The catastrophe of the body is never far away in Samuel Beckett's writing. Mortal, decaying, risible, smelly, full of inconvenient humours and vapours and needs, the human body steps forward in all its poignant obscenity. It's the eternal answer to human hubris, a tube of flesh which serves only to transform nutrition into dung. So too in The End, one of several novellas Beckett wrote in the 1940s that presage, in theme and often in phrase, many of the later works that generated his fame.


Written with Beckett's characteristic stylistic parsimony, The End is an exquisite work of prose. It's clearly an earlier work, since it permits itself flourishes - notably a subtext of Christian symbolism - that Beckett pared down in his later work. It shouldn't be surprising that this first person monologue translates into stunning theatre, but somehow it is: Beckett is such a purist of form that his prose gives the impression of needing nothing except the page and a reader to generate its full imaginative life. What could a performer add to this?

Robert Menzies provides one answer in this gem of a production at the Malthouse, not so much adding to Beckett as embodying Beckett's story for us. Directed with perfectly judged restraint by Eamon Flack, there is nothing here aside from the performer, the words and the dimensions of the stage. This is theatre stripped to its most essential, radiating a sternly focused power, which beautifully folds the exposure of performance into the emotional duress of Beckett's story.

The set (there is no design credit aside from the lighting, and the set was reportedly posted to Menzies) consists of a wall with a door in it and a floor on which there is marked a cross in white tape. At the beginning, Menzies enters through the door and slowly, with a sense of loathing and reluctance, makes his way to the cross and places his feet on it. Once he is on the cross, he expressionlessly examines his audience, those who have come to witness his crucifixion: at last, he speaks. Teegan Lee's minimal lighting design - there are, I think, four cues in all - shapes the space around him, at once imprisoning and exposing the actor, and at last creating a darkness without perspective in which Beckett's ghost flickers and vanishes.

The story he tells is of the adventures of a homeless man who has fallen from better days. He tells us of his peregrinations after he is thrown out of a charitable hostel, in a suit that is too small for him, his own clothes having been burnt. He has a bowler hat, a tie, "blue, with kinds of little stars", a small amount of money. He knows that "the end was near, at least fairly near". He drifts through the city, recounting his various places of lodging; he is cheated by a dishonest landlady; he sits by a horse trough. He encounters his son, a businessman in the city and an "insufferable son of a bitch". He meets a man he had known "in former times", who lives in a cave and offers him shelter. Like Christ, he exits the city on an ass, but instead of celebration he is greeted by small boys throwing stones.

Unable to stay in a single place for any length of time, Beckett's anti-hero ends up living in a shed in the back of a grand house, hiding in a boat he has adapted to keep out rats, and begging for a living. The story finishes with a vision of his floating downstream into the sea, crushed by the hugeness of the natural world, "the sea, the sky, the mountains and the islands", and "then scattered to the uttermost confines of space".

As well as its subtextual Christ, the story echoes an ancient Irish poem, Buile Suibhne (The Madness of Sweeney), which recounts the travail of an Irish King who is cursed with insanity. Crazy with fear, he can't stay in a single spot but leaps from place to place in the wild "like a bird", homeless and lost, and at last is killed by a cowherd as he is "eating his meal out of the cowdung". As the poem says, "Wretched is the life of one homeless, / sad is the life, O fair Christ!" In The End, Beckett transforms this abject mythical figure into its contemporary version: a filthy, half-mad homeless man, eking out the tiny details of his life invisibly on the edge of society.

Which is no more than to say that although this is a short work, it encompasses whole worlds. Menzies' performance brings every nuance of this story into present life: its tragedy, its beauty, its obscenity, its humour. Most of the time the lighting focuses on his face and his hands, which are almost cruelly expressive. The performance gradually builds up to the desolate beauty of its finale, attentive to the crucial detail of each moment: it's Menzies at his unafraid best, straddling both grandeur and humility, pity and revulsion. Unmissable theatre.

It's perhaps unfortunate that I saw The Dream Life of Butterflies, the new play by Raimondo Cortese that opens the MTC's 2011 Studio season, the following night. It certainly suffers in direct comparison: another example of minimal theatre, this production demonstrates what happens when a text exposed to the demands of performance lacks the largeness and profundity of Beckett. Well, we can't all be Beckett, and life would be very dull if we were.

Still, it's a long time since I was this bored in a theatre. I don't have a long acquaintance with Cortese's work: the first thing I saw was Ranter's Holiday in 2007, which I liked very much indeed on both viewings. Holiday gave us two men (Paul Lum and Patrick Moffatt) who encounter each other at a resort. They are strangers, they don't know each other at all, and their conversation consists of inconsequential ramblings, punctuated by a cappella baroque songs. I thought this exquisite, buoyant theatre that beautifully exposed the fragility of human relationship.

The next was Affection, at the Arts Centre, which featured friends on a couch, making inconsequential conversation. I thought this didn't work so well: where this conceit worked brilliantly between strangers, it lacked nuance and fire when it came to expressing relationship. I had similar reservations about Ranter's offering for the Melbourne Festival last year, Intimacy, which seemed to me even more mannered. Cortese, I felt, was in a stylistic rut; so I was curious to see what he did when he was working purely as a playwright, away from his collaborative ventures with Ranters.

Well, The Dream Life of Butterflies is about two sisters, Vanessa (Natasha Herbet) and Zelda (Margaret Mills). They sit around, on benches this time, making inconsequential conversation. The difference here is that underneath this inconsequential conversation there is a plot: these sisters are reunited after a long estrangement, and we gradually get to hear about their lives, the reasons for Vanessa's long unexplained absence, and that Zelda has been raising Vanessa's son during her absence. There is a lot of affable smiling, pace Lum and Moffatt, a lot of idle chit chat that (I suppose) reveals the distances between these sisters as well as their desire to renew their relationship. Anastasia Russell-Head introduces the three acts of the play with some baroque music on a harpsichord, again reflecting the Ranters productions, although I couldn't really work out why.

The story that emerges is as banal as the dialogue which reveals it, and there's no chance here of communicating the woundedness we are presumably supposed to feel. The Dream Life of Butterflies seems like a marriage of avant garde theatre and mainstream "well-made" plays that turn on emotional revelation for their power, taking the worst of both worlds and placing them in a universe of edgeless tedium. The play runs mercilessly along the same catatonic rhythm for more than 90 minutes, with never a variation.

Cortese has a weirdly Tourettian idea about what subtext is: he seems to think it has independent life that goes on underneath spoken language, like an underground river that bears no relationship at all to the exposed geography above-ground, with occasional eruptions into bald statement. More interestingly (as in, say, Pinter's or Mamet's plays) subtext works as a complex disturbance of conscious language, a retreating and gathering of meaning that intensifies its complexity and significance as the surface action evolves. Silence isn't simply space that must be filled up with a bland narrative.

I certainly don't understand Cortese's one-size-fits-all aesthetic. If this is supposed to be uber-naturalism, I couldn't believe the characters, who seemed like automata, and I didn't believe the plot, and I certainly didn't believe the end. Perhaps it's a sophisticated joke on us all, but I missed the punchline.

I can't blame the performers, who both shaped what they could out of this strangely emotionless text. And Marg Horwell's set frames the performances with stylish cool. I think director Heather Bolton's decision to do a Ranters on the play is a mistake, because it heightens the imaginative poverties of this text; but on the other hand, it's hard to know what else she might have done with such excruciatingly mannered dialogue. Deeply puzzled on this one.

Picture: Robert Menzies in The End. Photo: Jeff Busby

The End, by Samuel Beckett, directed by Eamon Flack. Lighting design by Teegan Lee, stage manager Bec Allen. Performed by Robert Menzies. Belvoir St production, Malthouse Theatre. Until March 11.

The Dream Life of Butterflies, by Raimondo Cortese, directed by Heather Bolton. Set and costumes by Marg Horwell, lighting design by Jenny Hector, stage manager Julia Smith. Lawler Studio @ MTC Theatre, Melbourne Theatre Company until April 2.