Melbourne Fringe Festival: The Heart of Another is a Dark Forest, directed by Kate Sulan and Ingrid Voorendt. Set design by Emily Barrie, lighting design by Richard Vabre, sound design by Jethro Woodward, music by Zoe Barry. Rawcus and Restless Dance Company, Dancehouse.

In The Arms of a Lion, written by Peter van der Merwe, in collaboration with Penelope Chater. Directed by Penelope Chater, performed by Peter van der Merwe. Set by Brian Finlayson, lighting design by Katie Sfetkidis, sound design by Xana Chambers. White Swan Productions, Northcote Town Hall Studio 2 until October 4.

The haunting title of The Heart of Another is a Dark Forest is a quote from the early 20th century American novelist Willa Cather, who was notable for writing in plain, poetic speech about the lives of ordinary people. And this collaboration between Rawcus, a theatre which works with both disabled and abled performers, and the Adelaide dance company Restless, is an attempt to glimpse the most private desires of other people.


Rawcus produces unashamedly romantic work, rich with texture and colour and expressive lighting that frames the delicacy of the moments it is seeking to express. The Heart of Another... is no different. It is a sumptuous feast for the senses, from the live score and sound design, to the William Morris-style decorated walls and fabrics that are the main feature of the design. It's work that seeks a poise between delicacy and darkness, treading the border between the inscrutably private and its public expression.

The performance opens as the audience enters the space, where musicians are playing back stage and forestage a man is balletically posed, wearing a robe of excessive and androgynous luxury that recalls the ornateness of Regency Beaux, rather than feminine display. When the lights go down, the performers enter the stage one by one. Most of the cast is disabled, but here the focus is on the individuality of each person, challenging the generalised blindness that often comes with the label "disability".

The show consists of a series of encounters in which we are invited into private worlds, expressed through a series of often arresting theatrical images. Desire is symbolised in a variety of ways - as a jar in which is placed different objects or through play; through shadow theatre, when the curtains back stage open and reveal a counter-text of imaginings; through the shifting relationships of bodies on stage.

It's a show of interesting ambiguities and ambitions. There was one very moving moment when a girl with no arms discovers flight. The shy joy of the young performer was intensely poignant, revealing the ambition of the show, its movement towards freedom through the expressiveness of imagination.

There is a danger in this work of heading towards the twee, which The Heart of Another... evades because it unearths the ambiguity of desire, its darkness as well as its illuminations. Nevertheless, I felt an uneasiness about its decoration, the careful assembly of its images, that made me wonder if something was being obscured. As I watched, I thought of, say, the straightforwardness of Stephen Page's marvellous show Kin, which was devised with young members of his family, or Jérôme Bel's The Show Must Go On, which also investigates the depth of the everyday. Both these works achieved a passionate delicacy of communication in ways which I think The Heart of Another... just missed, for reasons that are very hard to trace.

One thought is that, where Bel wears his profound thinking lightly, finding a purity of performative expression that can ambush you with unexpected and joyous feeling, The Heart of Another... insists on its emotional integrity in a way that somehow impedes the experience of the moment. But for all that, it's a show which achieves moments of real beauty.

PETER van der Merwe's one-man play, In the Arms of a Lion, is an elegant and moving show which explores the effects of Apartheid on those who enforce its privilege. Its effects on the black population of South Africa are well known, but here van der Merwe is more concerned with what he calls the "deformation of the soul" that results from violently oppressing the majority of a country's population.

It consists of a series of monologues by different characters, all of them memories of a young gay man called Stephen, the son of a fundamentalist Afrikaaner family. His uncle is a priest who uses the Bible to justify the ideology of white supremacy as the will of God, and who expresses in a baldly shocking fashion (shocking only because of its utter conviction) the ugly realities of racism.

But this play is much more than a simple condemnation of plainly ugly social injustice. It opens with Stephen confessing his sexual orientation to his mother, who as a God-fearing woman is wholly distressed that her deeply loved son has revealed himself to be, in her eyes, an abomination. Stephen himself rejects the epithet "gay"; he prefers "queer". He loves to wear women's clothes, but not, he says, because he wants to impersonate a woman, but because he finds a deep pleasure in his own male body clothed in femininity. In the same way, as he says, when he puts on men's clothes, he is not "being a man": he is merely dressed as a man.

This subtext on the performance of gender reaches into the performance of race. Being "white" is as much a performance as any other, and comes with its particular rules and tabus. Stephen's sexual ambiguity makes him Other to his family and his community, even a traitor, and he lives in terror of being beaten up and killed. What gives this visceral weight is that he is constantly witness to how the other Others - those with black skin - are themselves brutalised and demonised.

Stephen's mother, who is much more than a caricature, is torn between her love for her son and her ingrained, unshakeable beliefs, which are reinforced by the fears that underlie them. Stephen's situation is not as simple as the young gay man being rejected by his family - emotionally brutalised himself by growing up in a state threatened constantly by terrorism, he is as much an agent of his alienation as his family.

In the Arms of a Lion is a complex and emotionally potent take on its subject, with its own clear parallels to Australia's less than glorious treatment of its own demonised others. I seldom say this, but I felt its hour-long format, while adequate, was too short - a little more air might have made the show less impressionistic. The design and direction reminded me rather of Peter Brook's production of Sizwe Banzi is Dead at last year's Melbourne Festival - a bare stage, simply but evocatively lit, with all the mechanics exposed and the performer changing character through costume. Absolutely basic and absolutely effective.

And it's a bravura performance from Peter van der Merwe, who handles all the registers, from pathos to comedy, with total commitment. Courageous theatre.

Fringe Festival: Cake by Astrid Pill, directed by Ingrid Voorendt. Designed by Gaelle Mallis, lighting design by Geoff Cobham, composition by Zoe Barry. With Astrid Pill and Zoe Barry. Vitalstatistix and Malthouse Theatre @ The Tower until October 7.

Kin, directed by Stephen Page. Design by Stephen Page, lighting design by Glenn Hughes, videography by Douglas Watkin. With Isileli Jarden, Sean Page, Ryan Jarden, Josiah Page, Samson Page, Hunter Page-Lochard and Curtis Walsh-Jarden. Malthouse Theatre @ The Merlyn Theatre until October 6. Bookings: 9685 5111.

There's a beautiful synergy in the pairing of these two shows at the Malthouse this week. It goes further than the pleasing alliteration of Cake and Kin: like those racing horses Montaigne once admired in Italy, they're both "small but exquisitely formed". And both are stylishly realised devised productions that explore delicate reaches of the human psyche with tact, humour and honesty.


Cake comes to the Malthouse from a hit season at the Adelaide Fringe. It's easy to see why this show attracted attention: it irresistibly combines the erotic attractions of eating and sex, and seductively tickles your senses - taste and smell as well as eyes and ears. (Even touch, if you're lucky enough to get a cupcake). But it is more than a sensory feast: in ways that remind me of Margaret Cameron's brilliant show Things Calypso Wanted To Say, a fond memory from around 1990, Cake is an excoriatingly honest, funny and sometimes bleak examination of subversive feminine eroticism.

The first thing you notice is Gaelle Mellis's design. When you enter the Tower, you walk to your seat across a stage sprinkled with icing sugar, trying not to trip over small piles of cupcakes that are piled on the floor. The two performers, Astrid Pill and Zoe Barry, are already present, softly singing the nursery rhyme "Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker man".

The show is performed in the round to a small audience. In the centre of the stage is a wooden kitchen table, and in the corners are a table with tea things, a glockenspiel and a chair. The feeling of intimacy is heightened by Geoff Cobham's subtly fanciful lighting design, which mostly consists of a raft of classic Australian kitchen lights hung low over the table.

Under Ingrid Voorendt's precise direction, Cake becomes a detailed integration of text, music and physical theatre. Pill narrates two parallel narratives, one in the first person and one in the third. The first follows a woman's hopeless passion for the baker in her local cake shop, from whom she purchases unseemly numbers of cakes, while never daring to tell her love; the other is a piercingly exact - even at times brutal - examination of a relationship, that explores the grief of losing a baby.

The narration is interspersed with songs, including a wicked version of This is the House that Jack Built. Zoe Barry, dressed identically to Pill in a demure skirt, shirt and stilettos, is Pill's wordless counterpoint: she performs the lush score live, becoming Pill's inner, witnessing self.

It could all be too cute for words, but the show's intelligence and wit - and its slyly obscene subversion of the apparently inhibited femininity it explores - ensures that it never is. Such a show could be in great danger of simply confirming the diminutive of the feminine; instead, its artists gracefully steer it to a surprising affirmation of the female self. Who can bake her own cakes.

Kin, on the other hand, is yang to Cake's yin. This show is an exploration of maleness: in particular, it looks at the fertile, delicate period of prepubesence, when boys are poised between childhood and manhood. In particular, and with a gentleness that is the best kind of tact, it explores the issues faced by Indigenous boys. It's advisedly named: the performers, all aged between 10 and 14, are the nephews and the son of its director, Bangarra Dance Theatre's Stephen Page.


Like Mellis, Peter England has designed this show with great care for the spatial relationships between performers and their audience. Except for a row of seats at the back, the stage is surrounded on two sides by a bench arrangement, which immediately gives it a pleasant informality (a quality heightened by the number of children present on the night I went - I wish that children were seen more often at the theatre).

The show opens with the boys casually gathering together for a jam under a spill of light on the wide Merlyn stage. It's an ingenious opening that unobstrusively harnesses those young, potentially chaotic energies. And, as the familiar Led Zeppelin chords echo across the stage, it is immediately and charmingly recognisable to anyone who has had anything to do with teenage boys.

As you would expect, Kin is exquisitely choreographed, moving between several loosely-connected scenes that enact different aspects of the boys' lives. They muck about in a beaten-up car; they stun themselves into insensibility sniffing petrol; they dance - both rap and traditional dance - for us and for each other.

The show deals with serious issues with a light touch, exploring domestic violence, racism and land rights. In a highlight, the boys perform a rap version of Oodgeroo Noonuccal's (formerly Kath Walker) 1962 poem, Aboriginal Charter of Rights, reminding us that Indigenous activism has a long and distinguished history that is still very much alive.

Perhaps what is most striking about Kin is how these young performers own it: it is very clear that their performances emerge from their individual physicalities and experiences. It's an exemplary example of sensitive collaboration with young people, which expresses their worlds without exploiting them. The show is short - around 35 minutes - but length is no synonym for substance: as it shifted to its final scene, a videoed projection of an initiation into adulthood, I felt I had come a long way.

I hope it is not merely sentimental to say that around halfway through, I found myself in tears. I think what moved me was the freedom of a particular gesture as a boy danced, a piercing moment of joyousness that exquisitely expressed the vulnerability and pride and tumultuous anarchy of boys on the threshold of manhood.

It was one of those moments when theatre justifies itself, when it reveals our connections as well as our differences. In such moments, theatre becomes an intricate dance between audiences and artists, between our social and private selves; a place of fleeting but profound communion. In this sense, the most generously human, both Cake and Kin are profoundly political works.

Picture: Astrid Pill in Cake. Photo: Jeff Busby