Dorothy Hewett would have been amused. Last Tuesday, Ms TN high-tailed it to the Sumner Theatre to see The Man from Mukinupin. I turned up to what I thought was the pre-show scrum, wondered why no-one was checking tickets at the theatre door (how odd, I thought, and shrugged, dismissing the thought), and sat down to enjoy the show. Which I did.

On my way out, still vibrating with Hewett's lyrical passion, I bumped into a well-known Melbourne poet. What did you think? I asked. Oh, he said, it's Hewett attempting to write a Shakespearean comedy, and, well, frankly, it's a bit of a mess... At which point, my mind became a series of exclamation marks. How, I wondered, could you see that play and think first of all about messiness? And a familiar cloud that I associate with the world of poetry, which so often seems like a tea party of Victorian ladies carefully arranging the doilies of reputation, rose like a dank miasma in my brain.


But there were a couple of alarm-bells. The program said the show went for two and a half hours, with a 20 minute interval: but we were clapping the actors after 90 minutes. How strange, I thought, they don't usually make that mistake on a program: and off I went home, beset by vague worry. Over the next couple of days I hunted unsuccessfully for my copy of the play, which along with a whole bunch of other feral books, seems to have vanished into the dimmer recesses of L-space. Finally abandoning the quest, I rang the MTC's PR staff to check the discrepancies.

You will, of course, be way ahead of me. I had turned up at interval, not realising that Tuesday shows start at an hour and a half earlier than usual, and I had happily watched half a play, thinking it was the entire show. Perhaps, thought a chastened Ms TN, I had been mistaken in so hastily condemning the doily-ideology of the poet: perhaps the play really was a shambles. So this Tuesday, neurotically checking my watch, I once again wended my way to the MTC, and saw all of the play.

Is it a mess? Perhaps. I'm not so sure this matters very much. Such cavils remind me of John Dryden's discussion of "dramatic poesy". (Dryden was the first Poet Laureate, and in his day a shining light of the Restoration stage, newly emerged after a long hiatus in English drama caused by the closing of the theatres.) While allowing that Shakespeare was paramount for his vital portrayal of Nature, being superior in his imaginings to the nancy classicism of the French, Dryden concludes his discussion by suggesting that verse is "a rule and a line by which [the poet] keeps his building compact and even, which otherwise lawless imagination would raise either irregularly or loosely".

Order and regularity - if perhaps trumped by the radiant sun of Shakespearean "genius" which is, fortunately, very rare (and he was already a dead poet) - was all. To this end, Dryden rewrote several of his forebears, including an operatic adaptation in rhyming couplets of Milton's Paradise Lost, one of the greatest works of blank verse in English. Given Milton's famous attack on the "the jingling sound of like endings", rhyme being "a troublesome and modern bondage" that shackled the "ancient liberty" of poetry, it seems a foolhardy and impertinent exercise. Dryden's Miltonic adventures suggest that metrical propriety is is merely the outward clothing of an unpoetical moral obedience.

Dorothy Hewett would have given Dryden conniptions. She was lawless in her writing and her life, bowing to no rules. She wrote good verse if she chose to, and ignored it when she didn't; she acted with a fine inattention to propriety of any kind, but always with a passionate truthfulness. Worst of all, she was a woman. In the 17th century, an outspoken woman of letters was considered at best an absurdity and at worst an obscenity. Although things have certainly changed since then, the rags of those attitudes have a strange persistence in many literary circles.

Certainly The Man from Mukinupin demonstrates none of the tidy formality so admired by Dryden. It is a glorious patchwork of pastiche, merrily stitching Australian folksong, vaudeville and Elizabethan epithalamion to some wicked imitations of the more moralistic Victorian poets. It's structured as a classic comedy (everyone gets married in the end). But this is a comedy that talks about Aboriginal genocide, and that takes a satirical glance at the myth of nationhood forged through the blood sacrifice of World War 1, situating both in an evironment degraded by salination caused by farming. The erotic relationships of each of the couples are underlaid by a dark subtext of violence, self-destruction and despair.

In short, Hewett breaks every rule going, which is perhaps why she is often treated with suspicion (as she said, theatre critics always called her a "poet", and poetry critics always said she was a "playwright"). But she breaks the rules with irresistible elan. The patchwork becomes a whole thing because of the fusing force of her passion: passionate anger, passionate desire. And perhaps most importantly, by her direct, unembarrassed desire to make beauty.

For those unmoved by such passions, it's easy to find fault with the text: the first act is perhaps a little clumsy, and the second act (which on two viewings I decided was quite brilliant) features some contrived deux ex machina plotting. And so on. Certainly it's not neat, and perhaps the first act could have benefited from some cutting. But to me such suggestions are a little like saying that Blake ought to work more on his scansion: they miss the point. Quod scripsi scripsi and all that: chilly perfection was never Hewett's bag. And the fact is that the flaws are a little like the asymmetries and blemishes of a loved face: they are its living imperfections, the idiosyncrasies that make it unlike any other.

Wesley Enoch has given The Man from Mukinupin a vitally lucid production that is very much in the spirit of the writing. It subtly highlights the subtext of racism by casting Indigenous actors wearing whiteface, but otherwise lets the writing speak for itself.

Richard Roberts's set is beautiful. Much of the action takes place before a curtain of calico sheets, hung as if on a washing line, which he also uses for some great shadowplay. When the curtains are drawn back, it reveals an edgeless space behind it, a sand-floored, impressionistic picture of Mukinupin seen through the imagery of fringe-dwellers: a broken down caravan with cheap cotton curtains, a stone-edged campfire, the naked limbs of trees, moodily lit by Rachel Burke. The band, playing Alan Johns's arrangement of Jim Cotter's original music, are seen in half-light backstage, near a wooden counter that represents the General Store.

Enoch has directed it as music theatre rather than a musical, with an emphasis on theatricality that generates hugely enjoyable performances from his excellent cast. Suzannah Bayes-Morton, in the double role of Mukinupin belle Polly Perkins and her outcast half-white half sister Lily, perhaps has not the strongest of voices, but makes up for this by the impure poignancy of her singing. Her songs, backed by a wittily directed chorus, were highlights.

Many characters are twinned, with siblings acting as archetypal mirrors of the light and dark sides of Munikupin: the brothers Jack and Harry Tuesday, played by Craig Annis, or Eek and Zeek Perkins (Max Gillies). Others, like the damaged wife of Eek, Edie, are double-natured. Edie is possessed by an oracular spirit which speaks her crushed desires and hatreds, her amplified voice echoing through the theatre like a dark angel. But all of them - David Page, in three roles, Valentina Levkowicz as Clemmy Hummer, Melodie Reynolds as Clarry Hummer and Widow Tuesday, and Amanda Muggleton being fabulous as the melodramatic actress with an eye for the main chance, Mercy Montebello - deserve mention.

Although I was never bored, I was ready for the first act to finish when it did. But the second act - and as you know, I speak from dutifully repeated watching - runs like a river in flood. It's a wonderful play, here given a revival that respects it in all the right ways. It shows that in her political intuitions, Hewett was way before her time, and that stylistically she deserves to rank with Patrick White as a defining Australian playwright. Like White, she draws her theatre from vulgar traditions such as vaudeville as well as modernism, but her attack on vernacular speech has more sheerly joyous vigor, a knowing intimacy that White could not quite attain. And her anger and passion are still startlingly contemporary.

Picture: Suzannah Bayes-Morton as Lily Perkins in The Man from Mukinupin. Photo: Earl Carter

The Man from Mukinupin by Dorothy Hewett, directed by Wesley Enoch. Musical direction Alan John, set and costumes by Richard Roberts, lighting design by Rachel Burke, choreography by Jack Webster. With Craig Annis, Suzannah Bayes-Morton, Max Gillies, Valentina Levkowicz, Amanda Muggleton, David Page, Melodie Reynolds and Kerry Walker. Company B and Melbourne Theatre Company, Sumner Theatre, until July 19.