It's Australia Day today. As our national day of celebration, it acts as a post for all sorts of flags. Once, in more innocent times - or at least, in the days when White Australia was a harmless nationalistic masthead that merely signified cutting off the pigtails of Chinese goldminers - it meant the Land of the Long Weekend was nearing the end of its summer hols. The Australian Worker returned to his factory in the worker's paradise, there to cock his snook in a suitably larrikin fashion at the Boss, while stealing his copper piping.


Then our Indigenous people were given the vote, and we found that a sizeable slice of the Australian population thought that Captain Arthur Phillip's arrival at Botany Bay marked a day of calamity. In response to this and other kinds of thoughtfulness, Australia Day has become an occasion for bashing Indian students, dubious dress-sense and general boganoogery, which itself prompts a wave of horror from the anti-thug brigade in the national press.

I'm not sure that Australia is more racist than it has been. A certain zombie element is certainly expressing its racism in worse taste and with more confidence, and - seizing the commercial opportunity - supermarkets, insurance salesmen and furniture barns are cashing in on the patriotic ka-ching. Luckily, that's not all of Australia. It's certainly not the Australia I know. As a proud, card-carrying "arts extremist" and, well, ordinary urban citizen, I can testify to the tolerance, intelligence, ingenuity, passionate thoughtfulness and, yes, decency (George Orwell valued decency highly, and so do I) of the Australia I inhabit.

Phew. Just had to get that off my chest. Now from the editorial to the reviews: which will, I fear, be brief. Today is somewhat crowded. and I am working against other deadlines at present which limit my time.

The splashy opening of last week was, of course, the Melbourne Theatre Company's production of the Broadway hit The Drowsy Chaperone. If anything expresses Australian colonialism, it's a willingness to take the cultural lead from the traditional Anglo centres of culture, Britain and the US; in theatre's case, Broadway and the West End. However, the paradox of colonialism - as cricket and soccer demonstrate so well - is that the damn colonials end up doing the mother country's culture better than the mother country itself: and Simon Phillips's production here is a case in point.

The Drowsy Chaperone might usher in a subtext of nostalgia for the days when we - meaning white, middle class audiences - could comfortably laugh at wops and dagoes with funny accents. And it unashamedly claims that theatre is about entertainment and escapism, and nothing else. (It's actually the "nothing else" clause that I object to - I know very few extremist arts elitists who aren't up for popcorn). But its ironic self-commentary means that it has its cake and eats it too.

Disliking The Drowsy Chaperone would be like disliking kittens: pointless and somehow inhuman. This is a preposterous cocktail of a show, delivered with just enough lemon to cut against the syrup, and Phillips has given it a superb production. It plays homage to the golden age of musicals, when life was grand (if you were rich enough): it evokes 1920s Broadway, when Dorothy Parker was sharpening her pen at the Algonquin Round Table, Gershwin and Cole Porter were shaping the tunes and the Great White Way was paved with rhinestones and sequins.

What makes it more than merely an exercise in nostalgia is its simple but ingenious framing. When the lights go down at the start, they stay down: we sit in the anxious darkness that precedes every show, and Geoffrey Rush’s voice, refracted through a New York accent, floats across the auditorium. "I hate theatre," he says. "Well, it's so disappointing, isn't it?" And he tells us the prayer he delivers before every show: that it will be fun, that it will be short, that the actors will strictly observe the fourth wall and stay out of the audience, and that it will deliver an escape from the mundane travails of ordinary life.

The light lifts on a small, unimpressive apartment to reveal Rush, whose character doesn’t even have a name – he is simply the Man in the Chair. He is a musical theatre geek – for him, Elton John is a decadent shadow of Gershwin, and Cameron Mackintosh’s spectaculars are an unspeakable vulgarity. The Man has the blues, or at least an ill-defined anxiety he calls the blues, and to combat his melancholy, he proposes to share one of his favourite albums – a 1928 cast recording of a chestnut called The Drowsy Chaperone. He fussily puts it on the turntable and the overture begins.

And suddenly the blinds lift on his windows to reveal a real band playing outside. The walls ascend to reveal another, more glamorous world, the characters enter one by one, and the musical comes to life in his apartment. The musical itself is a ludicrous parody, performed by an outstanding cast with a brio that lifts it beyond its undistinguished score. It’s wittily annotated throughout by the lugubrious Man in the Chair, with occasional unwelcome interruptions from the “real” life he wishes so desperately to escape.

As well as theatrical stars like Rush, Richard Piper and Robyn Nevin (whose technical control is, in case we've forgotten, superb), Phillips has cast from experienced music theatre stagers, with a lineup that includes Adam Murphy, Shane Jacobsen, Rhonda Burchmore. And it's the cast - which has depth as well as breadth - that makes this show. Choroegrapher Andrew Hallsworth has put together some ripping dance routines - I'd forgotten, for example, how sheerly pleasurable it can be to watch a great tap duet. It all generates pure comic showbiz, with a sparkle heightened by Dale Ferguson’s ingenious set and spectacular costumes. A sure-fire crowd pleaser.

At the other end of the scale is Gary Abraham's Acts of Deceit (Between Strangers in a Room). At La Mama's Courthouse Theatre as part of the Midsumma Festival, this shows Melbourne's indie scene at its considerable best. It's loosely based on James Baldwin's second novel, Giovanni’s Room, which explored the alienation of a young, gay American man in 1950s Paris, his inability to reconcile his homosexuality with his ideals of manhood, and the catastrophic consequences. It is, in fact, the kind of thing that in lesser hands could be teeth-achingly pretentious. When delivered with the skill and passion you get here, what occurs is gut-wrenching, compelling theatre.

David (Jay Bowen) is waiting in Paris for his would-be fiancee Hella (Joanne Trentini), who is travelling Spain as she decides whether to marry him. While she's away, he meets a young West African barman, Ku-Jean (Terry Yeboah), and begins a passionate affair. His deceptions of his lover, his fiancee, his gay friend Jacques (Dion Mills) and a young woman whom he sexually exploits (Zoe Ellerton-Ashley) begins, of course, with his self-deception.

The major change in Abrahams' sensitive adaptation of Baldwin's novel is to transform the race of David's lover from Italian to West African. It's appropriate: as a black, gay man, Baldwin was himself one of the most insightful commentators on race relations in post-war literature; it also introduces a subtext about illegal immigrants that gives the text a contemporary spin. Also impressive is how the text wears its intelligence lightly, echoing Baldwin's literary sophistication without weighing down the play's dramatic force.

Perhaps what I most admired about this show - besides the passionate and, above all, accurate performances, which are truly extraordinary - is the delicacy and honesty with which the production explores a complex emotional and moral situation, eschewing judgment for insight. The design team - lighting, sound and set - use simple strokes to effectively evoke the glamorous squalor of jazz-era Paris. But don't take my word for it. Go see it for yourself.

Picture: The Australia I adore: Melbourne cafes.

Shorter versions of these reviews appear in the Australian.

The Drowsy Chaperone, music and lyrics by Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison, book by Bob Martin and Don McKellar, directed by Simon Phillips. Melbourne Theatre Company. Playhouse Theatre, Victorian Arts Centre. January 21. Until February 27. Tickets: $115. Bookings: 1300 723 038.

Acts of Deceit (Between Strangers in a Room), directed and written by Gary Abrahams, from a novel by James Baldwin. Sets and costumes by Kat Chan, lighting design by Katie Sfetkidis, sound design by Jim Westlake, music composition by Lachlan Tan and Geoff Chan. With Jay Bowen, Terry Yeboah, Dion Mills and Zoe Ellerton-Ashley. Dirty Theatre and La Mama Theatre, 2010 Midsumma Festival. Courthouse Theatre. January 22. Until February 7. Bookings: (03) 9347 6142. Tickets: $25.

We're all a bit shellshocked here in Victoria, as the death toll from the weekend's bushfires keeps spiralling up. Saturday was a terrible day. Even in the city, where we were safe from fire, the heat was apocalyptic: there were leaves in our backyard burned black, as if they had been blistered by a blow-torch. We found little geckos that were vainly trying to escape the heat completely dried out on the concrete, and the birds were absolutely silent all day, which was spooky. But the fires were deadlier than anyone imagined.

All the same, the shows went on. It's good to see that the Malthouse - presently staging Woyzeck - donated its entire Saturday night's takings of $11,872.38 to the Myer Bushfire Appeal. Meanwhile, I managed to get to two plays last weekend, and neither was cancelled (which happened across the board last week when the city infrastructure imploded in the heatwave - I guess this is theatre in the age of climate change).

David Greig's Yellow Moon, the opening play of Red Stitch's 2009 season, was first cab off the rank on Friday night. Greig is an intelligently contemporary (and frighteningly prolific) Scots playwright. Yellow Moon (subtitled The Ballad of Leila and Lee) was commissioned by a company that specialises in the theatre for young people, and there are certainly shades of young adult fiction in this play, with its story of two damaged urban teens from the tiny Scottish town of Inverkeithing.


Stag Lee (Martin Sharpe) is an alienated 15-year-old who spends most of his time fantasising about how he will make his fortune from a life of crime. His mother is seriously depressed, his father left when he was five, and he fights with his stepfather, Billy (Dion Mills). Silent Leila (Erin Dewar), on the other hand, is a well-behaved, studious Muslim girl whose vices are reading celebrity magazine and self-harming. For all his difficulties, Lee is quite certain that he exists, swaggering about "as if he owns the place", but Leila (Erin Dewar) - who has given up talking because she believes that people only hear what they want to - suspects that she doesn't. The only time she feels real is when she cuts her arms.

So begins an unlikely saga where these two children meet by chance, and are together in a cemetary when Lee sem-accidentally murders his stepfather. They flee to a hunting estate in the Highlands, where Lee believes he will find his errant father. Bizarrely enough, they find their way to the lodge, and meet its keeper, Drunk Frank (Dion Mills again) where, through a kind of purgatory of hard labour, they claim their identities, rediscover their innocence and fall awkwardly fall in love. Leila also meets an actual celebrity Holly (Ella Caldwell), before a melodramatic finale.

Director Alex Menglet emphasises the play's artifice with a gorgeous red curtain, spotlights and some spectacular actorly playing. There is the odd bum note: when Leila first appears, she is full chadoor, which seems at once inaccurate (most good Western Muslim girls go for the hijab, if they bother at all) and gratuitous. What kept me paying attention were the sharply detailed, virtuosic performances: Martin Sharpe and Erin Dewar in the central roles generate an appealing and unsaccharine innocence, which moves between comic and poignant without a trace of manneredness, something that has sometimes bothered me in Sharpe's previous performances. Dion Mills gives a physically electrifying performance in his various roles as narrator, Billy and Frank, and Ella Caldwell is fun in her role as the vacuous celebrity Holly.

The writing depends heavily on narration, with Dewar, Sharpe and Mills slipping constantly between story telling and direct enactment. It's all very epic in that Brechtian sense, and the alienating effect of the narration works brilliantly for one quarter of the play. Once the action headed into the highlands, I found myself more often puzzled than not, and it began to feel as if the play was trapped in its devices. Narrative devices were ingeniously exploited, but eventually they seemed to run out of steam, which is perhaps why it had to explode into sensationalist melodrama. I guess...

This is in fact a deeply strange play: it might look like a classic coming-of-age tale of teen angst and the emptiness of celebrity consumerist culture, but at the same time, it is redolent with pagan imagery. Deer, especially stags, feature heavily, and I wondered if, what with the gruesome stuff about deer being gutted, pulsing hearts, cleansing rings of fire and so on, there was some subtext of the Corn God, with the father sacrificed to the fertility of the ensuing generation. Or was it something about Scottish identity, the true heart of the Highlands and all that? Whatever it was, I missed it.

Of course, my imagination might have been a bit hysterical with the heat. All the same, I kept feeling that there was some dimension of this play that I just wasn't getting. For all the appealing performances and inventive direction, it ended up just being a road movie, with not much going on aside from the plot.

On Saturday - the hottest day since records began 150 years ago - I ended up in a sweaty little theatre in South Melbourne at the last night of a play about gay men masturbating to phone sex. This could have been one of those evenings that make you regret that first insouciant moment when you thought that theatre criticism sounded like a dandy way to pass the time. But it wasn't.

What attracted me to Jerker in the first place was the production team. (Call me a geek if you like, but I'll follow production people as closely as performers and directors). The show is designed by Adam Gardnir, who has worked with everyone from Stuck Pigs Squealing to the STC, with lighting by Danny Pettingill, who among many other things designed the lights for Hayloft's spectacularly beautiful production of Platonov. And Kelly Ryall, the sound designer, is one of the justly lauded theatre composers-around-town. My nose led me right: this production is a little gem.

Jerker, by San Francisco theatre critic and playwright Robert Chesley, is one of the signature plays to come out of the AIDS epidemic. Consisting entirely of phone dialogues between two men, JR (Gary Abrahams) and Bert (Russ Pirie), it records the arc of a relationship which begins with phone sex and evolves to some surprisingly tender moments without their ever meeting in the flesh, foreshadowing the curious intimacy of cyber relationships in the 21st century.

It was originally aired in 1986 as a radio play and its frank sexual language stirred up considerable controversy, culminating in the Federal Communications Commission rewriting its rules. Yet for all its history as hot political potato, this is a play with a light touch, deftly and often comically humane, shamelessly erotic and, ultimately, deeply moving. It survives its genre as AIDS play and its age surprisingly well: although Gary Abrahams wisely directs it as a period piece, with dial telephones and so on, it almost wholly escapes a feeling of datedness.

This is partly because its rigorously limited form means that it hasn't a lot of time for polemic. It's there, of course, in a scene that might be the hinge of the play, when we find out that JR is a Vietnam vet who says, impassionedly, that he has seen what evil is, and that it's definitely not the hedonistic gay promiscuity of the '70s. Chesley's frank defence on sexual libertarianism - an insistence that put him heavily at odds with Larry Kramer during the AIDS crisis - is passionately argued throughout the play. It's an argument that is still confronting, although the way AIDS was parsed as a moral punishment for gay men makes Chesley's anger understandable. But mostly we are focused on the fragmentary intimacy of the phone conversations, the obscenity and surprisingly tender innocence of the relationship between these two men.

As you might expect, production values are low on budget and high on sophistication. The keyword is simplicity. The design is a small raised stage on which stands a double bed split down the middle to represent the two bedrooms. As JR and Bert become more intimate, their relationship begins to generate its own reality, and the borders between the spaces, at first rigorously observed, become permeable; they lounge across each other's beds, even touch each other. It's gorgeously, intimately lit, with effective blackouts between each scene.

As Bert, Russ Pirie, whom I last saw in Little Death's brilliant production of Philip Ridley's Mercury Fur, gives a remarkable performance: this is a beautifully nuanced portrayal, superbly cadenced in its shifts from ironic restraint to full-blooded sexual ecstasy to grief, and Gary Abrahams as JR is an able foil. Certainly, the rising heat in the theatre that night wasn't just about the weather.

Picture: (L-R) Dion Mills, Martin Sharpe and Erin Dewar in the Red Stitch production of Yellow Moon. Photograph: Jodie Hutchinson

Yellow Moon by David Greig, directed by Alex Menglet. Set design by Peter Mumford, lighting design by Stelios Karagiannis. With Ella Caldwell, Erin Dewar, Dion Mills and Martin Sharpe. Red Stitch Actors Theatre until March 7.

Jerker by Robert Chesley, directed by Gary Abrahams. Set design by Adam Gardnir, costume design by Micka Agosta, lighting design by Danny Pettingill, sound design by Kelly Ryall. With Gary Abrahams and Russ Pirie. Milky Way @ Gasworks Arts Park, Midsumma Festival. Closed.