Since 2007, The Hayloft Project has established itself as one of Australia’s leading independent companies with a string of elegant, razor-intelligent productions. In particular, they've attracted attention for their reworking of modern classics, such as Wedekind's Spring Awakening, Chekhov’s Platonov and, controversially, a fascinating version of Three Sisters, 3XSisters. For Thyestes, Malthouse's Tower Theatre residency for 2010, director Simon Stone reaches much further into the past, to the plays of Nero's tutor and adviser, philosopher and sometime dramatist, Seneca the Younger.

He's linked forces again with Black Lung stalwarts Mark Leonard Winter and Thomas Henning. Others include Chris Ryan (seen most recently in Malthouse’s Elizabeth and Benedict Andrews’s Measure for Measure at Belvoir St), Hayloft dramaturge Anne-Louise Sarks, one of the brains behind Hayloft's Fringe hit Yuri Wells, and sound designer Stefan Gregory, who was responsible for the astonishing sound in the STC’s The War of the Roses. The result is Hayloft’s best work yet, and one of the highlights of the year. Thyestes is rock'n'roll theatre: confronting, transgressive, uncomfortably hilarious, obscene, horrifying, and desolatingly beautiful.

Yet it's hard to know where to begin talking about this show. Thinking about it is very like contemplating one of those breeding tangles of snakes that David Attenborough's Life featured a couple of weeks ago on the ABC: it's an orgy of forms and ideas, each writhing about the others, which makes the mind slide distractingly from one thought to the next. I think that above all, you're dazzled by the sheer outrageous excess of it, its shockingly wasteful expense of energy. And yet this impression of excess is created by what is surely one of Hayloft's most austere productions.

The austerity begins with the design, which is stark black and white, reflecting the absolute moral world of classical tragedy. The Greeks didn't do shadows: this is a universe of darkness visible, where the hidden is dragged into the unforgiving light. Claude Marcos's traverse set - effectively a black, narrow, enclosed box, with a white interior exposed by Govin Ruben's harsh fluorescent lights - embodies this sense of continuous revelation. When the blinds that serve as curtains are down, as they are between every scene, it's impossible to see the audience on the other side: each new scene reveals the audience as well as the actors. This becomes increasingly disconcerting, because one of the paradoxical effects of this show is to erase distances: between then and now, them and us, the actors and ourselves.

A major reason for this sense of collapse between boundaries is Stefan Gregory's sensually enveloping sound design. Gregory shamelessly exploits the capacity of music to locate us ecstatically in the present: the soundtrack includes Schubert and Handel, Wu Tang Clan and Ice Cube, Roy Orbison and Queen. This connects with another convention - the use of surtitles - to make Thyestes seem like a kind of opera. It looks like theatre, sounds like theatre, but in its strangely abstracted narrative, and especially in its emotional excess, it works more like an operatic history.


And what of the story itself? Simon Stone and his collaborators claim their version of Thyestes is "after Seneca", but it's probably more true to label it "before Seneca". Seneca's actual play - notoriously "modern" in that very little happens aside from the climactic event - is enacted in a mere couple of scenes, right at the end of the show. The rest is an excavation of the bloody history of the House of Tantalus: the first and worst of all unhappy families.

From Tantalus himself, who stole ambrosia from Olympus and who most notably slaughtered and cooked his son Pelops to feed the gods, to Menelaus and Agamemnon, who besieged Troy for 10 years to recover the faithless Helen, this single family constitutes the DNA of what we think of as canonical western literature. The doings of Tantalus's descendents exercised, among countless others, Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and, later, Seneca. And through his influence on Jacobean and Elizabethan tragedy, and especially on Shakespeare, Seneca is arguably the biggest classical influence on English drama. What Hayloft presents isn't recognisably Shakespearean. It's not particularly Senecan, come to that. And yet its effect is surprisingly close to both: which I think is a result of a complexity of texture on the one hand, and a primitive, unforgiving harshness on the other.

Its narrative genius is the surtitles, which flash up before each scene, describing the plot of the story, before the curtains rise on the stage, revealing another, altogether more mundane reality. It's a brilliant way of coping with the tale's anachronisms, which are mostly removed from the actual performances, and become instead a framing device. And this convention means that the dozen or so short plays or tableaux that make up the whole need not concern themselves at all with plot. When the curtains rise, we are suddenly pitched into 21st century Melbourne, into the unremarked spaces between larger, tragic events. What we see are overwhelmingly domestic scenes.

The story begins with the murder by Thyestes (Thomas Henning) and Atreus (Mark Leonard Winter) of their half-brother, Chrysippus (Chris Ryan), at the urging of their mother Hippodamia, who is angry that her sons have been passed over to inherit the throne. The first scene is brilliant in how it winds you into its double reality: the three actors perform with an almost documentary realism that at first almost makes you believe you're overhearing three young men passing time, late at night, at a party. Until, that is, Chrysippus turns his back, fiddling with his iPod to get a favourite song, and the two brothers stand up, suddenly full of menace, and pull out the gun, and the machinery of tragedy is activated. Oddly, not so much on stage, as in our minds.

It's clear from the beginning that this version of Thyestes is primarily about the relationship between two brothers. The show has a genuinely Freudian edge, and not just in its unafraid confrontations of sexuality. Its increasing sense of disturbance is in how it echoes those dark jealousies that only exist between siblings, and that can continue lifelong, coloured into adulthood by the uncontrolled passions of infancy. Chrysippus's murder is at first presented as the originatory crime from which emerges the others, but as this bloody family history unrolls before us, it becomes clear that even this is an echo of earlier crimes, that these brothers are trapped in a hell of repetition that is the curse of their family.

This understanding has both a symbolic and a literal value: we understand the story in wholly contemporary terms, in how incest, for instance, can be passed down from generation to generation, the parent visiting on the child his or her own suffering; and we also understand it as myth, as a representation of something larger than it is. This dislocatedness is why it is, at times, very funny indeed. Some of its most powerful moments are when these double recognitions, which weave a complementary dance through the show, suddenly unite into a single breathtaking image.

The most memorable perhaps is when the curtain rises on the suicidal Pelopia (Chris Ryan), singing a Schubert lieder: mother of a child who is the product of incestuous rape, she is the image of unhealable damage, lifted suddenly into an ecstatically operatic moment, pain and beauty united. In such moments - there are others - the performers embody Nietzsche's idea of the tragic: a Dionysian image of absolute negation becomes, through the ecstasy of performance, "the absolute limit of affirmation". It's a quality that Barrie Kosky also achieves, although in very different ways: and the secret is in the balance between restraint and excess.

Winter, Henning and Ryan are astounding, on the one hand achieving a naturalistic authenticity that locates these extreme events in the middle of the mundane present, without on the other losing a sense of heightened reality. We believe in these ancient tales of warring kings, because we also understand, through these performances, that betrayal, violence, sexual excess, greed, despair and madness are, in fact, the most ordinary of human realities. Scratch the history of any family, and you will find such behaviours lurking not far beneath the surface. I'm not the first, for example, to link Thyestes's eating of his children with incest: in Hayloft's rendering of the story, this connection is even clearer, as it becomes a mirror of Thyestes's rape of his daughter Pelopia.

There's much more to tease out, but I've probably said enough. If you can possibly get there, don't miss it. The word is out, and it is wildly good: and the critics are in unusually rhapsodic alignment. The season has been extended an extra week, so there is still a chance to see it. But I suspect you'll have to be quick.

A short version of this review was in Monday's Australian.

Pictures, R-L: top, Mark Leonard Winter and Chris Ryan; bottom, Mark Leonard Winter, Thomas Henning and Chris Ryan. Photos: Jeff Busby

Thyestes, co-written and directed by Simon Stone, after Seneca. Co-written and performed by Thomas Henning, Chris Ryan and Mark Leonard Winter. Set and costumes by Claude Marcos, lighting by Govin Ruben, sound design by Stefan Gregory. The Hayloft Project and Malthouse Theatre, Tower Theatre. Melbourne Fringe Festival. Until October 9.

Black Lung Theatre and Whaling Firm's eight-day season of Glasoon is the hot ticket in town. It sold out in five days after its announcement on Facebook, so if you're not already booked, you'll have to resort to blackmail, robbery or espionage to get a ticket. To give it even more an air of samizdat, the location is "undisclosed": you have to phone to make a booking, whereupon you're told to head for a certain bar in East Brunswick at a certain time, buy a drink, and wait, like someone out of Smiley's People, for the Sign.

Which is all cool enough. The actual site is a warehouse music venue scrawled with graffiti art from floor to ceiling, with rugs on the floor and battered laminex kitchen chairs and ancient sofas as seating. And then there's the performance, which won't disappoint any Black Lung aficionados. It begins with a Christ figure stumbling through a door, covered in blood, and being revived by an operatically-attired and voiced mother figure who offers him her ample breast to suckle. It continues with a vicious parody of fatherly advice to a young man and then descends into a kind of sexual hell, a dizzying, blackly funny and relentless parade of bodily incontinence, perversity and violence, where people fuck and vomit in each other's mouths and dance even though they're dead, where a zombie doll in a dress is playing an electric guitar, where God is a man with a beard in a Britney Spears wig and lace panties who lounges carelessly to expose his testicles.

In fact, there is plenty of opportunity in this show to contemplate the fact that the Black Lung fellas really have balls, some of them startlingly waxed.


You could just go ZOFMG!!!! and leave it at that, but it seems inadequate (Oh, those bad Black Lung boys!) The alternative is to flail in several different directions at once, since the show is sort of indescribable. It makes a guerilla foray on the conventional wisdoms of rocknroll death art, attacking the glamour of those impeccably masculine acolytes of Thanatos, Jim Morrison to Nick Cave, fake Rimbauds the lot of them. Rebellion here is is stripped back to its egocentric adolescent defiance, exposing the incontinent holes in its skin, its deadly cunt envy. What rock critic Anwyn Crawford describes as the "bodiless despair" of the male rock god is given back its body. And it's not pretty at all.

If Glasoon were pretty, it would become seductive; for all the nudity and sex, it's not sexy. It's an assault, mostly on the male body. Though it certainly has a kind of beauty: that of the abject body unsexed and pinned to its mortality, like the dead Christ in 17th century Spanish art where the god is so embodied, so corpse-like in his meticulously rendered wounds and green-mottled skin, that it seems shockingly blasphemous and perverse.


Glasoon isn't merely sensational épater le bourgeois. If it were, it wouldn't be nearly as interesting as it is. It's certainly obscene, but it makes you realise that the obscene is of a different order than the pornographic. The obscene, even if it violently rejects the idea of God, is on the same spectrum as the divine, while the pornographic is monodimensionally of the order of capitalism: cummodity for the masses, rather than ecstatic nightmare. Think of the 17th century saint, Margaret Mary Alacoque, who wrote of licking up the vomit of her patients, a "pleasure" she wished she could repeat every day, or of St John of the Cross, cleaning out the sores of lepers with his tongue.

Mere sensation wouldn't sidle into your subconscious like a slow-release toxin. It wouldn't create this riveting theatre, sharp and loose, galvanically in the present. Glasoon plugs into an inner urgency, a neurotic anxiety that spirals into a excoriation of the murky solipsism of the self, an unforgiving massacre of internalised social authority. It employs the vocabulary of now, but its circling gods seem to be Nietzsche and Freud: Civilisation and Its Discontents, Beyond Good and Evil, thrown on the pyre of its malicious laughter.

*

I googled "Glasoon", and found no definitions, aside from it being a surname about as rare as Croggon. Warming to my search, I looked it up in Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (no entry), the Oxford English Reference Dictionary (nothing between Glasgow and Glasnost) and a series of online maritime dictionaries (nada). Nor is it mentioned anywhere in the play itself, which is, despite all appearances to the contrary, a tightly scripted work from Thomas Henning.

Glasoon is, it seems, a word that means nothing, and refers nowhere. It's a nonsense coinage, empty of semantic meaning. It is a perfect Dada word. As Tristan Tzara said in his 1918 Manifesto: "Dada means nothing". Dada expresses, he said, "the knowledge of a supreme egoism, in which laws wither away". It's worth pursuing Tzara a little further here, from his 1922 Lecture on Dada:

The beginnings of Dada were not the beginnings of an art, but of a disgust. Disgust with the magnificence of philosophers who for 3ooo years have been explaining everything to us (what for?), disgust with the pretensions of these artists-God's-representatives-on-earth, disgust with passion and with real pathological wickedness where it was not worth the bother; disgust with a false form of domination and restriction en masse, that accentuates rather than appeases man's instinct of domination, disgust with all the catalogued categories, with the false prophets who are nothing but a front for the interests of money, pride, disease, disgust with the lieutenants of a mercantile art made to order according to a few infantile laws, disgust with the divorce of good and evil, the beautiful and the ugly (for why is it more estimable to be red rather than green, to the left rather than the right, to be large or small?) Disgust finally with the Jesuitical dialectic which can explain everything and fill people's minds with oblique and obtuse ideas without any physiological basis or ethnic roots, all this by means of blinding artifice and ignoble charlatans promises.

As Dada marches it continuously destroys, not in extension but in itself. From all these disgusts, may I add, it draws no conclusion, no pride, no benefit. It has even stopped combating anything, in the realization that it's no use, that all this doesn't matter. What interests a Dadaist is his own mode of life. But here we approach the great secret.

Dada is a state of mind. That is why it transforms itself according to races and events. Dada applies itself to everything, and yet it is nothing, it is the point where the yes and the no and all the opposites meet, not solemnly in the castles of human philosophies, but very simply at street corners, like dogs and grasshoppers.

Like everything in life, Dada is useless.

If anything is palpable in Glasoon, it is the solipsism of disgust. The Black Lung Theatre and Whaling Firm's reliably uninformative press release for Glasoon quotes writer Thomas Henning, self-described as "a reasonably mediocre personality":

The great dramas of my life are enacted majorly within my mind. My experience of hardship, of politics, of social change is thin on the ground. My ideas are lofty but my world is small. I retreat habitually to my mind, where the world is an exciting place... The way I convince myself to sleep, is with violence. Dreams of violence and guns. I think it’s a focus for me. Death. Is this something key to a sense of mediocrity, or weakness, or failure? That I convince myself to go to sleep with war fantasies and dreams of slaughtering dozens of people? Is this a common male thing?

The focus of disgust here, as in so much of Black Lung's work, is maleness itself, projected out in a phantasmagoria of loathing. Glasoon is an adolescent nightmare, a solipsistic excursion through the dark edges of male desire, a murderous excorcism. It's pure, like acetylene is pure.

Does it mean anything? Does it matter?

*

Among others, Hennings' text also calls to mind the British writer Heathcote Williams, whose 1972 play The Immortalist was described at the time - and from this end of things, quite justly - as "the first play of the 21st century". Williams' anarchic radicality seems, like his American poetic contemporary Ed Dorn, a darkly prescient foreshadowing of the mediated, consumerist, corporatised war machine of the 21st century. Like Williams, who spiralled out of the Vietnam and Cold Wars, or Tzara, who was writing in Switzerland while Europe was razed in WW1, Hennings' Glasoon springs from a reality predicated on war, the matrix of the petro-chemical-military-industrial-Disney-Murdoch complex.

It's a woman-hating paradigm in which the leaky, penetrable feminine body is the site of deathly denial and loathing. In Glasoon the female love object is, in an obscene joke, dead. (It's perhaps worth commenting here that exploring the pathology of misogyny isn't the same as being misogynistic. If this work were misogynistic, the female body would be naked and abject, not the male.)

In this reality, utopia is as extinct as the thylacine and the broad-faced potoroo. The nowhere of utopia depends on there being a place to go to: if the planet is burning up and drowning in its own waste like a plague victim, then the only refuge is inside your own head. There is no utopia even hinted here. Glasoon is an assault on given wisdom, on history, religion and social authority, which are minced into nonsense and funnelled into the central character's head, like a goose being force-fed to make fois gras.

Translated into performance, it's like being in someone else's nasty dream. Its insistence on now is a hatred of mediation. Its characters, or phantoms, all speak a debased language of pre-formed mass media cliches. Like a dream, Glasoon generates its own inescapable logic. Its power depends on the extraordinary cast, who without exception take the text and run through the pain barrier: they are not characters so much as embodiments of extremity, caricatures who joylessly fuck, bleed and die like creatures in a mediaeval depiction of hell. Only I, played with what you can only say is startling courage and honesty by Vaczadenjo Warton-Thomas, contingently approaches the status of character: he is the subject to whom all this humiliation is happening, the passive eye in the storm.

There's a kind of hope, if it can be called hope: when his abjection is compete, when the ritual is over, I kills everybody and goes away, like the teenager in the story. Where does he go in his new suit? Into the sober disillusion of adulthood? A new, sane life? Who knows?

Like the poet said: True, the new era is nothing if not harsh...

Picture: top: Simoncee Page Jones, Vaczadenjo Warton-Thomas and masked guitarist in Glasoon. Photo: Max Milne. Below: Dead Christ by Gregorio Fernández

Glasoon, by Thomas Henning. Performed by Sacha Bryning, Rima Hadchiti, Simoncee Page Jones, Lily Paskas, Vaczadenjo Warton-Thomas and Thomas Wright, with Liam Barton, Angus Kenny, Joseph O’Farrell and Keith Oakden-Rayner. Black Lung Theatre and Whaling Firm, location undisclosed, season booked out.

Avast & Avast II - The Welshman Cometh, by Black Lung Theatre Company, presented by the Malthouse. With Sacha Bryning, Gareth Davies, Thomas Henning, Mark Winter, Thomas Wright and Dylan Young. Sound design and music by Liam Barton, lighting design by Govin Ruben. Tower Theatre, CUB Malthouse, until December 6.

In a model of enlightened patronage, the Malthouse Theatre this year offered the Black Lung Theatre Company and Whaling Firm (to give it its full moniker) a three month residency in the Tower. And, it seems, basically left them alone to see what would happen, in the spirit of a scientist leaving a petri dish at the back of a laboratory. The result is Avast - a reprise of this company's first show - and Avast II - The Welshman Cometh, a new work which is (apparently) a prequel to Avast.


The Black Lung is a collective of seven startlingly fearless performers, who devise a particular kind of anti-theatre that at once brilliantly exploits and destroys theatrical artifice. They attracted particular notice with their Fringe hit Rubeville, which deservedly carried off the gongs in the Melbourne and Adelaide Fringe Festivals with its blackly hilarious assault on the delusions of celebrity culture.

A crucial element of their previous work has been the sense that the audience enters a self-contained environment, in which the events they perform (it’s hard to call them “plays”) follow their own inscrutable laws. This environmental element could easily have been compromised by their move to a main stage, but the three month residency seems to have been spent on extensive renovations. The Tower is almost unrecognisable; it has the air of a bizarre, ramshackle domicile rather than a conventional theatre, a place that is lived in rather than a mere stage.

It's fascinating to see what is, in effect, a mini-retrospective, jamming together their first and most recent works. The two shows, for all their common provenance, are actually quite distinct from each other. Both exploit clichés from mass culture – The Lord of the Rings, samurai movies, westerns, role playing games, apocalypse fiction – and, like all parodies, also pay them fond homage. And each has a narrative of sorts. Avast concerns two brothers meeting again after long estrangement, while Avast II is a post-apocalyptic western in which a stranger arrives at an isolated settlement to rescue the doomed inhabitants.

However you look at it, there's no escaping that the Black Lung is men's business. The company is all male, and squinting through the shambolic disorder of Avast and Avast II reveals a deep preoccupation with contemporary male anxiety.

In both these shows, the contradictory construction of masculinity - the delusions and mythlogies that sustain it - is put under extreme pressure. Like the theatrical conventions that are invoked only to be exploded, these delusions collapse, leaving in their place the raw and absurd presence of the (often) naked and (always) sexually ambiguous body. The abject incontinence of the feminine body - its uncontrollable leakages of blood, sexual fluids, tears, saliva - is, in traditional ideas of masculinity, contrasted with self-sufficient, impermeable manliness. But here the naked male body leaks various fluids with as much promiscuous abandon as Woman.

Avast II (the prequel, remember) opens with a tour de force: the baptism of a baby that, with a touch of gothic horror, lots of smoke and moody lighting and a brooding Nick Cavean guitar accompaniment, invokes the ritualistic nature of theatre. (Ritual is, in fact, not at all inappropriate as a way of understanding these shows: they are, among other things, enactments of psychic expiation.) Here a wild-eyed priest figure (Mark Winter) shouts incantations into a microphone before raising a cleaver and cutting off the baby's hand in a sacrifice that is intended to protect his frontier community from some dreadful evil that assails it.

We then strike the Gunslinger figure (Gareth Davies), the lone hero who encounters the handless baby (Dylan Young), now grown up. Gareth is The Welshman, and he lassoos young Dylan and drags him around in a way that rather irresistibly recalls Lucky and Pozzo in Beckett's Waiting for Godot. They make their way to the frontier town, where the luckless inhabitants, led by the Mayor (Thomas Henning in top hat, pyjamas and wheelchair) are assailed by some supernatural beast at nightfall and lock their doors in terror. The strangers are left outside to die.

The Hero and his sidekick are attacked, saved by God (a deux ex machina puppet lowering from the flies), shoot Him dead, and enter the amazed township. Then they do the Seven Samurai/Magnificent Seven thing, rousing the inhabitants with an exhilarating spoof of sumarai fight sequences and boldly striding off to do battle. The hero gets the Girl (Thomas Wright in an appalling black wig and nightie), stealing him/her from the town's blacksmith (Sacha Bryning). They fight the monster, the Girl dies, and then...

Well, then the story gets kind of forgotten. One of the intriguing aspects of Black Lung's practice is how the company quite genuinely channels the power of gothic melodrama and epic grandeur, while at the same time mercilessly taking the piss. This is not suspension of disbelief so much as its constant levitation, before the tightrope snaps with loud twang. And maybe what happens after that twang gets terminal is most interesting, as the theatre cuts closer and closer to literal reality: a recitation, for example, of the various ways the cast will die in the future, which generates a superstitious creepiness, as if it's a curse; or an extraordinary monologue which is a gem in itself and which takes the show into entirely different emotional territory.

And then it kind of finishes with a song, with no clear signal to indicate it's over. Certainly no bows. Like other Black Lung shows, it just stops, and leaves you to wonder what just happened.

Avast (their earliest show, which supposedly follows their latest - are you with me?) is similar in how it constructs and brutally destroys staged realities. The narrative here is simpler - a long estranged brother (Gareth Davies) returns home, and confronts his brother (Thomas Wright). Davies, who most of the time stands in a washing machine, is covered in blood, and Wright is wearing black speedos and appears to be covered in semen.

The dialogues continue through all the necessary clichés (the dead mother, the revelations, the recriminations - "you were never there!"), interrupted by various strange visitations - a man in a ten-gallon hat and outrageous moustache, a polar bear. And then the whole thing explodes. I'm reluctant to describe how, but suffice to say that I've seldom seen meta-theatre done so effectively. It left my theatre partner, young Ben, sleepless with outrage, distress and dilemma.

These brutal interventions of literal reality go way past parody, generating a sense of genuine abjection and discomfort. There really is no way of predicting what will happen in the next moment and, with the help of some remarkable performances, it makes for riveting theatre. It's risky stuff that could easily slump into boring mayhem or mere embarrassment, and The Black Lung only gets away with it because their apparent anarchy is underlaid by some steely discipline and accuracy. And sheer front, of course.

Another version of this review is in today's Australian.

Picture: The Black Lung Theatre Company and Whaling Firm

Rubeville, written and directed by Thomas Henning. Music by Liam Barton, Sebastian Steiger and Sean the Saw. With Gareth Davis, Dylan Young and Eloise Mignon. The Black Lung @ The Black Lung Theatre until October 15. Debris by Dennis Kelly, directed by Tanya Goldberg. With Thomas Campbell and Bojana Novakovic. Ride On @ the Black Lung Theatre, 55 High St Northcote, until October 14. Bookings: 8412 8777

"No other production this year," trumpets the press release for Rubeville, neatly undercutting its own hyperbole, "has combined these actors with these lines!" That's marketing for you, in all its empty seduction: the banal promise, so prinked up with exclamation marks that even its own mother can't recognise it. It's the hustle, the con, the sell, the miasma of delusion. At the centre of its fog of deception is the hustler himself, the most deluded of them all.

This is the world of Rubeville, where everything is for sale and nothing has any value. As it begins, this show reminds us that working in the theatre was once considered synonymous with prostitution: an abject Hernandez (Dylan Young), whom we have just seen begging on a street corner outside the theatre, offers himself to a member of the audience ("fifty dollars? ok, thirty five"), then pulls down his shorts and bends over the sofa.

A man with his shorts garlanding his naked bum has a certain grotesque pathos; but it becomes something else when Hernandez, playing out the imagined fantasies of his putative john, begins to sob, "Don't fuck me, please, don't fuck me". The voyeuristic horror of rape gives way almost at once to a lecture from "George Clooney", played by Gareth Davis, on what Hernandez (or Dylan Young) is doing wrong in his performance. "You want to please," says George (or Gareth). "You're pandering to the audience..."

I guess you could call what follows an extended mindfuck. A savage hour-long riff on the brutalisations of commodified celebrity culture, this is wickedly hilarious theatre, acutely self-aware and blackly intelligent. Thomas Henning and his cast pitilessly manipulate the expectations of their audience, invoking extremity only to explode it, turning in a trice from violence or pathos to outrageous comedy to sly commentary.

Rubeville is a sardonic response to the Americanisation of our culture, invoking the fantasy world of Hollywood and the seductive dream of a quick buck. The stage is littered with blank television sets, one of which neurotically plays a loop of random video footage: a close-up of George Clooney, some scenes from a black and white movie, film titles in a language which looks like Finnish. The band, playing Tom Waits-style blues/rock/folk, plays in the corner. Their faces are painted white and black in a sinister echo of blackface make-up, calling up the racial erasure of the Black and White Minstrels or the nationalistic mindlessness of football fans.

The plot, such as it is, concerns a series of get-rich-quick scams hatched by George Clooney, the self-proclaimed hustler, and his half-naked, filthy sidekick Hernandez. Trixie (Eloise Mignon), a junkie prostitute, ODs on their couch (but not before stepping out of character and complaining about the gender politics of the production, which means that the only woman in the cast is playing a junkie prostitute). They decide to make a quick buck by demanding ransom money from her rich family. Then they rip off the till of the theatre, in order to go to Iceland to claim Trixie's inheritance...

The nonsense of the plot is really a pretext. Rubeville is, among other things, a satire on theatre itself: theatrical conventions are invoked only to be undermined and attacked. The actors slip in and out of character, performing themselves as well as their roles, confusing the fictive reality of the show. It is completely unclear when the play begins or finishes. You walk into the theatre where the three-piece band is playing as George/Gareth scrambles over the seats, muttering incomprehensibly. Towards the end, George/Gareth confesses sadly that he has "run out of show". The final blackout, which prompts the audience applause and actorly bows, loses its finality when the actors come back on stage and start playing with the band, as if the bows were just another scene in this apparently improvised performance.

Rubeville makes me think of the sexually-charged anarchy of Heathcote Williams' play AC/DC, but it lacks Williams' utopian optimism. Like Williams, its destruction of the barriers between identities makes it genuinely Artaudian, and it is fuelled by a pervasive anger at the state of contemporary society. "Mediocrity and delusion," says the poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger, "stand in a complementary relationship to each other; their apparent antagonism conceal a deep-seated collusion. A social location which lies outside this entanglement will not be found." Rubeville is a spirited protest against both mediocrity and delusion, sardonically aware that, as members of a society which expresses its anxieties about identity in performances of violence, we are all implicated in their mutual machinations.

For all its apparent anarchy, this is highly polished theatre. All three actors generate rawly powerful performances with a risky improvisatory edge, but the real tell of this show is its sharpness: the timing is always impeccable. And did I say that it is hilarious? The Black Lung is evolving into one of the truly exciting nodes of theatre-making in Melbourne.

As well as being a theatre company, the Black Lung is a curated venue. For the Fringe Festival it has imported from Sydney Ride On's production of Debris, the debut play of British writer Dennis Kelly. First performed in 2003, Debris put Kelly in the company of playwrights like Mark Ravenhill, David Harrower and Sarah Kane, who are loosely grouped under the rubric of In-Yer-Face theatre.

It's easy to see why Debris attracted attention : it's a play that intriguingly combines high poetic language, drawn in part from Christian mystic traditions, with a hard-edged and blackly comic look at family dysfunction. It concerns a brother and sister, Michael (Thomas Campbell) and Michelle (Bojana Novakovic), who have been dragged up by their alcoholic father after the death of their mother. Oddly, for all its extremity the writing is apt to undercut its own emotional power by reaching too easily for a joke, but the energy and beauty of its writing is undeniable.

The play opens with a monologue by Michael, in which he describes how his father crucified himself in his living room on Michael's 16th birthday. The description of the (rather ingenious) self-crucifixion is at once funny and brutal, and the sensuality of its evocations of the dying father's flesh, filled with a kind of loathly eroticism, echo Julian of Norwich's descriptions of Christ's body on the Cross in her visionary work Revelations of Divine Love.

The mystic imagery recurs throughout the play, which tells a nightmare story of neglect and deprivation through a series of fragmentary scenes. The image of a lactating Christ, another common symbol in mediaeval mysticism, is resurrected in Michael's discovery of an abandoned newborn baby in the trash and his breastfeeding it with his blood. Against these macabre Christian manifestations, Kelly poses Michelle's various narratives of her mother's death and her own birth: in one, her mother dies of joy, choking on a chicken bone from a celebratory meal, and Michelle is ripped untimely from her womb; in another she gestates in her mother's corpse, which rots ignored in the corner of the living room, and turns into a nightmare carnivorous plant. These fictions, as becomes clear, are the means by which the children survive their upbringing.

Novakovic (most recently seen here in Eldorado and The Female of the Species) and Campbell are certainly up to the challenges of the script, and give powerful and nuanced performances as the two siblings. Unfortunately, Tanya Goldberg's direction lacks the bold imaginative flair of the writing: there is little sense of mise en scene, and the actors often seem awkwardly placed in the space.

The metaphor that stitches the production together - scene titles are chalked on the theatre walls by Novakovic, filling pre-drawn letter spaces like those in writing primers - also muddies the focus. Although it emphasises the childhood of the characters, the Brechtian allusion seems misplaced here, both theatrically and metaphorically - it is hard to see, for example, how this play is any kind of lesson, and the schoolroom reference, with its implications of orderly authority, has absolutely no connection to the disenfranchised lives the play portrays. For all that, it's a fair fist of a startling play, and more than worth the ticket price.

The Black Lung Theatre