Last Wednesday, Lally Katz's A Golem Story and Robert Reid's The Joy of Text premiered at the Malthouse and the MTC. The same week, the Malthouse opened its remount of Declan Greene's 2010 hit, Moth. Meanwhile at the MTC, Joanna Murray-Smith's The Gift is running at the MTC's Sumner Theatre, and tonight Ian Wilding's new play The Water Carriers opens at the Lawler Studio. At the moment, Melbourne's main stage theatres are exclusively devoted to new Australian work.


Has this ever happened before? If it has, I missed it. For this reason, and not without a certain astonishment, it's worth sticking a small, patriotic and ironically tasteful flag in June 2011 and admiring the view from the hill. Well done, MTC and Malthouse: despite all the commercial wisdoms that mitigate against producing contemporary Australian plays, together you've curated a mini-showcase of new writing, flung a spotlight on it, and put it out there.

Last week's openings are noteworthy: they're all well worth seeing, and they're all very different from one another. (Discussion of A Golem Story will follow in a separate post, because it started going on, and on...) Katz, Reid and Greene all grew up in Melbourne's independent theatre scene: Katz developed most of her early work with Chris Kohn and Stuck Pigs Squealing, while Reid had, and Greene has, their own companies, respectively Theatre in Decay and Sisters Grimm.

It's a point worth noting: these playwrights learned how to do it just as Shakespeare did, by writing plays, finding collaborators and putting them on. They put them on in carparks (and sometimes in cars), in tiny alternative venues, under the umbrella perhaps of institutions such as Theatre Works or the Melbourne Fringe or the Store Room, sometimes with money, often with no funding at all. They didn't ask permission, and they created audiences.

Moth, a co-production by Malthouse and Arena Theatre, is unquestionably the pick of the bunch. This is exquisite theatre: in my view one of the most accomplished new plays of the past few years, here given a superbly restrained and devastatingly powerful production by Chris Kohn. This is a remount of last year's sell-out production, and what I said the first time round still holds: it's a play notable for its needle-sharp accuracy, its sure theatricality and its unforgiving emotional honesty.

Its conceit - a retelling by two friends, Claryssa (Sarah Ogden) and Sebastian (Thomas Conroy) of a traumatic incidence of schoolyard persecution and subsequent breakdown - is both ingenious and cleverly maintained, but its heart-cracking power exists in our understanding that this retelling is impossible: reality, it tells us, is different from what we hope.

As enactment, Moth has a sense of the un-illusioned redemption Allen Ginsberg grasps in Kaddish, his great poem of mourning for his mentally ill mother Naomi: "Work of the merciful Lord of poetry, / that causes the broken grass to be green, or the rock to break in grass - the Sun to be constant to Earth - sun of all sunflowers and days on bright iron bridges..." Suspended in the force of this impossible longing, the tragedy of madness - in all its horror, obscene comedy and abjection - opens as an unhealed wound. The truth of that unhealedness is the only redemption there is: it's the ferocity of the desire that things be otherwise that most tellingly reveals its pain.

This production demonstrates the value of remounting work. The premiere was hugely impressive: this time round, with a new cast member replacing Dylan Young, I was struck by the beautiful detailing of Ogden and Conroy's performances: every moment thought through and articulated, every gesture accurate. Each aspect of the design - Jethro Woodward's soundscape, Jonathan Oxlade's set, Rachel Burke's lighting - unobstrusively strokes in texture and contrast. I don't remember the script well enough to know how it's changed, but its fragmentations seemed sharper to me, the comedy more telling, the action more lucid. Small, but perfectly formed.


The Joy of Text, on at the Fairfax, is another kettle of sardines altogether. Robert Reid has clearly considered a major problem of contemporary art: how do you deal with complex ideas and simultaneously find a wide audience? "It is not enough to simply preach to the converted," he says in a program note. "If it is not kept open and accessible to us all, cultural discussion risks becoming obsessively self-referential and irrelevant to all but a narrow band of self-elected cultural elites." Quite.

Reid's solution is to take a popular generic form and remodel it to his own ends: in this case, farce. The Joy of Text is a satire on language and authority, and examines how language, far from being a vehicle for truth, creates its own destabilising realities. Here traditional reason and authority grapple with irrationality and inauthenticity. It's no accident that it's set in a school, where authority and anarchy regularly meet and attempt to discipline each other: nor that the play's title spins off a famous 1970s sex manual.

From its opening scene, in which the acting head master Steve (Peter Houghton) and English teacher Diane (Louise Silverson) have an argument about syntax, it's clear that we are in a parallel reality close to, but by no mean identical with, our own. For one thing, people speak in perfect sentences, like Samuel Johnson. I've never been a teacher, but somehow I doubt that most of the staff-room conversation concerns itself with the finer points of grammar, debating favourite authorities. They're mighty creaky ones too - Fowler's A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926) and Strunk and White's Elements of Style (1918) - which place the arguing teachers in a fustian, outmoded matrix of authority, of certainty shored up by textual jurisdiction about correct modes of behaviour.

This mode of authority meets its nemesis in the persons of a bright student, Danny (James Bell), and an ambitious young teacher, Ami (Helen Christinson), both of whom represent different models of inauthenticity. Danny appears first in an argument with Ami, where he is heatedly accusing her of humiliating him in front of the class. Asked to deliver an essay on satire, his assignment consists of a copy-and-paste of the Wikipedia entry on Jonathan Swift. Ami is not impressed by his argument that his essay is a performance of satire itself ("We are all Lilliputians!) and Danny retires, hurt and vengeful.

Meanwhile, Ami's identity is called into question when Diane decides to put The Illusion of Consent - a book written by a 16-year-old schoolgirl which details her alleged affair with a teacher - on the school syllabus. Ami is fiercely against it, claiming that the book is a fiction by a girl seeking attention, and pointing out that the publication of the book led to the teacher's suicide. When Steve casually gives the book to Danny to read, Danny (in an unlikely feat of textual scholarship) deduces that the book's author is Ami herself. And then, pursuing his performative method of learning, he re-enacts scenes from the book with various teachers, spreading chaos and confusion.

Farce, the most self-conscious of theatrical modes, is in fact the perfect form for a satire of language - it is all about confused identity, self-destructing authority and sexual shenanigans. Joe Orton took farce to a logical conclusion, becoming, as the critic CW Bigsby said, a "crucial embodiment of the post modernist impulse": "by means of farce he gives expression to the conviction of a dislocated self, of a reified experience, of a brittle and contingent language". Here Reid takes that post modernist impulse and makes it explicit.

Marx's famous dictum about history repeating itself, "the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce", is not wholly inappropriate here: the first time the teacher shoots himself, the second time the teachers, as a result of the first event, find themselves lost in a maze of bureacracy, definitions of "appropriate behaviour" and uncertainty.

Reid's play is an often brilliant, and very funny, enactment of all these ideas: the first act steps through a minefield of uncertainty with a deft theatrical wit. The second act, in which all these energies reach their various climaxes, collides with an impulse hostile to the suspensions of farce and somehow collapses under its own weight.

Behind this is a desire that these characters be relatable, that we identify with them and feel sympathy with them: a laudable desire for human emotion to emerge from these alienating language games. Characters in farce provoke interest and hilarity for different reasons: because they are absurd, because the unremitting logic of their behaviour inexorably leads them into chaos. Act Two changes gear into something more akin to naturalism (with the odd reference to tragedy), and Reid hasn't quite managed the marriage of these opposing impulses in his text or, I suspect, in his ideas. It feels grafted in, rather than an evolution from the premises of the first act.

For all that, it's a very enjoyable production. Aidan Fennessy's direction straddles, somewhat uncomfortably, the contradictions of the text, approaching it primarily as farce; the actors deal with the stage business very well, but then are left with the difficulty of creating empathic characters out of these brittle theatrical constructions. Houghton as the morose acting head master, both panic stricken by his temporary authority and longing for its status, manages this best of all the cast, although I liked Louise Siversen's astringent Diane. And Andrew Bailey's multilevel institutional set places the action gloriously in a mundane, utterly recognisable present which, fascinatingly, works best of all in the dislocations of the first act.

Pictures: top: Sarah Ogden and Dylan Young in Moth; bottom, James Bell and Peter Houghton in Joy of Text. Photo: Jeff Busby

Moth, by Declan Greene, directed by Chris Kohn. Designed by Jonathan Oxlade, lighting design by Rachel Burke, video design by Domenico Bartolo, composition and sound design Jethro Woodward. With Thomas Conroy and Sarah Ogden. Malthouse Theatre and Arena Theatre Company, Beckett Theatre at the Malthouse, until June 25.

The Joy of Text by Robert Reid, directed by Aidan Fennessy. Sets and costumes by Andrew Bailey, lighting design by Matt Scott, composition by David Franzke. With James Bell, Helen Christinson, Peter Houghton and Louise Siversen. Melbourne Theatre Company @ the Fairfax Studio, until July 23.

As readers will know, last week Ms TN suffered a knock-out blow in her long-running war with the Dreaded Lurgy, putting her on the benches. There she has been grinding her teeth and annoying her neighbours, like the nameless anti-hero of Notes From Underground. In the interests of social amity, it's probably time I got my personae under control and started work again. So here, on tottering feet, we go.

If another person writes another op-ed complaining that Australian theatre is dying, beset by aesthetic crises and apathetic audiences, I will simply point them to Melbourne, May 2010, and have done with it. I can't remember a time when our theatre culture conspired so successfully to demonstrate that it's well and truly alive: and it's been happening at every level. At the MTC, Richard III is packing them out and The Ugly One has scheduled late performances; you can't get a ticket to Moth at the Malthouse for love nor money and The Threepenny Opera, in previews later this week, is officially sold out. Beyond the main stages, indie companies are posting "full" signs all over town.


What's going on? A lot of very interesting theatre, for one thing, boosted by the Next Wave Festival, which continues until the end of the month. And also a lot of word of mouth. Many shows are selling out without the benefit of a single review. So much for the much-vaunted power of crrrritics! What counts for much more is the excited report of a friend or acquaintance: that is, the impact of the work itself. This also demonstrates very clearly the idiocy of the idea that the success of one aspect of the theatre culture comes at the expense of others. It suggests something altogether more interesting: that vitality breeds vitality, and that theatre companies ignore their interdependence with the rest of the culture at their own peril.

Out of all this richness, reports of which have reached even my subterranean ears, I've been able to see very little. What I did see gives some indication of the quality of work that is not only expected but is delivered in this city. Following are some notes on what I've seen:

Moth

At a distressingly young age, Declan Greene has carved out a reputation in Melbourne’s independent scene with a series of plays demonstrating a black wit, iron nerve and a considerable lyrical gift. What's notable is the restlessness of his work: he's a playwright whose work is distinctive but never predictable. And he's learning fast. Moth represents yet another startling evolution: it was not at all what his previous work led me to expect, and yet is an absolutely logical progression.

It’s a powerful examination of mental illness, especially in relation to young people. Greene's two 15-year-old protagonists are Claryssa (Sarah Ogden), a wiccan emo, and Sebastian (Dylan Young), all-round oddball, who are both rejects in the merciless pecking order of high school. They are compelling portrayals of adolescents - self-centred, mocking, vulnerable and funny - who are traumatically alienated from the social lives around them. A horrific, if horribly familiar, instance of bullying unlatches Sebastian's already uncertain sense of reality, and his sense of self splinters into delusion. He has an apocalyptic vision of St Sebastian, embodied as a moth he keeps in a jar, and sets off on a mission to find the saved. Meanwhile Claryssa, as traumatised by Sebastian by the bullying episode, sinks into paralysing depression and is unable to help her friend.

Perhaps the strongest aspect of this script is how unsentimentally and accurately it represents not only the speech and attitudes of teen subculture (I had a 15-year-old with me who affirmed its authenticity) but the subjective experience of mental breakdown. The story is told through enactments by Ogden and Young, shifting between times and different subjective states in ways which recall the narrative of the cult film Donnie Darko, and Greene exploits to the full his capacity to soar from vernacular speech into pure poetry.

Chris Kohn directs Moth on a stage bare of everything except what looks like three lengths of underfelt, cascading from backstage to the floor, that define three different theatrical areas. Kohn's direction is absolutely simple and absolutely lucid, directing so good it's almost invisible. Jonathan Oxlade's design, Rachel Burke's lighting and Jethro Woodward's music conspire to focus the action on stage to diamond precision. Ogden and Young are remarkable, giving passionate, minutely disciplined performances that wind up to a shattering climax. What begins as a comic picture of two teen misfits ends up as a piece of theatre with the catastrophic power of tragedy. The long, devastated silence that preceded the applause was its proper tribute.

The Ugly One

Marius von Mayenburg, long-term dramaturg with Thomas Ostermeier at Berlin’s Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, debuted in Melbourne at the Malthouse in 2006 with the brilliant Benedict Andrews production of Eldorado, a scorching parable on the human capacity for self-destruction, and returned in 2008 with a production of a fascinating collaboration, again with Andrews, called Moving Target. The Ugly One, written between these two productions, is a play on a smaller scale, but demonstrating to the full Mayenburg's imaginative control of theatrical form.



As an exercise in theatrical elegance, it's an exemplary text. The Ugly One is a painfully hilarious and disturbing satire on the contemporary obsession with appearance, in which Mayenburg cunningly exploits a simple theatrical idea – identically named characters played by the same actors – to explore the place of individuality in an increasingly homogenised society, and how our uniqueness plays into our idea of self.

Lette (Patrick Brammall) is the inventor of a new kind of plug, but finds that when it’s time to present it to the world, his boss Scheffler (Kim Gyngell) thinks he is too ugly to sell it, and instead intends to send his assistant, Karlmann (Luke Ryan). When he asks his wife Fanny (Alison Bell), she confirms, to his astonishment, that he is as ugly as everyone says. In despair, he undergoes plastic surgery. Lette emerges looking exactly the same, but finds that his world has changed. Women lust after him, and he becomes a corporate success. But now everybody wants to look like him.

Using this simple premise, Mayenburg pulls to the surface all sorts of contemporary anxieties. The face is both more and less than a marker of individuality: it is, in the corporate world, the equivalent of a brand, through which perceptions of success and failure are filtered independently of the reality of achievement or quality. Lette's "transformation" - he is the only actor, incidentally, who doesn't play multiple roles - gives him the competitive edge in both the sexual and corporate worlds. But all too soon technology catches up and reproduces him, creating a hall of mirrors, a nightmare vision of Lettes that flood the market like generic drugs. In such a world, no human being can be anything but a product, a commodity valued by his or her exchange value. In the process, Lette's personal identity - whatever uniqueness he originally possessed - is completely lost.

Peter Evans gives this play the elegant production it deserves, directing it in the round with minimal props. The razor-sharp shifts in the text are handled with finesse and spareness, and some ingenious staging: among other effective touches, the amplified crunching of an apple excruciatingly evokes the sounds of surgery. All four performers rise to the challenge, giving nuanced and witty performances that bring out the play's comedy, and permit the darker themes simply to rise to the surface as a profound rippling of disturbance. This is definitely a highlight of the MTC's 2010 season, and not to be missed.

Hole in the Wall

Hole in the Wall is the only show I've been able to catch from the Next Wave Festival. This 45-minute show knocked my socks off, and made me even more sorry about what I've been missing. It's a fascinating multi-disciplinary theatre work that explores the experience of domestic, surburban space as lived by a twenty-something couple. Sounds mundane? As Hole in the Wall manages to demonstrate, the mundane is only dull if you're not looking.

The text, written by My Darling Patricia member Halcyon Mcleod, has a simple premise: it articulates the thoughts, fears and desires of a young couple (Matt Prest and Clare Britton) during the course of a single night. They would like a better house; they wonder what they are doing with their lives; they take out their frustrations on each other in bitter and violent arguments; they are afraid of dying; they are lonely. All these recognisable vignettes play out with a dream logic that ignores chronology, giving us snatches of their domestic lives.

It creates the premise for an extraordinary piece of experiential theatre. The audience is divided into four, and then put in four separate boxes that are simulacra of the average weatherboard rental house, with wallpaper up to the picture railing, a paned window (which is closed), and a painted white door with a brass handle.

Once you are enclosed with your fellow audients, the box begins to move, forcing you to walk along with it. It is difficult to describe how disorienting this is: it quite literally made me dizzy. Part of the dizziness was the necessity to reorient my sense of place. While in fact the floor is quite still, and it's the box that's moving, from the point of view of those enclosed, it's the walls that are stationary. There was a similarly disconcerting exhibit of a swaying room in the Guggenheim exhibition at the NGV recently (I'm afraid I can't remember the artist) - this was much more displacing, because it was more claustrophobic.

Once the box stopped moving, the lights went out, leaving us in complete darkness, and the first monologue - about the way a bed is like a grave - boomed out over us, accompanied by a rising growl of sound. And then one wall was thrown open, revealing the the rest of the audience in the three other boxes, all ingeniously linked together to make one room, in the centre of which was a bed.

The performances played out in these intimate spaces, which were continually reconfigured in constantly surprising ways by unseen manipulators. Sometimes the boxes became a long hallway, through which the performers entered and left, in which we became guests at a party, or ghostly witnesses of private grief. Sometimes we looked out through a window at Preston walking outside in his pyjamas. Once all the walls opened and we watched a projected animation of puppets who played out the story of a happy suburban couple.

The effects were haunting, poignant, moving; sometimes (as in the terrible quarrel between the couple) confronting. Aside from the compelling performances, perhaps the most powerful aspect of Hole in a Wall was how the initial disorientation made us all complicit in the show. Social barriers immediately dropped in our initial surprise and puzzlement, and when we were watching the performances, we were all aware not only that we were watching together, but that we were in the same intimate space as the performers, and that we were, in our witnessing, part of the show. An absolutely fascinating and beautiful experience.

Pictures: top: Sarah Ogden and Dylan Young in Moth. Photo: Jeff Busby Bottom: Patrick Brammall, Alison Bell and Luke Ryan in The Ugly One. Photo: Jeff Busby

Moth, by Declan Greene, directed by Chris Kohn. Set and costume design by Jonathan Oxlade, lighting design by Rachel Burke, composer Jethro Woodward. With Sarah Ogden and Dylan Young. Malthouse Theatre and Arena Theatre Company, Tower Theatre, Malthouse, until May 30.

The Ugly One, by Marius von Mayenburg, translated by Maja Zade, directed by Peter Evans. Lighting design by Matt Scott. With Alison Bell, Patrick Brammall, Kim Gyngell and Luke Ryan. Lawler Studio, MTC Theatre, until June 12.

Hole in the Wall, text by Halcyon Mcleod, directed by Hallie Shellam. Concept by Clare Britton, Matt Prest, Hallie Shellam and Danny Egger. Set design by Clare Britton, Matt Prest and Danny Egger. Lighting design by Mirabelle Wouters. Original music, sound design and animation by James Brown. Performed by Matt Prest and Clare Britton. Next Wave Festival @ The Meat Market. Closed. Carriageworks, Sydney, May 26-29.

The oft-asserted wisdom behind the categories "Fringe" and "Mainstream" runs something like this: the mainstream is mainstream because it is more fun, while the fringe is the fringe because it's so unremittingly serious its arty eyebrows disappear up its own fundament.

As those who read Ms TN with attention will know, she is a mortal enemy to these categories. Because one needs some kind of general handle, I prefer the slightly less unsatisfactory "main stage" and "independent" for distinguishing between companies with large institutional structures and those running on rags and hope, and I certainly never use them as aesthetic predictors or descriptors. Otherwise you fall into absurdities, such as Peter Craven's and Robin Usher's claims a few years ago that artists such as Jérôme Bel or Romeo Castellucci - who have played some of the largest venues in Europe - are "anti-mainstream". Whatever that means.

Anyway, the point is that fun occurs, or doesn't occur, across the entire spectrum of theatre. (Actually, "fun" is a depressing word, which for me evokes the spectre of cocktails with suggestive names in bleakly desperate nightclubs, or The Footy Show, or a certain scoutmaster I once encountered who had an extraordinary talent for killing any kind of social enjoyment by shouting: "Now everybody listen! We're all supposed to be having fun here! Will the mums stop chatting and line up so we can wrap them in toilet paper, ok? We're all having fun! Ok?")

There's "pleasure". Or "delight". Spontaneous joy. Whatever. It's a lightness of being that rises involuntarily and lifts us momentarily out of time on a gust of laughter. Like happiness, it can't be commanded - which is why that scoutmaster got it so wrong, and why it's so sheerly embarrassing to watch a bad comedian. In such moments of delight, we forget the weight of ourselves. We become bigger than we are, and more innocent; we might gasp at comic savagery, but our souls are never shrivelled by its calling to our meaner selves. So while the Sam Newmans of this world might claim they're "just having a bit of fun" by saying black people are just like monkeys, they never inspire delight. Sam's just saying he's the biggest boot on the block, and his obsequious followers snigger in the bully's shadow.

True delight is liberation rather than such enslavement. For instance, on Friday I spent five hours at La Mama, at Moira Finucane and Jackie Smith's Triple Bill of Wild Delight! (It comes with an exclamation mark). On a balmy autumn evening, the moon swinging high over our heads, it was hard to think of anywhere better to be. We arrived to find La Mama's courtyard decked out as a cantina, with coloured lights and candle-lit tables, serving pre-show sangria and barbecued corn cobs and chorizos, before being ushered into Finucane's one-woman storytelling fantasia, The Feast of Argentina Gina Catalina. Argentina Gina Catalina is - well, what is she? Her footsteps melt the pavement where she walks; her deadly gaze can freeze the hearts of two thousand pirates; she's the daughter of wolves and whales and a priestess who can make a cascade of oranges fall out of the sun. She is the embodiment of excess and desire, and she carries the tropes of magical realism beyond parody, into sheer hilarious poetry.

Finucane's performance is as over-the-top as her gorgeous costumes; she ignites a spectacle of desire that somehow, for all its excess, unwaveringly maintains its own reality. Duende, maybe? The sensuality of the language takes cliche and sets it on fire; even as our credulity is mischievously mocked by more and more outrageously absurd stories, we believe in Argentina Gina Catalina. In between each narrative, we're fed and watered with various delicious titbits: olives, bread, Spanish cured meats, mussels steamed in boullibaise, chocolate cake, ice cream and tequila (the food is provided by KT Prescott).

After a half hour's break in the Pleasure Garden, there's contemporary circus with Azaria Universe, Jesse Love and Derek Ives in Tooth & Nail: a show with trapeze and aerial acts (astounding in La Mama - who would have thought it?) in which the traditional circus tropes - especially the sexy showgirl - are undermined, mocked and also brilliantly realised. We still, after all, want to see deeds of derring do, even if the co-stars are bickering and putting razor-blades in each other's toffee apples. The final act, in which the naked performers stand before us wearing huge cartoon animal heads, is so blazingly strange that it knocks the performance into some other dimension. Perverse, disturbing and oddly beautiful.

And after that comes Salon de Dance DELUGE, hosted by Maude Davey, which features an all-star cast of performers mainly drawn from Melbourne's rich dance scene. It features 19 acts, performed inside and outside La Mama; they range from the absurd (two identical Frauleins with blond pigtails performing a bawdy version of the lederhosen slapping dance, or Moira Finucane, dressed as a prim waitress, orgasmically eating a meat pie to AC/DC's TNT) to the beautiful (Brian Lucas, performing a dance of yearning as he rises operatically from a sea of red fabric) to the macabre (Yumi Umiumare's weeping, faceless woman dancing in a dark forest, or Finacune's later adventures with a sauce bottle, as excruciating a performance of sexual loneliness as anything I've seen). Or there's Christopher Green's recital of Molly Bloom, as you've never heard it before, which gives us, as he points out, some "proper acting". As, indeed, it does.

Everything is directed with unobtrusive slickness: food is served, theatres re-dressed, costumes changed, tomato sauce mopped, with never a glitch in the action. Stage manager Cath Carmody must be working harder than anyone else in Melbourne. She and her staff of enablers, plus the first-class performers, add up to a show that reminds us why life is worth living. It's wit, poetry, hilarity, nonsense, pleasure, beauty, all rolled into a gloriously subversive, wickedly sexy evening that nourishes both soul and body. You can book each show separately, but I recommend seeing the lot if you possibly can. Long live Finucane and Smith, I say.

The night before, your fearless correspondent was pursuing pleasure at the Collingwood Underground Carpark. Plunging like a dark mouth beneath the tower blocks of Collingwood, it seems at first glance an unlikely venue for seekers of delight: but enter past the forbidding portal, and you are in another world, possibly Berlin circa 1984, where gorgeous denizens of the underworld gather around an incongruously cosy bar, as music blares at a decibel level beyond the range of the human ear.

The occasion here was Sisters Grimm's production of Little Mercy. At the proper time - or, to be more accurate, a little after the proper time - audience members were led along a path in the darkness marked out, like an airport landing strip, by rows of candles, to a surprisingly intimate theatre scratched together somewhere in the bowels of the carpark.

Little Mercy is an absurdity devised by Declan Greene and Ash Flanders, a fond pisstake of that staple of Hollywood horror movies, the demon child. Roger Summers (Sean-James Murphy) and his wife Virginia (Ash Flanders) are the successful power couple: he is a celebrated musical director, his wife a successful glamour alcoholic. There is only one grief in their life: they have no child. As the play opens, they are rushing off to the premiere of Annie when Virginia (searching for her earrings) discovers a letter from an orphanage mysteriously left beneath a couch. Just as she reads the contents, lightning flashes, thunder rolls and the child itself, Mercy (Susie Dee, in frilly dress and pigtails) appears at their front door.

A carnivorous cuckoo, Mercy settles into the house and begins her murderous career by killing the adored but ancient cat (a stuffed toy which scuttles in and out of the stage on a skateboard) and blinding her tutor (Cara Mitchell) by substituting sulphuric acid for her eye drops. The one difference from the Hollywood version is that, instead of being sent back to the Abyss from whence she came, Mercy wins the day.

It's acted with the appropriate po-faced melodramatic passion by its cast, with some ingenious stage tricks and multi-media. In some ways, it recalls The Thirty Nine Steps, which the MTC produced in 2008: it has the same light hearted delight in meta-theatrical camp, the same low-tech pleasures. And the production and performances are high quality, with Ash Flanders as the soft-hearted innocent Virginia stealing the night, so by the end I wholly believed his performance. Nonsense, yes, but irresistibly funny nonsense, delivered with brio and flair.

Finucane & Smith's Triple Bill of Wild Delight: The Feast of Argentina Gina Catalina, Salon de Dance DELUGE and Tooth & Nail. Devised by Moira Finucane and Jackie Smith, with numerous collaborators. La Mama Theatre, until March 28. Check the La Mama website for details of performance times.

Little Mercy, by Ash Flanders and Declan Greene, directed by Declan Greene. Costume design by Alice Swing, lighting design by Katie Sfetkidis, print media design by Andrew Downer. With Ash Flanders, Cara Mitchell, Sean-James Murphy and Susie Dee. Sisters Grimm @ Collingwood Underground Carpark, 48 Harmsworth St, Collingwood, until March 27. Bookings: Sisters Grimm.

In the interests of organisation, Ms TN has been tidying her desk. This bland, anodyne phrase cannot begin to comprehend the dimensions of the task. It's like the fifth labour of Hercules (Augean Stables, Cleaning Of), only instead of incontinent cows, I have constant incoming drifts of press releases, programs, drafts, invoices, notebooks, permission requests, bills, receipts, postcards, lists, chocolate wrappers, magazines and books, books, books - phalanxes of them diving in like migratory flocks of starlings, and taking up disordered residence anywhere there's a spare centimetre.

I have often thought my desk is a reflection of my state of mind, and this tells you more than you, gentle reader, need to know. But having reached the point where annihilation by domestic avalanche was more probable than not, I girded my loins, sinews, teeth and anything else that needed girding, and now my study appears to be the habitation of a marginally sane and reasonably organised woman. Appearances may deceive, certainly, but it's nice to have the surface at least, even if it's undermined by a faintly hysterical loquacity.


And now at last I can begin to speak, if briefly, of last week's fringedwelling, which has been sidelined not only by the Labour of the Desk but by my upcoming departure from these sea-girt shores next Monday. I saw three shows last week, making five in all out of a possible menu of around 400 acts, which is pretty wimpy compared to some others. On the upside, I enjoyed all of them. And if the Fringe is conceived as a showcase for the energies throbbing beneath Melbourne's sedate skin, I reckon it's filling its brief nicely. Perhaps what I found most interesting about these shows is that there are all, crucially, works of imagination. It's about time imagination came back.

A Black Joy is one of two Declan Greene plays on at the Fringe. The other, Home Economics, is running at the Store Room until Saturday, so if you missed the first, I recommend the second, sight unseen. I wasn't especially enamoured of Greene's Rage Boy, which I saw in 2007 in a production directed, like this one, by Susie Dee; but two years is a long time in an artist's life, and Greene's been working hard. Now his quality is clear and unambiguous. He's a dark, explosive talent, a playwright who channels the anxieties of 21st century living into a tunnel of comedic nightmare that is as grotesque and pitiless as Bosch.

The conceit of this play is that the characters are all celebrities - John Candy (Tom Considine), Diane Keaton (Anne Browning), Bette Davis (Carole Patullo), Joseph Cotten (Chris Bunsworth), Dakota Fanning (Miriam Glaser), Corey Haim (Ash Flanders) and Megan Twycross playing a character who looks suspiciously like Paris Hilton. They are addressed, all through the play, by their full names, which is a device that gets weirder through repetition. As the author says in the program, the play emerged from a documentary about the fetish called "Feeding", where one partner overfeeds the morbidly obese other in a perverse co-depedency. The centre of A Black Joy's action is John Candy lying beneath his enormous stomach, being fed baked beans by Bette Davis.

This morbid dysfunction sets the cue for the action in the play - the plot, as such, includes Diane Keaton neurotically pumping iron so she won't be raped by her lesbian house cleaner; Keaton's husband Senator Joseph Cotten imprisoning Paris Hilton and feeding her the liver of her murdered daughter, Dakota Fanning; and Corey Haim's romance with Dakota Fanning and the Neo-Nazis. It could be simply a schlock-fest, but Greene's frankly beautiful writing - which ranges from spikily hilarious dialogue to extraordinarily lyric monologues - and Dee's focused and unafraid production makes it something else altogether.

Each time I've contemplated this play, I find myself thinking about mediaeval or Renaissance art - yes, Bosch, because it's enacting a kind of hell; but the celebrity "characters" also recall the stock characters of Commedia dell'arte or even Punch and Judy, obscene and grotesquely exaggerated types who refract our human foibles. It's maybe not so odd - Bosch and the vulgar theatre emerged from another age haunted by apocalyptic fantasy, a world as unstable and strange as ours. It's a comedy for a contemporary apocalypse, underpinned by millennial fears - climate change, mass species extinction - in which the idea of the self is emptied out by celebrity-fuelled consumerism, in which appetite devours itself.

The production is done in the round, with Candy's prone body - swollen under a huge sheet with horrifically rotting feet poking out the end - the centrepiece around which the action revolves. The performances tackle the extremity of the text with relish, excavating at once the cruel comedy and strange pathos of the text. They're all good, but I particularly enjoyed Carole Patullo's Bette Davis, Tom Considine's John Candy and Anne Browning's hyper-neurotic Diane Keaton. Really something.

From the large to the small: Yuri Wells is a one-man show (with added musician) written and performed by Benedict Hardie, and co-devised and directed by Anne-Louise Sarks. It's a change of direction for Hayloft, whom we last saw creating mayhem among the commentariat with their huge and ambitious production 3XSisters, for which Hardie directed a third of Chekhov's play. Maybe it's not so much a change of direction as of scale: in its conception it's as ambitious as anything this company has done.

Yuri Wells is a beautiful piece of theatre, created with deeply thought artfulness and craft. It begins as the audience enters the small, curtained space, with Hardie and musician Stuart Bowden doing a kind of pre-show warm-up, greeting audience members, playing the odd song and passing a toy xylophone around for people to cautiously plink. It's all very relaxed, and with lots of meta-theatrical friendliness. Once it's time to begin, Hardie tells us he's starting the show. So far, so avant garde familiar. Then Bowden sits down among the audience, and Hardie removes all the props from the stage, leaving it totally bare. (The props all gain their significance in the subsequent monologue, but by then we must imagine them).

Hardie tells us that he is playing Yuri Wells, an aged care nurse who, it is rapidly clear, has problems relating to women. And then comes a miraculous and unexpected transition, from an actor playing an actor, with the expected nods to the audience, to an actor becoming Yuri Wells, lonely and possibly homicidal human being. The power of this transition is in the words as much in Hardie's strangely unsettling performance: he takes techniques more at home in contemporary lyric poetry and applies them to theatre, creating an allusive, rich language that is subtle and full of ambiguity, while still remaining emotionally lucid. The writing is theatrical in the best way, and turns on a dime. Yuri Wells is, in the end, a portrayal of human loneliness; but its power comes from its being a portrait of a particular person's loneliness, and all the more desolate and complex for that.

The show is unsettling, disturbing and surprisingly gentle, all at once. But perhaps its greatest invitation - and reinvention - is into the world of imagination, ours and the actor's. I thought this show utterly enchanting, in the proper sense of the word: "to subject to a magical influence, to bewitch", "to delight". Remembering of course that spells have their darker side.

Finally, I saw In the Absence of Sunlight, a one-on-one show that began at the Town Hall pub in Erroll St, North Melbourne, as an assignation in a bar with a stranger. I confess that, given its set-up, I was expecting something like the controversial hit of the Edinburgh Fringe, Ontoerend Goed's Internal: something that turned the intimacy of theatre into a disturbing collision between fantasy and reality. It turned out not to be that at all. Or if it turned out to be something like that, it was not in the way I expected.

When you arrive at the right table, there is a card under the "reserved" sign that says: I need to ask you something. The performer, Tamara Searle, turns up and there's a stilted conversation, the kind that happens between strangers who are meeting for a reason only one of them understands. She talks about where she lives, about John the barman, her room upstairs. She talks about how she has seen me in the street (and I almost say, but I never hang out around here, but don't). Then I'm invited upstairs, to a room that opens out on a balcony. She pours some elderflower cordial, she tells me she has been ill, she takes me out on the balcony and we blow bubbles.

By this time it's clear that the invitation of this show is to be part of the fiction. I am the woman that she has observed obsessively during her illness, unknowingly seen in all my intimate moments. And I guess how you might respond to this show would depend on how you feel about entering a fictional self. It's something I do all the time, one way or another, so once I understood this, I found myself playing this woman. After all, I might have lived on my own across the road from the pub. I might have been observed in my solitude. I might have something to forgive a woman I have never seen in my life.

I thought it a delicate and brave performance, only half shielded by its fiction. Oddly, the more I became my fictional character, the less chatty I became: the more prepared to be silent, to watch Tamara to see what she would do or say next. It was strangely liberating, just as sitting in the dark of the theatre is liberating. Perhaps one of the fascinations of art is the chance not to be yourself, or to escape the carapace of imposed selves into other aspects of who you are. I don't know how useful it is to know that this theatre piece is an adaptation, or perhaps more strictly speaking a kind of coda, to Marjorie Barnard's lyrical short story about illness and recovery, The Persimmon Tree. It gives it an added depth, I guess; but I'm not sure that it matters.

Picture: Benedict Hardie in Yuri Wells. Photo: Lachlan Woods

A Black Joy by Declan Greene, directed by Susie Dee. Design by Emily Barrie, lighting by Katie Sfetkidis, audiovisual by Nicholas Verso, sound design by Ben Bourke. With Anne Browning, Chris Bunsworth, Tom Considine, Ash Flanders, Miriam Glaser, Carole Patullo, Megan Twycross and Alastair Watts on cello. Fortyfive Downstairs, Melbourne Fringe Festival, until October 4, closed.

Yuri Wells, written, co-devised and performed by Benedict Hardie, co-devised and directed by Anne-Louise Sarks, music and performance by Stuart Bowden. The Hayloft Project, Melbourne Fringe Festival, North Melbourne Town Hall, until October 10.

In the Absence of Sunlight, devised by Katerina Kokkinos-Kennedy, Dayna Morrissey, Danny Pettingill, Ivanka Sokol, Xan Colman, performed by Tamara Searle. A is for Atlas, Melbourne Fringe Festival, until October 11. Bookings here.

Detest (This Thousand Years I Shall Not Weep) created by Angus Cerini, with music by Kelly Ryall, Courthouse @ La Mama until February 17.

Chocolate Monkey, written and performed by John-Paul Hussey, directed by Lucien Savron. Original music and sound design by Kelly Ryall, photography and visual design by Natalie Lowery, lighting design by Remo Vallance, Mark Benson and Luke Hails. The Amazing Business, presented by the Store Room Theatre Workshop at Full Tilt, the Victorian Arts Centre, until February 18.

Rage Boy by Declan Greene, directed by Susie Dee. Set and costume design by Emily Barrie, lighting design by Katie Sfetkidis, video design by Nicholas Verso. Midsumma Festival at the Beckett, Malthouse Theatre, until February 10.

It's been a dislocating week. Not for any traceable reason, but still, discombobulating enough to scatter my neurones over a wide field. Permit me some bloggish indulgence as I attempt to gather these oddments into some semblance of coherency, in the hope that a random skitter through last week might get those neurones firing, or at least talking to their Team Leader. This will be long, so arm yourself with your liquid drug of choice, and then listen and attend, O my beloved, as I relate to you the banal marvels of ordinary life.

So: last week I managed to deliver my youngest boy to his first week at high school, complete with uniform, lace-up shoes, bus ticket and mobile phone. I agreed, after deep contemplation of the word "no", which does exist in my vocabulary somewhere, to be on a panel of the Green Room Awards. I read Robert Musil's Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One and George Bataille's Story of the Eye. I finished a review for the Book Show of Dorothy Reynolds' gigantic book on Dante and sat in a studio trying to imitate Simon Schama as I read it into a microphone ("It is common to compare Dante Aligheri’s epic poem the Divine Comedy to a cathedral: VAST, SOARING, sublime...") I considered the many reasons why I have never had the slightest impulse to be an actor. I worried about the reviews I wasn't writing.

I didn't go (although I put it in my diary) to David Williamson's John Sumner Lecture, which I idly thought to attend last Thursday. I just wanted to stay home with my new best friend, a box of Anti-Viral Facial Tissues that apparently "kills 99% of Cold & Flu Viruses, in the tissue". (Virucidal tissues seem to me a piquant symptom of the paranoia of contemporary middle class life.) I bored several people to catatonia talking about my Novel. (Formal apologies to all thus buttonholed, You Know Who You Are).

In the midst of all this, I saw three pieces of theatre, all by men and all, in various ways, exploring the dilemmas of masculinity. Two of them were monologues - Chocolate Monkey and Detest - and one, Rage Boy, had 10 cast members. Somehow all these works added to my general subjective scatteredness. It is as if I've been trying to listen to a conversation that is running at the back of my mind, a kind of shadowscape of thought which flickers past and refuses to coalesce into anything as concrete as mere words. So, as reviews often are, this will be an attempt to recuperate some fugitive impressions, to pin the butterfly to the wheel and see if it sings. Only more so than usual.

The above excess of confessional detail is, I suppose, prompted by the monologues. The performers so embed themselves - or perhaps more accurately, fictions of themselves - in their work that they call up similar self-reflection in response. So, if you're still reading, blame Angus Cerini and John-Paul Hussey (and, no doubt, their mutual musical collaborator, Kelly Ryall). Detest and Chocolate Monkey are, in very different ways, intensely personal works: they directly tangle with the vexed question of the self in art, foregrounding the performer's body to confront the audience with the discomforting, confronting fact of an actor's ontological existence.

In both of these shows, the audience is unable to be merely a spectator of an object called an actor, who plays for us roles hermetically sealed off from his or her life outside the theatre. Rather, we are drawn into direct relationship with a self that presents itself as autobiographical, with a performer who brazenly announces that he exists outside the four walls of the theatre, and who rudely intrudes his life on us, and himself, and art. This is dangerous territory but, using vastly differing strategies, both performers escape the trap of narcissism.

The two shows have even more in common. Both are parts of larger works - Cerini's is a further development of earlier works Puppy Love and This Thousand Years I Shall not Weep, while Hussey's is the first instalment of a trilogy. And both of these pieces arrive well-polished by performance, as they have been touring (Chocolate Monkey is a return season, and was a hit on its first showing). Even more intriguingly, they both have circular structures, finishing at their beginning. Perhaps it is the archetypal voyage of Odysseus: it is, after all, the journey that matters in both these works, and they both begin from a place of abjection, one of mockery, one of despair. As Cavafy says in the poem Ithaca, at the end of the journey, the beginning is still a place of poverty, with "nothing more to give". But "Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage".

Detest (this thousand years I shall not weep) made me think of Robert Musil's mischievous reflections on art and kitsch, which I was reading (see above) on the way to the play. "Is not art," asks Musil, "a tool we employ to peel the kitsch off life?...Can it be that the farther it is removed from life, the clearer art becomes?" In a series of absurd logical steps, Musil comes up with two syllogisms: that art peels kitsch off life, and that kitsch peels life off language. This leads to some even more absurd algebra ("life equals three times kistch") which in the end only proves that these syllogisms do not resolve.

Inside Musil's games are some serious questions: what is life? What is art? What is kitsch? He defines kitsch as a "firm, clearcut and immutable relationship between feeling and words". It seems to me that Cerini plays between these categories, art, life and kitsch, in very interesting ways.

If Detest is not quite kitsch, it plays with kitsch's cousin, sentiment, calling on understood codes of language to elicit specific responses. Cerini's language, generated from conversations in a juvenile prison, switches between vernacular obscenity and flights of lyrical yearning. Its narrative is simple: it tells the story of a 15 year old boy sent to prison for shaking his baby brother to death, and his visceral loathing of a boy found guilty of raping and murdering an old woman.

The writing itself ranges from very fine to very crude, but this strikes me as unimportant. What is important is how his text reveals the close relationship between the coded kitsch of sentiment and the aesthetic of fascism. Both are impoverishments of linguistic possibility, and thus of the possibilities of conscious experience. Cerini does not give us an articulate tongue, but rather a mouth that screams against its inabilities; life is horrifyingly in excess of language, and yet is constantly truncated by its limitations.

Words are poor things to hold up against the extreme realities of sexual desire or violence, or the banality of suffering. The gaps between simplistic language and complex reality cause the mind, unable to understand its own experience, to collapse inward under its emotional pressures. In Detest this pressure becomes intolerable, finally expressing itself in dreams of righteous retribution against the granny rapist. With chilling verisimilitude these dreams enact the obscene language of concentration camps, in a violent outspilling of self-loathing that becomes a fantasy of total annihilation.

It is impossible to separate Cerini's text from his body's expressiveness or from Kelly Ryall's soundscape and composition: all three elements are intimately woven to create an aria of grotesque anguish. In the cavernous spaces of the Courthouse, Cerini's body is a lonely thing, a poor bare forked animal, both exposed and concealed by the carefully minimal lighting design.

Make no mistake, Cerini's performance is exhilarating. Although it is very polished, this is peformance at its most raw, in that state Duchamp describes as "finally unfinished". After a prologue, partly in German, which self-consciously, even precociously, lays out for us the works we are about to witness, Cerini performs what is perhaps best described as a dance. His movement ranges from joyous to parodic, grotesque to bathetic: what is always foregrounded is his electric physical presence. He finally arrives at a stasis, endlessly jumping on the same spot, neither at rest nor in motion, as arresting an image of desolate entrapment as I have seen.

The commitment and intensity of his performance, its particular style of fearlessness, reminds me of Tom Waits, and like Waits it forces you to recategorise your judgements. Don't miss this one.

If Detest uses elements of a rock concert to make theatre, Chocolate Monkey employs the tropes of stand up comedy. John-Paul Hussey bills this show as "extreme storytelling", and its surreal verbal riffs remind me of nothing so much as Dylan Moran. (Perhaps it's the Irish accent, too, and the violent reaction against the easy kitsch of Oirishness).

It's easy to see why it was such a hit. Hussey is very funny indeed, with an ability to sketch vivid satirical portraits, at once mocking and fond, a raconteur's talent for accents and an appealing self-mockery; and under Lucien Savron's direction the show is slickly lit and designed. It's presented at the Arts Centre's Black Box under the aegis of the Store Room Theatre Workshop.

It's hard to say what Chocolate Monkey is about; its narratives splinter and dissolve, although in the mediaeval imagery projected on the stage and in the text itself there are many hints of a complex subtext. As Genet says of metaphor in the theatre, it ought to be like the rigging on a ship - visible from a distance. Here Hussey contents himself with subtleties that more properly belong to prose, and pushes the show through with the sheer vim of performance.

Among its several narratives, Chocolate Monkey traces the end of a relationship (described, in a striking image of mutual narcissism, as conjoined twins in a constrictingly narrow house) and Hussey's job as a auditor of the Melbourne rail system, which involved him trundling a measuring device over every inch of it, a physical purgatory that becomes a metaphor for redemption. But its central tale is of the disastrous production of an earlier show, Burnt Monkey, which through a series of comic misadventures never saw the light of day.

Hussey's fanatical eye for the eccentricities of inner thought and the extreme details of everyday experience - and his ability to communicate them - gives this piece its peculiar illumination. In a sense that is not dishonourable, it seems curiously pointless: he takes the risk of permitting the piece to be, like life itself, unclear, complex, full of loose ends and, in the end, resistant to interpretation. I am still unsure whether the risk is entirely successful, but I can say, unequivocally, that I enjoyed the ride. And I'm very curious to see what happens next.

The disappointment of the week was Declan Greene's play Rage Boy, which had a short return season as part of the Midsumma Festival after a production last year at Melbourne University's Student Union Theatre. It is narrated by Toby Milk (Aaron Orzech), a young man disabled by polio. His family is violently and colourfully dysfunctional: his father Daddy Rice (Marc Testart) is a wannabe revolutionary folksinger with a swastika tattooed on his forehead, his grandfather Grampy Milk (Adam Wieczorek) a demented and bitter old man still in love with his Nazi twin brother, the household hobby watching porn on television, and so on. Toby has a couple of similarly dysfunctional friends.

Perhaps it's unsurprising that Toby, the archetypal innocent-at-large, falls in love with the rich lunacy of the Talent family, who are Jehovah's Witnesses who believe that the world will end in a fortnight. He decides to get baptised and to wait for the end of the world, which might be more interesting than the world as it is.

About ten minutes in, following the week's tradition of being reminded of other artforms, I began to think of Napoleon Dynamite. The problem was that then I couldn't stop thinking about it. It's not just that this play exploits the same po-faced quirkiness (with, it must be said, rather less success at humanising its eccentric cast of misfits). It's also that its conventions are more those of film than theatre; indeed, large parts of it are filmed, projected on the back of the stage to the accompaniment of a voiceover from Toby.

Here Musil's discussion of kitsch and art might come in handy again. As Musil comments, "the more abstract kitsch becomes, the more it becomes kitsch". Greene's script demonstrates that his reputation as a promising young playwright is not unearned, but that he is as yet unable to transcend the constrictions of his own conventions. In its grotesque alienations, his satire is in fact more kitsch than its models, and its supposed taboo-breaking is, in fact, very tame. Perhaps what surprised me most of all, given its title, was that there is very little anger in this show at all. If anything, it leans towards the sentimental.

It's given an elegant production by Susie Dee which, using the device of seating actors around the edge of the stage when they are not in a scene, moves with admirable despatch. There was certainly no point where I was actually bored. But, despite an appealing central performance from Aaron Orzech, I can't say it captured my imagination. Rage Boy is curiously affectless; certainly, compared to the other two shows, it is - paradoxically enough - the one that strikes me as self-indulgent. In art, I guess, the putative subject matter is usually what matters least.

And that, O my beloved, has been my week. If you have read this far, I thank you for your attention. And now I must attend to my washing.