I wish I could adequately explain the irrational joy that The Rabble's latest work, Special, invoked in me when I saw it last week. There is something in it of pure theatre, unafraid act, that set a flame in the gloom that has bedevilled me this long Melbourne winter. Or maybe it's just liberating to see something this angry.

In Special, The Rabble confront the psychic disintegration of contemporary life. Emma Valente and her collaborators tap into the increasingly ominous sense that it is later than we think, that the endemic violence that powers the machinery of our society - violence against people, against meaning and relationship, against the living systems of our planet - is accumulating to a point of crisis. In such a time, what can meaning mean?


We are left with the absurd, the abyss over which our attempts at continuity and knowledge and purpose flail and expose their emptiness. Yet what The Rabble track in their vignettes is not, for all its sardonic exposures of failure, a trajectory towards nihilism, but a strange and exhilarating affirmation. "If nothing had any meaning, [nihilism] would be right," said Camus in the 1940s. "But there is something that still has a meaning." It's that "something" - relationship, the possibility of transformation - that is at the centre of this extraordinary work of theatre.

In Kate Davis's design, the stage is surfaced with a deep layer of earth, topped with a thin layer of a disconcertingly artificial green, with the earth mounded on one side to create a small hill. On three sides it's surrounded by what appear at first to be white curtains but which are in fact white paper streamers. Special consists of a series of scenes between the spectacularly pregnant Special (Mary Helen Sassman) and her mother Goldie (Liz Jones). When the lights first come up, Jones, in a white pantsuit, is slogging away on an exercise bike, while Sassman, decked out in a huge Indian headdress, is lying on her back, ostentatiously licking an ice cream. It's worth seeing for this image alone, which somehow evokes the emptiness of consumerism in one gloriously absurd moment.

The lighting and set emphasise toxic hues of green or oxidic white, so it seems that our characters are enclosed in a world which unsuccessfully mimics the natural world. Within this frame of the artificial, Sassman's pregnant belly (no illusion, there's a real baby in there) and the exposed earth suggest a chthonic anarchy on the point of eruption. This eruption - of anger, desire, violence, love - is more or less what happens through the show. Valente exploits some extremely effective lighting and sound design to create an almost Artaudian sense of transformation. Only this is - how do I put it? - a distinctly female exploration, in which conception and rebirth are much more than metaphors appropriated into masculinised meanings. There's a strong whiff of Hélène Cixous's "repressed" about the whole thing.

The relationship between Goldie and Special is both antagonistic and mutually dependent, and it's this relationship which gives vitality and shape to the bizarre rituals which they explore during the course of the performance. They collect the rubble of transcendence, scraps and fragments of ritual stolen from a grab bag of cultures - Native American, Spanish American, Catholic, tribal African - which they pile into an increasingly grotesque pastiche of faith.

Goldie announces it is her "special day", which involves an elaborately solemn costuming and which collapses into comic anti-climax. Instead, the mysteriously pregnant Special, whose child we begin to suspect is immaculately conceived, begins to create her own ritual. What's interesting is how this sense of transformation is embedded in the ridiculous: there's a lot that makes no sense, or at least, doesn't make any common sense. But it's riveting theatre.

Its theatrical movement makes me think of Octavio Paz's comments in his book on the sacred, Conjunctions and Disjunctions: "History is a discourse. But the rebellions of the twentieth century have violated both the rules of dramatic action and those of representation. We have unforeseen irruptions that disturb the linear nature of history ... both the events and the actors betray the text of the play. They write another text, or rather invent one. This is the end of discourse and rational legibility." Special mimics the formation of this "other text", opening possibility beyond the enclosures of words.

I haven't seen all The Rabble's work, having missed their Sydney productions, but Special is the first show I've seen that isn't hobbled by a sense of over-aestheticised seriousness. It's funny, tough, unafraid, and beautifully realised.


Silent Disco, which is part of the Full Tilt season at the Victorian Arts Centre, arrives from Sydney with a raft of glowing reviews. It's fair to say that the glow didn't transfer to me; without exactly hating it, I was scratchily disappointed. I guess I expected more than a competently realised, conventional social drama.

Lachlan Philpott's play about a doomed relationship between two misfit kids is directed by Lee Lewis, last seen here with her beautiful production of Twelfth Night for Bell Shakespeare. As with Robert Reid's The Joy of Text, the play is set in a school, and related through the matrix of educators; but in its tracking of adolescent breakdown, it recalls Declan Greene's Moth, recently remounted at the Malthouse. Unlike Moth, which created an authentic theatrical diction for its characters, Silent Disco never escapes the sense that this is an adult vision of young people. It's not surprising to find that Philpott has been a teacher.

Unlike Reid's The Joy of Text, teaching itself is presented unproblematically, as a known (if sometimes failing) function: a central character is the well-meaning English teacher Mrs Petchall (Camilla Ah Kin), observing with concern the disconnected, alienated generation hooked up to their iPods and Facebook. The "silent disco" of the title is one in which everyone dances to his or her own headphone music, which here becomes a somewhat obvious metaphor for social disconnection. I'm not sure it's that simple: this is an authority's perception of youth culture, which only awkwardly enters into the experience of what that culture is.

The central characters are troubled teens Tamara (Sophie Hensser) and Squid (Meyne Wyatt) who wind up towards inevitable crisis. In both cases, slightly disturbingly, their problem is absent, uncaring mothers - Tamara lives with her gay father, the Indigenous Squid with his auntie. Their awkward romance is derailed by Squid's criminal brother Dane (Kirk Page), who targets Tamara for seduction as revenge for being thrown out of the family house, and to undercut Squid's nascent ambitions to make something of himself.

Silent Disco affirms all sorts of worthy impulses - concern for deprived youth, the role of education, and so on - in the lingua franca of heightened naturalism. In two acts, it's overwritten and you can hear the dramatic shifts coming a mile off. The odd verbal or theatrical pyrotechnics don't prevent its being weighed down by predictability. The British have a brilliant tradition of socially committed work that looks at the experiences of alienated or deprived young people - think Ken Loach's devastating film Kes, or Tony Richardson's The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, or more recently Shane Meadowes's This Is England. Philpott's intentions are clearly in the same arena, but Silent Disco never gets near this kind of plain-speaking anger or emotional power, and it certainly isn't anywhere close in terms of political intelligence.

With her hard working and committed cast, Lee Lewis's direction injects the production with moments of vitality. There's Tamara's evocation of her first experience of sex, a delicate subject that here attains a moment of real theatrical power, or a comic portrayal of check-out chicks at the supermarket, sharply observed vignettes of social irony. Aside from these moments, it seldom touched me. It's fine, as far as it goes; it just doesn't go very far.

Pictures: Top: Liz Jones in Special. Photo: Marg Howell. Bottom: Meyne Wyatt (left) and Sophie Hensser in Silent Disco.

Special, directed by Emma Valente, concept by Emma Valente, Mary Helen Sassman. Devised and performed by Liz Jones and Mary Helen Sassman. Lighting, sound and composition by Emma Valente. The Rabble @ La Mama Courthouse, until August 21.

Silent Disco by Lachlan Philpott, directed by Lee Lewis. Designed by Justin Nadella, lighting design by Ross Graham, sound design and composition by Stefan Gregory. With Camilla Ah Kin, Sophie Hensser, Kirk Page and Meyne Wyatt. Griffin Theatre Company, Hothouse Theatre and Australian Theatre for Young People, at the Victorian Arts Centre Fairfax Studio, until August 13.

Few poets write of desire with such passionate delicacy as Federico García Lorca. Lyric, erotic and savage, his poems celebrate the anguish of absence, the bittersweet longing for what cannot be possessed. When he writes of his home city Granada, he imagines an ideal beauty, the "spiritual colour" which Andalusia woke within him. This beauty exists within and beyond the "poor cowardly city", the "miser's paradise" that contains "the worst bourgeoisie in all Spain", of which he wrote bitterly only months before he was shot dead near Granada by Fascists. He saw the real as clearly as the possible.

In Lorca's poetry, repression squeezes desire into a defiant brilliance. Lorca was gay - some claim that is the reason that he was murdered - and so, in a world of absolute divisions, he existed on the penumbra between both sexes, a fluid creature of the twilight, weaving his poems out of the blinding contrasts between night and day. He made of them paeans to life in which beauty is a measure of mortality: "Like all ideal things," as he says in a poem about fountains, "they are moving / on the very edge / of death."


His theatre articulates these tensions in different ways. Lorca's plays attacked the bourgeois theatre of his time both stylistically and thematically, uniting a burning passion for social justice with a take on tragic poetry that incorporated influences from Shakespeare to Surrealism. He is most famous for his "rural trilogy", Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba, the last of which he completed two months before his assassination. In all of them, but especially in The House of Bernarda Alba (which is subtitled "A Drama of Women in the Villages of Spain"), Lorca presents a critique of the place of women in Spanish society.

The House of Bernarda Alba is the story of the newly widowed Bernarda and her five daughters. Bernarda turns the frustrated rage of her marriage into an uncompromising tyranny over her children, insisting that she is the only authority in the house. As one daughter - enriched by her step-father's death - is courted, the others are riven by jealousy and desire. The youngest and most beautiful daughter becomes the mistress of her sister's fiance, with tragic results. It's a bitterly savage portrayal of the internalisation by women of the chains of patriarchy.

This is the world that The Rabble, one of the most interesting young companies around town, explores in Cageling, a work of physical and visual theatre that springs from Lorca's final play. Created, co-directed and designed by Kate Davis and Emma Valente, it is most certainly not, except in the most abstract sense, a performance of the play: aside from a few fragments Lorca's text scarcely exists, except in how images from the text have been amplified and embodied. In fact, often it seems more like an attempt at physicalising the qualities of Lorca's poetry, which is, along with a little Ovid, interpolated into the minimal text. [Correction: the poem, Grandmother's warnings to Carlota and Ana, is actually by Ana Rosetti. Though I would have sworn it was Lorca]. While Lorca (with, I think, a certain irony) said his play was intended as a "photographic documentary", this is a theatre of dream and nightmare, seeking to tap the unconscious in parallel ways to Lorca's surreal lyrics.

I had an interesting time watching this show: my responses shifted wildly through its duration, from irritated impatience to straight-out impressed. The design is stunning: the set is a wooden box placed in the middle of the space, with paned windows facing out to the audience, who sit a couple of metres away. The inside of the box is painted white, and the costumes and various props are black, reflecting the austerely beautiful world Lorca describes in his play. Near the window is a microphone.

When the audience enters, the actors are already inside, trapped in this box from which they cannot escape. There are five of them - Daniel Schlusser, Dana Miltins, Mary Helen Sassman, Jayne Tuttle and Pier Carthew. Both men and women are sexually ambiguous: they wear the constricting dress of formal mourning but are sometimes bearded, sometimes male, and they all wear ballet shoes.

For 20 minutes, nothing happens: the performers shuffle from one side of the stage to the other in tiny ballet steps, rehearsing the mundane domestic routine. At one point, Schlusser moves across to the microphone and taps it, before retreating without saying anything. Expectation is drawn out to such a pitch that for me the thread broke: I wasn't wound into the action, as can happen with this kind of uncompromising refusal, but rather thrown aggressively outside it. The windowpanes already forbid direct relationship, and the actors face the centre of the stage, in a wholly contained, alienated world. I really thought I might scream.

And yet - and yet - gradually, backed by Matt Davis's nuanced sound design, the show winds up, almost imperceptibly, into an extraordinary expression of repressed desire that explodes volcanically into violence. I missed The Rabble's two earlier shows, Corvus and Salome, which were both produced in Sydney, but I can see why this work has prompted some people to draw comparisons with Romeo Castellucci. Although The Rabble is doing quite different things, the ambition - and often, the potency - of the theatrical images this company creates are in the same universe. When these images work, they are sheerly strange, poetic, erotic, disturbing. Their sense is the language of dream.

Aside from its oneiric choreography, Cageling's power comes from the courage of the performances, which are rigidly disciplined, and yet reach into extremity. Schlusser, playing Bernarda Alba, is compelling: he is both male and female, as Alba herself takes on the role of patriarchal tyranny, or like a priest, whose spiritual authority is signalled by feminine dress. His is the voice which insists, as Pier Carthew attempts to recite a poem into the microphone, on the emotional truth of its language: this is real, what is this reality, what is it?

The minute exactness of the performances and movement play against what feels like a fuzziness in the broader direction and structure of the piece. This kind of theatre, like a poem, depends crucially on rhythm: the pulse of contrast, the shaping of transition. These are aspects Castellucci judges to a micron. Thinking it over afterwards, I thought it was here that I felt most problems with the show: its structural rhythmic uncertainty means that the relationships between stillness and movement often fail to be kinetic, each investing each with potential energy. Sometimes the inhibition it seeks to express seems instead an aesthetic inhibition.

In short, it's fascinating, frustrating, beautiful. And also clearly in evolution. I'm sure later shows - I saw it on opening night - have developed from what I saw, and I'd be very curious to see it again. Sydneysiders get a chance to see it for themselves when it opens at Carriageworks on June 24.

Picture: Dana Miltins in Cageling. Photo: Daisy Noyes

Cageling, devised from The House of Bernarda Alba by Federico García Lorca. Co-created, designed and directed, by Emma Valente & Kate Davis, sound design by Matt Davis, dramaturgy by Dan Spielman. With Daniel Schlusser, Pier Carthew, Dana Miltins, Mary Helen Sassman and Jayne Tuttle. Fortyfive Downstairs unti tomorrow night (booked out). Carriageworks, Sydney, June 24 to July 3.