Asylum by Kit Lazaroo, directed by Jane Woollard. Design by Amanda Johnson, lighting design by Richard Vabre, sound design by Peter Farnan. With Glynis Angell, Tom Considine, Fanny Hanusin and Tim Stitz. La Mama Theatre, Carlton, until March 8. Booked out, but tickets possibly available: 9347 6948 weekdays.

I've seen two of Kit Lazaroo's plays - the beautifully lyric Letters from Animals and now Asylum - and both productions left me wondering what would happen with these texts if they were given time, money and a large theatre.

This is an unusual thought for me, since I believe that theatre is a cheeringly democratic artform: money is no guarantee of imagination, nor resources of success. Think of Jan Kott's recollection that one of the best productions of Richard III that he ever saw was on top of a table in a Polish student cafeteria. It is belief that transmits belief.


All the same, it seems to me that Lazaroo creates a theatrical artifice that would reward a visionary approach - the kind of direction that, instead of attempting merely to realise the writing, could catch it up and play with it. I suspect that it's a writerly vision that is most effective when seen through a proscenium arch, rather than in the exposed intimacy of a small theatre like La Mama.

I mean by this no disrespect at all to the hard-working cast and crew on the deservedly praised La Mama production of Asylum. Amanda Johnson's set, consisting of a multi-level wall of filing cabinets that opens to reveal miniature puppet stages, is as striking as any I've seen in this space, and it's beautifully lit by Richard Vabre. But the very achievements of this production make you hanker for more.

Asylum follows the machinations of an HIV-positive asylum-seeker, Yu Siying (Fanny Hanusin) as, with increasing desperation, she attempts to avoid deportation back to China. Psychologist Lally Black (Glynis Angell) and immigration official Turlough Dando (Tom Considine) both become as obsessed with the young woman as she is obsessed with her own case, even dragging in Lally Black's brother, Smudge (Tim Stitz), a prison guard who is on stress leave after shooting an escapee.

The immigration case is loosely based on fact, but rather than an earnest docudrama, Lazaroo has chosen to write a strange, haunting melodrama, leavened with black comedy. Each one of these characters - from the asylum seeker herself to those who seek to help or thwart her - is culpable and yet each is also, in some essential way, innocent. What's interesting is that their innocence means that, like small children, they are also amoral: it's not that fault or blame cannot be traced to their actions, but that judgement is suspended here: such values do not apply.

What dominates the play, as the ceiling-high block of filing cabinets dominates Johnson's set, is the surrounding bureaucracy of the Department of Immigration, which creates its own inescapable realities. As in some of Kafka's stories, this bureaucracy is a meaning in itself, creating and maintaining the known parameters of the world with which all these characters must deal, for good or ill.

Its laws are implacable and unquestioned: when bureaucratic imperative collides with human need, need has no chance. The run-off is an uneasy psychosis, a miasma of guilt and dread that haunts all these characters. There is certainly no sense that anyone is "right": rather a sense of a deep, endemic wrongness that can't simply be fixed by a superficial shift of regulations. It's a vision of pessimistic irony that undermines the apparent optimism of the end.

Here Theatre's acclaimed production, back for a return season at La Mama, is faithful to Lazaroo's text, if it seldom surpasses it. As if to compensate for the lack of distance which might otherwise create the necessary artifice or alienation in a larger theatre, the performances tend to the quirkily comic, which can obscure the more serious or moving elements of the play. But each actor manages, at one point or another, to reach past the vaudevillean mask and touch genuine emotional depths.

Picture: Fanny Hanusin in Asylum. Photo: Ponch Hawkes

Letters from Animals by Kit Lazaroo, directed by Jane Woollard. Design by Amanda Johnson, lighting design by Bronwyn Pringle, sound design by Colin James and Jane Woollard. With Glynis Angell, Georgina Capper and HaiHa Le. Here Theatre and Store Room Theatre Workshop until November 25. Bookings: 9481 8496

Kit Lazaroo, who’s been quietly gathering plaudits and prizes since 2003, has been sitting in my mental filing cabinet with the stamp “must investigate” for some time now. Big red stars in texta were drawn on the file after the sell-out season of her play Asylum at La Mama last year, of which much praise trickled Williamstown-wards. Well, I might be slow, but I get there in the end.


It’s hard to know where to begin with Letters from Animals, now on at the Store Room in a simple but beautifully realised production. It’s much more difficult to write about than it is to see; it's a delicate, complex work that can seem merely whimsical, when in fact a bleak and uncompromising intelligence runs through it like a steel rod. Perhaps it’s an indication of its richness that this play prompts comparisons in so many directions.

Lazaroo is one of a number of noteworthy new playwrights presently enlivening Melbourne’s stages (others include Lally Katz and Ross Mueller), although her imaginative diction also reminds me of Sam Sejavka, who has been writing since the 1980s. And these writers have something in common with others further afield, people like Britain’s Philip Ridley or Germany’s Marius von Mayenburg.

For all their variousness, these playwrights reflect a sensibility that seems to me quite particular and of our time, but I’m sniffing: I’m not quite sure how. I suspect it's partly to do with a certain formal playfulness, a post-television consciousness that returns to the basics and throws them up in the air for questioning; but they also have an underlying darkness, an uneasiness that reflects contemporary anxieties and uncertainties. All of them approach the world elliptically, avoiding the easy statement, the play-as-message; but that can be said of every serious artist. And certainly, all of them are writers who understand the inherent poetic of the theatre.

Letters from Animals is several things. It’s a sorrowful and absurdly comic fable on memory and forgetting; a bleak warning about stupidity, greed and treachery; a satire on bureacractic oppression; and a lament of considerable lyric power. One of the admirable things about it is how it keeps so many things in play at once, so nothing ever quite comes to rest on a conclusion.

It's set in an imagined future, in a world in which animals no longer exist. This is a world destroyed by pollution and global warming, flooded with poisonous water and “sludge”. The only living things on earth are human beings. Or, more precisely, women: there seem to be no men at all. No doubt they have mutated out of existence thanks to the oestregen in the water and perhaps the women all reproduce by parthonogenesis: the playwright doesn’t say. Every other living thing has been eradicated, as harbingers of disease and uncleanliness from the "Days of Filth".

Queenie (Glynis Angell) is a former scientist living on the margins of society, who is attempting to restore the animal world from the few fragments – biological and semantic – that are left. This is subversive work in a world run by the sinister and faceless Developer; here people are controlled by regular inoculations which wipe their minds clean of memories and dreams and guard them against the possibility of remorse. Queenie is being investigated by the bureaucrat Shelley (Georgina Capper), who sends the young and ambitious Gretel (HaiHa Le) to spy on her activities.

In the meantime, the animals themselves – in the form of a Rat, a Vulture and a Cockroach – are demanding their return, perhaps even planning a revolution. It is never clear whether the animals exist independently or as alter-egos of the three characters; in the oneiric logic of this play, they are both. And, being peculiarly literary animals, they are sending letters to the women, asking to be remembered, to be restored, to be mourned.

Most of all, this is a play about language: the extinction of our fellow creatures is reflected by a linguistic and, crucially, an emotional impoverishment. As we lose their names, their descriptions, so we lose the ability to understand ourselves. Animals are everything that escape human order and human law; but they are also in us, in our animal selves, and with us. In the terrible future imagined here, they need us. Or is it simply our need speaking through the memory numbed by their absence? As the animals say in one of the letters that mysteriously haunt the bureaucrat Shelley:

Unaccustomed as I am to putting pen to paper. I find myself in need of your assistance. I trust you haven’t forgotten me. I cut your foot once when you went swimming. You looked through the boards of the jetty and watched me push against the current. I was in a cage at the zoo. I lived under the roof of your house. I ate food from your bin. You saw me resting in the mud. You caught me in a glass jar and put me on a windowsill. I fell out of a tree when the sun was hot and spat at your feet. You kept me in a shoebox under your bed and fed me the wrong leaves until I died. Don’t forget me. Bring me back. Speak my name.

Balancing the comedy, pathos and mystery of a play like this is not an easy ask, even in the best of circumstances, let alone in the confines of the Store Room. Here Theatre pulls it off admirably. After the theatrical excesses of The Madwoman of Chaillot two nights before, it was an inexpressible relief to be reminded that it really is true about two planks and a passion.

What counts most in making this imaginative world are the performances, and all three actors are equal to the task. Georgina Capper in particular, in the double role of the disintegrating bureaucrat Shelley and the French Vulture, is an actor I want to see more of. Director Jane Woollard deftly evokes Lazaroo's elliptical realities with the help of a lot of smoke, Bronwyn Pringle’s ingenious lighting, several buckets and an evocative sound design.

It’s an exemplary demonstration of how theatre can be political and contemporary without being didactic or simplistic. In short, it rocks.

Picture: Glynis Angell and HaiHa Le in Letters from Animals.