I walked out of the opening night of Lally Katz's new play Return To Earth with my stomach in a knot. Readers, I have seldom seen a production which was so utterly wrong. It's wrong from the ground up, wrong from the first moment, and goes on being wrong all the way through to the end. Every flicker of life in this play is wrestled to the ground and throttled to death.


Any text, if it's at all interesting, invites a multiplicity of interpretation, and it's always possible merely to disagree with a take on a play. In this case, the wrongness goes beyond disagreement to a fundamental misunderstanding of the very being of the writing, to the point where the play itself is terminally obscured. It can happen to any play - I've seen it done to Shakespeare. It's as if a mistaken decision were reached early in the process, and every step afterwards led inexorably to doom. How this happened with the cast and production team that director Aidan Fennessy had to hand is a case study in artistic car crashes. On paper it's impeccable, some of the best talent that our theatre has to offer.

I should say that I am already familiar with this play. Back in 2008, I was one of three judges who unanimously gave Return To Earth a RE Ross Playwright's award for further development. The following year I saw it read in Hobart as part of Playwriting Australia 2009, and saw no reason to revise our judgment that this was one of Katz's best plays so far. Not that it's visible in this production; if I hadn't read the text, I might have thought it one of her worst.

Katz's early work, from the closely observed suburban absurdity of The Eisteddfod to the wildly theatrical dislocations of Lally Katz and the Terrible Mystery of the Volcano, created a riveting tension between a stern, even cruel emotional truthfulness and the dizzying vortex of her imaginative world. As her work has developed, from plays such as Goodbye Vaudeville Charlie Mudd to A Golem Story, the writing has become sharper: more theatrically crafted, less anarchic. But those desolating absurdities remain at the centre of the work: an obsession with death, loss and love, refracted through a self so splintered it can be scarcely said to exist. Katz is, crucially, a playwright of surfaces: her characters are performances of themselves, role-players in the most profound sense, and the emotional abysses that open beneath their emptiness and lostness can be vertiginous.

Return To Earth is an apparently simple fable that preserves Katz's unstable realities, but here locates it firmly in a - supposedly - naturalistic suburbia. There's not much in the way of plot. Alice (Eloise Mignon) returns home to her family after an unspecified time away, searching desperately for something real. Her parents Wendy (Julie Forsyth) and Cleveland (Kim Gyngell) welcome her home with claustrophobic solicitude.

Alice attempts to reunite with an old childhood friend Jeanie (Anne Louise Sarks), reconnects with her widowed brother Tom (Tim Ross) and her terminally ill niece Catta (Allegra Annetta) and has an affair with local car mechanic Theo (Anthony Ahern), a man whose skin is disconcertingly covered with shellfish. Alice finds she can save her niece's life by donating a kidney, but at the same time discovers that she is pregnant, which means the life-saving operation can't be done. Her niece dies, but Alice has her baby. Finally she tells her mother where she has been - in outer space, where she has lost her self but discovered the marvellous.

What counts is the slippages and ellipses in the texture of the play, how it lurches from apparently banal reality to strangeness in the space of a sentence. The result can be, as in Borges's story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, an increasingly disturbing feeling of the known world losing its moorings, becoming strange and perilous. In this production, we get quirky instead of strange, and emotional insight becomes mere whimsy.

Alice is played as terminally naive: there is no sense of interstellar alienation in her performance, no sense of almost irretrievably damaged adulthood. Her unvarying tone sets the pitch for the rest of the performances: somehow these characters, despite everything that happens in the play, are curiously static. The performances are generalised caricatures, rather than detailed investigations of emotional states. Claude Marcos's design, an abstract revolve mimicking a planetary system with a diorama of a night-time suburb in the background, exacerbates the problems: the actors all seem lost in the space. The set almost acts as a spoiler, leaving nothing to reveal about Alice's travels: we know from the beginning that she has been in outer space. Everything looks slick, but feels empty.

The major problem in this production is that the play's emotional realities have been flattened or simply avoided; certainly, I very seldom felt any emotional connection with what was happening on stage. Once or twice - interestingly, when the everyday realities were allowed to play without an overlaid theatrical self-consciousness - you could feel a flicker of life in the text, but otherwise its comedy and poignancies are all but destroyed. One feels that the MTC has tried to "make sense" of Lally Katz, closing up the centrifugal polarities of her work in the process, when her real gift is to use emotional truthfulness to destroy such enclosing rationalities. Without that truthfulness at its heart, the felt realities of loss and lostness, the play makes no sense at all.

Picture: Anthony Ahern and Eloise Mignon in Return To Earth. Photo: Jeff Busby

Return To Earth, by Lally Katz, directed by Aidan Fennessy. Set and costumes by Claude Marcos, lighting by Lisa Mibus, composition and sound design by Kelly Ryall. With Anthony Ahern, Julie Forsyth, Kim Gyngell, Eloise Mignon, Tim Ross and Allegra Annetta / Talia Christopoulos / Matilda Weaver. Melbourne Theatre Company at the Fairfax Theatre, Victorian Arts Centre, until December 17.

*Spoiler alert*

In A Golem Story, Michael Kantor and Lally Katz reach into Judaeic folklore and mystic traditions, fashioning a work of theatre which is at once outstandingly beautiful and frustratingly perplexing. Mounted in the Merlyn, this is one of Kantor's most compellingly conceived works. The action occurs in a simulcrum of a candle-lit 16th century Prague synagogue, sketched by a scaffolding of iron geometry and bare wood, the sole decoration an elaborate candelabra. The performance is punctuated by Hebrew and Yiddish songs, led by cantor Michel Laloum, so the whole work has the gravity of religious ritual.

Ambitious, starkly simple and often brilliantly performed, I still felt naggingly that something was missing. I missed a sense of cross-grained complexity, a counter-argument, that at first I attributed to Katz's text. The odd thing is that the text reads with more complexity than it performs. I suspect that as theatre, the whole has the air of a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total artwork (first theorised, ironically enough given the subject matter, by anti-Semite Richard Wagner) in which all elements are sternly subordinated to a single idea, and that this has the effect of flattening out some of the textual ambiguities.


A Golem Story is based on the most enduring of golem legends, the Golem of Prague, which exists in many variations (a major source, peculiarly enough, is called the Katz manuscript). Most literary scholars date the legend to around the 1750s. It runs more or less like this: under the reign of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II in the 1500s, the chief Rabbi of Prague, Rabbi Loew, created a golem from the mud of the Vltava River to protect Jews against anti-Semitic pogroms. A golem is an automaton activited to life by language: in this version, the golem is given life by the name of God inscribed in a tablet kept in its mouth, its chem, and is destroyed when the tablet is removed; in others, the word Emet (meaning truth or reality) is inscribed on its forehead, and the Rabbi destroys the golem by rubbing out its first letter, making the word Met (death).

The Golem legend has inspired writers from Mary Shelley to China Mieville. It persists for its compelling metaphor, in which man's hubristic creation of sentience destroys him. Most often it's a narrative of transgression, as in Frankenstein, when a scientist follows his highest idealisms, only to create a misunderstood monster. Likewise, the Golem of Prague escapes the Rabbi's control and rampages murderously through the city killing Gentiles and, in some versions, its creators. It's a legend which reaches deeply into Judaic mysticism, and especially into the Kabbalah, a mindbendingly complex collection of esoteric lore which originated in 13th century Europe. The Kabbalah weaves a dizzying range of influences, including Gnosticism and Neo-Platonism, into Jewish theosophy. Central to the Kabbalah is the Sefer Yesirah (The Book of Creation), a text which dates from somewhere between the 1st and 6th centuries, in which are instructions for making a golem.

The last director to investigate these traditions in Melbourne was Barrie Kosky, in his early works for Gilgul in the 1990s, and here Kantor demonstrates that he is by no means an identikit of Kosky: this is a vastly different theatrical take on the same material. Kosky's interest in mysticism is evident in almost all his work: it manifests as a fascination with ecstatic states, in the uniting of the sacred and the profane. Kantor is, unexpectedly perhaps, more interested in the aesthetic shapes of ritual and, perhaps even more unexpectedly, in the word itself. This is not a theatre of irrational extremity, but of rational argument.

Katz's text is a parable of power, politics and transgression. My first thought was that there seemed to be a remarkable absence of Katz: there is little of that sense of barely restrained anarchic imaginings and unexpected collisions that characterise her work so far. Instead, she creates a disciplined, episodic narrative that draws on a number of golem stories and gives a contemporary twist. The play works as a fable, with each character carrying a symbolic charge: the Rabbi (Brian Lipson), the Student Amos (Dan Spielman), the woman Ahava (Yael Stone), the Guard (Greg Stone) and the Emperor (Mark Jones). So the Rabbi represents one argument about Judaeism and God, Amos another, the Guard represents the anti-Semitic Gentile, the Emperor the civilised Gentile, and Ahava - her name one letter away from the Hebrew for Eve - represents Woman.

None of these representations is quite so stark as written here, as I'll tease out below. But it does ask for an allegorical reading, and here I found myself confused and troubled. Although it can be read as a story about the perils of technology - genetic experiment, nuclear power - it's presented as a specifically Jewish story, exploring the dilemma of a persecuted people. The program features a quote from a children's book which comments: "Considering the Jewish people's long history of conflict and suffering, it is no surprise that the legend of the Golem, in which massive physical strength defeats overwhelming persecution, remains one of the most powerful traditional stories". And from there, it's a short step to contemporary Israel, which perhaps is its own Golem: the armed state lurching out of control into destruction.

Most reductively, it can be construed as a parable of Zionist militarism; and here the character of the Guard is especially problematic. The least nuanced of all the characters, he is a fanatic anti-Semite, driven by the mingled loathing and desire that constitutes hatred. When the Emperor decrees that the Blood Libel - the canard that Jews killed Gentile children to drain their blood for religious rituals - can only be reported by parents, he prepares to kill his own son, in order to unleash the slaughter of the Jews of the city.

The Guard's murder of his own child is so close to claims that Arabs slaughter their own children in terrorist attacks or, closer to home, to the Children Overboard affair, that it pulled me up short. In mediaeval Europe, Jewish communities were often accused baselessly of the murder of dead or disappeared children, but I don't know of any mediaeval precedent of Gentile parents killing their own children in order to libel Jews. (The closest is accounts, during the Crusades, of Jewish parents killing their own children and themselves, to save them being murdered by Crusaders.) As in these contemporary narratives of Arabs, the Guard is driven by reasonless, fanatical hatred.

Yet there is another major thread in the text - that of misogyny - which remains subliminal in the production, and which is perhaps the missing counter-argument. Most of the time it exists as a puzzle: it only becomes clear towards the end, when you realise that in this world, women are completely absent, except in the form that men have created: the feminine.

The play opens as Ahava wakes painfully from unconsciousness. She is told by the Rabbi that she has been possessed by a Dybbuk, the ghost of her former fiance, Israel Hasidim, who cut his own throat. Ahava herself has no memory of anything: she has no self, and worst of all, no sense of God. Throughout the play this emptiness exists as sexual longing: she pleads with both the Guard and Amos to touch her, to fill her up. The only female character in the play, she exists as sexual and spiritual absence. Amos, the student, regards her with terror as a blasphemy who will bring down destruction on the Jewish people. The only creature who responds to her panicked desire is the Golem.

The source of this emptiness only becomes clear towards the end of the play, when we find out that Ahava is a Golem herself, created by Israel Hasidim. Ahava is not a person, but an object, created by man to answer his own desires. She represents not so much Woman as the Feminine, the male-created sex: and as an object or chattel, she is the subject of bickering: the Emperor claims she is his commissioned artwork, while the Rabbi claims her for himself.


This twist is drawn from another Golem legend, but it suggests the rather more benign myth of Pygmalion, the sculptor who makes a woman of ivory so beautiful that he falls in love with it. For me it most compellingly recalls the Welsh myth of Blodeuwedd, one of the tales from the Mabinogion. Blodeuwedd was made out of flowers by the wizard Gwydion, to be a wife for the king Llew Llaw Gyffes. Blodeuwedd has an affair with Gronw Pebyr, together they plot to murder Llew, and as punishment Blodeuwedd is turned into an owl. Here the feminine turns deadly, defying the will that creates her in her will to selfhood. In A Golem Story, this doesn't become explicit until the very end, when Ahava claims her selfhood. She rejects her status as object and claims her place as a creator: "All these men - these men from God - but no man but the Golem loved me. I was made by them. But only the one I made held me."

The Guard's fanatic anti-Semitism becomes explicable when read as a form of misogyny. In her book Powers of Horror, Julie Kristeva links misogyny and anti-Semitism closely: she reads it as the forcible expulsion of the Other, as a symbol of the filth rejected from the self. The Jew and the Feminine are both, in this theory, expressions of the same horror. "There looms, within abjection, one of those dark, violent revolts of being ... a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the hope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable... The abject has only one quality of being - that of being opposed to the I." The master ego defines itself, in fact grounds its being, on what it rejects. "I sometimes wonder," muses the Guard earlier in the play, "if my elder son is more female..."

And here is the click, the mechanism of violence: the Guard's loathing of Jews and the violence against his own son emerges from the same source. "It is not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection, but what disturbs identity, system, order," says Kristeva. "What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite..." The Golem, poised between humanity and inanimate mud, life and death, male and female, is this ambiguity personified. So, as it happens, is the Emperor, whose almost amoral passion for art and hunger for knowledge is presented as feminine, even camp. Between the Golem and the Emperor are the Rabbi and his student: Amos will have no truck with this ambiguity, whereas the pragmatic Rabbi is prepared to negotiate. But in their rejection of the female, they are closer to the Guard than either would like to admit.

This thread is certainly present in the play (although it still seems unclear to me, perhaps because of the complete absence of an actual woman) but it sinks almost to invisibility under the production. I picked it out afterwards, thinking backwards from the end and from reading the text; and I know I wasn't inattentive while I was watching. This is partly because the episodic argument of the text is fragmented by the songs. Sometimes the singing acts as a kind of oratorio, and replaces action: at these points, especially in the final song (A Pastochl A Troimer, a song which berates God for His lack of care and calls for His burial), I found my inability to understand the words critical. The sheer beauty of the voices and performances paradoxically intensifies this sense of confusion. The critique of militarised masculism that is embodied in Ahava is obscured by a sense of reverence for the very things criticised.

It certainly makes for a fascinating evening of theatre. For all my reservations, I think A Golem Story demonstrates Kantor's strengths as a director: and the performances, by a top-rate cast, are compelling. It's an especial treat to see Dan Spielman back on stage - a scene where he describes the Golem's attack on the soldiers of Prague is a highlight - and Yael Stone's anguished performance physicalises the agony of growing consciousness. In Anna Cordingley and Paul Jackson's stunning design, the Golem is represented by a beam of light, a simple solution to a difficult theatrical problem. It's elegant, beautiful and powerful; perhaps too elegant, beautiful and powerful. Definitely not to be missed.

Photos: Top: Yael Stone in A Golem Story; bottom (foreground) Yael Stone, (back) Mark Jones and Brian Lipson. Photos: Pia Johnson

A Golem Story, by Lally Katz, directed by Michael Kantor. Sets and costumes by Anna Cordingley, lighting by Paul Jackson, musical direction and vocal arrangements by Mark Jones, Jewish/religious consultant Michel Laloum. Performed by Nicholas De Rossos, Joshua Gordon, Mark Jones, Michel Laloum, Brian Lipson, Dan Spielman, Greg Stone and Yael Stone. Merlyn Theatre, Malthouse Theatre, until July 2.

Next year, Lally Katz is probably the most produced playwright in Australia (although Shakespeare might give her a run for her money). She has three new plays coming up on main stages through 2011 - Neighbourhood Watch at Belvoir St, Return To Earth at the MTC and A Golem Story at the Malthouse. Who would have thought that this least classifiable of playwrights should have become a mainstream fixture?


But before any of that happens, she is premiering a new play in New York with The Production Company. This theatre company was founded by artistic director Mark Armstrong and Nicolle Bradford to forge exchanges between US and Australian playwrights, producing work from both. Since 2004 it has quietly built a solid indie reputation, most recently with highly praised productions of Patricia Cornelius's Love and Blair Singer's The Most Damaging Wound. Seasons of short plays under an umbrella called The Australia Project have introduced names like Van Badham, Ross Mueller, Wesley Enoch and many others to American audiences. Lally's play, Goodbye New York, Goodbye Heart, started life as one of the shorter plays in The Australia Project, and she has extended it for this production.

Now over to Lally, who has generously shared her thoughts on writing plays, New York and sharks over several emails during the past week...

AC: Why are you in New York?

LK: I am in New York to attend rehearsals of my play Goodbye New York, Goodbye Heart which is being produced by The Production Company. They're a really great company in New York, who are very committed to putting on Australian works- which is wonderful! I came here to come to rehearsals and work with the company and cast. I've worked with the director, Oliver Butler before in a collaboration with Stuck Pigs and his brilliant company The Debate Society. I was really excited when Mark Armstrong, the artistic director of The Production Company, suggested that Oliver direct the play. It's a really good fit.

I'm having a ball here. For a while I was going to every single rehearsal and doing constant rewrites, but now I've kind of banned myself from rehearsal so that I stop rewriting and give the actors a chance to learn their lines. Although I went tonight. And I'm going tomorrow night. So I guess it's not a very successful ban... Especially since already I'm planning on doing a couple of rewrites. I keep hearing Australian actor Luke Mullins in my head saying, "Rewriting doesn't necessarily make it better- sometimes it just makes it different". But still, I feel there are just a few more rewrites that really will make it better!

I am also seeing as much theatre as I can while I'm here. I went to Chicago where Neil Armfield's opera Midsummer Night's Dream was opening in this amazing, glamorous building. Damien Cooper had done the lights and Dale Ferguson had designed it. It was pretty exciting seeing an opening in Chicago, and seeing all these people on the other side of the world stunned by the work of Australian artists. While I was there I also attended the Steppenwolf New Writing Festival with my friend/agent Jean Mostyn. We both were really blown away by the plays we saw. It's a really different style to plays that I'm familiar with and I really felt I learnt from it. In New York, I haven't been able to see as much theatre because I've been rehearsing every night (or hanging out with my grandparents in New Jersey), but I did see Will Eno's Middletown, which was stunning.

Your plays recently seem full of Goodbye (Goodbye New York, Goodbye Heart; Goodbye Vaudeville Charlie Mudd) or its opposite, like Return to Earth. Does this reflect a preoccupation with transition, from childhood to adulthood, or at least from some state of innocence to a state of knowing?

That's a great question! It's funny, because these are the sorts of questions that you don't think about much in your day-to-day conscious mind - but it's kind of your core story - or a core story in your life. I think I am constantly in a state of transition between innocence and knowing. It is like every situation in life is an epiphany both about the world and myself in the world that I'm on the crest of finding out. Those scenes from life often end up in my writing.

For a long time I thought of things as endings. I guess I thought of life as a series of eras, that came to an end. I feel differently now. I don't feel like things are usually as final as they seem at the time. I guess for years I was seeing life as a play. My friend Martina Murray and I talk a lot about that - how we're subconsciously trying to bring everything to conclusion constantly so that it fits the format of a play - and to us that has been reality. Now I see life a little bit more like television, you have a strange episode with someone, but there will be something different next week. Mac Wellman, this really great New York playwright, said to me once when I was asking his advice on my romantic life and on something which I saw as definite disastrous end, and he said: 'Things don't always have to be so final. You don't have to make things be so final". This was a huge realisation and comfort to me. I hadn't realised it was a choice.

I don't know if that's really answering your question. I guess my writing and my life cross over all the time. And the past fifteen years have been a long transition from childhood to adulthood for me. So there have been all these kind of goodbyes to innocence. I guess I feel more like an adult now. And it's nice. Maybe that is why I feel like the next plays that I write will be less about transition and more about people in the lives that they're in.

But in terms of the Goodbye.. plays, yes, I think both those plays have transitions from innocence to knowing in them. Both Vaudeville... and Goodbye New York, Goodbye Heart have the characters realising that they have to let go of their forced innocence or unrealistic or unlivable ideals in order to move to the next phase of conscience or life.

You’re a playwright who collaborates closely in rehearsal. How important is collaboration to your writing? Do you write for particular performers?

I do collaborate closely in rehearsal. I think it's a really important part of my writing. When I'm writing a play I see it in real life. I never see a stage, or set or lights, or anything - I just see it in the world, really happening (this can be a bit of a challenge for directors because it can make some things quite hard to stage!) So then when rehearsal begins, I start to see what it is onstage.

So if I'm in rehearsals, then I usually end up making lots of little - and sometimes big changes to the script- this is often in response to offers that the director or the actors make. Sometimes I can go too far with it. On a lot of the productions that I've done with Chris Kohn, the two of us would get really into making changes and trying new stuff, and eventually the actors would have to say, "No more. We open in two days". And then we'd know the jig was up!

I've been working really closely with Oliver Butler who's directing Goodbye New York, Goodbye Heart on making shifts in the script - and really closely with the actors too. I hadn't met any of these actors before, so now as they become more concrete in my mind, they become the characters I see when I write changes and do edits - which shifts the overall script too. I guess with some scripts you wouldn't want them to shift too much. And in that case, I think it's better for the writer not to be in rehearsal too much. Because when the writer is in rehearsal things are up for grabs a bit - because there's always the potential that things can change. At the moment, I'm probably going to every second rehearsal so that they have the time they need away from me, but I can still be making little tiny alterations.

In terms of writing for specific actors, that's something I really enjoy. Because you have the format for the character straight away. I think it actually costs you less creative blood as a writer in a way, because already the character is sort of alive, because you're seeing the actor in there. We created Black Swan of Trespass for the original cast that did it, and the parts of Abalone and Gerture in The Eisteddfod were written for Luke Mullins and Jessamy Dyer - though I didn't actually get to know either of them until later and wasn't even in rehearsals because I was overseas (Luke thinks that sometimes the process works better when I am overseas!)

I wrote Neighbourhood Watch which is on at Belvoir next year specifically for Robyn Nevin. I had a whole life adventure with my neighbour because I was looking for a character to write for Robyn. That was really fun. I've also spent a lot of time meeting with Robyn and talking about the character and the world of the play. She's been really involved in it from the beginning, which has been just brilliant. It's so exciting to work with actors to create these lives together.

That's a play that I don't want to be changing much in rehearsal because it's a big production, and very complicated for the actors - especially Robyn because her character speaks a very different kind of English - almost like her own language. So Simon Stone who's directing it, Eamon Flack from Belvoir and I have been meeting regularly, doing developments on the script, so that it's a really finished play by the time we get into rehearsals. I also did a lot of work on it with Julian Meyrick - and Belvoir did a reading of it.

Actually, I don't think any of my plays next year will be having many changes in rehearsal. I guess that is always the aim - that they're really finished! Developments really help this. The Malthouse as usual, have been great making sure that A Golem Story has had plenty of developments and readings. Also I was meeting regularly with Michael Kantor for a lot of this year going through the script. And Return to Earth at the MTC has had quite a few developments and readings with RE Ross Trust and Playwriting Australia, so we know what it is theatrically. Neither of those plays will have to have many changes during rehearsal. I'll still be in the room for all three of those plays - as much as the director wants me in there for - but it will probably be more to assist in questions about tone than actually making changes in the script.

We haven't made huge changes in Goodbye New York, Goodbye Heart, just little ones - but they always feel huge when you're doing it. It's exciting to come to New York and work with a bunch of people that I don't know and find that we have very similar emotional, tonal and aesthetic theatrical instincts. Before coming to New York Oliver and I were emailing and skyping a lot about the script, so we were really on the same page when I got here. Mark Armstrong, the Artistic Director of The Production Company has been really involved with the script too, ever since first commissioning a version of it in 2007. So again, there's been lots of opportunity to be in the world of the play before rehearsals began.

I've veered way off, but I guess what I'm saying is, sometimes I start off writing for a particular actor - or sometimes I begin to write for them during the process - and then sometimes the play is just itself and it's a finished product before the production begins (though perhaps it's had development and readings). They're all such different ways of working. I think when doing shows within big companies it's better if you can have the script as stable as possible before rehearsal begins, because there's so much else going on in the production. But one thing is, you never really know what a show is until you see it. I guess that's a reason why multiple seasons are great - because the production and the script together have a chance to evolve and strengthen.


How do you first begin to imagine a play? Does it just begin with a line? Or do you think about what shape it might be, or what it might feel like?

It begins in different ways. But it will usually start off being a collection of different things that all end up all forming the pieces of a world or a story together. Goodbye New York, Goodbye Heart first started the last time I was in New York, four years ago. We were tech-ing a development we'd been doing and I wasn't needed. I asked if I should stay or go to the top of the Empire State Building, and Oliver Butler (who is directing GNYGH- through no connection to this story) said, "Why don't you go to the Empire State Building? You'll probably have an adventure that you end up writing about". So I started walking there. It was twilight, about to be dark. And, as I was walking there were these two girls walking ahead of me. And I thought I heard one of them say to the other, in this sort of knowing voice, "Yeah, but you thought Star Wars was never ending".

For some reason, that really caught my imagination. And I kept saying it out loud to myself, over and over again as I walked to the Empire State Building, "Yeah... But you thought Star Wars was never ending". I wanted to find out what it meant.

On that same trip, Luke Mullins and I walked from where we were staying across the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan to rehearsal everyday. And as we would walk over the bridge, I would think about how buildings in New York looked so set. So deeply placed. It was like they had become as much of a part of the world as cliff faces, or mountains. Like the buildings of New York had become nature.

Again - on that same trip - it was my last day in New York and I was walking by myself - (basically all these things revolved around me either walking by myself or with Luke Mullins) through Fashion Avenue and near Central Park. And I was looking at all the buildings - it was a really hot day. And I was looking at that big, beautiful glass Apple store near Central Park, and I was thinking, "It's all going to go. All this stuff - this permanent stuff they built isn't going to last". I don't know why I thought it, but it was such a big feeling. I'd also been seeing this guy in New York - just briefly, and I was a little sad to be leaving because of that. So I kept thinking in my head, Goodbye New York, Goodbye Heart. I knew all these things fit together.

Then, back in Australia, maybe a year later, I was reading online about different teenagers who had committed suicide and left all this stuff on their myspace pages. And then their friends had made all these tributes on their myspace pages. And I thought it was like they had committed suicide on the internet. But at the same time, they were also continuing to live on the internet.

It was around this time, that The Production Company asked me to write a short play for their season featuring all Australian writers. It was a great season - with lots of writers who I love in it. I won't say who, because I'm so scared I'll forget someone. So anyway, they asked us all to write something on what our experience of New York was, as an Australian. So I started writing - I knew it was going to have some of this stuff in it. The shape and life of it had begun that first time I heard the Star Wars thing. It was like all these things, plus some other stuff from my life at that time, were like connect the dots in this story. However, this first script was really short, and was kind of just the beginning and end of a much bigger story.

Three years later when Mark Armstrong, the Production Company's artistic director asked me to write a full length version of the play, I had lived or seen, or heard all the missing dots that needed to be connected to form the whole shape of the play. And then of course, things change shape again in rehearsal.

That is one specific example, but often my writing will take that shape. Though it is rare for me to write something as a short play and then extend it later. It was right for this project.

Neighbourhood Watch began with a conversation with Robyn about writing a character for her, then grew when I met my neighbour Anna, and then every experience I had fed into it from there. I always feel like I end up having to live every play. I guess it's fair though - because you want the play to be alive.

Finally (I can't resist) - why is it that the thing that you fear most about flying is sharks?

I love this question! I have actually been talking to my cousin Eli about this a lot! And he's been really helpful about this phobia. When we were moving from Miami to Canberra when I was eight and three quarters years old, I somehow tricked my parents into letting me get the book Jaws the Revenge at the airport. It was a great book. I was engrossed in it, all through the long, long flight. So straight away, there as an association with sharks and planes.

I shared this experience with my six year old brother, by reading him sections as we flew. Then after that, we bought the video of Jaws and my brother and I would watch it everyday after school. Then Jill got killed by a shark on Baywatch and I taped it. Now my brother and I would watch Jaws everyday after school and the part of Baywatch where Jill got attacked. Then I would make my brother come outside to our circular, above ground pool, where I would make him be the person in the water that the shark was circling and I would then pretend to be Jill going in to rescue him, where I would then act out the gory attack, pretending I was Jill, getting eaten.

Somehow, the end result of this is, that my brother and I are both terrified of this: Being on a plane. Flying over the ocean. Then the plane goes down, over the sea. You pass out - or you're knocked unconscious. You wake up, realising you're alive. But then you look around, and everything is dark. The plane is filling up with water. The only light is those safety lights that lead to the exit - flashing on and off, making a kind of buzzing noise. And then you see, in the flashes, swimming up the aisle - a shark.

That is my worst nightmare. It is also my brother's. Both of us dream about it. All the time.

Picture: Publicity image for Goodbye New York, Goodbye Heart. Photo: Julie Skarrat

Goodbye New York, Goodbye Heart opens on December 2 at HERE Arts Center 145 Sixth Avenue, NYC. Details and bookings here.

Back in 2000 I was, for six months, a writer-in-residence in the hallowed halls of academe, viz. Cambridge University. This was a most interesting time in my life, not least because I am completely innocent of academic qualifications. This didn't prevent my hosts from (just in case, I suppose) painting DR CROGGON in gold lettering above the door of my rooms, which is the closest I will ever get to a PhD.

While I was there, I was granted an audience with JH Prynne, whom a number of smart people regard as the most significant English poet of the late 20th century. (Read him. He probably is.) With an austere but friendly courtesy, one of the most subtle and formidable minds I will ever meet took me for tea and buns in the Senate House, where dark polished wood tables and leather armchairs nestled comfortably on a huge and no doubt uninsurable William Morris carpet.

Naturally (he was talking to me, after all) the conversation at one point turned to theatre. "The problem with theatre," said Prynne, "is that it's crude." "Oh!" said I earnestly. "But that's why I like it so much!" It was barely perceptible, but a sort of pained shudder passed through him, a seismic quiver as of an oak whose roots are subtly disturbed by some hidden monster... We moved on to discuss other things. But I think I did my dash with Jeremy Prynne right then.


I guess it's the irrepressible vulgarity of Goodbye Vaudeville Charlie Mudd that made me think of that meeting with Prynne. It's crude, all right. It exploits the tricks and illusions, the painted faces and acrobatics and coarse jokes, that make up the vulgate of theatre; in this case, vaudeville around 1914. And yet it demonstrates precisely why this crudity can be so enchanting, and ultimately profound. Samuel Beckett, for example, was a huge fan of vaudeville, and exploited it in his own plays. Aside from its robust, even brutal liveliness, he understood how it can reveal, with an irresistible poignancy, our human absurdity, our fragile, self-blind mortality.

The parallel universe of Lally Katz’s imagination has always had something vaudevillean about it. It's an estranging, breathlessly anxious, uneasily hilarious place, a mirror in which the world is not merely backward, but upside down and inside out as well. Her long-term collaboration with director Chris Kohn has been one of the most fruitful in independent theatre, with award-winning productions such as The Eisteddfod and The Black Swan of Trespass establishing them among the most striking talents on the Australian stage. Goodbye Vaudeville Charlie Mudd brings their collaboration to a new level.

It echoes elements of all their previous work, but its extrovert theatricality and emotional richness reminds me most of the haunting sadness of Lally Katz and the Terrible Mysteries of the Volcano, an extraordinarily original dramatisation of fractured solipsism. Like all of Katz's plays, her characters exist in a claustrophobic, self-contained fantasy world, a world of sinister and seductive charm tinged with nightmare. As the plays progress, they become - I can't think of a better word - unhinged: a kind of centrifugal force undoes the tendons of the characters, revealing beneath their artifice a terrible emptiness: an anguished longing, perhaps, or something as simple as the recognition of death.

This makes her oeuvre sound repetitive and even gloomy. On the contrary, the restlessness of Katz's imagination ensures that her creations have been enormously various, and they're always funny, with her spiky lyricism generating moments of genuine beauty. In this latest work, the tatty charm of vaudeville in the brief moment of Edwardian sunshine before the outbreak of World War One (beautifully realised in Jonathan Oxlade's set and costume designs) is re-imagined as a distorted fairytale, a fable about love, time and change.

Charlie Mudd (Jim Russell) is the not-so-successful impresario of Charlie Mudd Vaudeville Castle, a down-at-heel theatre that in this alternative Melbourne is situated on the bank of the Swanston River. He leads a strange band of misfits: Maude Adle (Christen O’Leary), “ventriloquist, singer and musical paper tearer”; Knuckles (Circus Oz star Matt Wilson), “acrobat and domestic balancer”; Allarkini (Alex Menglet), “magician and man of mystery”; Ethylyn Rarity (Julia Zemiro), “insect impersonator and singer of dramatic arias”; and Bones (Mark Jones), the “End man”. They are framed in an old-fashioned 19th century stage, complete with red velvet curtains, and their performances are drawn from genuine Tivoli variety acts. But in Mudd's theatre, there is no difference between the performer and the actor; both are the same person. As the Great Allarkini says, the magic is real.

Although the Tivoli acts have been, as it were, lallykatzed, there is a feeling of authenticity in the peformances that make up the bulk of the first half, which is structured - sort of - as an improvised and notably unsuccessful performance before an absent audience. The racism and sexism of the early 1900s haven't been airbrushed out of the picture. When Bones walked onto the stage in full Black and White Minstrel blackface at the beginning, sitting down at a piano decorated with a watermelon, the audience gasped audibly. Even more so when the new ingenue Violet - soon to be drawn into the theatre's sinister dreamworld as Ethylyn - commented that it must take a long time to make up before his performances. He is uncomprehending: "I'm sorry, Miss Violet," he says. "You done lost me there." In this theatre, to perform is to be; outside the act, there is nothing.

What you understand primarily is the essential innocence of each character, a sense that deepens in the second half, when the back-stage realities come to the fore. Each character is damaged - Bones suffers the pangs of unrequited love, Maude is a victim of incest, Allarkini's only magic trick is to suck worms out of the veins of the living, demonstrating that they are the walking dead. Charlie Mudd himself is a kind of Bluebeard who would rather kill than accept the death of love. (There is even the fairytale forbidden door, but it reveals not the corpses of dead wives - they're beneath the floor - but the possibility of freedom).

As with the Katz/Kohn Ern Malley, I found myself sympathising with these greasepainted characters, who are half-aware of their vertiginous fictional status. Like them, we all believe that our roles are real, acting them out in the tawdry theatres of our imaginations; like them, we're afraid to let go of our illusions and assigned roles, in case we find a yawning vacuum beneath. And we too hover with blithe unawareness on the edge of global catastrophe. It's hard not to laugh uncomfortably at the opening song: "Welcome to 1914... the people are peaceful, the economy is strong / There's nothing that could possibly go wrong". Yeah, right.

What begins as a warts-and-all evocation of a mostly forgotten past morphs into an unexpectedly moving meditation on time, nostalgia and mortality. And, perhaps most importantly, a meditation on both the imprisonments and freedoms of love. It's as much an essay on theatre and the nature of illusion as distorted fairtale. The final scene is a dismantling of theatricality that reminded me of nothing so much as Prospero’s final speech in The Tempest, when the enchanter breaks his magic staff and pleads for his release from the audience “with the help of your good hands”.

The performances are exhilarating, striking a note between heartless caricature and possible sentimentalisation, discovering an uneasy, even grotesque realism. Every cast member finds at least one moment of genuine tenderness - Christen O'Leary's lovelorn ventriloquist, for example, reflecting that the only man who loved her was her incestuous father, or Mark Jones (who also composed the music) when he sings Bones' song of unrequited love, which is the show-stopper of the evening. Jones is in fact the lynchpin of the show, his piano punctuating the dialogue and action just as his emotional story provides the backbone of what passes for plot. (I'm not sure Katz does plot, as such).

Chris Kohn's meticulously orchestrated production grabs your entire attention for two and a half hours, stepping deftly between comedy and tragedy, illusion and reality. While you might miss the vertiginous sense of risk that characterised some of Katz and Kohn's earlier work (notably in Volcano, which somehow maintained throughout a sense of imminent collapse, and seemed to be a play imagined as a acrobatic feat), it's more than made up for by the sureness with which unlikely imaginings are here realised on stage. This is deeply accomplished work, darkly beautiful theatre that resonates in the intimate chambers of the mind.

Picture: Julia Zemiro and Christen O'Leary in Goodbye Vaudeville Charlie Mudd.

Goodbye Vaudeville Charlie Mudd by Lally Katz, concept and direction by Chris Kohn. Set and costumes by Jonathan Oxlade, music composed by Mark Jones, sound design by Jethro Woodward, lighting design by Richard Vabre. With Mark Jones, Alex Menglet, Christen O'Leary, Jim Ruseell, Matt Wilson and Julia Zemiro. Malthouse Theatre and Arena Theatre. Beckett Theatre, CUB Malthouse, until March 28. Bookings: (03) 96855111.

Ms TN flew back into the smoke haze of Victoria yesterday afternoon. It was all a bit spooky, peering out from my little metal tube 38,000 feet in the sky and watching this sunburned, smoke-scarred landscape below, all dry dams and empty rivers and bare paddocks. An aerial view gives a dramatic and rather frightening picture of just how drought-stricken Victoria is: you just can't see its aridity from ground-level. I really do think it's about time Queensland stopped pinching our water.

The War of the Roses will take a few days (weeks?) to process; it was a massive experience. I am, however, heroically aiming to post about it early next week. It finishes in Sydney this week, and then heads off for a season at the Perth Festival. Perth persons, if you haven't booked your tickets, go hence immediately. You'll regret it if you don't.

Meanwhile, let me point you to a charming and fascinating rehearsal blog being kept by Christian Leavesley for the production of Lally Katz's Goodbye Vaudeville Charlie Mudd, a co-production between Arena Theatre and the Malthouse. Videos, mathematical posts, reader surveys, bizarre advertisements - what more does a cybergal need?

Very interesting news in my mailbox this morning. Full Dress Productions, which under David Frazer has been producing some very respectable indie theatre about town, has announced a new Melbourne-based performing arts press, Full Dress Publishing.

They've certainly spotted a gap. "Despite being the independent theatre capital of Australia, it's surprising that Melbourne doesn't have a publishing house with a specific focus on the performing arts, particularly given the calibre of the work produced," says David. "I am very excited to fill the void."

And they've started in style, with two playwrights who mark, as David says, a "generational leap" in Melbourne theatre writing. The company’s first two titles, Ross Mueller’s Construction of the Human Heart and Three Plays by Lally Katz – The Eisteddfod, The Black Swan of Trespass and Smashed, are on sale now from the company's website. They'll be launched, no doubt in the obligatory shower of cheap wine and cheese cubes, at a Melbourne Writers Festival event hosted by the incomparable Julie Zemiro. The details are:

Date: Friday, August 22, 2008
Time: 2.00 – 3.00pm
Venue: Festival Club, ACMI Function Space – Federation Square, Melbourne
Cost: Free public event, no booking necessary

Criminology, devised by Rosemary Myers and written by Lally Katz and Tom Wright. Design by Anna Tregloan, video design direction Peter Brundle, video design Chris More, lighting design Paul Jackson, composition Jethro Woodward. With Gemma Cavoli, Jing-Xuan Chan, Simon Maiden, Bojana Novakovic, Luke Ryan and Samantha Tolj. Arena Theatre and Malthouse Theatre @ the Merlyn Theatre, CUB Malthouse until August 19. Bookings: 9685-5111.

When you walk out of the doors of the Malthouse Theatre, the first thing that catches your eye is a huge yellow billboard across the freeway. It squats beneath the urban skyline asking, in brash red letters: “WANT LONGER LASTING SEX?” This garishly desolate image has a disconcerting continuity with the world explored in Criminology, a fascinating archeological exploration of the pathologies beneath the surface of middle-class suburban Australia.


It’s co-written by Tom Wright, who last week won a Helpmann for his work on The Lost Echo, and Lally Katz, best known for her work with Stuck Pigs Squealing. But Criminology is a theatrical collaboration in which the work of the director and its several designers is as important in creating meaning, through projected video and mise en scène, as the writing itself.

Devisor and director Rosemary Myers draws from Helen Garner’s controversial book The Consolation of Joe Cinque, which explored the bizarre 1997 killing of a young man by his girlfriend Anu Singh, both students at ANU in Canberra. Singh was convicted of manslaughter for deliberately overdosing Cinque with heroin, and served a prison sentence. Among the more disturbing aspects of the crime was that their circle of friends knew of Singh’s intention to kill Cinque, but did nothing to prevent it.

Criminology is almost an inverse picture of Garner’s book. Garner was concerned with the victim, filling out the anonymity of the headlines with the visceral reality of his grieving family. Notoriously, Anu Singh refused to speak to her, and the figure of the young woman remains mysterious, inscrutable and deadly. Myers has chosen to see the story from another angle, as if in a mirror darkly.

She and her collaborators create a nightmarish indictment of the pathological narcissism of contemporary society. Criminology reveals a world of unrelieved banality, in which the language of feeling is expressed through the cliches of blockbuster movies, values are taken from the gossip pages and sexuality is merely pornographic.

In this telling, everything is backwards: Anu is fictionalised as Una (Bojana Novakovic) and Joe Cinque becomes The Boyfriend (Hazem Shammas), a passive cipher who is a blank screen for the projection of Una’s warped desires. Even some of the performances are backwards: 1990s celebrities like Princess Di and Michael Hutchence appear on stage performed by actors with masks on the backs of their heads and their clothes on the wrong way round. It makes them move like zombies, jerkily and unnaturally, and they grotesquely focus Una’s fascination with the link between sex, death and fame.

This is theatre of a profound semantic richness – performance, image, design and Jethro Woodward’s brilliant soundscape combine to create a complex and confronting language. Anna Tregloan’s design capitalises on the banality of the world explored in the show – the walls are even beige, and the wide set is littered with comfortable furniture. The bedroom – the site of both sex and death – is a glass box. Above the stage hang a constellation of screens, on which are projected fragmented images – close-ups of bodies, plants, trees – that work in counterpoint to the action on stage.

Una exists in a haze of psychic distortions caused by her drug-taking and bulimia. She and her friends live in a world marked, more than anything, by sexual and spiritual impoverishment, and her psychosis is shaped by the desires projected upon her and the fantasies of an unreal world populated by visions of magazine-cover celebrities.

Aspects reminded me of George Bataille’s The Story of the Eye, which brutally explores the the excesses of adolescent sexuality: but unlike the children in Bataille’s story, who take a perverse and imaginative pleasure in their sadistic games, Una’s erotic provocations and manipulations seem strangely pleasureless. For Una, sex is not an end in itself, but a means to power: and her need for power is directly related to her own sense of feminine powerlessness.

What makes this show particularly riveting is the physically potent performances from all the cast. The body is at once celebrated for its perfection and tormented, distorted in sexual ecstasy or vomiting or death. Bojana Novakovic portrays Una with total commitment: she oscillates from a manipulative sexual succubus to desperate bulimic, unflnchingly performing Una’s self-loathing and extremity. Luke Ryan as the corrupt young drug dealer Alastair gives a nuanced, sinister performance, and Hazem Shammas as the Boyfriend is a cryptic, wordless shadow until he convulses in his death, which is perhaps the only time he is real to Una.

There are occasional longueurs in the dramaturgy, a feeling sometimes that the ideas aren't going anywhere – the grotesque image of Princess Di, for instance, dulls in repetition. And I felt ambivalent about the portrayal of Una, a sense that it exploits the archetypal power of the deadly, sexualised woman as much as critiquing its creation. I’m not sure that it’s an entirely successful piece, but it's undoubtedly powerful and confronting theatre.

Picture: Hazem Shammas (projection image), Jing-Xuan Chan and Bojana Novakovic in Criminology. Photo: Ross Bird

More blog responses at Post-Teen Trauma and Esoteric Rabbit.

A shorter version of this review appears in today’s Australian.

Thom Pain (Based on Nothing) by Will Eno, directed by Julian Meyrick. Lighting by Kerry Saxby, design consultant Meredith Rogers. With Neil Pigot. Melbourne Theatre Company @ the Beckett Theatre, CUB Malthouse, until August 11. Bookings: 1300 136 166.

The Eisteddfod, by Lally Katz, directed by Chris Kohn. Design by Adam Gardnir, lighting design by Richard Vabre, sound by Jethro Woodward. With Luke Mullins and Katherine Tonkin. Stuck Pigs Squealing @ the Tower Theatre, CUB, produced by Malthouse Theatre, until July 29. Bookings: 9685 5111

It’s a common idea that if a work is “intellectual” or “cutting edge”, it must be cold and emotionless, a thing of steel and ice that is above the messy, smelly business of the human heart. Conversely, it’s assumed that anything with feeling can’t also be “intellectual”. Feeling and intelligence, so this logic runs, are opposites, and an excess of one means an inevitable lack of the other.

This weird binary has long puzzled me. For one thing, it’s so manifestly untrue: writers like Edward Said, Robert Musil or Hélène Cixous show that the intellect is in fact an instrument of passion. Far from being incompatible opposites, I think that feeling and intelligence are both required to articulate the process of consciousness. Particularly, it seems to me, in works of art.


Anyway, that is a long and complex argument, and I should drag myself to the matter to hand. These ruminations occurred after seeing Thom Pain (Based on Nothing) and The Eisteddfod, both now on at the CUB Malthouse. I suppose they both might be placed under the deathly rubric of “cutting edge” art, which is to say that they don’t obey conventional ideas of narrative or dramatic structure. Both, in this sense, are experimental (another useless term, since art is, strictly speaking, always experimental, unless it is dead).

But what strikes me primarily about both plays is that they are, fundamentally and crucially, about love. And loneliness. And all those other human, messy things.

Thom Pain is an MTC show, and it’s frankly brilliant to see them programming writing of this quality from the more innovative edge of contemporary Amercian writing. It’s had an interesting history, considering Will Eno is a New Yorker - this play premiered at the 2004 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where it won a swag of awards, and transferred to a successful season in London before finally opening in New York. It was ultimately shortlisted for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize.

It makes me wonder what American theatre is thinking, if a work as funny, smart and moving as this has to prove itself in the British provinces before it gets a look at an American stage. It’s really a poem: a highly theatrical poem which owes much to the plays of Edward Albee and Thornton Wilder. But the writer who kept insisting himself as I watched it was the 1950s New York poet, Frank O’Hara. It’s not so much style – though both O’Hara and Eno have plenty of that, and Eno shares O’Hara’s wit and lyrical gift – as sensibility. Like O’Hara, Eno is a writer who perceives human fragility and imperfection with a sceptical but wholly unironic compassion.

There is much here of sheer writerly intelligence, that witty play of allusion and metaphor that (sometimes rightly) is often taken as an evasion of feeling. But, as its name suggests, this show is actually about human pain. The comedy is often cruel (as comedy almost always is), but it functions as a kind of tact which permits us to see this fictional character’s vulnerability and, through his, our own. In its honest examination of the emotional cauterisation of trauma, it is very moving; but it is not – save for a misstep at the end, a direct plea to the audience that somehow lets us off the hook – in the least sentimental.

In the figure of Thom Pain, Eno has created a fragmented Everyman, a damaged soul ill at ease in his mortal body. Thom Pain – performed with a mixture of superbly nuanced restraint and sheer front by Neil Pigot – recounts for us, in an ad hoc, disorderly manner, the injuries that have marked his life. His wounds are at once absurd and tragic – from the electrocution of his beloved childhood dog to his broken love affair (as he sums it up, in a particularly beautiful line, "I disappeared in her and she, wondering where I went, left.")

He is, in fact, an unexpectedly gentle reflection of our own unacknowledged pain, the shaping hurts that damage us for the rest of our lives. “When did your childhood end?” he asks. “How badly did you get hurt, when you did, when you were this little, when you were this wee little hurtable thing, nothing but big eyes, a heart, a few hundred words?” And, responding almost involuntarily to this direct question, we find out with a pang of memory that yes, the loss of innocence happens to all of us.

Julian Meyrick directs with a light hand: it is given a stripped, bare production, forgoing any sense of theatrical illusion in order to focus attention on the script and the performer. The set is a bare stage, marked out in squares, with a life-size cardboard image of Pigot in one back corner, and a chair in another. Neil Pigot realises his fractured character with subtlety, comic chutzpah and heartbreaking candour. He stands before us, slightly dishevelled, in a plain suit and glasses, and delivers a painfully funny stand-up routine (complete with a raffle that never actually occurs) that works off our own sense of discomfort.

As he makes clear at one point, Thom Pain (a wry spin, I presume, on the famous American revolutionary Tom Paine) is a contemporary version of Tom O’Bedlam, a truly urban “unaccommodated man” who, for all his suit and tie, is no more than “a poor bare, forked animal”. If this play has a message - not that a message is the point - it is simply that those wounds never actually heal, and we cannot live hiding from our own anguish. “Isn't it wonderful,” says Pain, with deceptive blandness, “how we never recover?"

The unhealable wounds of childhood is also an abiding theme of The Eisteddfod, Lally Katz’s disturbingly funny fantasy of suburban childhood. I saw its first full production at the Store Room three years ago, my first experience of Stuck Pigs Squealing, and was impressed. The Malthouse is now giving it a welcome remount in the Tower.

Since its first outing, The Eisteddfod has had seasons at the PS122 and Ontological-Hysterical Theatre in New York and Belvoir St in Sydney, and a cast change (Katherine Tonkin takes the role of Gerture, originally played by Jessamy Dyer). But it remains as fresh as ever, a darkly comic meditation on the perversities of longing, loneliness, pain and erotic love.

Gerture and Abalone (Luke Mullins) are brother and sister, living together, after the bizarre death of their parents, in a claustrophobically destructive relationship of mutual need and resentment. Their longings are played out through various fantasies – Gerture’s masochistic relationship with a sadistic lover, Ian, or their parents’ dysfunctional marriage – as Abalone rehearses the part of Macbeth for an upcoming eisteddfod, in which he plans to unleash his true genius on a dazzled world.

Lally Katz is a true original, and so confounds all attempts at categorisation. She is not quite like any writer I have encountered, although her work calls up shades of Pirandello, Cocteau, Chekhov and a bunch of other people. There is an anarchy in its core which means that anything might happen, a perilous sense that the whole might disintegrate into total nonsense: but it never does, because also at work is an unobtrusively steely discipline and a very sharp wit.

She’s well served by her performers, who match Katz’s precision and wit as they scramble over Adam Gardnir’s ingeniously claustrophobic set. Mullins’ performance is a sheer joy, and often simply hilarious, as he metamorphoses between Gerture’s brutish lover, his own father, a Sean Connery-inspired Macbeth and the vulnerable, jealous persona of Abalone himself. Tonkin is a perfect foil as the alienated Gerture, the victim of every male she encounters, who finally reaches out and discovers her own freedom.

Calling on my frustratingly imperfect memory (I’ll read my earlier review later) it seems to me that Chris Kohn’s production is, unsurprisingly, a highly polished version of what I saw three years ago. Certain details – a puppet, a balaclava – have vanished, and the play itself somehow seems cleaner and more focused, perfectly complemented by Jethro Woodward’s unobtrusive but beautifully textured soundscape. And while its humour always emerged from a dark place, and the violence in the centre of Gerture’s and Abalone’s childish games was always close to the surface, this time I was struck most forcibly by its sadness.

I think this production has grown in depth: it was always a play of brilliant surfaces, but now those surfaces open to unsettling abysses, and the final dialogue, a meditation on a pathetic suicide, resonates with an acute and haunting melancholy. It’s a wonderful piece by some of our most unfairly talented young artists. Miss it at your peril.

Picture: Luke Mullins and Katherine Tonkin, The Eisteddfod

A version of my review of Thom Pain appeared in Monday's Australian. Weblink if and when one appears on the site.