It's tempting to consider what Mary MacLane's life might have been, had she been born male. For one thing, I might have had a better chance of having heard of her: the work of interesting women is all too apt to disappear after their deaths. Perhaps MacLane might have been known as an early 20th century Thomas Chatterton or Arthur Rimbaud, a wayward brilliance that ignited rebellion into a literary flame. But she wasn't born male, and her sex determined her life and her later reputation. It meant that she was doomed to being considered eccentric rather than original, and the egocentricity permissible in a young man of genius put MacLane beyond the pale of womanhood.


She was certainly scandalous: precociously intelligent, unapologetically sexual, Romantic with a startling capital R. Her best selling memoir The Story of Mary MacLane was published when she was 19, and sold 100,000 copies in its first month. In it she vividly recounted her desires, her boredom, her fantasies, and proclaimed herself as a genius. In 1902, this was unprecedented only in that it was a woman writing in such a way: Walt Whitman, clearly a foundational influence, first published Song of Myself in 1855. The real scandal was (and remains) that a woman should proclaim an autonomous self, an active subjectivity.

Such proclamations have always been made, and have been routinely diminished and ignored over the past few hundred years. Watching The Story of Mary MacLane by Herself, I was struck by how much her writing chimes with the writings of women mystics in the Middle Ages. Several years ago, I became deeply interested in these women, who invented a whole new vocabulary of subjective experience for western culture. The parallels with MacLane are intriguing.

*Spoiler warnings*

The end of the year is rushing up like a charging rhino. Melbourne theatre has its traditional means of signalling this milestone - widespread admissions of astonishment that Christmas is only 34 sleeps away, the issuing of phalanxes of party invitations, and, of course, the Christmas shows, crowd-pleasers that fill the houses with cheer and, hopefully, audiences. The Malthouse and the MTC have two winners this year with Meow Meow's Little Match Girl and The Importance of Being Earnest.


Meow Meow is not so much an artist as a phenomenon. She likes to have her cake and eat it too, while simultaneously throwing it at her audience. No performer could get away with it unless they had nerves of titanium and the charisma of an anti-Christ: Meow Meow does, because she's Meow Meow.

Anyone who's experienced her cabaret act will know the breathless feeling that the whole tottering edifice might collapse at any moment, the increasing tension of frustration and delight as the world's most accomplished theatrical tease refuses the moment of climax again and again, delivering in the final moment with some heart-stopping version of a masterpiece such as Surabaya Johnny.

In Little Match Girl, Meow Meow again moves her prodigious abilities onto a larger stage, collaborating with musical director Iain Grandage to create an intoxicating mixture of music and Meow Meowness, under the sharp direction of Marion Potts. Here the conceit is Hans Christian Andersen's story, in which a starving, abused girl is staring into the windows of the rich on Christmas Eve, as she freezes to death outside.

Don't, however, expect an adaptation: the story is rather the show's informing metaphor. Meow Meow points out that the Little Match Girl has never gone away, and that homeless, abused children are dying in every city on the planet. "Maybe it's too much to expect," she says, "that a song will change the world..." And of course, as Meow Meow knows as well as anybody, it is. The surprise is that anyone should raise the idea.

It opens with one of Anna Cordingley's most spectacularly lush sets (beautifully lit, or, in some cases, unlit, by Paul Jackson): a long thrust, with art deco floor lights, silver curtains, a huge chandelier. We enjoy this for perhaps five minutes before the whole thing is plunged into complete blackness by a small explosion in the lighting box, and Meow Meow is scrambling over the darkened seats of the auditorium, bullying audience members to lend her iPhones (which, astonishingly, they do), or to hold torches ("my face! on my face!"), or to power a bicycle generator. One particularly harassed audience member turns out to be music theatre star Mitchell Butel, who proves to be much more than a foil to Meow Meow's incandescence, and has a couple of show-stoppers himself.

As well as comedy, the darkness permits some powerful moments of intimacy: Meow Meow singing lit by hand-held torches in a cavernous space, or lighting a series of matches that immediately splutter and die. Of course the lights come back on, eventually, in one of the more gorgeous coups de theatre we've seen this year.

There's always been a strong smell of the Weimar Republic about Meow Meow (reinforced by her opening remarks being in German, until she remembers with a start that she is in Melbourne). And it's this which makes her work feel so contemporary: she brings a defiant spark to the darkness of our times, although it is a light that, in the end, only illuminates the shadows. One of the highlights of the show is her rendition of Laurie Anderson's The Dream Before, a tribute to Walter Benjamin's vision of the Angel of History flying backwards into a storm as the rubble of progress heaps up ruinously before its face.

Meow Meow is the embodiment of intellectual eroticism, supple and perilous as a flame: you'd have to have a heart of mud to resist a show that carelessly folds Richard Wagner, Walter Benjamin, The Magnetic Fields, Laurie Anderson and Noel Coward into one heady mixture. The energy of its theatricality is sparked by continuous contrast, which Peter Brook once claimed to be the basis of all theatre: at one moment, it is all heart-breaking poignancy; in the next, all heartlessness. Irresistible.


If there is such a thing as a sure hit, the Melbourne Theatre Company's production of The Importance of Being Earnest, starring Geoffrey Rush as Lady Bracknell, is it. The show is all but booked out, although I believe the MTC is holding daily ticket raffles for last minute seats. Simon Phillips's farewell show as artistic director is a remake of his 1988 production, which featured an astonishingly beautiful and ingenious Beardsley set: a giant Yellow Book opened by the butler (I saw Frank Thring in this role, and will never forget his superb loathing as he surveyed the audience) to reveal black and white pop-up sets.

The original designer, Tony Tripp, died in 2003, and his design is recreated by Richard Roberts and Tracy Grant Lord (who realised the sumptuous costumes). Geoffrey Rush and Jane Menelaus, who played John Worthing and Gwendolen in the original production, are respectively Lady Bracknell and Miss Prism in this one. It's fair to say that this is a production rich with nostalgia: so many of the original cast members - Monica Maughan, Ruth Cracknell, Frank Thring and Gordon Chater - have since died. Tempus fugit, indeed.

Back in the present, the show pretty much lives up to expectations. Phillips is at his best with this kind of quicksilver text: his production skitters over Wilde's profound surfaces with stylish ease. To his credit, Rush doesn't camp up Lady Bracknell, and makes a frighteningly convincing bellows-voiced aunt, a redoutable galleon in full sail. Christie Whelan (Gwendolen) and Emily Barclay (Cecily) are stand outs, handling the mercurial text with deceptive suppleness. On opening night, Patrick Brammall (Algy) and Toby Schmitz (John Worthing) seemed constrained, sometimes a little stilted, although this lifted in the second act. And I guess nobody could stop Bob Hornery from outrageously mugging the role of the senile butler, Merriman.

The artifice of Wilde's writing is heightened by touches such as freezing the characters at the end of each scene, so they become images frozen against the pages of the book. I suspect that the symmetries of Phillips's blocking, which became increasingly mannered towards the end, might have strained Wilde's notions of taste: asymmetry is, after all, one of the necessary cross-grains of beauty. But it feels churlish to nitpick a production which so artfully fulfils its own expectations of sentiment and style. A foregone winner, as I said.

Pictures: top: Mitchell Butel and Meow Meow in Little Match Girl; bottom, Patrick Brammall and Toby Schmitz in The Importance of Being Earnest. Photos by Jeff Busby

Little Match Girl, created and performed by Meow Meow and Iain Grandage, directed by Marion Potts. Sets and costumes by Anna Cordingley, lighting by Paul Jackson. Featuring Mitchell Butel. Malthouse Theatre, Merlyn, until December 4. The Famous Spiegeltent, Sydney Festival, January 6-29.

The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde, directed by Simon Phillips. Original design by Tony Tripps, set realiser Richard Roberts, costume realiser Tracy Grant Lord, lighting design Matt Scott. With Patrick Brammall, Bob Hornery, Toby Schmitz, Geoffrey Rush, Christie Whelan, Jane Menelaus, Emily Barclay and Tony Taylor. Melbourne Thatre Company @ the Sumner Theatre, until January 14.

I've been dithering over this post for days, trying to find a way in to writing about this extraordinary show. As with Back to Back's Food Court, which remains one of the most compelling experiences I've had in a theatre, Ganesh Versus The Third Reich takes an idea which initially appears to be very simple, and then, with cumulative force, systematically unpicks every expectation that you might have formed, until the psyche finds itself at such a point of vulnerability that you are suddenly confronted with - what? The Human Condition? Your own existential solitude? The naked soul as Foucault imagined it, criss-crossed and scarred by the traces of power and authority?


One of the problems in discussing Back to Back, the little theatre company from Geelong that could, is that it creates experiences that defeat description. Outlining a production's shape gives an idea of its characteristics, its morphology, if you like; but this morphology doesn't explain the vitality that inhabits the work. I feel, even more than usual, as if I were attempting to invoke an entire life, with all its incidence, richness, mundanity, conflict and beauty, by dissecting a corpse.

Bruce Gladwin and his collaborators make a work that can only happen in a theatre. It can't be translated into another medium, because it exists so fiercely in its transient present, in the particular moments in which it's witnessed by the particular people who happen to attend. Its transformations are a kind of alchemy, a human magic that ignites in the shifting relationships between the performers and the audience. It's at once transparently simple and profoundly complex.

As those who have followed the mild controversy that greeted its publicity will know, Ganesh Versus The Third Reich is, in part, a fable about how Ganesh, the elephant-headed Hindu god, travels to Nazi Germany to wrest back the swastika from Hitler. A major god in the Hindu pantheon, Ganesh is the deity of obstacles: he not only removes them, but will place them in situations that need to be checked. One of his lesser aspects is as lord of letters and learning, an avatar of stories (which is why I have two small brass effigies of Ganesh on my desk).

Ganesh's aspect as remover of obstacles must have special significance for a company in which most members are disabled. And Back to Back's decision to interrogate Hitler reminds us that, well before their plans to eradicate Jews, homosexuals, Roma and Slavic people, Nazi Germany targeted its disabled population. In 1939, the state systematically began to murder people with mental and physical disabilities, labelling them "unworthy of life", with estimates of deaths varying from 200,000 to 250,000. These murders were the experimental laboratory for what later became the death camps: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka.

Given such a dark subtext, not to mention the questions of cultural appropriation in employing the figure of Ganesh, it's unsurprising that the company discarded their initial idea for Ganesh Versus The Third Reich. "We knew our narrative was morally fraught," says Bruce Gladwin in his program note. "Over time our thinking shifted. Our self-imposed censorship - our reasoning that we should not create the work - became the rationale for bringing it to life."

What is presented instead is a double reality. We see the actors - Mark Deans, Simon Laherty, Scott Price and Brian Tilley - and director David Woods creating their Holocaust fairytale. When we walk in, the stage is a working studio littered with tables, ladders and other miscellaneous mess, with a row of huge curtains tied up at the side of the stage. As the performers argue in a desultory fashion, the director comes in and takes charge.

These glimpses of rehearsal are punctuated by scenes of theatrical spectacle, in which the semi-transparent plastic curtains, painted with silhouetted outlines of trees, houses and other illusions, are drawn across the stage. They are backlit, so performers can be seen in silhouette as well, or are used as a screen for shadow puppetry. The shifts from mundane reality to fairytale are swift, signalled by sound and lighting, and completely transform the stage, so that you are plunged wholly into mythic realities and just as suddenly, almost with a sense of bereftness, dragged out of them.

What is hard to explain is how this rhythm of contrast intensifies into a shattering potency during the show. As in Food Court, the work is an ambush: gestures and relationships which seem of merely mundane importance, or which begin as comic confrontations, inexorably gather emotional force. Subtly and incrementally, connections begin to accrete between the two storylines; for example, David plays Mengele, the Nazi doctor who conducted horrific experiments on, among others, disabled children, and David's very correct treatment of his actors begins to collect sinister undertones.

Perhaps part of this sense of ambush is in how lightly these connections are drawn. The rehearsal scenes are leavened by absurd comedy: Simon, for instance, complaining about his part as one of Mengele's experimental subjects: "It's hard being a Jew." They argue, passionately, about the issue of appropriation. There are sudden and confronting gestures towards the audience: David flinging his hand towards us, as if he is addressing a bank of empty seats, claiming that the audience is just coming to watch "freak porn". As the arguments between the performers intensify, his contempt becomes double-edged, and you begin to wonder if the person most interested in "freak porn" is David himself.

When these arguments explode into violence, the effect is devastating and shocking: the disparate elements and themes of the production suddenly fuse in a wholly unexpected way. The final image is unforgettable. David, tired of his job, tired of these freaks, is left with Mark, who has been the silent focus of many of the cast's arguments. Mark's mother will pick him up later. David, using all his professional skills in people management, deals with the annoyance of Mark by suggesting that they play hide and seek.

Mark hides under the table; David, pretending to look for him, picks up his things, and leaves the room. As the light closes in on him, Mark remains crouched under the table, wriggling with delight at the game, waiting to be found. Even thinking of this moment shakes my heart. It's not simply that this disabled man has been carelessly abandoned by someone who should know better. It's how this apparently trivial gesture becomes, in the deepest and most vulnerable echo chambers of the consciousness, a metaphor for the betrayal of all human hope.

This shows the power and ambiguity, also, of what Back to Back do to the notion of performance. David Woods is the only actor without disability, and his is, in the conventional sense, a brilliant performance. There is no question, at any time, that the rest of the cast isn't making a performance: this is the company's counter-argument to the bitter notion of their being "freak porn". But these actors bring another edge, a sense of perilous exposure that is intensified under Gladwin's impeccably sure direction. I can't think of another company which so foregrounds the knowledge that this work is being made, in each moment, before our eyes: it is a great part of why the audiences becomes so deeply involved.

Back to Back have never had any truck with "special" treatment: their work has a harsh honesty that makes it impossible to patronise. But they also specialise in moments of breath-taking beauty that assert the sheer power of their skills. There are images I won't forget: the impossible poignancy and strangeness, for example, of Ganesh, dressed in a business suit, standing before Hitler, who is played by Simon in a ridiculous knitted Hitler costume. Or an evocation of Indra's net, when a back curtain of stars was lifted to reveal a blazing light, like a sunrise. I've never seen anything like this show, because only Back to Back could make it. They are, simply, our most important independent theatre company.

Picture: David Woods and Brian Tilley in Ganesh Versus The Third Reich. Photo: Jeff Busby

Ganesh Versus The Third Reich, directed, designed and devised by Bruce Gladwin. Lighting design by Andrew Livingston, Bluebottle; design and set construction by Mark Cuthbertson, design and animation Rhian Hinkley, composer Jóhann Jóhannsson. Performed by Mark Deans, Simon Laherty, Scott Price, Brian Tilley and David Woods. Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne Festival and Back to Back Theatre. Merlyn Theatre, Malthouse, until October 9.

Your faithful blogger has been shanghaied by the day job lately, dealing with an editing deadline for my forthcoming novel. (Forthcoming Christmas 2012, that is - lead times are long in the publishing world). And I find, lifting my weary head from the coalface of the imagination, that I've fallen rather behind in my reviews, and this despite steadfastly missing nearly the entire Melbourne Fringe. I'll apologise here to those who invited me personally to their shows - I tried to reply to everyone, but believe me when I say that my inbox exploded. And I know I missed some worthy events. Perhaps my biggest regret is Nicola Gunn's At The Sans Hotel, at La Mama, which I meant to see last Sunday. That plan was derailed by a migraine, another regular pothole in the Croggon road to enlightenment. The spirit is willing, etc...


Despite my most cunning attempts at theatre evasion, I was still lured to three shows. Clybourne Park at the Melbourne Theatre Company opened two weeks ago, which demonstrates how tardy I am. The other two are the first harbingers of the Melbourne Festival, which officially opens tomorrow. (Expect TN's usual blanket Melbourne Festival coverage; I've cleared my desk and will be focusing on being a critic for the next three weeks.) The Malthouse got in early last week with The Border Project's Half-Real and Back to Back's Ganesh Versus The Third Reich. Back to Back's show is an exceptional work, which confirms this company's place as one of the most significant we have; more on that tomorrow later. Half-Real is mostly striking as a missed opportunity. But, first, to Clybourne Park.

Bruce Norris's Pulitzer Prize winner springs from Lorraine Hansberry's groundbreaking 1959 play, A Raisin in the Sun. Hansberry's play is based on the hostile racism (culminating in a lawsuit) that she experienced during her childhood when her family moved to a white neighbourhood in Chicago. It follows the fortunes of the Youngers family as they attempt to move into the middle class, along the way exposing the mechanics of North American racism, especially as expressed through the housing market. In A Raisin in the Sun, the family buys a house in a suburb called Clybourne Park: and this is where Bruce Norris picks up the story.

The first act of Clybourne Park, also set in 1959, is almost Ayckbournian in how it fills in the "other" side of Hansberry's play, although Australian audiences, unlike American theatre goers, will miss most of the cross-textual references. It begins as Russ (Greg Stone) and Bev (Alison Whyte), haunted by the suicide of their war veteran son, are selling their house in Clybourne Park.

When it becomes known that it has been bought by a black family, all hell breaks loose: their neighbours, who claim to be all very tolerant of black people in their place, are horrified by the thought of their being next door. Community leader Karl (Patrick Brammall), a take on A Raisin in the Sun's character Karl Lindner, even offers the family money to buy elsewhere. The second act is set in the same house fifty years later. Clybourne Park has in the meantime become a black neighbourhood, and now the new white gentry are moving back in, thoughtlessly obliterating a complex history.

This juxtaposition permits Norris to make mordant fun of liberal hypocrisies, exploring how little has changed in American social relations. Aside from race, its major question is the place of memory and history in a world defined by the marketplace. It's a conventional realist play, with nods to the expressionist theatre of Arthur Miller as well as situation comedy and farce. And it's strikingly well written: while it never reaches the heights, say, of Death of a Salesman, it's rare to see a play this well crafted, and that goes a long way to dispel the inevitable mustiness of its form.

The production is as well-crafted as the play itself: it's beautifully lit by Matt Scott, with a simple and effective set design from Christina Smith and an unobtrusive but evocative sound design from Jethro Woodward. Director Peter Evans brings together an exceptional cast, who ably negotiate the various levels at play in the text. The tone shifts with blinding swiftness from farce to robust comedy to tragedy, and the actors step nimbly and exactly from one to the other, with such skill that you barely notice the artifice.

It's truly an ensemble effort, but to pick out some highlights: Greg Stone as the depressive Russ handles the role's miserable aggression with wit and force and, in the end, moving humanity. We've long known that Bert Labonté (Albert/Kevin) is one of our best stage comedians, but I had no idea Zahra Newman (Francine/Lena) could be so funny. Given that I've seen her playing the title role in Elektra, and more recently in Debbie Tucker-Green's stunning one-woman play Random, this woman is blazing a trail as one of our most complete actors. And Patrick Brammall's Karl is a comic jewel. I often come out of these kinds of plays badly needing some artificial stimulants, but I really enjoyed this.


The main question bouncing around after the premiere of The Border Project's Melbourne Festival offering Half-Real was: why? Anyone wanting to prove the popular thesis that video games and art are an incompatible mix will find their prejudices amply affirmed by this show. Its successes - mainly in Geoff Cobham, Michael Marner and Chris More's fascinating digital design - only highlight how badly Sam Haren's production misses the mark.

The premise is that a woman has been murdered. Audience members, furnished with a Wii-like controller (minus buttons), are invited to investigate aspects of the crime by voting to choose which aspects of character or event they would like to witness, thereby "solving" (or not - my audience certainly didn't) the murder. While it was kind of fun waving the controller and seeing if your choice got up, it's fair to say that the novelty palls.

Half-Real's basic choose-your-own-adventure format is the first problem: as productions like LA Noire or Heavy Rain demonstrate, videogames outgrew simplistic narrative structures years ago. They offer far more sophisticated experiences, with morally complex stories and deeply designed environments. But even the most basic shoot'em up offers player choice and participation in ways that theatre is challenged to match: within a guided structure the player controls every action, not simply, as here, which chunk of story they wish to witness. And games are not confined by theatrical limitations of time.

Immersive theatre has been the buzz phrase over the past few years, with companies such as the UK's Punchdrunk leading the way. And there's continuing discussion about the formal possibilities interactive digital technologies offer for theatre. For my part, it's easy to see why writers might be excited about exploring the narrative structures pioneered by games. It's not a big step from the complex interactivity of games to, say, the aleatory playfulness of John Cage or even (as is teasingly hinted in Duncan Graham's text) the kinds of oblique narratives imagined by a writer like Roberto Bolaño.

Half-Real, however, only demonstrates the limitations of a by-the-numbers story. There's little evidence that the concept was thought through beyond the superficial details of structure: what such an approach could mean for theatre itself is barely examined. As a consequence, we get neither the best of theatre nor the best of gaming: instead of an imaginative collision of different forms, we get a reduced vision of both of them.

The impressive aspect is the design, in which projections transform an angled set into different environments. Digital characters are represented as shadows which are voiced by actors standing off-stage, and interact seamlessly with the actors. It's ingenious and sometimes beautiful. This is let down by DJ TRIP's sound design, which is almost a parody of bad videogame music. But even an actor as good as Amber McMahon can't rescue the banality of the story or, more profoundly, of the concept.

Pictures: top: (L-R) Patrick Brammall, Laura Gordon, Bert Labonté and Zahra Newman in Clybourne Park, photo Jeff Busby; bottom, David Heinrich in Half-Real. Photo: Steve Tilling

Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris, directed by Peter Evans. Set and costumes by Christina Smith, lighting design by Matt Scott, composition by Jethro Woodward. With Greg Stone, Alison Whyte, Zahra Newman, Luke Ryan, Bert Labonté, Patrick Brammall and Laura Gordon. Melbourne Theatre Company @ the Sumner Theatre, until October 26.

Half-Real, by Duncan Graham, directed by Sam Haren. Design consultant Geoff Cobham, lighting design by Chris Petridis, video art by Chris More, video system design by Michael Marner, composition by DJ TRIP (Tyson Hopprich). With David Heinrich, Alirio Zavarce and Amber McMahon. The Tower, Malthouse Theatre, until October 15.

For four decades, Michael Leunig's savage and wistful universe has been one of the constants of Australian popular culture. His cartoons were a ubiquitous part of my childhood. Back in the 1970s he was still working for the lamented Nation Review, and I saw many of his cartoons for the first time in its pages - that is, until my father cancelled our subscription after a particularly pornographic review of a Cocteau film.

It seemed that a copy of The Penguin Leunig was in every Australian household. My sisters and I spent hours flipping through it, staring with wonder and hilarity at the Moomba princess strung by her toothy smile on the telegraph wires, the powdered ladies, the nose polisher.  We laughed at those mute, comic animals and the strange erotic encounters that imbued us with a mysterious sexual thrill we were too young to understand. I think we did understand, however vaguely, his darker visions, in which his wavering, fragile line revealed human beings minced in an economic machine, alienated from each other and themselves in an atomised world.

In Look Right Through Me, Kage, Kage's Kate Denborough collaborates with Leunig, leaping off many of his best-loved cartoons to create a darkly beautiful work of physical theatre. She has resisted the temptation to literally illustrate them, instead looking to translate the imagery of his imaginative world into the languages of theatre.

As with her sensitive work Headlock, which played at the Malthouse five years ago, this is a meditation on masculinity. Look Right Through Me is a manifestation of Leunig's inner world. It's a series of dreamlike sequences that move from mental imprisonment to freedom, driven by a score by Jethro Woodward that embraces, like Leunig's cartoons, the lyrical and the absurd.

Julie Renton's set, lit by Rachel Burke, puts a chainlink and barbed wire barrier between the stage and the audience. Behind it, on a darkened set lit by revolving amber lights, are a number of Leunig-like constructions: an abstract tree, a rowing boat which rears up over some small models of ducks, a bed head, a ladder. At the back is a kind of cubby house, in which there lives a small boy. At the beginning of the show, he wanders out and hangs a sign on the corrugated iron fence at the back of the stage: "Dreams will be towed away". This is, of course, a reference to Leunig's famous cartoon of the drunk in the gutter.

The world revealed here is not so much one of inner-city harshness, but rather the squalor of the suburbs: it explores a more spacious kind of desolation. The central performer, Timothy Ohl, and the child who echoes him - reflections of each other, but separate - move through a bewildering and often cruel world. The performance moves towards a reuniting with innocence, a stepping away from the seductions of alienation.

The other four dancers - three men and a woman - dramatise the man's encounters through several sequences that leap from particular cartoons. There are familiar images - a man resting in a tree, or lying in a bed sprouting grass, or a grotesque carnival - but these are occasions for investigation rather than illustration, an explication of masculine vulnerability and lostness. The danger of such an adaptation is that Leunig's fragile ethos, which always teeters on the edge of sentimentality, might be coarsened in the theatre into mere bathos. Denborough and her collaborators avoid this by making it very much its own work.

The movement itself is a mixture of dance and circus, with an exciting feeling of physical risk. In its lyrical gestures and its reach towards a naked emotional expression, some of the performance is strongly reminiscent of Pina Bausch, whose Cafe Mueller I coincidentally watched the night after seeing Look Right Through Me. This is especially true of a sequence in which Fiona Cameron flings her arms about Ohl and is repeatedly dragged away by the other performers. Thinking about Bausch, whose sense of rhythm was scrupulous, highlights the uncertainties in the dramaturgy: there are moments when the action on stage seems to splinter into dislocated elements and loses its energy, or when its repetitions cease to enrich its language. But these longueurs are balanced by some riveting moments of dance.

Pictures: Look Right Through Me. Photos: Jeff Busby

Look Right Through Me, conceived and directed by Kate Denborough, creative collaborator Michael Leunig. Designed by Julie Renton, lighting design by Rachel Burke, music composed by Jethro Woodward. Co-devised and performed by Craig Barry, Fiona Cameron, Timothy Ohl, Cain Thompson, Gerard Van Dyck, Oscar Wilson and Declan Edwards. Malthouse Theatre and Kage at the Merlyn, until September 18.

The notion of "authenticity" in art has whiskers all over it. Art, by definition, is artifice, mimicry, representation: at its most achieved, it can perhaps aspire to be authentically fake. It's entirely possible that the rest is marketing: celebrity didn't just start with Paris Hilton, after all. This generates one of the central paradoxes of art: what makes art matter, to those who encounter it as well as those who make it, is a quality that can best be called truthfulness. It's that quality, wherever it exists, which calls up the immediate sense of recognition that makes a work resonant. It goes through you, like wine through water, and changes the colour of your soul.


It is a quality at home in any form, and therefore as indefinable as it is recognisable. I've found it in work as diverse as the alternative realities of Ursula Le Guin or the astonishing visual poems of Cy Twombly; in HD's reconstructed etymologies or Beckett's astringent theatrical sculptures or, most recently, in Antonio Tarbucchi's novels. It's in Pessoa's multiple identities as much as in the passionate fakeries of Picasso's paintings. This quality might, as Viktor Shklovsky hints, come down to something as simple as the changes registered in a work of art, its movement from one state to another, mimicking similar psychic and physical states within wider human experience. Whatever it is, it is experienced as a sense of truthfulness: and in a work of art, no matter how difficult or tragic the truth might be that it communicates, that is a joyous experience.

Authenticity and truthfulness are not the same thing, although they're often confused. While truthfulness emerges from within the work itself, authenticity is a kind of certificate, an extrinsic guarantee that the work is, in some way, "genuine". In literature, for example, the author is often the guarantor, feeding a public hunger for the authentic that somehow elides the whole question of fictional truthfulness or even imagination. This is, of course, the primary reason for literary hoaxes like Helen Demidenko or Norma Khouri.

Namatjira, which opened last week at the Malthouse after a hugely successful Sydney season at Belvoir St, plays authenticity against truthfulness in deeply revealing ways. I haven't seen a lot of Big hArt's work, but it's an exemplary maker of community theatre, and one of the most interesting companies working in Australia. I first encountered Big hArt with the production Ngapartji Ngapartji, which featured in the 2006 Melbourne Festival, and later saw a moving documentary on their community work in the Northcott Housing Project in Sydney, which resulted in a Sydney Festival performance called Sticky Bricks.

Big hArt's headline festival performances are the publicly visible part of much larger long-term community engagements. Namatjira, which narrates the story of the hugely popular Aboriginal painter Albert Namatjira, is one aspect of a community project in Hermannsburg, Central Australia which, as the program note explains, "is designed to leave lasting legacies beyond this touring performance". It's this profound level of engagement which gives the production its sense of authenticity: for example, this story is told with Namatjira's grandchildren, Kevin and Lenie Namatjira, on stage. They are both painters themselves, and throughout the show, with fellow painters and family members Elton, Hilary and Kevin Wirri, work on the massive chalk drawings of country, representations of Namatjira's own paintings, that constitute the background of the set.

Such careful signals of a work's authenticity can set off all sorts of warning signals. When work like this is presented in the privileged, middle class setting of a theatre, it risks being merely worthy, served up with a sense of piety that replaces vitality and, worst of all, art itself. I don't deny there's an element of piety somewhere in the work, as well as in its reception, but mostly this is exploded with comedy, the mischievous parodying of precisely those careful contemporary proprieties. Big hArt are upfront about seeking connection with their audiences, and in their oscillation between these contradictory qualities of truthfulness and authenticity, this is what they achieve. The key is the art.

Namatjira, written and directed by Scott Rankin, is a supple mediation between the artifice of theatre - highlighted in the charismatic central performance of Trevor Jamieson, the major narrator, and his offsider Derik Lynch - and the realities that the story of Namatjira reveals, signalled by the presence of his inheritors on stage. Into this are layered the mediations of painting itself. The performance unfolds in what is effectively a giant, dynamic work of visual art.

As the audience enters, Robert Hannaford is hard at work on stage, painting a portrait of Trevor Jamieson, who sits patiently as the artist darts back and forth from the canvas to his palette. This is an allusion to Sir William Dargie's famous portrait of Namatjira, but it's also, quite clearly, a portrait in its own right of the actor who is playing Namatjira. Before a word is spoken, we are already in a complex world of representation.

The performance modulates into song and music - lush choral songs from the Lutheran Mission, country and western parodies, and Genevieve Lacey's haunting recorder compositions, played live on stage. It's a contemporary take on old-fashioned story telling, and irresistibly seductive: within ten minutes, Jamieson has his audience eating out of his hand.

The story itself is a fascinating fable of colonial Australia, at once tragic and hopeful. It starts with Namatjira's parents and his childhood on a Lutheran Mission in Central Australia, his meeting with his friend and mentor Rex Battarbee, and his decision to begin painting to feed his rapidly growing family. Then there's Namatjira's extraordinary fame and wealth at a time when Aboriginal people were still considered part of Australia's flora and fauna, and his subsequent exploitation by both whites and blacks (he supported his entire 600 member community). He was the first Aboriginal given citizenship, although this honour was conferred so he could be taxed.

There are also the various rip-offs - his desperate selling of his copyright, his unsuccessful bid to buy a cattle station - which demonstrated that, for all his fame, he was still a second-class citizen. And there was his old age, culminating in the humiliation of his unjust imprisonment to hard labour after an alcohol-related crime in his community for which he was considered responsible, and which broke and killed him.

The show is careful to pay attention to complexities: Namatjira was a victim of the conflicts that resulted from his stepping between both cultures. Here the depth and complexity of personal relationships are set against the blank impersonality of institutional racism: the friendship of Rex and Albert and their mutual exchange of knowledge becomes a glimpse of a lost possibility that the company itself seeks to resurrect in its work. It's not so far from what historian James Boyce described as "indigenising", a process in which a white underclass learned from black knowledge. It created a new way of living in this country, and was often violently repressed by colonial authorities. In the utopian space of theatre, this possibility is ignited as a hope for something better.

The word is never said, but Namatjira is an enactment of reconciliation. For one thing, it's a show consciously directed towards a white audience. White attitudes to Aboriginality are gently mocked, but this is never alienating; instead, mischievously, it invites its audience into its world. The fact that the production manages to do this without a trace of false sentiment, moralising or special pleading is a tribute to how artfully its makers step through the political minefield of this kind of community-based work. It's feel-good theatre that generates an answering goodwill in its audience, a sudden generosity of possibility. And that's a rare thing to witness.


Tim Winton's first play, Rising Water, is another vision of Australia, in its own way as artfully positioned as Big hArt's. Let's make no mistake: both these productions are unashamedly directed at mainstream audiences, and in their own ways are equally manipulative (as all art, in fact, is). But Rising Water, like Winton's novels, carefully shows us the Australia we would like to imagine, or at least, would like to talk about over our dinner tables. The artfulness here, rather than disarming me, made my teeth ache.

Rising Water is set on Australia Day, on three boats moored at a Perth marina on which live three different middle-aged characters, Col (Goeff Kelso), Baxter (John Howard) and Jackie (Alison Whyte). They all have secrets which are gradually revealed through the show. They are all stuck in the backwater of their lives, wondering how to go on. They all represent various aspects of Australia, or the Australian character (the action takes place on Australia Day, with various nationalistic tics going on in the background). Variously, they provide occasions for critiquing contemporary materialism, via WA Inc or the rapacious consumerism of suburbia, or nationalism, or change.

There are some secondary characters, played by Stuart Halusz, and a mysterious boy (Louis Corbett) floating around in a boat, whom at first I thought was a Ghost of Childhood Lost or somesuch, until in the second act he turned out to be a character too, with his own monologues. And lastly there's the young British backpacker (Claire Lovering) who sparks the action of the play. Foul-mouthed and drunk, with "Pogrom" (the name of a band, apparently) tattooed on her back, she represents what has happened to the Mother Country.

It feels like a thoroughly colonial work, in a way that Namatjira - which is wholly concerned with colonisation - totally manages to avoid. Even its diction seems like a colonial derivation of something else. Perhaps Winton's attention to a certain idea of authentic Australianness means it never feels quite truthful. Among other things, the play is about nostalgia, but at the same time the writing itself seems to be crippled by nostalgia. It is curiously old-fashioned, like a play written about fifty years ago.

The structure consists of dialogues punctuated by long reflective monologues, with moments of theatrical poetic usually signalled by the presence of the Boy. Winton gives us a kind of cod Tennessee Williams with Australian accents, only without the Williams pathos and passion. Most of the time, it's clear that this is a novelist's play: the language tends to the descriptive rather than performative. There's not a lot of sense that language is an act, a necessary understanding for writing in the theatre. This transformation does occur sometimes in Winton's dialogues, and when it does, the difference is palpable.

Kate Cherry's production is a suitably lyrical rendition in a minor key, with silhouettes of masts against a changing sky and the water itself represented by a highly polished black floor. The central performance, John Howard's Baxter, is hugely enjoyable, and makes the most of the text. Baxter is in fact the only character to whom anything happens; everyone else just witnesses it happening to him, doing a kind of psychological striptease along the way.

Given my reservations, and they are considerable, Rising Water wasn't nearly as bad as it might have been. For all its dramaturgical vagueness and its pandering to the dinner-party-fodder aspect of culture, I feel a bit eccentric for confessing that I was sitting there thinking, well, at least the man knows how to write a sentence. There are a few playwrights who could learn that skill to their benefit.

Pictures: Top: Trevor Jamieson in Namatjira. Photo: Brett Boardman. Bottom: Alison Whyte and John Howard in Rising Water. Photo: Gary Marsh

Namatjira by Scott Rankin, created with the Namatjira family. Set design Genevieve Dugard, composer and music director Genevieve Lacey, costumes by Tess Schofield, lighting designe by Nigel Levings, sound design by Tim Atkins With Trevor Jamieson, Robert Hannaford, Derik Lynch, Kevin Namatjira, Lenie Namatjira, Michael Peck, Elton Wirri, Hilary Wirri, Kevin Wirri. Malthouse Theatre and Big hArt, until August 28.

Rising Water by Tim Winton, directed by Kate Cherry. Costumes and set by Christina Smith, lighting by Matt Scott, sound design and composition Iain Grandage. With Geoff Kelso, John Howard, Alison Whyte, Claire Lovering, Stuart Halusz and Louis Corbett. Black Swan State Theatre Company at Melbourne Theatre Company, Arts Centre Playhouse, until September 10.

We all know some variation or other of this feeling. You are alone, it is dark. You hear an almost inaudible sound, just on the edge of hearing, that you can't quite identify. Your body is shocked into a state of hyper-alertness: adrenaline floods through your bloodstream like a rush of cold water. Your ears strain into the busy silence. You hear it again. Or maybe you don't hear it, maybe it's just the sound of your heart beating in your ears.

This is the imaginative landscape of Tamara Saulwick's exemplary Pin Drop. Saulwick recorded interviews with a number of women in which they were asked to describe experiences in which they felt unsafe. In Pin Drop she weaves the stories together into a sound poem of recorded and performed voices. The stories - some unexpected and funny, some sinister, all candid - lead into some surprising places, far from the tabloid sensationalism that loves an eroticised female victim. Saulwick is not so much interested in violence itself, as in the experience of fear and threat.


A sense of terrifying estrangement is a staple of horror films, in which the familiar and domestic is transformed into the strange and threatening. It is also a commonplace of torture: part of torture's world-destruction entails ordinary objects - telephone books or broomsticks - becoming agents of pain or humiliation. But this ambiguity wouldn't hold its power if it were not part of the fabric of our urban lives: it is the cusp between solitude and our social selves, where anything might erupt over the lip of possibility. Realities of assault or robbery or rape feed this anxiety, but are not the whole of it: it is also a shadow in ourselves. Whether a threat is actual or not, our vulnerability is real: we realise in these moments how fragile we are, how mortal, and, perhaps, how dangerous we might be. As one woman says, it's in such moments that she realises that she is capable of murder.

This investigation becomes the occasion for an extremely powerful work of sensory theatre. One of the striking things about Pin Drop is how very real it seems: its power stems, at least in part, from a careful attention to the fragmentary and contradictory nature of experience. It makes you remember afresh how much fear shapes our lives: we put locks on doors, walk fast in night streets, never appear to be lost in foreign cities. It's a constant bluff designed to ward off the Bogeyman, who may or may not be there.

It is primarily driven by Peter Knight's remarkable sound design. Bluebottle's set and lighting are a platform for Knight's compositions - looped sounds and voices, pulsing electronics, taut silences. The sound envelops the audience, resonating in our breast bones but also making us acutely aware of the space around us: footsteps echo coldly as they move around the perimeter of the auditorium, voices and sounds erupt from different corners, or complete blackouts plunge us into the soundstream of our own blood.

The very simple elements employed so ingeniously here - a stage within a stage, smoke, darkness, light and sound - powerfully call up your own memories of fear or threat. The theatre becomes, quite nakedly, a kind of psychic echo chamber. There is an invitation in the very bareness of the gestures: the manipulations offered here are all completely exposed. One sequence involves Saulwick using a series of objects - a door lock, a knife, a water melon - to make a series of amplified noises, that are then treated with feedback. The objects are lit, the rest of the stage is dark. And even though we know exactly how those noises are made, it's surprising how they ratchet up a real sense of anxiety.

Sense memory is a potent thing, and by coolly and precisely accessing mnemonic triggers, Saulwick invokes a parallel theatre in your mind. Pin Drop reminded me of the particular senses of vulnerability that come from being alone in a house with small children, or from obscene anonymous phone calls late at night, or from home robberies and house invasions. It's clear that sexual threat, part of the texture of living as a woman, is a gendered experience, but even though this focuses on the stories of women, it doesn't exclude men: we all are frail in the house of our flesh.

What's less easily explained is the strange, breathless sense of liberation that comes with its aftertaste: perhaps it's as simple as the naming of a fear that is often evoked - we are surrounded by warnings about violence - but which is, in fact, seldom examined. It's remarkable theatre, executed with an exact brilliance that makes its sensual vividness all the more powerful. It's a short season, closing on Saturday, so hurry. This is not to be missed.


Meanwhile, over in Brunswick at the Mechanics Institute Performing Arts Centre, stalwarts Hoy Polloy are performing Frank McGuinness's Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme. This is a strange and terrible text written in the mid-80s, when the IRA and Ulster Loyalists were on the one hand secretly attempting to find a negotiated settlement to Protestant/Catholic warfare, while on the other pursuing an active program of terrorism and assassination. This background is implicit rather than explicit in this play, which observes the intractable violence of Northern Ireland through the lens of the First World War, in which Ulster Loyalists marched, like good Colonial boys, to their own deaths in the service of Empire.

McGuinness presents this political violence, present and past, as neurotic repetition. His anti-hero Kanneth Pyper (played by Ian Rooney as an old man, and by Dan Walls) is haunted by the ghosts of his lost comrades in the 36th Ulster Division, of which he is the only survivor. Pyper moves through the action as a ghost among ghosts, a man in whom possibility is destroyed. It is written with a desolate irony and anger: in its play-acting of empty signifiers - the Loyalist drum-beatings and commemorations of ancient wars - the play reveals these men as lost in a dance of death, each victims of their own misled impulses to heroism and glory.

None of this would count if the heroism wasn't, in its own way, convincing: and each of McGuinness's doomed characters (for even Pyper is dead, by his own admission "changed utterly" on that day in the Somme) has his claim to something admirable, a sense of courage or hope or capacity for love. The central story is, in fact, the love story between Pyper and David Craig (Nicholas Brien), showing what is destroyed by the black and white moral certainties that map the binaries of Protestant and Catholic, male and female, right and wrong, across a landscape of blood.

McGuinness's denunciation of this idea of heroicism - if not of his characters, who are victims of its deathly absolutes - is bitter and scathing. From early on, when a Loyalist soldier boasts of beating up and humiliating a Catholic child, to Anderson and McIllwaine's desperate conjurations of the Loyalist "Holy ground", the Ulster myth is presented as deathly and empty. It's difficult to get a sense of these very specific contexts and passions, those that decimated Ulster in the late 20th century, in a production in Brunswick in 2011, and perhaps unfair to ask. Director Steve Dawson softens these bitter questions to a vague sense of tragic heroism and historical regret, a colonial mythos not unlike that of the film Gallipoli. He presents past violence as it is caught in the amber of history, rather than as present violence that is traumatically re-enacted in an endless Purgatory. So the play feels a little sentimentalised.

The design is striking and effective - the action plays on a stage the shape of a cross, like the cruciform floorplan of a cathedral, with the audience watching from the various edges in traverse. It's a straight-up-and-down production, although there's a puzzlingly placed interval after 40 minutes, one third in, which made me wonder why it isn't played through. For the most part, however, Dawson and his hard-working cast make a good fist of a difficult play, and achieve a rough and admirable sense of honesty. I wish they had left the Irish accents out - often they wandered all over Ireland and the Antipodes. But this a play worth seeing, and which is seldom done. And it demonstrates how powerful writing can be in the theatre. Recommended.

Picture: Top: Tamara Saulwick in Pin Drop. Photo: Ponche Hawkes. Bottom: Nicholas Brien and Dan Walls in Observe the Sons of Ulster. Photo: Fred Kroh

Pin Drop, created and performed by Tamara Saulwick. Composition and sound design by Pater Knight. Movement by Michelle Heaven. Design and production by Bluebottle, Ben Cobham and Frog Peck. Malthouse Theatre @ Beckett Theatre until August 7.

Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, by Frank McGuinness, directed and designed by Steven Dawson. With Ian Rooney, Dan Walls, Nicholas Brien, Angus Brown, Tosh Greenslade, David Passmore, Mathew Gelsumini, Kevin Dee and Karl Cottee. Hoy Polloy, Mechanic Institute Performing Arts Centre, until August 13.

For the first ten minutes or so, I was completely transfixed by Matthew Lutton's theatrical extrapolation of Schubert's late song cycle, Die Winterreise. It is a beautiful idea: the juxtaposition of some of Schubert's most sublime lieder with the experience of a man listening to them in the most mundane of settings. Die Winterreise, set to a poem cycle by Wilhelm Müller, is one of the most emotionally potent works of the Romantic era: its stripped simplicity, lone voice and piano, exposes a raw nerve of feeling which has never dated.


The production begins with the audience looking into profound darkness: it's a black curtain which absorbs all light. This opens to reveal Adam Gardnir's set, a room of astounding shabbiness, recreated in every hyper-real detail, on what is clearly a stiflingly hot summer day. It's a loungeroom dating from about the 1960s, with sliding glass doors at the back, sash windows on either side, a galley kitchen. The walls are moldy, the windows opaque with filth. It speaks of neglect and loneliness: every object, from the lamps to the fan to the kitchen, is old, mismatched, falling apart.

An old man (George Shevtsov) is cooking his dinner, and we can smell the onions frying. The sounds of chopping are amplified, and we begin to understand that this is a subjective reality. He fussily arranges a lace cloth on the table, and puts a vinyl on his stereo. Through the crackles, we hear it is a recording of Schubert. Outside the sliding doors is another kind of space altogether: a continual shower of green foil suggests this is an imagined place. It's a potent image; even if shiny foil is practically copyrighted by Benedict Andrews, and perilous to use, this creates an immediate frisson of strangeness.

A man (Paul Capsis) suddenly appears outside the doors like a ghost and enters the room. Then another (pianist Alister Spence) and, later, another (dancer James O'Hara). As live performance overtakes the recording, Capsis sings the first of the songs while Shevtsov goes about his domestic business. And so the excavation of memory and grief begins.

The danger of directly invoking emotion is, of course, that it can veer into sentimentality, which is the crude obscuring of feeling, rather than its articulation. Die Winterreise, for all its notation of a young man's hopeless love and his subsequent wanderings through a winter landscape, is far from a sentimental work. Alas, this can't be said of Lutton's production, which topples headlong into the trap.

I think the problem begins with the conception: why make this work, so much a young man's composition (it was written shortly before Schubert died at the age of 31) an exploration of old age? We are given a parallel narrative which ends up grasping at the obvious: the mundane and potentially profound experiences of aging and loneliness are explained for us as past trauma. If the production had found the balance between emotional extremity and simple ordinariness of Müller's poems, it might have been riveting: I'm thinking here of something like the devastating simplicity of Franz Xaver Kroetz's short play Request Concert. But that would have required a steady gaze.

For all its musical drama, Die Winterreise is not a dramatic work, and you can't but feel that Lutton overcompensates. On stage, the drama is provided by three earlier selves summoned by the music, each expressive in different artforms: music, song and dance. As is my wont, I'd not read the director's note beforehand, and I found this very unclear: following the lyrics of the songs, I was under the impression for much of the show that the dancer (James O'Hara) was a former lover, rather than a former self. At another point, I thought that Shevtsov was dying of a heart attack. Which would have been okay, except that he wasn't, and I was forced to conclude that he was having some kind of melodramatic crisis instead.

Chrissie Parrot's choreography, however beautifully danced, mostly felt unintegrated with the rest of the production, except in one sequence that shifted from its earlier enactments of neurotic physicalities to a more lyrical expression. One of the more puzzling aspects is Capsis's performance. He sang two of these songs for Barrie Kosky's production of The Lost Echo (and recorded Irrlicht for his album Everybody Wants to Touch Me). I've seen him perform Schubert live before, and can attest to the electric power he can bring to this music. Yet here he seems physically and vocally lost and, despite their being sung in English, the songs lose some of their resonance. Although I confess Capsis's rendition of Irrlicht (Will o'the Wisp), in which the singer declares that all sorrows have an end, still left me in tears.

Perhaps the worst misjudgment is the introduction of an explanatory text, written by Tom Holloway, just before the end. Here the emotional hamfistedness of the production becomes very clear indeed. This monologue lets us in on the story that has informed the previous actions; it is (of course) a traumatic experience of loss, probably during Word War 2, probably in Germany. Suddenly Die Winterreise is enclosed in literalism, which shuts down its emotional openness and metaphorical resonance.

All these seem to me to be errors of feeling, a lack of the emotional accuracy which makes Schubert's songs so powerful. And it's made the more egregious by the promise this show holds. All aspects of its design - lighting, sound design, set - are superb. There are moments of real beauty: perhaps the most striking is when snow that is falling outside, invoking the winter journey of the songs, begins to fall inside the house. But the whole is much less than the sum of its parts.

If you want to see contemporary Romanticism at work in the theatre, you're better off scoring a ticket to Undine, the latest show by those resolutely indie theatre makers Four Larks. This takes place in a big back shed in Brunswick, not far from Moreland Station: you meet at a designated street corner before you are guided through an alleyway to the back of a house, where you are served mulled wine. Which, on the wintry night I attended, was mighty welcome.

Like Die Winterreise, Undine is show driven by music. It draws on a plethora of folk tales and literature which tells of a man falling in love with a water spirit, a theme drawn on by writers from Friedrich de la Motte Fouque (who wrote the major inspiration behind this show) to Hans Christian Anderson to Oscar Wilde. Here an unnamed composer - who is played by three actors (Ben Pfeiffer, Luke Jacka and Paul Bourke) - finds a mute, half-drowned woman (Karen Sibbing) by the edge of the sea, and brings her home. They fall in love, and so the stranger gains both a soul and a voice, until the composer's obsession with his music drives her back to the sea.

This simple story is delivered in a sensual avalanche of music and visuals. The set, designed by Sebastian Peters Lazaro and Ellen Strasser, is extraordinary: it's a detailed domestic interior festooned with pages of music, drenched in an amber light, through one wall of which we can see the band. There is, as one might expect liberal use of water, both as a sound and as a visual cue: it rains from the ceiling, it splashes out of baths and tubs.

The entire play is scored by writer and director Mat Diafos Sweeney (lyrics by co-director Jesse Rasmussen) and the text is delivered almost in the manner of song. The effect is rather as if one of Joanna Newsom's longer narrative songs were transformed into theatre: it has the same kind of tumbling, over the top imagery, the same heightened energy. There is even a harp. The show strikes an emotional pitch very early on and maintains it all the way through, with inventive staging (there's an extremely ingenious reveal) and concentrated performances.

If there's a criticism, it's in the show's uncritical acceptance of the Romantic feminine, the soulless elemental that at once inspires and destroys the male artist: you feel that work this intelligent ought to be a little more self aware. But that's a quibble after the fact. It's a signal step forward from the last production I saw, Peer Gynt, which had an air of theatrical naivety this one doesn't possess. It's exciting to see this company so confidently developing its own theatrical language. Certainly, no one in Melbourne is making theatre quite like this.

Die Winterreise, featuring songs by Franz Schubert, conceived and directed by Matt Lutton. Original text by Tom Holloway. Choreography by Chrissie Parrott, set and costumes by Adam Gardnir, original composition and sound design by Kelly Ryall, lighting design by Paul Jackson. With Paul Capsis, James O'Hara, George Shvtsov and Alister Spence. Malthouse Theatre and ThinIce, Merlyn Theatre until July 31.

Undine, written and directed by Mat Diafos Sweeney and Jesse Rasmussen, Movement direction by Sebastian Peter-Lazaro. Set by Sebastian Peters-Lazaro and Ellem Starsser, lighting feisng by Nicola Andrews and Tom Willis, costumes by Mallory Gross. Musicians: Adam Casey, Genevieve Fry, Caleb Latreille, Esala Liyonage, Prudence Rees-Lee, Lisa Salvo and Mat Diafos Sweeney. Performed by Ben Pfeiffer, Luke Jacka, Paul Bourke and Karen Sibbing. Singer: Linsday Cooper. Four Larks Theatre until July 30. Bookings: 0423 863 336.

*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.

Last Wednesday, Lally Katz's A Golem Story and Robert Reid's The Joy of Text premiered at the Malthouse and the MTC. The same week, the Malthouse opened its remount of Declan Greene's 2010 hit, Moth. Meanwhile at the MTC, Joanna Murray-Smith's The Gift is running at the MTC's Sumner Theatre, and tonight Ian Wilding's new play The Water Carriers opens at the Lawler Studio. At the moment, Melbourne's main stage theatres are exclusively devoted to new Australian work.


Has this ever happened before? If it has, I missed it. For this reason, and not without a certain astonishment, it's worth sticking a small, patriotic and ironically tasteful flag in June 2011 and admiring the view from the hill. Well done, MTC and Malthouse: despite all the commercial wisdoms that mitigate against producing contemporary Australian plays, together you've curated a mini-showcase of new writing, flung a spotlight on it, and put it out there.

Last week's openings are noteworthy: they're all well worth seeing, and they're all very different from one another. (Discussion of A Golem Story will follow in a separate post, because it started going on, and on...) Katz, Reid and Greene all grew up in Melbourne's independent theatre scene: Katz developed most of her early work with Chris Kohn and Stuck Pigs Squealing, while Reid had, and Greene has, their own companies, respectively Theatre in Decay and Sisters Grimm.

It's a point worth noting: these playwrights learned how to do it just as Shakespeare did, by writing plays, finding collaborators and putting them on. They put them on in carparks (and sometimes in cars), in tiny alternative venues, under the umbrella perhaps of institutions such as Theatre Works or the Melbourne Fringe or the Store Room, sometimes with money, often with no funding at all. They didn't ask permission, and they created audiences.

Moth, a co-production by Malthouse and Arena Theatre, is unquestionably the pick of the bunch. This is exquisite theatre: in my view one of the most accomplished new plays of the past few years, here given a superbly restrained and devastatingly powerful production by Chris Kohn. This is a remount of last year's sell-out production, and what I said the first time round still holds: it's a play notable for its needle-sharp accuracy, its sure theatricality and its unforgiving emotional honesty.

Its conceit - a retelling by two friends, Claryssa (Sarah Ogden) and Sebastian (Thomas Conroy) of a traumatic incidence of schoolyard persecution and subsequent breakdown - is both ingenious and cleverly maintained, but its heart-cracking power exists in our understanding that this retelling is impossible: reality, it tells us, is different from what we hope.

As enactment, Moth has a sense of the un-illusioned redemption Allen Ginsberg grasps in Kaddish, his great poem of mourning for his mentally ill mother Naomi: "Work of the merciful Lord of poetry, / that causes the broken grass to be green, or the rock to break in grass - the Sun to be constant to Earth - sun of all sunflowers and days on bright iron bridges..." Suspended in the force of this impossible longing, the tragedy of madness - in all its horror, obscene comedy and abjection - opens as an unhealed wound. The truth of that unhealedness is the only redemption there is: it's the ferocity of the desire that things be otherwise that most tellingly reveals its pain.

This production demonstrates the value of remounting work. The premiere was hugely impressive: this time round, with a new cast member replacing Dylan Young, I was struck by the beautiful detailing of Ogden and Conroy's performances: every moment thought through and articulated, every gesture accurate. Each aspect of the design - Jethro Woodward's soundscape, Jonathan Oxlade's set, Rachel Burke's lighting - unobstrusively strokes in texture and contrast. I don't remember the script well enough to know how it's changed, but its fragmentations seemed sharper to me, the comedy more telling, the action more lucid. Small, but perfectly formed.


The Joy of Text, on at the Fairfax, is another kettle of sardines altogether. Robert Reid has clearly considered a major problem of contemporary art: how do you deal with complex ideas and simultaneously find a wide audience? "It is not enough to simply preach to the converted," he says in a program note. "If it is not kept open and accessible to us all, cultural discussion risks becoming obsessively self-referential and irrelevant to all but a narrow band of self-elected cultural elites." Quite.

Reid's solution is to take a popular generic form and remodel it to his own ends: in this case, farce. The Joy of Text is a satire on language and authority, and examines how language, far from being a vehicle for truth, creates its own destabilising realities. Here traditional reason and authority grapple with irrationality and inauthenticity. It's no accident that it's set in a school, where authority and anarchy regularly meet and attempt to discipline each other: nor that the play's title spins off a famous 1970s sex manual.

From its opening scene, in which the acting head master Steve (Peter Houghton) and English teacher Diane (Louise Silverson) have an argument about syntax, it's clear that we are in a parallel reality close to, but by no mean identical with, our own. For one thing, people speak in perfect sentences, like Samuel Johnson. I've never been a teacher, but somehow I doubt that most of the staff-room conversation concerns itself with the finer points of grammar, debating favourite authorities. They're mighty creaky ones too - Fowler's A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926) and Strunk and White's Elements of Style (1918) - which place the arguing teachers in a fustian, outmoded matrix of authority, of certainty shored up by textual jurisdiction about correct modes of behaviour.

This mode of authority meets its nemesis in the persons of a bright student, Danny (James Bell), and an ambitious young teacher, Ami (Helen Christinson), both of whom represent different models of inauthenticity. Danny appears first in an argument with Ami, where he is heatedly accusing her of humiliating him in front of the class. Asked to deliver an essay on satire, his assignment consists of a copy-and-paste of the Wikipedia entry on Jonathan Swift. Ami is not impressed by his argument that his essay is a performance of satire itself ("We are all Lilliputians!) and Danny retires, hurt and vengeful.

Meanwhile, Ami's identity is called into question when Diane decides to put The Illusion of Consent - a book written by a 16-year-old schoolgirl which details her alleged affair with a teacher - on the school syllabus. Ami is fiercely against it, claiming that the book is a fiction by a girl seeking attention, and pointing out that the publication of the book led to the teacher's suicide. When Steve casually gives the book to Danny to read, Danny (in an unlikely feat of textual scholarship) deduces that the book's author is Ami herself. And then, pursuing his performative method of learning, he re-enacts scenes from the book with various teachers, spreading chaos and confusion.

Farce, the most self-conscious of theatrical modes, is in fact the perfect form for a satire of language - it is all about confused identity, self-destructing authority and sexual shenanigans. Joe Orton took farce to a logical conclusion, becoming, as the critic CW Bigsby said, a "crucial embodiment of the post modernist impulse": "by means of farce he gives expression to the conviction of a dislocated self, of a reified experience, of a brittle and contingent language". Here Reid takes that post modernist impulse and makes it explicit.

Marx's famous dictum about history repeating itself, "the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce", is not wholly inappropriate here: the first time the teacher shoots himself, the second time the teachers, as a result of the first event, find themselves lost in a maze of bureacracy, definitions of "appropriate behaviour" and uncertainty.

Reid's play is an often brilliant, and very funny, enactment of all these ideas: the first act steps through a minefield of uncertainty with a deft theatrical wit. The second act, in which all these energies reach their various climaxes, collides with an impulse hostile to the suspensions of farce and somehow collapses under its own weight.

Behind this is a desire that these characters be relatable, that we identify with them and feel sympathy with them: a laudable desire for human emotion to emerge from these alienating language games. Characters in farce provoke interest and hilarity for different reasons: because they are absurd, because the unremitting logic of their behaviour inexorably leads them into chaos. Act Two changes gear into something more akin to naturalism (with the odd reference to tragedy), and Reid hasn't quite managed the marriage of these opposing impulses in his text or, I suspect, in his ideas. It feels grafted in, rather than an evolution from the premises of the first act.

For all that, it's a very enjoyable production. Aidan Fennessy's direction straddles, somewhat uncomfortably, the contradictions of the text, approaching it primarily as farce; the actors deal with the stage business very well, but then are left with the difficulty of creating empathic characters out of these brittle theatrical constructions. Houghton as the morose acting head master, both panic stricken by his temporary authority and longing for its status, manages this best of all the cast, although I liked Louise Siversen's astringent Diane. And Andrew Bailey's multilevel institutional set places the action gloriously in a mundane, utterly recognisable present which, fascinatingly, works best of all in the dislocations of the first act.

Pictures: top: Sarah Ogden and Dylan Young in Moth; bottom, James Bell and Peter Houghton in Joy of Text. Photo: Jeff Busby

Moth, by Declan Greene, directed by Chris Kohn. Designed by Jonathan Oxlade, lighting design by Rachel Burke, video design by Domenico Bartolo, composition and sound design Jethro Woodward. With Thomas Conroy and Sarah Ogden. Malthouse Theatre and Arena Theatre Company, Beckett Theatre at the Malthouse, until June 25.

The Joy of Text by Robert Reid, directed by Aidan Fennessy. Sets and costumes by Andrew Bailey, lighting design by Matt Scott, composition by David Franzke. With James Bell, Helen Christinson, Peter Houghton and Louise Siversen. Melbourne Theatre Company @ the Fairfax Studio, until July 23.