Yes, Ms TN has been whinging heroically this past fortnight, but that hasn't stopped her getting out to the theatre. Writing about it has been a different matter. But this morning she awoke from her slumber, brutally thrust aside the heap of used tissues that had accumulated overnight, and cried out: "Now or never!" Or something of the sort. (Witnesses differ: another report claims she actually said "Oh no! Not again!" Which reminds me of the Belgian theatre director who wakes up every morning, walks to his window, flings open the shutters, and shouts "Help!")


Existential angst is all part of life's rich whatsit, and it must be admitted that Ms TN does it exceptionally well. She does it, in fact, so it feels like hell. But it doesn't get the reviews done. So after a salutory kick in the arse from her alter ego, Ms TN will finally report on last week's theatre going. These reviews will be a little briefer than usual, for which Ms TN's better self apologises: but it's been a full week of mundane dread here, and that all takes up space.

First up was a production of Maxim Gorky's The Lower Depths at Theatre Works, which was on for a mere four days. I wanted to see this because of the personnel involved: it's a collaboration between John Bolton, Brian Lipson, Bagryana Popov and Joseph Sherman, with lighting by Shane Grant, and the cast included people from the St Kilda Uniting Care Drop in Centre. I expected something special, and I wasn't disappointed. Gorky's unsentimental expose of the Russian underclass had a production last year at 45 downstairs directed by Ariette Taylor (and there's more about the play itself in that review). Unlike Taylor's production, however, this company brought Gorky's preoccupations unflinchingly into the present day.

Bolton and his collaborators presented a savagely cut-down version of the play which lasted a little over an hour. It was promenade theatre, with the audience milling around with the actors in the large space at Theatre Works. The set filled the theatre with found objects that were probably rescued from rubbish dumps or skips, and bits of cardboard boxes, torn newspaper and rags covered the floor in a convincing simulacrum of squalor. In the centre was an area cordoned off by a walkway, in the centre of which was a bed where the consumptive Anna (Bagryana Popov) lay dying. Around the edges of the theatre were a series of booths or miniature stages. Phrases from the play and other kinds of graffiti were chalked onto the black walls.

It was one of those events which interlocked the fictions of the play with present-day realities, a decision reinforced by the qualities the non-professional actors from the drop in centre brought to the production. Working with non-professionals is a honourable tradition in realist art: neo-realist film directors such as Ermanno Olmi, for instance, worked with non-actors in films like Il Posto or The Tree of Wooden Clogs, bringing an unactorly authenticity to the performances which reinforced the political anger behind his films.

The effect of using non-professional actors in theatre is slightly different. On the one hand, it brings a direct immediacy of experience to the production; and in fact several of Gorky's monologues are replaced by the performers' own stories. But unlike film, theatre can't forget its own artifice. The performative effect is almost the opposite of authenticity: it's an unconscious artifice, a certain naivety, that paradoxically reinforces the emotional reality of the play.

Here these qualities - professional and non-professional - are skilfully woven together in a sharply contemporary work that seems very true to Gorky's bleakly humane vision, however radically it departs from the text. The Lower Depths has an organic vitality: the actors and audience occupy the same space, the actors watching as attentively when they're not performing, and emerging into focus when required. It seemed to me an exemplary work of community theatre, bringing together social and artistic ethics in a rare integrity.

It reminded me more than anything of the work of the British film and theatre director Lindsay Anderson. I never got to see Anderson's theatre (wrong age, wrong continent) but films such as If, O Lucky Man or This Sporting Life are brilliant examples of radical art. Like this production, Anderson's films examine human experience with a kind of tender democracy of vision that's underlaid by a clear-eyed social anger.

"Fighting means commitment, means believing what you say, and saying what you believe," said Anderson memorably. "It will also mean being called sentimental, irresponsible, self-righteous, extremist and out-of-date by those who equate maturity with scepticism, art with amusement, and responsibility with romantic excess. And it must mean a new kind of intellectual and artist, who is not frightened or scornful of his fellows." The Lower Depths reflects this kind of intelligent artistic commitment. I'd like to see more of it.

The following night I went to the opening of Peter Houghton's The Colours at the MTC's Lawler Studio. The Colours is the conclusion to a trilogy of monologues, made in collaboration with Anne Browning, that began with Houghton's hit satire The Pitch and continued through The China Incident (performed by Browning). The earlier two are concerned, in different ways, with the global US empire: The Pitch hilariously satirised the film industry, while The China Syndrome was about the PR spin of global realpolitics.

In this unexpected conclusion to the trilogy, Houghton summons the ghosts of the British Empire. He plays the reality-challenged Colour Sergeant Tommy Atkins, who is the final solitary remnant of Empire in a forsaken African outpost. Ventriloquising a dozen characters gives Houghton the chance to display his virtuosic comedic skills, and he’s a delight to watch. But the play’s more serious intent - an attempt to pay homage to the footsoldiers of colonial power – is undermined by sentiment: an edge of savagery is missing here, tipping its premise into naivety.

It's a fine line between paying homage to the bravery and belief of those who laid down their lives - usually unwillingly - for the British Empire, and sinking into a nostalgia that insidiously ignores some of the lessons of post-colonialism. Despite his parodic intent, Houghton falls off the tightrope here, although his evocation of Atkins, haunted by his dead comrades, is at times undeniably moving. And you can't but admire his control of the stage, shifting from pathos to comedy with razor timing. This is a brave play, if only for its defiant unfashionableness, but it left me feeling uncomfortably ambivalent.

Partly it's a feeling that I've seen this before, and done better: the 60s saw a lot of work which excavated the myths and price of the empire. Plays like John Arden's Sergeant Musgrave's Dance or films such as Joseph Losey's searing King and Country, which follows the court martial of a shell-shocked infantryman in the trenches of World War 1, tore apart the ideologies of empire building with intelligent anger. It's an anger that's missing in The Colours, for all its satire. And maybe the British Empire is still too close to home for me to forgive it so easily.

Finally, I saw Yumi Umiumare's En Trance at the CUB Malthouse. As its title suggests, En Trance is a work about liminal states, the thresholds of transformation between one mode of being and another. And it’s also a work that reaches for an ecstatic dissolution of the self, the loss of self-consciousness that occurs in a state of trance. Umiumare achieves these ambitions in a fascinating and complex one-woman piece that defies classification. Part dance, part theatre, part multimedia immersion, part dream, En Trance inexorably reels you into Umiumare’s subjective world.

Umiumare was a member of the influential Japanese Butoh company DaiRakudakan and moved to Australia in 1993. Here she extends the anarchic tradition of Butoh – a form of modern Japanese dance that emerged after the chaos of World War 2 – by introducing text and filmed images into what is ultimately a deeply personal narrative about shifting between different cultures.

En Trance begins with an almost classical simplicity. Dressed in a white shift, Yumi Umiumare enters a bare stage adorned with slim white columns, and tells us a surreal domestic story about her cat. Suddenly, in a moment that is like Alice’s fall into the rabbit hole, we are plunged into another reality. The stage is drowned in the harsh sounds and images of a city street, as Umiumare writhes and twists in a kind of panic, her body almost invisible behind the images that are projected onto her. This sequence is like an assault: the noise is alienating, the images confusing to the eye.

Just as suddenly, the performance transforms again. Umiumare changes on stage into a black, flowing costume, and becomes a whirling cat-like creature. This dance is where the performance began to come to life for me: Umiumare is riveting. Her body seems to defy its physical limitations, as if she is possessed by a spirit of transformation.

En Trance moves through several more sequences, each of them wholly unexpected yet each deepening the meaning of the others. In one, she explains the many Japanese words for tears. In another, she pounds out a hilariously kitsch Japanese pop song. In yet another, she combines Aboriginal and Butoh dance, reprising her earlier cat-dance, this time as a feral creature in a new landscape.

Bambang Nurcahyadi’s projected images and Ian Kitney’s sound design seamlessly combine with Umiumare’s performance into a singular unity of expression. It makes En Trance an impassioned and beautiful piece, constantly rich and surprising in its emotional range, and finally very moving.

Picture: Yumi Umiumare in En Trance. Photo: Jeff Busby

The review of En Trance was in Monday's Australian.

The Lower Depths by Maxim Gorky, directed by John Bolton. Designed by Brian Lipson, lighting by Shane Grant, music direction by Bagryana Popov. With Brian Pigot, Brett A. Walsh, Stewart Weir, Tom Moleta, Joseph Sherman, Maree Wesol, Brian Lipson, Pat Nyberg, Abdul Hay, Rodney Dean Mcleish, Ant Bridgeman, Bagryana Popv, Sharon Kirschner and John Bolton. Theatre Works and participants from St Kilda Uniting Care Drop in Centre @ Theatre Works. (Closed).

The Colours, written and performed by Peter Houghton, directed by Anne Browning. Design by Shaun Gurton, lighting design by Richard Vabre, composer David Chesworth. Melbourne Theatre Company @ the Lawler Studio, MTC Theatre, until September 12.

En Trance by Yumi Umiumare. Dramaturge and collaborator Moira Finacune, media art by Bambang Nurcahyadi, installtion artist Naomi Ota, costumes design by David Anderson, lighting design by Kerry Ireland. With Yumi Umiumare. Malthouse Theatre @ Tower Theatre, CUB Malthouse until September 13.

Feeling, real feeling, is the hardest thing to recreate in art. Too crudely represented, and it is coarsened to sentimentality, a victim of the limited vocabularies we have for emotional nuances and extremes; too refined, and we miss the point altogether, in a maze of cerebrations that elide its visceral genesis. The phenomenon of feeling encompasses everything that makes human beings such contradictory creatures: feeling is our consciousness of emotion, a heightened and subtle state of being that, on the other hand, is driven by a little almond-shaped piece of porridge, the amygdala, which is lodged in the primitive reptilian part of our brain.

Language is one of our primary ways of expressing feeling, but it is also one of the best ways of repressing it. This is, of course, why poetry was invented. Poetry is the art of creating fractures in language through which feeling can emerge. Language - especially official, legislative or bureaucratic language but also, less obviously, the social codes through which we organise our most mundane social interactions - orders our realities in recognisable chunks, which at their crudest become clichés that determine our responses. Poetry attempts to smash the cliché in order to release the feeling beneath it.


In this sense, Will Eno is certainly a poet of the stage. Eno is one of the most interesting writers to emerge in the US in the past few years. He is best known for his theatrical monologue Thom Paine (Based on Nothing), which premiered here in an elegant production starring Neil Pigot at the MTC a couple of years ago. Oh the Humanity (and other exclamations), which has just closed after its Australian premiere at La Mama, is a series of attacks on language that attempts precisely to discover the feeling beneath the shells of words, the hidden universe of the self that aches for expression.

Oh the Humanity is a recent play that consists of five short, unrelated playlets that in different ways directly address the audience. In each piece, Eno sets up a recognisable situation and then collides public speech with interior musing. There's the football coach at a press conference explaining his team's failure ("The phrase, of course, you are familiar with. It was a ‘building year,’ this last year was. We suffered some losses...") There's the two people recording a self-advertisement for an online dating service, and the airline PR woman who is speaking to grief-stricken relatives after an air tragedy.

In these three works, the expected is invaded by the unexpected, as inappropriate privacies are made public. The coach suddnely reveals his inability to love and the crises of his life. "I found myself standing in the unforgivable light of a grocery store, staring at my reflection in a freezer, and realising: 'You’re not having a bad day — this is just what you look like, now. This is who the years are making you'." (Shades here of the American poet Randall Jarrell - "if just living can do this to you/ living is terrible").

The two lonely hearts describe themselves in unlikely ways and reveal fragile fantasies of connection, almost visions, in which they are simply recognised or heard. The PR woman attempts to speak about her own grief in a context in which it is simply unacceptable to do so, revealing the lies she tells herself about death to comfort herself. But spoken to a roomful of devastated families, these understandable self-deceptions become monstrous. They open out as an anaesthetisation against reality, a fantasy of empathy which reveals itself as a kind of callousness.

The final two pieces intensify the ambiguities Eno has set in play. The Bully Composition features two photographers recreating a historical photograph from the Spanish-American War (with the audience as models), in which the desire to recapture the reality of a past trauma becomes frankly predatory, a kind of ghastly pursuit of authenticity that betrays the emptiness of those who seek it. But even this is fractured by a brief, vivid vision of the reality behind the photograph, a flash of imaginative insight. And the final piece, Oh the Humanity, is a dialogue about mortality between a couple, apparently on the way to some event (either a funeral or a christening) in a car. Here Eno smashes the pretence of theatre. Their car - represented by two chairs - won't start. Pier Carthew, playing the husband, carefully mimes opening a door and stepping out of a car. He circles behind it, staring hard. What's wrong? demands his wife (Emma Officer). "It's just two chairs," he says.

The constant slippages of meaning and register that characterise Eno's writing make these pieces a difficult ask, and neither Eno's writing nor the production escape the odd moment of easy sentiment. That is, of course, the risk of so directly asserting the place of feeling, although it must be said that the script is intelligent enough to avoid bathos. Director Laurence Strangio gives the production an appropriately minimal theatrical frame, with the actors changing and setting up new scenes in full view of the audience, but the suppleness of Eno's linguistic shifts are sometimes dealt with a little crudely: for example, when the football coach segues into a poem, it's signalled with lighting and sound changes that paradoxically made it less effectively strange. Carthew and Officer give focused performances that nicely articulate the script's ironies and delicacies, although I felt there was more to exploit.

When Dion Mills made an appearance at the end as "the beauty of things, the majesty of — I don’t know — the world? The universe?", his sure actorly presence gave that brief role just enough ironic spin to get away with the audacious metaphysical abstraction of his role. He generated the poetic suspension between belief and disbelief, irony and sincerity, that the other actors couldn't quite attain. But it's a near miss. I liked this show a lot.


As a writer, Peter Houghton could do with some of Eno's dramaturgical poetic. He is by no means an elegant playwright, and his new show, A Commercial Farce, has a lot of visible joins and is still a little over-written. But these quibbles are erased by the sheer bravura of its execution and by Houghton's gift for devastatingly witty one-liners. This sets out to be a very funny show, and it is. Like Eno, Houghton is interested in cliché, but his treatment is more violent: he simply pumps it up until it explodes.

Houghton is a fine actor – he recently played James Joyce in the STC’s glittering production of Travesties, and last year gave us a memorable Hamm in a brilliant Melbourne Festival production of Endgame, produced by Eleventh Hour. He specialises in a particular kind of backstage comedy that he performs himself. Collaborating with his wife, Anne Browning, he’s written and produced a trilogy of monologues, beginning with the hit show The Pitch, a perilously funny satire of the film industry, and culminating in The Colours, which opens this August as part of the MTC’s new Lawler Studio season.

In A Commercial Farce, directed at the Malthouse by Aidan Fennessy, Houghton turns his laser wit onto commercial theatre. It’s as much homage as satire: Houghton has his cake and eats it too. It’s funny for all the reasons that Alan Ayckbourn or Michael Frayn are funny, with added meta-text. It takes all the hoariest jokes of farce - symbolised by the banana-skin and the nose-flattening rake, both awaiting the unwitting foot - and delivers them up crooked. Some of the best jokes involve Ben Grant's sound design, and Anna Cordingley's ingenious double-level set is basically a comic booby-trap.

The set-up, as with all farce, is simple, with the necessary spice of panic. Middle-aged director Bill (Houghton) has poured all his money into a production of a farce by popular playwright Dylan Crackbourn, which opens the following night. It’s Bill’s 20th wedding anniversary, it’s nearing midnight, and he’s fighting with his aggrieved wife on his mobile. Instead of popping the champers with Bianca, he’s having one last desperate rehearsal with Jules (Luke Ryan), a television star with no experience of the technical demands of comedy.

Jules is a Generation Y opportunist with an undertow of violence whose every second exclamation is “awesome!” And he simply doesn’t see why he has to slip on the banana-skin or step on the rake. What, he wants to know, is the theme of the play? As he gulps down the sponsor’s wine, Bill despairingly explains the mechanics of farce and its relationship to the tragic absurdity of living. And this in turn lifts the stakes higher: having exposed the bones of comedy, how do you subvert the form enough to make it, well, funny?

The answer lies in two bravura performances that mercilessly expose the close relationship between farce and tragedy. Both performers bring a luminous physical ebulliance to their roles and invest what could be empty stereotype with unexpected flourishes that flesh out their complexities. Ryan is a brilliant fool, but it becomes clear that this youthful scion of Howard's Australia is not nearly as stupid as he looks. Houghton's performance brings a genuine pathos to his role: he plays resigned hangdog with a painful verisimilitude, generating the anxiety that gives this comedy teeth. As Bill’s mid-life crisis takes florid flight, it demonstrates the unpalatable truth that nothing is as funny as another person’s pain.

Pictures: (Top) Emma Officer in Oh The Humanity. Photo: Daisy Noyes. (Bottom) Peter Houghton (above) and Luke Ryan in A Commercial Farce. Photo: Jeff Busby

Oh, the Humanity (and other exclamations) by Will Eno, directed by Laurence Strangio. Sound design and composition by Neddwellyn Jones, lighting by Gwendolyna Holmberg-Gilchrist, designed by Laurence Strangio and cast. Performed by Pier Carthew and Emma Officer. La Mama @ the Courthouse Theatre, closed.

A Commercial Farce by Peter Houghton, directed by Aidan Fennessy. Set and costume design by Anna Cordingley, sound design by Ben Grant, lighting by Matt Scott. With Peter Houghton and Luke Ryann. Malthouse Theatre @ the Beckett Theatre, CUB Malthouse, until June 27.

Comedy Festival: Heard It On The Wireless: The Kransky Sisters, with Annie Lee, Christine Johnston and Carolyn Johns, Athenaeum Theatre (season over)

The Jinglists, directed by Ansuya Nathan, with Warwick Allsop and Tamlyn Henderson, Bosco Theatre, Federation Square until April 13.

The China Incident, written and directed by Peter Houghton, sound design by David Franzke, performed by Anne Browning, The Tower, CUB Malthouse, until April 12. Bookings 1300 660 013

Sometimes it dawns on me with disconcerting clarity that I am not the girl that once I was. It is a sadder and a wiser face that greets me in the mirror each morning. At least, I hope it’s wiser. It’s certainly more tired, which means I must have been doing something, and I should hate to think all that effort might have been for nothing.

What has induced this gloom? The Melbourne Comedy Festival, that’s what. It’s a young person’s game, and it forces me to admit that those halcyon days of yore are all kaput. When I’m stuck in an unmoving, sweaty mass that is attempting, step by tiny step, to escape a theatre, something in me begins to hate humanity. Humanity’s all very lovely at a decent distance (say, a metre or so) but those crowds around Collins Street or streaming in and out of the Town Hall bring out all my innate misanthropy. (I guess I should file these reviews under a heading like “reflections of a middle aged misanthrope”, but the fear that they might inadvertently enter an irony-free zone - Andrew Bolt, for instance - gives me pause.)



Festivals fill me with panic on principle: one look at a program with 200 shows in it and I begin to hyperventilate. I lack the stern fibre of proper critics, who stick out their chins and head off, elbows akimbo, to cover six shows a day. Even at my most self-deceiving, I can’t pretend I am actually covering the Comedy Festival. So here are reports on the three shows I managed to see; all of them, serendipitously, illustrations of the thesis that laughter is deeply related to the human instinct for cruelty.

The Kransky Sisters - Dawn, Mourne and Eva - are three black-haired, pale-skinned singers from “Esk, in Queensland”. They tour the rural roads in their father’s red Morris Major, bringing to eager audiences their idiosyncratic arrangements of songs that they’ve heard on “the wireless”. This evening begins with a slideshow of just such a tour – happy snaps of the unspeakable orange-coloured food in roadside diners, or roadkill, or the three grim-faced sisters squeezed into their car.

In their prim, high-necked costumes, they quiver with sibling hatreds (mostly directed at their half sister Dawn, the tuba player, who is held responsible for their father’s departure) and throbbing, repressed sexuality. The Kranskys are spookily innocent – television was forbidden by their mother, and they still sleep in their childhood beds. But the passions within them have never been quite extinguished, which results in some bizarre behaviours. And has incidentally fatal consequences for several small animals.

Their cruel and painful story unfolds between a song list that is as unlikely as the sisters themselves. Theirs has clearly not been an easy childhood, and their eccentricities are the scars of trauma. “Sticks and stones will break your bones”, says Mourne at one point, looking blackly at her sister, “and words hurt too”. If they weren’t so funny, it would be the saddest thing you’d ever heard.

Annie Lee, Christine Johnston and Carolyn Johns are fantastically inventive musicians: their instruments include an old 60s keyboard, a toilet brush, tambourines, a saw and a saucepan, all accompanied by the lugubrious baseline of Dawn’s tuba. With these unlikely tools, they attack AC/DC, The Eurythmics, Russell Morris and (perhaps my favourite of the lot) Talking Heads, unpacking the tropes of popular music with a deadpan wit that, in a true theatrical paradox, somehow stays true to the anarchy in the heart of rock and roll.

Sibling passions and frustrated sexuality are also at the heart of The Jinglists, the second show from Warwick Allsop and Tamlyn Henderson. They brought us the surreal cabaret A Porthole Into the Minds of the Vanquished, which premiered at the Comedy Festival in 2006. While Porthole was a kind of riff off the subconscious, like entering someone else’s dream, The Jinglists is almost recognisably a play. At least, it has a recognisable narrative, and even characters.

The Jinglists is at once more serious and more ambitious than their first piece. In its evocation of agoraphobic childhood, it irresistibly recalls Lally Katz's play The Eisteddfod, which also explored the fantasy lives of two isolated enfants terribles. In this case, the two brothers Loman and Leigh haven't moved outside their apartment since their mother died. They make their living by writing advertising jingles, and the rest of the time live a distorted version of childhood, dictated by nursery routines of eating, bathing and sleeping.

In their own strange way, the brothers are quite happy in their hermetically sealed world. That is, until love knocks on their door and adult passions are wakened within their childish psyches. Performing in white-face, Allsopp and Henderson are sad clowns exposing the infantile emotional manipulativeness and barren realities of the world of advertising.

This show requires a more sympathetic venue; it's theatre rather than knockabout standup comedy. But Allsopp and Henderson are consummate performers, and against the odds they bring to their strange, absurd story a compelling poignancy. And some fatally catchy jingles.

Like Peter Houghton’s one-man comedy hit The Pitch, The China Incident originated at La Mama. It’s effectively a companion piece, this time with Houghton in the directorial seat and his partner Anne Browning, who directed The Pitch, as the performer. Anne Browning plays Bea Pontifec, a high-powered, emotionally explosive diplomatic consultant walking an increasingly narrow line between career triumph and personal disaster.

The play consists of one side of an increasingly frenetic series of phone calls. Bea has five different telephones, a mobile and an intercom, all of which ring constantly. She juggles calls from a blood-thirsty African dictator, the President (who wants to know about her underwear), her lover at the UN and her PA. As her job rockets into hyperdrive, so does her family life. Her counter-cultural daughter Penny is getting married, but Penny’s idea of table decorations gives Bea conniptions.

The basic danger with this show is a lack of range: on its first outing, there was a sense that, for all its energy, it was a little monotonal. Much of the comedy in The Pitch, a satire of the film industry, evolved from Houghton’s virtuosic performance of entire casts of popular movies, but here Browning has the challenge of performing a single – and rather unsympathetic - character.

But the show has developed from its initial outing last year, and Browning has invested Houghton’s monstrous invention with a little humanity. Even a touch of poignancy. Bea is a bigoted, cynical control freak, a woman to whom image is much more important than substance. She doesn’t care if her daughter is miserable at her own wedding, as long as the table settings communicate the right messages about power, privilege and elegance.

As a diplomatic consultant, her job is about spinning image to hide reality, an agenda she follows with ruthless cynicism. White guilt, she advises the brutal African dictator, will protect him from the criticism of the world community. Meanwhile, a little sexual blackmail ought to keep the Koreans under control… But, like her dysfunctional family, reality keeps intruding, with increasingly chaotic results.

And as her polished professional veneer begins to crack, Bea almost becomes a tragic figure, helpless in the face of the reality she has spent her life denying. It’s not as laugh-out-loud hilarious as The Pitch: the satire here is more bleakly savage. But it’s well worth a look.

Part of this review appears in today's Australian.

The China Incident, written, directed and designed by Peter Houghton. Lighting design by Michael Jewell, sound design by David Franzke. With Anne Browning. Newtown Honey by Marty Dennis, directed by Beng Oh. Lighting design by Matthew Barber. With Lauren Clair and Curtis Fernandez. La Mama Theatre until July 15.

These two shows demonstrate one reason why La Mama is so important. If diversity is crucial to a species' survival, then us addicts of the thespian art owe La Mama a big bunch of flowers for making sure that the Melbourne meme pool is full of creatures wondrous, various and strange. Its current season is a case in point: it's hard to imagine a greater contrast than between these two pieces. Intriguingly, they both feature theatrical couples; but there the resemblances end.

The China Incident is a comic monologue, a companion piece to Peter Houghton's one-man hit The Pitch, this time with Houghton in the directorial seat and his wife Anne Browning, who directed The Pitch, as the performer. Newtown Honey features the married actors Lauren Clair and Curtis Fernandez and is a two-hander, a powerful piece of poetic theatre that is like a cross - if you can imagine such a beast - between Franz Xaver Kroetz and Dylan Thomas.

On one level, The China Incident is, like The Importance of Being Earnest, a convoluted excuse for a bad pun. In its relentless satire of the media-driven hyperreality that shapes so much of contemporary life, it is quite clearly related to The Pitch, and it shows off Houghton's gift for writing lines that biteth like the serpent who's had a bad run-in with Steve Irwin.

Anne Browning plays Bea Pontifec, a high-powered diplomatic consultant, who is a kind of Ann Coulter with power (one would like to call it a fiction, if it weren't for Condi Rice). It begins with a fine moment of theatrical instability: Browning enters the space seemingly talking to herself, until you realise that she is on the hands-free mobile. As she takes off her overcoat, revealing the obligatory pinstripes, she turns toward a desk covered with five different coloured phones - the red one is the direct line to the President of the United States - the aforementioned mobile and a laptop. And behind her is an intercom.

And it's a hundred miles an hour from there. The phones ring constantly, and Bea juggles calls from an African dictator who wants his massacres massaged for the world community, the President (who wants to know about her underwear), her lover at the UN and her PA. She has reached a peak point in her career - she is to be the circuit breaker in the deadlocked five nation talks involving North Korea and China. Unfortunately, as her career rockets into hyperdrive, so does her family life. Her daughter is getting married, her son has just been busted for drugs, she's fighting with her daughter, the gay male bridesmaid, her future in-laws and her ex-husband, and those phones just keep ringing...

Of course you see the punchline coming, but it's no less funny for that. The play gives Houghton an excuse to let fly at a range of contemporary targets, from neo-con media spin to PC family relations. Bea is a monster, but she's monstrously familiar. And you can't but admire the split-second ferocity of Browning's frenetic performance and David Franzke's sound design. It's not as straight-out hilarious as The Pitch, which permitted Houghton the freedom of slipping in and out of a dizzying variety of roles, but it's a marvellous conceit which makes an intelligently diverting hour in the theatre.

Marty Denniss' Newtown Honey is a complete change of pace. Denniss's first play, it premiered in Sydney a decade ago with the same lead actress, which perhaps explains something about the commitment and depth of the performances. It's a passionate, surprising work, given a sparely imaginative production by Beng Oh, which demands (and rewards) close attention.

Maddy (Lauren Clair) and Loos (Curtis Fernandez) are lovers, caught in a relationship of almost claustrophobic intimacy in which they have insulated themselves against a world they do not understand, and which does not understand them. From the moment Loos appears, frightened and panting, on stage, we know that something is wrong; and the play follows their attempts to remember their pasts in order to remake the present, as they weave together their mutual stories in an attempt to find a truth that you sense is already lost to them.

Despite obvious differences, this play reminds me irresistibly of Kroetz's bleakly beautiful two-hander Michi's Blood, about another outsider couple withdrawn from the world, their future symbolised by a pregnancy. Both plays contemplate the nature of love in ways that would not be recognised by Hallmark; and, as has been said of Kroetz's work, Denniss's play gives you the sense that you are witnessing "a crack-up at the edge of truth".

Where Denniss differs markedly from Kroetz is in the richness of his language; where Kroetz's doomed lovers speak a blasted, impoverished vernacular that leaves his characters lost in the gaps between their experience and what is expressible, Maddy and Loos have invented a private language that articulates their despair and love with a tough, ragged beauty. At moment it segues into moments of pure poetry (and sometimes even verse - Denniss is not afraid of rhyming); but this is a poetry of the theatre, meant to be enacted through bodies, and it is never mere lyrical decoration.

Beng Oh - whose direction I've encountered once before, in the bizarre but effective Shakespearean play The Nero Conspiracy - gives this play an intelligently simple production that permits its theatricality full flower. All the action takes place on a thin strip of carpet at the far end of the tiny La Mama stage, creating a necessary alienating space between the performers and the actors. The action is abstracted - when Loos lights candles, for example, Fernandez simply draws them on the wall - which focuses the attention where it ought to be, on the script and the performers.

At times the density of the language left me uncertain what was happening, and I think it would take a second viewing to be clear about the details. But for me, that didn't matter; I was riveted by the intensity and truthfulness of this production, and the complexities that were woven and unwoven before my eyes. Clair and Fernandez give extraordinarily generous and sure performances, creating the discomfort that comes of witnessing the unspeakably intimate moments between human beings. Newtown Honey seems to me to be theatre of an unusual integrity: not perfect, perhaps, but most certainly exactly what it is, which is not nearly as common as it sounds.

COMEDY FESTIVAL: The Pitch, written and performed by Peter Houghton. Directed by Anne Browning, sound design by David Franzke, lighting by Paul Jackson. The Beckett @ The Malthouse until April 28. The Sound of Music Drag Show, directed by Jessica James. With Jessica James, Kris Del Vayse, Amanda Monroe, Jackie Stevens, Roxy Bullwinkle and Jillette Jones. Drags Aloud @ the Bosco, Federation Square, Melbourne Comedy Festival until April 15.

The Melbourne International Comedy Festival is one of those events that throws me completely. This year I cowered pathetically before the program: like, how many acts? So I'm afraid that if this is coverage, then a postage stamp is an overcoat. Luckily for cybernauts, indefatigable bloggers Avi of The Rest is Just Commentary and Richard Watts of Man About Town are better men than I am: they are stoutly braving the crowds and seeing stuff and even writing about it. Me, I've managed to get to two of the 250 or so shows that are whirling around town at the moment. I laughed all the way through both of them, so, despite everything, TN's horse sense still seems to be working.

Peter Houghton's one-man show The Pitch is the Malthouse's contribution to the festival. These days Houghton is riding high: earlier this month, he swept the board at the Green Room Awards, winning best actor and writer gongs for both The Pitch and his brilliant performance of Hamm in Eleventh Hour's production of Endgame. And the word on this show was glowing: a couple of my spies told me it was the best thing they saw at La Mama last year. Sadly, I missed its debut. It must have been quite something in that intimate space.



Rest assured that the hype is warranted. The Pitch, a sardonic take on that predatory mirage known as the film industry, is hilarious from beginning to end. The conceit is that Walter Weinermann, a hapless screenwriter whose love life is mess, is about to pitch his screenplay to a panel of producers. There are three of them: an Englishman who distributes films in Europe, a tough-guy American producer chewing a cigar, and an Australian academic bureaucrat. Somehow Weinermann's script has to please all three of them if he's to get any money to make the movie.

In the hour before this crucial meeting, Weinermann runs through his screenplay, fine-tuning it according to the four Big Rules as laid out by Sid, the American producer. "I'm talking about the actual stories that make the world go round," says Sid. "Four of them son. Just four." The four stories are, for reference, "being more than what you are", getting over disadvantage, love (of course) and revenge.

This conceit permits a glorious pisstake on practically every Hollywood cliche you can poke a stick at. The only thing missing is a car chase: I really think Houghton covers everything else, complete with sound effects. Running underneath is a sly comment on the links between cultural and military imperialism, as the movie shifts from the Hindu Kush in the 1930s (when imperial power was British) to present day Afghanistan.

In between is a nonsensical action movie that shifts from a smokey Paris jazz club to the mysterious Orient "where nothing is what it seems", from a surreal performance of Macbeth to an International Rap Competition. It involves spies, war, romance, assassination, a tribal Afghani who "spent a lot of time in the Bronx", the obligatory comic sidekick, a plane crash and lots of shooting. And it stars, well, practically everyone - Sean Connery, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Michael Douglas, Robert de Niro and "that guy with the eyes from The Lord of the Rings". Though Weinermann isn't sure whether his hero will be Russell Crowe or Clint Eastwood, and supplies alternative lines for each possible casting.

The script doesn't miss a beat, and neither does Houghton's performance. Aside from anything else, there's the exhilaration of watching a virtuosic actor at the full stretch of his physical and vocal skills. And Houghton's Robert de Niro impersonation is really something to see.

The following night, down at Federation Square, I trickled into the Bosco, a brightly painted wooden tent which is hospitably hosting a number of Comedy Festival acts, to see The Sound of Music Drag Show. Last year it became the longest running drag show ever in Melbourne, and also won the Rainbow Award for Best Drag Show. It's easy to see why.

This is rough theatre at its rudest and most uproarious. Its cast of six re-enacts, to a rather free version of the Julie Andrews sound track (it segues into funk or Europop at a moment's notice), a scatalogical version of The Sound of Music. Maria (Jessica James) is not quite the sylph-like innocent of the movie, Captain von Trapp (Kris del Vayse) has a serious problem with flatulence, the Baroness (Roxie Bullwinkle) is a predatory vamp, and the children (who have been whittled down to four) are, if it's possible, even more unspeakable than they are in the film. And the nuns rock.

The ideal of the happy family saved by song takes a few slaps in the course of the show, and of course there's the hypnotic performance of femininity that is drag itself. Fascinatingly, you get a broad spectrum of the feminine here: the six performers are a wide variety of shapes, sizes and ages. It's fair to say that gender is a free-floating entity: when the queens dress as men, they still sport very impressive breasts.

It is as much a tribute to The Sound of Music as it is a high-spirited parody. Part of its charm is the chance to hear again all those classic Rodgers and Hammerstein songs, and to remember how good they are. They're certainly robust enough to survive the disrespectful treatment. The cossies are fabulously over the top, the choreography is winning, and the sheer energy irresistible. And the performers seem to be having as much fun as the audience.

Pictures from top: Peter Houghton as Clint Eastwood in The Pitch, photo Jeff Busby; Jessica James as Maria in The Sound of Music Drag Show