It's proverbial that there is a Hamlet for every century. As Jan Kott says, it's a play that absorbs its times. The Romantic era gave us a pale, introspective youth; the 20th century an animal trapped in the pitiless mechanisms of power. In the 21st century, the Prince of Denmark has become the random particle in a corrupted, dysfunctional and claustrophobic nuclear family.


Stripping the play of its larger politics reveals the powerlessness of its two women: Hamlet's mother, Gertrude, and his love object, Ophelia, are starkly shown to be male possessions, objects of exchange whose value rises and falls on their sexual conduct. Ophelia's own brother lectures her on keeping her virtue intact, as her virginity is a commodity by which her family honour and standing is measured. Her father is more explicit while ordering her to avoid Hamlet's wooing, when he tells her to "tender yourself more dearly". Gertrude's lubricity in marrying her husband's brother (and, unknowingly, his murderer) shortly after she is widowed is the ignition point of the whole play.

Female desire in Hamlet is dangerous, a threat to patriarchal authority. "Fear it, Ophelia, fear it!" Laertes says: but, as with all the other men in the play telling women how to manage their sexuality, it's his own fear that he expresses. It's the fear of this female desire, and most deeply, the fear of his own uncontrollable impulses, that leads to Hamlet's incestuous jealousy of his mother and his unconscionable cruelty towards Ophelia; and in the middle of it all, Ophelia, seeking only to be obedient to her father's and brother's will, is herself broken.

In Ophelia Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Daniel Schlusser and his collaborators have picked up this subtext of perilous sexuality to create a work that is part installation, part dance, part performance, part music. An opera, a work, in the broadest sense of its meaning. It's a co-production between Chamber Made Opera and Bell Shakespeare's developmental wing, Mind's Eye, which permits an experimental freedom difficult to find in the pragmatic contingencies of theatre.

A home is much more than a building. "Originally," says John Berger in his almost unbearably beautiful book And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, "home meant the centre of the world - not in a geographical, but in an ontological sense. Mircea Eliade has demonstrated how home was the place from which the world could be founded. A home was established, as he said, 'at the heart of the real'."

The loss of this ancient sense of home, says Berger, is at the centre of much of the modern experience of displacement. And the word "home" itself has been hijacked: it's become a metaphor for domestic morality, a propriety that safeguards property (including women and children); "homeland" is the patriotic article of faith that persuades people to kill and die in foreign countries. Yet that ancient desire for a place in which to ground one's own reality stubbornly persists. People make homes, however temporary they might be, out of habits, of memories, out of cardboard: without some place, however humble, in which our souls might be housed, we feel lost.


As librettist Cynthia Troup points out, the Australian Bureau of Statistics uses the term "dwelling structure" to cover the buildings in which people find shelter. There is a code which classifies the various structures, from "1. Separate house" to "6. Improvised home, tent, campers out" to "9. Other." Government agencies analyse the idea of home for economic modelling, to trace populations, abstracting complex space to make it orderly. But these terms cannot speak to the inner human idea of what a home is, what it might be.

The tension between these two ideas informs Chamber Made Opera's Dwelling Structure, which is perhaps the most beautifully judged site-specific work I have seen. Here the meanings behind that phrase "dwelling structure" are opened out, to create a moving evocation of how memories and things are inextricably bound together in our notions of home, and of how much is lost when we only measure our lives by economic value. It's one of a series of "living room operas" that Chamber Made Opera has recently introduced, but in this case the work occurs in the home of the two artists, Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey, who composed it.

The opera is, first of all, a social gathering - a bunch of around 20 strangers is invited into a home, welcomed with wine, and look about curiously (as one does). It's an unusual home, formerly a Rechabite Hall, with a small hall at the front that now functions as a studio. And there is much to look at - a "visual assemblage" by Neil Thomas, surrounded by QR codes which can be scanned by iPad-like screens to bring up fragments of the libretto and score.

The opera itself is structured in eight "time-use episodes", another term taken from governmental language, where it is used as a means of calculating monetary value. Troup's libretto is notable for remaining mostly unspoken. It's largely a poetic list of sound cues - "Feet on carpet. Cushions plumped and patted. Wind through trees and under eaves. A rattle of windows." These are interspersed with fragmentary texts - scraps of Rechabite songs, newspaper clippings, radio announcements - from the building's history.

The first episode occurs in the kitchen. Flynn and Humphrey make coffee and tea, weaving between each other as intimates do. The score is an almost Cageian collage of noises - windows opening, gas clicking on - slightly exaggerated to become percussive, with an electronic wind rising behind these domestic rhythms. Then we are led to the living room, where we are seated for the next seven.

The score is constantly surprising, inflected by wit and careful precision. The text is projected onto the wall, and sometimes its instructions are literally followed ("from a great distance ... a party group singing Auld Lang Syne"), or the score lifts to some unexpected musical expression. We hear the sound of a distant vacuum cleaner, beachballs bouncing down the stairs followed by the tumbling steps of a child who runs through the living room, birdsong, wonky organ music. Live and recorded sounds are woven together, and microphones are ingeniously placed so that listening becomes an experience of contantly shifting aural space and of increasing complexity.

It draws you in and makes you listen, quite involuntarily. And gradually it is as if the history of this building - its ghosts, its past - is awakening around you, and you have a strange feeling of past and present folding together into some infinitely complex texture of simultaneous time. By the end, I felt exactly the kind of effect that Octavio Paz claims for poetry - that it takes you from silence to silence, but by the end the silence has changed. It is mysteriously joyous, and profoundly beautiful.

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A couple of brief notes on two other recent outings (both also closed). Jack Productions, formed last year, brings the language of classical ballet into the purview of contemporary dance. Their new work Animal - a meditation on the deep connections between animal and human behaviour - features some notable retired ballerinas: Kirsty Martin, Lisa Pavane, Alida Chase, Christine Howard and Shane Carroll.

Claude Marcos's design is typically striking. The dance occurs on a highly polished black stage, which reflects the dancers as if in a dark pool and by the end is smeared with footprints and the marks of human sweat. When the dancers enter, they open tiles in the floor and bring out ingenious fold-out chairs of pale wood that become the single props of the dance. Lucas Jervis's choreography, set to a percussive score by Eugene Unghetti, lyrically explores the dynamics of group behaviour: exclusion, inclusion, acceptance, individual rebellion and expression.

There are - perhaps because of the chairs - echoes of Lucy Guerin's work here, less intricate and more conventionally lyrical. Perhaps this is because the focus is always, for all its metaphorical exploration of animal gesture, on the literal bodies of the performers. And what I enjoyed most about this was watching these dancers perform. Their bodies might be less supple than when they danced as prima ballerinas, but now they give us another aspect of performance - an assurance of presence, a certain quality of beauty - that can only come with age. I'd like to see more older dancers on stage.

Lastly (and how belated am I - this has been a long silence): two weeks ago I found myself one cold night hovering next to a phone box in Russell St. From the streets of the naked city I was led to a bedsit temporarily transformed into a theatre, where I was offered popcorn and witnessed Inside a Mime's Compact, a work made and performed by two young theatre makers, Camilla Buckthorpe and Lily Beaux-Lyons. This is definitely a young work, unfocused and undeveloped in its thought, but it nevertheless had an energy which charmed me.

It's a kind of fairytale about three sisters, the youngest sister represented by a chicken - a raw, dead chicken - to which some terrible things are done. Buckthorpe and Beaux-Lyons explore, in a short fragmented performance, the sibling savagery and self-alienations that underlie the notion of femininity. It generated a promisingly absurd sense of disgust underlaid by a not-quite articulate anger; aside from exploring their ideas, I thought they needed to explore that darkness further. Perhaps Buckthorpe and Beaux-Lyons could read some Kathy Acker. Noted for future reference.

Dwelling Structure: An Opera in 8 Time-Use Episodes, created by Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey, libretto by Cynthia Troup. Visual assemblage by Neil Thomas and neighbourly interruptions by Suitcase Royale. A living room in Northcote. Chamber Made Opera.

Animal, choreographed by Lucas Jervis, music by Eugene Ughetti. Designed by Claude Marcos, lighting by Robert Cuddon. With Alida Chase, Shane Carroll, Christine Howard, Kirsty Martin and Lisa Pavane. Jack Productions at the Beckett Theatre, Malthouse.

Inside a Mime's Compact, devised and performed by Camilla Buckthorpe and Lily Beaux-Lyons. Smootz and Hovering Ponies Take Umbrage at a city apartment.

Watching the development of theatre companies is a fascinating business. They are organisms subject to all the travails of being alive: growth, change, decay, death and renewal. They are networks of individual energies which seed in unexpected places, producing unexpected syntheses and collaborations. The Hayloft Project and Chamber Made Opera are cases in point. Both have had a major impact on performance in this town, and both are under new artistic leadership.

Hayloft was begun by Simon Stone in 2007, pulling together a bunch of recently graduated talent for a notable production of Franz Wedekind's Spring Awakening (review here). Since then, Melbourne, and later Sydney, has seen a series of productions that re-examined classics and mounted new works, sometimes controversially, and Stone has catapulted to the main stage at the STC and is now resident director at Belvoir St. Hayloft, which has never been short on talent, is now under the artistic leadership of Anne-Louise Sarks, who as well as being assistant director on Stone's recent Belvoir production of The Wild Duck, directed the Fringe hit Yuri Wells and last year's exquisite version of Gorky's The Nest.


Chamber Made, on the other hand, has been around since 1988, until last year under the artistic directorship of Douglas Horton. From its first production, the oft-returned Helen Noonan solo work Recital, it defined itself as the place for modern opera in Melbourne. Its production of Phillip Glass's The Fall of the House of Usher, which featured an outstanding design by Trina Parker, remains one of my peak theatrical experiences. And this company too has a new artistic director - David Young, formerly AD of Aphids and a composer in his own right.

The continuities are much more obvious in Hayloft, which is not so much reinventing itself as continuing its previous explorations, using much of the same talent that drove their earlier work. Delectable Shelter, directed and written by Benedict Hardie, is Hayloft's second production under Sarks. Under the umbrella of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, it's an SF apocalyptic satire, produced with all the style we've come to expect from Hayloft. It's a stylish three-act nonsense with savage undertones and a surprisingly optimistic feel.

The conceit is that a bunch of fanatics have decided that the world is past saving and have ramped up climate change to a catastrophic degree that destroys all life on earth. Five people - an engineer and four members of an upper-middle class Melbourne family - are in a bunker underground, readying themselves to repopulate the planet, once it is possible to reinhabit it, with a new, utopian society.

The bunker itself, represented in Claude Marcos's design by a kind of open-sided cabinet propped on the stage, is decorated with the most eye-burning wallpaper I've ever seen which, even more than the walls of the box, emphasises the claustrophobia of Hardie's black vision. (The single sign of real life, a painting by Van Gogh, sits jarringly on the wall, representing everything that has been destroyed). In between the three acts, we are given performances of 80s pop songs rearranged by Benny Davis as Bach madrigals, sumptuously sung by the performers in eye-popping salmon-pink choral robes.

There are touches of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Red Dwarf and Chris Morris's deeply unsettling Blue Jam in the text. The first two acts follow the fortunes of this dysfunctional family, immediately after the catatrsophe and then a couple of years later. Privilege functions here as emotional and intellectual cauterisation, a complete inability to empathise with anyone, or to grasp any reality beyond the immediate situation. It emerges as careless cruelty and a carefully meaningless dialogue that skates over an abyss of neuroticism. The family obediently bows to the necessities of their situation: breeding schedules and survival.

The action then leaps three centuries, to the eve of their re-emergence onto the surface of the planet. Hardie examines the (il)logical results of a vastly depleted gene pool - a bunker populated by hundreds of people who are all identical to their five progenitors, and a musical culture that has evolved from two Ur-texts, Bach chorales and 80s pop songs. Idle suggestions written down three centuries earlier have risen to the status of religious texts, cannibalism is a way of life and the Chinese - according to rumour, the only other survivors of the destruction of the earth, and masters of leaping backwards onto buildings - are The Enemy. But how to greet the Enemy? With guns or with songs?

Alistair Mew's sublimimally rumbling sound design adds to the dissociative realities, suggesting a world crumbling in chaos outside the bright, airtight box where the increasingly unhinged characters dutifully pursue their deluded dreams. Hardie's play is sharp and clever, paying off all its jokes, although I thought the middle act a little overwritten and consequently slow. The cast brings an infectious energy and some beautiful voices to this bizarro world, with an especially sharp comic performance by Yesse Spence; the early scenes were a little sticky on opening night, but relaxed as the evening progressed. Very funny, with enough sting to create a lingering aftertaste.


Chamber Made's Minotaur: The Island is another cup of tea entirely. Something between a New Music concert, an installation, a ritual or invocation and the kind of performances children make for their families, it's part of an initiative by David Young that literally brings opera into the living room. For this performance, co-commissioned by Tasmania's 10 Days on the Island festival and a private sponsor, Dr Peta Gillingham, we were invited to an apartment 17 floors above St Kilda Rd. The event was catered by a chef and involved some good wines and a stunning night-time view over the Shrine: I imagine it was a very different experience from the opera's premiere at Bruny Island, where it was developed among the community.

Quite aside from its loungeroom setting, the reverberations with theatre made at home are irresistible. Once everyone was seated, we were asked to close our eyes, in lieu of a blackout. The costumes are all repurposed - dress-ups, headgear made of baskets and handbags and pencil-cases. There is a percussion kit, a small harpsichord and a double bass, but music is also made from a series of props: cane coffee tables, wooden objects, a conch shell. The event is immediately domestic and improvised, but the effect is fascinating: it's a re-enactment of a myth that draws out of these humble objects a compelling sense of ritual. I found the performance wholly absorbing, and started thinking about the Lares, the household gods of the Romans, where the domestic sphere is also the site of the sacred.

Margaret Cameron's text is a fragmentary poem of considerable beauty that bookends the performance. The opening section is spoken by Caroline Lee, lying as Venus washed up on an imaginary shore, "the worst place I can imagine", and the final stanzas are sung by Deborah Kayser as Ariadne, who has lost her way and now must "start again". In the centre is the question of ecstasy and loss.

Venus recalls the conception of the Minotaur, half bull, half man, the result of Pasiphaë's passion for a white bull - a punishment meted out to her by the Goddess of Love for the husband's refusal to sacrifice the bull. That perverse copulation is the precursor of Ariadne's treacherous passion for the Athenian champion Theseus who, once he has used her insider knowledge to find and slay the monster in the Labyrinth, abandons her on the Isle of Naxos on his way back to Athens. The opera is about this place of abandonment.

In this opera, "identity is all timbre". David Young's score is about detail, silences and sounds drawn from ordinary objects as well as conventional instruments - the scraping along a plank, the rustling percussion from striking a basket, the breath of the performers - that build to concanetations of musical energy and then dissipate. It has a feeling of something ancient behind it: there are sounds that gesture towards the music scored for the Classical Greek theatre when it was first performed. Transformations are minimal and uneasy, and demand close listening. It's a familiar enough menu of sound for those at least a little acquainted with New Music, but what it's not is theatrical: Minotaur explores other senses of rhythm and fragmentation and attention.

The music evolves alongside highly stylised, hieratic performance. The performance walks a fine line, always with the threat of falling into the risible, but it never quite falls over. This is because its unstable tensions retain their suspension, and is also due to the performances themselves, which are utterly focused. And it creates some memorable images: a woman with a bird's head, playing the harpsichord; a multiple vision of a bull, made of six bodies; Ariadne holding a conch shell, perched like a ship's figurehead on a island made of a jumble of furniture. I couldn't always read the symbolism, but somehow that didn't matter. Fascinating work.

Images: promotion shots. Top, Hayloft's Delectable Shelter; bottom, Chamber Made's Minotaur.

Delectable Shelter, written and Directed by Benedict Hardie. Composed by Benny Davis, musical direction by Nathan Gilkes, set design by Claude Marcos, lighting design by Lucy Birkinshaw, costumes by Esther Hayes, sound design by Alister Mew. With Thomas Conroy, Simone Page Jones, Anthony Mackey, Josh Price and Yesse Spence. The Hayloft Project @ Theatre Works, until April 17.

Minotaur: The Island, composed by David Young, directed and written by Margaret Cameron. Performers: Deborah Kayser, Caroline Lee and Hellen Sky. Musicians: Mark Cauvin, Matthias Schack-Arnott and Anastasia Russell-Head. Commissioned by Ten Days on the Island and Dr Peta Gillingham, performed at a private apartment. Closed.

Phobia: text and direction by Douglas Horton, music and sound concept by Gerard Brophy. Design coordination by Jacqui Everett. With Teresa Blake, Boris Conley, Patrick Cronin, David Hewitt, Graeme Leak, Daniel Witton. Chamber Made Opera at Melbourne Town Hall.

wit 1 (wt)
n. 1. The natural ability to perceive and understand; intelligence.
2. a. Keenness and quickness of perception or discernment; ingenuity. Often used in the plural: living by one's wits. b. wits Sound mental faculties; sanity: scared out of my wits.
3. a. The ability to perceive and express in an ingeniously humorous manner the relationship between seemingly incongruous or disparate things. b. One noted for this ability, especially one skilled in repartee. c. A person of exceptional intelligence.

Perhaps the chief pleasure of Phobia is its wit. In all senses of the word.

It's a fond and deft tribute to the genre of film noir: the black and white world of hard boiled detectives, blonde dames, mysterious violent deaths and high heels clicking down shadowy alleys: a Hitchcockian universe in which the key to a mystery, instead of comfortably knitting up the world like Miss Marple, opens up to existential blankness. But here the medium really is the message.

Described as "the sound track to an imagined film", Phobia is set in a chaotic sound studio, in which each of the performers sit behind desks littered with various objects chosen, as becomes clear, for their sonic qualities. The narrative follows the employment of a detective by a man concerned by the erratic behaviour of his wife, whom he fears is having a breakdown. There follows a story of love, suicide, surveillance and mistaken identity, where of course the dame, under various identities, gets it (three times).

The narrative really exists to create a pallet of colours and moods, an occasion for the sound world shaped by Gerard Brophy and given life by the performers. The subcutaneous narrative, the detective story, the post-mortem dissection of film and the dissolution of identity are all familiar staples of post-modernity, but here they are given a fresh twist.

The focus of this opera is on the performances, which bring multi-tasking to a new level: the cast plays a multiplicity of instruments and performative roles with a tightly disciplined precision which gives the impression that they're all inter-dependent parts of a single organism. Part of the reason for this must be the intensely collaborative nature of its creation. Composer Gerard Brophy worked closely with the performers and the director Douglas Horton in creating scored elements and improvisatory frameworks.

As the credits make clear, the conventional roles of composer, director, performer and so on have been blurred, as have the distinctions between music and noise/sound (although some might argue that much 20th century music has done this). And there's a fair bit of play with gender and identity as well, as none of the dramatic roles is assigned to any particular performer, and an individual role might switch from one cast member to several others in the space of a few seconds.

A fascinating miscellany of objects - black telephones, crumpled paper, celery, egg beaters, books - are transformed into instruments. There's something of the obsessed geek in this relentless tapping of the secret sound-life of found objects, and even a touch of the Goon Show. This intricate soundscape segues into lush and seedy jazz numbers or other fragments drawing on a wide range of musical influences.

Horton's direction makes Phobia - surprisingly perhaps, since it also seems strongly ascetic - visually lush. The lighting plays on the cavernous spaces of the Town Hall, creating soft, lamplit oases in a world where it always seems to be night-time. In the darkness behind the playing space, performers act out film tropes - for example, the looped image of a woman running upstairs and casting herself into darkness, or a man in a suit lighting a cigarette. This sense of chiaroscuro and distorted perspective reinforces a pervading nostalgia that is underwritten by menace.

With its sly cultural referencing and absurd gender-bending, Phobia has many comic moments, but often what makes you laugh is delight at its sheer ingenuity. Like that hardy production Recital, about to be revived again at the Malthouse Theatre, it's high camp refined through a rigorously disciplined aesthetic, a mode which best illuminates Horton's considerable talents.

Chamber Made Opera

Disclosure: Douglas Horton has directed two operas by Michael Smetanin, of which I wrote the libretti: The Burrow (1995) and Gauguin (2000).