Today I planned to write reviews of Hoy Polloy's Tom Fool (highly recommended) and Red Stitch's very creditable production Leaves of Glass, but I received some good news (which was a big surprise and which I will share with you in due course) and find myself knocked deliriously off course.

I'll put myself back together and finish the reviews tomorrow: in the meantime, let me note in passing that suddenly Caryl Churchill's controversial playlet Seven Jewish Children will have three separate readings in Melbourne, after the STC's Australian premiere reading last month. The first will be at the State Library on May 18, and features Max Gillies and Miriam Margolyes (other dates reported as they come to hand). The Age reports this morning that Ms Margolyes, an Anglo-Jewish actor, has been dropped from a Jewish charity appearance for her participation in an allegedly "anti-Semitic" work. To quote the redoutable Ms Margoyles, "That's bollocks". You can check out a video of the Royal Court reading on the Guardian site here, and make up your own mind.

NB Details for Monday's reading, which features a stellar cast, here (thanks Michael Magnusson!) It's first come, first served, and has been generating a lot of publicity, so get there early...

News bulletin #153: Our Geoffrey has conquered Broadway with his genius portrayal of the dying Berenger in Ionesco's Exit the King. Among a swag of critical bouquets, New York Times senior critic Ben Brantley calls Rush a "fire-trailing comet" in an unreservedly rave review of Neil Armfield's production. It's a triumph for the Malthouse (known in its overseas entrepeneurships as Malthouse Melbourne) and Company B Belvoir St, which produced the original production. And remember: we saw it here first.

And while we're on the subject of New York: Caryl Churchill's Seven Jewish Children continues to generate controversy after its New York Theater Workshop presentation. George Hunka points to Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon's must-read examination of the play.

The Sydney Theatre Company is presenting a reading of Caryl Churchill's controversial short play Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza. Approximately ten minutes in length, the play is Churchill’s response to the situation in Gaza, written in January 2009. It caused a widespread media furore when it was first performed in February at the Royal Court Theatre, London.

Seven Jewish Children will be presented as a free rehearsed reading on Sunday, March 22 at 7pm at Sydney Theatre Company’s Wharf 1, immediately following the evening’s scheduled performance of The Removalists by David Williamson in the same theatre. Ian Sinclair will direct the reading, but casting is still to be confirmed.

Previous productions of Churchill's work by the STC have included Far Away, directed by Benedict Andrews, Top Girls directed by Melissa Bruce and Serious Money directed by Simon Phillips. The event is part of the Company’s Back Stage program, including play readings, ‘meet the artist’ forums, pre-show briefings and back stage tours.

The reading is a free, unticketed event with entry on a first-come first-served basis. And it also gives me an excellent excuse to point to David Jays' meticulous close reading of the text, Practical criticism: reading without prejudice, on Performance Monkey.

Update: George Hunka on British playwrights, responding to David Cote's Time Out blog, is a must-read. And see Andrew Haydon in the Guardian on the banning of a play by Anthony Neilson in Malta. Godwot, it's been a busy week in Britannia...

______

Caryl Churchill's new play, Seven Jewish Children, is presently stirring up a huge brouhaha (or is it a furore? Anyway, one of those words that you never read outside articles like this one).

Billed as a "ten-minute history of Israel, ending with the bombing of Gaza", it is being staged as a free event at London's Royal Court, after performances of Marius von Mayenburg's play The Stone, which is about German attempts to deal with its Nazi past. Predictably, given its implied critique of the State of Israel, Churchill's play has been accused of being anti-Semitic, and even of bringing up the blood libel. This stems from a line that reads: "tell her I look at one of their children covered in blood and what do I feel? tell her all I feel is happy it’s not her." Which is a tough line, yes, but is also plainly a response to the kind of commentary which also sparked articles like this one from Gideon Levy in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

You can read Churchill's text for yourself here. The dingdong argument at the Guardian theatre blog continues here, Andrew Haydon has a review and discussion here and George Hunka has more here. George intriguingly reports that the New York Theatre Workshop - which caused another furore when it first booked, then cancelled, a NY production of My Name is Rachel Corrie (TN background here) - is putting out feelers about putting on Churchill's play.

The accusations of anti-Semitism made against Churchill are very depressing. They are part of a political strategy to undermine critique by conflating legitimate criticism of a state with the ugliest racism. What is worse is that the bombing of Gaza has prompted some of the vilest anti-Semitism I have seen recently, which seems - erroneously - to legitimise this stance. However, confusing Churchill's play with anti-Semitism helps nobody, and worst of all, trivialises what anti-Semitism actually is.

Coincidentally, an email from the distinguished US poet Adrienne Rich recently landed in my inbox, in which she explains, not without anguish, her reasons for joining an academic and cultural boycott against Israel. She also outlines this particular mechanism of repressing political critique as clearly as anyone I've seen:

As an American Jew, over almost 30 years, I’ve joined with other concerned Jews in various kinds of coalition-building and anti-Occupation work. I’ve seen the kinds of organized efforts to stifle — in the US and elsewhere -- critiques of Israel’s policies -- the Occupation’s denial of Palestinian humanity, destruction of Palestinian lives and livelihoods, the “settlements,” the state’s physical and psychological walls against dialogue—and the efforts to condemn any critiques as anti-Semitism. Along with other activists and writers I’ve been named on right-wing “shit-lists” as “Israel-hating” or “Jew-hating.” I have also seen attacks within American academia and media on Arab American, Muslim, Jewish scholars and teachers whose work critically explores the foundations and practices of Israeli state and society.

Me, I'll just point out that libelling artists of conscience as anti-Semites in order to stifle debate and criticism is as wrong as racism itself.

This Is Good Advice: This Is A Chair by Caryl Churchill, Advice to Iraqi Women by Martin Crimp, directed by Lauren Barnes. Sound design by Rueben Stanton, set design by Rhys Auteri and Vlad Mijic, set illustrations by Vlad Mijic and Harriet O'Donnell. Welcome Stranger @ Trades Hall, Carlton, until February 10.

Sometimes the concept of "British Political Theatre" seems synonymous with David Hare, whom the SMH describes this week as "Britain's most committed left-wing playwright". I'm not sure how one measures such things, but in a field that includes barnacled warriors like Edward Bond or Harold Pinter, this seems, to say the least, highly arguable. Hare takes the prize - in the mass media, at least - because he writes about issues that everybody recognises as politics, from Israel to Iraq, in ways that are utterly familiar to anyone who has watched television. Hare's finger, it seems, is ever sensitively pressed to the pulse of current affairs.

But Britain has produced deeply committed political playwrights whose artistic achievements far overshadow the narrow oeuvre of David Hare. Caryl Churchill is among the first rank of these. Since the early 1960s, she has steadily written plays that express her commitment to socialist and feminist ideals and, later, a disturbingly prescient vision of a natural world being destroyed by the relentless progress of global capitalism. She is also one of the most exciting formalists now writing in the theatre.

This Is A Chair is a case in point. This short and elegant play, premiered by the Royal Court in 1997, is a sardonic evolution of Bertolt Brecht's Fear And Misery of the Third Reich, a series of fragmentary and realistic sketches of the impact of Nazism on the ordinary lives of Germans. Brecht's examination of the nexus between politics and social behaviour is at once oblique and direct, focusing on the apparently inconsequential to illustrate the rapid erosion of rights and freedoms under Hitler's regime.

Churchill has shaved this form to the bone; at first sight, her sketches of mundane social interaction have nothing to do with their purported titles - War in Bosnia, The Northern Ireland Peace Process, Genetic Engineering. They are at once domestic and strangely iconic: a young woman stands up a man with whom she has a date, a couple order their child to "eat up", two old women watch television while discussing a medical procedure. The only overt sign that something else is going on - in the text, at least - is in the scene titles, which, in classic Brechtian fashion, are to be displayed or announced before each scene.

The cognitive dissociation that vibrates between the labelling of significant public events of the mid-90s and the brief sketches that supposedly illustrate them has an effect that becomes progressively more and more uneasy. One hunts for the connections, and finds more usually a disconnection. What comes closer and closer to the surface is the carelessness people display towards each other in their ordinary lives, an ethical callousness that might appear minor and unimportant, but which, in the magnification of the theatre, demonstrates how little people actually perceive each other's pain.

The amplification from the micro to the macro is not a simple question of metaphor, of these domestic mise en scenes illustrating in miniature the larger public events. Rather, Churchill is sketching out an ecology of human affairs, creating a sense of how these small events accumulate into a social ethos. Just as climate change is created by billions of individually insignificant choices, so a callous public ethos is linked to countless smaller events, such as a doctor persuading an old woman not to use anaesthetic during a procedure in order to save money. In each case, the capacity of empathetic responsibility - one of the better human traits - is imperceptibly worn away.

More, Churchill is playing with the nature of knowledge and its relation to reality. The statement "This is a chair" is a common philosophical cue for investigating knowledge: how we know things, whether they exist apart from our knowing of them, what the nature of this knowing is, what role language plays in constituting human realities, and so on. These are the kinds of questions at play, as the program points out, in Magritte's famous painting Ceci n'est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe). All the same, I can't escape a nagging suspicion that Churchill is also employing a playwright's direct literalism in her titling: an insistence that, indeed, things are as they are seen, which is not at all the same as how they are said to be.

It's a subtle thesis which is largely trampled by Lauren Barnes' production for Welcome Stranger, although she makes a creditable attempt at what is an extremely challenging play. Only a writer of Churchill's calibre and precision could even attempt such a stylistic coup, and the demands of this kind of spare text are unforgiving to even the most experienced actors. The actors employ blackboards, emphasising an pedagogic element that might exist in Brecht's play, but which in Churchill's remains ambiguous: it is not a lesson play, a Lehrstücke, so much as an attempt to destabilise the simple categorisations that make it easy for us, in our media-driven age, to ignore the actualities of our actions.

So what is written as a simple interaction is labelled for us: the opening scene, for example, has blackboards behind each actor: He is Bosnia, She is Britain. (I confess, I was at first confused: I thought they had just got their grammar mixed up, not that they were different nations). The effect is to simplify its complexities, to read the play in a directed way that removes much of its jangling affect. In order to play with a proper metaphorical potency, a text of this kind requires an intensity of realism in the performance which is here side-stepped by the approach: the subtext is, as it were, written out for us, and I'm not certain that it's the correct subtext.

All the same, there is enough ingenuity in this simple staging and enough energy in the performances to keep it interesting. It's not surprising that the lesser play - Martin Crimp's 10 minute Advice to Iraqi Women - is by far the more successful piece. Here the actors are working well within their limitations, and Crimp's piece, which depends - albeit in a far less nuanced way - on an ironic dissonance between its text and its content, finds the comedy and depth that eludes the earlier piece.

Advice to Iraqi Women is a litany of the advice routinely given out to mothers to ensure the safety of their children - always supervise children near water, lock away poisons, give them good food. It has long irritated me that such advice is couched in terms that feed parental paranoia, thus no doubt ensuring that we are the most protective parents in history. (Yes, I am all for sensible safety standards...) Crimp picks up on this rhetoric to create what becomes a blackly ironic comment on the hypocrisy of the British Government's slogan "Every Child Matters" while it was simultaneously bombing children in Iraq.

It's performed by three actors seated in a row on three chairs. Beneath them is a stretch of sand, scattered with lit tealight candles that suggest a memorial to the dead. They glance anxiously at each other before blurting out the standard exhortations. "Your kitchen," they intone, "is a warzone." Your garden is a minefield. Death awaits your children around every corner. Beware! Beautifully judged performances, taking their cue from the tone of earnest social welfare and magazine television, highlight the comic unreality of the rhetoric in the face of those who live in actual warzones. It's simple and powerful and very effective.

For all my reservations, This Is Good Advice is a chance to see a couple of plays by two of Britain's major playwrights that otherwise wouldn't get an airing here, performed by an interesting young company. Well worth a look.

Lots happening this week and much of it worth a peek as Melbourne theatre heads into its busiest time of year...

It's the final week for Eagle's Nest Theatre's Buyback: Three Boongs in the Kitchen at La Mama. Written and directed by that fine novelist and theatre writer Kathleen Mary Fallon, it explores "an unvoiced loneliness in the heart of Australian culture, which is intimately connected with our history of colonialisation, terra nullius and the resulting treatment of the indigenous communities". At the Carlton Courthouse until September 17, bookings 9347 6142.

The arts in a dry climate program at the Arts House in North Melbourne is a powerhouse of innovative art. It includes URBANology, a suite of programming inspired by street culture, in which four stand-alone events collectively challenge how art is conceived, defined and categorized. Opening this week too is the innovative circus ensemble CIRCA and their new work Timepieces, which includes short pieces choreographed by Gideon Obarzanek, Lucy Guerin and Natalie Cursio. The whole shebang opens September 14 at the North Melbourne Town Hall and the Meat Market and you can find more details here. Bookings 9639 0096.

And finally, the third leg of the VCA Directors Season opens this week, with Europe by Michael Gow, directed by Matt Scholten, and Far Away by Caryl Churchill, directed by Hallie Shellam. More details (and more shows) at Matt Scholten's blog. Grant St Theatre, Grant St, Southbank, bookings 9685 9233.

If any readers would care to post on any of these shows, I'd be very interested.

The Skriker by Caryl Churchill, directed and designed by Brian Lipson. Lighting by James Shuter, audio visual by Qiao Li, visual effects Nicklas Tibo Ersson, costumes by Caitlin Kerry. With: Susan Miller, Julie Wee, Katherine Bradley, Eryn-Jean Norvill, Mick Lo Monaco, Tristan Meecham, Russ Pirie, Jing-Xuan Chan, Christine Mowinckel, Sharon Davis, Gemma Cavoli, Patrick Flynn, Ashley Zukerman, Soraya Dean, Jamieson Caldwell, Thomas Wren. VCA School of Drama, Space 28, Dodds St, Southbank.

One of the vexing and beautiful things about writing about theatre – one of the primary reasons I keep doing it, I guess – is that the more profound the experience is, the more difficult it is to express in words. So often when theatre resonates deeply, it’s because it strikes chords that are crude and primitive and naïve. What is that quality which transforms what might otherwise be mere foolish pretence into an act that plucks at the roots of the psyche, waking out of the darkness the monsters that walk in all of us?

It is, for example, a truism to speak of theatre’s “magic”. The Skriker, surely one of the strangest and cruellest plays of Caryl Churchill’s extraordinary oeuvre, reminds us what magic actually is. You can be sure, there is nothing benign or twee about it: this is the world of the uncanny, the cruel, the unhuman, the heartless. Almost a dystopian version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Skriker draws on ancient English and Irish folk and fairy tales to look at some inadmissably dark truths about fertility, motherhood and damaged nature.

Brian Lipson and his company of actors take Churchill's bleak, disturbing play and realise an entire theatrical world that is like being in an enchanting and sinister dream, a damaged world of transformation and dis-ease. This is, in every sense, demanding work: it wolfs your entire attention for three hours with a constantly inventive mise en scene of resonant theatrical image. Oneiric, haunting and toxic, it's one of the most powerful pieces of theatre I have seen this year.

In The Skriker, Churchill draws elements from folk and fairy tales about “good” and “bad” women and places them in contemporary urban settings. She creates a world of hallucinatory mirrors: the human overworld mirrors the faerie underworld, the bad mother mirrors the good, the animal mirrors the human, the changeling mirrors the real child. It's perhaps a particularly English tradition of Gothic: Churchill's desolate urban world reminds me strongly of the London fantasy writer China Mieville’s gritty realities - in particular, his dark tale of contemporary magic, Familiar, in his short story collection Looking for Jake.

Josie (Susan Miller) is the bad sister: we meet her in an asylum, where she has been confined after murdering her newborn baby and baking her in a pie. The good sister is her friend Lily (Julie Wee), who is pregnant. Both of them are haunted by the Skriker, a shape-shifting fairy who envies and desires their fertility - babies have high value in the sterile world of Faerie - and seduces them by granting their wishes. She turns up in various guises - as an American woman in a bar, a nasty little girl eaten up with sibling rivalry, a lover who behaves like an obsessed stalker - and tempts both of them down into the carnivalesque Underworld.

Around the three major figures erupts a world infected with malign enchantments, a population of lost and dead children, lunatics, hags, kelpies, bogles and monsters. Nothing here is “natural”: environmental apocalypse is as much part of the sickness this play expresses as mental illness. It’s interesting to think that it was written, to some hostile incomprehension, in 1994: as climate change becomes more urgently evident, as the World Health Organisation warns that mental illness will be the major growing health problem over the next two decades, it now seems spookily prescient. As the Skriker says: “It was always possible to think whatever your personal problem, there's always nature. Spring will return even if it's without me. Nobody loves me but at least it's a sunny day. This has been a comfort to people as long as they've existed. But it's not available any more. Sorry. Nobody loves me and the sun's going to kill me. Spring will return and nothing will grow.”

Theatre is a place where the archaic meaning of “glamour” – a spell, an enchantment – still hangs vapourously about its more conventional usage. In its original sense, glamourie was the word given to the ability of fairies - the Irish Sidhe, the Norse Alfar or the English Faerie - to transform and fool human senses. One of glamour’s most common uses was to change human beings into animals. So in the Odyssey, Circe changes Ulysses’ shipmates into pigs, or the fairy queen Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream transforms Bottom into an ass.

The production begins with this kind of transformation: in the theatre foyer, a boy, up to this point seemingly another member of the audience, is turned into a pig. Inside the theatre, we hear the sounds of animal howls and shrieks, and the beasts begin to hammer on the door…and thus we are led inside, into a claustrophobic tunnel like a cattle race, dimly and obscurely lit by a single reddish-yellow lightbulb. It is like the inside of a womb, or a limbo of the half-formed, where the audience members mill around with cast members that we can barely discern, surrounded by a cacophony of bestial noises. We emerge into a corral, surrounded by higher platforms on all sides; the lights widen, and human speech begins to emerge from the squeals and growls.

This introduces the first movement, as it were, of this production, which divides roughly into three main parts. The first is a promenade, opening with an evocation of Churchill’s long introductory speech, in which language itself becomes other. Much of the text – the words of the Skriker, the damaged fairy – is a collage of word association, in which meaning is on the verge of slipping into nonsense. “Slit slat slut. That bitch a botch an itch in my shoulder blood. Bitch botch itch. Slat itch slit botch. Itch slut bitch slit….Whatever you do don’t open to do don’t open the door...”

This is language as thickness, viscera, weight, saliva, sex, violence, the softness of palate and lip: language as spell and enchantment, where meaning constantly threatens to slip its noose and collapse back to animal howl and croon. Here Churchill is pushing theatre hard up against the poem, sense against nonsense, and one can only admire the force of the centrifugal will that keeps the text this side of comprehensible. Lipson divides the Skriker's speech between the actors of the company, who vocalise it as a sound poem or a spoken oratorio around the audience. Focus is constantly shifting: you might be listening to an actor standing at your shoulder and then to a figure suddenly lit in the distance, who as suddenly vanishes. It is a wholly immersive experience, at once shockingly intimate and alienating.

The first clear piece of narrative is a scene in a lunatic asylum, where Lily is visiting Josie. This is performed on four sides, the audience still standing in the centre, by four sets of actors; again the words are carefully orchestrated, so each scene is at once clear and splintered. No scene is identical, either: each set of actors moves and interprets the text differently. The effect is arrestingly disturbing, the beginning of a sense of a world without mooring or base reality from which reference can be made, and the realism of the performances – which touch precise emotional authenticities – is an edge against which the carnivalesque world of Faerie is whetted.

It’s a contrast which is fruitfully worked through the evening, and which gives this show much of its richness and complexity: if it were merely clever and cruelly comic (and it is both) this production wouldn't possess its dark and urgent potency. Behind this show is an attuned attention to the emotional and psychic disturbance that occasions it, and it's reflected in the emotional fearlessness and clarity of the performances that Lipson has elicited from each member of his young ensemble.

The design is a mixture of contemporary street aesthetic and the grotesque, with liberal use of mask and costume. One wall of the theatre is piled to the roof with cardboard boxes, and the stage space is shaped by trolleys, which are used in all sorts of ways: scenes are sometimes performed on top of them, or sometimes, as in Ariane Mnouchkine's Le Dernier Caravansérail, the performers are wheeled on platforms by the other actors, so they can be at once still and in motion.

After the animal intensities of the opening sequences, the production segues to a series of scenes which play on mirroring: a bar sequence, for example, performed in double vision, with actors each side mirroring the actions of the others. After the interval, when Lily's baby is born and Josie escapes the Underworld, the scenes are more singular, and the sense of a borderless, anarchic world narrows down to domestic gothic (although this is simpliflying considerably). Among many other elements - this is a show headily rich on texture - there is witty use of Qioa Li's audio-visual material, from four television screens suspended from the ceiling: distorted news reports, nightmarish music clips, and a mixture of live and recorded images. The sense of multiple space invoked in the theatre is reinforced also by James Shuter's ingenious lighting design.

Primarily, something which really only became clear at the finish, I was struck by this production's elegant and powerful coherence. Reflecting Churchill's language, Lipson places the theatre under such imagistic and emotional pressures that the experience constantly threatens to fly apart into its disparate elements. He keeps it together by dint of acute directorial exactingness: this is a very detailed and carefully focused production. There were only a few moments where I felt the intensity and energies began to slacken, and even then, on reflection, I am not sure.

What I am sure of is that watching this play was totally compelling, and I will be chewing over it for days hence. Maybe for years. It's rare to see work in which linguistic, emotional and visual complexities of this order are realised with such thought and art. Some pieces of theatre stick with you, altering the colour of your mind; and for me, this was one of them.

This week, Lindy Davies announces that she will leave her position as Head of the Victorian College of the Arts School of Drama at the end of the year. To mark the occasion, she talks exclusively to Theatre Notes about how her life as one of Australia’s most significant actors and directors has influenced her work as a teacher

“I suppose what seems most important,” says Lindy Davies, leaning back into her sofa in her office at the School of Drama, “is that there is a record of what’s happened here. The thing that is so disappointing about our culture is the perpetual amnesia, the lack of acknowledgement of things that have occurred. Our achievements aren’t cherished, aren’t built from.”

Davies encapsulates one of the major laments of Australian theatre artists: the sense that the innate ephemerality of the artform is reinforced by an almost wilful ability to forget, even to erase, its achievements. Which is why, in the middle of an especially demanding fortnight, Davies is speaking to me.

It’s a Saturday evening, and Davies is about to see Chris Bendall’s VCA production of Howard Barker’s Victory. She has probably been at the School of Drama every night this week: aside from Victory, the VCA School of Drama has three major productions going this week. They include Caryl Churchill’s 1994 play The Skriker, directed by Brian Lipson – “Brilliant!” says Lindy, “Just amazing! But nobody’s coming, nobody knows about it, it’s like Eldorado [at the Malthouse, which played to poor houses] - and it’s the sort of thing you mustn’t miss…”; James McCaughey’s production of Alexander Ostrovsky’s The Forest and Mary Sitarenos’s production of Churchill’s Fen. Not to mention the VCA Director’s Season, a selection of short plays by writers like Artaud and Lorca. Not to mention a week of student assessments.

Not to mention Davies’ impending departure as Head of the School of Drama, the announcement of which she keeps putting off. It’s time to go: the imminent restructure of the VCA as a faculty of the University of Melbourne reminds her that she has been at the school for at least six years longer than she intended. She is tired, and she can’t stop until she gets on a plane for Los Angeles next Wednesday. She is longing, she says, for time to reflect, a little leisure, but it will be a while before she can afford such a luxury.

But Davies is what they call a trouper. That dramatic, generous presence, tempered by a charming and well-concealed shyness, is the hallmark of a consummate actor. And she is an actor of a very particular kind, embodying in her career and philosophy a history of Australian theatre making. From her student days when, with people like John Romeril, Lindzee Smith, Graeme Blundell, Alan Finney and Kerry Dwyer, she helped form the La Mama Experimental Theatre Company, which later became the Australian Performing Group at the Pram Factory Theatre, Davies has been part of some of the iconic moments of Australian theatre history.

Davies’ influence at the VCA School of Drama explains a lot about the theatre graduates who have been emerging from the school and energising the theatre community over the past few years. The VCA School of Drama is a direct inheritor of the radical tradition of Australian theatre that came to the fore in the 1970s. Davies, with other VCA staff such as Richard Murphet, have brought to the college a living notion of theatre as an innovative political, ethical and spiritual activity. It’s a notion that has evolved over the past three decades of their work as theatre artists.

At the School of Drama, this history is quite literally expressed in bricks and mortar. The School of Drama building was purpose-built for the school, designed by Melbourne architect and theatre designer Peter Corrigan, himself a designer associated with the Pram Factory. The three-storey building in Dodds St, Southbank, was designed in close collaboration with Davies. With its day-glo balconies, Corrigan’s perky building is hard to miss in the street: but inside what is most striking is how unlike an institution it feels. This is a building that is created for one purpose – to make theatre – and it has the relaxed, focused sense that goes with an efficient working theatre space.

“We wanted to make a place where we could interact with the public, where we could interact with ourselves – that is, a place to reflect – and where we could interact with collaborators,” says Davies. Perhaps what most struck me was the fact that the studios in which the students work are based on the designs of warehouses in which the various groups associated with the Pram Factory rehearsed through the 1970s and early 1980s. A theatre of memory, indeed.

Davies is concerned that the “playwright-centric” idea of theatre (espoused, for example, by commentators like the former Age critic Leonard Radic) creates a “revisionist” history that totally obscures some of the important influences that drove the “new wave” theatre of the late 1960s/early 1970s. “Anything we achieved in those days – it wasn’t director-driven, it wasn’t writer-driven,” says Davies. ”We were ideas-driven.”

The “larrikin” physical theatre that was developed by the Australian Performing Group - and which is still a vital tradition in the work of Circus Oz - is usually assumed to be a wholly Australian invention. But, as Davies points out, it has much older antecedents, with some very traceable genealogies. The day before our interview, Davies had been watching some workshops on Italian mask run by Valeria Campo, a teacher of Commedia Dell’arte. “And I suddenly remembered,” she says, “so clearly, where the Pram Factory style came from. We got the masks from the MTC production of Goldoni’s A Servant of Two Masters. Graeme Blundell was in the play…”

The production was directed by George Ogilvie, who was then newly returned from several years in Europe, where among other things he trained intensively with Jacques Lecoq in Paris for three years learning Italian mask and Commedia Dell’arte. As Ogilvie explains in his newly released biography Simple Gifts: A Life in the Theatre, he conducted Italian mask workshops for the actors in his 1967 production of Goldoni’s play.

“The thing about Commedia,” says Davies. “It had no pedigree… it was made by poor people. And we were in total reaction against the English repertory model, the hierarchy of the English rep. The commedia was perfect. So we had these masks which we took from the MTC production and we improvised… the first thing that came out of that was called Mr Big The Big Fat Pig by John Romeril… which was influenced by the Bread and Puppet Theatre [in New York]. That was where what was later called the larrikin style of the Pram Factory came from – it was from Commedia Dell’arte and those exciting companies we read about. Marvellous Melbourne [the first production at the Pram Factory theatre] was this vaudevillean, burlesque grotesquerie – it was all these huge cartoonish figures.”

For all its excitement, Davies felt a couple of important elements were missing from the APG model of theatre making. In 1972, she saw Rex Cramphorn’s production of The Tempest at the Guild Theatre at the University of Melbourne, and was blown away.

“At the Pram Factory, I never felt – aside from productions like [Jack Hibberd’s] Stretch of the Imagination – that language was particularly valued,” she says. “I have a passion for language. And I felt that the Pram Factory lacked this poetic and dramatic imaginative landscape. That’s why it was such a profound experience for me to see the Rex Cramphorn Performance Syndicate.”

Davies names Rex Cramphorn as the single most important influence on her work. “In this building, he is the presence I most often feel,” she says. “Rex was the person who introduced me to the idea that form is content. He showed me there was a world where an actor was valued in relation to language, where the actor was a maker.

“Rex could be infuriating: he was always in the process with the idea, always applying his intellect, which people often experienced as indecision. I remember in the Playbox production of Hamlet, in 1984, the audience was coming into the show and Rex was still rehearsing the show, sitting on the steps of the theatre with an Arden edition of Hamlet, listening to the ideas in action...”

The other problem with the Pram Factory, Davies says, was that it had a limited mechanism for coping with difference or disagreement. “What happened in the end was that effectively the company was being run by a triumvurate. I wanted a way of opening up dialogue so people could talk about their work, so they wouldn’t be afraid of disagreeing - a way of seeing conflict as an inciting moment, a place where you can begin to debate through your work.”

From those very early days, Davies found herself working towards an idea of theatre as a collaborative act, and much of her thinking, as director, actor and teacher, has been about how to create environments in which the ideal of collaboration might be made possible. Much later, in 1982, Davies helped form the Actors’ Experimental Stream of the Playbox Theatre with Melbourne actors like Mark Minchinton, Margaret Cameron, Rob Meldrum and others, and they began to formalise a philosophical and practical framework in which to realise these ideas.

“That’s 24 years ago!” she says. “Now it seems such a basic thing to do, to think about those things. We were driven by the belief that theatre had value as spiritual and social microcosm. And we wanted to create a new aesthetic through our differences, to celebrate our differences.

“The problem was always how to create an environment that permits an collaborative model. It’s about creating a dynamic, an ethic, in relation to” (here she sounds faintly mocking) “unconditional positive regard for the people in the room. You can’t work where there is judgement, jealousy, self-deprecation, ego problems of any kind – you can’t have them in the room. In teaching, for example, these dynamics involve a great deal of tough love.

“It has to be non-judgmental, or nothing can happen. If there’s no compassion, theatre can’t happen.”

All these influences have been drawn together into the School of Drama’s philosophy of the “autonomous actor”: the actor as maker, who is as much at ease in classical plays as in physical theatre traditions or innovative theatre making. Davies has collected around the core of the school a staff of theatre practitioners who, as well as teaching the students, often later collaborate with them in their work outside the college.

The imminent integration of the Victorian College of the Arts into the University of Melbourne is part of a massive restructure of the university system, which is now basing itself on the American model of universities like Princeton. The integration, which adopts the VCA as a faculty of the University of Melbourne, is due to take effect from January 1, 2007, but it will not for the moment mean that the School will essentially change.

As for Davies herself, leaving the college won’t usher in any slower time. Next year she will be directing in London, and working on other projects in Slovenia and at the Max Reinhardt School in Vienna. She is also planning a theatre project in Melbourne with Robyn Davidson. In the meantime, she is off to LA to woo legendary acting teacher Anne Bogart over to visit next year, and then to the Toronto Film Festival, where she will deliver a workshop for film directors. It seems that the time for reflection for which she currently yearns won’t come any time soon.

“Life isn’t like that,” she says. “You just do what you can… I suppose what I’m most proud of is that I’ve seen a lot of good theatre here. What we can do in a place like this is have the time to investigate, to really examine and make pieces of theatre, which may be text-based. And some extraordinary theatre has happened here – Robert Draffin’s The Idiot, for instance, or his Le Balcon; Brian Lipson’s The Crucible and The Skriker, John Bolton’s Grim or East, Richard Murphet and Leisa Shelton’s Dolores and the Department Store, Kirsten von Bibra’s Three Sisters, Mary Sitrarenos’ Sarita, Tania Gerstle’s Five Kinds of Silence… the VCA has actually made good theatre.

“I didn’t think we could make it all happen here. But we have, and that’s very comforting. I’m so glad I came here: it’s been the most immense privilege. I want to keep a strong relationship with this place. I love teaching, there is more for me to investigate in that area. I suppose an artist’s life is always about that oscillation between regret and fulfilment, going through that moment. There’s a kind of melancholic sweetness about that.

“In terms of the future of this place, I suppose I hope that it keeps a unique vision – that whatever happens here, whoever takes over, that they keep the question – what is theatre? – at the forefront of whatever they do.”

Richard Murphet, currently Postgraduate Coordinator and Head of Theatre Making at the school, will take up the position of Acting Head of Drama to provide leadership and continuity for students and staff as the VCA integrates with the University of Melbourne in 2007.

Phaedra's Love by Sarah Kane, directed by Julie Waddington, design Julie Waddington and Luke Hails, sound by Nicholas Albanis. With Ben Noble, Georgina Capper, Fabienne Parr, Peter Roberts, Nick Austin, Pablo Calero, Alison Boyce, Jacinta Perry and Keira Lyons. Abstract Chaos with Instorage at the Store Room, until November 21.

Sarah Kane is the most exciting British playwright to emerge in the past decade. Her work was long overshadowed by the tabloid frenzy sparked by the 1995 production of her first play, Blasted, notoriously greeted as the product of a "sick" mind by a succession of rabidly foaming reviewers. The Daily Mail's Jack Tinker memorably labelled it a "disgusting feast of filth".

In common with many English-language writers treated without honour in their own countries (Samuel Beckett, Edward Bond, Howard Barker), European theatre was quick to recognise Kane's significance and welcomed Blasted as one of the most important plays of the 1990s. Critical opinion in Britain began to turn in 1998 with the premiere of Crave, but her suicide the following year made her the poete maudite of her generation. After her suicide, Kane's plays - like Sylvia Plath's poetry, and to their equal detriment - were mostly read as autobiographical expressions which foreshadowed her untimely death. As much as the claim that she wrote to shock for shock's sake, this romanticised notion obscured her uncompromising theatrical innovation.

In Australia, despite her steadily growing international reputation, Kane's work is still the province of the "fringe". She has been staged by theatres like Brisbane's La Boite and Sydney's New Theatre or the Stables, or by small independent theatre companies in Melbourne. I mean no disrespect to independent companies when I say that it's a shameful reflection on Australian theatre that one of the most important contemporary playwrights in the English language is unable to get a gig on a major stage.

Kane was one of a post-Thatcher generation of playwrights which emerged in the 1990s and challenged the pedagogic "theatre of journalism" exemplified most notably by David Hare. Many of them looked to playwrights like Caryl Churchill and Martin Crimp, or to Howard Barker's "theatre of catastrophe", as animating inspirations. As Kane's work evolved, her plays successively attacked the notion of theatrical naturalism in a distinctively visceral way. The revulsion and shock her plays invoke is never gratuitous, but is intended to provoke a re-evaluation of reality.

Although these playwrights were called the Nihilists or the New Brutalists, Kane's vision is far from nihilistic. It exposes a moral universe in which, as Hamlet says, "there is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so", and searches uncompromisingly for an ethics which can survive the violence of our contemporary world. But even 4:48 Psychosis, her final, excoriatingly beautiful masterpiece, finishes with a fragmentary but stubborn hope that should not be dimmed by her subsequent suicide.

Abstract Chaos' production of Kane's second play, Phaedra's Love, is an uncertain rendering of Kane's work, but worth seeing nevertheless. The night begins promisingly, but by the end has fallen off the unforgiving tightrope that Kane sets up with such deceptively simple assurance. It exemplifies the kind of difficulties - lack of resources, lack of time - faced by independent theatre productions. I should add that some of its problems may resolve as the season progresses.

Phaedra's Love is Kane's take on Seneca's and Euripides' tragedies Hippolytus, which tell the legend of Phaedra, the wife of Theseus. She is cursed by Aphrodite and falls desperately in love with her stepson, the beautiful and chaste youth Hippolytus, with catastrophic results. It is most famously adapted by Racine in his play Phaedre, which is written in what are allegedly (I have to take George Steiner's word for it) sublimely beautiful alexandrines.

Kane's take couldn't be more iconoclastic, although it still has traces of the naturalism which she afterwards abandoned altogether. Phaedra's Love is the most darkly funny of her plays and is also the first which explores the nature of love, a theme that became the major obsession of the later work. Here she perverts Phaedra's tragedy to create what is at once a chilling vision of the nature of obsessive love, and a strange liberation from despair.

In Phaedra's Love, Hippolytus (Ben Noble) is very far from being the chaste and beautiful youth of the original story. He is physically and emotionally repugnant, seen in the opening scene watching tv while wanking into a sock. (He checks that he hasn't blown his nose in it first). Phaedra's (Georgina Capper) fatal passion for him is therefore inscrutable and terrifying; when she declares her love, in a scene of skin-crawling humiliation, she performs oral sex on him while he watches television and snacks indifferently from a bag of lollies.

Yet in his monstrous boredom, his disgust with the falsity of everything that surrounds him, Hippolytus is also a curiously attractive character. Behind his joylessness and refusal of any human contact lies a desire for absolute honesty, a ruthless integrity which will have no truck with a world that disgusts him. The only time he shows anything like wonder is after he hears of Phaedra's suicide: "She really did love me... Bless her." And it becomes clear that Phaedra's accusation of rape against him is not the act of revenge that it appears to be, but a gift: the orgy of violence which follows is, at last, a real moment, in which there is no trace of human deceit. Hence his final words: "If there could have been more moments like this."

Phaedra's suicide is the logical result of the fire which has so consumed her, her abnegation the utter loss of self which is, as Kane perceived, tragically attracted to its opposite, the self that will compromise nothing. The gravity exerted by these extremes detroys everything around them - Phaedra's daughter Strophe (Fabianne Parr) is raped and murdered by Theseus (Peter Roberts) in the final carnage. But Kane's humour here is wicked: the murders of the Royal family are represented as a barbecue, with Hippolytus' genitals becoming a gruesome sausage.

Kane's grand guignol violence contains a serious critique, of classical theatre as much as of the nature of human love and the dilemma of the self. It's in eight tautly written scenes, which move rapidly to its horrifying and obscenely funny conclusion. Unfortunately, Julie Waddington's direction seldom matches the icy clarity of the text, so nothing is ever quite in focus.

Stylised acting at the pitch this play demands requires a depth of polish that the standard four weeks' rehearsal simply cannot achieve with any certainty. Georgina Capper's performance as Phaedra is the most successful in negotiating the challenges of the play's stylistic formality, and has some genuinely thrilling moments. Ben Noble's Hippolytus achieves his character's grossness, but falters at the extremity of his despair and so cannot reveal his perverse nobility. I had the feeling that often the other performances were hesitant or even, at times, without conviction. This means that the final scene has all the faults of stage violence when it doesn't work: despite the liberal application of tomato sauce it merely looks fake, and the audience laughs for the wrong reasons.

I thought the set design a major problem in this production. Admittedly, Kane wrote with a fine disregard for the difficulties of designers: at one point Phaedra's body is meant to be set on fire, which defeated the ingenuity of this production team. At times, however, the set literally gets in the way of seeing the action, and the pace is hindered by cumbersome moveable blocks which are rearranged between scenes. The set changes impede the flow of the tragedy, stilting its emotional movement so it achieves neither apotheoses of horror nor comedy. Despite these reservations, it's a rare chance to see - if through a glass darkly - a fascinating work by a major contemporary dramatist.

Links
The Store Room
Sarah Kane