We all know some variation or other of this feeling. You are alone, it is dark. You hear an almost inaudible sound, just on the edge of hearing, that you can't quite identify. Your body is shocked into a state of hyper-alertness: adrenaline floods through your bloodstream like a rush of cold water. Your ears strain into the busy silence. You hear it again. Or maybe you don't hear it, maybe it's just the sound of your heart beating in your ears.

This is the imaginative landscape of Tamara Saulwick's exemplary Pin Drop. Saulwick recorded interviews with a number of women in which they were asked to describe experiences in which they felt unsafe. In Pin Drop she weaves the stories together into a sound poem of recorded and performed voices. The stories - some unexpected and funny, some sinister, all candid - lead into some surprising places, far from the tabloid sensationalism that loves an eroticised female victim. Saulwick is not so much interested in violence itself, as in the experience of fear and threat.


A sense of terrifying estrangement is a staple of horror films, in which the familiar and domestic is transformed into the strange and threatening. It is also a commonplace of torture: part of torture's world-destruction entails ordinary objects - telephone books or broomsticks - becoming agents of pain or humiliation. But this ambiguity wouldn't hold its power if it were not part of the fabric of our urban lives: it is the cusp between solitude and our social selves, where anything might erupt over the lip of possibility. Realities of assault or robbery or rape feed this anxiety, but are not the whole of it: it is also a shadow in ourselves. Whether a threat is actual or not, our vulnerability is real: we realise in these moments how fragile we are, how mortal, and, perhaps, how dangerous we might be. As one woman says, it's in such moments that she realises that she is capable of murder.

This investigation becomes the occasion for an extremely powerful work of sensory theatre. One of the striking things about Pin Drop is how very real it seems: its power stems, at least in part, from a careful attention to the fragmentary and contradictory nature of experience. It makes you remember afresh how much fear shapes our lives: we put locks on doors, walk fast in night streets, never appear to be lost in foreign cities. It's a constant bluff designed to ward off the Bogeyman, who may or may not be there.

It is primarily driven by Peter Knight's remarkable sound design. Bluebottle's set and lighting are a platform for Knight's compositions - looped sounds and voices, pulsing electronics, taut silences. The sound envelops the audience, resonating in our breast bones but also making us acutely aware of the space around us: footsteps echo coldly as they move around the perimeter of the auditorium, voices and sounds erupt from different corners, or complete blackouts plunge us into the soundstream of our own blood.

The very simple elements employed so ingeniously here - a stage within a stage, smoke, darkness, light and sound - powerfully call up your own memories of fear or threat. The theatre becomes, quite nakedly, a kind of psychic echo chamber. There is an invitation in the very bareness of the gestures: the manipulations offered here are all completely exposed. One sequence involves Saulwick using a series of objects - a door lock, a knife, a water melon - to make a series of amplified noises, that are then treated with feedback. The objects are lit, the rest of the stage is dark. And even though we know exactly how those noises are made, it's surprising how they ratchet up a real sense of anxiety.

Sense memory is a potent thing, and by coolly and precisely accessing mnemonic triggers, Saulwick invokes a parallel theatre in your mind. Pin Drop reminded me of the particular senses of vulnerability that come from being alone in a house with small children, or from obscene anonymous phone calls late at night, or from home robberies and house invasions. It's clear that sexual threat, part of the texture of living as a woman, is a gendered experience, but even though this focuses on the stories of women, it doesn't exclude men: we all are frail in the house of our flesh.

What's less easily explained is the strange, breathless sense of liberation that comes with its aftertaste: perhaps it's as simple as the naming of a fear that is often evoked - we are surrounded by warnings about violence - but which is, in fact, seldom examined. It's remarkable theatre, executed with an exact brilliance that makes its sensual vividness all the more powerful. It's a short season, closing on Saturday, so hurry. This is not to be missed.


Meanwhile, over in Brunswick at the Mechanics Institute Performing Arts Centre, stalwarts Hoy Polloy are performing Frank McGuinness's Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme. This is a strange and terrible text written in the mid-80s, when the IRA and Ulster Loyalists were on the one hand secretly attempting to find a negotiated settlement to Protestant/Catholic warfare, while on the other pursuing an active program of terrorism and assassination. This background is implicit rather than explicit in this play, which observes the intractable violence of Northern Ireland through the lens of the First World War, in which Ulster Loyalists marched, like good Colonial boys, to their own deaths in the service of Empire.

McGuinness presents this political violence, present and past, as neurotic repetition. His anti-hero Kanneth Pyper (played by Ian Rooney as an old man, and by Dan Walls) is haunted by the ghosts of his lost comrades in the 36th Ulster Division, of which he is the only survivor. Pyper moves through the action as a ghost among ghosts, a man in whom possibility is destroyed. It is written with a desolate irony and anger: in its play-acting of empty signifiers - the Loyalist drum-beatings and commemorations of ancient wars - the play reveals these men as lost in a dance of death, each victims of their own misled impulses to heroism and glory.

None of this would count if the heroism wasn't, in its own way, convincing: and each of McGuinness's doomed characters (for even Pyper is dead, by his own admission "changed utterly" on that day in the Somme) has his claim to something admirable, a sense of courage or hope or capacity for love. The central story is, in fact, the love story between Pyper and David Craig (Nicholas Brien), showing what is destroyed by the black and white moral certainties that map the binaries of Protestant and Catholic, male and female, right and wrong, across a landscape of blood.

McGuinness's denunciation of this idea of heroicism - if not of his characters, who are victims of its deathly absolutes - is bitter and scathing. From early on, when a Loyalist soldier boasts of beating up and humiliating a Catholic child, to Anderson and McIllwaine's desperate conjurations of the Loyalist "Holy ground", the Ulster myth is presented as deathly and empty. It's difficult to get a sense of these very specific contexts and passions, those that decimated Ulster in the late 20th century, in a production in Brunswick in 2011, and perhaps unfair to ask. Director Steve Dawson softens these bitter questions to a vague sense of tragic heroism and historical regret, a colonial mythos not unlike that of the film Gallipoli. He presents past violence as it is caught in the amber of history, rather than as present violence that is traumatically re-enacted in an endless Purgatory. So the play feels a little sentimentalised.

The design is striking and effective - the action plays on a stage the shape of a cross, like the cruciform floorplan of a cathedral, with the audience watching from the various edges in traverse. It's a straight-up-and-down production, although there's a puzzlingly placed interval after 40 minutes, one third in, which made me wonder why it isn't played through. For the most part, however, Dawson and his hard-working cast make a good fist of a difficult play, and achieve a rough and admirable sense of honesty. I wish they had left the Irish accents out - often they wandered all over Ireland and the Antipodes. But this a play worth seeing, and which is seldom done. And it demonstrates how powerful writing can be in the theatre. Recommended.

Picture: Top: Tamara Saulwick in Pin Drop. Photo: Ponche Hawkes. Bottom: Nicholas Brien and Dan Walls in Observe the Sons of Ulster. Photo: Fred Kroh

Pin Drop, created and performed by Tamara Saulwick. Composition and sound design by Pater Knight. Movement by Michelle Heaven. Design and production by Bluebottle, Ben Cobham and Frog Peck. Malthouse Theatre @ Beckett Theatre until August 7.

Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, by Frank McGuinness, directed and designed by Steven Dawson. With Ian Rooney, Dan Walls, Nicholas Brien, Angus Brown, Tosh Greenslade, David Passmore, Mathew Gelsumini, Kevin Dee and Karl Cottee. Hoy Polloy, Mechanic Institute Performing Arts Centre, until August 13.

Some days, writing is about as much fun as flogging yourself with a wooden spoon. Different parts of the brain refuse to speak to each other, which causes problems with the brain-hand-keyboard co-ordination traditionally associated with the art of writing. Thoughts float past in clogged, alienated lumps, not one connecting to the next. Every sentence you screw out has the vim and grace of a three-legged gazelle on valium. Gentle reader, it's bloody miserable.

And yes, Ms TN spent all yesterday - hours of fruitless, frustrating struggle - in such a state, attempting to write of three shows she saw last week, until at last she gave up and retired in dudgeon and dolour. I'm going to try again today, in the hope that the Muse of Criticks - Errata, wasn't it? - might be more merciful, because this week I'm seeing another four shows. (Plus I'm at the Wheeler Centre tonight talking about Privacy in the Age of Social Media, which I hope might give some nuance to these musings...) I suspect that my real problem is that most of me packed up and stopped at the end of October, whether I wanted me to or not. It's been a long and full year - novels written, essays churned, blogs blogged, stuff stuffed - and, basically, Me has had it.


This by way of an apologia for responses that are brief and partial and perhaps a little disconnected at the joints, which maybe bothers no one but myself.

1927's The Animals & Children Took to the Streets made me think about genre. The company itself is named for, among other things, the year that Fritz Lang's classic SF movie Metropolis was made. Back then genre art, although it certainly existed, lacked the dizzying sub-categories of modern marketing, and the lines between "literary" and "genre", or "popular" and "art", were less blackly drawn.

There were the fantasy worlds of Lord Dunsany or George MacDonald or William Morris, and the science fiction of pioneers such as HG Wells or Jules Verne, themselves with plenty of literary precedents. And there was plenty of pulp: the proto-steampunk stories of late 19th century scientific romances, say, in which sociopathic robots terrorised Native American savages. But SFF, from Morris on, always had a thread of social idealism in between its imperialist narratives, and modernist artists frequently appropriated its tropes for imaginative visions of the contemporary world.

1927 takes us back to genre art's modernist heritage, especially its social critique. The Animals and Children is a parable of a modern city, written with a wicked wit by Suzanne Andrade. It's performed with a mixture of animation and white-face melodramatic acting, as if it were a graphic novel brought to life. Backed by live piano, the story is set in the cockroach-infested slums of the Bayou, which skulk in the east beyond the shiny skyscrapers. It tells how the anarchic slum children invade the respectable parks and gardens of the well-to-do, demanding a decent living, a decent education and an X-Box.

The government's response is a plot to kidnap the revolutionary children and feed them addictive lollies that not only sedate them, but paralyse them with fear: a suggestive reference not only to drugs like Ritalin, but to that great opiate of the masses, the mass media. After a week of treatment in an abandoned asylum, they are returned to their families, who declare their subjugated young a great improvement.

There are a couple of sub-plots: the well-meaning and naive do-gooder Agnes Eaves moves into the slums to reform the bad children with pots of clag and creative programs, and her daughter Evie is kidnapped as well. The lugubrious Caretaker of the Bayou Mansions, who looks rather like the mad scientist in Metropolis, has a hopeless crush on her, and sacrifices his one chance to leave the Bayou in order to rescue Evie. There is - apparently - a choice between two endings, the "realist" and the "idealist" - but despite the audience calling for the idealistic one, we got the realist ending: Agnes returns, a sadder and wiser woman, to her little village, the slum children remain in the slums, sedated and frightened, the Caretaker begins to save up again for his ticket out of the Bayou, and everyone gets on with their lives.

For all its gestures towards the fantastic and its sharp comic wit, The Animals and Children delivers a bleak picture of contemporary life. In tandem with the headlines about the biggest government cuts in Britain since the 1920s, increasing economic divisions between the rich and poor and a worldwide drift to the right, its brutalised world begins to seem more literal truth than fantasy.

Its framing in fact permits a far more direct critique than might otherwise be palatable. The abiding spirits behind this tale of urban squalor, middle class powerlessness and authoritarian repression are a couple of Soviet Russia's most talented artists: the poet and playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky, whose lively, disrespectful writing championed the urban poor, and the brilliant Constructivist Alexander Rodchenko. Paul Barritt's animation ranges across references from Betty Boo to Inspector Gadget, but is mostly like a cross between a graphic novel by Shaun Tan and Rodchenko's collages: its soft gloomy browns recall Tan's melancholy urban landscapes, while Rodchenko's graphic invention is directly referenced with angular blocks of animated text and lots of Cyrillic font.

All this is bound up in a story that, aside from its grim message, looks and sounds like a children's fairytale. Its razor-sharp folding of animation and performance makes extremely seductive theatre. I'm not sure whether it's one of the most subversive shows I've seen.


Across town, Hoy Polloy - who for the past decade have stubbornly continued to premiere some of the most interesting international plays around - offer another dystopian view of contemporary life. Electronic City, by German playwright Falk Richter, looks at the marriage of technology and capitalism, and how the new corporate nomadism comes at a horrific human cost.

Richter is a stablemate of Marius von Mayenburg at Berlin's Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, where he is an associate director, and is regarded as one of Germany's leading exponents of the post-dramatic theatre. Written in 2004, Electronic City is a fascinating text: it's mostly a series of chorus-like third person statements that might be divided between any number of performers (Richter suggests a cast of "between five and 15"). Buffeted by this continual commentary and mediation are two characters, both employees of the global city that corporatism has made of the world: Tom (Dan Walls), a businessman, and his wife Joy (Sarah Ogden), a kind of international check-out chick for an airport supermarket chain.

These two are examined at a crucial moment of breakdown. Tom has arrived at another city to broker another deal (another takeover of another company) and has completely lost his bearings: he finds himself in a hotel corridor, unable to remember the code to his room: "he can't remember any more, he absolutely can't remember, he can't even name one place he has been to recently or what he actually did there". Joy is a "stand-by" flown to whichever part of the world needs a person to plug a hole: today she is scanning goods in a take-away food counter when the infra-red scanner stops working, leaving her in front of an increasing queue of angry businessmen.

The play tracks their different crises as they attempt desperately to make some authentic human contact. The chorus is a continual confusing mediation, mimicking the information overload that characterises modern cyberlife: Tom and Joy might be stars in a reality tv documentary, or actors in a horror film, playing themselves but always less certain who this self they're playing is supposed to be. The effect is a dissociated panic, a creeping horror at the disconnect between the cauterised, disembodied language of contemporary life (the hotel chain called "Welcome Home" that has, for instance, nothing to do with any human sense of home; the debased lingua franca of business-speak, "downsize, download, outsource, out-task", that destroys meaning with euphemism).

Wayne Pearn's sternly minimal production employs a chorus of six, presenting Electronic City as a cross between physical theatre and oratorio. It's constantly inventive and energised, and often, despite the dystopian message, very funny. Designers Kat Chan and Ben Morris create a deceptively simple stage that unobtrusively throws the entire emphasis onto the bodies of the actors. The cast is dressed in black, the single splash of colour provided by Joy's red-checked apron, and the space is entirely defined by light and shadow. The production ruthlessly exposes the text, and it's all the more powerful for the absence of the technology that the play invokes, for insisting on the human body as the medium of its message.

In the centre of this production are two first-class performances by Ogden and Walls: they provide the emotional authenticity that is splintered and destroyed by placelessness, demonstrating Richter's thesis that global corporatism inevitably ends in madness. They represent a desire so thwarted it barely knows how to name itself, so deeply trapped in their anxiety that they can't see past a passive resignation. Powerful, riveting theatre.


Songs For Nobodies is a simple conceit – the great singers of the 20th century are summoned, with a kind of theatrical voodoo, through the recollections of the anonymous people who loved their songs. And with the miraculous voice of Bernadette Robinson as her medium, Joanne Murray-Smith is on a winner.

This play is an evolution of Murray-Smith’s hit one-woman show Bombshells, a series of monologues by different women on the brink of emotional disintegration, which was written to exploit the pyrotechnic talents of Caroline O’Connor. This time Murray-Smith has Robinson’s uncanny vocal abilities at her disposal, which permits the introduction of some of the greatest songs ever written. Each monologue recounts a story of how the lives of the singers evoked in the show – Judy Garland, Patsy Cline, Edith Piaf, Billie Holiday and Maria Callas – briefly brushed against the “nobodies” of the title.

What’s impressive in the writing is its wit and exactness: each character is vividly realised. Like their songs, the singers represent a dazzling freedom, a possibility beyond the mundane, even a strange blessing, that is briefly granted in otherwise unremarkable lives. If it sometimes comes across as a paean to resignation, to a powerlessness that rubs uneasily with the thesis of Richter's play, this strikes against the potency of Robinson's performance.

The show opens with a disquisition on happiness – defined as the absence of fear that something bad will happen – by Bea Appleton, toilet room attendant. Disappointed in both life and love, Bea has learned to cut her cloth according to the measures given her. Her shining memory is of Judy Garland coming into the ladies to find Bea crying. The story segues into Garland’s rendition of Come Rain or Come Shine – “We’ll be happy together, unhappy together / Now won’t that be fine.”

Murray-Smith plays the variations on this theme with a diverse cast of characters – an usher, an English librarian, an Irish nanny and a New York Times journalist desperate to get off the women’s pages. The variety of accents and characters permits Robinson to demonstrate her virtuosic acting skills. But the real draw of this show is her voice, which shifts from the smoky blues of Billie Holiday to the vibrant contralto of Patsy Cline with startling ease.

Her performances of Edith Piaf and Maria Callas, however, strike another chord altogether: they rise beyond the virtuosity of mimicry to the sublime. In these moments, she is doing much more than imitation. The baroque composer Lully is supposed to have said that music was a way of speaking to the dead; and Robinson makes you believe it.

Pictures: top: Esme Appleton as Agnes Eaves in The Animals & Children; centre: Dan Walls and chorus in Electronic City. Photo: Fred Kroh. Bottom: Bernadette Robinson in Songs for Nobodies. Photo: Jeff Busby.

Versions of the reviews of Electronic City and Songs for Nobodies were published in the Australian.

The Animals & Children Took to the Streets. Performer, writer and director, Suzanne Andrade; animation and design, Paul Barritt; performer and co-costume designer Esme Appleton, performer and composer Lillian Henley. Costume design Sarah Munroe, voice Jamie Adams, lighting by Jamie Adams. 1927 @ the Beckett Theatre, Malthouse. Until November 28.

Electronic City by Falk Richter, directed by Wayne Pearn. Sets & costumes by Kat Chan, lighting by Ben Morris, sound design by Tim Bright. With Dan Walls, Sarah Ogden, Nick Darling, Liza Dennis, Ngaire Dan Fair, Elizabeth McColl, Luke Mulquiney and Daniel Rice. Hoy Polloy, Mechanics Institute Performing Arts Centre, Brunswick. Until November 27.

Songs For Nobodies, by Joanna Murray-Smith, directed by Simon Phillips. With Bernadette Robinson. Melbourne Theatre Company @ Fairfax Theatre, Victorian Arts Centre, Melbourne. Until December 23.

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ariel Dorfman is by any standard a distinguished writer. The Chilean-American author of many novels, plays, poems, essays and films in both Spanish and English, he's been called a “literary grandmaster” (Time) and “one of the greatest living Latin American novelists” (Newsweek). His books have been translated into over 40 languages and received many international prizes. His best known play – performed in more than one hundred countries - is Death and the Maiden, which has won dozens of best play awards around the world, including England's Olivier award.


An expatriate from Chile since the 1973 military coup against the government of Salvator Allende led by General Pinochet, Dorfman has been active in the defense of human rights for many decades, and has addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations and the main forum of UNESCO in Paris. He teaches half the year at Duke University, where he holds the Walter Hines Page Chair of Literature and Latin American Studies. He has received numerous honorary degrees and is a member of The Académie Universelle des Cultures in France and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Following their Australian premiere of Franz Xaver Kroetz's Tom Fool, independent company Hoy Polloy are premiering Dorfman's Purgatorio, written in 2000. It opens at the Brunswick Mechanics Institute on August 8. Click below the fold to read a fascinating interview with this complex and humane writer, in which he shares some insights into his work.

As a writer, you've worked in a bewildering number of ways, as a human rights activist, novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, critic. Is there a unifying obsession in your work?

It’s been bewildering to me as well. Part of the explanation may be in a sort of boundless energy and insatiable desire to explore anything new (I was an attention deficit disorder child, though I’d suggest, as would my loving parents, that my Attention was simply Ordered in a different way and that this was not a deficiency but a Proficiency). Another possibility is that this incessant transmogrification of genres and activities originates in my wandering life, the fluid existence created by my relentless exiles, so that I flit from one literary quest to the next one, as if I were shifting countries (or languages).

As to a unifying obsession there seem to be many, repeated across whatever I write and also in my search for justice. I guess we could call it, a term used in the title of a book about to published on my work, my Aesthetics of Hope, the certainty that one must find small corners of hope in the midst of times of terror and sorrow, a hope that has to be wrestled into an existence through an unremitting need for the truth, not to lie. Even in a play like Purgatorio, where the protagonists seem beyond redemption, where they have done to each other what many would consider unforgivable acts, and trapped as they are in a cycle and vertigo of possible eternal recurrences, even there, but especially there, what ultimately sustains me is my compassion, my expectation that if the characters are brave enough to appear naked, to unmask their fears, they may be able to see each other, truly, deeply see each other, and risk some hint of resurrection. So: hope, but only if we accept the ambiguity and uncertainty of the struggle, that there’s no guarantee we will find a way out of the labyrinth. Not to lie. I think that’s probably my literary credo.

Since you work across different literary forms - essays, plays, poems, fiction - you must have thought about the differences between them. What prompts you to form one idea as an essay, another as a play, another as a poem? Which came first? Or have they emerged together, each sparking the other?

I never know, before I start writing, what genre will choose me (I’m not arrogant enough to presume that I’m the one making that choice: I really do feel like a vehicle for some madness floating, some glorious voice floating nearby). I tend to have, buzzing and fevering in my mind, a jumble of several hundred ideas, characters, atmospheres; and then, something happens, a couple of words stringed together, a sort of flash inside, like a seed that falls finally into fertile ground, and as soon as the words are out there, I know, I simply know, what genre those words contain, are channeling.

There are times when that genre is fixed and immutable. Purgatorio, because of its almost primeval, inherent drama, for instance, was always going to be a play. But Death and the Maiden started as a novel and only became a play when circumstances forced me to write it in a Chile just out of dictatorship that was trying to deny what I imagined happening in that room, and it became clear that this needed to be staged, and staged as soon as possible.

In other cases, what starts as a poem about an old woman berating a captain about how she can identify a body that appears in a river, becomes a novel called Widows and then a play of the same name (that I was blessed to be able to write with Tony Kushner as my co-author). Or take My House is On Fire. It’s a short fictional film about two children playing house without knowing if their games about the enemy coming to get them will end up being true. I co-directed this short with my son Rodrigo and we set it in Durham North Carolina (where I live), and made the kids the son and daughter of illegal immigrants. But it had been originally a poem where I conjured up that situation but under a dictatorship: children who must grow up, much too fast, in the midst of fear in a place like Chile. But I had also written it as a short story, where I basically explored how that sort of relationship could reveal how the boy has been trained to be a macho, how his very identity is under siege by not knowing how to react to friend, to foe, how to distinguish between the two.

As a bilingual writer, you write in both Spanish and English. What prompts the decision to write in one language or the other?

For many years – and it’s a long story I’ve told in my memoir, Heading South, Looking North – I was adamantly monolingual, fending off the other language, demanding an almost fanatical devotion to only one tongue (and behind that, of course, the anhelo, the longing, for only one identity, one nation, one allegiance). History – and the gentler winds of literature – taught me that this was not who I was, how I should write, and I eventually became this adulterer of languages I am now, in love with them both. Today they share me, my English and my Spanish, and it really depends on what words will first spring into my mind, who the immediate audience will be, that determines which of the two rides (writes) shot-gun.

The main condition of such courtesy on the part of one or the other of my lover languages is that the one left behind should subsequently (and promptly) receive affection and attention from me, so that as soon as I finished writing Purgatorio (in English), my Spanish demanded her opportunity, his interlude with me, and then I used that Spanish version to correct and ameliorate (I hope) the English. It’s exhausting but enriching: it means that I have something like a translator inside all the time, shaping what either language says with the contours of its rival and collaborator. Su rival y colaborador.

I find it fascinating that your first book was a study the theatre of Harold Pinter. You've spoken about how, after seeing The Dumb Waiter, "something in my work and life changed forever". What was it in Pinter's work that spoke so directly to you? What have you learned from him as a playwright?

I hope you don’t mind if I quote myself, in the Washington Post, two days after my friend died (though I know so many people supposedly alive today who are for more lifeless than Pinter!):

“He showed me how dramatic art can be lyrical without versifying, can be poetic merely by delving into the buried rhythms of everyday speech. He whispered to me that we often speak in order to hide, and perhaps avoid, what we are really feeling and thinking. He was not afraid of silence or letting his characters lapse into stuttering or inscrutability. He understood that if you push reality hard enough, it will end up exposing under its surface another dimension -- fantastic, absurd, delirious. He suggested that the worst hallucinations of fear are not immune to the pendulum of humor.

“But all of these lessons in dramatic craftsmanship pale next to what he taught me about human existence and about -- dare I say the word? -- politics.

“From that very first play, I felt that Harold Pinter was unfolding a world that was deeply political. Not in the overt sense (as would happen later, beginning in the early '80s, in several of his dramas) that his creatures were affected by who governed them, whether this or that man controlled the army or gave orders to the police. No, these figments of Pinter's psyche, at least back in the '60s, did not care to dispute the public arena, were uninterested in changing the world for better or for worse. They were, on the contrary, sad citizens of intimacy, obsessed only with their own survival.

“And yet, by trapping us inside the lives of those men and women, Pinter was revealing the many gradations and degradations of power with a starkness I had not noticed before in other authors who were supposedly dedicated to examining or denouncing contingent politics. All power, all domination and liberation started there, he seemed to be saying, in those claustrophobic rooms where each word counts, each slight utterance needs to be accounted for, is paid for in some secret currency of hope or suffering. You want to free the world, humanity, from oppression? Look inside, look sideways, look at the hidden violence of language. Never forget that it is in language where the other parallel violence, the cruelty exercised on the body, originates.”

It would have been impossible to write Purgatorio without that unique inspiration. In fact, if I had not already dedicated Death and the Maiden to him, I most certainly would have added his name next to Angelica’s (my wife) at the front of Purgatorio. He loved this play and wanted to direct it. His sickness blocked that aspiration of his and mine. When we next open in London, my dream is that his dear wife, Antonia Fraser, will be sitting by our side.

How do you see your involvement in theatre as a writer?

If you mean, how does it help (or hinder) to be a novelist, poet, essayist, etc., I think it allows me great freedom. I’m not scared of narrative or the lyrical or even the analytical, as long as it prods along the tension, keeps people on the edge of their seats and, more crucially, on the edge of their minds (I almost wrote: on the edge of their sanity). If you mean, how much do I intervene in the production: after the first premiere, once the play is set, not at all. I’ll answer questions from directors or actors (once in a while, because you can’t live your whole life looking back – though recently, for instance, I had a very interesting exchange with the director who was opening Death and the Maiden in Pakistan; and a long collaboration with a Colombian director of my Speak Truth to Power play in Rome, at the Eliseo Theatre, an important production because we’re taking the play into hundreds of schools in Italy as a way of bolstering interest among the young about human rights).

How important has your critical work been to the evolution of your creative work? Or is it a separate activity altogether?

In one sense, you put your critical faculties in a parenthesis or stuffed away in some faraway pocket when you’re writing; you don’t want a voice inside saying, ah, but that does not agree with what good old Wittgenstein (just an example: I’ve never read a word of his) would think about this matter. On the other hand, obviously, I am informed by my previous intellectual adventures. The one rule: don’t interfere with your characters or where they are going, even if they are breaking the parameters or paradigm (or para anything, parapluies) you hold sacred.

How crucial was the 1973 coup against Allende as a spur to your work? Was it a watershed?

I hate to think that all that suffering made me a better writer, though I may have emerged as a less pure human being, but maybe that also made me a better writer. What’s certain, is that the coup changed everything for me, sent me into an exile that I have been unable to escape, and plunged me into the deepest despair and discover the wells of resistance everywhere, forcing me to ask myself about my responsibility to the word and the spirit and the struggle to not forget.

Chilean human rights archivist Eugenio Ahumada says your work is at the "centre of the struggle for memory". Is that how you think of it?

I blush.

What does it mean for art to be political? Are the demands of political commitment ever at odds with those of art?

They are like traveling companions who are chained to each other (at least, for me, perhaps I’m the chain) and who should never pretend there is not an inevitable tension between them. What I’m wary of is of art as “serving” a cause; not because I don’t believe that we have the right, and often the obligation, to feed our ideas and activities with our artistic talents, but because the best art generally comes out of uncertainty, not knowing where you are going, an acceptance of the extraordinary complexity of the human condition. An example: I’ve spent years fighting for the rights of migrants and refugees, but when I wrote a play, The Other Side (where a barbed wire wall cuts through the house of a man and a woman, and even their bed), I did not let my ideas of what was right or wrong interfere with what the characters said or did, I avoided in that dark comedy any speechifying, any attempt to tell the audience what should or should not be, leaving them to draw their own conclusions.

In the Spanish-speaking world, the place of a writer in the wider culture and particularly in the political world seems, from the outside at least, to be very different from that of an English-speaking writer. Poets from Quevedo on were often directly involved in politics and of course, you were cultural attache to Allende's government. What causes that difference? And what effect does it have on how writers perceive their world and their place in it?

I just suggested that we shouldn’t simplify – and yet, and yet, here goes. It’s possible that when you belong to a nation that is malformed or deformed or not quite functional, the void created by this lack, by this twist and turn of history, forces you to think and feel the moment and the future and the role of art as a language that puzzles out reality, well, to think and feel all this in a different way. However, I would like to point out that there are moments in English-speaking history when a crisis looms or explodes, and then you have novelists like Steinbeck or essayists like Thoreau or poems like the sort pouring from the serene desolation of Auden. I could add some Australian examples, if it weren’t impolitic and unfair to all my friends whose work originates in your country/continent.

You now live and work in the US and have said you no longer consider yourself an exile, but an expatriate. Do you ever contemplate returning to Chile?

I return there, physically, from time to time; and mentally and emotionally, all the time. I even write whole books about those trips (for instance, my Desert Memories, which National Geographic commissioned, on the driest desert in the world, in the North of Chile). But I feel comfortable with distance. It allows me to write with joy, keeps me away from the false loyalties to fatherland or territory and closer to a deeper faithfulness to humanity. That distance (not to be confused with remoteness or indifference) nourishes my ability to break down barriers. For instance, in my most recent play, Picasso’s Closet, I explore how the famous painter dealt with life under the Nazi occupation of Paris, but I am, undoubtedly, also commenting obliquely on Chile’s period of repression and my own dilemmas, do you stand aside when terror invades your community, stand aside in order to save your art; or do you plunge in because human lives and human dignity are at stake, even if you are risking death or prison?

Can you tell us a little about Purgatorio?

I can’t exaggerate how important this play is to me. I have been working on it for quite a number of years now, whittling it down from its original two and a half hours, trying to figure out, I suppose, what I meant when I conceived it. It goes to the very core of my work and my life, asking questions that have no easy answers.

I had been wondering for a long time about the terrible things we humans do to one another and how – indeed if – there can be some sort of reparation, and I wanted to take this out of the directly political arena (an agent of the state executing or torturing or censuring victims or hiding bodies) and into the one on one relationship where lasting damage is done (because it always comes down to one human being facing another one, always starts there, at times ends there). And then, one morning, I had a vision of a man and a woman in an austere room and she wanted to escape and he held the key and wished to help her but there was also something in him that was enraged, that he was concealing, and something in her that gave her immense power over him (like so many of my woman characters). And I didn’t know who they were and was determined to find out – and the only way to do this was to have them start talking.

It was only after they beat around the bush of each other for a while that it began to dawn upon me what their identity might be and where they were located. And it turned out that I had been meaning to write something for many years about that mythical woman and also that for longer than I can remember I have been fixated on the afterlife (my last four poems are written by the dead, Columbus, Picasso, William Blake, Hammurabi, possessing my tongue to warn us about our contemporary blindness, cruelty and folly). And it all began to come together once I realized that this would also be an exploration of time, that I could play tricks on the audience just as the characters are trying to play tricks on each other and on me.

I particularly loved the challenge of writing a piece that transpires in the landscape of the mutual mind, meaning that what we are seeing is the place where two souls meet and fight and discover they will always be lonely and, simultaneously, that they will always have the other close by, waiting, twinned for eternity. I love challenges! I hope that audiences, now in Australia and very soon in other countries, also believe that to be challenged is the most thrilling aesthetic experience.

I keep hearing, here and there, that these days "text-based theatre" (to you and me, "plays") is out of fashion. The contemporary stage, the whisper goes, is hostile to the writer: in these post-dramatic, post-structural, post-everything times, the director has seized the crown in the theatrical hierarchy and the playwright is out in the cold, shivering in his underpants.

The truth is, just as the masculine pronoun is no longer a default grammatical device, so theatre's practice has shifted to a broader consideration of the semiotics of the stage: meaning is expressed through movement, design, music and performance as much as through words. On the other hand, is that emphasis really new? Meaning is an unstable quiddity, sure, but it's been unstable since modernity began to erase the certainties of church and state (and reading Lucan can make you realise that such instabilities are about as ancient as human civilisation). And after all these years, I'm still not sure what a "linear narrative" really is: I'm not sure I've ever met one.


In any case, I see text everywhere. Even an exploration like 3xSisters (which must by now have generated the longest ever discussion on this blog) depends on a source text, however it spirals around it. And that old-fashioned concept, the play, is a hardy one. People keep writing them, and people keep putting them on stage. I saw two last weekend. They were definitely plays, done in the old-fashioned way of getting actors to remember the words and enact them on stage. They were even, in very different ways, naturalistic plays.

In fact, I think that the diversity of contemporary practice means that the grim days of default naturalism - the idea that theatre is divided into "accessible" (meaning televisual) "naturalism" and weird "non-naturalistic" experiment - are well and truly over. Instead, naturalism as a formal device has been injected with something like its original energy and urgency. Recently there have been some vivid reminders of how powerful - and how poetic - naturalism can be in the theatre - Peter Evans' brilliant production of David Harrower's Blackbird for the MTC, for example, or Duncan Graham's Ollie and the Minotaur.

Perhaps this is why Hoy Polloy's production of Tom Fool by Franz Xaver Kroetz seems so timely: Kroetz is one of the major invigorators of naturalism in post-war theatre. Although there are more obvious reasons for its aptness: Kroetz's portrayal of the alienating mechanisms of capitalism, of how human beings are reduced to disposable cogs in a gigantic economic machine, is as relevant in 2009 as it was in 1977, when it was first written. Beng Oh's exemplary production, directed with a profound and compassionate clarity, brings this home with devastating, painful emotional force.

Tom Fool (a loose and perhaps slightly judgmental translation of the more neutral Mensch Meier, which means, more or less, "Everyman Meier") is a fable of late 20th century capitalism. It's the story of Otto Meier (Chris Bunworth), a semi-skilled factory worker who lives in a tiny apartment with his wife, Martha (Liz McColl) and son Ludwig (Glenn van Oosterom), and is written in a series of short, titled scenes that focus on the banal domestic minutae of their lives. Kroetz is a master at digging the tragic meaning out of moments that appear on the surface to be trivial, and this production meets his demanding poetic with an admirable honesty.

Tom Fool would be very easy to get very wrong; so much depends on the play of the emotional subtext of each moment, and that in turn depends on a larger wisdom about human behaviour that must meet the playwright's. Every decision in this production hits the right note, neither overdone nor glossed. Beng Oh hasn't attempted to update or Australianise it: Chris Molyneux's stylisedly naturalistic set is a perfect simulacrum of late 70s decor, and the actors, speaking an unobtrusive lower-middle-class Australian, refer to German currency and social conditions.

The scenes are punctuated with a sure rhythmic hand: as the scene title is projected onto the wall, the actors and a couple of stage hands arrange the props, which becomes in itself part of the texture of domestic routine. Then there is a snap, the lights come up and the scene begins. (Tim Bright's sound design and Ben Morris's lighting find a brilliant variousness in this stern aesthetic.) These structural decisions create a solid frame for the actors, which permits them to explore the emotional nakedness of the play. Bunworth, McColl and van Oosterom generate their characters with deft, accumulating touches, gradually excavating their extreme loneliness. This production is notable for its precise detail, which is particularly noticeable in Kroetz's long silent scenes - here the smallest gesture, a shrug, a glance, becomes pregnant with meaning.

They create unforgettable portraits of the fragmentation of the self in contemporary capitalist society. Otto Meier, the "human screw-driver", a "car-screw in-screwer, a screwologist", knows he is dehumanised by his work, but the knowledge doesn't help, as he sees no way out: it emerges in violent rages of frustration that only serve to further alienate his family. Each character becomes more alone, more isolated, although each deals with their alienation in a different way. What makes this play so painful is that their recognition of their isolation, their abandonment of their various dreams in the face of obdurate reality, collides with a heightened realisation of their yearning: the further the dream retreats, the more they desire. It is all the more painful for their inability to communicate their longings to each other.

It's a beautifully performed, tactfully produced realisation of a play that is, for all its apparent banality, a work of great poetic delicacy. The evening passes with astounding swiftness; for all its grim concerns, this production has a nicely judged lightness of touch, and is infused with moments of surprising comedy. It's a rare chance to see Kroetz done as he ought to be. Don't miss this one.

Inevitably, Philip Ridley's Leaves of Glass suffers by comparison to Tom Fool. It's another family drama, and again written in a series of naturalist scenes. Although it features some astounding writing, especially in the monologues, it's doesn't have anything like the imaginative sweep of Ridley's Mercury Fur, a dark fantasia about snuff parties which also centred on the relationship between two brothers. Put next to Kroetz's sparely judged writing it seems fussy and melodramatic, and its social commentary - an exploration of the human capacity for denial, of how we can erase reality with language - not nearly as deeply thought.

I suppose the title, Leaves of Glass, is an elliptical nod to Whitman's Leaves of Grass, though it's difficult to make the connection. There are certainly touches of Tenessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie in its exploration of human fragility and damage. It's a family drama with all the expected Ibsenite elements - dark secrets, deaths, dramatic revelations, murderous sibling rivalry - given a 21st century twist. Steve (Dan Frederiksen) is a picture of materialist Britain, a successful, emotionally stunted businessman married to a WAG-style shopaholic wife (Amelia Best). His younger brother Barry (Johnny Carr) is an artist, traumatically scarred by the suicide of his father, and both still live in the shadow of their mother, Liz (Jillian Murray). What makes it interesting how the writing turns on its cliches, especially in the climactic scene where language itself becomes a means for murder.

Simon Stone gives it a spare and well-judged production, with a design by Peter Mumford in which the stage is divided into parallel sections by clear plastic curtains, which are drawn back or closed to reflect the degrees of separation between the different characters. The performances are excellent; I especially liked Johnny Carr and Daniel Frederiksen as the two brothers. Although it's a bit of a disappointment after Mercury Fur, it's well worth seeing all the same. And certainly the best production at Red Stitch since Tom Holloway's Red Sky Morning.

Post script: my opening speculations are further illuminated by David Williamson's attack on "capital-T theatre" in today's Sydney Morning Herald.

Picture: Chris Bunworth as Otto in Tom Fool. Photo: Tim Williamson

Tom Fool by Franz Xaver Kroetz, translated by Estella Schmid and Anthony Vivis, directed by Beng Oh. Design by Chris Molyneux, lighting design by Ben Morris, sound design by Tim Bright. With Chris Bunworth, Liz McColl and Glenn van Oosterom. Hoy Polloy, Brunswick Mechanics Institute until May 23.

Leaves of Glass by Philip Ridley, directed by Simon Stone. Design by Peter Mumford, lighting design by Kimberley Kaw. With Dan Frederiksen, Johnny Carr, Jillian Murray and Amelia Best. Red Stitch, until May 30.

On Saturday evening, Hoy Polloy Theatre is presenting what is, unbelievably, the Australian premiere of Franz Xaver Kroetz's 1978 play, Tom Fool (Mensch Meier). Not that Ms TN needs any excuse to leap at the chance of an interview with Kroetz, whose extraordinary hyper-realist plays exerted a profound influence on post-war theatre. He created, as the critic Richard Gilman said, "a theatre of the inarticulate", a profoundly political drama that perhaps has new purchase now, as the excesses of capitalism fall about our ears.


First, a brief introduction. Kroetz was born in Munich in 1946. He first attracted public attention in 1970, when two one-act plays premiered at the Munich Kammerspiele. Their subject matter - masturbation, abortion, child murder - aroused such a violent public response from extremist Catholic groups and others that the theatre had to be put under police protection. This didn't stop the theatre journal Theater Heute claiming that Homeworker was the "most important new play of 1971". Subsequently Kroetz wrote a number of one-act, super-naturalist plays, of which the best known is probably Farmyard, the story of a love affair between a retarded teenage girl and a farm worker four times her age.

Kroetz joined the German Communist Party in 1972 and remained a member until he quit in 1980. Tom Fool (Mensch Meier) is a family drama written shortly before he broke with the Party. It was his first popular and financial success when it premiered in 1978, and marked a return to the techniques of his earlier plays, with brutally frank depictions of sex, nudity and violence. In 1988 Kroetz, who has also worked as an actor all his life, was cast as the sleazy gossip columnist Baby Schimmerlos in the popular television mini-series, Kir Royale (which was shown on SBS), and became a media celebrity.

In Melbourne, La Mama has been a champion of Kroetz's work: Farmyard was produced by La Mama in a memorable production directed by Ariette Taylor in the late 90s, and Kroetz's Request Concert was also given a beautiful production by Wendy Joseph. But until now, we haven't had a chance to see Mensch Meier, which is arguably his most significant play.

And now followeth the interview:

The conversation took place in Franz Xaver Kroetz' parental home in the rather petty bourgeois, quiet suburb of Obermenzing in Munich. He calls it "the innermost of the Kroetz dramatics".

TN: It's a long time since you wrote Mensch Meier. What do you think of that play now?

FXK: I think the whole trilogy, consisting of Upper Austria, The Nest and Mensch Meier, could have a chance at survival, despite the usual passing of contemporary art; I can tell from teaching materials and the replies from schools. The trilogy paints a reliable image of this anxious German post-war period into which I was born in 1946, of its fears, its worries and its hopes which might not be as clear in other literary forms. It is a petty bourgeois proletarian description by someone who knew it very well. I have also acted in Mensch Meier myself and produced it for Hessian Radio. I believe it is one my most beautiful and best plays, with this utopia of gliding, all those desires and this broken marriage. It describes a series of frail, poetic beginnings. It was in this house, my parents' house, that the words were spoken: "You cannot become a bricklayer! The neighbour has attended university, he's becoming a judge!" That was because I had a job in construction when I was 15. I have experienced, suffered, desired everything that is in these characters. It is at the centre of my writing.

Relatively few of your plays are translated into English, but I read that you've written about 50. This must give English speakers a skewed view of your work. What are we missing?

I don't think that there are few English translations. As far as I know, a little over half of my 60 works have been translated; only recently another volume containing about 10 plays was published. Since the 70s, the Rosica Colin Ltd agency in London has taken care of this very well, I feel I am in very good hands there. Of course I am happy if my plays are produced in foreign countries. And considering my small circumstances and that I am a German author it is actually quite a lot. The interest in my later work is generally rather low, it therefore receives little advertising and thus reaches foreign countries less often. On the other hand, my early work is probably more significant.

Plays like Mensch Meier or Michi’s Blood are powerful demonstrations of the power of silence, and seem driven by the desire to give voice to those people silenced or erased by articulate culture. What is the place of silence in writing? Did that desire to give voice to the voiceless stem from a personal sense of inarticulacy or disempowerment, or was it primarily fuelled by social anger?

In my petty bourgeois parental home there was a lot of talking, because my mother was an eloquent Tyrolean. I would almost say: Silence is the death of poetry. Apart from that, I went to drama school when I was 15. It is therefore not my own inarticulacy. But apparently I am the inventor of inarticulacy on stage; this stems from a kind of proletarian precision, because until I was 25, I worked in all sorts of jobs, as a gardener etc... Naturally, a divide opened up between the eloquence required for a highly intelligent Brecht text and the inarticulacy of real life. This stirred up a social anger inside me and I joined the Communist Party. Well, I was an active young man who wanted to change the world. And that is why I wanted to grab this bourgeois theatre by the head and dunk it into this wordless sauce, to make anti theatre. Even if Request Concert is a play without words, Michi's Blood is actually my most silent play. In it, inarticulacy is the social outcry of those to whom even language is denied. By the way, I have noticed self-critically that I have become more and more chatty over the years... But I am proud of my radical beginnings.

Language is obviously a deeply political phenomenon, but your plays have been more closely concerned with what happens beneath language in human consciousness. Is silence a political question for you? Or does it exist beneath/beyond politics?

Much has changed because of the new media, and all these possibilities like mobile phones probably achieve the opposite. In Bavaria, there is a beautiful saying: The most eloquent language of friendship is silence. This attitude no longer exists today, I believe it has volatilised. We have a conversational lower class culture today which I also notice in my children: Before they can find an attitude towards themselves, they are already being manipulated. In this regard, we shouldn't underestimate those casting shows. I like to travel on the S-Bahn and I observe a mashing up of public and private role model functions. These days, people are being language-cloned before they have found an original language.

That is pure politics: The individual is expected to be reachable at any time, to be disturbed in their own thoughts, to be a 100 per cent manipulable, controllable mass. Capitalism and democracy are mutually exclusive anyway. Capitalism is a dogmatic and totalitarian ideology. This system is broken, that's how I see it. You see pathetic little humans wandering through department stores - I feel sorry for all of them, it cuts me to the quick. They have long since been cut off, from freedom for example - freedom begins with resistance. This destruction is deliberate and conscious. How to improve private television? Simple: Forbid any advertising on TV. If inarticulacy has become pointless garrulity today, this is the same or actually a worse form of paternalism. Recently, I saw a real-people format in which a female messie was asked to finally face up to the truth. And she asked: "Is what is true also important?" That could be a Kroetz sentence. Then again, I'm not that good.


What role does compassion play in your work?

Compassion is essentially unproductive, you cannot write with it. However, you can with empathy. And looking back, I had that to an almost pathological degree. This empathy, this putting yourself in someone else's shoes was the cornerstone of this writing. The empathic is something productive, is more than compassion. After all, I also acted in my own plays. I have killed, loved, impregnated in them. So Kroetz the actor was always used by Kroetz the playwright.

People have often said that your plays are too extreme to really reflect reality. Is this true? Or is life really that extreme?

It is the other way around: Reality is so perverted in its unbelievable mercilessness that I as a poet become silent. You cannot top reality anymore. You cannot exaggerate your point to such an extent that you won't lag behind reality. Shakespeare's most cruel plays are lame ducks when you listen to people who were traumatised during the Vietnam War or in Chechnya. I am a fan of the extreme. The more I have succeeded in pointed exaggerations, the larger the probability that there is some truth in them. It is the other way around: Reality is filthy, not us. And it is increasingly difficult for me to counter this or to add something to reality. I am glad that I have not stopped writing with implants and false teeth, but with a TV massacre, with lonely men masturbating in front of their TVs. No art without the extreme. It is the salt in the soup, especially for a playwright.

How has your politics changed over the years? What is your view now of your time as a member of the Communist Party in the 1970s, and how do you view the plays you wrote then? What about those notorious rewrites? How did/do you negotiate your political and literary selves? Are they different or contradictory beings?

(Note from the interviewer: Mr Kroetz wasn't sure what "famous adaptations" meant... Neither was I. – Translator's note: I suspect "notorious rewrites", which I translated literally, must have been changed afterwards (not sure by whom) into "famous adaptations" which of course was in no way part of the original question. TN's note: After he joined the Communist Party, Kroetz controversially rewrote an earlier play, Men's Business, to conform to his ideology and, as Richard Gilman claimed, his writing "changed radically". This was perhaps a rather sensitive question, and maybe it's not surprising it was lost in translation.)

I would need to answer this in an essay, the topic is too complex. As a matter of principle, I no longer comment on political events. In 1968, I was simply on the side of art, loved Mauricio Kagel, John Cage, György Ligeti. Back then, I was prepared for any change and any consequence of it. Even today, I prefer Ulrike Meinhof's backside to Angela Merkel's face. I thought the RAF was a grandiose, insane business, resistance was the order of the day, not just idle talk. I am still just as leftist as I was back then, perhaps even more radical, I have only grown older and more tired.

Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth about the Algerian War is my favourite book, with its famous preface by Sartre. After all, it was he who said that it is resistance which makes one a fully-fledged human being in the first place. These days, that is closer to my heart than anything else, because I am quite without illusions and worn out from growing old and used up. I have a lot of sympathy for everyone who moves. The way the world is today, it is – as far as progress is concerned - in the worst state imaginable, it is developing into the wrongest direction. People must be stirred up to disobedience. Unfortunately, I have never managed to do that. I was basically in the totally wrong party back then, because the Communist Party was already dead when I joined it.

Can you tell us a little about your writing for television and film? How does it differ from theatre? Do you prefer working for either, or is it a question of the interest of a particular project?

I do not write screenplays as a matter of principle, because I don't think they are literature. For the film version of "Brandner Kaspar", I changed some of the text for my role, or back when I made "Mensch Meier" into a movie, I edited the play. Maybe I wrote one or two screenplays right at the beginning. I regard it as an activity that does not befit my status. (Laughs heartily).

Could you briefly describe the literary and political context that prompted your early plays? How important were writers like Fassbinder and Ödön von Horvath to the development of your work? What was it like to work with Fassbinder?

I was not influenced by Fassbinder, he was working on other construction sites, was already making films back then which was something I was never interested in. Once, Fassbinder was allowed to do a production at a free theatre at which I was an actor because he and his troupe had been kicked out of another theatre. He didn't have enough actors and that's how I ended up playing a role in a play by Marieluise Fleißer. The critics treated me pretty well and Fassbinder berated me for that. I hadn't played the role the way he wanted me to. There was no further collaboration with him. Marieluise Fleißer, Horváth, the early Brecht, of course they were formative, but I cannot describe the literary context here. It would take too long.

Do you see your work as part of a wider German tradition, or as a reaction against German culture? Or perhaps both things?

Starting with drama school, I was innately interested in the whole Southern German popular theatre. From Ludwig Anzengruber to Felix Mitterer, that is my literary home. Among these I also count Brecht's early plays.

Is it possible to translate the implications of using Bavarian dialect into English? What is the cultural significance of using that speech in a play?

We were in Belgium recently for a theatre festival where I staged my very first play, Negress, in French. We spent the first four days revising the publisher's translation. Even though I hardly speak any French, my presence was very important, because there were a lot of Bavarian expressions that nobody understands and that keep being translated completely wrongly. It's not so much the translators' fault, it's more a matter of cultural policy. Coming back to the question: I believe it is difficult, almost impossible. There are things which already won't be understood in Berlin. I find an incredible delight in language, and for me that has always been dialect, patois, never anything else. I have therefore gladly relinquished general intelligibility in favour of my own pleasure. Oh, that is something glorious!

How important is it to your writing that you are also an actor?

Writing is completely under the influence of acting. I act out everything for myself, try it out. I have always needed the actor, it wouldn't have possible otherwise, I don't think. When staging a play, I also read or acted out some scenes at home with assigned roles, tried it out in my mind. After all, the mind is the most beautiful place for theatre.

Translated from German by Elisabeth Meister

To bring this interview to TN readers has been a major international operation, and here I wish to thank several people for their invaluable help: Ben Starick, who co-ordinated the exercise; Wolf Heidecker (Australian end); Christine Diller (Germany); Elizabeth Meister and the Goethe Institute.

Pictures: Top: Franz Xaver Kroetz. Bottom: Publicity shot for the Hoy Polloy production of Tom Fool, with Chris Bunworth, Liz McColl and Glenn van Oosterom.

Tom Fool premieres at the Brunswick Mechanic's Institute, Brunswick, this Saturday, translated by Estella Schmid and Anthony Vivis, and directed by Beng Oh until May 23.

How To Disappear Completely and Never Be Found, by Fin Kennedy, directed by Paul King, Sound design by George Bisset. With Michael F Cahill, Glen Hancox, Helen Hopkins, David Passmore and Tory Rodd. Hoy Polloy Mechanics Institute Performing Arts Centre, Corner of Sydney & Glenlyon Roads, Brunswick, until June 7)

“What makes you who you are? A name? An address? A random collection of experiences, a few memories? …You are who you can prove you are. You are what people think. And that’s the easiest thing in the world to change.”

So claims the doomed conman Mike in Fin Kennedy’s play How To Disappear Completely and Never Be Found, a haunting and powerful exploration of identity and loss that made big waves when it premiered in Britain last year.


How To Disappear Completely explores the netherworld of missing persons. Kennedy sketches a bleak picture of the spiritual bankruptcy of contemporary society, where identity is little more than an advertising brand.

It follows the existential collapse of young advertising executive Charlie Hunt (David Passmore). He has an incipient ulcer, a bad cocaine habit, and his employers are just about to prosecute him for embezzlement.As his life crashes around his ears, he decides to slough off his old “soiled” identity and become someone else.

This was the first unproduced play in 40 years to win the prestigious Arts Council John Whiting Award, and its premiere at the Sheffield Crucible elicited rapturous reviews. Kennedy was tagged as a name to watch.

Even in this imperfect Australian premiere by Hoy Polloy, it’s easy to see why. It’s rarer than you might think to encounter new plays of this quality.

Kennedy has a sure sense of theatrical structure and a poet’s ear for professional vocabularies – the pathologist, the career criminal, the advertising shill – which he moulds into arresting dramatic language.

At once dramatically direct and metaphorically resonant, this writing demands a concomitant level of skill from actors, and is unforgiving if they don’t meet its demands. Hoy Polloy’s hardworking cast gives us a honest presentation of the play, but the performers are seldom able to fulfil its potential.

Michael F Cahill, playing a variety of roles, is the only actor who possesses the vocal skills to exploit the theatricality of Kennedy’s text.

Passmore in the central role has a couple of electrifying moments, but lacks a sense of journey: Charlie begins and ends abject. And too often the other cast members, playing a dizzying array of doubles, fall into mugging their parts when they’re at a loss.

Like the performances, George Bisset’s sound design and Paul King’s direction are patchy: there is little sense of integration and continuity. But there’s enough to give us a sense of this play’s power, and it’s a welcome chance to see one of the major new talents in British theatre.

Picture: David Passmore as Charlie/Adam in How To Disappear Completely and Never Be Found. Photo: Tim Williamson

This review appeared in Monday's Australian. I fear I am not able to do an extended review this week. As you might have gathered, it's been madness here.

Fin Kennedy is regularly dubbed one of the hottest new playwrights in Britain. And this week Melburnians get to see why - on Friday, Hoy Polloy is staging the Australian premiere of his play, How To Disappear Completely & Never Be Found. His second full-length work, it was the first unproduced play in 40 years to win the 38th Arts Council John Whiting Playwrighting Award, which led to a critically celebrated production at the Sheffield Crucible. For your illumination, Ms TN strapped Fin into the interrogation chair and asked him some probing questions...

Firstly, could you tell me a little about the genesis of How To Disappear Completely & Never Be Found? Was there something in particular that sparked your interest in missing persons?

The play idea originally came from stumbling across the website of the national Missing Person’s Helpline (NMPH) a charity here in the UK. They’ve got gallery after gallery of snaps of ordinary-looking people who were never seen again. I was instantly fascinated and began doing some more research. An academic study I read said that 210,000 people are reported missing each year in the UK alone. This seemed like an epidemic! And far fewer of them than you might expect are due to abduction or mental health or suicide. Of those that are traced, two thirds say they did it deliberately (as opposed to just drifting out of touch unintentionally). Further research showed that there was a whole cottage industry out there in self-help books about how to change your identity, and how to exploit loopholes in various systems so that you could survive outside of the mainstream world of documentation which we all take for granted.

I quickly got into quite existential territory about what constitutes an identity anyway, especially in the modern world where ideas of things are so malleable. When I asked the people at the NMPH whether they saw a ‘type’ of missing case again and again they said yes – white male, late twenties or early thirties, good job in the private sector, makes some money, works and parties too hard, suffers some sort of personal crisis and just disappears overnight. They didn’t seem to know why.

A policeman I went to interview told me that in London a lot of them end up being fished out of the River Thames after drowning from drinking too much and falling in. That was where the character of Charlie was born and where the main trajectory of the play came from. He works in advertising as a Brand Manager, so spends all day trying to manipulate and manage people’s ideas of things, so one day he tries to see if he can re-brand himself. There’s a strong philosophical argument that you only exist in other people’s minds and that was something I wanted to play with. It’s a very dark play, but also quite funny in an absurd sort of way. It’s quite influenced by that link between existentialism and absurdism in some of Sartre’s and Camus’ writing. I’ve said elsewhere that it’s a sort of L’Etranger for the 21st century. Charlie’s journey certainly visits some dark parts of the human soul.

You say research in very important in your work. What does this research entail? Is it about more than getting the facts right? Do you have a responsibility as a playwright towards an imaginative engagement with your subject matter? How does the act of research square with imagination?

Research for me is a living, breathing creative act, not a dry thing done in a library (though that has its place). Empathy and research go hand in hand, because for me research is less about understanding facts and systems (though that can come into it) but about getting into other people’s heads and hearts. For me its about accessing life experiences which I haven’t had, and as such I think it's essential if you’re going to have any longevity as a writer (let’s face it, few of us have had such eventful lives that they will provide material for a whole career of plays – and anyway, how self-indulgent would that be?).

I usually conduct interviews whilst researching, then type them up word for word. With my first play Protection, which was about social workers, I was pretty religious about this and I had lots of people wanting to talk to me. But with How To Disappear the subject was more sensitive and obviously the people at the heart of it were a little more difficult to find having disappeared, so I never actually got to meet anyone who had done it and come back to tell the tale (though I did find some interviews online).

This meant I had to engage in a process of imaginative research, where I had to get myself into the head of someone who was absolutely at breaking point and saw such a drastic course of action as their only escape route. So I spent a lot of time in Southend, a tacky coastal town where Charlie ends up, standing at the end of the pier trying to imagine wanting to throw myself in, whilst reading interviews and rehearsing escape routes in my head if I ever had to leave my old life behind. I got all the guide books and worked out how to get a portfolio of new ID. I reckon with a bit of notice I could probably get most of it. Passports are a bit harder now but when the play was written they were still fairly easy. I’m sure it can still be done if you know how. I have a perverse admiration for criminal minds who can exploit systems and confound every security measure, so I had fun writing the character of Mike, Charlie’s mentor.

So anyway, research and imagination are inseparable for me. Those characters were born out of all of the above combined, and emerged over many months in fragments gleaned from one source or sparked off by another. A field trip to a resonant site which will spark imaginative ideas is as much an act of research as being shown pictures of drowned bodies by a policeman, or reading a book by a dodgy private detective about how to get a new driving licence. It’s about establishing the truth of a given character’s situation and the course of action they embark on.

How To Disappear gives a merciless portrayal of the moral and emotional emptiness of contemporary life, which for all its specific Englishness resonates very strongly here too. Among other things, it strikes me as an attack on the cult of appearances, on a society in which surface is everything. Identity itself seems, in the end, to be fraudulent. (I guess it's no accident that your protagonist works in advertising). Are you angry about where contemporary society is going? What are the concerns that propel the play?

I’m not angry at contemporary society so much as exasperated with it, and incredulous that people don’t see through it most of the time. The cult of the individual is the ultimate triumph of advanced global capitalism, to which we all acquiesce every day. Over the years powerful forces have created a system that keeps us unfulfilled and powerful forces continue to manipulate that emptiness by selling us things that promise to fill the vacuum, but which in fact just continue to feed the monster.

Now we have a world full of branding and disposable consumables and makeover shows and empty promises of freedom and rejuvenation. We thought all this would make us happy but it doesn’t and now we’re all stuck with it. And, so far as I can see, it’ll only come to an end when the environment breathes its last and kills us all off. I suppose that’s the ultimate tragedy - that a species so intelligent is managing to kill itself and its planet through sheer stupidity. I don’t know how much of that is in the play but it’s something that occurs to me most days.

It's been said that you're in the tradition of David Hare, a social realist playwright. How To Disappear isn't by any means a documentary play, however. Can you talk a little about how you see your work in the context of British writing?

That was only said of my first play Protection, which was a traditional research-led piece of social realism, documenting an aspect of the public sector, in the tradition of Hare’s state-of-the-nation trilogy Racing Demon, Murmuring Judges and Absence of War at the National Theatre in the early 90s. How To Disappear was my second play and I deliberately set out to do something completely different, so it’s a nightmarish netherworld of distorted timelines and people waking up dead. If Protection was politics then I guess How To Disappear is philosophy. I’ve also done a modern Jacobean revenge tragedy, a radio play about religion and mental illness, an as yet unproduced play about the looting of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, and lots of plays about teenagers in east London. As for where all that fits within the context of British writing, I’m not really sure. Like most writers, I just get on with it and leave academics and so on to put forward theories linking us all up.

Bizarrely (I think) How To Disappear was turned down by many companies, and was only produced after it won a major prize. How hard is it for new voices to enter British theatre? Does the theatre culture suffer from a closed shop mentality? Or is it just hard all round?

It’s hard to break into theatre if you can't afford to work for nothing. That’s the main problem. The current system puts the onus of responsibility onto the individual writer to subsidise their own play, by working on it in their spare time in the hope that it might pay off one day with a commission. This effectively turns playwriting into a speculative activity. It’s the same for directors.

This is why most theatre practitioners are white, male, middle-class graduates – they’re the ones who can afford to take these risks. Now these people can of course produce great drama. But in the modern world they’re not all that representative of the country at large, and it doesn’t seem fair that lower socio-economic groups are excluded from taking part by the ad hoc nature of the current system. There are a few schemes emerging now to address that, and I’m involved with one of them, so I hope things are changing. I remember when I wanted to write my first play for the fringe I had to quit my job and live off my credit cards for six months. It took me two years to pay that off. That’s what ‘arts funding’ means for most freelance artists at the start of their careers, and I think most people would admit that it isn’t the best system for producing great work. We really need some sort of system to spot talent and nurture it and fund it prior to getting that first commission. That’s where most people fall down.

As for How To Disappear being turned down, I’ve never really got to the bottom of that. I suppose structurally it breaks a few rules and that makes theatres nervous, especially in a new writer. Audiences and critics all loved it though, which was a real boost.

You have worked a lot both teaching and with specific communities - can you expand on that work? How has that work influenced your writing?

For the past two years I’ve been playwright-in-residence in a school in east London. I teach playwrighting to students and staff, I help the GCSE and A-level kids develop their play ideas, and I write and produce a new play each year for the kids to take to the Edinburgh Festival. Before that I did similar work on a smaller scale for a variety of different companies working with inner city communities. I also did a play-making project with kids in the social services care system. I love it. It’s very easy as a writer to sit in a room pontificating about how the world works without actually taking an active part in it. That side of my work keeps me real and in touch with some of the most vibrant communities in the UK. It’s so rewarding helping them explore their creativity and shape their ideas, and of course it informs my own work because I have a long-standing relationship with Half Moon Young People’s Theatre in east London who produce and tour my plays for teenagers, so I draw on a lot of my teaching experiences when I write for them.

The young people’s theatre sector is terribly overlooked over here, especially by critics. There’s still a perception that we’re putting out some rickety theatre-in-education tat when actually the sector has changed hugely since the 1980s when that may have been true. As a writer who works both there and in the mainstream I have to say that the young people’s sector affords me far greater opportunities to develop ideas over a long period and experiment with form.

My first play for Half Moon Locked In was a hip hop musical set in a pirate radio station, and was effectively my first verse play. I developed it with them over two years of workshops with their youth theatres and play readings in local schools. A mainstream adult company would never offer you that broad a canvas. You’d get a commission and be expected to deliver in six months with little or no support. Young people’s companies despite, or perhaps because of, having less money, are very loyal to their writers and develop much longer term relationships with them. You get to grow as an artist.

These two sides of my work are now totally inextricable. For example, I can trace a direct lineage from experimenting with verse in Locked In to Chimeras, my modern Jacobean tragedy, which the commissioning company Liquid Theatre are now trying to co-produce with one of the big national companies. I could never have written a play like that without having the time and space to experiment with form which the young people’s sector offered me.

Do you write things other than plays (and blogs/journalism)? Have you always just wanted to be a playwright? What made you want to do it in the first place?

I’m just a playwright, and occasional blogger and features writer. I’ve been doing drama in one form or another ever since I was a kid, through youth theatres, then school shows, then a Drama and English degree. I’ve written stories ever since I could hold a pen, and I’ve always worked in theatres too, long before I was a writer I was an usher, crew member, box office staff etc. I suppose I wanted to write plays because I always had an interest in politics, philosophy, sociology, language and poetry/literature. Playwrighting seemed to combine all those, and in the most exciting way. The self-employed thing also appeals to me, as well as not having to wear a suit.

Who are the writers whom you most admire?

Oh, loads. I won't list them. Playwright love-ins are always a bit tedious. Also I might offend someone by leaving them out. Writers are sensitive like that.

Links
Fin Kennedy's website
Playscript on amazon
Hoy Polloy website