Last Friday, the Melbourne premiere of Steve Rodgers' Savage River also saw the opening of a significant new theatre: the Melbourne Theatre Company's Lawler Studio. This gorgeous 150-seat venue is the studio the MTC had to have: a basic, flexible black box space that is beautifully fitted out and which, crucially, features excellent acoustics. This will give the MTC a lot more artistic room to move.

I can't overstate how important this possibility is to the wider ecology of Melbourne theatre, as much as to the culture of the MTC itself: it opens the door to new talent and new audiences, allowing the company to nurture some exciting energies that simply can't be accommodated in larger venues. It looks to me that it will be a worthy complement to the work that goes on elsewhere, in the Malthouse's Tower seasons and the Arts Centre's Full Tilt programs. I have thought for some time that the lack of a mainstage theatre that devotes itself, Royal Court-style, specifically to new writing is a significant gap in Melbourne culture; and it seems to me that the Lawler Studio might be it. Certainly the emphasis of this year's program, under associate director Aidan Fennessy, is squarely on new plays.


The inaugural season kicks off with a modest but intriguingly various program of three works that reflects the diversity of Australian contemporary theatre writing, as well as a season of playreadings later this year. After Savage River, Lally Katz's Apocalypse Bear Trilogy is one of the MTC's Melbourne Festival shows, and Peter Houghton premieres the third in his trilogy of comic monologues, The Colours, next month. The opening play, Savage River, premiering here after a season at Sydney's Griffin Theatre, is unambiguously a play. And even if it is more melodrama than drama, betraying the faults of a promising but new playwright, it is encouraging to see a new work with these ambitions.

Earlier this year, after reading my way through more than 50 scripts as a judge for a couple of awards, I started to wonder where all the dramatists were. I saw plenty of writing for theatre, some of it very exciting indeed, but very little work that really grappled with the craft of drama. As was said in the judges' report for the RE Ross Trust award, "the strongest entries tended to come from the poetic or 'alternative' end of the spectrum. All but one of the winning contenders conform to this pattern."

I've speculated privately on why this might be. I suspect part of it is simply that writing drama is very difficult indeed. I have wondered now and again whether the much-vaunted "post-dramatic stage" is simply about an art being forgotten, rather than its being no longer relevant. It also occurs to me that the strength in "alternative" writing might equally stem from the fact that the culture around collaborative work is presently so vital: we have brilliant directors, designers, theatre composers, technicians and actors who are able to realise different kinds of theatricality with sophistication and flair.

The culture around writing plays is only just beginning to catch up, dropping, I hope, the anti-intellectual "a-play-is-not-literature" polemic that led to such incuriosity about the formal qualities of plays, and perhaps laying down at last the deadening issue-led ideologies that dominated the 1980s and 90s. Deadening, I would argue, because they focus on aspects extrinsic to a text, politicising work in ways that are ultimately deeply conservative - both politically and aesthetically - because they draw attention away from the primary experience of theatre itself. That primary experience is, after all, the truly radicalising force of any kind of artistic work.

Savage River is a play that doesn't fall into this vanguard; it rightly leaves any "issues" for the audience to think about. Set in an isolated shack on the edge of Savage River, a mining town in the north-west of Tasmania, it explores the obsessive relationship between Kingsley (Ian Bliss) and his son Tiger (Travis Cardona), which is disturbed when the arrival of a stranger, Jude (Peta Sergeant), catalyses dramatic change. Kingsley and Jude are both hiding: Jude is an alcoholic trainwreck with a shady past, on the run with some stolen money. Kingsley, who works at the mine, has kept his son "safe" from the corrupting and dangerous world, and also, we discover, from the family of his Indigenous mother, who disappeared when he was a small boy.

These three characters become a broken mirror of the conventional family unit, a strange reflection of the settler-invaders who drove the local people from their land and into the shadows. In the figure of Tiger's absent mother and her family, there's a glance towards the recent scholarship on Aboriginal history, which argues that Indigenous genocide was as much a practice of hidden genealogies and secret family history as it was of slaughter. And beneath it all is the uneasy question of belonging, of relationship to place as well the bonds between people.

In the play's best moments, there's an edge of Sam Shepard in these isolated characters, a rough-hewn lyricism that could be burnished to an iconic, and particularly Australian, grandeur and tragedy. It doesn't get there: Rodgers as yet lacks the subtlety of emotional register to lift the story beyond melodrama. The first act moves slowly, obliquely filling in the textures of these three lives without quite avoiding the perils of stasis, and when in the second act events unfold, as you know they inevitably will, they crash down with a kind of grinding legibility. You can see the potential in some of Rodgers' dialogues, an ability to write dynamic language that surely comes out of his acting experience, but his crafting of dramatic movement - perhaps the most demanding of all writing, bar poetry - is still crude and uncertain.

As a result, there is an air of overstatement in the performances, as if the actors are pushing the emotional meat of the play, rather than permitting it to emerge. The actors all have their moments - I especially liked Cardona's portrayal of Tiger's confused innocence - but at the same time I thought that feeling was being demonstrated rather than communicated. All the same, there's no doubt that the production is elegantly designed, with a simple but evocative set by Stephen Curtis floored by black sand, a lush lighting design by Daniel Zika and some nice music from Jed Kurzel. Kelly Ryall's sound design does tend to swell up to signal important moments, but generally Peter Evans's direction is tactful, lucidly framing the play. It's not going to set the world on fire, but it's a decent start to what I hope will be an exciting new phase for the MTC.

Picture: Travis Cardona and Peta Sergeant in Savage River.

Savage River by Steve Rodgers, directed by Peter Evans. Design by Stephen Curtis, lighting design by Daniel Zika, sound design by Kelly Ryall, music composed by Jed Kurzel. With Ian Bliss, Travis Cardona and Peta Sergeant. MTC @ the Lawler Studio, until August 8.

Ms TN was intending to be at this morning's launch of the Melbourne Theatre Company's Lawler Studio Season, an event I was anticipating with lively curiosity, but my plans were derailed by an early-morning phone call from my editor. So instead of venturing out into the pleasant sleet and hail of a Melbourne winter morning, I spent the day at home writing furiously to a 4pm deadline. Such are the travails of a theatre writer.

Luckily, the wonders of email mean that it all landed in my inbox, sans champagne and croissants but with all the right spelling. And this season of three new plays, curated by MTC associate director Aidan Fennessy, looks very interesting indeed. In fact, it opens the MTC programming right up.

It kicks off on July 22 with Savage River by Steve Rodgers (last seen at the MTC with Ray's Tempest). This is a co-production with Sydney's Griffin Theatre and the Tasmanian Theatre Company, and will be directed by associate director Peter Evans. Next is The Colours, a one-man show written and performed by Peter Houghton and directed by Anne Browning (coincidentally, Houghton's Malthouse play A Commercial Farce opens tomorrow night). Lastly is a Stuck Pigs Squealing production, Lally Katz's Apocalypse Bear Trilogy, opening on October 8. This will be Luke Mullins's directorial debut, as he returns to Melbourne after a year as a member of the STC's Actors Company. Mullins is co-directing with Brian Lipson and both will be starring with Katherine Tonkin.

The MTC has also scrambled together funding for a three-year program of playreadings and workshops for emerging playwrights, which will begin later this year. You can find more details on the Lawler Studio Season here.

Which reminds me that, what with this and that (there's been a lot of this and that about lately), I have neglected to mention the announcement of the STC's new ensemble, The Residents, last week. The Residents replaces the Actors Company with a full-time ensemble of younger actors, who will work in the engine room of the company, presenting main stage works but also working on developmental projects such as Rough Drafts - rehearsing and presenting a play in a week - and plays for the educational program. They include a bunch of very talented performers, including Melbourne actor Richard Pyros, whose performance of Hamlet for A Poor Theatre (film and play) was a knockout. Watch out for The Residents' debut later this year with The Mysteries.