First, an apology of sorts: Ms TN is wearing another couple of hats at present, and has only so much forehead where they can fit. Worse, one of the hats is generating a bunch of psychic static that gets in the way of everything else. The reason I have no time for the argument that claims that criticism is just the same as making art is that, in my experience anyway, art demands everything that criticism does, and then eats your soul as well. Which means that these responses will be brief.

Secondly, a pointer to the 2010 Green Room Awards nominations, which were announced yesterday, prompting a flurry of tweets. Reading through the nominations reminded me how rich 2010 was for Melbourne theatre: so many shows were outstanding. Go thither and form your own thoughts: the winners will be announced on March 21.


Now to the two shows I saw last week. A Behanding in Spokane is Martin McDonagh's first new play for 15 years: as is well known, the six plays that made his name were drafted in a frenzied nine month period in 1994. Here McDonagh has moved his particular brand of Grand Guignol from a fantasy Ireland to a fantasy mid-West: the action is set in a seedy hotel somewhere in America, and revolves around the pathological state of a one-handed man, Carmichael (Colin Moody). His hand was severed by hillbillies 27 year earlier, and ever since, after exacting revenge on his tormentors, he has been searching for his missing appendage. Two young opportunists, Toby (Bert LaBonté) and Marilyn (Nicole da Silva) hear of his quest and attempt to sell him a hand to make a quick buck - but it is, of course, the wrong hand.

The play is basically about Toby and Marilyn's subsequent attempts to escape from the hotel room after the deal goes pear-shaped, with occasional interruptions from the bellhop Mervyn (Tyler Coppin), a man who has turned disappointment and indifference into an art form. It's swift, funny and black-humoured: a neatly structured four-hander which turns its theatrical tricks with style. It's a shiny version of Sam Shepard's early plays, with the sharper edges of Shepard's dark excavations of the American Dream rounded off: less memorable and strange, and concomitantly less interesting. But there's no doubt it's fun.

What's of note here is Peter Evans's production. From Christina Smith's angled stage-within-a-stage, lavishly draped with red curtains that reveal a hotel room of staggering squalor, to the pitch-perfect performances to Ben Grant's ominous sound design, it's a winner. It takes the absurd premise of the play and turns it into high comedy, stylishly meta-theatrical, holding the balance of belief in a sure hand. On the one hand, we know these characters are fantasies: on the other, in the magic box of the theatre, they generate their own compelling realism.

The performances are, without exception, first class. Colin Moody as Carmichael gives a bravura performance of psychotic obsession, baffled threat in his every footstep, nicely leavened with an undercutting petulance and credulity (some of the funniest dialogue is a phone conversation with his mother). Tyler Coppin equally explores the grotesque with his melancholy "reception guy", who is, like Carmichael, arrested in a permanent state of distorted adolescent fantasy. Both characters are much more childish than the two young people, whose comparative rationality and ordinariness plays against the grotesquerie of Mervyn and Carmichael: LaBonté and da Silva play their characters more or less straight, with just enough exaggerated edge.

The play was accused of racism in its US outing, and it's easy to see why: Carmichael is a white supremacist and the word "nigger" flies around freely. Mostly it was criticised for its stereotypical portrayal of black maleness. In this reading at least, the play seems more a piss-take on racism: LaBonté's characterisation certainly lifts Toby past crude caricature. If anything, it could be accused of sexism, since the least interesting role is the woman's: Marilyn exists mostly as a foil to the other characters, although Da Silva makes the most of the little she has. Each character is in fact a graphically sketched cartoon, but this production finds the life in them.

Richard Pettifer's No-Show (sadly, closed after a short season at La Mama) is at the other end of the theatrical spectrum. As Pettifer explains in his program, it came about because he "had a show fall over a few weeks ago" and made this show to replace it. The no show was a play called Smudged by Megan Twycross, which made a brief appearance at the Brisbane Festival before foundering on the rocks of theatrical difference.

Out of this catastrophe, Pettifer makes a poignant work of anti-theatre. As with all anti-theatre, the focus is on the immediate presence of the performer and the audience as the bedrock of theatrical experience. He is, as it were, surrounded by the rags of the absent show: the set is four chairs labelled with the names of the absent performers, and during the course of the 50 minutes he dons one costume after another, explaining what each character was meant to do. It's irresistibly reminiscent of Forced Entertainment's Spectacular, which I saw in 2009, but with this difference: where Spectacular left me with an empty sense that I'd been had, this show takes off the aesthetic protection and exposes something real and human about the risk that is theatre.

I'm going to cheat now and refer you to The Blogger Formerly Known As Neandellus, Andrew Furhman, who discusses this show with more thoughtfulness and intelligence than I can presently summon. Essential reading about theatre, failure and the avoidance of failure in two posts, here and here, at Primitive Surveys.

Picture: Colin Moody in A Behanding at Spokane. Photo: Jeff Busby

A Behanding at Spokane by Martin McDonagh, directed by Peter Evans. designed by Christina Smith, lighting by Matt Scott, sound design by Ben Grant. With Tyler Coppin, Nicole da Silva, Bert LaBonté and Colin Moody. Sumner Theatre, Melbourne Theatre Company, until March 19.

No-Show, by Richard Pettifer, with excerpts by Megan Twycross. Lighting non-design by Tilly Lunken, sound non-design by Alister Mew. La Mama Theatre. Closed.

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh, directed by Görkem Acaroglu. Design by Emma Kingsbury, lighting design by Katie Sfetkidis, sound design by Ben Grant, music arranged and performed by Caitlin French. With Luke Elliot, Ben Grant, Mark Treginning and Gemma Falk. Tiny Dynamite Theatre @ Theatreworks until September 21.

The Time Is Not Yet Ripe by Louis Esson, directed by Jane Woollard. Design and set painting by Amanda Johnson, lighting design by Bronwyn Pringle. With Kurt Geyer, Ming Zhu-Hii. David Adamson, Don Bridges, Melanie Beddie, Tom Wren, Grant Cartwright, Georgina Capper, Sharon Davis and Mike McEvoy. Here Theatre and La Mama @ the Carlton Courthouse until September 14.

There is an interesting, if elliptical, continuity between these two vastly different plays. One, Martin McDonagh's The Lonesome West, was written in the late 1990s in Ireland; the other, Louis Esson's The Time Is Not Yet Ripe, a hundred years earlier in Australia. Both are black comedies which in different ways satirise the social and historical emptiness of a colonised culture.

There are parallels, as well as illuminating differences, between Ireland and Australia, even if they are rather more interesting than those outlined by The Lonesome West director Görkem Acaroglu in the program. (Acaroglu wins the prize for fatuous program notes for pointing out that "Ireland, like Australia, is an island surrounded by water. The Irish and the Australian's (sic) love travelling. Yet Australians, unlike the Irish, also suffer from the tyranny of their distance. The distance creates loneliness...a feeling of imprisonment, and often yearning and despair.")


Perhaps it's unfair to begin by criticising a program note; or it would be if the cliches expressed here weren't reflected in the production. Despite a couple of bravura performances from Luke Elliot and Ben Grant, McDonagh's play deserves a little more directorial sharpness: the production gives a sense that emotional complexities are here simplified, going for an easier, more clownish humour than the tragic comedy the writing aspires towards.

It's hard not to feel that Acaroglu might have been better off following up the common historical themes of colonisation and its legacies of concealed violence - the corpse in the attic about which everyone knows and nobody talks - and the cultural and personal amnesia that follows. As well as that sense of no-place - the conviction that life goes on elsewhere more richly and fully and meaningfully - that sucks the vitality out of any engagement with the present. This sense of displacement is, with its twin emotion, parochialism, the defining nostalgia of the colonised mind.

Certainly, McDonagh's black comedy, the final instalment of the Leenane trilogy he wrote in the 1990s, examines a kind of hell in which people are so brutalised they no longer recognise the realities of their own feelings. The Irish town Leenane becomes bleak portrait of contemporary Ireland, a consciously brutal counter-argument to the sentimentalised view of the land of poetically melancholic peasants larking about with shamrocks in quaint pubs.

A four character play like The Beauty Queen of Leenane (and Sam Shepard's True West, with which this play bears some affinities), The Lonesome West concerns two brothers, Valene (Luke Elliot) and Coleman (Ben Grant), whose sibling relationship is defined by vicious rivalry. Valene is a miser of Gogolian proportions, who conceals his hoarded poteen in a biscuit tin sealed by (re-used) tape and marks all his possessions, including his cherished collection of plastic Virgin Marys, with his initial. His violent brother Coleman has just murdered their father with a shotgun, and in order to prevent Valene going to the police has signed over the house to his brother.

The two characters who dream of something better are the young alcoholic priest Father Welsh (Mark Tregonning) and the foul-mouthed but innocent schoolgirl Girleen (Gemma Falk). Welsh is so ineffectual in his attempts to reform the village ("the murder capital of Europe") that no one gets his name right. Predictably enough, these two fail to survive the village - one drowns himself and the other goes mad. But it's a moot point whether the brothers have survived either: the worst, one senses, has already happened to both of them, and the long trail of mutual crimes between them is itself the result of unhealable damage.

How this play might situate itself in an Irish history marked by centuries of political violence and British occupation is beyond the scope of this review, but my bet is on a strong connection. It's probably worth pointing here to an essay I read recently about the early 20th century Irish revolutionary Ernie O'Malley, who has been heavily criticised as callous and unfeeling for his indifference to his brother's death. The Irish post-colonialist David Lloyd comments:

[O'Malley] writes with considerable cultural as well as personal insight in a long—and invaluable—auto-biographical letter from prison... about his middle-class Irish family and its inability to foster loving relations: “There was very little love in the family. I can honestly say that I never loved my parents, but I respected them.” Home life, he explains, “was none too congenial as its ties were never strong enough.” The sense of lack of affect is hardly unique to the O’Malley (or Malley) family in the Ireland of the time or for many generations since, and it would be valuable to have further study of the ways in which the intersection of Victorian values and colonial culture may have impacted the “structures of feeling” in Ireland at the time of the revolution.

This production aims for a sense of Irish authenticity, emphasised by the fiddler who plays Irish folk airs between or, at certain moments of emotional heightening, beneath the scenes. Given McDonagh's dialogue is written in Irish brogue, it would be difficult to perform without accents, but the violin blurs the anti-romanticising of the play (a broken fiddle might have been more appropriate). And it's certainly performed with energy and brio, bringing out the slapstick comedy between the warring brothers, if without a tragic sting. What emerges is a creditable but strangely underwhelming production.

The Time Is Not Yet Ripe is, on the other hand, a colonial oddity, like the paintings of misshapen kangaroos and oak-like gum trees that dot our galleries. Like the national argument about becoming a Republic - which, as Robert Hughes sardonically points out, has been hotly debated since the 1850s without our ever leaving the Monarchy - it demonstrates how Australian cultural amnesia results in a constant cycle of repetition. Perhaps the real (if somewhat depressing) virtue of this play is its demonstration of how little has changed in our mainstream cultural discourse. Even as things shift under the skin, the same repressive responses rise to counter them.

Esson's political satire was first performed in 1912 - five years before the October Revolution in Russia, two years before the outbreak of World War 1. Edwardian England was rife with new political ideas - a mood of public anti-Imperialism driven by the Second Boer War had seen the Liberals elected in a landslide, with Labour holding the balance of power.

Reading the literature of the time, it's fascinating to see how many preoccupations Edwardians had in common with us - feminism, republicanism, the endless question of national identity recur again and again. But with a few signal differences - the 20th century revolutions of Fascism and Socialism brought modern totalitarianism into being and left millions of corpses in their wake. Utopian belief is much harder to sustain in the 21st century than it was in 1900. And the political struggles of Indigenous people in Africa, Asia, America and here scarcely registered on the European map in Esson's time. Politics was a white man's burden.

Esson reflected the general European conviction that Australia was a "prose dull land" bereft of poetry (our first poet, the superbly named Barron Field, lamented Australia was "where Nature is prosaic, / Unpicturesque, unmusical, and where / Nature-reflecting Art is not yet born.") Esson the social satirist portrays a colonial society in which the present of elsewhere repeats itself here as farce, and in which a leaden inanition mitigates against change.

The occasion for the play is an election, where the Prime Minister Sir Joseph Quivington (Kurt Geyer) is defending his conservative government. The action revolves around two characters in rivalry for the same seat - Quivington's daughter Doris (Ming Zhu Hii), who represents a Woman's temperance party, and her fiance Sydney Barrett (Grant Cartwright), who is standing for the Socialists. Both represent repressive extremes at odds with The People, but in the end Woman wins with her mission to make politics, and everything else, more polite.

Jane Wollard's production takes on all the melodramatic cues, with varying degrees of success. There are a couple of wonderful theatrical conceits - Barrett's absurd speech, for example, in which he makes a call for more Egyptologists and poets, results in a stirring rendition of the Red Flag. Much of the time the artifice degenerates into shameless mugging, but there are very decent performances from Georgina Capper as the uptight Temperance activist Miss Perkins, Tom Wren as Tom K. Hill, an American investor, and Grant Cartwright.

Esson's insistence on an authentically Australian drama has made him an attractive figure in later periods of Australian theatre, but unlike, say, Oscar Wilde (whose wit this piece aspires towards) his work remains enclosed in its time. It bounces along painlessly enough, but all the same I felt sorry for the VCE students forced to believe that this play is anything more than a historical curiosity.

Picture: Luke Elliot (left) and Ben Grant in The Lonesome West. Photo: Ponch Hawkes

The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh, directed by Simon Phillips. Design by Gabrila Tylesova, lighting by Matt Scott, composer Ian McDonald, animator Dom Evans. With Richard Bligh, Joel Edgerton, Kim Gyngell, Rima Hadchiti, Natasha Herbert and Dan Wyllie. Melbourne Theatre Company @ the CUB Malthouse until June 22.

I think I dreamed about The Pillowman last night. Not because it is dark and nasty (I guess it is, although not because it touches the actual nerve of nightmare); not because it is disturbing (it is, but not in the ways the writer so clearly intends); not because it is obscene (which it is, but only in how basely it tickles its audience). No, let me fling off the faux objectivity of the crrrritic and speak frankly as the writer who woke early this morning with this smugly self-congratulatory play ringing in my ears like tinnitus.

The more I thought about this play, the more I hated it. But before I tell you why, let me be fair. This is a decent production that features an excellent cast, who make the most of McDonagh's undoubted talent for vaudevillean dialogue. There are at least a couple of outstanding performances which warrant the storm of applause at the end. I'm sure that The Pillowman will be greeted with as much enthusiasm here as it was in London and New York and, well, good luck to McDonagh. As Prospero says at the end of The Tempest, the project of the players is "to please", and it seems that McDonagh certainly knows how to do that.

For my part, I walked away feeling somehow soiled. Outside the oeuvre of Donald Trump, The Pillowman is possibly the vainest piece of self-propaganda that I have seen penned by a writer. It's archly deceptive, purporting to shock and confront its audience while in fact it deftly massages their expectations. Its complex plot and "dark" themes (spoilers below) serve to disguise a determined superficiality, and it presents a justification of literature that's breathtakingly callous and self-serving. That final point is, I think, what disturbed my sleep. I mean, writing is my trade, my obsession and one of my great loves: is this all there is to it?

The Pillowman opens with a classic interrogation scene. In an unnamed totalitarian dictatorship, two policemen, Tupolski (Kim Gyngell) and Ariel (Greg Stone) are cross-examining Katurian (Joel Edgerton). Katurian - whose full name is Katurian Katurian Katurian (KKK - geddit?) - is a writer of short stories, twisted fairy tales which almost always concern themselves with the torture, dismemberment and murder of children. He is bewildered but co-operative, ignorant of why he has been arrested, and disclaims any political or subversive intent in his stories.

No, says Katurian, running through the standard disclaimers: his first, and perhaps only, duty as a writer is to his story. What others make of what he writes is not his concern. He repeats Wilde's dictum that stories can only be judged on whether they are "well written or badly written" (itself echoed in Peter Handke's statement that a writer's morality is in his style). Given the overwriting of many scenes, this strikes me as an unwary move on McDonagh's part; but at the same time, it's hard not to feel some empathy with his plea for the right to exist outside some narrowly-defined ideology, to be judged on his work alone.

We forget pretty much straight away about the totalitarian state, which is the first of several red herrings that appear briefly and then vanish without trace. It becomes clear that Katurian's arrest is due to the recent murders of two children, who have been killed in gruesome ways that mimic the mutilations in his stories. A third child is missing, believed dead. And Katurian's brother Michal (Dan Wyllie), who has "learning difficulties", has also been arrested and may in fact be being tortured in an adjacent room by the psychotic Ariel, who has had a "difficult childhood" that manifests in a penchant for sadistic violence.

Meanwhile, back at the police station, we find out that Michal really did kill those children. A "twist", I suppose, which seems to be the major quality Katurian looks for in his fables, just as, judging by the several twists in The Pillowman, McDonagh does in his plays. Tormented by the thought that he is now, albeit unwittingly, in some way culpable for the murders, Katurian smothers his brother with a pillow, and decides to do a deal with the police. He will confess to everything, in return for the assurance that his masterpieces will be preserved for posterity in a police file, presumably to be discovered by an aghast and adoring public 50 years later when the files are declassified.

And so the plots thicken, assisted by the enactment of Katurian's stories with theatrically heightened vignettes performed by Natasha Herbert, Richard Bligh and Rima Hadchiti. And the themes multiply in tandem with the stories. At one point the central question is one of moral responsibility, not political intent, at another there seems to be a thesis that writers are psychologically damaged. McDonagh serially undermines each proposition, forestalling critical analysis by satirising its expectations. Well, I have some sympathy with such a project: but where does he end up?

You could make an argument that McDonagh sees writing as an act of displacement, a liberation from the endless cycle of trauma, in which a child victim of abuse becomes the adult perpetrator. After all, Michal and Katurian have had a most unfortunate childhood. On discovering that young Katurian had a yen for writing, his parents peformed an experiment designed to develop his precocious talent. They showered him with love and attention, while chaining his brother to a bed in an adjoining room and subjecting him to nightly torture with dentist drills, sharpening Katurian's gift by exposing him to a nightly chorus of human suffering.

Actually, Saddam Hussein had a remarkably similar idea, only he wanted to create dictators, not writers. As children, his sons Uday and Qusay were often taken to Saddam's prison cells to witness the torture of prisoners, and we all know what great literature they produced. But this is a fable, not a news story: and it seems to me that McDonagh is splitting the writerly self, that perhaps the crippled brother represents the tormented, murderous child within the writer, whose unconsoled howls spark the anguish that rings the truth in his immortal works. Or something like that.

Whatever the case, the parental experiment works, and their son becomes a twisted - but, of course, brilliant - writer. When, after seven years of listening to the torture of his brother, Katurian breaks down the door and discovers what has been happening (perhaps he too is somewhat simple-minded), he is horrified. He smothers his parents with a pillow, and rescues his now brain-damaged brother from his life of torment. They then live happily in a garrett, while Katurian finds a job at an abbatoir. And in his spare time, he writes 400 short stories. The most significant of these, besides his autobiography, is about the Pillowman, a creature made of pillows who visits suicides and takes them back to their last happy memory as children. Then he tells the children of their terrible lives to come, and offers them the choice of killing themselves at that point, and avoiding the certain pain of the future.

A colleague suggested at interval that he was on the side of the policemen: he thought Katurian ought to be shot for crimes against literature. And the stories, whose telling takes up a great deal of this play, are certainly part of my problem with the text, because it's crucial that we believe in their narrative enchantment. They are slight, one-dimensional shadows of the master fabulists that McDonagh is aping: Kafka, Borges, Marquez, Schultz. If they have the heartlessness of traditional fairytale, they do not possess its profoundly unsettling strangeness (a quality Caryl Churchill brilliantly exploits, for example, in Skriker). Certainly, they don't in any way mitigate the silliness of the plot.

And, like the stories themselves, all this gruesome cruelty is curiously affectless. At no point, despite the best efforts of the performers, is there even the edge of threat in the violence on stage. It is there to create a frisson, the illusion that by witnessing this cartoon mayhem we are somehow peering into the darkness of the human soul (from a comfy chair, to be sure, which is well-padded with laughs). And if the violence on stage is like the hammer that regularly flattens Wile E. Coyote, well, who cares? He'll just accordion back to his proper size and start running around again: we know that he's not really dead, and that he never feels any real pain. There's no risk for any of us: we know it's all pretending. But that's not how this play is framed by the writer, who wants us to believe that we're watching something edgy and extreme, something that, in his words, allows us "to see things more clearly" by pushing the boundaries. But what are we seeing "more clearly"?

It seemingly becomes clear in the end, when the writer as anti-hero becomes writer-as-hero; although, even here, McDonagh hedges his bets. In the ten seconds while he is waiting to be shot in the head by Tupolski, Katurian narrates his final story (the hedge is that the story is unfinished, so we never get to hear its proper ending). His brother is given a choice by the Pillowman, on the last day before his parents begin to torture him in order to turn his brother into a writer. He can die now, and avoid seven years of dentist drills and his eventual murder by his own brother: or he could live through the certainty of future suffering. And Michal chooses to live, knowing the anguish that awaits him, because he loves his brother's stories.

(I know I have a lamentably literal mind. But I'm willing to bet that, in the unlikely event of some thug giving a victim the choice between having his elbows drilled or being able to read lovely stories in some far future, the victim would go for whole elbows every time. No matter who was writing them: even if it was Kafka himself. And I say that victim would be right.)

This post-mortem moment is underscored by the simultaneous decision of the psychotic cop Ariel, moved by Katurian's recognition of his own suffering, to preserve the stories rather than to burn them, as ordered by his superior. Even so, it's hard to escape the feeling that McDonagh is winking knowingly at the audience. Yes, the writer is vain and a bit nasty, isn't he? But his stories live on, all the same...and that, after all, is what matters.

Gentle reader, this is where I rebel.

Putting aside false modesty with my usual unseemly alacrity, I can say that I have devoted a large part of my life and considerable material sacrifice to the idea that writing is important. I believe, with Kafka, that it can be the axe that breaks the frozen sea inside us. I take Rilke at his word when he claims that it means "you must change your life". Rightly or wrongly, stupidly or otherwise, I believe in the necessity of the liberating possibilities that are offered by human imagination. It seems to me that if society as a whole were more literate in the byways of our desires, if we were better able to contemplate our own inadmissable longings, our cruelties and pain and terrors, or - perhaps most confrontingly of all - our capacities for love or joy, then we might be able to better deal with our realities. And I think that art is the major technology that we have invented for investigating and expressing these complex, amoral desires.

In The Pillowman, it seems to me that McDonagh is doing something rather different from this. If the story is its own justification, a thesis I am perfectly willing to accept, this story's justification is no more serious than a cheap thrill, slumming it in the bad suburbs of the intellect. McDonagh in fact is inoculating us against consciousness, craftily removing all psychic peril from the exercise of art. The play's inescapable assertion - that the universal, timeless (inject favourite superlative) magic of art redeems the actual pain of a human being - misrepresents the amoral claim that imagination makes upon consciousness. Its callousness is a cynical inversion of the part that pain often - but not always - plays in the creation of art. And it artfully places the writer at the centre of his own redemptive universe, hermetically sealed from critical inquiry by his own genius.

I guess such manoeuvering has its own kind of genius, and there's no doubt that McDonagh's measure of an audience's general tolerance for reality - or art - is more finely judged than my own. Sifting through reviews of different productions of this play, I read again and again how harrowing and stomach-churning it is. I concede that the play is telling us all the time how harrowing and stomach-churning it all is. Put it next to the real thing - Sarah Kane, Franz Xavier Kroetz, Fernando Arabal - and its pretensions become readily apparent.

The MTC production is effectively directed by Simon Phillips, although close up I felt rather too aware of the workings of Gabriela Tylesova's elaborate set. And it features bravura performances: in particular, Greg Stone as Ariel, Kim Gyngell as Tupolski and a virtuoso turn from Dan Wyllie as Michal are sheerly pleasurable to watch, and make the three hours much less burdensome than they otherwise might be. The Pillowman has some killer one-liners and draws freely from the kind of to-and-fro banter exemplified by Abbot and Costello. And therein, I think, lies the authentic charm of the play, which this production exploits with elan: it's a comedy with grand guignol dressing. The rest is just tosh.

Update: The debate continues in New York on Parabasis.