La beauté, “Beauty is difficult, Yeats” said Aubrey Beardsley
when Yeats asked why he drew horrors
or at least not Burne-Jones
and Beardsley knew he was dying and had to
make his hit quickly

Hence no more B-J in his product.

So very difficult, Yeats, beauty so difficult.

- Ezra Pound, Cantos

I left Whiteley's Incredible Blue last night with Pound's verse circling around my head. Barry Dickins's new play, subtitled "an hallucination", is almost an essay on the proposition of the difficulty and necessity of beauty, through the medium of the enfant terrible of Australian art, Brett Whiteley.


Whiteley is a compelling figure: part artist, part charlatan, myth-maker extraordinaire, he died of a heroin overdose in 1992, aged only 53, in a country motel. So much of his work is trashy product for the cannibalistic art market that at once made and destroyed him, and yet his sublime gift for colour and line gave us some of us our most iconic paintings. Dickins, however, isn't interested in moralising, nor in biography. What he has created instead is a poetic riff that recreates Whiteley's restless imaginative excesses, a theatrical meditation on art, beauty and self-destruction.

The title not only recalls Whiteley's fondness for the colour ultramarine blue, but colloquially suggests Whiteley's argument ("blue") with life itself. It's probably Dickins's best play, and certainly a play only he could have written: here his Dylan Thomas-esque ear for rhythm and colour is given full rein, looping and relooping in an avalanche of imagery. These flights are grounded by an earthy self-awareness, a deprecating humour that pricks the impulse towards romanticising the artist, seeking instead to make luminous the sensual passion that informed his paintings. The blur of the sentimental is always a danger in a work like this, and this play never goes there.

The conceit is simple. Brett Whiteley's soul is in purgatory, trapped in the squalid motel room in which he died. He is played with a startling verisimilitude by Neil Pigot, who with the addition of a curly wig looks almost exactly like him, but it's clear from the opening moments that this isn't intended to be a realistic representation. Pigot plays him as a clumsy dancer, half child, half cynic, regretful and regretless, looking back at the failures of a passionate life from the dispassion of death, a collision of quicksilver and human flesh borne down by the gravity of mortality. It's a bravura performance, exact and compelling, which drills into the observation that might be Whiteley's epitaph: "I'm not good. I'm a good artist."

Julian Meyrick's production is carefully designed to frame and amplify the text. The set is simple: a wide stage, featuring only a messy double bed that recalls Tracy Ermin's squalid autobiographical My Bed, a side table loaded with pills, a radio on the floor. To one side is the band (Pietro Fine, Robert George and Robert Calvert). The art is suggested visually by the barest of cues - a mobile of birds in flight to the right of the stage and a few projected graphics. The paintings are principally invoked through music, Whiteley's line echoed in the soaring notes of a saxophone.

Hallucinatory stage directions are read in voice-over by Richard Bligh, Keonie Dodd and Daniela Farinacci, sometimes overlapping each other, punctuating the various movements of the monologue with vivid, oneiric mise en scenes. This is a reality created almost entirely through Dickins's words.

I wished that the acoustics at Fortyfive Downstairs were less muddy, as the music sometimes overwhelms the text. And occasionally Meyrick's directorial eye slackens: Pigot's physicalisations - playful dance, jumping on the bed - can tip over into the merely silly. When Pigot's gestures, however odd they are, unite with the extremities of the text, it creates a potent expressiveness, but this is not unfaltering. It made me think of the sort of precise physicalisations Anita Hegh created in Peter Evans's production of The Yellow Wallpaper: the performance language here is not as sharp. But these are quibbles. This is a sound production of a challenging and complex text, from a writer who should not be forgotten.



It felt serendipitous that I should see Foley on the same day as Whiteley's Incredible Blue: it was a day for Australian icons. Gary Foley, Aboriginal activist, uncompromising anarchist and unrepentant larrikin, is a living repository of a fascinating and shamefully little-known aspect of Australian history: the battle for self-determination and land rights for Aboriginal people. Rachel Maza Long's production is basically a lecture tarted up with a cardboard set that recalls a television talk show, with four screens showing various media - photographs, graphics, television footage. It's plain, unpretentious theatre, and absolutely riveting.

As with Ilbijerri's Jack Charles Versus The Crown, this is an exercise in autobiographical theatre. Gary Foley presents himself in his "native habitat" as an Aboriginal historian, which is a room scattered with archive boxes. Late in life, he tells us, he became a creature he despised, an academic (spit), graduating with honours in history from Melbourne University (spit), and now can be observed in his rooms at Victoria University. From here, he tells us the story of his life, which - as Foley was part of some of its most important events - is also an introduction to the wider history of black struggle in Australia.

It's a warts and all presentation, and often hilarious. It opens with a video of the young Foley on the lawns of Parliament House, being buttonholed by a disapproving matron in a twinset. At first he attempts to explain the aims of the protest, but soon he loses patience and roundly abuses her. When Foley himself, sans beard and long hair, 61 years old, steps onto the stage, he tells us that this angry young man is dead. "Now I'm a grumpy old man," he says.

Foley's often controversial life is full of colourful anecdote. He was one of the founders of the Aboriginal Embassy on the lawn of Parliament House in Canberra, a member of Black Power, which started the first free legal and medical services for Aboriginals (or anyone) in Australia, and even co-designed the Aboriginal flag. Importantly, he is also an actor. Indigenous theatre has been from its beginning a political theatre, the most consciously political we have; it's here that the very European notion of theatre as social revolution exists as a living thing.

Foley was a member of Sydney's Black Theatre, founded under Bob Maza at the Nimrod, and was in the cast of the ground-breaking 1972 political revue Basically Black. This is a legendary production, and one of the highlights of Foley is a short showing of some of the sketches filmed by the ABC for a pilot. The series was never made, presumably because it was considered "too political". On the evidence of those few minutes, Basically Black is the funniest tv show that was never made. You can only sigh for what could have been.

He outlines the history of Aboriginal activism against the background of the notorious White Australia policy and the wider international Civil Rights movement. This history reaches back to Federation, and forward as Foley traces his own involvement in the protests of the 1970s and the various governmental betrayals of the Aboriginal quest for Land Rights (it finishes by making the point that Native Title is an entirely different question to Land Rights).

Foley highlighted the shameful fact that I know much more about the US Civil Rights movement than I do about the history of Indigenous activism here. Even so, I had no idea that the early 20th century boxer Jack Johnson - in his time the most famous black person on the planet - was a prominent activist, or of his far-reaching influence on Indigenous politics here. This history is not only necessary; it's fascinating. If nothing else, that these stories remain largely untold demonstrates how colonial Australian culture remains.

And you'll seldom be taught history as entertainingly as in this show. Invigoratingly irreverent, driven by an unflinching lifelong passion for justice, it makes absorbing theatre. As the Age said of Foley himself: "If his ego is epic, as his opponents allege, so is his story." Foley's the one to tell it, and you'd be mad to miss it.

Pictures: Top: Neil Pigot as Brett Whiteley. Photo: Jeff Busby. Bottom, Gary Foley as Gary Foley.

Whiteley's Incredible Blue by Barry Dickins, directed by Julian Meyrick. Designed by Meredith Rogers, lighting by Kerry Saxby. Performed by Neil Pigot, with musicians Robert Calvert, Robert George, Pietro Fine. Melbourne Festival, fortyfivedownstairs, until October 23.

Foley, written, performed and co-devised by Gary Foley, directed by Rachael Maza Long. Co-devised by Jon Hawkes, co-written by Tony Birch. Audio and lighting by Danny Pettingill, costume and design by Emily Barrie. Ilbijerri Theatre, Melbourne Festival. Fairfax Studio, Victorian Arts Centre, until October 15.

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.

In today's Age, Peter Craven writes a sober and sensible analysis of this week's excitement, namely Julian Meyrick's attack on Cameron Woodhead's and my reviews of The Birthday Party. (Cameron's, sadly, is not online). In the process, he makes some good points about critical writing in general. This is particularly justly said:

Too often criticism in Australia has been characterised by a sugar-and-water or sugar-and-lemon approach, where the critic is afraid of frankness even when she is unimpressed. In contrast with this, both Woodhead and Croggon have the virtue of being fearless critics. Fearlessness is no guarantee of accuracy but it’s one kind of safeguard against the most obvious form of dishonesty. It is not the critics’ business to fudge their reaction or to mess about mediating the audience’s potential response. The critic is not there to review on behalf of the audience. The critic is the audience because he can have no opinion but his own...

Candour and eloquence are no guarantees of right judgment but they do guard against various kinds of falseness, including the falseness that comes from caring too much about the feelings of the frogs in the pond to say that it’s contaminated.

There’s also the plain fact that negative criticism is the logical corollary of its opposite. Only if you have the right to say that something is rubbish do you have the right to say that it’s a masterpiece.

Update: David Mence weighs in on the Captain's B'log with a commentary on the "theatre wars".

Director Julian Meyrick has answered reviews of his production of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party with an essay which is posted today on the MTC site (pdf file). My response follows here. Before I say anything else, I want to make clear that I welcome Julian’s comments. Nothing I say about theatre is or should be beyond questioning and, like every artist I write about, he has every right to take issue with what I say.

Julian makes several criticisms of Age critic Cameron Woodhead’s and my responses (both the Australian notice and the later meditation on TN). Most seriously, he claims that our reactions are part of “our culture’s bizarre, unreadable and depressing attitude to Aboriginality”. In his view, “the evidence points … to a critical absence where a critical response should be: to a marked unwillingness to connect with the victim of the play.” Basically, both Cameron and I missed the point of the production because we are unable to empathise with the plight of Indigenous people in Australian society; which is to say, our responses were racist. I’ll return to this point, which has led to a fair bit of soul-searching on my part, later. Firstly, I’d like to respond to the criticisms Julian has made of my practice as a critic, some of which seem a little personal. I don’t presume to speak for Cameron.

Julian suggests that Cameron and I are part of a sterile and rigid matrix of ideas that will, sooner or later, spell the death of Australian theatre. He is more disappointed with me, because he has higher expectations. After saying (nicely) that I am one of the most intelligent people writing about theatre today, he says of my reviews: “partisanship is the essence of her craft. It is possible to say ahead of time what Alison will think of any show because her view of theatre is schematic, adversarial and assured. The result is opinions which label themselves as such, yet lack range in feeling and taste. This has always been a problem for Australian critics of quality, who are bottled-up in a theatre scene not big enough even to be called a pond.”

I don’t in fact know what Julian means by saying that my view of theatre is “schematic” and “adversarial”. (Assured, maybe, although anyone who reads me carefully will know that doubt is one of the poles of that dialectic.) Perhaps Julian really can tell ahead of time what shows I will enjoy, in which case he knows something that I don’t: but it is hardly true, as he seems to be claiming, that I only enjoy a particular kind of theatre. It’s a little hard to second-guess what he means here, but I’ll take my cue from his comments about his revulsion against a theatre of “bling and high technique” that eschews “simplicity and sachlichkeit (literally ‘sobriety’)”, and assume he means that I am a partisan critic who supports a theatre of spectacle at the expense of less showy but more truthful aesthetics.

Well, it's certainly true that I have enjoyed shows that exploit the spectacular possibilities of theatre, from Jersey Boys to Honour Bound, from Food Court to The Women of Troy to The War of the Roses (although that production seemed, if anything, to embrace qualities of simplicity and sobriety). But surely if I were simply a narrow partisan for that kind of theatre, I should have also enjoyed Bell Shakespeare’s Anatomy of Titus, Fall of Rome or Barrie Kosky’s production of The Navigator or the Malthouse production of The Odyssey? And I certainly would not have been so enthusiastic about the MTC production of Blackbird, which was as simple and sober as anything I’ve seen, or the recent production of Franz Xaver Kroetz’s Tom Fool, or even Ranter’s defiantly anti-spectacular work in Holiday. I have pretty catholic, if not always populist, tastes. I admit, as a quirk of sensibility, that I prefer highbrow and lowbrow over middlebrow, but probably my most identifiable prejudice is towards good writing.

Further, Julian says that "a certain kind of diminishing power comes with being a critic - a petty power directors also court, so I recognise it - that is corrosive of disinterested thinking and the wider view." Perhaps. I always hope that my writing is at once interested (in the work it attends to) and disinterested. I can say in clear conscience, however, that I have never been remotely interested in “power”, unless it’s the power to spark a conversation. If power were what motivated me, I wouldn’t have started this blog, or I would have dropped it the moment the Australian job came along. I don’t find power – or at least, the power that Julian seems to be talking about – very interesting at all. I guess I’m rather Senecan on that question: it means very little, and it certainly won’t last, and I’d rather spend my energy in more rewarding pursuits.

It’s possibly not irrelevant here to note that I also inhabit at least two other worlds (not counting those private worlds which come with raising a family), both of which give me a status, even a minor international fame, which is much less ambivalent than the notoriety which comes from commenting rudely on other people’s work. In other words, I don’t need to do this work to gratify my ego. Priggish though it might sound, aside from my passion for the art of theatre I am motivated by the hope that a culture of conversation will take hold on the fragile soil here. I am glad the blog is regarded as influential – that is of course gratifying – but it’s a shame if it also means that the work is read less carefully, if its perceived status obscures the worth or otherwise of what one is actually doing. If anything, the blog’s success has sparked a nightmare scenario of my ossifying into a one-woman institution; and if anything makes me stop blogging, it will be that prospect.

For these reasons, I should be sorry if this argument is read as being simply about power, or even as adversarial. It’s not. It’s about disagreement. Even if it is not the case, I prefer to imagine that I live in a civilised culture, a culture where difference can be respected and is considered an enriching means of extending and questioning the self.

Which brings me to Julian’s central point: that my critique of The Birthday Party was primarily marked by a lack of attention to the Indigeneity of the cast that amounts to racism. This is a difficult charge to counter; and I should hate to think that was really the case. In my reviews of Indigenous productions – Black Medea, for instance, or Yibiyung, or The Man from Mukinupin - I’ve always tried to be sensitive to racial issues, but that doesn’t mean that I’m always successful. As any woman knows in attempting to explain the subtler ramifications of sexism, it can be difficult to register the nuances of prejudice if you haven’t encountered it yourself.

And it seems that here I failed; moreover, I failed in a way that is emblematic of wider problems in Australian culture. As Julian claims:

In shaping their responses, everything about The Birthday Party that is different, new, challenging and important has been swept aside. The result is an evasiveness which, if you didn’t know the show, might not be perceptible. Even if you did know the show you might be tempted to gloss over it as allowable, though strange. But if you cared about it, had felt Pinter’s cold, undeniable fingers close round your heart then this weird slipperiness is something that needs explaining.

I cannot unpack my thoughts on the show without discussing Australian theatre more broadly. Although it is a generalisation, it is one that captures something about the art form at the moment to say there is a hole where its heart should be. This is exemplified by Cameron’s and Alison’s reviews. They are incomplete, in an emotional and spiritual sense, and this speaks to a larger disconnection in the culture.

I am not at all sure how one can be a “complete” reviewer anywhere, let alone in the constraints of print media. Written responses to anything, from the overnight notice to the seriously considered book, are all, to one degree or another, partial. All the same, it’s fair to say that my emotional connection to this production of The Birthday Party was incomplete: my primary criticism of the production, in a mirror of Julian’s criticism of my comments, was that something was missing in the middle.

Contrary to Julian’s claims, I called the cross-racial casting “a rare and welcome example of main stage cross-racial casting” and later, in response to a commenter, expanded my thoughts: “I really don't think the cross-racial casting is an issue here, in any negative way I mean. It's the most interesting aspect of the production, it's thoughtfully done so it doesn't cheapen the play or the issues it brings to bear on the text, and it works, not least because it brings a brilliant new energy into the MTC purview. I'm hoping it brings local casting more in line with what goes on routinely, for example, on the BBC, which is light years ahead of us on this question. The idea had - and I guess this is what frustrated me - the possibility of bringing a tough and fresh angle onto Pinter's work. For me it just didn't get there - but it's not because of anything to do with the casting.”

The major sticking point is the comments on Isaac Drandic’s performance, which attracted criticism from both Cameron and myself; although I took it as probably a directorial decision, Cameron went with his guns ablaze for the actor himself. To quote Julian again: “I have … come to feel these critical judgements of his performance are harsh, unreasonable and perverse. Worse, they operate in such a way as to block traffic, fuddling the intended meaning of the show. His performance is used as an excuse not to look at the unsettling racial associations the action throws up. As a young, black, working-class man – and this description would apply both to Isaac and Stanley – empathy is withheld from him in an unnatural way.”

It’s only natural to want to defend an actor who has been so pilloried. But all the same, I find it hard to swallow the suggestion that these responses have nothing to do with the production, and everything to do with unacknowledged racial prejudice; that it comes from an "unnatural" coldheartedness that can only be explained by racism. As for a perverse lack of empathy for the real victims feeding into my critique of the acting: I think the actual victim in this play is the naif landlady, Meg, and I was knocked out by Pauline Whyman’s beautiful performance.

I think the argument comes down to different readings of the play. Certainly, in his defence of his production, Julian seems to be warping the play I’ve read, giving it a sentimental gloss that is so at odds with my understanding of Pinter’s work that it’s no wonder I missed the point.

Is Stanley, even performed by a “young, black, working class man”, really such a sympathetic character in the play? Is he really the “real victim”? I’d say that Stanley is an ambiguous character from the beginning, as this exchange in Act 1 demonstrates:

Meg: Stan?
Stanley: What?
Meg: Am I really succulent?
Stanley: Oh yes. I’d rather have you than a cold in the nose any day.
Meg: You’re just saying that.
Stanley: (violently) Look, why don’t you get this place cleared up! It’s a pigsty! And another thing, what about my room? It needs sweeping. It needs papering. I need a new room!
Meg: (sensual, stroking his arm) Oh Stan, that’s a lovely room. I’ve had some lovely afternoons in that room.
He recoils from her hand in disgust, stands up and exits quickly.

Or this, a little later on:

Stanley: (quietly) Who do you think you’re talking to?
Meg: (uncertainly) What?
Stanley: Come here.
Meg: What do you mean?
Stanley: Come over here.
Meg: No.
Stanley: I want to ask you something. (MEG fidgets nervously. She does not go to him.) Come on. (Pause.) All right. I can ask it from here just as well. (Deliberately.) Tell me, Mrs Boles, when you address yourself to me, do you ever ask yourself who exactly you are talking to? Eh?

This is classic Pinter dialogue, ripe with ambiguity and implied menace. The dialogue is laced with mingled sexual attraction and repulsion and an implied violence pulses beneath the text. Meg’s sudden fear speaks volumes: she really doesn’t know who she is speaking to. And as McCann and Goldberg make clear later, Stanley is somehow compromised by a secret mutual history that involves these two figures, although we never know what it is. He is not merely a simple working class guy. (If he is, indeed, working class, which I think is arguable).

My issue with Julian's production was always with the emotional tenor and interpretation of the direction. The production I saw smoothed out these disturbances: the relationship between Stanley and Meg was comfortably maternal, with any hint of incestuous perversion softened to a harmless joke, and Stanley never, at any point in the first act, generated any sort of threat. That simply seems to be at odds with the text. As I said, I could see the potential power of an Indigenous take on this play, but in this instance it never caught flame:

But - and for me it is a large but - there was something missing in the middle of the play… a sense of soft-focus permeates the tone of the whole production: the squalor of the boarding house… is here rendered with a respectable cleanliness. There are moments of sudden brutality, moments of discomfort, but instead of winding slowly up to a kind of stomach-twisting panic, they dissipate in comic relief. It's too easy in this production to read The Birthday Party as a kind of surreal comedy about "those" kinds of people - lower middle class, Not Like Us - because its real power, its merciless exposure of the dark animal impulses in human behaviour, is muffled. The sense of interior nightmare never takes hold where it counts, in the primitive caverns of the subconscious.

My first critical concern was with this play, not the director’s political intentions. To my mind, if the production had succeeded on this deeper level, its political intentions would have, blazingly, followed. But I don't believe this happened in this production, or at least in the performance I saw.

My racial blindness, says Julian, lies in two main areas. Firstly, I am remiss in not fully welcoming the implications of an Indigenous cast performing The Birthday Party. “You might get the impression from the reviews that cross-racial casting of canonical English plays went on all the time, instead of the reality, that it almost never happens. One contributor to the Theatre Notes blog suggested it might be a marketing strategy. But the implications are professionally and culturally profound. There are few more difficult playwrights than Pinter. If you can act Pinter, you can act anything. An indigenous cast nailing The Birthday Party is an indication that a new era in cross-cultural casting has arrived. It’s a shift from why (why cast Aboriginal actors) to why not (why not cast Aboriginal actors). If they can do the part, they can be in the play, regardless of colour or creed.”

On reflection, perhaps I could have said more about the fact of the cross-racial casting; but aside from welcoming it, the fact is that I didn’t out of a fear of seeming patronising. It shouldn’t be a surprise that Indigenous actors can do this play; of course they can, just as Iraqi or Russian or Australian actors can (or can’t). To suggest anything else seems, well, racist.

The other level of blindness is in the meaning of the play. This is trickier: in his essay, Julian is suggesting a rewriting of the class and racial structures in the original text along lines that rather shock me in their reductiveness. In Julian’s words: “In this production, everyone is Aboriginal except for Goldberg. So the action goes: a white man hunts down a black man, charms his landlady, seduces his girlfriend, then terrorizes, tortures and takes him away to a malign fate. When Stanley appears at the end of the play, ready to go, he’s physically OK but can no longer talk. It seems hilarious now but when I was rehearsing, I thought the meaning of all this would be too obvious. I hadn’t factored in Australia’s completely aphasic attitude to race.”

I’d suggest that it’s not so much an aphasic attitude to race as a familiarity with the play, which sets up its own expectations, and which is not exactly amenable to any simple top-down reading. As Pinter himself said, “In my play The Birthday Party I think I allow a whole range of options to operate in a dense forest of possibility before finally focussing on an act of subjugation.” In the original play, the lines of power are not nearly so clear-cut, with the "superior" race at the apex of power: race and class cut against each other.

Goldberg might be the top dog, the wealthier man of a higher class, and, indeed, the locus of violence; but, crucially, he is Jewish. As Pinter well knew, he would be a man who was, no matter what his social or economic status, a target of the casual and vicious anti-Semitism in English culture (Orwell’s self-excoriating essay on covert anti-Semitism in Britain is a must-read on this one). McCann, an Irishman, is from another culture marginalised and discriminated against in English culture. It might have made more sense in Julian’s production for Goldberg to be Aboriginal. The play itself works against Julian’s professed intentions, and that’s why I didn’t read it in the way he desired.

I'll finish with a quote from Pinter’s Nobel speech, which perhaps best expresses the indeterminacy of his drama, its essential inhospitability to imposed interpretation:

Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.

I briefly reviewed Julian Meyrick's MTC production of The Birthday Party just over two weeks ago and have been meaning to write about it at more leisure ever since. That I haven't yet done so is symptomatic of (a) the time of year - it's flu season here in Williamstown, and various microbes have been doing a serial dance through the family home - and (b) the difficulty I'm having balancing the conflicting demands of my increasingly chaotic life. So this is a brief cathartic visit to some thoughts that have been irritating the delicate membranes of my synapses over the past fortnight.

Another reason for the delay was that I wanted to watch the 1968 William Friedkin film of The Birthday Party. Thanks to the magic of Amazon, it arrived last week. The screenplay was adapted by Pinter himself, and it features a great cast, with Robert Shaw in the central role of Stanley, Patrick Magee and Sydney Tafler as the mysterious strangers McCann and Goldberg, Dandy Nichols as the naive landlady Meg and Moultriie Kelsall as her husband, Petey. It's very much a film of its time - some of its special effects are worthy of YouTube - and it's obviously made with a budget of around $2. But it remains an astounding film.


It's not, by any means, comfortable family viewing. You watch it all the way through with your stomach in a knot, unease growing with the slow inevitability of nightmare as the play's banal but obscurely threatening situations unfold. What these performances do so beautifully is to demonstrate the startling dislocations of Pinter's dialogue, how he violently wrenches language from its emotional subtext. The story of the film is not in what is said, but what is going on in the actors' faces: the fear in Nichols' face as Shaw suddenly turns on her, asking if she knows who he is; Shaw's seemingly irrational terror when the two men appear in the miserable boarding house where he has been living for the past year; Magee's hesitation and fear in the face of Tafler's smoothly civilised violence.

It's not the notorious Pinteresque Pause that matters here; it's what going on underneath the language, which may indeed flower into silence, but equally occurs in the estrangement of the dialogue. The fact that Pinter's name is practically synonymous with the Pause has always faintly baffled me: other playwrights (and not only Beckett) have used pauses, which act as the writerly equivalent of musical notation, an indicator of linguistic and emotional rhythm. So why should Pinter's be so controversial? But those who wish to belittle his achievement for whatever reason - political disagreement, artistic hostility - always refer to the Pause, which is I guess a way of eliding the fact that he actually wrote a lot of words in between his silences.

It strikes me that this discomfort with Pinter's pauses reflects a wider cultural response to silence. We don't know what to do with it: we have to fill it up with noise, as if silence is a yawning abyss that threatens to devour our souls. I've noticed this especially when watching anime: the master of the medium, Hayoa Miyazake, uses silence beautifully in his carefully constructed soundtracks. But if in error I put on the dubbed versions instead of the subtitled Japanese soundtrack, suddenly all that fertile, evocative silence disappears under a welter of music and dialogue.

And it also reflects a cultural discomfort with, well, discomfort itself. Have we such a terrible fear of ourselves, of what might emerge if we are forced to contemplate the realities that underlie the camouflaging gabble of language, that we literally can't face it?

Which brings me to Julian Meyrick's production, now running at the Fairfax Studio in the Arts Centre. I think this is a perfectly respectable and intelligent production of the play, which in many ways brings a contemporary vitality to The Birthday Party. Meyrick has cast it mainly with Indigenous actors, in a rare and welcome example of main stage cross-racial casting. Smartly, he has avoided obvious racial power relationships: power and disempowerment reside in every character. The single white actor is Marshall Napier, a man of slippery identity, who is the locus of hidden but palpable violence. Goldberg's Irish sidekick McCann is played by Glenn Shea, his Irish song replaced by an Aboriginal chant. (This subtly draws an interesting parallel between the colonisation of Ireland and Australia). And I was particularly taken by Pauline Whyman's beautiful portrayal of Meg, the naif whose fantasy world almost completely protects her from the sharp edges of reality.

But - and for me it is a large but - there was something missing in the middle of the play. It was characterised by Isaac Drandic's performance of Stanley, which I am guessing, having never seen Drandic in action before, was a directorial decision. And perhaps - not having seen it again, I don't know - this performance has evolved from opening night. On the night I saw it, Drandic was a blank: he responded catatonically, with none of the repressed violence so characteristic of Shaw's performance in the film. This gives the performance nowhere to go, since in the final scene he really is catatonic; because he has been emotionally blank from the beginning, his inability to speak is much less devastating. And it neutralises many of the exchanges in the play, as Stanley is always a passive victim.

This sense of soft-focus permeates the tone of the whole production: the squalor of the boarding house, physically palpable in the details of Friedkin's film, is here rendered with a respectable cleanliness. There are moments of sudden brutality, moments of discomfort, but instead of winding slowly up to a kind of stomach-twisting panic, they dissipate in comic relief. It's too easy in this production to read The Birthday Party as a kind of surreal comedy about "those" kinds of people - lower middle class, Not Like Us - because its real power, its merciless exposure of the dark animal impulses in human behaviour, is muffled. The sense of interior nightmare never takes hold where it counts, in the primitive caverns of the subconscious.

The performances and direction bring out the absurd comedy of Pinter's language, which is in itself no bad thing. Like Beckett, Pinter is full of comedy: also like Beckett, he is also deadly serious, and laughter is only sometimes on the menu. Discovering that a playwright is funny shouldn't, as regularly happens with Chekhov, elide the tragedy that drives the drama. As I watched it, I thought of Howard Barker's stern comments about laughter in the theatre. "Laughter appears to be a manifestation of solidarity," he says, "but it is now more often the sign of subordination. It is pain that an audience needs to experience, and not contempt. We have a theatre of contempt masquerading as comedy".

I think Australian theatre is not arrogant enough to generate the contempt Barker speaks of. Rather, the impulse towards comedy reflects a different kind of subordination. It seems to me to be a fear of the audience, a fear that they will not get it, a fear that if they do, they won't like it anyway. Who, after all, wants pain? And in this fear we lose the larger possibilities of art, its paradoxical exhilaration and joy.

There is, alas, good reason for these fears, as the conversation after my review of The Man from Mukinupin - probably the MTC production I've enjoyed most this year - demonstrates all too clearly. And certainly, the production of The Birthday Party has been warmly received; indeed, it's been welcomed almost with relief, as if a visit to the dentist defied expectations by serving up chocolates instead. But I can't help pondering the value of presenting Pinter in a prophylactic, with all the danger at a comfortable remove. On the one hand, yes, there's more chance of attracting an audience to the work of a playwright generally considered "difficult". But on the other, what is the point, really?

Note: for more discussion of the play, you can find an earlier TN review of a production of The Birthday Party here.

Picture: (from left) Jada Alberts, Marshall Napier and Isaac Drandic in the MTC's production of The Birthday Party.

Ms TN is writing a review for tomorrow, organising various family things, sneezing (oh no!), answering emails and packing her bags for Canberra. In the meantime, good to see Julian Meyrick's report in today's Age on last week's preparatory meeting at Arts Victoria, in which all the Victorian Creative Australia participants got together for a sandwich and chinwag. I feel much the same as he does. "The results were hopefully a taste of things to come," says Meyrick. "There was no grandstanding. The tone was pragmatic, not ideological....I expected to hear different views. I didn't expect the degree of convergence between them, making agreement on key issues a real possibility."

Fingers crossed. And wish us all luck.

Next week the MTC is running its sixth annual Hard Lines Play Reading Program, presenting selections from four new plays by Peter Houghton, Felix Nobis, Dina Ross and Nic Velissaris. It's the final play-reading overseen by associate director Julian Meyrick, who has coordinated the MTC's writers' development arm since in 2002.

Meyrick is leaving the company at the end of this year to assume a post-doctoral research fellowship at La Trobe University. As yet there's no word on who will be replacing him. (Or, indeed, if he will be replaced: the MTC website says that "currently there are no positions available at Melbourne Theatre Company". Although we also note that the information on Hard Lines dates from last year...)

This year, writers supported by Hard Lines won major awards - the Patrick White (Patricia Cornelius), Wal Cherry (Ross Mueller) and Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards (Jane Bodie) - which shows that Meyrick has an eye for talent. He'll be speaking about his experiences with new Australian drama and the aims of the MTC's development program after Wednesday night's reading.

$5 entry, students free, at the Grant Street Theatre, Victorian College of the Arts, at 6.30pm on November 27 and 28.

...the word is that MTC associate director Julian Meyrick has resigned. And, according to several sources, he's resigned not in sorrow but in anger, although officially he plans to spend more time with his writing. (And not a bad thing, either: as his Platform Paper Trapped by the Past demonstrates, he's a nifty theatre historian and polemicist).

TN's flapping ears haven't picked up the inside story, but all the same, this strikes me as a very bad omen. The MTC is looking more and more rudderless compared to its Armani-coutured sister state company up in Sydney. Not only has the STC cornered the glamour market, it's just launched a 2008 theatre season that looks genuinely exciting. Among the sprinkle of obligatory Broadway/West End hits are seven (count that: seven) productions of new Australian plays, including a diptych from that Keene fellow, and major new works from some of the most exciting directors in Australia: Barrie Kosky (The Trojan Women), Benedict Andrews (The War of the Roses) and Nigel Jamieson (Gallipoli). The titles alone show that the STC is grappling with the major theme of our time: war.

Compared to that, the MTC's 2008 season looks a little wan. The Australian premieres are Joanna Murray-Smith's 90 and a vehicle play for Caroline O'Connors by David Williamson, both what the French call boulevard theatre. Aside from the brilliant Benedict Andrews production of Patrick White's The Season at Sarsaparilla, an import from the STC, and a pick up from Sydney's Griffin Theatre, Tommy Murphy's adaptation of Tim Conigrave's Holding the Man, it's basically a shopping list of tried plays from overseas.

I'm looking forward to David Harrower's Blackbird and curious to see Tom Stoppard's Rock'n'Roll, but I can't say the program has me delirious with excitement. I'm not sure that I'd go as far as the prominent director who recently waved his arm towards the MTC and cried: "It's a disgrace!" But should the flagship state company, and the mainstream keystone of Melbourne theatre, look so dusty? And this at a time when Melbourne theatre culture is more electric than it has been for decades.

The program might explain Meyrick's acrimonious departure: Meyrick was, after all, a major force for new work within the institution. I can't say I feel good about it. And neither should any of us in Melbourne who care about theatre.

UPDATE: Richard Watts, who rang the MTC publicity department, tells me that the Age mentioned Meyrick's resignation last month. Missed that one, but then my eyes do glaze over when reading Robin Usher...

Othello by William Shakespeare, directed by Marion Potts. Set design Ralph Myers, costumes by Brice McKinven, light design Nick Schlieper, composition and sound design Max Lyandvert and Stefan Gregory. With Bob Baines, Wayne Blair, Mitchell Butel, Anni Finsterer, Marcus Graham, Michael Habib, Ron Haddrick, Chris Ryan, Leeanna Walsman and Tom Wren. Bell Shakespeare @ Arts Centre Playhouse (closed), Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, until July 28, Orange Civic Centre August 2-4.

Enlightenment by Shelagh Stephenson, directed by Julian Meyrick. Set design by Ralph Myers, costume design by Miranda Flynn, lighting design by Paul Jackson, composer Tim Dargaville. With Nicholas Bell, Caroline Brazier, Grant Cartwright, Beverly Dunn, Lewis Fiander and Sarah Pierse. Melbourne Theatre Company @ the Fairfax Studio, Victorian Arts Centre, until July 21.

Othello has long seemed to me to be one of Shakespeare's potboilers, like The Merchant of Venice or The Taming of the Shrew: an ultimately flawed play, rescued by passages of Bardic brilliance. And I swore a while back, after walking out of Romeo and Juliet, that I'd never bother with Bell Shakespeare again. So I can't say that I approached this production, which I saw late in the season, with high expectations.

It just goes to show that you should never trust your prejudices. I came out of the theatre glowing and silenced, wrenched by the extremities that only tragedy can invoke. I still think that Othello is flawed - that crucial scene in the third act where Othello is consumed by jealousy doesn't really bear heavy scrutiny. But only the stoniest heart could fail to quicken to this classic story of love and betrayal, of the Noble Moor who has transcended his own slavery, only to be undone by the hatreds projected onto his black skin.

Marion Potts has created a production which nakedly reveals the power of the play. Ralph Myers' set is Elizabethan in its simplicity. In the centre is a wooden platform, behind which stretches a concrete wall, of the kind that have become familiar in pictures of Baghdad. On each side of stage are racks on which are placed 44-gallon drums, and high above the wall, giving an air of threat, are banks of theatre lights. If they are not in the scenes, actors either leave the stage altogether or sit on a motley assortment of chairs to either side of the platform. They play the music live, using a variety of instruments: guitars, a mandolin, tambourines, the 44-gallon drums, even bottles.

While it's not as beautifully austere as Rex Cramphorn's Hamlet, which I saw in the same building longer ago than I care to remember, this production works on the same premise. It emphasises the play's theatricality, focusing attention on the actors and the text. I'd be churlish now to deny the power of the script; and there are some truly remarkable performances which explore the playfulness and emotional dynamic of Shakespeare's language. Potts' decision to perform the whole play, leaving in the Fool and musicians and other scenes that are usually cut, intensifies its theatrical power and complexity.

Crucial to this production, but in the most sub-textual and subtle of ways, is Wayne Blair's Aboriginality in the role of Othello. It changes the dynamic of the play, and sends subterranean echoes into present-day Australia. For centuries Othello was played in blackface - the white actor taking on the mask of blackness. This, as the critic Joseph Roach argues, served both to express and erase contemporary social fears about race and sexuality.

Certainly, the play's theme of miscegenation provoked powerful responses. Roach quotes the essayist Charles Lamb, who argued that the "revolting" appearance of a "coal black Moor" offering "wedded caresses" to "this Venetian lady of highest distinction" offered unanswerable evidence that Shakespeare's play ought to be read, but never staged. Speaking of Thomas Betterton's famous performance of Othello in the early 1700s, Roach comments: "Here is the doubleness of the actor's art, a black mask covering his white face, a European general's uniform covering his history as a slave.... In a world predicated on African slavery, the actor in blackface stands astride the theshold of social death. As death and its rituals offer occasions to mark and question boundaries... so miscegenation and its representation enact the fears of some that those boundaries will collapse."

Casting a black actor as Othello removes that level of irony and erasure, and at the same intensifies the expression of its anxieties. Othello, the enslaved child who grows up to be a great general in the Venetian army and who secretly marries the daughter of a Venetian Senator, presents his blackness without irony. When he speaks of his suffering (the same sufferings with which, ironically, he snares first Desdemona's attention and then her heart), or when Brabantio (Bob Baines) spits with repulsion and rage at the thought of having a black son-in-law, it can't but ripple up against the racism that still infects contemporary Australia.

I ought to emphasise that this is not in the least the kind of production that seeks to impose anachronistic homilies onto an unwilling text. Rather, Potts' direction permits the questions of race and gender that live in the play - and I was surprised, in fact, by how directly Shakespeare addresses both these issues - to resonate through the production with their proper, complex unease.

Blair's Aboriginality extends beyond the colour of his skin, informing his entire physical presence on stage: this Othello is not, like Olivier's, more noble than the nobles, whiter even than they are, but rather the assimilated Other, whose origins are evident in his every gesture. Blair speaks with a gravity and precision that expresses the care and containment of an outsider who must watch his every word and act, lest he transgress; and yet his stance, his movement, is inflected throughout the play with the tropes of Aboriginal dance. An echo merely, no more, woven into the performance as a texture, which informs it more deeply as the story darkens, as Othello begins to brutalise Desdemona (Leeanna Walsman) and to plot the murder of Cassio (Tom Wren), and which erupts in the final operatic scene, when Blair attains an authentic grandeur in his pride and despair.

He is well matched by Marcus Graham's Iago. I have not been a great fan of Graham, but this performance made me a convert: this is a remarkable Iago, charismatic and dangerously attractive, who woos the audience with his asides into uneasy complicity with his revenge upon Othello. Where Othello is contained, Iago is a core of dynamic energy, an evil clown whom we can't but unwillingly admire, a Mephistophilean seducer who winks to the audience, provoking our horrified laughter as he explains his jealousy and hatred of Othello, and boasts of his ruthless ingenuity at working the Moor's downfall and his own promotion.

When, at his most wicked, Iago pledges himself to "wronged Othello's service", his statement that "I am your own forever" is heart-stopping: not because it is a lie, but because we know it is the truth. By making Othello his victim, Iago has chained himself to Othello forever with his crime: but there is a deeper resonance. Iago is also Othello's other self, the voice that articulates the slanders that he has internalised, despite his pride, about his colour, and which confirms everything he fears. Othello is so eager to listen to Iago only because he already suspects, at some level, that what Iago says is true.

These two performances dominate the play, as they should: but there are many fine moments in this production. The heartbreaking scene where the doomed Desdemona dresses for bed with her maid (and Iago's wife) Amelia (Anni Finsterer) was one of those moments of theatre where the entire audience was spell-bound, utterly silent: not a cough, not a rustle, not a breath. In this scene, Desdemona's vulnerability and fatalism are shocking, as if she is already a ghost, and her pure voice singing the words of a dead woman shows the true power of pathos: not as melodrama, nor sentimentality, but as measure of the desperate human need for hope against the certainty of doom.

It is a powerful production, rather than a perfect one; earlier in the play, for example, Walsman's Desdemona seems to be caught in a strangely hieratic mode of speaking, which mitigates against the nuances of sexual passion she might otherwise express, and some other actors similarly waver in and out of focus. And, especially early in the play, I felt that the convention of the playing platform could have been more rigorously used to better effect; the staging of some scenes both on and off the platform dissipated the energy that such a convention can generate.

But it's fair to say that no one gives a weak performance. I especially enjoyed Ron Haddrick's brief but important cameo as the Duke of Venice, Chris Ryan's melancholy Clown, and Anni Finsterer's wickedly radical speech to Desdemona about letting "husbands know / Their wives have sense like them". If Bell Shakespeare continues to extend itself in this direction, placing its faith in the plays themselves rather than in superficial bells-and-whistles interpretations, it will be a deeply exciting development.

AFTER the heights and depths of Othello, it is perhaps a little unfair to turn to Shelagh Stephenson's domestic drama about grief, Enlightenment. And in truth, I find myself with not much to say about it. It's a perfectly competent play, written in the tradition of Alan Ayckbourn without quite his skill or technical ingenuity, and while there's not much to object to, there's not much that grabs your interest, either.

It concerns Lia (Sarah Pierse) and Nick (Nicholas Bell), a middle-aged, middle-class couple whose son Adam has been missing for four months, after disappearing on a back-packing trip to South East Asia. The lack of certainty about his fate intensifies their grief, creating conflicts in their marriage: Lia consults a psychic, Joyce (Beverley Dunn) whose vague wittering enrages Nick but gives her some comfort, while Nick takes refuge in his work. Meanwhile, Lia's father Gordon (Lewis Fiander), a slightly disreputable MP, inviegles her into making a documentary about her grief with the morally dubious television journalist Joanna (Caroline Brazier). And then they hear, at last, that Adam (Grant Cartwright) has been found, albeit with memory loss: but is it actually Adam whom they meet at the airport?

Writing all this down makes me almost go to sleep with contrariness. I suppose I have a deep failing, in that I don't really understand why this is theatre instead of television. It looks like theatre, I suppose. Julian Meyrick gives Enlightenment a perfectly decent, if somewhat slow, production: Ralph Myers' set reflects the play's process of shedding, as Lia and Nick's painful process of understanding is underlined by the gradual removal of their possessions, leaving them without protection against the uncertainty of life.

Meyrick employs a fine cast, and I enjoyed watching the performances, even as I lost patience with the play. From its initial domestic premise, it devolves into melodramatic silliness before ending on a grave note of philosophic resignation that explains everything that has gone before. Sarah Pierse in particular plays the complexities of fragility and toughness, guilt and grief, that inhabit her character, and Lewis Fiander is always enjoyable to watch on stage, a virtuosic performer in control of his space. And you feel that if Grant Cartwright's character made more sense, he'd be a magnetic presence on stage.

In short, there was enough going on to prevent acute anguish, and I never wanted to do the Dorothy Parker thing and shoot myself. But, gentle reader, it's very difficult to write about a play which neither offends you nor particularly interests you, that is neither stupid nor particularly intelligent, that seeks to explore, neither dishonestly nor with especially profound veracity, certain truisms about the transience and uncertainty of life. How do you write excitingly about indifference?

Black, created by Anna Tregloan. Sets and costume design Anna Tregloan, composition and sound design David Franzke, lighting design by Paul Jackson. Dramaturge Maryanne Lynch. With Martyn Coutts, Moira Finucane, Caroline Lee and James Wardlaw. Tower Theatre @ The Malthouse, until April 1.

The Ghost Writer by Ross Mueller, directed by Julian Meyrick. Design by Stephen Curtis, composer Darren Verhagen, lighting by Paul Jackson. With Margaret Harvey, Belinda McClory, Raj Sidhu and John Wood, Melbourne Theatre Company, Fairfax Studio, Victorian Arts Centre until April 21.

Ashes to Ashes by Harold Pinter, directed by Sam Strong. Design by Melissa Page, lighting by Danny Pettingill, sound by Rob Stewart. 45 Downstairs, Flinders Lane, until March 24.

I am beginning to think that one day soon I'll disintegrate into a cloud of written words: where once were real muscles and sinews and bone, a glistening collection of viscera and nerve and skin and fluids, you will find a kind of alphabetic mist. Words, words, words, as Hamlet said with such memorable impatience. How long can I keep on morphing between hack journalist, sort-of reviewer, genre novelist and even, now and again, real writing (I can tell the real writing because that's the stuff that really wipes me out) before I reach some kind of critical mass and implode?

Perhaps, like the decline and fall of the West, the worst has already happened and I am already my own linguistic hallucination, a kind of pixilated fallout, and just haven't realised it yet. Thank God for the theatre, say I, because at least it gets me out of the house and distracts me from morbid speculation. The irony being, of course, that my theatre-going generates the necessity for yet more words. Not, please note, that I am complaining; I mean, I really do believe that it's hard to have too much of a good thing, and I am on the hotline to God to arrange more hours in the day.


This week I saw three shows, each very different from the other but all of them, in different ways, about atrocity. Given my delicate state of imminent dissolution, I hesitate to say that I am going to "review" them. Take my responses as the ravings of a post-virtual neurotic, and cheer on the Singularity, when neuroplasty will give us all such miraculous brains that the idea of human limitations will be as quaint as cooperage or The Flat Earth Society.

Which is, I guess, a long-winded way of saying that I'm a bit tired, and I will do my best.

Of all the shows I saw last week, Anna Tregloan's Black is the only one that offered the unmistakeable satisfaction of an achieved work. But before I say anything about it, I'd like to consider briefly what it is. A big elephant stamp to the Malthouse for inviting into a main theatre, as part of a "mainstream" season and not as a "special" festival event, some of the preoccupations and vocabularies of contemporary visual art. Installations have been bog-standard visual arts practice for decades, but in the theatre world such ideas and explorations have been regarded as obscure experimenta that belong in dark studios inhabited by impossibly cool Andy Warhol clones.

Anna Tregloan has sometimes seemed to have a monopoly on design credits in Melbourne theatre, but she also has a rich history of performance installations, of which Black is the most recent. For what these divisions are worth - which is not very much - Black seems to me to be very much the work of a theatre artist. Tregloan has created a dynamic theatrical environment in which the movement of bodies in space - both of the performers and audience - is crucial. Here visual design, performance, sound, and written and spoken text are carefully woven into a coherent, if mysterious, whole.

The actual performance of Black is around 45 minutes long, and repeated in a loop for three hours, so the audience member can wander in and out and around it at will, and begin wherever and whenever he or she happens to be (I never worked out where the actual "beginning" was, I just noticed when it began to repeat). It is a work that revolves obsessively around the notoriously gruesome Black Dahlia murder in 1947, when the wannabe actress Elizabeth Short was discovered, cut in two and horribly mutilated, in a vacant lot in Los Angeles.

Black is not concerned so much with the murder, although the crime sits in the centre of its darkness, as with the fantasies that it inspired: the myths that grew up around Elizabeth Short (that she was a prostitute, that she had "infantile genitalia" that meant she could not have sex) and the many theories about her murderer, including the bizarre fact that within a month, more than 50 people had confessed to the crime.

Black begins with the disorientation of walking into darkness: at first, before my eyes adjusted, I could barely see my feet. I walked up the stairs into the Tower and almost felt my way along a black-draped tunnel, hearing the performance somewhere to my left, until I emerged at a kind of gallery above the performers. Some people stay here for a time watching, to be observed in turn by the audience below. Others make their way down the stairs again to a room below, a small gallery, where several objects repose on three suspended tables: three books frozen inside blocks of ice, piles of photographs of objects encrusted with crystallised salt, a collection of souvenir spoons. I couldn't help touching the iced books, which are slowly defrosting (you can hear the water dripping). The spoons, rather unsettlingly, jump every now and then. If you try to sort through the photographs, you find that underneath the top image is just a pile of blank photographic paper.

From here you turn into the main site of the performance. The initial impression is confusing: there are performers moving, speaking, they are saying things you only half hear, they are reflected in mirrors or windows so you can't tell at first if what you see is a real body or a reflection, whether it is here or on the other side of the window, and above, something is moving like a black wing. People are around the space, standing, sitting on chairs, on the floor, watching. Some are reading the texts on the wall, some are constantly moving, some are arriving, some are leaving.

I read the texts on the wall, which recount some of the hypotheses about who killed Elizabeth Short. (I noted particularly that one theory held Marcel Duchamp responsible). And, like a radio tuning in, I began to be able to understand what was being said. There are rhythmic percussive sounds, objects being struck or stroked, ocasionally something that sounds like a drill. The light is dim, the sound for the most part low; it makes you lean forward, immediately you are in the pose of attention, wondering what is being said, what you are looking at, and before long - it took me about five minutes - you find yourself paying total attention, wound further and further into the spectral realities that flow around and before you, a world of rumours, ghosts, reflections, bodies that disappear and bisect and double in the glassed windows, bodies in hysterical poses, fragmentary texts that recount the horrific mutilations of Short's body, or the history of bodies preserved in salt, or police dialogues or newspaper headlines, or that break startlingly into songs or screams.

It's a fascinating experience, beautifully realised with a meticulous attention to detail. For all the violence at its thematic heart, Black is a work that induces a state of meditative focus that is, somehow, gently compelling; it invites, rather than forces; you are at liberty, after all, to walk out at any time. The attention it provokes is involuntary, dreamlike and hypnotic, its multiple layers endlessly intriguing, a little, perhaps, like looking into the flames of a dark fire, but your reverie, however free, is more directed, more focused. And productive of much more thought and response than I can describe here. Go see it for yourself.

As its name suggests, Ross Mueller's The Ghost Writer also attempts spectral realities, but the aesthetic explored here is that of the well-made play. Ross Mueller is a playwright of considerable subtlety and power, as was shown in Construction of the Human Heart, which played a season at the Malthouse last year. In this new play, commissioned and developed by the MTC, I get the sense of an uncomfortable fit between private writerly ambition and the perceived demands of conventional theatre.

The ghost writer of the title is Claudia (Belinda McClory), who accepts a commission from her unreliable publisher father (John Woods) to ghost the life story of Brihanna (Margaret Harvey), an illiterate woman from a small country town whose four year old daughter Megan was murdered in circumstances that irresistibly recall the Jayden Leskie case. Claudia has an unexplained but serious illness, and is obsessed with the idea of death. She has a lover, West (Raj Sidhu) with whom she has a strange, disconnected relationship - they do not even know each other's names. But, as Claudia discovers when she begins to research Megan's murder, West is in fact the public prosecutor who unsuccessfully put Brihanna's boyfriend, Brian, on trial for the murder of the child.

Mueller uses this narrative frame to dangle a bewildering plethora of themes. He canvasses the morality of public justice; satirises the predatory nature of commercial publishing; asks us to ponder the nature of truth; examines love between mother and daughter, father and daughter, and lovers; looks at class issues in contemporary Australia, especially the urban/rural divide; raises the question of domestic violence; explores the conflict between baby boomers and Generation X and, of course, ponders the question of death. (I think I've listed everything, although there's a major preoccupation with writing and representation as well). It's a lot of freight for a conventional dramatic script, weighing it down more when these themes are heavily signalled, as when West agonises over the morality of his cases or when Claudia earnestly claims she's pursuing the "truth".

There's no doubting the craft of Mueller's text, especially notable in some striking monologues, but craft is never the whole of writing. While it has nothing like the theatrical deftness or formal curiosity of Construction of the Human Heart, it's actually quite difficult to pin down where the script goes wrong (although you can point to somewhere in the second act, when all the horses start galloping in different directions).

The Ghost Writer seems to me like an "issue" play - drawing transparently on well known contemporary events, and signalling its contemporary social relevance - into which is jammed unhappily another kind of theatre altogether, one that is more concerned with the fluidity of interior states. Yes, one can point to Arthur Miller, but this play never quite attains that level of coherent integration. It's presumptuous to say so, but you can almost hear the workshoppy voice that said "hmmm... we need to bring out the social relevance more here..." or "I don't understand the motivation of this character".

And perhaps I have problems too with its genre edge. Mueller appropriates conventions from thrillers, detective fictions and ghost stories and it seems to me that, like many "literary" explorations in that direction, The Ghost Writer is too self-conscious to be class pulp. In good genre writing, serious subtextual concerns run along, as it were, with the enthusiasm of the classic conventions that are invoked or undermined in the work. In "literary" appropriations of pulp (I'm thinking, say, of Graham Swift's take on the detective novel in The Light of Day) the serious subtext is all on top. A pulp novelist writes a story about a murder mystery that reveals the human search for order and meaning in a godless universe; a literary novelist will write a novel about the human search for order and meaning in a godless universe, using the shape of the detective novel as a device. As a result, very few escape the odour of slumming it.

The Ghost Writer is, however, a better play than it appears to be in this production. Julian Meyrick's direction fatally slows down what ought to be fluid and swift transitions between scenes and, despite an abstract design, somehow over-literalises the text, so that it can seem clumsy even when it isn't. And the performances are puzzlingly not as compelling as they ought to be, although the ingredients are there: there are flashes of possibility in individual moments, in monologues from Belinda McClory and Margaret Harvey especially. In the end, despite all the talent that is abundantly present, you sigh and notch it up as just another MTC play. Which might be the root of the problem.

You might think, for example, that Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter would be a shoo-in as an MTC fixture, being arguably the most significant English-language playwright of the past few decades. But it is not so. I've had to wait a long time to see Pinter's 1996 play Ashes to Ashes in three dimensions, although it is one of his greatest plays (possibly, in Alison's eccentric universe, his greatest). And, although this is by no means an ideal production, it was a real pleasure to see it.

Ashes to Ashes is a menacing, traumatically dislocated dialogue between a man called Devlin (Simon Stone) and a woman called Rebecca (Sara Gleeson). It shows Pinter at his most icily precise, anatomising the subtext of mundane interactions until he summons the Holocaust into a middle class loungeroom. What has always amazed me about this transition is how Pinter manages it without the least sense of gratuitousness: by the time we understand the atrocity that haunts the centre of this play, it is absolutely embedded within the middle class reality we are also accepting as real. The connecting tissue between the two realities is violence, in particular a complex take on male violence against women.

Ashes to Ashes is also a play about the hauntings and displacements of memory, and requires actors who carry the marks of the past in their faces and bodies and psyches. Gleeson and Stone are too young for their parts, and it really does matter. Sam Strong's production is a little puzzling, in that the movement of actors around the space sometimes seems to bear no relation to anything. To be honest, I'm not quite sure that Strong has understood the play very well.

However, the biggest problem with this production is Simon Stone's performance, which carries no sense of menace at all; he is interrogative, puzzled, and generally rather blank (with a brief moment of rage). Sara Gleeson, on the other hand, finds an accuracy and focus in her performance that permits her to switch between differing states of impotence and power, forgetting and remembering, with a verisimilitude that makes up for her youth.

Despite its problems, I enjoyed the experience. The production is nicely set in the new downstairs space at 45 Downstairs, with a dramatic row of windows behind the simple elements of the set. And even imperfectly realised, it's still an astounding play.

Picture: Caroline Lee, Moira Finucane, Martyn Coutts, (Caroline Lee repeat) and James Wardlaw in Black. Photo: Jeff Busby

A Single Act by Jane Bodie, directed by Julian Meyrick. Design Louise McCarthy, lighting Ben Cobham, composer Darrin Verhagen. With Anita Hegh, Neil Pigot, Travis McMahon and Tanya Burne. Melbourne Theatre Company at the Beckett Theatre, Malthouse until June 10.

For once, I find myself applauding the MTC's programming policy. A Single Act is the first in a studio season of new writers, "Young Turks, vibey up-and-coming writers we predict will be the future of Australian theatre writing," as artistic director Simon Phillips has it. And I think in this instance they've got it right: Bodie is an impressive talent.

Perhaps as an indice of the MTC's nervousness about how this play will be received by its subscribers, this production comes well-studded with cautions: "A contemporary play with frequent strong language, nudity, a simulated sex scene, adult themes and acts of violence. Please note there is smoking on stage and strobe lighting effects used. A live rabbit features on stage; Animal Welfare and RSPCA guidelines are being observed." Prepare for a wild ride, aesthetes.

Frankly, it's not especially shocking: A Single Act isn't nearly as out-there as the Malthouse's A View of Concrete, currently playing upstairs in The Tower, which also addresses the impact of terrorism on personal lives. Yet I think A Single Act is the superior play, a coolly intelligent work by a writer very aware of her form and of what she wants to do with it. Sadly, it's not served well by this production, which almost obscures its subtle power.

A Single Act follows the relationships between two couples, Scott (Travis McMahon) and Michelle (Tanya Burne), and Neil (Neil Pigot) and Clea (Anita Hegh), after an unspecified but devastating urban terrorist attack clearly based on September 11. At the beginning of the play, Neil and Clea return home, shaken to the core, each desperately relieved to find the other alive. Scott and Michelle are shown a year later, at what is clearly the end of their relationship, when Michelle finally gathers the strength to leave an abusive Scott.

We watch Clea and Neil's relationship disintegrate, as they crumble before their inability to help each other. Neil is the one who most visibly falls apart, unable to deal with the void of grief that the terrorist attack has opened within him: he withdraws from his life, driven to aimless walks and relationships with strangers which now seem more meaningful to him than his marriage. Clea, on the other hand, flounders through grinding loneliness, attempting to continue an ordinary life by repeating the gestures of relationship, which become emptier and emptier as the gaps between them widen.

Threaded between these painful scenes of estrangement is the story of Scott and Michelle, which moves backwards towards its beginning on the day of the terrorist attack. In the first scene, Scott brings home a pet for Michelle, a rabbit, which she rejects: it isn't what she wants now, it was something she wanted when she was seven. Scott infantalises her as a means to control her; when that doesn't work, he beats her. But now she is, at last, deciding to leave him, to follow through on "a single act of defiance".

Behind Scott's behaviour is fear: fear of rejection, fear of lonelieness, fear of failure, but mainly just fear itself. And fear also drives Michelle's behaviour: not, as might seem obvious, fear of her lover, but of being in the world. Right in the beginning of their relationship, she hands the power over to Scott: and that abrogation of responsibility for herself leads her into the abusive relationship. The terrible secret is that the relationship would not exist without her collusion, if somehow Scott's abuse and control didn't fulfil a deep need within her. And this shift from confident working woman to will-less victim occurs precisely on the day of the terror attack.

Bodie is a writer of considerable subtletly and formal elegance, and she records these shifts of relationship through dialogue that exposes the viscera of human relationships with the economy and delicacy of a scalpel. She has clearly read, and what's more, learned from Harold Pinter, most tellingly in the oblique precision of her dialogue. The backwards movement of Scott and Michelle's story also nods towards Pinter's Betrayal, in which the story of a relationship moves from its end to its beginning.

Julian Meyrick's overdressed production muffles Bodie's (admittedly challenging) clarities. It features a rather ugly set - curved wooden ribs represent a house, behind which flicker three television screens set in a wall that is partly a green screen and partly naked bricks. It has several playing areas at different levels, lit by lamps as well as theatre lights. The design ought to be interesting, but it remains unresolved and fragmented.

The modular furniture needs to be rearranged by the actors between nearly every scene, making the emotional orchestration of the play subordinate to the demands of the set. This effectively clogs the action, making the play feel much slower than the writing or performances seem to warrant; and also any delicacies between scenes, contrasts or similarities between the unfolding relationships, are muted or effectively lost.

Although there is little to complain about in the individual peformances, which are each skilled and committed, there is something a little crude in the characterisation. This seems more a problem in the direction than in the acting, a question of general approach. I felt that, despite the complexities of the script, everyone was presented as a "type": Scott as a working class brute or buffoon, Michelle a victim, Neil a traumatised nutcase and Clea a stressed professional woman.

This tendency towards stereotype and its subsequent muddying of emotional clarities may account for some longueurs in the middle of the evening which are not, on reflection, problems in the writing. It's hard to be sure, of course, without reading the play: but it seems to me that, as in the relationships portrayed on stage, crucial connections aren't happening, and an elusive, vital charge is missing from the production.