*Spoiler warnings*

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Trial of Salome, adapted and directed by Bob Pavlich. Designed by Romanie Harper, lighting by Gwendolyna Holmberg-Gilchrist. With T'mara Buckmaster, Emma Goldsworthy, Adrian Mulraney, David Adamson, Alex Pinder and Josh Ryan. La Mama @ the Carlton Courthouse, until August 5.

Oscar Wilde's enduring popularity is due, in part, to the fact that he is a figure of unsettling modernity: the fin de siècle decor of his writings, which otherwise might date him as badly as Swinburne, is underlaid by a tough, unsparing intelligence. This is as true of his less well-known writing as it is of the plays which established him as the greatest comic playwright since his fellow Irishman, Sheridan.

The fairy tales in the collection The House of Pomegranates ("intended," said Wilde, "neither for the British child nor the British public") rank high in his achievement: they are not only enchanting, beautifully wrought stories, but among his most serious meditations on (for example) the relationship between art and feeling, or the place of love in religion, or the ethics of public authority. And they also demonstrate his capacity - more evident in his prose, in fact, than in his poetry - for sustaining extremes of poetic language.

Of Wilde's plays, the closest in both sensibility and diction to his fairy tales is Salome. Perhaps the strangest of Wilde's plays, this one-acter retells the Biblical story of Salome, step-daughter of the tetrarch Herod Antipas, who requests the head of Jokaanan (John the Baptist) on a silver platter as her reward for dancing the Dance of the Seven Veils.

Originally written in French, its English premiere was cancelled when the Lord Chamberlain refused it a license, deeming it illegal to represent Biblical characters on stage. This ban held until 1931, but it did not stop private performances of the play, including one that sparked a 1918 trial for criminal libel which bore startling similarities to the trial that brought about Wilde's own downfall.

The suit was brought against Noel Pemberton Billing, the properietor of a right wing journal called The Vigilante, by the actress Maud Allen, who, in an attack on a production of Salome in which she performed the title role, was accused of being a member of the "Cult of the Clitoris" - a coded accusation of homosexuality.

For The Trial of Salome, director Bob Pavlich has cut together original transcripts from the trial with adapted excerpts from Wilde's play. Aside from Salome (T'mara Buckmaster), all the cast plays double roles - Herod (Adrian Mulraney) is also the Judge, Emma Goldsworthy is Herodias and Maud Allen, and so on.

It's an intriguing concept which, among other things, demonstrates with eye-popping clarity the close relationship between misogyny and homophobia. In Billing's eyes, a woman's uncontrolled sexuality is as much a threat to the clean-living heterosexual male as is the disease of homosexuality. The clitoris, we learn, is a mysterious organ known only inside medical journals and to perverts; in the grip of its influence, a woman might "be driven to an elephant".

If it hadn't actually happened, it would be hilarious. Sadly, as religious fundamentalism ensures that homophobia and misogyny creep into the core of public life, especially in the US, this is rather more than a period piece. As in Sylvere Lotringer's blackly funny Overexposed: Treating Sexual Perversion in America, a series of interviews with psychologists "treating" sexual criminals, it becomes increasingly clear that the real perversities exist in the fantasies projected by those who claim to be preserving the moral health of the nation.

Pavlich has created a fine piece of dramaturgy, theatrically cutting between the two realities in ways that are neither unsubtle nor predictable. The excerpts from Salome - a drama that is, in fact, about a woman savagely protecting her chasteness from the lust projected onto her by nearly every man she encounters - become an ironic counter-argument.

Perhaps what was most troubling to the censors was the beauty of Wilde's language (described during the trial as a certain sign of the sodomite). This beauty is felt as a moral affront; and in fact, the authorities were quite correct to feel this. In Wilde's moral universe, sensuous beauty was a radical imperative, a manifestation of love - even divine love - that struck profoundly at the heart of political and moral authority. For example, in The Fisherman and his Soul, the Priest, having cursed the lovers whose profane corpses have been cast on the beach, prepares to preach a sermon of fire and brimstone:

"He began to speak to the people, desiring to speak to them of the wrath of God. But the beauty of the white flowers troubled him, and their odour was sweet in his nostrils, and there came another word into his lips, and he spake not of the wrath of God, but of the God whose name is Love. And why he so spake, he knew not..."

The passions induced by Salome's beauty are much darker. For Salome, what matters is her chasteness, her moon-like integrity, which are constantly assailed by the lusts she unwittingly inspires in men, including in her stepfather Herod. Her revenge is deadly, and most deadly against the one man who inspires in her an answering desire, only to spurn her, Jokanaan.

Salome knowingly uses the lust she inspires to gain her own ends, finally acceding to Herod's impassioned requests that she dance for him, and then refusing all the riches he can offer her in favour of Jokanaan's head. "There are not dead men enough!" she says, as she orders soldiers to bring it to her.

When Herod witnesses the reality of Salome's desire, he is horrified, calling her "monstrous", and orders her death. But it's clear that her desire has been made monstrous by its constant erasure. She is only ever the object of desire, her own wants ignored by the men who, blinded by their lust, fail to perceive her at all. In this way they are no different from Jokanaan, who will not even look at her.

Stephen Berkoff brought his National Theatre production of Salome here several years ago. Although widely disparaged by Melbourne critics, it left me open-mouthed: aside from featuring one of the most sheerly beautiful designs I have ever seen, the company's performances of Wilde's Solomonic language was revelatory, showing me how powerful poetic language can be on stage, if uttered with complete physical and emotional conviction.

Unlike Berkoff's production, this co-op show hasn't the resources to meet the ambitions of this most interesting script. Aside from Mulraney and Goldsworthy, both fine, experienced actors, the cast has real trouble coming to grips with the extremes of Wilde's lyrical theatricality. For the most part (though this is also a function of the direction) they seem static in space, physically ungrounded, uncertain how to pitch either the poetry or the comedy.

And puzzlingly, given the intelligence of Pavlich's script, his direction seems to be misconceived, most grievously in Buckmaster's portrayal of Salome as a petulant, seductive teenager. There is no sense of the wounded pride which erupts so murderously in the play's climactic scene: the performance is more Paris Hilton denied a new pair of shoes than barbarian princess struck by the curse of Cupid's arrow. The decision to spread the part of Jokanaan between all the male cast members on the one hand emphasises their common blindness but, on the other, robs Jokanaan of his singularity and, perhaps most crucially, of his physical presence.

Despite my reservations, The Trial of Salome is worth seeing for the sheer interest of the script, which deserves a better-resourced production, and for its admirable ambition.

Comedy Festival: The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde, devised and edited by Jon Haynes, David Woods and Jude Kelly, directed by Jude Kelly with Ridiculusmus, David Woods and Jon Haynes. Malthouse Theatre until April 30. A Porthole into the Minds of the Vanquished written adn performed by Tamlyn Henderson and Warwick Allsopp, direction by Ansuya Nathan and Tony Taylor, musical direction/keyboards by John Rutledge. Regent Room @ Melbourne Town Hall until May 7. From Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle written and performed by Russell McGilton, directed by Kimberley Grigg-Pierzchalski, music by Alan Griffiths. 45 Downstairs until May 7.

Sometimes I wonder if festivals are what Melbourne has instead of a culture. The arts calendar seems to wander from one festival to another, oscillating between feast and famine like a cultural bulimic. However, the Comedy Festival is one of our success stories, growing out of the innovative comedy scene of late 70s Melbourne to become one of the big three in the world. With 230 events under its frenetic umbrella, it's more than usually impossible to know what to look at. These are the chance sightings your fearless critic made before a virus grabbed me by the jugular and dragged me down into lowland...



The Importance of Being Earnest is a glittering chandelier of a play, one of my all-time favourites. While it's hard to miss Wilde's wit and flair, it's less easy to see the toughness, even the bleakness, that underlies his dazzling nonsense. Ridiculusmus's anarchic interpretation reminds me how resilient this play really is, how Wilde's sure sense of theatricality and dramatic structure survives - even gleams the more brightly - under the British duo's disrespectful treatment.

Oscar Wilde is the patron saint of camp, the aesthetic of pure artifice. As Susan Sontag comments, camp is "above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation - not judgment. Camp is generous... It only seems like malice, cynicism. (Or, if it is cynicism, it is not a ruthless but a sweet cynicism.)" Camp is not the opposite of serious: Wilde was, after all, the most serious of artists. But it's his unmalicious laughter at the passionate superficiality of human beings that gives this play its irresistible buoyancy.

The play itself is a brilliant conceit, and much more than an elaborate excuse for a bad pun. Not a single character in it is in the least credible: each one of them, from the various Ernests to Lady Bracknell, is an utterly conscious being, wholly aware of his or her own subtext. As Gwendolen says, the vital thing is style, not sincerity.

In the comic couplings of the various pairs of lovers, Wilde acutely sketches romantic love as egocentric projection: the Lacanian admonition on the impossibility of actual love is here given theatrical body. The attraction of Ernest (whether Algernon or Jack) lies in his name, not his person. Its charm exists in the sensational imaginations of Cecily and Gwendolen, and both of them are completely conscious of their own egocentricity (Cecily even writes her own love letters to herself). That Jack does indeed turn out to be Ernest - that his lies were in fact the truth - does not disturb Gwendolen's satisfaction, since, as she observes sagely, her Ernest is "sure to change".

Wilde's observation that human behaviour is a profound playing of roles ("To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up," says one character in An Ideal Husband) makes this play particularly apt to Ridiculusmus' treatment. The two actors, Jon Haynes and David Woods, play all the characters, helped with some intelligent direction and ever more ingenious costume changes.

From the start you are not allowed to forget that you are watching actors pretending to be someone else, which creates yet another layer of performance to those already woven into the play. The stage is an over-the-top collection of Victoriana, every square inch a nightmare of chintz and chi-chi, and all the stage business is transparent to the audience. Sound cues are mostly controlled by the actors, using a cd player with a remote control, and characters are indicated by costume changes.

At the beginning the costume changes create lengthy pauses that are fully exploited for their comedic possibilities, as David Woods dons the butler outfit or Jon Haynes becomes (to the accompaniment of the Ride of the Valkyries) Lady Bracknell in full sail. Once the conceit is established, the switches become more and more inventive, using hand puppets and other devices, until by the end a wig or a shirt is enough to suggest a whole character.

Ridiculusmus releases the play's erotic anarchy: the sexual games which bubble beneath the surface of Wilde's text are given grotesque and hilarious articulation. That one so willingly suspends disbelief in the face of such flamboyant artifice says as much for the energy of the performances as it does for Wilde's play.

A Porthole into the Minds of the Vanquished is another two-hander by two extremely accomplished performers, Tamlyn Harrison and Warwick Allsopp. Apparently the script is based on text messages the two have exchanged since 2001. That explains the man who is trapped inside the mobile phone, starving to death.

They have created a surreal cabaret, supposedly a peek inside the minds "of the vanquished", whoever the vanquished are. Although the show includes satire (of television quiz shows or talk-back radio, for example) they go way beyond parody into an alternative reality created solely by language: surreal linguistic and sonic juxtapositions give birth to new forms of life, like the paypacket porcupines, or percussive eyeballs evoked by vacuum-packed squids. It's associative comedy like that of the Goons, creating its own absurd narrative-defying logic; but it has sinister, even viscerally disturbing, undertones.

What makes this show is the razor-sharp performances. Henderson and Allsopp are outrageously talented: they can act, sing, dance and even play the squid. They're ably backed by John Rutledge on keyboards, who gives them the requisite atmospherics.

From Bombay to Bejing by Bicycle is another self devised piece, this time a solo show by Russell McGirton, economically directed by Kimberley Grigg-Pierzchalski. As the title suggests, it's about his adventure holiday in which he rode a bicycle from Bombay - known these days as Mumbai - to Beijing.

It was a fruitful trip, since he also wrote a book, Yakety Yak, about his experiences, which were various and often comic (to hear about, if not to experience). The hour-long show is narrated as if in a hallucinatory delirium - it opens with his Indian doctor saying cheerily, "Congratulation! You are having the malaria!" and from then on it's a mad ride through McGirton's memories.

In between nightmarish treatments with giant injections and prescriptions for health that include drinking his own urine, McGirton summons up a cast of 20 characters. They include his father and a cartoon British officer, who are perhaps the bullying superegos that sent him on this masochistic odyssey in the first place. He tells of violent encounters with the local wildlife, explores the comedy of cultural incomprehension and breaks up with his girlfriend. And there's the obligatory diarrhea sketch, which rivals Billy Connelly's excesses.

Like most travel stories, it's more about the traveller than the country he encounters. It is a surprisingly intimate tale, inventively theatricalised, and narrated with considerable physical bravura. And, yes, it's very funny.

2006 Melbourne Comedy Festival