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.

Last week, as is our wont now and again, Ms TN and her alter egos spent some hours pondering what it is that most matters to me in art. Is there one quality, we wondered, by which I gauge how much a work matters to me, one value by which we measure the rest? Yes, I answered myself, there is. What’s more, for all the hundreds of thousands of words I’ve written here and elsewhere, I have never really said what it is.

Why is that? Is it cowardice? Is it because it’s too private? Is it that to articulate something so personal as what matters most is, somehow, to do it violence – to reduce it, to nail down a delicate and necessary silence with the crudity of words? And let's face it, when you put it baldly, it just sounds banal. What matters most to me, in any artwork, is its truthfulness.


Of course, "truthfulness" is a shorthand term for a constellation of qualities, some of them contradictory (as Whitman says, "Do I contradict myself? Well, then, I contradict myself...") There is, however, one thing I unambiguously don't mean by truthfulness. I don’t mean that a work of art must tell The Truth, that one-eyed monster so beloved of morally calcified politicians or right wing columnists. The Truth – a singular, jealous god that admits no Other – is only the shiny side of a lie.

No, I'm thinking of less monumental, more profound qualities of truthfulness. True, as in when a craftsman runs his hand along a beautifully made table, or when a dressmaker cuts a pure line. True, as when you are true to your ideals, or to someone you love. True, as in poetry. This quality of truthfulness can't be disproved; but then again, it can't be proved either. Since its foundations are, like the ladders of Rilke's lovers, "long-since groundless ... leaning / on only each other, tremulously", it is, ironically perhaps, a little like faith. It has nothing to do with being "right" or "wrong". Can a life be right or wrong? Can an artwork?

"Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling," says Muriel Rukeyser. For Rukeyser, life and poetry are very nearly synonyms. They are a dance, an exchange, an invitation. I would say that of most arts, and claim it an especial quality of the theatre. The negation of feeling, its complexities, its realness, results in waste and injury, a necrosis of denial that infects every area of public and private life. Truthfulness is beyond mere honesty: "If we settle for honesty," said Rukeyser, "we are selling out." It is more complex and more ironic, more supple, more self aware. It's also more primitive. Its presence alerts the same kind of senses that make a deer startle when it smells a predator on the wind, or which reassure a suckling infant that it is safe. This truthfulness is never still, because it is a living thing. It keeps on happening, rippling out from the energy generated by encounter: artist and world, artist and work, work and witness.

So, if I have a "bias" - as is asserted now and again by more or less anonymous commenters on this blog, or by disaffected directors, or even by professional arts journalists interviewing total strangers about stuff that has nothing to do with me - then this "bias" tends to art that, to my mind, struggles towards the true. Equally, work that flinches from the true - especially art that makes grand gestures towards truthfulness, borrowing the weight and courage of others who have dared it, but refusing their risk - gets up my nose. Truthfulness has a price – for the poet Lorca, the price was his life – and you can’t cheat it.

Are my judgments "subjective"? Indeed they are, as are all judgments in matters of art by anyone. They don’t mean that work I don’t enjoy is therefore a lie – just as The Truth is almost certainly always a lie, so the opposite of a truth might be another truth. But they are certainly judgments that record my own struggle to be truthful. More, in writing down these thoughts and speculations, I seek to make reasonable judgments, because I value rationality as fiercely as I do feeling. No one can argue with my belief, because belief is unarguable and incorrigible: but anyone can take issue with my arguments.

Well, now I’ve said my ideals. Which, if any of you are still reading, brings me finally to last week's theatre viewing: The Trial, Matthew Lutton and Louise Fox's staging of Franz Kafka's famous novel at the Malthouse, and All About My Mother, Simon Phillips's MTC production of a play based on Pedro Almodóvar's film of the same name. Both are adaptations, and it's reasonable, given my preamble, to begin by asking whether the adaptation is true to the original. After all, Almodóvar, contemporary Spanish film-maker, and Kafka, Prague insurance clerk, are both, to the point of anguish, truthful artists. This fidelity is not about slavishly copying the work from one medium into another: it's more properly a question of whether the adaptation faithfully refracts in its new form the truthfulness of the original work.

Although it was first published in 1925, a year after Kafka's death, The Trial is one of a handful of novels – George Orwell’s 1984 and Albert Camus’s The Plague are others – which articulate with an almost sadistic precision the "human condition" of the 20th century. Matthew Lutton and Louise Fox have achieved something brilliant with this production: they have translated this iconic story to the stage without trivialising it, and without resorting to the romantic cliches that cluster around Kafka like flies around a corpse.

Kafka's work especially attracts this kind of thing, perhaps because of the obdurate refusals and opacities of his texts. They are more like cruel objects than stories, full of brooding significance that seems to retreat further the more you attempt to interrogate its meaning. For some commenters, he becomes a moraliser, although Kafka went to more trouble than almost any other human being to avoid moralising; to his hagiographers Max Brod and Gustav Janouch, Kafka was even a saint.

The brief essay printed in the program, by Dimitris Vardoulakis of UWS, is not untypical: Vardoulakis says the "main objective" of The Trial is "a critique of the ideal of liberal democratic freedom". "Instead of the logic of the law, Josef K should have followed the logic of desire that he discovered in his association with women characters...only then can Kafka's other freedom be possible." Yet the great nightmare of The Trial, and the reason why it resonates so disturbingly through the history of the past century, is that it shows a world where freedom is not possible at all.


It's fortunate that the production has nothing to do with Vardoulakis's argument, which attempts to rescue a utopic hope from a novel that is peculiarly resistant to any such illusion. The multiple seductions in the novel are far from expressions of liberation; rather, like the kiss Josef K bestows on Leni, they are "aimless", fevered and furtive exchanges that promise nothing except another slavery, this time to the imperatives of bodily functions. Josef K doesn't just die "like a dog"; like everyone else around him, he ruts like a dog too, only without the privilege of a dog's bestial innocence. The torment in this novel is consciousness, which is why Josef K's death comes almost gently, as a relief. One of the great virtues of Lutton's production is how powerfully it communicates a palpable sense of the sordid bodily realities Kafka evokes in The Trial – you can almost smell the grotesque seductions, the shabby, stuffy rooms, the sour sweat of panic.

Josef K’s unavailing struggle against the law that both accuses and condemns him is uncannily prescient; it foreshadows the faceless bureaucratic violence that came to fruition in Auschwitz or Kolyma or Tuol Sleng. Nor have its insights dated: in the surveillance society of the 21st century it resonates with an extra chill. And yet it's a mistake to think of it as a political novel. To regard The Trial as merely as a critique of the state's power to inscribe itself on the bodies of its subjects is to ignore its metaphysical dimensions, which culminate in the famous and inescapably Judaeic parable of the Doorkeeper at the end of the novel. Kafka is, like Beckett, a master of the precise and essential metaphor: The Trial might be most accurately called a portrait of the modern soul, in the same way Foucault's study of the penal system, Discipline and Punish, is described as that soul's genealogy.

The major strength of Fox's lucid script is that she refuses to lay any interpretation over Kafka's hauntingly mundane narratives, leaving them open to the multiple interpretations that resonate in the book. It's almost sternly faithful to the novel, but avoids any hint of deadly reverence. Likewise, Lutton's direction constructs a theatrical simulacrum of Kafka's claustrophobic reality that is at once compelling and, for all its nods to Orson Welles's magnificent film, totally original.

In Lutton's hands, the narrative becomes crudely theatrical, mockingly exposing the clumsiness, embarrassment and abjection of the human bodies which tumble around the raw plywood revolve that mainly constitutes Claude Marcos's set. The direction is swift, almost clinical, in how it moves the story imperceptibly from its banal, comedic opening into the logical absurdity of a nightmare. From its opening moments, when Josef K wakes up to find two police officers by his bed, ("before breakfast!"), to its desolate final image, Lutton and his cast generate an irresistible cumulative power.

The action is punctuated by several changes in the set - the dropping of curtains, the activation of the revolve about an hour in, and particularly a stunning set reveal late in the show. Each change serially exposes the mechanics of the stage, making us aware that the actors are trapped in the machinery, literally as well as metaphorically. Kelly Ryall’s brilliant sound design is one of the most textured and dramatically active I've experienced: it's a world in itself, paranoid and inscrutable, of half heard human voices, technological noise, irritating beeps, acoustic echoes punctuating the spoken text. In certain crucial scenes it segues gloriously into the lush romantic piano music of Ash Gibson Greig, a harsh juxtaposition that generates an almost unbearably poignant irony.

However, the credit for generating this reality must lie with the cast, who give impeccable performances, precise, comic and powerful, in a genuinely ensemble production. Only Ewen Leslie as the increasingly abject Josef K has a single role: the other six actors - John Gaden, Peter Houghton, Rita Kalnejais, Belinda McClory, Hamish Michael and Igor Sas - play differing parts as the play requires. Leslie is riveting, slumping from the entitled outrage of the wrongly accused bank clerk to a man who is more and more abject, more and more certain of his own guilt and especially of his own shame. With some clever doubling, such as the splitting of the role of Leni between Kalnejais and McClory, the recurring faces become increasingly disconcerting, reinforcing the feeling that the action is some terrible, endless dream-reality where meaning and sense infinitely regress.

I think this a brilliant and perceptive theatrical adaptation of a novel that is at once simpler and more difficult than is generally allowed, as is the case with so many books called masterpieces. And it's also first-class theatre. I went twice, to make sure. And yes, I thought it truthful. All the way through.


This is not the case with All About My Mother, which is adapted by Samuel Adamson from Pedro Almodóvar’s 1999 film. You might wonder why it was adapted at all, given that the film is so easily available, and so good. But even given the current fad for film-to-stage adaptations, it’s not so surprising that it should have been transposed to the theatre: All About My Mother is, after all, the most directly theatrical of films, stealing its structural and emotional ideas from plays such as Federico Garcia Lorca’s Blood Wedding and Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire.

In his film, Almodóvar takes the form of contemporary soap opera and amplifies the tragic chords that underlie its melodrama. In doing so, he draws out the raw emotional truths behind the role-playing and performance of ordinary life. His abject, doomed characters are full of feeling, but never sentimental. The emotional landscape Almodóvar exposes is, like Lorca’s, bitterly beautiful: it’s a world of twilit ambiguity, where life and death, male and female, the sacred and the profane, meet at a disputed border.

What is surprising is that this production, directed with luscious visual flair by Simon Phillips, seems to be competing with the seductive spectacle of movies, rather than exploiting theatre’s capacity for emotional intimacy. It looks gorgeous, but it feels empty. In the clean, over-aestheticised spaces of Stephen Curtis’s design, Almodóvar's duende becomes so much exotic decoration. Without any palpable sense of abjection and filth in the production, there is no concomitant sense of the sacred. Instead, we just get soap opera with arty quotes.

All About My Mother – the title itself a nod to the most theatrical of films, All About Eve – concerns Manuela (Alison Whyte), working nurse and single mother of 17-year old Esteban (Blake Davis). For his birthday they see legendary actress Huma Rojo (Wendy Hughes) perform A Streetcar Named Desire, and Esteban is killed in a car accident as he tries to get Rojo’s autograph. Manuela, stricken by grief and regret, then revisits her former low-rent life in Barcelona, in an attempt to track down Esteban’s transsexual father, Lola (Jolyon James).

Samuel Adamson’s adaptation is, tellingly, an hour longer than the movie, and often feels like explication. Although it doesn’t slavishly attempt to reproduce the film, it’s hard to see what the play offers - aside from a spectacular design, that is - that the movie doesn’t do better. And there are one or two bad decisions - most notably, making the dead Esteban a continuous presence through the play - that introduce a cloying sentimentality.

The cast, led by Whyte’s gruelling and intense performance as Manuela, work hard and break through the multimedia wall now and again to generate moments of connection. Paul Capsis’s deadly irony saves the transsexual prostitute Agrado from becoming a camp cartoon, and Hughes delivers the final lines - a quote from Blood Wedding - with thrilling poetry. It's a borrowed, unearned flourish, although it did make me think that Wendy Hughes in Blood Wedding would be really something. But mostly, sentiment and spectacle win out over Almodóvar’s harsh and beautiful truths.

Versions of the reviews of The Trial and All About My Mother were published in the Australian.

Pictures: Top: Ewen Lesie as Josef K in The Trial. Picture: Jeff Busby Middle: Ewen Leslie and John Gaden. Picture: Jeff Besby. Bottom:The cast plays scenes from A Streetcar Named Desire in All About My Mother.

The Trial, adapted by Louise Fox from the novel by Franz Kafka, directed by Matthew Lutton. Set designer Claude Marcos, costume design by Alice Babidge, lighting design by Paul Jackson, composer Ash Gibson Greig, sound design by Kelly Ryall. With John Gaden, Peter Houghton, Rita Kalnejais, Ewen Leslie, Belinda McClory, Hamish Michael and Igor Sas. Malthouse Theatre, Sydney Theatre Company. Merlyn Theatre, Malthouse, until September 4. Sydney Theatre Company, September 9 - October 16.

All About My Mother, by Samuel Adamson, based on the film by Pedro Almodóvar, directed by Simon Phillips. Set design by Stephen Curtis, costume design by Esther Marie Hayes, lighting design by Matt Scott, sound design by Matt Scott, composer Alberto Iglesias. With Paul Capsis, Blake Davis, Katie Fitchett, Wendy Hughes, David James, Jolyon James, Katerina Kotsonis, Peta Sergeant, Lourise Siversen and Alison Whyte. Melbourne Theatre Company, Sumner Theatre, MTC Theatre, until September 26.

Tartuffe by Molière, adapted by Louise Fox, directed by Matthew Lutton. Companion artist Neil Armfield. Set and costumes by Anna Tregloan, lighting by Paul Jackson, composer Peter Farnan. With Laura Brent, Marcus Graham, Francis Greenslade, Peter Houghton, Rebecca Massey, Barry Otto, Ezekiel Ox, Luke Ryan and Alison Whyte. Malthouse Theatre until March 8. Bookings: (03) 9685 5111.

A minor puzzle of 2008 is that, as if we are suddenly a small outpost of France, Melbourne’s two major companies are hosting three plays by Molière, including two productions of Tartuffe. It remains to be seen if this is too much of a good thing. But the sizzling adaptation of Tartuffe now on at the Malthouse demonstrates that Molière’s joyously wicked satire remains as apt now as it was four centuries ago.


Molière’s comedy is founded on the gloss of human appearances, on the slippery gaps between how we perceive ourselves and how others perceive us. In his own time, his relentless satirical attacks on the hypocrisies and vulgarities of the elite made his plays immensely popular, and also caused them to be banned for offending against religion.

It is moot whether Molière's defence - that rather than attacking religion itself, his plays were truly pious in attacking those who adopted the trappings of piety without the substance - holds true or is a little disingenuous. Certainly, in this version he is presented as the uncensored atheist he might have been if the mores of the time had permitted such frankness.

Without a whiff of deadening reverence, Louise Fox’s adaptation sticks closely to the spirit and structure of the original play. The action is transposed to a garishly imagined version of contemporary Toorak, where the wealthy patriarch Orgon (Barry Otto), after narrowly surviving a heart attack, has been born again under the insidious influence of the charismatic charlatan Tartuffe.

Tartuffe (Marcus Graham) is an evangelist Christian in the mode of Tom Cruise – handsome, cut (we get plenty of opportunities to admire his torso) and deeply creepy. And beneath his slickly pious exterior beats the heart of a conman. Having gained Orgon’s unwavering trust, Tartuffe ruthlessly exploits his position, causing havoc in Orgon’s dismayed family. He attempts to seduce Orgon’s wife Elmira (Alison Whyte), gains power of attorney over his fortune and is promised in marriage to his daughter Mariane (Laura Brent).

Fox’s version, written in robustly colloquial rhyming verse, finds contemporary equivalents for Molière’s targets, and makes merciless fun of Melbourne’s suburban mores, from Toorak to Werribee. Her biggest departure from the text is a boldly blasphemous reworking of Molière’s original deux ex machina ending. In the hands of Peter Houghton, here given a touch of divine amplification, it's a theatrical coup.

Despite his absence due to illness, the production still bears the mark of Michael Kantor's fascination with rough theatre, and it's hard to disentangle Matthew Lutton's directorial vision from Kantor's. It's certainly directed with a lot of vim. Just as Molière fused the vulgar theatre of his day – farce and commedia dell’arte - with literary drama, Lutton’s production weaves together the conventions of traditional French farce and contemporary popular culture. The result is feisty and very Australian, drawing on local traditions of clowning and physical theatre that date back to the Australian Performing Group. It’s rude, crude and vulgar, animated by a lively intelligence.

And again like Molière’s play, it doesn’t make a lot of sense so much as a lot of pointed nonsense. Orgon’s family – shallow, narcissistic, materialistic and selfish – lounge around the pool in their gated mansion in white bathers and sunnies, presenting a series of immediately recognisable social “types” that are contemporary equivalents of the stock characters of commedia dell'arte.

Alison Whyte is Elmire, Orgon’s second wife, the blonde, toned, spoilt socialite; her daughter Mariane (Laura Brent) is a not very bright innocent with the hint of an eating disorder, and the son (Luke Ryan) is an inarticulate, violent private schoolboy who is no good at school but excellent at rowing. Francis Greenslade is Cleante, Orgon's brother, a Toorak Buddhist who is one of the two oases of common sense in the play, while the other is provided by the voluble Dorine (Rebecca Massey) as the Russian maid. Mariane’s fiance Valere (Ezekiel Ox) is a Lebanese homeboy who hangs out at the local mosque when he’s not (presumably) doing wheelies in his doof-doof Valiant.

At the centre of the action is Barry Otto’s performance as Orgon, an exquisitely poised balancing act between genuine poignancy and vulnerability and self-interested blindness, folly, selfishness and greed. He plays both Orgon and his mother, Madame Pernelle, which necessitates at one point, in a comic highlight, a phone conversation with himself. It’s a truly virtuosic performance.

Anna Tregloan’s set is designed in traverse, with a narrow stage running through the centre of the theatre that features a stylised pool and dayglo turf. It gives the audience the opportunity to study one another across the stage, perhaps leading to further reflections about Molière’s observations of human folly. And the action is heightened by a mishmash of popular music, courtesy of a lively score from former Boom Crash Opera soundman Peter Farnan.

It’s a high energy, irresistibly funny production. And perhaps as close as we can get to the vitality and contemporary bite that Molière’s work had when it was first produced.

Picture: publicity shot for Tartuffe featuring Marcus Graham and Barry Otto.

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