Ms TN's second week of Fringe demonstrated her craft and guile in negotiating the program: I enjoyed all three shows. There were a couple of regrettable TN misses - I intended to see Uncle Semolina & Friends' mega one-night-only production of Peter and the Wolf at the Collingwood Underground Carpark, but the Australian sent me to the bling opening of Hairspray instead (print review here). And a temporary brainfreeze meant I turned up an hour late for Mothlight, a circus show that I'd been greatly anticipating (shows at the Fringe Hub start an hour earlier on Sundays - doh!) Any reports on these shows, or others worth noting, are most welcome. Also, keen theatrenauts should keep an eye on Neandellus, Capital Idea, Sometimes Melbourne and Cameron Woodhead's new blog, Behind the Critical Curtain, for more reviews of more Fringe events.


My Fringe blogging is now all done, but the Fringe proper continues until October 10. I'm attending From Somewhere Underneath, Part 2 at the Donkey Wheel tonight. But that, like the MTC's offering next week at the Melbourne Festival, Life Without Me, (written, for those few who don't know, by my husband Daniel Keene), will be a family affair: courtesy of Platform Youth Theatre, my son Josh, along with a number of other young artists, is making his writing/directing debut. Then the Melbourne International Arts Festival officially opens on Friday night, although I'll have already seen two MIAF shows by then. I'm looking forward to it: I missed most of last year's festival, Brett Sheehy's first, because I was unexpectedly awarded a Poetry Tour of the UK and Ireland. One shouldn't look a free overseas trip in the mouth, but I was a bit sorry about missing the fest. (Only a bit, mind.)

But now, without further ado: Notes On What Ms TN Saw At The Fringe, Part The Second:

Intimate Exposure

Intimate Exposure takes place in what is surely the most notable new space in Melbourne: The Substation in Newport. The Substation is a magnificent early 20th century industrial building, built in 1915 by Victoria Railways to convert electricity supply for Williamstown. After it closed in the 1960s it was derelict for years, until it was restored to become Hobsons Bay Community Arts Centre. Upstairs at present is the Fringe Furniture Exhibition (my favourite piece being a steampunk gentleman's valet). And downstairs, in the catacomb-like rooms which once housed the rotary converters, is Intimate Exposure: three short dances especially created in and for these spaces, punctuated by two dance films by Dianne Reid.

There's an organic feel to how the event is structured. The audience members wander downstairs to see Dianne Reid's film she sleeps, a brief meditation on chronic illness featuring Jaye Hayes, which is on a loop in one of the basement rooms. In our own time, we reassemble in the central corridor, and the crowd is then divided in two for for the first dance, Soft Targets [solos], danced and choreographed by Jade Dewi Tyas Tunggal and Amelia McQueen. The audience is reunited for the next three dances: Carlee Mellow's Simmer, in another room; Dianne Reid's gorgeously lyrical film Magnificent Sadness (Luke Hickmott), in the corridor; and the final part of Soft Targets, a duet this time, with William Bilwa Costa manipulating the sound live.

As the live performers are all women, the dances made me especially aware of the female body: vulnerable, manipulated, assertive, comic. This is especially the case in Simmer: that which bubbles away beneath the surface. The dancers perform the soundscape, at first singing wordlessly, exploring their voices as instruments. The dance is a witty exploration of feminine inhibition: the dancers wear pink gumboots and strangely crocheted dresses that makes them seem to be parodies of femininity. They ask nervous questions of the audience without waiting for answers, and dancers Madelaine Krenek and Paula Lay end up shouting through plastic tubing into a paddling pool, literalising the piece's title, while Sarah Black's rebellious body neurotically articulates the rage beneath feminine obedience, until her apologetic smile or her tears no longer seem to be part of her face.

Tungall and McQueen's dances work specifically with the Substation spaces, focusing on the body's vulnerability in the graffitied shadows of the industrial brick walls. I thought their solo pieces more successful - McQueen writhing to a sinister heartbeat score in an enclosed space so small she can barely stand up, while we peer down a tunnel like voyeurs, or Tungall, her mouth covered by a strange crocheted mask that looks as if it were made of internal organs dyed in day-glo colours, retching as if her body were poisoned, before she plunges all of us into total darkness by switching off the light. Until October 9, Newport Substation.

The Event

John Clancy's meta-meta script, The Event, is given a spare and intelligent treatment by director Daniel Clarke and performer Nick Pelomis. It is, basically, theatre in the third person: the actor stands in the pool of light, and informs us that he, the actor, is standing in a pool of light, speaking words written by the author, and making gestures as rehearsed, in front of a bunch of strangers (us). Clancy's text is a smart and detailed deconstruction of a particular type of theatrical event. Because it is so smart, the pedant in me wants to point out that there are many kinds of theatrical events, employing or breaking different sets of conventions to those fondly satirised here, but it is only a minor point, since what Clancy's describing is the most conventional conventions.

I spent two days trying to remember what it reminded me of. For what it's worth, it reminded me of the clip below: Charlie Brooker taking the piss out of television news.



The Event could get a bit cute for its own good, but mainly stays a leap ahead of us. The most effective moments are those where the text cheats, leaping out of its meta-self-consciousness into sometimes quite moving meditations about contemporary life (that then snap back to reminding us that this is performance - haha, that wasn't me - a device technically known as "having one's cake and eating it").

But it all works: even though The Actor pauses at several points to tell us exactly how many minutes have passed, and how many more there are to go - a risky strategy, because it immediately makes the audience aware of time in a way that theatre seeks to defeat - it doesn't drag. Pelomis's performance is very likeable, making us intensely aware that, for all the skill and distancing techniques employed in the performance and the script, he is a living, breathing human being in the same space as us. Well worth a look, although I think this kind of theatre finishes where work like last year's Fringe hit Yuri Well begins. The Loft, Lithuanian Club, Fringe Hub, until October 9.

Dances with Worms

Which brings me to Dances with Worms - like Yuri Wells, a collaboration between Stuart Bowden and Benedict Hardie. I have no idea how to describe this one, without making it sound desperately unfunny and deeply infantile. The fact is that this show is very smart, and very funny indeed. But it is, perhaps, more than a little infantile: its scatalogical jokes and, most of all, its forlornly comic hero, Stuart, seem to place it in an adulthood that is crippled by nostalgia for its own past.

I don't think it was just Bowden's red velour dressing gown that made me think of Barry Humphries's Sandy Stone, a similarly lugubrious character nostalgically washed up on the edges of suburbia. When the audience enters, we see on stage an old-fashioned electric organ topped by an aspidastra pot plant, a large amplifier and a beige lounge chair on which is seated a worm (a long brown sausage with goggle eyes, glasses and black wool hair). Stuart emerges clutching two mugs, a skinny, slightly stooped, shy-looking man, and drops a kiss on the worm. Which he continues to embrace with increasing passion - until, with a start, he becomes aware of our gaze and stops, embarrassed. The worm, it turns out, is his wife; their relationship, we obliquely discover, is undergoing some kind of crisis.

In between, to the accompaniment of Stuart's ukelele, the odd skirl from the organ and some nifty sonic layering with a loop pedal, we are treated to some scatalogical and surreal fairytales and songs. They work just on the hilarious side of what would be otherwise searingly painful explorations of sexual humiliation. Performed with po-faced exactness by Bowden, it's worth the price of admission for its evocation of the Savannahs of Melton alone, let alone Bosley the Pencil's disastrous encounter with a lustful balloon. Highly recommended. Old Council Chambers, Trades Hall, until October 9.

You can tell it's spring, because the ants are co-ordinating a spirited insurgency in the bathroom, and bare branches everywhere are bursting into blossom. Most tellingly, the Town Hall in North Melbourne is overrun with young people in black eyeliner, who are spilling down the steps and colonising the pavement cafes.


Ms TN has been slapping on her eyeliner with the rest of them and thronging the halls, albeit in a sober fashion suitable to her advancing years. I read a couple of years ago that Guardian critic Lyn Gardner sees six shows a day during the Edinburgh Fringe. I couldn't do anything remotely like that without the inside of my skull turning into something like mashed banana. So there's inevitably a chance element to the few shows I see out of the several hundred on offer, and they can hardly be thought of as representative: for those contemplating Fringe visits, the wisest strategy is to grab a program or browse the website.

Also, the performing arts continue outside the Fringe. I saw Bangarra Dance Theatre's Of Earth and Sky on the weekend: if you can beg, borrow or steal a ticket (or possibly buy one at the box office) before it closes next Saturday, do so. It's extraordinarily beautiful. I'm hoping to write more on Of Earth and Sky later this week, if I can think of the words: but today, let me briefly bring you up to speed on Ms TN's Adventures at the Fringe So Far. And I mean briefly. Ms TN is unseasonally under the weather today.

The Arrival


Shaun Tan’s moving graphic novel about the experience of immigration, The Arrival, is adapted for the stage by new company Mutation Theatre, under the eyes of emerging directors Sam Mackie and Patrick McCarthy. Getting to the venue was an adventure in itself: as the skies darkened over the surreal landscape of Docklands, half industrial chic and half just industrial, we encountered lonely bowler-hatted figures waving signs in the dark, to guide us to Shed 4. It almost - but not quite - felt like being on a strange film set, half Coppola, half Tati.

The show takes place in a gigantic metal warehouse, in which is erected a tent-like structure. Around 18 bowler-hatted young actors enact - now with carnivalesque excess, now with lyrical poignancy – Tan’s simple story of a man arriving in a strange country, having left his family behind. Tan's drawings are projected onto the ceiling of tent, as a counterpoint to the performances on stage. The result is an ambitious work of physical theatre that is often completely enchanting. Its strengths make you forgive its unncessary length and lack of focus as youthful excess. If this is the new generation of theatre makers, the future is looking good. Sadly, closed.

Home?


Written and directed by Jono Burns, Home? must be one of the slyest shows of the Fringe. An unapologetically autobiographical account of Burns's time at New York's Actor's Studio, it is a hilarious take-down of the pretensions and absurdities of the acting life and, in particular, method acting. Burns gives a tour de force performance, embodying around a dozen unlikely characters, from Phillip ("Do you know how many red-haired Jewish gays there are in Minnesota? Eight!") to an abrasive busker in Central Park. It gradually becomes clear, however, that Home? is more than a fond satire of an interesting and sometimes confronting time: it's also a moving account of coming to terms with loss.

Ably supported by musicians Sunny Leunig and Cathryn Kohn, Burns gices a virtuosic performance: turning on a dime from hilarity to real poignancy, he compels your unwavering attention for the hour-long show without missing a beat. Given the similarities to some of Peter Houghton's one-man shows, it's not surprising that Houghton's collaborator Anne Browning should have directed it with such a deft hand. Small, but perfectly formed. Fringe Hub, until October 1.

The Endarkenment

The Endarkenment, a post-apocalyptic musical by young writer/actor Fregmonto Stokes with score by Angus Leslie and Julius Millar, is the sort of rude, disorderly show that embodies the spirit of the Fringe. It makes almost no sense at all, has some of the most absurd costumes I've seen, and is powered by a rough, irreverent energy (and three cyclists, who every now and then cycle up the watts for a couple of torches). A spirited piss-take of online worlds such as Second Life, here called Corporate Life, it takes the form of a liturgy in which the high priest, Bugsy (Peter J. Reid) conducts a ceremony designed to appease the angry post-capitalist gods Imacdonald, Harvey Norman and Old King Coal. His three acolytes Swatch (Amy Turton), Flappy (Rueben Brown) and Zak Pidd (Goose) enact their fall of from grace and the subsequent Minor Economic Correction that saw the world fall into darkness.

Accompanied by a band of what appear to be pixies playing some very wonky pop, the performers belt out some fun numbers with ferocious gusto. Its satire of 21st century excess is limited to a basic attack on the alienation of virtual life, and some (admittedly enjoyable) wordplay on internet acronyms, but there are a couple of moments that pierce through the nonsense into something genuinely uncomfortable. Fringe Hub, until October 1.

Testimony


Testimony opens with a riveting image: we walk into the theatre to see a grotesque figure, dressed in what appear to be filthy white rags, standing on a podium, his back to the audience. When the lights go down, he turns to face us, and we see that he is abject indeed: his testicles, the size of grapefuits, dangle between his legs, forcing him to stand bowlegged, and his face is marred with what appears to be some terrible skin disease. This creature is, we learn, Octavio Asterius, the degraded modern remnant of the minotaur, the monster in the labyrinth of the contemporary imagination. Here, using an old convention of the theatre, he is on trial, with the audience as his jury and judge.

Graham Henderson's monologue was originally written as prose, and despite the best efforts of performer Matt Crosby and director Suzanne Chaundy, its transposition to theatre isn't entirely successful. The staging is simple: Crosby is framed by projections manipulated live on stage from a light projector, which are ingeniously various. Crosby's performance is detailed, brave and physically impressive; but his undoubted commitment is let down by some indifferent dramaturgy.

Testimony shows little grasp of dramatic structure, which means its energy really begins to sag in the final 20 minutes. Worse, the prose segues without warning from epiphanies of soaring poetic to moments of bathetic banality that recall nothing so much as a yoga meditation. If the text could be excised of its increasingly turgid repetitions, and could solve its problematically simplistic relationship to the audience, it might make a brilliant, albeit rather shorter, show. As it is, it founders under its own weight. Fringe Hub, until October 9.

Every September for the past five years, Ms TN has looked up from her desk to see the Melbourne Fringe Festival bearing down on her like an express train, or that rock that Wil E. Coyote intended for the Roadrunner, but which somehow is getting bigger and bigger in the air above him... And every year I hand in my Critic's Badge, and go and have a good lie down, because trying to choose between almost 5000 artists at around 150 venues makes my head explode.


This is where Fringe creative producer Emily Sexton comes in, because she's not only overseeing a festival which last year increased its box office by 42 per cent, and which seems to be miraculously combining the best of curatorial flair with the ideals of open-access culture: she has time to take the fearful crrritic by the hand, and to gently suggest some interesting pathways through the chaos. And this year I will share the TN recommendations with you all.

But first, get your shiny program, because it really is shiny this year, and a big felt pen. Ready? This is going to be fast.

Top of the list is a Melbourne Fringe venture conceived by Sexton herself. Visible City is a hugely ambitious cross-artform venture, employing 12 contemporary artists from Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia and China to generate a new take on "live art" in the urbs. Visible City happens across the city, and is not being programmed: part of the fun will be finding out when and how, and you might just stumble across it by accident. Keep your ear to the ground for this one.

Some of the dance is happening just down the road from Ms TN, in The Substation in Newport. Intimate Exposure presents solo, duo and trio work from some of Melbourne's most exciting dance artists, Carlee Mellow, Jade Dewi Tyas Tunggal and Amelia McQueen, with dance films by Dianne Reid. Also keep an eye out for Love Hunter, a fusion of dance, theatre and comedy at the Fringe Hub in North Melbourne, in which "friends talk, rave and whisper about love". Sounds intriguing.

There's plenty of circus, but look out for Mothlight, on at the Fringe Hub, which crrritic John Bailey describes as "absolutely at the razor's edge". And Suitcase Royale fans will be curious to see Royale regular Miles O'Neill in his first solo show, Miles O'Neil's World Around Us, at the Lithuanian Club, based on some old super 8 videos.

As for the theatre: the Dog Theatre in Footscray is presenting a la carte, an exploration of physical and visual theatre by Born in a Taxi, the Public Floor Project and Well & Son. La Mama is giving us Ridiculusmus in Total Football (some of you might have seen an early draft of this at last year's Fringe, and it should be a hoot). Telia Neville, winner of the best newcomer at this year's Comedy Festival, is presenting For Whom The Bell Tolls at the Lithuanian Club, which promises to be "an intimate look at the genesis of a genius".

Shaun Tan fans will be agog - I know I will - to see Mutation Theatre's version of his beautiful graphic novel The Arrival, which is on at the Docklands. And I am very excited to hear that Uncle Semolina & Friends are back, this time to perform Peter and the Wolf at the Collingwood Underground Carpark.

Malthouse and Hayloft are presenting Thyestes at The Tower, which, like all classical drama, involves fratricide, adultery, incest, betrayal, exile and other nice human behaviours. And I'm intrigued by the premise of The Endarkenment, a "pedal-powered opera" that summons up our post-grid future in what sounds like a Riddley Walker-type argot.

Look out too for Bambina Borracha Productions, with a one man show Words They Make With Their Mouths and an immersive production of Under Milk Wood. Lastly, the excellent Adelaide director Daniel Clarke is bringing his production of John Clancy's The Event to the Fringe Hub, which I reckon will be well worth a punt. Some of you will have seen Clancy's Fat Boy at Red Stitch earlier this year.

It's all beginning on September 22 and stops on October 10, just in time for the Melbourne International Arts Festival. Yes, folks, Melbourne's annual cultural orgy is less than 10 sleeps away. And you can find details on all these shows and more, and book online, at the Fringe website. See you there!

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.

Attract/Repel is an intriguing work of theatre at the Store Room which meets, head-on, the question of racism. One of the best things about it is how it does so without fuss or apology, yet instead of visiting the expected arguments of victimisation or entitlement it manages - delicately and with humour - to excavate something of the complexities of human social relationships, to explore the fluidity of the categories of "us" and "them".

A devised work directed by Ming-Zhu Hii, and generated in collaboration with the performers (Jing-Xuan Chan, Fanny Hanusin, Georgina Naidu and Terry Yeboah), Attract/Repel it has a pleasing transparency about its motives and aesthetic which focuses on the particularities of experience to illuminate general truths, rather than the other way around. The most important aspect of this approach is that contradiction is embraced rather than glossed.


As it begins, the four cast members enter the space one by one, each carrying a suitcase. Each is regarded with suspicion by those already occupying the territory of the stage, until they find their own space. It's an elegant introduction, and is almost a theatrical illustration of an image used by the poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger. In an essay on migration, he describes how one passenger in a train carriage will immediately occupy it. When another enters, he is regarded with mistrust, even veiled hostility; but once he has settled in, he too occupies the carriage. When a third passenger enters, both will regard the new occupant with the same mistrust, until she too has settled in. Enzensberger uses this metaphor to describe the tensions between successive waves of immigrants, pointing out that migration has been the essential history of human beings for millennia. Difference always generates hostility until it is absorbed into the fabric of a society, at which point it becomes part of the "us" that makes a "them".

Once all four performers are on stage, they introduce themselves by asking each other their full names. Because they are from different cultures - Chinese/Australian, Chinese/Indonesian, Indian/Celtic, Ghanaian - they each have names that immediately signal their differences: none has a standard western christian and surname, although their names have all been "translated" into western formats. They ask each other how many languages they speak (an average of about three each, as I recall). They ask each other to say "I love you" in their native language. Georgina's native language is English.

And so begins an intriguing exploration of the mechanics of making human beings "other". The achievement of Attract/Repel is that it at once enters the realm of personal experience and frames it in a series of wider questions: what is racism? Who is racist? Is racism only a question for white privilege? How, in a supposedly multicultural society, does it actually function? What does it feel like to encounter racism? And through these apparently simple questions, which immediately subvert themselves in ways that are comic, unexpected and moving, a picture emerges of something that is not simple at all: a social texture that is full of ambiguity and contradiction, and which is reinforced by the most apparently trivial of gestures as much as by its coarser manifestations.

Ming-Zhu Hii has learned a lot from Jérôme Bel, notably from the apparently straightforward simplicity of his approach in Pichet Klunchun and Myself. However, she has framed this work in a sculptural installation of neon lights designed by Damien McLean, originally inspired by a Dan Flavin installation. This framing makes it more self-consciously theatrical and less joyously transparent than Bel's work, but has its own attractions. The cast use chalk to write on blackboard walls, giving the work a pedagogical frame that is undermined by the playfulness of the performance. There is some stylised movement which doesn't always throw off the smell of studio improvisation, but on the whole the conceit is startlingly successful. The stern simplicity of the work liberates a sense of play, which in turn releases a very human complexity that evades the traps of earnestness or simple moralising.

What makes this work is ultimately the generosity and skill of the performers; they slip with grace and subtlety between raw expressiveness and artifice, keeping both qualities constantly in play. We are never quite permitted to forget that this is a performance, that these performers are playing characters, even if those characters are themselves. At the same time they bring to this consciously theatrical construction a disturbing ability to generate authentically naked emotion. It's intelligent and deeply felt theatre, alert to all its possible pitfalls and evading most of them. Ming-Zhu Hii and her collaborators have created a work that seems to be all light surfaces but which resonates in some deep places.

The Ridiculusmus Readings were, as the name suggests, a series of play-readings of works in progress by Ridiculusmus, the British comic duo, David Woods and Jon Haynes, who brought us an unforgettable The Importance of Being Earnest a few years ago. Over four nights, they read differing combinations of three plays, one of which involved a volunteer cast of around 50 people.

I'm not quite sure how to describe the reading I saw, which included the play with the cast of 50 (a hyper-theatrical and possibly awful play about Princess Diana called Goodbye Princess). For one thing, in the tiny La Mama space, the cast outnumbered the actual audience, although maybe it's truer to say that in many ways the cast and the audience were the same. Which made it a peculiarly immersive experience.

Both plays were reflections on contemporary Britain. Total Football is a two-hander about a PR campaign to jazz up enthusiasm for British Identity by finding golden moments in British public history (including Winston Churchill's declaration of war on Germany and a winning goal by David Beckham). It was a sly and hilarious pisstake on nationalism as a brand, performed with faultless comic timing by Haynes and Woods. Goodbye Princess was read by practically everyone. I guess it had the same concerns as the first play, with added metatheatrics and idiot royals. But what made it totally enjoyable was being in the middle of this anarchic communal reading, complete with misreadings, missing characters and lots of coarse acting. Totally irresistible fun.

Picture: Attract/Repel at the Store Room Theatre.

Attract/Repel, conceived and directed by Ming-Zhu Hii. Lighting design and dinstallation by Damien MacLean, with Rachel Burke, music by Yusuke Akai. With Jing -Xuan Chan, Fanny Hanusin, Georgina Naidu and Terry Yeboah. The Melbourne Town Players @ The Store Room, Melbourne Fringe Festival, until October 10.

Ridiculusmus Readings by David Woods and John Haynes. La Mama Theatre, Melbourne Fringe Festival. Closed.

'Tis the season for launches. Last night the Melbourne Fringe Festival launched itself into the giddy stratosphere. More than half a million people watched more than 4500 artists at around 100 venues last year. That's a lot of stuff, and explains why Ms TN - a delicate creature at the best of times - gets out her sal volatile before she consults the program. As I recall, last year she threw up her hands in despair, crumpled into a foetal heap in the corner, and just stayed home being fed grapes by various slaves family members. This year she'll do a little better (frankly, it would be hard to do worse) and will see, well, a few shows, thanks to Fringe AD Emily Sexton, who made soothing noises and guided Ms TN's trembling finger to the "program highlights". But the blog-hungry should keep an eye on the hubsite Spark Online, where our blogging confreres Neandellus and Jana will be logging shows, and of course the indefagitable Richard Watts, who is prepared to fry his brain and see the requisite thousand shows a day. I suppose, as Fringe chair and awards judge, he's obliged.

The night before, the MTC launched its 2010 season with the obligatory fountains of champagne. 2010, which kicks off with the Australian premiere of the Broadway hit The Drowsy Chaperone (starring Geoffrey Rush) is certainly various. Hannie Rayson and David Williamson fans are well-served, with new plays from each (Williamson's Let The Sunshine premiered at Sydney's Ensemble Theatre last year). There are a couple of unknowns to me which spark my curiosity - JT Roger's Madagascar and Tony McNamara's The Grenade - and a lesser Mamet, Boston Marriage, which on the other hand features Pamela Rabe. And there are some potential gems.

Ewen Leslie - an absolute revelation in the STC's The War of the Roses - will star in Richard III, with a stunning cast of women, Jennifer Hagan, Deirdre Rubenstein, Alison White and Meredith Penman (who'll be familiar to Hayloft fans). I'm looking forward to an adaptation of Pedro Almodovar's film All About My Mother - which as you might know, features a production of A Streetcar Named Desire - and Sarah Ruhl's Dead Man's Cell Phone - Ruhl does a genuinely deft and graceful line in contemporary American surrealism. Joanna Murray-Smith has Songs for Nobodies, an intriguing theatrical conceit that is a Bombshells-type vehicle for the extraordinary singer Bernadette Robinson, and Daniel Keene is there with his existential comedy Life Without Me, which features a stellar cast - Greg Stone, Deidre Rubenstein, Brian Lipson, Kerry Walker and Rob Menzies. And it finishes with a production of Marius von Mayenburg's The Ugly One at the Lawler Studio. This is a fantastic play, and I was kicking myself that I missed it at the Royal Court last year, when I saw Anthony Neilson's Relocated instead.

Before I forget, which I have, let me remind you about the Cybec Readings at the Lawler Studio. If you haven't kept your eye on them, you'll have already missed Nicki Bloom's Tender (the Captain helpfully reports here, with a bonus fascinating discussion on text and theatre) and Ian Wilding's The Water Carriers. Which gives you no excuse to miss Robert Reid's The Joy of Text, coming up on September 29.

Meanwhile, the Belvoir St Company B season launch has prompted a lot of disquiet. Where, a lot people want to know, are the women? Do we not write? Do we not direct or design? Nicholas Pickard has the story here. And Katherine Lyall-Watson has some useful basic facts at her Performing Arts Blog.

I just couldn't manage the Fringe. Here's why, with a potted summary of my week so far.

Thursday and Friday: two openings, with an increasingly heavy head cold. Saturday: my nose in full flood, I cancel my plans to see Red Stitch's production of Jack Goes Boating. Early Sunday evening: a quick visit to Emergency with severe breathing difficulties (yeah, I know, I gotta stop smoking). Monday: armed with sufficient steroids to ensure several lifetime bans from the Tour de France, I fly to Brisbane to see a preview of Michael Gow's QTC production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Tuesday: I fly back to Melbourne, slightly less bug-eyed than when I left, thanks to said wonder drugs. Wednesday: recovery. Sort of.

So I'm planning to write up last week's openings tomorrow - before I fly to Adelaide on Friday, to see another play. I'm not complaining, I swear. It's all brilliant. But I really see the point of those performance-enhancing drugs. Just don't tell Dick Pound...

TN is getting a little obsessive about time. In the brave new 21st century, there seems to be less of it around; a month passes in the flicker of an eyelid, a year seems merely a frantic pause between one breath and another. And what am I to do - really, what am I to do - about the Melbourne Fringe Festival? I've been reading, in the vain hope that some research might bring me some solutions. This briefly caught my eye:

"Psychologists are interested in whether we can speed up our minds relative to physical time. If so, we might become mentally more productive, get more high quality decision making done per fixed amount of physical time, learn more per minute." It sounds exactly the sort of thing I need, but as I read on, I became discouraged:

Several avenues have been explored: using drugs such as cocaine and amphetamines, undergoing extreme experiences such as jumping backwards off a tall tower with bungee cords attached to the legs, and trying different forms of meditation. So far, none of these avenues have led to success productivity-wise.

This led to an exciting moment when I imagined a bunch of corporate executives having bungee-jumping workshops with a coked-up facilitator, but was otherwise useless.

The philosophers are no help at all. Nobody seems to agree on what time is in the first place, and some claim that it doesn't exist at all. (I'm beginning to agree with the latter party). And then you get people like the Nobel Prize-winning physicist David Gross saying that "spacetime is doomed". He's clearly been studying my diary.

It is, I admit freely, a critic's problem, and no one else's. The fact is, TN is a wuss. I've read two real critics recently (Chloe Veltman from the SF Weekly and Lyn Gardner from the Guardian) mention in passing that when they attend their local fringes, they see six shows a day. They must be women of steel. This, to TN's tiny mind, makes bungee jumping backwards off the Eureka Tower seem like a snip. Six shows a week sends me into a decline. I don't know how anybody sees that much theatre without dissolving into the floorboards like the Wicked Witch of the West.

Then there's the Melbourne Festival proper, which opens on October 11, when the Melbourne Fringe is still in full hue and cry. Since MIAF consists of a legible number of events, I've already sorted out my diary for that one. It's pinned on the fridge, looking frighteningly dense and very exciting. If I were a proper critic, I'd have already combed the Fringe program and picked out possible highlights. But every time I look at it, something happens in my moind. Little cogs fall out. Important mechanisms cease to function. I think I am not a proper critic at all. (I suspect this might be very close to the truth).

There are further complications. In a gigantic diary malfunction, I'm flying to both Adelaide and Brisbane in the first week of October. I'm seeing shows, but they are not MFF shows.

Then there's the saga of The Novel. (This is turning into a record whinge; I'm sure that all those not crying crocodile tears at the hard lives that we poor critical flowers lead are probably slumbering peacefully on their keyboards. But hey, this is what blogs are for). As regular readers know, earlier this year, I finished The Novel. And ever since it has been with my excellent and very lovely editor while she considers the myriad ways of making it better.

And late yesterday, I received a phone call from England from said excellent and very lovely editor, who wishes to send me my rather thick manuscript, annotated neatly in red ink, so I can do all the rewriting by, well, say the first week in November, so we can have it all well in hand for publication in July...

Since I am not completely crazy, I told her that was impossible. We have negotiated a deadline that touches the horizon of probability. But, you know, it's another one of those things. I have this uneasy feeling at present that all my lives are out of control.

In the light of which, once again, I turn to my diary, wondering what I can do about the Melbourne Fringe Festival. There's so much of it, and it's so everywhere. Maybe next week I'll feel stronger (TN returned from Sydney with a doozy of a cold) but that still won't solve my temporal, physical and psychic limitations. And we already know that bungee-jumping doesn't work.

I guess this is a kind of extended apology: as I keep saying to people, feeling pathetic as I say it, I can't get to everything. At Fringe time I feel like I can't get to anything. How do others cope?

Rubeville, written and directed by Thomas Henning. Music by Liam Barton, Sebastian Steiger and Sean the Saw. With Gareth Davis, Dylan Young and Eloise Mignon. The Black Lung @ The Black Lung Theatre until October 15. Debris by Dennis Kelly, directed by Tanya Goldberg. With Thomas Campbell and Bojana Novakovic. Ride On @ the Black Lung Theatre, 55 High St Northcote, until October 14. Bookings: 8412 8777

"No other production this year," trumpets the press release for Rubeville, neatly undercutting its own hyperbole, "has combined these actors with these lines!" That's marketing for you, in all its empty seduction: the banal promise, so prinked up with exclamation marks that even its own mother can't recognise it. It's the hustle, the con, the sell, the miasma of delusion. At the centre of its fog of deception is the hustler himself, the most deluded of them all.

This is the world of Rubeville, where everything is for sale and nothing has any value. As it begins, this show reminds us that working in the theatre was once considered synonymous with prostitution: an abject Hernandez (Dylan Young), whom we have just seen begging on a street corner outside the theatre, offers himself to a member of the audience ("fifty dollars? ok, thirty five"), then pulls down his shorts and bends over the sofa.

A man with his shorts garlanding his naked bum has a certain grotesque pathos; but it becomes something else when Hernandez, playing out the imagined fantasies of his putative john, begins to sob, "Don't fuck me, please, don't fuck me". The voyeuristic horror of rape gives way almost at once to a lecture from "George Clooney", played by Gareth Davis, on what Hernandez (or Dylan Young) is doing wrong in his performance. "You want to please," says George (or Gareth). "You're pandering to the audience..."

I guess you could call what follows an extended mindfuck. A savage hour-long riff on the brutalisations of commodified celebrity culture, this is wickedly hilarious theatre, acutely self-aware and blackly intelligent. Thomas Henning and his cast pitilessly manipulate the expectations of their audience, invoking extremity only to explode it, turning in a trice from violence or pathos to outrageous comedy to sly commentary.

Rubeville is a sardonic response to the Americanisation of our culture, invoking the fantasy world of Hollywood and the seductive dream of a quick buck. The stage is littered with blank television sets, one of which neurotically plays a loop of random video footage: a close-up of George Clooney, some scenes from a black and white movie, film titles in a language which looks like Finnish. The band, playing Tom Waits-style blues/rock/folk, plays in the corner. Their faces are painted white and black in a sinister echo of blackface make-up, calling up the racial erasure of the Black and White Minstrels or the nationalistic mindlessness of football fans.

The plot, such as it is, concerns a series of get-rich-quick scams hatched by George Clooney, the self-proclaimed hustler, and his half-naked, filthy sidekick Hernandez. Trixie (Eloise Mignon), a junkie prostitute, ODs on their couch (but not before stepping out of character and complaining about the gender politics of the production, which means that the only woman in the cast is playing a junkie prostitute). They decide to make a quick buck by demanding ransom money from her rich family. Then they rip off the till of the theatre, in order to go to Iceland to claim Trixie's inheritance...

The nonsense of the plot is really a pretext. Rubeville is, among other things, a satire on theatre itself: theatrical conventions are invoked only to be undermined and attacked. The actors slip in and out of character, performing themselves as well as their roles, confusing the fictive reality of the show. It is completely unclear when the play begins or finishes. You walk into the theatre where the three-piece band is playing as George/Gareth scrambles over the seats, muttering incomprehensibly. Towards the end, George/Gareth confesses sadly that he has "run out of show". The final blackout, which prompts the audience applause and actorly bows, loses its finality when the actors come back on stage and start playing with the band, as if the bows were just another scene in this apparently improvised performance.

Rubeville makes me think of the sexually-charged anarchy of Heathcote Williams' play AC/DC, but it lacks Williams' utopian optimism. Like Williams, its destruction of the barriers between identities makes it genuinely Artaudian, and it is fuelled by a pervasive anger at the state of contemporary society. "Mediocrity and delusion," says the poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger, "stand in a complementary relationship to each other; their apparent antagonism conceal a deep-seated collusion. A social location which lies outside this entanglement will not be found." Rubeville is a spirited protest against both mediocrity and delusion, sardonically aware that, as members of a society which expresses its anxieties about identity in performances of violence, we are all implicated in their mutual machinations.

For all its apparent anarchy, this is highly polished theatre. All three actors generate rawly powerful performances with a risky improvisatory edge, but the real tell of this show is its sharpness: the timing is always impeccable. And did I say that it is hilarious? The Black Lung is evolving into one of the truly exciting nodes of theatre-making in Melbourne.

As well as being a theatre company, the Black Lung is a curated venue. For the Fringe Festival it has imported from Sydney Ride On's production of Debris, the debut play of British writer Dennis Kelly. First performed in 2003, Debris put Kelly in the company of playwrights like Mark Ravenhill, David Harrower and Sarah Kane, who are loosely grouped under the rubric of In-Yer-Face theatre.

It's easy to see why Debris attracted attention : it's a play that intriguingly combines high poetic language, drawn in part from Christian mystic traditions, with a hard-edged and blackly comic look at family dysfunction. It concerns a brother and sister, Michael (Thomas Campbell) and Michelle (Bojana Novakovic), who have been dragged up by their alcoholic father after the death of their mother. Oddly, for all its extremity the writing is apt to undercut its own emotional power by reaching too easily for a joke, but the energy and beauty of its writing is undeniable.

The play opens with a monologue by Michael, in which he describes how his father crucified himself in his living room on Michael's 16th birthday. The description of the (rather ingenious) self-crucifixion is at once funny and brutal, and the sensuality of its evocations of the dying father's flesh, filled with a kind of loathly eroticism, echo Julian of Norwich's descriptions of Christ's body on the Cross in her visionary work Revelations of Divine Love.

The mystic imagery recurs throughout the play, which tells a nightmare story of neglect and deprivation through a series of fragmentary scenes. The image of a lactating Christ, another common symbol in mediaeval mysticism, is resurrected in Michael's discovery of an abandoned newborn baby in the trash and his breastfeeding it with his blood. Against these macabre Christian manifestations, Kelly poses Michelle's various narratives of her mother's death and her own birth: in one, her mother dies of joy, choking on a chicken bone from a celebratory meal, and Michelle is ripped untimely from her womb; in another she gestates in her mother's corpse, which rots ignored in the corner of the living room, and turns into a nightmare carnivorous plant. These fictions, as becomes clear, are the means by which the children survive their upbringing.

Novakovic (most recently seen here in Eldorado and The Female of the Species) and Campbell are certainly up to the challenges of the script, and give powerful and nuanced performances as the two siblings. Unfortunately, Tanya Goldberg's direction lacks the bold imaginative flair of the writing: there is little sense of mise en scene, and the actors often seem awkwardly placed in the space.

The metaphor that stitches the production together - scene titles are chalked on the theatre walls by Novakovic, filling pre-drawn letter spaces like those in writing primers - also muddies the focus. Although it emphasises the childhood of the characters, the Brechtian allusion seems misplaced here, both theatrically and metaphorically - it is hard to see, for example, how this play is any kind of lesson, and the schoolroom reference, with its implications of orderly authority, has absolutely no connection to the disenfranchised lives the play portrays. For all that, it's a fair fist of a startling play, and more than worth the ticket price.

The Black Lung Theatre

Material Mouth, performed and devised by Carolyn Connors. Directed by Margaret Cameron, lighting by Gwendolyna Holmberg-Gilchrist. La Mama Theatre until October 9.

Material Mouth, says the press release, is a "theatrical concert for solo voice", which seems as good a description as any. Created and performed by the remarkable Carolyn Connors, it's as hard to classify as it is to adequately describe - a work of performance art that encompasses sound poetry, compositions for voice and wine glass, cabaret and satire.

In Material Mouth, music, poetry (in its least semantic form) and theatre collide in the female body. As much as anything, this work is a very conscious performance of femininities, a subtly devastating parody of how the politeness of the feminine is laid, like a constricting costume, over the impolitic female body. The gap between the proper and the improper emerges as a disturbance, in expressions of hysterical extremity clothed in a parade of apology, which assault the audience with a discomfort that is very close to embarrassment. The response, certainly on the night I saw it, is a lot of laughter.



This is not to say that Connors isn't funny; she is often very funny indeed. But there was an interestingly nervous edge to the laughter of the audience; Material Mouth was as clear a demonstration of the mechanism of laughter as a release for anxiety as any I have seen.

Carolyn Connors has been called one of the "most experimental mouths" in Australia. A composer, keyboardist and vocalist, she has collaborated with the sound poets Amanda Stewart and Chris Mann, and most recently she was the "Psychokinetic Pianist" in Gotharama with Moira Finacune, star of the "new burlesque". Here she is directed by Margaret Cameron, one of the most innovative and distinctive theatrical talents in Australia.

Material Mouth begins by gently satirising La Mama itself: as every regular habitue knows, most performances begin with the sound of footsteps creaking down the stairs. This is a sound we are supposed to politely edit out, as we edit out the bottles crashing into the recycler from the restaurant next door. In Connors' show, it suddenly becomes foregrounded: we hear her coming down the stairs and wait for the lights to come up and the show to start. But the lights don't come up: the footsteps go up the stairs again. And then down. Then they seem to be going around in nervous circles. Or maybe she's going upstairs again? We are not sure... There's a bit more fussing about and then, finally, the lights come up on a silent woman smiling at us anxiously. She spends more time than is comfortable standing still, looking at her leisure at each of us, her smile flickering with a kind of incandescent apology across her face, as if she has discovered herself here by accident.

In the liminal space before the performance, when everything is possible, this pause is an uncomfortable questioning of the presence, not only of the performer, but of the audience. What, she seems to be asking, a little quizzically, are we doing here? What will we do now? Only the most confident of performers can pull off enacting this kind of uncertainty; it can easily collapse into real embarrassment. Connors deliberately walks this tightrope throughout the performance, always on the edge of catastrophe, with never a false step.

Finally, as if she remembers something, she crosses to a tightly lit area of the wall and slowly, with a hieratically stylised movement, puts on an absurd velvet hat that obscures the entire upper part of her face. As in Beckett's play Not I, everything is focused on her mouth. She turns, so we see her in dramatic profile, looking like a cross between a priestess and a model on a Parisian catwalk. We wait, breathlessly, for Connors to speak...

With an almost melodramatic gesture, Connors sticks her finger in her mouth. Then she starts talking. It has all the expressivity and volubility of language, without a trace of semantic sense. Then she stops, takes her finger out of her mouth, pauses, turns her other profile, and puts her thumb in her mouth, and speaks again, this time in a lower voice. She performs a dialogue between the two profiles, which is at once comically infantile - it's exactly the sort of thing children do for fun, to make silly noises - and yet, in its vocal variations, disturbingly close to real speech.

This is pure sound poetry, removing all trace of semantic recognition from spoken language and exposing its subterranean physicality and sonic values. I found it interesting at this point how much I was longing for actual words to emerge from the vocalisations (a longing related to the difficulties I have, as a word-centred person, in describing adequately my experience of the show). But, as with all aspects of this work, Connors is not in the business of satisfying expectations; she forces the audience's attention to focus on the mouth and the noises it is making, on the embarrassing, recalcitrant presence of the performer herself.

This introduces a series of "acts" separated by blackouts, which are orchestrated to gradually expand Connors' musical and theatrical vocabulary. She mimes playing a piano, voicing the notes, pushing them to harshly discordant, assaultive extremes before bringing them back (apologetically, as if it had somehow got away from her) to something like melody. In a particularly beautiful moment, Connors sits like a medium before a draped table covered with wine glasses, places pieces of tin foil on top of them, and begins to sing. The tinfoil vibrates and splits her voice, so it seems as if there is more than one person singing; and then the foils slowly begin to rotate, like miniature ballet dancers, turned by the answering vibrations of the glasses.

In another act, three tiny music boxes are spotlit by the window; one by one, Connors flips them open. They are all playing Für Elise. To the accompaniment of this melodic tinkling, Connors wriggles into two huge tulle petticoats, flashing that brittle smile as she becomes entangled and clumsily sticks out her arms in a grotesque attempt free herself.

Because the eye and ear have adjusted to the minimalism of the performance so far, it is a shock when Connors puts on an accordion and belts out a number. It's almost like a pay-off, the performer finally relenting and delivering some entertainment; except that it has a sting in the tail, the delivery of such satisfaction itself a mockery of expectation. It's a parody, at once fragile, joyous and satirical, of the romantic feminine, and is followed almost immediately by a hilariously grotesque vision of a vagina dentata.

The lights come up to a disconcerting vision of a face, upside-down and seemingly between Connors' legs, lit from beneath by a tiny hand-held strobe light. This time the "other mouth" speaks (the only time words are spoken, rather than sung, in the entire show), a fragmentary dialogue with, one assumes, a lover. "Unlike you," it says, "I have twooo mouths." It finishes, impatiently, "Ok, I'll be the man." Predatory and sardonic, impropriety incarnate, this mouth does not apologise for itself; it takes what it wants.

There follow more songs, this time accompanied by a ukelele: a divertissement on the Australian women's swimming team ("What we want is LIFT!"), sung while she stands in a pan of water dressed in a bathing suit covered in obscenely drooping balloons, and another played in a costume that is really a brown paper bag. The paper, of course, crackles embarrassingly. The surprisingly lush design is full of intriguingly ambiguous promptings of the "proper": a music stand with music by Bach, empty earphones dangling from its side; yellowed sheet music pasted across a window.

Connors finishes by again meeting the eyes of her audience, smiling that smile, which remains as enigmatic as it was at the beginning. Is it apology, or mockery? Challenge or welcome? Benediction? All of these? The relationships in this intimate space between the proper and improper have imperceptibly, wickedly, been disrupted until it is impossible to tell which is which. And what are the implications of these disruptions? At once, I suspect, mundane and profound: again, I think of Beckett, of the pitiless compassion which exposes the fragility of human gesture, observing it without the comfort of consolatory moralising. And also of the perverse lightness of being which follows this observing.

Material Mouth is one of those deeply satisfying works which leave you ruminating for hours afterwards. A word for the lighting and design, which are beautifully precise and subtle, a hard ask in a space as small as La Mama. And also for Margaret Cameron's assured direction.

If you can manage it, I recommend catching Margaret Cameron's one-woman show Proscenium, also part of the Fringe, which I saw in July (review here); on some nights the timing allows you to see Material Mouth and run to the Malthouse for Cameron's piece afterwards. It would make a remarkably complementary evening of works by two of Australia's most interesting performance artists.

Picture: Carolyn Connors

La Mama Theatre
The Proscenium

Drink Pepsi, Bitch performed and written by Eddie Perfect, co-written by Tom Wright. Directed by Tom Healey. Music performed by Ben Hendry, Dustin McLean, Vincenzo Ruberto. Beckett @ The Malthouse Theatre until October 2. Bremen, directed by Michael Cammilleri, North Melbourne Festival Hub, Lithuanian Club Main Theatre until October 1.

Apologies for my lateness this week. Balancing this blog with everything else I do sometimes proves a tightrope act I can't quite manage, especially when I am bitten by yet another novel. I warn all budding writers: novels are a serious drug. You might begin with harmless poems and little playlets, thinking that you can stop any time you like, but before you know it you're trapped in the tentacles of addiction, sacrificing your life to feed your corrosive habit...

Currently, I am writing four novels. Even I think that is excessive. But despite being manacled to the computer, I managed to get out to a couple of Melbourne Fringe shows this week. (Eddie Perfect's show is certainly listed as part of the Fringe, even though, as he said himself, the lighting is too good.)

Drink Pepsi, Bitch! is fun with razor blades. Here is our multi-mediated corporatised world in all its inglorious unreality, from alienated cybersex to call centres to commodified celebrity. It's the universe of Michael Jackson, Britney Spears, Oprah Winfrey and celebrity disaster journalism, where our unfulfilled consumerist desires flash and crackle like sick hallucinations above a black abyss of fear.

Eddie Perfect's take on this is rude, crude and witty. After an Austin Powers-type voice-over intro, where some mega-corporate boss summarily liquidates his top celebrities (Michael Jackson, Britney Spears and some other person I forget), Eddie Perfect, faux-rebel, is introduced as the perfect weapon - commodity culture incarnate, set to destroy from within, a kind of lightning rod to safely earth any subversive desires.

It's a sardonic comment on how even rebellion has become a brand name (Che Guavera is, after all, mainly seen on t-shirts these days). And on Eddie bounces, in his suit and Australian Idol hair, to sing the glories of brand culture. His band is dressed (apparently to their displeasure) in cutsie waistcoats and caps, like McDonalds employees.

Drink Pepsi, Bitch! is a show which is basically a mix of cabaret singing and stand up comedy. Perfect likes "strong language" to put a bit of tabasco into his acerbic wit. So this, folks, is not the kind of show you'd take your grandmother to, unless she drinks Bundy and drives a motorbike.

Perfect is at his best when he is most pitiless, although there is one good moment where he reads a letter from the Oprah Winfrey website which is so appallingly sad that it silences the audience: it exposes, beneath the mockery, the human cost of our contemporary delusions.

I found the structure and direction of the show was sometimes clunky and contrived; it's hard not to compare it to Boulevard Delirium, a wholly successful importation of cabaret to the theatre. Where Barrie Kosky's direction slickly and unobtrusively focuses the stage on the talents of Paul Capsis, Tom Healey's here merely attempts to set up a semi-narrative frame. It also lacks a certain variety of texture, so Perfect's show doesn't quite escape a feeling, at times, of sameness, a kind of monotonality.

I also felt that the balance between savage satire and a more explanatory mode of social conscience was a little uneasy and unresolved. Though I liked very much the way Perfect lulls his audience with comedy, only to sock it to them with some biting observation about our own responsibilities for how the world is. No one is let off the hook.

What drives Drink Pepsi, Bitch! is, in the end, the courage and energy of the performer, and Perfect has these in abundance. The show culminates with a wonderful number, "Don't Be So Damn September 10", from his previous Malthouse show with Max Gillies, The Big Con. Here it is given a harsher and rockier edge which excoriates anyone who thinks that compassion is still an option in the New World Order after 9/11.

The following night, pepped up by Perfect, I went along to see Bremen, expecting magical puppets and rock and roll. I had forgotten something important about the Fringe: the right to fail. The fact is, I don't get out enough.

It was in the Lithuanian Club in Erroll Street, North Melbourne. This is an intriguing building, a centre for the Lithuanian community. Courtesy of the collaged photographs on the walls, I learned that "It Is Exciting To Be Lithuanian!" Like I said, I should get out more.

Bremen, loosely based around the Brothers Grimm fairytale, is, at 90 minutes, half an hour too long. It could easily get rid of that half hour by quickening its transitions from scene to scene, and making some of its performers speak their lines at normal conversational speed. To be fair, it may have been a disastrously slow night: aside from the delayed beginning, which came from the previous show running overtime, the lights went up and down a few times before anything actually happened on stage, suggesting a few technical unfamiliarities.

When anything did happen, it happened at a glacial pace. I had plenty of time to reflect on something a director told me a long time ago: that the art of direction is getting people on and off stage.

Despite this, some of the writing was lyrically lovely in a genuinely theatrical way, even through a rather earnest attempt to marry the fairytale with some commentary on asylum seekers.

And there were in fact wonderful moments - when, for example, the Sweet Sassafras Choir appeared, suddenly filling the stage with people, or the first glimpse of Death, who was genuinely, mediaevally impressive - and also some good singing. But the momentary pulse-quickening of these moments was almost immediately dissipated by the glumly slow rhythms of the show.

Melbourne Fringe Festival

Telefunken written and performed by Stuart Orr, directed by Barry Laing. Table 9 Productions @ the Tower Theatre, Malthouse, until September 25.

"Art, like suicide," says Ralph Manheim Mann blackly during the course of this fascinating show, "is very, very personal."

It's an illuminating analogy. Suicide is at once the ultimate assertion of self - the conscious decision to override even the deepest survival instinct, a blasphemous refusal of life - and the self's ultimate erasure. And if art, as Freud argued, is the sublimation of certain instincts towards death and sex, it is not a sublimation which yields gratification but is peculiarly circular. It is, in fact, a masochistic sublimation, erasing rather than aggrandising the self.



Stuart Orr's anti-Fascist aria Telefunken is art of this kind. Orr's electrifying physical presence is at the centre of the show, but all our attention is splintered and diverted from Orr himself by his very expressiveness. Personal this show may be, but it is the antithesis of confessional.

It's a bit of a challenge to describe its complexities. Telefunken works on several levels, and in reflecting on it, all of them seem to metastasise uncontrollably, creating dense clusters of allusion and metaphor which themselves collect more allusions, more metaphors...and it is no accident that one of the presiding gods in this piece is Loki, the trickster. I fear that one viewing is not nearly enough to absorb all of its implications.

It is, first of all, a riveting one-man show, a tour de force of performative and directorial skill, combining projected images and performance in continually inventive ways, so the eye and ear never know what to expect. It's deeply intelligent, in the anarchic fashion peculiar to art, which is disrespectful to everything except imagination, revealing truths through shiftings veils of deception and illusion.

As one reviewer said, less than euphoniously, Orr has a lot of accents. He does them all faultlessly, at least to my ear; I spent half the show convinced he really was German. He moves with the precision and speed of a dancer, and performs with a charismatic, even Mephistophelean, self-mockery. And often he is very, very funny, if in a rather apocalyptic fashion.

Telefunken is narrated by a character called Ralph Mannheim Mann, a propagandist for the Nazi regime, who is welcoming some American soldiers into the bunker as muffled explosions outside signal the fall of Berlin. Hitler's suicide is, he tells us, an hour away. In this time, he will reveal to us his unmade and clearly autobiographical masterpiece, a film called Cry of the Wolf, which follows the story of Erasmus, propagandist and werwolf, from bullied child to Fascist television producer, the major source of political influence in our contemporary world.

The thesis behind this show is somewhat unhistorical: Ralph Mann claims that television was a military invention used by the Nazis crucially to assist the rise of Fascism in Germany. While Telefunken advertised televisions for sale in 1936, it's a dubious proposition in itself; what is indisputable is that with films like Triumph of the Will, later called the most successful propaganda film ever made, the Nazi film maker Leni Riefenstahl was one of the seminal figures of modern propaganda.

Ralph Mann is her equivalent in the world of television; but again, he is trans-historical: he can, by putting on an instrument like the phylactery that pious Jews wear at prayer, channel all of Western television culture. And he foresees the monstrousness and power of television as a medium, how it projects its hypnotic images into the domestic space of every home. Orr's argument parallels the televisual culture of FOX and CNN with Nazi film propaganda, as is clear from the opening montage, which juxtaposes images of the Third Reich, George W. Bush speaking of weapons of mass destruction and Oprah Winfrey. However, as should already be clear, this is no simplistic parallel, but rather a darkly funny and dizzying exploration of the irrationalities inherent in Fascist power. Ralph Mann is the unacknowledged ghost in the machine, the personification of the incipient Fascism of the image.

The stage is like an extension of Ralph Mann's mind. The floor is littered with paper, the pages of his film script. In front is an old television set, topped by a gramophone and a set of wires, some connected to a ghastly looking machine which looks like something out of Frankenstein, the phylactery/headset which locks Mann in agonised torment to the demons of television. It's an idea which irresistibly recalls the Heathcote Williams of AC/DC, without the revolutionary optimism. Strapped to the side of the tv are sticks of dynamite, and on top is a plunger. Mann's suicidal trajectory is clear from the start.

On one side of the stage is an old fashioned pump organ, and at the back a scrim which can be lit from behind and which functions as a screen for projections of various kinds - drawings, extracts from films. This is topped by some old books. The images of books, of literary culture, recur obsessively through this show: books are what is destroyed in the translation to a culture of image, just as the tv propagandist Ralph Mannheim Mann and his werwolf creation Erasmus are the translation of that towering figure of German literary culture, Thomas Mann.

Some clues to Orr's complex system of metaphor and allusion can in fact be untangled from Mann's name. Ralph Mannheim is the name of Thomas Mann's most prominent English translator. The novelist Thomas Mann, writer of Death in Venice and - (here most pertinently) the masterpiece Dr Faustus - was the most famous patriarch of a famous artistic family, most of whom fled Germany in the 1930s as Hitler tightened his strangleghold on German society. (As Mann points out, before the Jews were persecuted, the Nazis came for the avant gardists and the socialists; what he doesn't say is that many of these people were Jewish, and that avant garde culture was denounced by the Nazis as Jewish decadence.)

Thomas Mann's son Klaus Mann wrote Mephisto, a novel about an actor called Hendrik Höfgen who colluded with the Nazi powers, betraying his left-wing friends and rising with the regime. This novel is based on Klaus' brother-in-law, Gustaf Gründgens, who became the director of Berlin State Theatre in 1934.

The character of Ralph Mannheim Mann (if he can indeed be called a character - he is not that in any conventional sense, but more a kind of occasion for performance) bears more than a little resemblance to Gustaf Gründgens. He speaks of staying in Nazi Germany while other artists fled, and clearly has reached a position of huge cultural influence, as chief propagandist for the Nazis, a lesser Leni Riefenstahl. He even travels to Paris to make tv shows with French actors, prompting some scathing cabaret parodies.

In both Mann's Dr Faustus and Mephisto, the legend of Faust - the consummate man of culture who is tempted by the devil and sells his soul - is an informing metaphor. In Telefunken, by contrast, Orr invokes the demons within the self, the transformative werwolf which emerges, like madness, with the full moon. The Mephisto figure might be television itself, which demonically possesses Ralph Mann every time he put on his phylactery/headset.

But it is of course perilous to take these allusions too literally. Orr works by bringing together constellations of association - and a wide ranging set they are, from South Park to Courbet's L'Origine du Monde, from the Norse myth of the trickster Loki to Michael Caine, from Bob Brown to Sesame Street - and imploding them in performance. It's blackly pessimistic - the Fascist propagandist's inevitable suicide releases on the world the demon of television, a new and monstrous culture of social manipulation, which Orr makes clear reaches its apotheosis in contemporary America.

The great achievement of Telefunken is that the centre holds, despite the incredible centrifugal force brought to bear upon it by Orr's imagination. This must be a tribute to Barry Laing's direction as much as to Orr's talent. It's a show of considerable class, rich with ideas and the immediate pleasures of performance, which means it repays both watching and later reflection. And that it is probably worth seeing twice.

Fringe Festival: Into The Fire: Wallpaper by Lucy Stewart & Interrogation by Ben Noble, St Martins Youth Theatre; Spatial Theory, created and performed by Bill Shannon, music by DJ Richie Tempo, lighting David Szlasa, North Melbourne Town Hall.

First, a mea culpa: a lethal combination of the school holidays and severe laryngitis meant that my fingers slid nervelessly off the pulse of Melbourne theatre, right in the middle of one of its busiest times. And so, belatedly coming to, I realise I've missed out on a few things I would have dearly liked to see: the Theatre of Decay's latest version of intimate theatre, viewed from the back seat of a car, for example, or a production of a play by France's most eminent playwright, Michel Vinaver. And you can't exactly rent out the dvd if you miss the show: the beauty and terror of theatre is, alas, its ruthless temporality.

However, I collected myself in time to catch a couple of interesting shows. At St Martins Youth Theatre I saw Into The Fire, a double bill of two young Melbourne playwrights, Lucy Stewart and Ben Noble. They are part of a new generation of Melbourne theatre artists which looks restlessly beyond parochial influences, and these two demonstrate that contemporary British writing is beginning to make itself felt in new writing here.

Although very different from each other, both these works eschew conventional ideas of character and narrative in favour of splintered, disconnected realities. Stewart's play Wallpaper is a theatrical exteriorisation of disturbed subjectivities, with sharp, unheralded shifts between differing levels of actual, imagined, remembered or deranged states of being. It's a technique Sarah Kane exploited spectacularly, but Stewart uses it here to different ends.

At the opening of the play the central character, Nigel (Chris Jefferson), is celebrating his twenty third birthday. He is undergoing a kind of early-life crisis, with his marriage falling apart and his work in an introduction agency echoing hollowly the lack of love in his personal life. As his sense of self disintegrates into a chorus of mocking voices, he begins a relationship with a girl (Miriam Glaser) who emerges from the grey walls of his house. The people around him - his wife Kiki (Naomi Francis), her sister Jeannie (Hope Hayward Rowling) and his employer Malcolm (Kristian Sartori) increasingly become less real to him than the strange young girl who sinisterly demands his love.

This kind of writing is much more challenging than conventional plot-driven drama, and Stewart doesn't always manage to achieve her ambition. The dramatic dynamic falls on emotional contrast and metaphoric connections rather than narrative suspense, and such complexities require a concomitant clarity in the writing. While it was never difficult to work out what was going on, I felt that Stewart often flinched from the more difficult implications of what she was writing about, relying on a fey lyricism or absurd humour to get her through. This feeling was reinforced by James Adler's rather fuzzy and fussy direction. The play's virtues are its freshness and ambition, and I look forward to Stewart's future work, especially if she finds a drivenness and focus her work presently lacks.

Ben Noble's Interrogation is a much darker play, directed with a sure and spare hand by Julie Waddington to make compelling theatre. Noble is clearly a startling and intelligent talent: he is the only actor on stage, and has given himself the material for a virtusoso performance. The play also features filmed scenes acted by Alison Boyce, Shaun Brown, Sylvie de Crespigny, Daniel Frederksen, Fiona MacLeod and Peter Roberts. The videos are naturalistic grabs of story or conversation, captured voyeuristically (we are always aware of the camera), which are interspersed with quotes from the Bible and an obscure text called The Encridion, which I can find nothing about and so suspect may be fictional. The monologues performed by Noble are all characters whom we also see on the screen, which creates a number of gaps between the differing representations. These gaps grow perversely more dislocating as the stories become clearer.

The links between the narratives are the murders of three young women. The masculinist equation of eroticism and death is well-trodden ground, but Noble makes an interesting fist of it here, only stepping falsely when he makes the dead woman speak of her longing to be watched or even stalked. Even if it is a projection of the imaginings of the men, this is a moment which comes uncomfortably close to the notion that women desire the violence to which they are subjected.

Interrogation is vaguely reminiscent of Martin Crimp's tour de force Attempts on Her Life, but instead of a named woman whose identity and story shifts and fractures from scene to scene, there are three nameless victims and three potential murderers. The final opening out of the play into the literal realities of the writer and the audience/reader did seem, perhaps, a little pat: given the power of Noble's performance and the intelligence of the writing, I think I wanted something that more disturbingly revealed that a fiction is also a reality.

I also saw Spatial Theory, New York street performer Bill Shannon's attempt on theatre made, he says with contagious insouciance, because you make more money in theatre than in the street (a fact that, frankly, I find hard to believe).

Bill Shannon is a beguiling entertainer, his improvisatory repartee honed in the harsh market of the street where a moment's boredom means your audience will wander off, and he is dynamically supported by the amazing sound work of deejay Richie Tempo, a mixture of jazz, hiphop and percussive funk. The show is a bastard cross between dance, a lecture (complete with videos) and stand-up comedy, with all the joins showing. While each section is slick, the movement from one to the other is often awkward, and a director might have excised a few repetitive longueurs. However, this show is conscious and ambiguous enough to make a fetish of its own awkwardness, and to make discussing the whole idea of success an uneasy prospect.

Shannon was diagnosed at the age of five with Legg-Calve-Perthe disease, a kind of arthritis which means that he is dependent on crutches. He hasn't let that stop him, and Spatial Theory demonstrates that he is not called "The Crutchmaster" for nothing. With his especially designed dance crutches and a skateboard, he creates moments of breathtaking lyricism and grace out of an uncompromising street aesthetic. The crutches are extensions of his body and become elements of his fluid expressiveness - a cross, a cage, wings - both the badge of his limitations, and the means of his freedom. Perhaps the most interesting moment was a dance in which he performed more and more difficult tricks until he fell over, flat on his back, the music stopping instantly. The gasp from the audience was instantly turned back on us, the audience's willing him on to "success" gently satirised by his own dislike of being patronised, of help that is more about the helper excercising their own notions of themselves as humane people than anything the other person might actually need.

Underneath the comedy and strange beauty, Spatial Theory is mining some uncomfortable areas, exploiting the ambiguity and uncertainty the abled feel towards the disabled, and what it means to be a disabled person in a public place. He fearlessly launches himself into the pathos and comedy of failure, in the process both creating an aesthetic of heroicism and redefining that word "ability". How can a person of such abilities actually be "disabled"? And what was I watching? An artist making a show, or a disabled person transcending their disabilities? As Shannon says, turning the question back on us, "Is it a dance, or is it a trick? Is it a trick, or is it a dance?" The answer is, I suspect, that it is both of these things, or neither of them. The truth is, I still don't know.