Dust, written and directed by Donna Jackson, composed and performed by Mark Seymour. Music directed by Tracy Bourne, media and film by Malcolm McKinnon. With the Victorian Trade Union Choir, Willin Wimmin and the Ballarat Arts Academy Ensemble. Hubcap Productions with the Asbestos Diseases Society and the University of Ballarat. Williamstown Town Hall, closed.

The phrase “community theatre” is liable to conjure images of earnest amateur thespians giving demonstrations in coarse acting. But this is hugely misleading.

Community-based companies are responsible for some of our most vital political theatre. In the hands of companies like Devonport-based Big hArt - who created Ngapartji Ngapartji, a work which looked at the impact of the Maralinga nuclear tests in the Pitjantjara people - it becomes a powerful conduit for the concerns of specific communities.

This is work that’s neither earnest nor brutally polemic, but rather a reminder that theatre is the most human of artforms.

In Melbourne, Donna Jackson, founder of Footscray’s Women’s Circus, has been making exemplary community theatre for years. Recently she’s been working with trade unions. Her spectacular show We Built This City was a site-specific work created with with former Hunters and Collectors frontman Mark Seymour, and featured, among other things, a surreal ballet of bulldozers.

Dust – an exploration of the grim history of the Australian asbestos industry – is their latest collaboration. Again a site-specific work, it was made originally for the Mechanic’s Institute in Ballarat and remounted in the beautiful Victorian space of Williamstown Town Hall, in Melbourne’s west.

It demonstrates Jackson’s talent for accessing the energies of diverse community groups. The show is backed by the Asbestos Diseases Society and its 60-voice choir includes singers from the Vctorian Trades Union Choir, local Williamstown songsters Willin Wimmin and the Ballarat Arts Academy Ensemble.

Dust is in two halves. In the first, the audience saunters around the huge space of the town hall visiting acts – three-minute plays, a magician, visual installations - in booths on either side, set up as in a fair. This is punctuated by a couple of songs from the main stage.

After interval it becomes a more conventional musical, in which stories glimpsed in the booths are expanded through song. Jackson again exploits multi-media to generate an operatic mode that embraces satire - it includes a marvellous parody of the ideal of the 1960s nuclear family so beloved of advertisers - and moments of sheer grandeur, as in the song Antarctica, based on the the diary entries and photographs of an Antarctic scientist who died of asbestos-related disease.

The politics is dealt with lightly but effectively – James Hardie is represented, for instance, by a corporate woman (Laura Lattuada), who is having problems with her shonky hairdresser before an important address to shareholders - taken, I am certain, from real documents - in which she speaks of a "difficult year", assures shareholders their money is safe and requests a salary raise for directors.

What binds the show together is Jackson’s sharp theatrical eye and the driving guitar of Mark Seymour. Seymour’s songs have the rock’n’roll power and lyricism of Bruce Springsteen, especially the Springsteen of The Ballad of Tom Joad. But he is good enough to transcend the comparison, giving this genre of social anger an antipodean twist. His songs pack a huge emotional punch, especially when they are amplified by 60 voices.

Without a trace of earnestness, but plenty of anger and grief, Dust relates the corporate scandal and individual tragedy of the history of asbestos manufacturing. It’s straight-up, moving and enormously entertaining. Community theatre at its very best.

This review was published in yesterday's Australian.

Car Maintenance Explosives and Love (CMXL), written and performed by Donna Jackson, original direction and dramaturgy Andrea Lemon. Midsumma Festival @ Gasworks, South Melbourne.

Donna Jackson's powerhouse solo show, Car Maintenance Explosives and Love, has attained the status of a minor classic. It premiered a decade ago, subsequently touring Australia and Britain, and its script was included in, and lent its name to, an anthology of lesbian writing edited by Susan Hawthorn. It even has its own handy acronym - CMXL. After a hiatus of a few years it's on again as part of the Midsumma Festival, and it's well worth a look.

Like Jackson herself, CMXL has worn well. Jackson founded the Women's Circus, so it's no surprise that this show includes a large component of physical theatre. And like the Melbourne Workers Theatre gigashow We Built This City, which Jackson directed last year, it features an industrial aesthetic, blue-collar rock and angle grinders. It's delivered in a full-on performance, which swings between an electric physical dynamism - fuelled by riffs from AC/DC or the Divinyls - and moments of tender poignancy.


It's a well-written piece which draws its complexities from a supple weaving of contrast rather than subtleties of writing. Donna Jackson's narrator is a car mechanic, obsessed by her American eight-cylinder car and her deteriorating relationship with her middle-class lover. She comes from a distinguished lineage of mechanics (her grandmother was a aeroplane technician in World War 2, her father a truckie, or "cartage contractor"). She describes a working class milieu in which emotional inarticulacy is balanced by a rich oral tradition, in which rough comedy or violence are often a cover for pain.

She meets her lover at a party, where she rescues her from an importunate sleaze by stuffing him headfirst into a fishtank. Romance blossoms over the duco (there is much in here about the erotic power of cars) and her lover moves in with her cat, evicting the pitbull terrier and introducing the concept of dinner parties. It begins with great sex (beautifully evoked by a sequence on ropes), domestic bliss and the joys of renovating her lover's EJ Holden, but soon the honeymoon begins to splinter under their differences. Jackson withdraws in a classically masculine fashion to her garage, where she find solace in the order of car manuals, so much more legible than relationships, and starts to take classes in demolition at the local TAFE from "Fast Eddie", so called because of his limp.

What rises to the surface of this show isn't so much the issue of sexual orientation - with its masculine/feminine polarities, this relationship seems much like many heterosexual couples - but of class. The lover and her friends are politically active, but the narrator wonders why she and her friends just talk, instead of taking direct action and blowing things up. She often feels marginalised by their conversations, of interest only when something goes wrong with their cars. But despite her impatience with their intellectualising, she finds that she is, herself, incapable of violent action; she understands its ugliness too well.

The relationship ends, in the best scene of the show, when her lover confesses that what most attracts her is the narrator's physical strength and incipient violence. She asks if she could "push her around" when they are making love. Jackson explodes with insult and rage, nearly throttling her lover. What she is protesting, without being able to articulate it, is the fetishisation of her working class background as a sexual turn-on, which exposes her lover's inability, finally, to understand her reality as a feeling human being. To Jackson's narrator, this is a kind of violence she cannot deal with. What divides them finally is an inability to see past the conditionings of class.

It adds up to a show that's hard to dislike, although it doesn't escape a feeling of datedness: circus skills in theatre are now a commonplace, and the audience interaction didn't, for me, add much to the show. Australian physical theatre has come a long way in the past decade. CMXL has some themes in common with Kage Physical Theatre's Headlock, which also sensitively and honestly explores issues of gender, emotional inarticulacy and violence; but theatrically speaking, Headlock is in a different realm. If Headlock is a theatrical equivalent of Radiohead, CMXL is like old-fashioned rock and roll: plain, honest theatre, which serves up exactly what it promises. No bullshit.