are dead. "The words of a dead man," said Auden in his panegyric to Yeats, "Are modified in the guts of the living." Hence the faux reverence for Shakespeare, which viciously attacks any attempt to release the living artist from the half-life of monumental fame. Within this is a kind of love, but if it were transposed to actual relationships, it would be the possessive obsession in which the loved object is jealously locked in a dark room. Yet this transformation of living art to cultural monument is an inevitable and necessary process: despite its catastrophic side-effects, without cultural memory the artist and her work would be forgotten. And, as much as the erasure of radicality, this digestion can mean a renewal of vitality. I am the kind of audience member who always prays for the latter.

So, to turn to Brecht, who perhaps more than most others remains locked inside his adjective. "Brechtian" has become shorthand for many things: most immediately, it calls up the theory of Verfremdungseffekt, often misunderstood as an abjuration of feeling in favour of didactic intellection, which itself summons a kind of dour Marxist theatre about tractor drivers. Brecht is, quite rightly, regarded as the exemplary political playwright, and perhaps the most influential of the 20th century: but what is most often forgotten about Brecht - especially in the English language - is that he is a poet.

The Threepenny Opera is an early work of Brecht's. At the time of its writing, Brecht was 29; he had just had his first success with Man Equals Man and was working with the politically brilliant but financially unstable director Piscator, who first conceived of the idea of Epic Theatre. Brecht was then in the early stages of his encounter with Marx: he was yet to meet Walter Benjamin, was on the threshold of writing the first of his learning plays and was midway through his opera Mahagonny. The year before, he had released his first book of poems, The Manual of Piety (Die Hauspostille).

The Threepenny Opera, chaotically scrambled together with Kurt Weill's score and sets by Caspar Neher from Elisabeth Hauptmann's translation of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, was the work of a young man in extreme creative flux. The premiere famously teetered on the brink of disaster: the dress rehearsal reportedly went down like a lead balloon, and the first night audience sat unmoved through the first act, until suddenly something caught fire and they broke out into wild applause. And thus was born the biggest theatrical hit of the Weimar Republic.

Ever since, The Threepenny Opera has been something of an embarrassment to hardcore Marxist interpreters of Brecht. Its greatest fans were the bourgeoisie whom it supposedly attacked: they liked nothing better than having their greed, hypocrisy and amorality so entertainingly exposed, and no one could demonstrate that they were any the better for it. Yet Brecht never disowned it; rather, he remained somewhat obsessed with it, continually fiddling with the text and even writing a film version.

This alone shows that Brecht the poet always dominated Brecht the political didact. As Eric Bentley points out, with considerable perceptiveness, Brecht's Epic Theatre is really the theatre of a poet. "The epic theory can be represented by unfriendly critics as Brecht's attempt to make a virtue of the special limitation of his dramaturgy, the dramaturgy of a writer of ballads. To which one might retort that the epic form vindicated this dramaturgy and showed that one can derive drama from poetic balladry." Indeed.

Perhaps the most illuminating prepartory read for The Threepenny Opera might be his Manual of Piety, a collection of savagely beautiful ballads satirising religion, some of which later were included in The Threepenny Opera and Mahagonny. Here Brecht pays homage to a formative influence, the thief-poet Francois Villon, and writes blackly robust ballads about dead soldiers or people like the servant girl Marie Ferrar, "Born in the month of April / Rickets, no birthmarks, orphan, not of age", who after unsuccessful attempts to procure an abortion, is found guilty of infanticide. "Her prayers, it seems, had no effect".

It's this godless Hobbesian world, in which the weak wait in vain for the gates of Heaven to open while the strong trample them into the mud, that gives The Threepenny Opera its dark illumination. What's seductive about it is what drives Brecht's prowess as a poet: its amoral, irresistibly vital joyousness. Brecht the poet is the same as Brecht the entertainer: and all the supposed contradictions (as opposed to vitalising creative tensions) of his theory in relation to his writing emerge from glossing this vital aspect of Brecht's work. Even as his plays bent more consciously towards Marxist radicalism, he eschewed neither poetry or entertainment. "Grab them by the balls," he said once, "and their hearts will follow."

The great strength of Michael Kantor's production for the Malthouse is that it reanimates this Brecht, poet, entertainer and wicked trickster. Its first virtue is Raimondo Cortese's adaptation, featuring lyrics by Jeremy Sams, which transposes the action from Victorian London to a 1930s gangster Melbourne. It works for a couple of reasons: like Brecht's vision of Chicago in In The Jungle of the Cities, his Soho is pure theatrical fantasy, and Cortese has simply replaced this with a dystopian fantasy of Melbourne, slimming down Brecht's text by introducing Jenny (Paul Capsis) as a narrator. Crucially, it permits Cortese to exploit Australian obscenity, creating an unsentimentally vernacular diction that's as clean as a knife, and has an immediate contemporary tang.


The production itself takes place in a huge boxing ring which stretches the entire width of the Merlyn Theatre, its shadowy expanses exaggerated by Paul Jackson's lighting, which seems more an art of darkness visible than mere illumination. Into this space are wheeled Peter Corrigan's modernist monstrosities, huge mobile sets that jar the eye and act as simulacra of urban dissonance, an organically disturbing mess of architecture. Across this various stage-scape plays Brecht's nonsensical parable of human greed, vice and lust.

Its cheerful cynicism turns conventional morality on its head: here the bad guys win, simply because they are meaner than everyone else. The apparent deus ex machina, in which Mack the Knife is saved at the last minute from the hangman's noose, is a sardonic reversal that, rather than providing an escapist happy ending, reveals an uncomfortable truth: the biggest criminals get off scot-free.

Mack the Knife (played with charismatic swagger by Eddie Perfect) is far from a rough diamond. He’s a killer, a “sadist and a rapist”, a thief and a liar with, aside from a hypnotic sex appeal, no redeeming features whatsoever. Brecht’s undeceived vision saw that Mack’s charisma was not despite his wickedness, but because of it. Like today’s celebrity gangsters, Mack is rewarded for daring to enact society’s repressed desires: his dangerous attraction stems from our secret complicity with his crimes.

Kurt Weill's music, under the musical direction of Richard Gill, is presented in its original shape. It remains as fresh as the day it was written, and is a reminder of how brilliantly Weill wrote for the theatre, and how profoundly he has influenced popular music, from Tom Waits to Danny Elfmann. The music is the glue that holds this show together, and the counterpoint to its poetic dramaturgy.

Kantor and his cast simply go for it, generating an irresistible burlesque energy. For all its joyous spectacle, Kantor keeps the focus on simplicity: one of the few missteps is the decision to play Mack's underlings as hooting monkeys. Capsis and Perfect's riveting cabaret presences provide the vernacular base of the criminal underclass, crude and colloquially direct. The accomplished operatic clarity of Judi Connelli (Mrs Peachum), Grant Smith (Mr Peachum) and Anna O'Byrne (Polly Peachum) enact the gloss of the parasitic middle classes who suck their wealth from the suffering of the poor, who themselves are represented by the bruised and endlessly exploitable beggar Filch (Jolyon James).

Whether it makes an effective political statement remains a question of debate: like all satirists, Brecht was half in love with everything he hated, and that ambiguous sense of fun remains as blasphemous as ever. But as this Malthouse production shows, it's brilliant theatre. Most of all, it's brutally alive and wicked fun: which is to say, it's utterly Brechtian.

Pictures: Top: (L-R) Eddie Perfect and Paul Capsis; bottom, Judi Connelli, Grant Smith and Anna O'Byrne. Photos: Jeff Busby

The Threepenny Opera, by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, adapted by Raimondo Cortese, lyrics by Jeremy Sams. Directed by Michael Kantor, conducted by Richard Gill. Set design by Peter Corrigan, costumes by Anna Cordingley, lighting by Paul Jackson, sound design by Peter Ripon, choreography by Kate Denborough. With Casey Bennetto, Paul Capsis, Judy Connelli, Jolyon James, Melissa Langton, Amy Lehpamer, Anna O'Byrne, Eddie Perfect, Dimity Shepherd, Grant Smith and John Xintavelonis. Music performed by Stuart Brownley, Daniel Carter, Bob Collins, Martin Corcoran, Doug de Vries, David McSkiming, Evan Pritchard, Bruno Siketa and Nic Synot. Malthouse Theatre and Victorian Opera @ the Merlyn Theatre, Malthouse, until June 19.

Despite my best intentions - which lead, so the proverbs tell us, straight to hell - I am yet to tackle Brecht at the Malthouse. I will, gentle readers, I will, just as soon as I am able to stop my hair looking like Ludwig van Beethoven's (yes, there he is, and you can tell he's a genius, if only because he was ahead of his time in his choice of hairdresser). I found out last night, to my embarrassment, that my agent has been checking my state of health by reading TN, which tells me that I've backslid on my resolutions and have been complaining again. This is me not complaining. Instead, for those who have missed it, I'll point you to last week's Australian review of The Threepenny Opera, which gives you the rough outline of my responses. More to come, once I discover where I put my hair product.

Some pointers to interesting stuff I've missed here recently. Firstly, and most importantly, La Mama put out a call for help last week. Having heroically raised $100,000 over a single weekend in order to place a deposit on the purchase of the theatre, Artistic Director Liz Jones and her team now faces the Herculean task of finding the rest of the $1.7 million required to buy this piece of prime Carlton real estate. Every bit helps, so get out there to help save this unique Melbourne institution.

Which leads me to point belatedly to Louis Nowra's very interesting review of a new history of the Australian Performing Group, Currency Press's Make It Australian by Gabrielle Wolf, in which he remembers his encounters with the APG as a young playwright:

My trouble was that I was estranged from the world the APG presented to me. Sometimes I didn't know if the APG was satirising the ocker or celebrating him. The contemporary male characters seemed from another era.... My reservations put me in the small minority, as did my queasy doubts about APG's macho heterosexuality, which seemed as gross as a pub bar five minutes before six o'clock closing. I also found its questioning of the cultural cringe, its gaudy Australian nationalism and anti-British, anti-American attitudes very old-fashioned, its lack of interest in sex and love mystifying. Yet, at the same time, the physical energy, the Aussie humour and the vigorous criticism of conservative suburban values were wonderfully refreshing.

Meanwhile, in a reminder that art is ever an axis of argument, UK playwright Mark Ravenhill robustly defends Bertolt Brecht against his detractors, most recently Nick Cohen, and asks why Richard Strauss, who supported the Nazi regime, is so much easier to forgive than BB.

And now I must, must, must turn to my poor neglected novel, which patiently awaits my authorial copy-edits, before my US publishers begin to scream.