I'm a sucker for Shakespeare's comedies. They reveal his profound knowledge of the stage, and his pleasure in its vulgar tricks and conventions gives us some of the most sublimely funny scenes ever written. In Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare steals freely from a bunch of popular contemporary sources, from Luigi Pasaquaglio's Il Fedele to Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, in which a virtuous woman becomes the victim of vicious intrigue. Transposing the story from tragedy to comedy through the language of courtly wit, he invents two of his most charming lovers, Benedick and Beatrice.


It's a deeply enjoyable play, in which Shakespeare modulates his comedic satire with scenes of real feeling. And John Bell's production for Bell Shakespeare, now on at the Arts Centre, uses his own profound knowledge of stage business to burnish its pleasures to a deep lustre. This is the best production of Bell's that I've seen: exhilarating, vital and surely crafted, with nothing of the fustian.

Stephen Curtis's design sets the action in a quasi-fifties Messina, with full-circle skirts and army uniforms with red sashes. Here the concept runs seamlessly with the play, a fantasia that gives its fantasies life without intruding itself. The action takes place in a basketball court, an institutional setting wrested to other uses of pleasure, with lush Tintoretto-esque wall murals to lift it out of the literal. Alan John's music, performed live, springs organically out of the performances, heightening its sense of carnival. And in the play's tomb scene, a central turning point of death and rebirth, the music becomes ritual itself with a glorious a cappella drawn from male voice Corsican choirs.

Benedick and Beatrice are equals in intelligence and vivacity, sceptics whose condemnation of love arises from their distrust of its sentimental cliches. Their verbal fencing is, as their mischievous friends recognise when they decide to trick the two into marrying each other, the showiest of courtships. They keep each other "waking and in continuall exercise", each pushing the other to more dazzling feats of wit. As in almost every Georgette Heyer romance, all that needs to occur is for each partner to recognise this as attraction, rather than as hostility: what occurs through the play is not a transformation of feeling, but an understanding of it.

This love story runs parallel with the fortunes of Hero (Alexandra Fisher) and Claudio (Sean Hawkins). When Hero is maliciously framed as unfaithful, Claudio mercilessly shames and abandons her in the midst of their wedding. Here, despite his lack of faith in his beloved, he is not portrayed as merely shallow; the insecurity of his passion drives him to a display of cruel machismo. Both couples must negotiate the deception and tricks of others to find the truth of their feeling through the miasma of appearance.

The key is the depth of its casting: every performance is worth the watching. Toby Schmitz and Blazey Best as Benedick and Beatrice create true electric play, the enlivening contrast to the more conventionally drawn lovers of Hero and Claudio. The whole is rich with comic invention: notably Max Gillies's Dogberry, the malapropic watchman, and Sean O'Shea's Don John, a kind of evil Mr Bean in a Mafia suit, the asocial wrench in this otherwise genial machine of sociality. The darker themes of war and malice are threaded lightly, present as shade in a complex comedic texture. A delight.

*

Chris Summers's Crossed was the second of two plays by this promising young writer to premiere within weeks of each other. It consists of five intersecting monologues, all revolving around the same traumatic event - the police shooting of "the smiley-faced boy" - which loosely recalls the fatal shooting of a 15 year old boy in Northcote in 2008. It's hard to imagine a better production, done in traverse in La Mama's Courthouse Theatre under the direction of Matt Scholten with a more than capable cast. And it shows that Summers has a sure gift for demotic speech, and an ability to create contradictory characters that lift out of stereotype into vital life.

There's a touch of the worthily sociological here, however, that the play doesn't quite escape, and I couldn't help feeling that the play trips over its own ambition. Crossed consists of two distinct parts: an interwoven narration that culminates in the climactic shooting, and an afterword in which each character adds a postscript to their experience. Aside from the final scene, which ends the play powerfully, most of the epilogue could have been cut without hurt: mostly the writing here gives an unnecessary sense of ends being tied up, and it certainly has the clunkiest lines.

The most compelling role is that of Lee (Ioan Roberts), the young gay man with a cyber-crush on the absent protagonist. The other characters sometimes fall into a sense of having been constructed rather than imagined. The rebellious Muslim teen, the aging, ill mother missing her son, the bright wog boy, the surfie nationalist, are all carefully - maybe too carefully - turned to avoid cliche. But maybe what I wondered about most was the tense of the writing: it can slide into a prosaic sense of text written firmly in the past tense, rather than unfolding in a remembered present. As a consequence, there are moments when the writing seems more description than gestus. These are marks of an early work: equally clear is that Summers is a writer to watch.

Picture: Toby Schmitz and Blazey Best as Benedick and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing.

Much Ado About Nothing, by William Shakespeare, directed by John Bell. Designed by Stephen Curtis, lighting design by Matt Scott, composer Alan John. With Toby Schmitz, Blazey Best, Max Gillies, Tony Llewellyn-Jones, Matthew Walker, Sean O'Shea, Sean Hawkins, Alexandra Fisher, Nathan Lovejoy, Robert Alexander, Arky Michael, Andrew Tighe, Megan O'Connell, Lizzie Schebesta and Tyran Parke. Bell Shakespeare @ the Playhouse, Victorian Arts Centre, until June 25.

Crossed, by Chris Summers, directed by Matt Scholten. Set and costume design by Kat Chan, lighting design by Lisa Mibus, music and sound design by Pete Goodwin. With Prag Bhatia, Matthew Candeland, Nicholas Linehan, Jenny Lovell and Ioan Roberts. Platform Youth Theatre, Appetite Arts and La Mama, Courthouse Theatre. Closed.

For the first time I can remember, Daniel Keene has two productions on at once in his home town. One, the comedy Life Without Me, opened last month at the Melbourne Theatre Company to enthusiastic reviews and sell-out audiences as part of the Melbourne Festival. The other, the delicate generational drama The Nightwatchman, opens later this month at Theatre Works in St Kilda as an independent production.

Since he lives in the same house as I do, I sneakily exploited our proximity to ask him some questions.

And, eventually, he answered them.

AC: To Elizabethans, says the critic Jan Kott, the world was the stage and the stage was the world. What world is your stage? What does it become in the hands of others?

DK: The stage is a frame. I like the frame to be simple and unornamented.

To put it a different way: the stage is a metaphor. It doesn’t need any other metaphors added to it.

The theatre is a pragmatic art. When I write a play, the action of the play has to happen somewhere. In a room? On a street corner? Both? I make fundamental delineations.


When I imagine a play, I imagine a bare stage, a source of light, an actor. Depending on the content of the play, I might call what I imagine ‘the lobby of a hotel’ or ‘the kitchen of a suburban house’ or ‘a building site’. In other words, I locate my actor standing lit on a bare stage in the world outside of the theatre. I am suggesting a simple recognition, nothing more or less. Once that recognition has occurred, we can all get on with the play. In other words, we can ask ‘what will happen?’

I write plays for the hands of others; the hands that make them and the hands that applaud (or don't applaud) them. A play is a casting off.

When we speak of poetry in the theatre, what do we mean? You read a lot of poetry, and sometimes write it yourself. What is the difference between a poem and a work for the theatre?

In a very, very basic way, a poem and a work for the theatre share a need for rhythm: the striking arrival of the next line, the feeling of inevitability when the line ends (an inevitability that is created by the line itself).

Perhaps it’s simply that I think every line in a play deserves the same attention as every line in a poem.

Is writing plays another kind of thinking?

Yes. It’s a very delicate, very crude way of thinking.

Who are the writers who matter most to you?

I keep discovering them. But there is no ‘most’.

What do you seek to make? Do you want anything? Do you simply arrive with empty hands?

I don't seek to make anything in particular. When I begin to write a play I never know what I’m going to make. I sometimes surprise myself and actually write a play. I abandon more plays than I finish. I sometimes have, as Beckett once said, 'the itch to make but nothing to say'. I think it's a kind of pathology. I don't understand it and have avoided trying to.

Empty hands? Yes, always. To want nothing, to know nothing, to bring nothing. And then the making. It’s a kind of magic, as is baking a cake or building a house.

For as long as you have been a playwright, you have worked closely with particular actors. How important is the actor to your imagining of a play?

The art of the theatre is the art of the word made flesh.

I am always aware that I am writing for the voice. I think that perhaps poets might have the same awareness. But where for a poet the voice is their own firstly (familiar), and secondly that of the reader (unknown), the voice(s) I am writing for belongs to a known other: it is not my voice, but it is a voice that I know, that I can hear as I write, the voice of the actor. I can hear what I imagine are the possibilities of that voice. I am not talking about the interpretation of the lines, but their music, their rhythm and cadence, their tone and volume. You could say that the voice is an instrument that I am writing for. The more familiar I am with that instrument, the more freedom I have. I can write lines that I myself could never say, lines whose expression is beyond my capacity even to imagine uttering them.

The voice comes from the actor’s body. When I write for the actor’s voice I am writing for his/her body. Generally, I don’t write many stage directions. I want the language itself to (literally) move the actor, for the voice and the body of the actor to become one energy, one dynamic expression of the language, without the ‘prompting’ of prescriptive directions. In other words, I want the act of speaking the lines that I write to propel the actor’s body, I want the act of speaking to bring the actor’s body to life.

Is the actor, alone and vulnerable on a stage, caught in the light before the eyes of an audience, the secret of the humanity of your theatre?

There is no secret. The actor, alone and vulnerable on a stage, caught in the light before the eyes of an audience is the beginning and the end of the theatre that I want to make.

In its exploration of the possibilities of absurdist comedy, Life Without Me strikes me as a play with a close relationship to Half and Half (2002), a two hander which you also wrote specifically for specific actors, in this case Robert Menzies and Dan Spielman. Comedy has always been an important part of the dramas you write, as far back as Silent Partner (1991). How important is it to laugh?

People often forget that in almost everything I have written there are moments of comedy (I call them ‘the funny bits’). Perhaps they forget because this comedy rarely lasts until the end of the play. In my plays laughter is usually the prologue to its opposite. Comedy makes the audience more open to what is occurring on stage (makes them more vulnerable to it). I try to create that openness by offering the possibility of laughter. Comedy is an invitation that I extend.

How important is it to grieve?

To grieve is to openly acknowledge our mortality. I think grief should be embraced. The acknowledgment of our mortality may be all that can save the human race from itself.

The theatre can be a place that opens a space for grieving. To put it another way: I take it that a metaphor can be understood as a displacement of reality that allows that reality to be more clearly perceived. The theatre is a place where metaphors are literally made in front of our eyes, where they exist only at a particular time and in a particular place. When the performance is over, nothing remains except our memory of it. It is as if the performance shares the mortality of its audience. This fact is in itself a metaphor (which may in fact lead us back to ‘all the world’s a stage’). If to grieve is to acknowledge our mortality, then the theatre can be the place where that acknowledgment is made manifest, where we can, literally, experience that acknowledgment as an emotional, intellectual and physical event in time and space.

That’s at least the beginning of an answer to your question.

Picture: Robert Menzies and Kerry Walker in Life Without Me. Photo: Jeff Busby

Life Without Me, directed by Peter Evans, is playing at the Sumner Theatre, MTC Theatre, until November 21. The Nightwatchman, directed by Matt Scholten, opens at Theatre Works, St Kilda, on November 24 and runs until December 12. Details and bookings online here.

Christopher Shinn is rightly lauded as one of the most powerful and accomplished playwrights now working in the US. Like his compatriot Will Eno, his work in his country of birth is more often honoured in the breach: his first play Four was rejected by every US theatre he sent it to, before it premiered at the Royal Court in London in 1998 and established his growing British reputation. Dying City premiered in London in 2006, a year before it received a New York production. Shinn's most recent play, Now or Later, premiered at the Royal Court two years ago, and despite four and five star ratings has yet to receive a production in New York.


In a recent interview, Shinn suggests that this reluctance to embrace his work is not, as he once thought, because of an increasing conservatism in the US theatre scene, so much as a cultural denial of emotional pain and tragedy. "It's not so much that they understand and then reject the work, but that they never actually experience it in the first place," he says. "That's much scarier to me than conservatism. Denial and negation are very hard, if not impossible, to undo."

Watching this play hard on the heels of Sarah Ruhl's Dead Man's Cell Phone at the MTC, it's difficult not to speculate that there might be similar denials here: why, in the work available from the US, choose Ruhl's work, or indeed JT Rodger's Madagascar, over a play that is not only vastly better written, but also more intelligent, more honest and, crucially, more moving?

Dying City is an elegant and powerful foray into contemporary naturalism. It moves between two different times: the night of the departure for Iraq by the volunteer soldier Craig (Brad Williams) and an evening and morning just over a year after Craig's suicide overseas, when Craig's gay twin brother Peter (also played by Brad Williams) unexpectedly visits Craig's mourning wife, Kelly (Zoe Ellerton-Ashley).

It opens with an understated scene that is heavy with unsaid tension: Peter's arrival provokes Kelly's inarticulate distress. At first it seems that Kelly's grief is sparked by his resemblance to her husband, and by how his unscheduled visit echoes the way the military turned up to tell her of his death. But as the play progresses, it gradually reveals an altogether darker emotional landscape that reaches beyond its domestic setting into a damning critique of a militarised, misogynistic society, and the media-saturated anaesthetisation that is both its cause and effect.

This critique is folded into the dialogue, as part of the emotional action rather than a didactic lesson, and so attains an increasing emotional power as the play progresses. Shinn weaves his argument into a lament for an increasingly decadent, anaesthetic culture, with allusions to America's great literary tradition - Melville, Hawthorne, Hemingway, Faulkner, O'Neill - cutting against the ironised poverty of the present.

Peter is an actor, who on the night he visits Kelly has just walked out of a production of Long Day's Journey Into Night after a homophobic comment by another actor; Craig has joined the military to gain a tertiary education, and is halfway through a thesis on William Faulkner. Yet the love of both brothers for their cultural heritage is truncated, betrayed by a violent present. This present is most potently symbolised by the twin images that have dominated the US in new century: the Abu Ghraib photographs and the events of 9/11 which is, as Craig says, writing from Iraq in 2004, "already a punchline".

But here these images of extreme violence have their correlatives in the minutae of domestic life, manifesting in irretrievable pyschic damage. Kelly is a therapist, part of a profession that holds out the promise of "closure" in the face of trauma. But as becomes clear, her professional skills are of no use in dealing with her own trauma. She is unable to face the reality of her marriage, and instead takes refuge in television crime series that hold out the promise of a death that is "symbolically reversed". Rather than face the pain that is crippling her, she is fleeing it: she is in the middle of moving house and has even changed her phone numbers so she won't be pursued by her husband's doppelganger and the horror of the memories his presence evokes.

For all the significance of the ideas Shinn is exploring, this play is never heavy-handed. And its poise is reflected in a concomitantly elegant production by Matt Scholten, which simply permits the emotional life of the writing to emerge. Kat Chan's cardboard box set manifests the transiency of the characters and is beautifully lit by Tom Willis. What counts in a play like this is the performances, and it's worth seeing for these alone.

Ellerton-Ashley and Williams are both remarkable, doing full justice to the nuance and suppleness of the writing. Williams's double act as Craig and Peter is a bravura demonstration of the actor's art: so complete is his transformation between the two characters you wholly believe they are different people (my daughter thought at first that they had in fact cast twins). The dialogue emerges from potent silences, in which the loneliness of the characters becomes almost palpable. Highly recommended.


Patricia Cornelius’s high anticipated Do Not Go Gentle... also opened last week at Fortyfive Downstairs. The winner of the 2006 Patrick White Play Award, this is another play that has struggled to find mainstage production here, despite what would seem to be its ideal provenance: not only is it a play that appeals to older audiences, it shapes its unsentimental tragedy with an appealing dose of comedy. Certainly, seeing the high-calibre cast in Julian Meyrick's lyrical production, which includes Paul English, Terry Norris, Anne Phelan and Malcolm Robertson, it makes you wonder if the best of what is generally called "mainstream" is, for the most part, lurking in independent theatre.

Cornelius borrows her title from Dylan Thomas’s poem, Do not go gentle into that good night. Perhaps the most beautiful villanelle written in English, Thomas’s poem celebrates the vivid life of old age, pressed hard against death: “Old age should burn and rave at close of day”. Likewise, Do Not Go Gentle… explores the flare of vitality that reaches a desperate intensity in the face of death, through seven characters who live in an old people’s home.

The central character, Scott (Rhys McConnochie), is obsessed with the tragic heroism of Robert Scott’s ill-fated expedition to the South Pole, a race he lost to the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, and which ultimately cost him his life. In Cornelius’s hands, this expedition becomes a metaphor for the long defeat that is life itself, moving with a poetic suppleness between entries from Scott’s diary and the mundane details of life in an institution.

She evokes with unsentimental compassion the confusions and longings of old age, or, in the case of Bowers (Pamela Rabe), a younger woman suffering from premature Alzheimers who doesn’t remember her own husband, of tragic memory loss. Scott’s story provides a narrative spine from which emerges the stories of the various characters. Most powerfully, this double reality becomes a theatrical metaphor for the uncertain world Cornelius’s characters inhabit, with the white wastes of Antarctica a potent image of desolation.

Yet, like Thomas’s poem, the play is primarily a celebration of life. Cornelius’s characters, like the actors who play them, are funny, angry and defiant, and out of the poverties of their situation create a richness that is its own meaning. The play isn’t wholly successful: there are scenes where the conceit of the double reality isn’t sustained, and Cornelius’s poetic language loses its tension, falling into the merely literal. But for much of its length it makes riveting and moving theatre, and Meyrick's production generates some moments of breath-taking theatrical beauty.

The opening scene is spine-tingling: Maria (Jan Friedl) shuffles onstage in dressing gown and slippers, opens her mouth and sings a glorious aria, while behind her six anonymous figures, dressed in thick arctic gear, march onto the stage, each leading the other like the figures in Breughel's painting The Parable of the Blind. It recalls Walter Pater’s insistence that all art aspires to the condition of music, yearning towards the mysteries of what can’t be expressed in words, and is as moving an image of mortality as I have seen in the theatre.

It can be great watching older actors on stage, and unsurprisingly this all-star cast elicits excellent performances, given an extra power here by the age of the actors. Malcolm Robertson is at his gritty best as Oates, haunted by the suicide of his son, and Anne Phelan as the increasingly uninhibited Wilson, making up for a life of self-abnegation in a late love affair, is comic and poignant. As Scott, Rhys McConnochie gives a moving portrayal of an ordinary man with huge dreams, breaking against his failed life.

Marg Howell's design exploits the wide space of Fortyfive Downstairs, using its windows beautifully: the stage is bare save for a collapsing ceiling at once end, baring it to be a space of imagination. Meyrick's direction moves the scenes swiftly between their shifting realities, using the whole of the space and its view outside to generate a sense that the stage has no borders. I found myself haunted by this play for several days after seeing it: it doesn't attain the elegance of Shinn, but it possesses a direct poetic honesty that lifts it past its flaws. Certainly, this production has an undeniable beauty and power, and I suspect it will be a major hit for Fortyfive Downstairs.

Disclosure: Ben Keene, who composed the music for Dying City, is my son.

A shorter version of the review of Do Not Go Gentle... was published in today's Australian.

Pictures: (Top) Zoe Ellerton-Ashley and Brad Williams in Dying City; (bottom) Pamela Rabe in Do Not Go Gentle... Photo: Jeff Busby

Dying City by Christopher Shinn, directed by Matt Scholten. Designed by Kat Chan, lighting by Tom Willis, music by Ben Keene. With Zoe Ellerton-Ashley and Brad Williams. Hoy Polloy, MIPAC, Brunswick, until August 21. Bookings: (03) 9016 3873.

Do Not Go Gentle... by Patricia Cornelius, directed by Julian Meyrick. Designed by Marg Howell, usic and sound design by Irine Vela, lighting design by Richard Vabre. With Paul English, Jan Friedl, Rhys McConnochie, Terry Norris, Anne Phelan, Pamela Rabe and Malcolm Robertson. Fortyfive Downstairs until August 29. Bookings: (03) 9662 9966.

I'm all for theatres in the west, which is my side of town. When Simon Stone opened the Hayloft Project in Seddon, I was briefly excited (especially when I went to see Platonov), but sadly that space ran into trouble through no fault of the Hayloft's. But it seems that the west's time has come.

The Dog Theatre, a nifty and well-set-up little space in Footscray's Dancing Dog Cafe, was launched yesterday with champagne and lots of enthusiasm. The theatre is about the size of La Mama, and with a similar - if new and raw - feeling about it.

It's opening on September 24 with a project directed for the Melbourne Fringe by our blogger friend Matt Scholten. It's a westy affair - Matt lives six doors down from the cafe, and he's putting on Daniel Keene's Half & Half. (Keene is a man of many identities, but is chiefly known as an eager patron of Coles supermarket in Williamstown.) Half & Half is a two-hander which - for once - deserves the Beckettian adjective that often attaches itself to Keene's work. It premiered as a Playbox/Keene/Taylor co-production in 2001, with Rob Menzies and Dan Spielman, and won the NSW Premier's Prize the following year. In this revisiting, it features Anthony Winnick and Matthew Molony. It promises well. (And in case you're asking - as with other indie productions of Keene's work in the past few years, I'm not reviewing it).

Upcoming Dog productions include a piece on Bulldog footballing hero Ted Whitten, again directed by Scholten, and some comedy. The connections with La Mama are more than superficial - watch for some exchange between a revitalised La Mama and the west. It promises to be a fertile new space in an area which is ripe for its own independent theatre.

The Dog Theatre, Dancing Dog Cafe/Bar, 42A Albert Street, Footscray.

The Burlesque Hour More More More! with Moira Finucane, Azaria Universe, Yumi Umiumare and Angus Cerini. Fortyfivedownstairs, City, until July 7.

A Slight Ache by Harold Pinter, directed by Matt Scholten. Designed by Shayne Greenman, costume design by Kylie Wake, sound and lighting by Simon Prentice. With Lou Endicott, Troy Larkin and Lawrence Price. If Theatre @ Chapel off Chapel (closed Sunday).

True to TN's turbo-charged ability to keep up with the new, she's finally seen The Burlesque Hour, oh, two years after it was, with local favourite La Clique, the toast of the Edinburgh Festival. It's not hard to see what the fuss is about. This show is to theatre what Époisses de Bourgogne is to cheese: vividly pungent, seductively soft, as complex as decay itself - most certainly, a taste shaped for adult palates.


In the mid-90s, a bunch of artists remade the tropes of music hall and vaudeville for the 21st century: they took the satin and velvet curtains of burlesque, added touches of cabaret, theatre and circus to the traditional strip-tease, and voila! a new movement was born. The Burlesque Hour is this neo-burlesque tradition in collision with performance art. If it weren't so much fun, it would be deadly serious. Or maybe, like sex itself, it is deadly serious and fun.

For this is a show that is mainly about sex. Not the fantasy sex so beloved of Hollywood, nor the asensual, alienated misogyny that characterises most pornography; this is sex that is funny, disturbing and outrageous, sex that involves real bodies (and most kinds of bodily fluids). The bodies that are flirting with us and enchanting us are at once powerful, mysterious, perverse and vulnerable. Most of all, they are shapeshifters who remind us that desire is polymorphous, a force that shatters and remakes identity. (Much of this show is surprising, so if you haven't seen it and intend to, be warned: there are major spoilers beneath the fold. Perhaps all you need to know is that I watched most of this show with my mouth open.)

Thanks to a garbage truck that collided with a train in Yarraville, thus disastrously disrupting my travel plans, I arrived out of breath in the middle of the first act. As I hastily found my seat amidst the tables, I kept one amazed eye on the catwalk that stretched out from the small, voluptuously curtained stage. A tall man in a plaid shirt was performing a striptease. The sight itself was eye-popping: he was the reverse of the buff male stripper, skinny and gawky, gyrating widely with parodic gestures. He stripped down to underpants and shirt, and I found myself staring at the unlikely bulge in his Y-fronts. It looked as if he had a sausage stuffed in there. I thought of Gene Simmonds, who reportedly used to enhance his manhood with an avocado.

And then this man flung off his shirt, revealing two quite real breasts. It was completely unexpected: until that moment, I had not even the remotest idea that he was anything but male. My next thought was that I was looking at a genuine androgyne. But then he pulled a feather boa out of his underpants, and I realised that he was a she, and these people - or at least, Moira Finucane - were fucking with my brain. That deeply disconcerting moment of perceptual disruption, which releases itself in delighted laughter, signals the underlying tone of the show.

Here gender is not a rule, but a game. The next act is Azaria Universe, a sexy strongwoman with a beard, doing a hoop act while oscillating between extremes of masculine showmanship (look at these biceps!) and uber-feminine eyelash batting. To be followed by the Butoh-inflected anarchy of Yumi Umiumare as a heavy-metal Coppelia and a Hello Kitty who shows that Japanese kitsch is weirder than you ever thought. There are also a couple of comedic strip tease acts from a guest artist - tonight, Melbourne performance artist/writer Angus Cerini, comically exploring the anxieties and inhibitions of masculinity.

All these acts derive their power from the uninhibited intensity of the performers, as is illustrated in an act that is perhaps the most surprising and transgressive of all of them. In the middle of all this flesh and anarchy, Moira Finucane comes back on stage, to the soundtrack of Elvis Costello's beautiful ballad I Want You. Dressed in a heavy black Victorian bustle, her hair drawn back tightly from her face, she mimes the ache of longing. The only naked skin on view in this act is Finucane's face, which stares yearningly out of the stern prison of her dress and posture, and her white, neurotic hands, helplessly seeking release in a minimalist performance of anguished, inexpressible desire.

Victoriana's counterpoint is Azaria Universe, who achieves the extraordinary feat of eroticising the act of eating fairy floss and who, naked except for long strings of fake pearls, reveals the real pain inside the incomparable kitsch of Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse of the Heart. But the act that I won't forget is Finucane as a classic Greek priestess dressed in white robes, stepping slowly on stage holding aloft a white bowl full of a red soup.

The act moves from comic (as she solemnly produces a spoon and begins, with exaggerated, even orgasmic, pleasure to eat the soup) to grotesque (as she begins to spill it over her pristine white costume and whisk it over the audience) to authentic Bacchanalian excess. Finally she lifts the bowl to her mouth and drinks, spilling a red stream over her chin and her breasts: and she is suddenly a creature of Dionysian mysteries, the terrifying image of a Maenad, drenched in the blood of her homicidal orgies. It must be one of the most perverse and exhilaratingly beautiful things I have ever seen.

FOR its debut production, If Theatre has chosen an early and - comparatively speaking - slight play by Harold Pinter, A Slight Ache. Originally commissioned for radio (and perhaps having the distinction of including what might be the only silent character ever written for radio), it was written by Pinter just after the The Birthday Party's disastrous debut on the West End.

It's interesting chiefly for what it presages in the later work: there are shadows of concerns that later evolve into the masterly Ashes to Ashes, for example. And it certainly includes some writing of astounding lyrical beauty. The play has a certain crudity of structure and idea that, to my mind, stops it from being in the first rank of Pinter's work. However, it's a good and interesting choice for a debut production of a young company, neither too ambitious nor too modestly self-effacing, and it's certainly worth the effort of producing.

Matt Scholten gives it a stylish production. The minimalist set has different playing areas designated by furniture, which abstractly outline the space of a comfortable house and garden, and the whole is lushly illuminated, creating little spaces of light in the darkness of the stage. It suggests the unreality of Pinter's story, which, in how it invokes the hidden desires and fears that live beneath the comfortable surface of middle class existence, is more like a Victorian ghost story than anything else.

A Slight Ache is a simple but unsettling drama about a well-off, quintessentially English couple, Edward (Lawrence Price) and Flora (Lou Endicott), who are haunted by a mysterious and ambiguously menacing stranger, an old and filthy matchseller (Troy Larkin) who stands by the back gate. When Edward, for reasons that are not at all clear, invites him into the house, the matchseller's silence and unresponsiveness draws out of the couple their deepest secrets.

Lawrence Price's performance is riveting, suggesting the subdued bully driven by a raging impotence. His performance is very slightly exaggerated, expressing the heightened naturalism of the dialogue. It's a fine judgement that is not quite matched by Lou Endicott, whose performance is dominated by an excruciating imitation of received English. It so grated my ear that I couldn't really perceive the rest of her performance, but to me it seemed mannered rather than heightened, a parody of the role rather than an expression of it. And Troy Larkin looked rigid and menacing and silent. I'm not sure that he didn't have the hardest role of all.

It's a respectable enough debut to ensure that I will be at If Theatre's next production, which is interesting in itself: a remount of three Jack Hibberd plays at La Mama, as part of La Mama's 40th birthday celebrations. I'm sure they'll be a welcome addition to Melbourne's theatrical diet.

Pictures: Top (left to right) Moira Finucane, Yumi Umiamare and Azaria Universe of The Burlesque Hour; Bottom: Lawrence Price in If Theatre's A Slight Ache.