Theatre is, perhaps more than anything, an act of translation. Acts are translated into words, words translated into actions and images. Watching any show means deciphering, consciously or not, a number of languages: the semiotics of space, lighting, choreography and gesture, the meanings of spatial relationship between performers and audience members, the inflection of a myriad of theatrical traditions through new technologies and techniques and ideas.

In the absence of a general theatrical literacy, this can lead to problems: it's common to encounter people who can watch experimental movies without blinking, easily processing the sophisticated and complex language of film, but who are baffled by the most basic techniques of creating theatrical meaning. It's not because theatre is inherently more mysterious; it's because our culture is soaked in the language of film, but the language of theatre has nothing like the same cultural status. The best education, as with all art, is to go and see a lot of it: screen culture is so hard to avoid that we absorb its language through a process of osmosis, but the language of theatre has to be consciously learned.


The primary language of theatre is still popularly considered to be writing: mention theatre to the average punter, and he or she will think of plays. And often our more experimental artists want to give this perceived dominance a good shake, and to foreground the other theatrical languages. This can lead to fascinating results, among them some of the best work I've seen in this city. But it's a process fraught with peril, which as often can make the whole much less than the sum of its parts.

On the question of text in theatre, I'm more or less with the German writer Robert Musil, who wrote in 1926: "The actor's theatre, the director's theatre, the theatre of acoustic form and that of optical rhythm, the theatre of visualised stage space, and many others have been offered to us... They have taught much that is worthwhile, but about as one-sidedly as the assertion that one should throw a man who has a cold into the fire, which is also fundamentally based on a correct idea. The experience of our senses is conservative... what is to be understood through seeing and hearing cannot be too far removed from what is already known."

True radicality, Musil argues, can only occur in "immediate proximity to the word", because it is through the word that human beings mediate and quarrel with experience: it is through the word that we think, and it's through thinking that we abstract, rearrange and create work that is more than merely novel. Musil is not merely being logocentric here: he is too canny to suggest that meaning can only be communicated through written or spoken language. The clue is in that phrase "immediate proximity".

Which brings me at last to Iván Sikic's Persé, which is one of those experiments with classic texts that moves away from the text itself. Performed in the vaguely sinister environs of the disused Collingwood Underground Carpark, it's a work of theatre inspired by Jean Genet's 1949 play Deathwatch, a drama between three prisoners and a guard set in a claustrophobic cell. This production shows that Sikic is a directorial imagination to watch, but it also demonstrates that moving away from a text as complex and intelligent as Genet's can also be a way of moving away from its challenges.

Genet is one of the great moral imaginations of the 20th century. He embraced the negation of conventional moral values, searching instead for an authenticity of existence which united the sacred and profane, a blazing immediacy which went truly beyond good and evil, which resisted any vulgarity of motive, sometimes by entering the most extreme vulgarities. Genet found this possible transcendence in the abjection of criminality, and especially in the act of murder. But, as Deathwatch demonstrates, Genet had a hierarchy of criminality: the mere act of murder was not enough.

It's impossible to summarise the myriad and fascinating arguments about Genet's work here. Jean-Paul Sartre's giant and somewhat homophobic study of his work, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, examines the paradoxes and achievements of Genet's oeuvre, given that Genet was always the most unreliable of narrators. Sartre proclaims him as the acme of the self-defining existentialist man. George Bataille claims that Genet, for all his prodigious gifts, failed as a writer because he failed in his paradoxical quest for sovereignty, without which communication is impossible. According to Bataille, he fails out of an excess of calculation, a self-aggrandisement that is "eager for royal dignity, nobility and sovereignty in the traditional sense of the word" that compromises the "momentary grace" that is all we can actually know of sovereignty.

It strikes me that for all their profound meditating on Genet's work, both Sartre and Bataille fail to recognise the significance of Genet's attitude towards "misfortune". "You don't know the first thing about misfortune if you think you can choose it," says Green Eyes in Deathwatch. "I didn't want mine. It chose me....I tried everything to shake it off.... It was only when I saw that everything was irremediable that I quietened down.... It's only now that I'm really settling down to my misfortune and making it my heaven." In Genet's sub-lunar world, liberty and revolution - central to Sartre and Bataille, both mid-century French thinkers - simply don't exist; the abject human being is a man who has no choice.

The paradox of inverted morality, in which good is evil and evil is good, is not a means to freedom or revolution (nor in fact what Genet ultimately does, which is rather to rearrange the boundaries of the sacred). Rather than a rebellion against unjust reality, Genet's literary outraging of moral precepts is, paradoxically, a radical acceptance of injustice. And that is, to minds that perceive literature as a manly pursuit, an active force in the world, perhaps his greatest and most troubling moral transgression. Genet takes the privilege of literature, a privilege assumed by both Bataille and Sartre, and infects it with unprivilege. In doing so, he destroys its moral - and, not unincidentally, its gendered - assumptions. It's not surprising, considering this, that he spent the last decades of his life in political activism, although it might have surprised Sartre and Bataille.

If I have discussed Genet at some length, it is because this dimension of thought is what is missing from Sikic's production. Persé doesn't attempt a conventional production of Deathwatch; rather, in Sikic's words, "we scrapped the text and approached the story physically. I felt that in order to get a more visceral and less rational representation of the story, the actors needed to let their bodies guide their decisions. This way, they would not get caught up in the language, which can sometimes be a barrier to the true essence of what each character is going through, and what the story is trying to say".

One can respect the attempt, although I can't help wondering at what stage the text was removed, and what each participant thought the story was about. Removing the script has the effect that Musil warns against: what we witness is the conservatism of the body, its relaxation into what is already known. Thus the three criminals we are allegedly witnessing seem about as dangerous as damp flannels; there is nothing in these performances of the suppressed violence that exists in a prison environment. You don't believe for a moment that any one of them could have committed a murder, whether out of petty vanity, like Lefranc, or for diabolically sacred motivations, like Green Eyes. Genet's ritualistic fable is reduced to a simple story of competing sexual power and yet, for all its ambition to reveal the eroticism and viscerality that underpins Genet's play, it is curiously anerotic.

I suspect that sticking to Genet's text, rather than replacing it with largely banal dialogue, would have at least challenged the collective's imagination, and would have resulted in better work. But I don't want simply to condemn this production: spatially and visually, it had moments that were better than good. The set, lighting and sound design were superb, generating moments when you could glimpse the possibility of something that reached beyond the banal, exploiting the abandoned, echoing space of the car-park to create an abstract reality that was at times almost visionary. The best moments were when the actors weren't moving at all; they created tableaux that had something of the quality of the surreal industrial scenography in Tarkosvky's films, unsettling and epic theatrical landscapes.

For all this talent to mean something, it has to work in that "immediate proximity to the word", to wrestle with the challenges that writing such as Genet's issues rather than, as here, side-stepping them. I admire the ambition, even if in Persé it vaults over itself and ends in something like a pratfall. And I will watch Sikic's further work with deep interest.

Picture: from Persé. Photo: Daisy Noyes

Persé, inspired by Jean Genet's Deathwatch, directed by Iván Sikic. Assistant director Daisy Noyes, dramaturg Jess Murphy, set design by Michael Parry and Richard Pettifer, lighting design by Emma Valente, sound design and composition by Martin Kay and Nick Van Cuylenburg, costume design by Michael Parry. With Angus Keech, Richard Pettifer, Simon O. Chen and Sean Cairns. The Sikic Co, Collingwood Underground Carpark, Harmsworth St, Collingwood, bookings 0423 238674. Closes tomorrow night.

The Maids by Jean Genet, directed by John Bolton, lighting by Armando Licul and Govin Ruben. With Suzannah Bayes-Morton, Zoe Ellerton-Ashley and Shelly Lauman. Victorian College of the Arts School of Drama Autumn Season, Grant Street Theatre

I vividly remember my first encounter with the writing of Jean Genet. I was around nineteen and for reasons I forget - perhaps no reason - I picked up his first novel, Our Lady of the Flowers. I read it in a kind of daze: I found myself hypnotised by the sheer decadent sensuality of the prose, and at the same time completely confused. I did not understand this moral universe at all.

Yet, when I reached its final pages, there occurred one of those perceptual shifts that art can occasionally produce, a kind of click; the mental equivalent, I suppose, of those Victorian optical puzzles where you suddenly realise that what appears at first to be a white vase is also two faces in profile. It was as if, through the experience of reading it, I had insensibly been given a key to the book. I went straight back to page one and read it again. And it's probably fair to say - though I can say this of a number of books, thus demonstrating the vicious effect of reading - that I have never been quite the same since.

My naive bourgeois assumptions had, all the way through the book, been kicked, trampled and spat on; and even so, I had probably understood about fifty per cent of its violations. (In many ways I had a sheltered upbringing). Genet turned all the values I didn't realise I held violently inside out.

It was all very exciting. But it was also much more than that; if it had been merely shocking, it would not have disturbed me so profoundly. What I realised, however foggily, was that Genet is a sternly moral writer.

Much later, I read Jean-Paul Sartre's monumental study, Saint Genet, which explores this basic illumination to great depth. But, however much I admired Sartre's scholarship and perception, I couldn't help feeling dubious about his breathless sanctification of Genet, which itself seemed a little bourgeois, underlaid by a wide-eyed boyish fascination with the romantic beauty of criminal revolt.

I think Genet was neither a saint nor a demon. These extreme identities were masks: behind them stood a complex, anonymous and, perhaps, even detached intellectual (a title he despised). He seems to me to be at once driven by deep anger and love, and yet standing at a profoundly ironic angle to himself. This generates the passion of his artifice, which is deadly serious: Genet's vision is not camp, as is often claimed, but tragic. It may elude and mock the fatal trivialities and sentiment of the intellect, which are the death of love, but it doesn't eschew, as camp does, seriousness itself. That's one of the things that can make Genet, still, an authentically shocking writer.

Georges Bataille's term "hypermorality" - used to describe a moral system which challenges received morality to the extent that it is regarded as either amoral or immoral - is pertinent here. Somehow in Genet's writing, despite the extremity of experience it enacts, one is always aware of the cold witnessing eye. Perhaps this is no more than to say that he was a great writer. Whatever the case, it is true enough to say that all his life, Genet was concerned with the question of power: what it is, what it does to those who lack it, what it does to those who possess it.

It's a theme already clear in The Maids. This play, his first to be produced, was actually his second work for theatre after Deathwatch, a blackly absurd drama set in prison. The Maids was written in 1945, the last year of World War 2, which is not insignificant. It has been said that the dropping of the nuclear bomb was the act which inaugurated the Theatre of the Absurd: the possibility that human beings could completely annihilate themselves suggested a world of such madness that only real madness could be considered a sane response.

The Maids, inspired by a notorious 1933 murder when two maids brutally killed their employers, collapses fantasy and reality. It is a play of heiratic roles, all of them ultimately cruel: the two maids, Solange (Suzannah Bayes-Morton) and Claire (Shelly Lauman), act out their sadistic mistress-servant fantasies and their social roles as servants; Madame (Zoe Ellerton-Ashley) her performances as tyrant, beneficient employer and lover.

All these roles circle each other, as increasingly malevolent reflections; each character switches without warning from total abjection to an equally total tyranny. Between these switches are poignant articulations of love, distorted by the cliches which express and imprison them, a yearning which is at once instransigent and ungraspable, because inexpressible. Literally, within the paradigm of power this play expresses, there is no language for love. Consequently, as becomes evident through the play, all these gestures are ultimately expressions of despair, rhetorics of behaviour which conceal a devastating inner emptiness. Beyond the paradigm of dominator and dominated, there is an unfillable vacuum.

This makes The Maids, to say the least, an extremely challenging play. John Bolton's production makes a very creditable fist of it. It opens with the fantasies of the maid servants performed on an over-the-top stage of velvet drapes and flowers, placed in the middle of an empty space. When the alarm goes off, signalling Madame's imminent arrival, Solange and Claire "tidy up": their makeshift stage is Madame's bed, the velvet drapes her bedspread, and so on. This opens the action out to the "real life" of the stage, which turns out to be as histrionic as their own fantasies.

Genet's famous advice to women playing The Maids (it was originally written for men) was that they must not "put their c***ts on the table". In other words, this is not a play which looks specifically at how women relate, and must not be played as if it is. By virtue of a certain toughness and edginess, this production avoids the traps that Genet warned against.

The Maids really requires an older cast; not because older actors might be more skilled, but because there are some understandings that come, except in very rare instances, only with time. In the absence of the extreme emotional sophistication Genet's writing requires - a lived understanding of the intolerability of what Genet is portraying - the passion of these young actors is a good substitute. They give performances that are at once fearless and controlled, and attain performative fineness without losing an essential, naive sense of emotional rawness.

I admired especially Zoe Ellerton-Ashley as Madame. Her predatory performance evoked both Madame's shockingly violent egocentricity and her fragility, the source of a genuine pathos. And it was great also to see an indigenous actor cast, without comment, in this play.

It is a good and honest production that reveals the despair that drives The Maids, its merciless portrayal of the intolerable poverty of emotional worlds wholly trammelled by capitalistic power. Yet it is a mistake to regard Genet's black vision as nihilistic: his work is far from that. The erotic dynamic in the play is, in a way, its own subterranean counter-argument. And, to quote John Berger, one of the great writers of our time: "The naming of the intolerable is itself the hope".