La beauté, “Beauty is difficult, Yeats” said Aubrey Beardsley
when Yeats asked why he drew horrors
or at least not Burne-Jones
and Beardsley knew he was dying and had to
make his hit quickly

Hence no more B-J in his product.

So very difficult, Yeats, beauty so difficult.

- Ezra Pound, Cantos

I left Whiteley's Incredible Blue last night with Pound's verse circling around my head. Barry Dickins's new play, subtitled "an hallucination", is almost an essay on the proposition of the difficulty and necessity of beauty, through the medium of the enfant terrible of Australian art, Brett Whiteley.


Whiteley is a compelling figure: part artist, part charlatan, myth-maker extraordinaire, he died of a heroin overdose in 1992, aged only 53, in a country motel. So much of his work is trashy product for the cannibalistic art market that at once made and destroyed him, and yet his sublime gift for colour and line gave us some of us our most iconic paintings. Dickins, however, isn't interested in moralising, nor in biography. What he has created instead is a poetic riff that recreates Whiteley's restless imaginative excesses, a theatrical meditation on art, beauty and self-destruction.

The title not only recalls Whiteley's fondness for the colour ultramarine blue, but colloquially suggests Whiteley's argument ("blue") with life itself. It's probably Dickins's best play, and certainly a play only he could have written: here his Dylan Thomas-esque ear for rhythm and colour is given full rein, looping and relooping in an avalanche of imagery. These flights are grounded by an earthy self-awareness, a deprecating humour that pricks the impulse towards romanticising the artist, seeking instead to make luminous the sensual passion that informed his paintings. The blur of the sentimental is always a danger in a work like this, and this play never goes there.

The conceit is simple. Brett Whiteley's soul is in purgatory, trapped in the squalid motel room in which he died. He is played with a startling verisimilitude by Neil Pigot, who with the addition of a curly wig looks almost exactly like him, but it's clear from the opening moments that this isn't intended to be a realistic representation. Pigot plays him as a clumsy dancer, half child, half cynic, regretful and regretless, looking back at the failures of a passionate life from the dispassion of death, a collision of quicksilver and human flesh borne down by the gravity of mortality. It's a bravura performance, exact and compelling, which drills into the observation that might be Whiteley's epitaph: "I'm not good. I'm a good artist."

Julian Meyrick's production is carefully designed to frame and amplify the text. The set is simple: a wide stage, featuring only a messy double bed that recalls Tracy Ermin's squalid autobiographical My Bed, a side table loaded with pills, a radio on the floor. To one side is the band (Pietro Fine, Robert George and Robert Calvert). The art is suggested visually by the barest of cues - a mobile of birds in flight to the right of the stage and a few projected graphics. The paintings are principally invoked through music, Whiteley's line echoed in the soaring notes of a saxophone.

Hallucinatory stage directions are read in voice-over by Richard Bligh, Keonie Dodd and Daniela Farinacci, sometimes overlapping each other, punctuating the various movements of the monologue with vivid, oneiric mise en scenes. This is a reality created almost entirely through Dickins's words.

I wished that the acoustics at Fortyfive Downstairs were less muddy, as the music sometimes overwhelms the text. And occasionally Meyrick's directorial eye slackens: Pigot's physicalisations - playful dance, jumping on the bed - can tip over into the merely silly. When Pigot's gestures, however odd they are, unite with the extremities of the text, it creates a potent expressiveness, but this is not unfaltering. It made me think of the sort of precise physicalisations Anita Hegh created in Peter Evans's production of The Yellow Wallpaper: the performance language here is not as sharp. But these are quibbles. This is a sound production of a challenging and complex text, from a writer who should not be forgotten.



It felt serendipitous that I should see Foley on the same day as Whiteley's Incredible Blue: it was a day for Australian icons. Gary Foley, Aboriginal activist, uncompromising anarchist and unrepentant larrikin, is a living repository of a fascinating and shamefully little-known aspect of Australian history: the battle for self-determination and land rights for Aboriginal people. Rachel Maza Long's production is basically a lecture tarted up with a cardboard set that recalls a television talk show, with four screens showing various media - photographs, graphics, television footage. It's plain, unpretentious theatre, and absolutely riveting.

As with Ilbijerri's Jack Charles Versus The Crown, this is an exercise in autobiographical theatre. Gary Foley presents himself in his "native habitat" as an Aboriginal historian, which is a room scattered with archive boxes. Late in life, he tells us, he became a creature he despised, an academic (spit), graduating with honours in history from Melbourne University (spit), and now can be observed in his rooms at Victoria University. From here, he tells us the story of his life, which - as Foley was part of some of its most important events - is also an introduction to the wider history of black struggle in Australia.

It's a warts and all presentation, and often hilarious. It opens with a video of the young Foley on the lawns of Parliament House, being buttonholed by a disapproving matron in a twinset. At first he attempts to explain the aims of the protest, but soon he loses patience and roundly abuses her. When Foley himself, sans beard and long hair, 61 years old, steps onto the stage, he tells us that this angry young man is dead. "Now I'm a grumpy old man," he says.

Foley's often controversial life is full of colourful anecdote. He was one of the founders of the Aboriginal Embassy on the lawn of Parliament House in Canberra, a member of Black Power, which started the first free legal and medical services for Aboriginals (or anyone) in Australia, and even co-designed the Aboriginal flag. Importantly, he is also an actor. Indigenous theatre has been from its beginning a political theatre, the most consciously political we have; it's here that the very European notion of theatre as social revolution exists as a living thing.

Foley was a member of Sydney's Black Theatre, founded under Bob Maza at the Nimrod, and was in the cast of the ground-breaking 1972 political revue Basically Black. This is a legendary production, and one of the highlights of Foley is a short showing of some of the sketches filmed by the ABC for a pilot. The series was never made, presumably because it was considered "too political". On the evidence of those few minutes, Basically Black is the funniest tv show that was never made. You can only sigh for what could have been.

He outlines the history of Aboriginal activism against the background of the notorious White Australia policy and the wider international Civil Rights movement. This history reaches back to Federation, and forward as Foley traces his own involvement in the protests of the 1970s and the various governmental betrayals of the Aboriginal quest for Land Rights (it finishes by making the point that Native Title is an entirely different question to Land Rights).

Foley highlighted the shameful fact that I know much more about the US Civil Rights movement than I do about the history of Indigenous activism here. Even so, I had no idea that the early 20th century boxer Jack Johnson - in his time the most famous black person on the planet - was a prominent activist, or of his far-reaching influence on Indigenous politics here. This history is not only necessary; it's fascinating. If nothing else, that these stories remain largely untold demonstrates how colonial Australian culture remains.

And you'll seldom be taught history as entertainingly as in this show. Invigoratingly irreverent, driven by an unflinching lifelong passion for justice, it makes absorbing theatre. As the Age said of Foley himself: "If his ego is epic, as his opponents allege, so is his story." Foley's the one to tell it, and you'd be mad to miss it.

Pictures: Top: Neil Pigot as Brett Whiteley. Photo: Jeff Busby. Bottom, Gary Foley as Gary Foley.

Whiteley's Incredible Blue by Barry Dickins, directed by Julian Meyrick. Designed by Meredith Rogers, lighting by Kerry Saxby. Performed by Neil Pigot, with musicians Robert Calvert, Robert George, Pietro Fine. Melbourne Festival, fortyfivedownstairs, until October 23.

Foley, written, performed and co-devised by Gary Foley, directed by Rachael Maza Long. Co-devised by Jon Hawkes, co-written by Tony Birch. Audio and lighting by Danny Pettingill, costume and design by Emily Barrie. Ilbijerri Theatre, Melbourne Festival. Fairfax Studio, Victorian Arts Centre, until October 15.

In the past few years, adaptations of classic plays have become more the norm than otherwise in Australian innovative theatre. Two directors in particular wrenched opened the Pandora's box. Barrie Kosky led the way from the 1990s with refigured classics, such as Lear or the baroque opera Poppea, while Benedict Andrews's explored an austere theatricality in shows such as The War of the Roses. And there's Simon Stone's adaptations, from Hayloft's visually luscious Chekhov Recut: Platonov to the controversial Malthouse/STC production Baal to his sensitive reworking of Ibsen's The Wild Duck.

All these directors demonstrate the far-reaching influence of European auteur theatre on Australian work. Kosky and Andrews work as much in Europe as they do in Australia (Kosky, now the director of Berlin's Komische Oper, seems to have vanished from the local scene almost completely). Then there's Daniel Schlusser, who has been working rather more under the radar and whose work has been leading him in a strikingly different direction. Over the past few years he's been conducting a fascinating exploration of theatricality, mainly in the institutional shelter of the VCA, that has produced some of the most exciting work that Melbourne has seen in the past few years.

I wouldn't say Schlusser adapts classics so much as blows them up: this work is much more than rewriting. Using a practice he calls "hyper-realism", he makes theatre out of classic texts that is not so much a textual exploration as a haunting, a demonstration of how these works live in our collective unconscious. With his collaborators, he creates an alternative theatrical reality that is at once located firmly in the present and the past. The first I saw of these works was A Dollhouse, an investigation of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House at the VCA. The Dollhouse at Fortyfive Downstairs is a revisiting of this production with a (mostly) new cast, and it demonstrates how polished Schlusser's practice has become.

Watching it, I was forcibly reminded of a show I saw in Britain back in 2008: Chris Goode's brilliant ...Sisters, a deconstruction of Chekhov's Three Sisters by way of John Cage. The reason is the profound focus in both directors on the theatrical present. No matter how we imaginatively enter the realities on stage, we are always reminded that this is a work of theatre, an artifice. This is a characteristic of most work in this vein, but Goode and Schlusser in their different ways explore further the implications of what this means for performance. Crucially, both have an unerring, even poetic, sense of theatrical rhythm that makes their investment in the minutiae of human experience deeply riveting.

As with ...Sisters, the audience enters to find the actors already on stage, in pre-performance mode, getting dressed, flirting, having barely audible conversations, fiddling with props. The play itself is introduced by Schlusser (who plays Krogstad) reading Ibsen's stage directions through a microphone, but its action evolves organically from the the idle conversations and games of the actors. The delicacy of this transition is hard to overstate: the actors remain the actors, while slipping almost subliminally into their assigned roles. These performances remain unstable, since the actors might at any point slip back to being "the actors" (roles which are, for all their apparent unstudiedness, as much a performance as the roles in the play).

Complex as this might be to describe, in performance it is very lucid. And we get Ibsen's play, although this time much more radically translated than in the 2007 show. What's followed is the action, not the text. Nora (a transcendentally good Nikki Shiels) is a sexy young thing addicted to shopping, living in the gilded cage provided by Torvald (Kade Greenland), who works for the Macquarie Bank. Nora's friend Kristine (Edwina Wren) is an unemployed economist from Tasmania, and is, aside from the faithful Dr Rank (played with poignancy by Josh Price), her only confidant.

She is as imprisoned in deceit as Ibsen's Nora, but Torvald's tyranny is more subtle, a question of invisible strings. It plays out in the sexual manipulations she uses to attract Torvald's and attention and favour, her willingness to be a sex toy, her terror that Torvald will discover that she has fraudulently borrowed money from Krogstad (Daniel Schlusser). When Nora's lies catch up with her and her world collapses, we get as powerful an image of abjection as I've seen on stage: Nora, stuffing her mouth with marshmallows so they spill out half chewed, her face smeared with tear-smudged make-up, clutching her groin like a little girl who wants to wee, but here with a horrifying sense of sexual injury.

The action plays across a narrow metallic set designed by Jeminah Reidy. It's a house of expensive toys - Torvald's Playstation, litterings of Lego and brightly wrapped Christmas presents - that summons the empty materialism of Torvald and Nora's marriage, the objects and rituals that replace actual relationship. Although Schlusser has kept the rewritten ending, as he did in the first production, he gives us a much tougher interpretation: the actions of these people are more ambiguous and lost, Nora's sexuality more scarred and frightened, the subtext beneath seemingly inconsequential interactions more desolate.

This feels like a work in which every moment has been thought through, creating theatre of admirable emotional and intellectual rigor. Mandatory for anyone interested in the possibilities of the contemporary stage. It's on until Sunday, as part of the Melbourne Fringe.

Picture: Nikki Shiels in The Dollhouse. Photo: Marg Horwell.

The Dollhouse, adapted from the play by Henrik Ibsen, directed by Daniel Schlusser. Set design by Jeminah Reidy, costumes by Tiffany Abbott, lighting by Kimberly Kwa, sound by Martin Kay. With Nikki Shiels, Kade Greenland, Edwina Wren, Josh Price, Daniel Schlusser and Cate Bastian/Gabrielle Abbott. Fortfive Downstairs until September 25.

Right now, just after the winter solstice, Ms TN is struggling. The skies have been grey for too long, the news has been bleak for too long, and human beings have been stupid and destructive for too long. Nary a light gleams at the end of the tunnel, and actually doing things - like, say, getting out of bed - seems impossible and futile. Yes, I know despair is a sin - I suspect I am on my way to discovering why - but the fear of God's wrath is little use to an atheist.

Midwinter funk is an all-too-common disease. But I can recommend a very effective temporary medicine - a visit to the latest incarnation of The Burlesque Hour at Fortyfive Downstairs. The theatre is transformed by a cloud of red Chinese lanterns into a cosily tatty club that might have existed in the Weimar Republic, with nests of be-candled tables and a catwalk up the middle of the space. You can hear the buzz of conversation ascending as you walk down the stairs, and already the sad heart lifteth. The Burlesque Hour Loves Melbourne is a tonic for the soul: sexy, hilarious, perverse, disturbing and liberatingly beautiful.


Contemporary burlesque curated by Moira Finucane and Jackie Smith, it's an exhilarating meld of cabaret, circus, vaudeville and performance art that moves spankingly through its many moods. It's a very Australian show, and has everything I love about this culture - fearlessness, subversion, wit, mischief and intelligence. And it has a starry list of weekly guests: so far they've included Rhonda Burchmore and Pamela Rabe, and coming attractions include Phillip Adams (he of Balletlab) with an especially commissioned dance; Meow Meow, direct from the West End; Constantina Bush and the Bushettes and Die Roten Punkte.

Finucane and Smith fans will have seen a few of these acts already: this is a kind of "new and selected" anthology of burlesque hits, with spangles, feathers, balloons and plenty of spillage (umbrellas are provided). But I can confirm that they are even better on a return visit. There's Romeo, the leather-jacketed macho boy stripping to Chrissy Amphlett's I Touch Myself, and the Queen of Hearts, with her cloud of red balloons and her nests of nipple-needles. There's Finucane's repressed pie woman, trembling with orgasmic excitement as she stirs her finger into a meat pie to AC/DC, and spilling tomato sauce and pie innards all over her neatly buttoned uniform.

Vaudeville acts by Holly Durant, Harriet Ritchie and Sosina Wogayehu include juggling, a whip cracking display and dance, including a dervish dance of two outrageously hairy women, an extension of an idea first performed for the burlesque by butoh dancer Yumi Umiumare. Their somehow innocent perversity recalls something of Maenads or forest spirits out of a Miyazake film. And they encapsulate the polymorhous nature of this show, which is at once serious and outrageously hilarious, surface and depth, spectacle and intimacy. Many acts invert expectations, such as the incomparable Maude Davey, stark naked aside from heels and rhinestone necklace, turning the sexual mystery of the vamp torch singer inside out by exposing everything, which somehow got funnier as the act went on.

There's a dark subtext to this show. A woman in a fur coat and sunglasses enters through the audience to Anthony and the Johnson's heartbreaking ballad Hope There's Someone, and appears to collapse; she makes her trembling way to the back of the stage, and is then hoisted up naked, like a carcass in an abattoir, leaving us momentarily and starkly silent. Or an avatar of death parades slowly down the catwalk, draped in black fabric through which she languorously smokes a cigarette, before popping a balloon that leaks sticky strips of black tar all over her naked body.

Finucane's bizzare erotic monologue to the National Gallery's water wall is a highlight. I can't think of another performer who is able to reach simultaneously such heights of comedy and erotic extremity. Unless, of course, it's Pamela Rabe. The guest artist for this week, she appeared as a statuesque goddess in a full-length black rubber dress with buttons all down the front, and performed an extraordinary monologue. It was a collage of quotations from Franz Wedekind's Spring Awakening and excerpts from an ancient Sumerian poem about the Queen of Heaven, the goddess Inanna. I shall not forget (and neither, I suspect, will the two men from the audience with whom she exited stage left) Rabe declaiming: "Who will plough my vulva!" It was breath taking, beautiful, terrifying and absurd, all at the same time.

But maybe I laughed most at Maude Davey's astounding performance of The Angels' classic hit, Am I Ever Going to See Your Face Again. Davey is in heels, nipple stars, ridiculous orange ostrich feathers, spangles and not much else. I'm old enough to remember seeing an angel-faced Doc Neeson belt this one out in some sticky-carpeted pub, and I can tell you that Davey gives him a run for his money in the rock-star charisma stakes. But she is much, much funnier.

This show is all about being human: human desire and human fear and human beauty and human laughter. It's a reminder of all those complexities that get edited out of mass culture. As with poetry, these things won't make the news, but people "die every day for the lack of what is found there". I can't think of a better antidote to the midwinter blues.

Picture: Queen of Hearts Moira Finucane in The Burlesque Hour Loves Melbourne

The Burlesque Hour Loves Melbourne, created and directed by Moira Finucane and Jackie Smith. With Moira Finucane, Maude Davey, Holly Durant, Harriet Ritchie, Sosina Wogayehu & Miss Pamela Rabe. Fortyfive Downstairs until August 14.

I'm loath to say this, for several reasons, but nevertheless: sometimes you have to point out the obvious. (In Ms TN's case, pointing out the obvious is my raison d'etre). The City at Red Stitch and La Mama's Bare Witness at Fortyfivedownstairs are productions which demonstrate that our indie women directors can be as ambitious, imaginative, intelligent, out-there theatrical and aesthetically tough as any man.


As soon as you write it down, it looks ridiculous and patronising. And, given that last week I saw Lee Lewis' Twelfth Night at the Arts Centre, and next year am looking forward to a Malthouse season curated by Marion Potts, it even sounds redundant. The problem is that if you don't write it down, this fact gets too easily erased. Anyone mumbling that women have a specifically feminine aesthetic that forbids them from the main stages, or that there aren't many woman directors around, or that only exceptional women have what it takes to fill a stage, or any of the other weasel reasons which add up to women, in defiance of demographics, being a "minority" in the decision-making arts, should get out and see these shows.

In the directorial hands of Nadja Kostich, Mari Lourey's play Bare Witness becomes an outstanding piece of physical theatre: a punishing, sensually immersive investigation of trauma that never forgets to be intelligent. The story tracks the career of a photojournalist, Dany Hall, from her induction as a naive rooky during the Balkans war of the early 1990s to the desert wars of the present day. There's an irresistible romance, even among journalists, around war reporting, and the subject matter is an ethical and aesthetic minefield. Bare Witness, to its considerable credit, avoids almost all the traps, from the first deadly sin of theatre - earnestness - to the Hollywood-style romanticising of journalists to the thoughtless exploitation of atrocity.

It's a seamless marriage of its various parts, which add up to an overwhelming work of theatre. Kostich has a first-class technical set-up: Marg Howell's bare but sensual stage design, seemingly made of crumpled paper; a broodingly punishing electronic and percussive score played live by Jethro Woodward; Emma Valente's ad hoc lighting, created on stage by the actors and Valente herself, with fluorescent strips, flash-lights and swinging lamps lifting a claustrophobic darkness; and Michael Carmody's fluidly abstract video, which combines footage of wolves (a ruling image of the press pack, who are both hunters and hunted), projected numbers or place names, or dissolving animations that recall the decaying charcoals of William Kentridge.

Against this richly suggestive theatrical field, the bodies of the five performers - Isaac Drandic, Daniela Farinacci, Adam McConvell, Todd MacDonald and Maria Theodorakis - play and transform. This is among the most exciting physical theatre I've seen - inventive and exhilarating, demonstrating how the precision of actors' bodies is quite different from the miraculous accuracy of dance: more vernacular, perhaps, in its comparative coarseness, but when as passionately and skilfully performed as here, every bit as compelling.


As Bare Witness argues, war reporting is very like an addiction, and perhaps stems from the same kinds of emotional poverties and alienations as drug addiction does. And it can be just as fatal. Meanwhile, are journalists self-interested predators, or idealistic seekers of the truth, or adrenaline junkies? What difference does getting the news out actually make, in feeding the ravenous maw of a media machine hungry for the next image of atrocity and human suffering? In an image-saturated, media-manipulated world, how truthful can a photograph actually be? And what is the personal cost of a restless fascination with violence?

These questions are, for the most part, lightly raised, and the show evades moralising and sentimentalising its subject matter. In questioning the media, it also keeps in play the equally knotty question of artistic exploitation, which is no less distasteful. I found that its emotional impact registered just as the lights went down at the end, not during the course of the show. Its pace gives no time for reflection or thought, which, given its subject matter, seems wholly appropriate. Kostich's production is perhaps most exciting in its unapologetic seriousness: it's a relief to see a work that so directly, without naivety or cynicism or face-saving irony, addresses the complexities of real world calamity.

I thought the show around 20 minutes too long - there was a narrative detour around East Timor that edged the text into an earnestness and expositional looseness that it otherwise avoids. And work of this unrelenting intensity is difficult to sustain for more than around 90 minutes, without its effects becoming simply numbing. Even so, this is ambitious, smart, beautifully realised theatre. And quite unlike anything else that is on in Melbourne.

*


The City might be the best production I've seen at Red Stitch, even though, as ever with Martin Crimp, I came away feeling deeply ambivalent about the play. Adena Jacobs offers an uneasily stylised production which emphasises the brittleness and fractures of Crimp's dramaturgy, transforming the small space of Red Stitch into a haunting shadow box of middle-class nightmare.

I found The City intriguing, but perhaps not in the ways Crimp intended. (Although, who knows?) Ostensibly a play about an emotionally sterile marriage, it extends into a self-reflexive discussion of art. Clair (Fiona Macleod) is a literary translator, married to Christopher (Dion Mills), an office worker in the city who loses his job and ends up at the butcher's counter in Sainsburys. A third character, Jenny (Meredith Penman), is a neighbour - a nurse married to a doctor who is away at an unspecified and apparently secret war. There is a brief and unsettling appearance by a spooky daughter (Fantine Banulski/Georgie Hawkins), who has the alienated air of a demon child out of a horror movie.

By the end, I was all but convinced that this play is a confession by the playwright of his own psychic damage and aesthetic limitations. I would normally resist any such interpretation of a work as fatally impertinent: but here it's irresistible. The play progresses as a kind of self-interrogation, a dismantling of its own inabilities, until by the end its characters are questioning each other's reality. It finishes with a description of a war-devastated city, bombed flat like Fallujah or Grozny, that is the simulacrum of Clair's writerly imagination; and its final scene is of a child mangling a piece of piano music, presumably an illustration of what writers do to reality.

Clair's confession of her creative sterility, of her inability to create living realities, is too close to my major problem with Crimp's own plays not to give pause. Whether this is a fatally self-indulgent premise for a play is moot: in the hands of this director and cast, it creates some startlingly strange and unsettling moments of theatre. Yet even in this production, which brings everything possible out of the text, it never strikes deeply. The work is as it says it is - emotionally and intellectually cauterised.

What's troubling about this is that Crimp's confession of writing as an act of emotional nihilism is generalised to embrace all literature. Clair, for instance, is (as Crimp himself has often been) a translator rather than maker of texts. At the beginning of the play, she describes a chance encounter with a writer whom she later translates, Mohamed. Mohamed possesses all the authenticity that Clair, in her white middle-class comfort, feels she lacks: he is ethnically exotic, and has been imprisoned, tortured and exiled.

Yet this authenticity, as Clair recognises to her dismay, is as emotionally dead as Clair's. He can't work with his young daughter around, and so palms her off on his sister-in-law (a nurse, who regards him with contempt), and when he hears news of his daughter's accidental death, he feels not grief but exhilaration. Not only is he liberated from his responsibility, but he now has even more authenticity to throw into his creative mill. It's a bleak view of writing that is, in fact, a toxic romantic cliche: the problem is that you think that Crimp believes it.

The City opens with a domestic scene between a husband and wife that introduces one of my major problems with Crimp - that he so often seems like a cut-price version of Harold Pinter. Using a number of Pinteresque techniques - fragmented conversation, non sequiturs, declarations of emotion that in fact convey their opposite, narrative leaps and disjunctions - Crimp generates a sense of unease and anxiety. But I can't help asking, to what end?

Pinter miraculously (as in, say, Ashes to Ashes) uses these techniques to pierce through the protective carapace of denial to a place of real feeling, a moment of disturbing, sometimes shattering insight when perception suddenly and irrevocably shifts. Crimp clearly aims to do the same thing: but he mistakes nihilism for realism. If he's a lesser playwright than those he mimics - Harold Pinter and Howard Barker, in particular - it's because his plays lack the imaginative largeness to embrace human possibility: joy as well as pain.

For all their bleakness, neither Barker nor Pinter forget that love or justice are human realities, and that these realities are the only things that invest our crimes - intimate or global - with their proper outrage. (Echoes of Beckett: "But I do give a fuck!") After all, who cares what happens to numb puppets? Crimp, on the other hand, cannot seem to believe that love and justice, being human inventions, exist at all, which is quite different from writing about their lack or their failure: and in this, he shows himself to be a cynic. A carefully polished pessimism is, after all, seldom going to be proved wrong. On the other hand, it seldom has the foolishness that permits belief in fictions: and without that belief, a writer will never create a living imagined reality. Poets, as Heiner Mueller says, must always be a little bit stupid.

Clearly, this play intrigued me; in so frankly embodying its own imaginative and emotional failures, isn't it, by sleight of hand, retrieving a kind of success? It's certainly difficult to imagine a more intelligent production. Dayna Morrissey's design and Danny Pettingill's lighting tricks the eye, so that the tiny stage at Red Stitch suddenly has several extra dimensions, functioning as both a poetic and naturalistic setting. Jacobs shows a bold theatrical imagination, unafraid of stillness or of extending performative gestures, so there are moments of pure, abstract, theatre - Penman being eaten by a piano in the background of a bleak marital dialogue; the spooky child reciting obscene limericks.

And in this Jacobs is helped by her fearless cast, who handle the warped naturalism of the production with unfaltering assurance. The dialogue - which largely consists of fractured monologues spoken past the other characters - is addressed directly to the audience, its delivery switching between mannered excess and bitten precision. The result is often comic, in tandem with an increasing upwinding of tension that opens a sense of menacing estrangement. That this doesn't actually amount to much beyond a generalised expression of middle-class anxiety is the fault of the play, not the production. I noticed in the program that Jacobs is planning a production of Anne Carson's Elektra at the Dog Theatre later this year: it will be fascinating to see what she will achieve with a text that actually does something.

Pictures: Top, middle: images of Nadja Kostich's Bare Witness. Photo: Marg Howell. Bottom: Meredith Penman, Fiona Macleod and Dion Mills in The City. Photo: Jodie Hutchinson

Bare Witness by Mari Lourey, directed by Nadja Kostich. Composer/musician Jethro Woodward, set and costumes Marg Howell, video Michael Carmody, lighting Emma Valente. With Isaac Drandic, Daniela Farinacci, Adam McConvell, Todd MacDonald and Maria Theodorakis. La Mama Theatre @ Fortyfive Downstairs, until September 26.

The City by Martin Crimp, directed by Adena Jacobs. Set design Dayna Morrissey, lighting Danny Pettingill, sound design Jared Lewis. With Fiona Macleod, Dion Mills, Meredith Penman and Fantine Banulski/Georgie Hawkins. Red Stitch until September 25.

Christopher Shinn is rightly lauded as one of the most powerful and accomplished playwrights now working in the US. Like his compatriot Will Eno, his work in his country of birth is more often honoured in the breach: his first play Four was rejected by every US theatre he sent it to, before it premiered at the Royal Court in London in 1998 and established his growing British reputation. Dying City premiered in London in 2006, a year before it received a New York production. Shinn's most recent play, Now or Later, premiered at the Royal Court two years ago, and despite four and five star ratings has yet to receive a production in New York.


In a recent interview, Shinn suggests that this reluctance to embrace his work is not, as he once thought, because of an increasing conservatism in the US theatre scene, so much as a cultural denial of emotional pain and tragedy. "It's not so much that they understand and then reject the work, but that they never actually experience it in the first place," he says. "That's much scarier to me than conservatism. Denial and negation are very hard, if not impossible, to undo."

Watching this play hard on the heels of Sarah Ruhl's Dead Man's Cell Phone at the MTC, it's difficult not to speculate that there might be similar denials here: why, in the work available from the US, choose Ruhl's work, or indeed JT Rodger's Madagascar, over a play that is not only vastly better written, but also more intelligent, more honest and, crucially, more moving?

Dying City is an elegant and powerful foray into contemporary naturalism. It moves between two different times: the night of the departure for Iraq by the volunteer soldier Craig (Brad Williams) and an evening and morning just over a year after Craig's suicide overseas, when Craig's gay twin brother Peter (also played by Brad Williams) unexpectedly visits Craig's mourning wife, Kelly (Zoe Ellerton-Ashley).

It opens with an understated scene that is heavy with unsaid tension: Peter's arrival provokes Kelly's inarticulate distress. At first it seems that Kelly's grief is sparked by his resemblance to her husband, and by how his unscheduled visit echoes the way the military turned up to tell her of his death. But as the play progresses, it gradually reveals an altogether darker emotional landscape that reaches beyond its domestic setting into a damning critique of a militarised, misogynistic society, and the media-saturated anaesthetisation that is both its cause and effect.

This critique is folded into the dialogue, as part of the emotional action rather than a didactic lesson, and so attains an increasing emotional power as the play progresses. Shinn weaves his argument into a lament for an increasingly decadent, anaesthetic culture, with allusions to America's great literary tradition - Melville, Hawthorne, Hemingway, Faulkner, O'Neill - cutting against the ironised poverty of the present.

Peter is an actor, who on the night he visits Kelly has just walked out of a production of Long Day's Journey Into Night after a homophobic comment by another actor; Craig has joined the military to gain a tertiary education, and is halfway through a thesis on William Faulkner. Yet the love of both brothers for their cultural heritage is truncated, betrayed by a violent present. This present is most potently symbolised by the twin images that have dominated the US in new century: the Abu Ghraib photographs and the events of 9/11 which is, as Craig says, writing from Iraq in 2004, "already a punchline".

But here these images of extreme violence have their correlatives in the minutae of domestic life, manifesting in irretrievable pyschic damage. Kelly is a therapist, part of a profession that holds out the promise of "closure" in the face of trauma. But as becomes clear, her professional skills are of no use in dealing with her own trauma. She is unable to face the reality of her marriage, and instead takes refuge in television crime series that hold out the promise of a death that is "symbolically reversed". Rather than face the pain that is crippling her, she is fleeing it: she is in the middle of moving house and has even changed her phone numbers so she won't be pursued by her husband's doppelganger and the horror of the memories his presence evokes.

For all the significance of the ideas Shinn is exploring, this play is never heavy-handed. And its poise is reflected in a concomitantly elegant production by Matt Scholten, which simply permits the emotional life of the writing to emerge. Kat Chan's cardboard box set manifests the transiency of the characters and is beautifully lit by Tom Willis. What counts in a play like this is the performances, and it's worth seeing for these alone.

Ellerton-Ashley and Williams are both remarkable, doing full justice to the nuance and suppleness of the writing. Williams's double act as Craig and Peter is a bravura demonstration of the actor's art: so complete is his transformation between the two characters you wholly believe they are different people (my daughter thought at first that they had in fact cast twins). The dialogue emerges from potent silences, in which the loneliness of the characters becomes almost palpable. Highly recommended.


Patricia Cornelius’s high anticipated Do Not Go Gentle... also opened last week at Fortyfive Downstairs. The winner of the 2006 Patrick White Play Award, this is another play that has struggled to find mainstage production here, despite what would seem to be its ideal provenance: not only is it a play that appeals to older audiences, it shapes its unsentimental tragedy with an appealing dose of comedy. Certainly, seeing the high-calibre cast in Julian Meyrick's lyrical production, which includes Paul English, Terry Norris, Anne Phelan and Malcolm Robertson, it makes you wonder if the best of what is generally called "mainstream" is, for the most part, lurking in independent theatre.

Cornelius borrows her title from Dylan Thomas’s poem, Do not go gentle into that good night. Perhaps the most beautiful villanelle written in English, Thomas’s poem celebrates the vivid life of old age, pressed hard against death: “Old age should burn and rave at close of day”. Likewise, Do Not Go Gentle… explores the flare of vitality that reaches a desperate intensity in the face of death, through seven characters who live in an old people’s home.

The central character, Scott (Rhys McConnochie), is obsessed with the tragic heroism of Robert Scott’s ill-fated expedition to the South Pole, a race he lost to the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, and which ultimately cost him his life. In Cornelius’s hands, this expedition becomes a metaphor for the long defeat that is life itself, moving with a poetic suppleness between entries from Scott’s diary and the mundane details of life in an institution.

She evokes with unsentimental compassion the confusions and longings of old age, or, in the case of Bowers (Pamela Rabe), a younger woman suffering from premature Alzheimers who doesn’t remember her own husband, of tragic memory loss. Scott’s story provides a narrative spine from which emerges the stories of the various characters. Most powerfully, this double reality becomes a theatrical metaphor for the uncertain world Cornelius’s characters inhabit, with the white wastes of Antarctica a potent image of desolation.

Yet, like Thomas’s poem, the play is primarily a celebration of life. Cornelius’s characters, like the actors who play them, are funny, angry and defiant, and out of the poverties of their situation create a richness that is its own meaning. The play isn’t wholly successful: there are scenes where the conceit of the double reality isn’t sustained, and Cornelius’s poetic language loses its tension, falling into the merely literal. But for much of its length it makes riveting and moving theatre, and Meyrick's production generates some moments of breath-taking theatrical beauty.

The opening scene is spine-tingling: Maria (Jan Friedl) shuffles onstage in dressing gown and slippers, opens her mouth and sings a glorious aria, while behind her six anonymous figures, dressed in thick arctic gear, march onto the stage, each leading the other like the figures in Breughel's painting The Parable of the Blind. It recalls Walter Pater’s insistence that all art aspires to the condition of music, yearning towards the mysteries of what can’t be expressed in words, and is as moving an image of mortality as I have seen in the theatre.

It can be great watching older actors on stage, and unsurprisingly this all-star cast elicits excellent performances, given an extra power here by the age of the actors. Malcolm Robertson is at his gritty best as Oates, haunted by the suicide of his son, and Anne Phelan as the increasingly uninhibited Wilson, making up for a life of self-abnegation in a late love affair, is comic and poignant. As Scott, Rhys McConnochie gives a moving portrayal of an ordinary man with huge dreams, breaking against his failed life.

Marg Howell's design exploits the wide space of Fortyfive Downstairs, using its windows beautifully: the stage is bare save for a collapsing ceiling at once end, baring it to be a space of imagination. Meyrick's direction moves the scenes swiftly between their shifting realities, using the whole of the space and its view outside to generate a sense that the stage has no borders. I found myself haunted by this play for several days after seeing it: it doesn't attain the elegance of Shinn, but it possesses a direct poetic honesty that lifts it past its flaws. Certainly, this production has an undeniable beauty and power, and I suspect it will be a major hit for Fortyfive Downstairs.

Disclosure: Ben Keene, who composed the music for Dying City, is my son.

A shorter version of the review of Do Not Go Gentle... was published in today's Australian.

Pictures: (Top) Zoe Ellerton-Ashley and Brad Williams in Dying City; (bottom) Pamela Rabe in Do Not Go Gentle... Photo: Jeff Busby

Dying City by Christopher Shinn, directed by Matt Scholten. Designed by Kat Chan, lighting by Tom Willis, music by Ben Keene. With Zoe Ellerton-Ashley and Brad Williams. Hoy Polloy, MIPAC, Brunswick, until August 21. Bookings: (03) 9016 3873.

Do Not Go Gentle... by Patricia Cornelius, directed by Julian Meyrick. Designed by Marg Howell, usic and sound design by Irine Vela, lighting design by Richard Vabre. With Paul English, Jan Friedl, Rhys McConnochie, Terry Norris, Anne Phelan, Pamela Rabe and Malcolm Robertson. Fortyfive Downstairs until August 29. Bookings: (03) 9662 9966.

In one of those interesting synchronicities, there is a rash of contemporary theatre examining the foundational Christian myths. As Hayloft's BC - a rewriting of the Annunciation - plays in Melbourne, the STC is hosting Genesis, a contemporary look at the first chapters of the Bible performed by the Residents, their new ensemble. Black Lung last week put Christianity on the rack of its traumatic anarchy in Glasoon. Looking further back, two years ago Uncle Semolina & Friends reworked the Old Testament in OT.

It suggests that religion, especially Christianity, is an acute locus of both anxiety and curiosity among those companies exploring the outer edges of theatre. I guess it's unsurprising, given that God has risen from Nietzsche's grave to stalk modernity like a brain-eating zombie in a splatter movie: the rise of mediaevalist fundamentalism is the dark story of our time. As the sublime Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski said in the 1980s as he witnessed the disintegration of the Soviet Empire, the three great challenges to world peace in the following decades were religion, nationalism and racism. In the past few years, we've seen that prophecy playing out in our global politics.


But this focus on religion is also a curiosity about the foundations of western culture. Christianity shaped the West: it has been a defining force in its art and thought for hundreds of years. It's influenced our metaphysics, philosophy, law and social conventions. And for those raised in the shadow of that tradition, it is a primary expression of transcendence and the divine.

It's this last aspect that debut playwright Rita Kalnejais explores in BC, which takes the story of the Immaculate Conception and sets it in an outer suburb of a nameless Australian city. After attacking the modern classics - Chekhov, Stravinsky, Wedekind - it's good to see Hayloft taking on the risks of new writing, with Benedict Hardie's Yuri Wells earlier this year and now BC.

Here Mary is the teenage daughter of Joachim (Tyler Coppin), a depressed real estate agent, and Anne (Margaret Mills), who is in recovery from cancer and is perilously on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Her learning-challenged brother, Gabriel (Dylan Young) is obssessed, not entirely healthily, with birds, the angelic possibility of flight. Elizabeth (Yesse Spence), in the original story Mary's confidante and the first to recognise that Mary's pregnancy is the fruit of God ("Blessed are you among women!") becomes a pleasant, well-meaning neighbour. There are disturbing threads running through it: foremost the suggestion of incest between Mary and her father and, more directly, her brother.

It's an interesting idea that, despite some moments of coup de theatre and an outstanding cast, doesn't quite come off. Kalnejais can certainly write: she has the gift - perhaps because she is also an actor - of understanding direct dramatic action, and of creating characters who immediately assert their reality. And there's no faulting her ambition. However, the play falters in its formal balance between the naturalistic and the surreal: the naturalistic scenes are not nearly as focused as the others and often are simply too long, creating longueurs. And there's a more basic problem with the larger structure, which leads to a couple of false endings.

The play aims to illuminate moments of ordinary grace, investigating the divine immanent in quotidian existence, but a conceptual muddiness gets in the way. For instance, it's not the angel who impregnates Mary, but God: Gabriel merely announces the fact. I simply didn't understand the point of the brotherly incest or why God was absent from the shenanigans. And the Christian idea of grace is actually deeply interesting: the simple idea presented here of unmediated grace fudges its sternness and beauty, and begs the question of why Christianity is introduced in the first place. This kind of fuzziness means that the writing doesn't escape the problem of conjuring sentiment rather than real feeling.

All the same, director Simon Stone and his team create moments of genuine comedy and theatrical power. The immaculate conception itself - in which the angel and Mary unite as reflections separated by glass - is a beautifully thought and realised image of transcendence. And although some of the characters - Ashley Zuckerman's Joseph, for example - veer dangerously close to caricature, they are strange and individual enough to escape the worst perils.

Claude Marcos's set, an evocation of a suburban house bisected by a diagonal window that can turn into a mirror, vividly recalls Benedict Andrews' obsession with windows and mirrors, but works well on its own terms. Stone elicits some excellent performances, with a stand-out role by Dylan Young as Gabriel. I'm not sure Kalnejais could have asked for a better production of her first play. What she needs is some sharp dramaturgy.

Bagryana Popov's Progress and Melancholy is also a nice idea laid low by uncertain dramaturgy. It's one of a number of recent shows that reworks a classic, in this case, Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. The idea is to excavate its subtext, radically resituating the play in the present - not only the contemporary present, but in the immediate present of the performers and the audience. Maybe the test of this kind of exercise is whether you're sitting in the audience wondering why the company doesn't just do the play: and in this case, I would have preferred to see Chekhov Uncut.

Popov has the chops here: her 2005 physical movement piece Subclass26A, which explored the realities of asylum seekers in detention, was riveting, sharply thought political theatre. So how come this one went so wrong? The play's subtext - focusing on personal, social and economic change - is shallowly explored, the connections made between the present of the actors and the imagined past of Chekhov are generalised and even sentimental, and when the physical movement aspires to the condition of dance, it is sometimes embarrassing. As a work, it seems frustratingly half-formed, and the informing ideas - the economic rise of China, the oncoming disaster of climate change, the feudal/capitalist exploitation of workers - all seem to operate at the level of naivety.

And yet there's the core of a great idea inside it. For all my reservations, the show features a couple of excellent performances. Natasha Herbert's Ranevskaya is (when it is allowed to occur) a moving and accurate performance of a middle aged bourgeois woman in denial of her disintegrating present. But the highlight - the performance that made this show worth watching - was Todd Macdonald's electrifying Lopahkin, the former-serf-turned-businessman who buys and destroys the cherry orchard, revenging the humiliations of his humble birth. In Macdonald's performance the intersecting realities - the big-talking developer, the ambitious nouveau riche serf - united and made sense, and the actor himself took a back seat. Given this, I wondered why the show didn't focus on Lopahkin, filleting that ambiguous character out of the play and attending to the realities that he both embodies and represents. But hey, it wasn't my show.

At one point they stopped the show and handed cake around the audience. It was good cake. It was well-meaning. And this was a well-meaning show. But I do think Chekhov would have threatened to shoot himself.

Picture: Dylan Young and Nicole Da Silva in BC. Photo: Jeff Busby.

BC by Rita Kalnejais, directed by Simon Stone. Set and costumes by Claude Marcos, lighting design by Kimberly Kaw, sound design by Stefan Gregory. With Tyler Coppin, Nicole Da Silva, Margaret Mills, Yesse Spence, Dylan Young and Ashley Zuckerman. The Hayloft Project @ Full Tilt, Black Box, Victorian Arts Centre, until December 19.

Progress and Melancholy, directed by Bagryana Popov. Design by Adrienne Chisolm, lighting design by Richard Vabre, composition and sound design by Elissa Goodrich. With Natasha Herbert, Todd Macdonald, Majid Shokor, Sara Black, Paea Leach, Christophe Le Tellier, music performed by Ernie Gruner. Fortyfive downstairs. Closed.

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.

I have an acquaintance to whom the mention of Shakespeare is as the red rag to the bull. Mention the "S" word and veins start throbbing his forehead and his eyes flash like traffic lights on the blink. Waving his copy of Das Kapital, spittle flying dangerously hither and yon, he raves of the oppression of the masses and of the sinister march of imperialism, of the Boots of the Establishment on the crushed necks of the Working Class, and so on and so on.


As one schooled in the mid-20th century radicalism of Jan Kott and thus believing that Shakespeare is a sly theatrical genius with subversion in the very marrow of his bones, this has always puzzled me. But maybe John Stanton has at last showed me why some people react with such class hatred to the Bard of Avon. If Shakespeare really were just the writer presented in And When He Falls, perhaps I would be out there waving a pitchfork with the best of them.

And When He Falls is like squinting through a glass darkly at the theatrical era conjured by Laurence Olivier. Or perhaps even further back, to Donald Wolfit. This Shakespeare is an English nationalistic icon, the dramatic historian of English imperial power. Stanton's mirror is fractured, so we only get little splinters of it, but it's full of nostalgia for the gargantuan performances that my father saw as a young man at Stratford-on-Avon, with Olivier pinning the disobedient audience with a gimlet eye, or even for that melodramatic extremity recalled in Ronald Harwood's brilliant remembrance of Wolfit, The Dresser.

Stanton's show is this Shakespeare dressed down for the Val Doonican generation, titbits of high culture dispensed with an avuncular air from an armchair. It's a wholly Anglophilic piece, an exemplary piece of colonial art. Its real excuse is that it gives John Stanton - to give him his due, one of our best known and respected main stage actors - the opportunity to perform some of Shakespeare's great speeches.

Directed by his wife Jill Forster, Stanton recites a selection of passages from Shakespeare's History Plays - the St Crispin's Day speech from Henry V, for instance, or Richard II's marvellous meditation on the mortality of kings, as well as a couple of pieces from lesser characters, such as a panicked French sailor describing the destruction of the French fleet by the English longbowmen. Since the show is structured as a little history lesson on the Plantagenets, it's prefaced with a speech from Marlowe's Edward II.

The staging is simply a piano draped with a red cloth, a chair and a stool, and lighting that goes (unvaryingly) up and down on the dramatic bits. The direction follows the lighting: Stanton moves metronomically between piano and playing area, depending on whether he is being Simon Schama or Laurence Olivier. The composer Tony Gould sits behind the piano and tinkles a few notes underneath the language, barely enough to be called a soundscape, although whenever Stanton says "DEATH" or 'MURDER" the piano hammers out a ghoulish chord, just in case we missed the bloody bit.

Forster's direction permits Stanton to get away with some sheer ham. The show is a gallery of crude performance decisions, characterisation imagined as caricature. Edward II is a screaming queen, the Duke of York is a bluff northerner, Richard II a self-piting, fey aristocrat. And I don't think I have ever seen (outside a comedy, I mean) anything quite like Stanton's ssssssibilant Archbishop of Canterbury. I woke up briefly for Hotspur's speech, which had an emotional versimilitude, a spiteful rage, that the other speeches lacked. And before his rendition of Richard III turned into a pastiche of Ian McKellen's twistedly camp malevolence, I was drawn into it for similar reasons.

Perhaps it is simply my misfortune that the brilliant performances of many of the same speeches in the STC's The War of the Roses are still fresh in my mind. Certainly the memory of them amplified the mono-dimensional effect of these thumbnail portraits which, lacking the dramatic blood of context, are reduced to the status of party pieces. Worse, the stolidly factual historical contexts they are given seem sadly misconceived, since they conflate historical fact and fiction in ways which illuminate neither: the greatness of these plays exists, after all, in their metaphorical illustration of power, not in their (highly dubious) value as illustrations of history. Seldom has so much skill and virtuosity - both of which Stanton has in spades - been applied to such empty effect.

And When He Falls: The Plantagent Kings of England, William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe. Directed by Jill Stanton. Performed by John Stanton and Tony Gould. Fortfive Downstairs until March 29.