I keep hearing, here and there, that these days "text-based theatre" (to you and me, "plays") is out of fashion. The contemporary stage, the whisper goes, is hostile to the writer: in these post-dramatic, post-structural, post-everything times, the director has seized the crown in the theatrical hierarchy and the playwright is out in the cold, shivering in his underpants.

The truth is, just as the masculine pronoun is no longer a default grammatical device, so theatre's practice has shifted to a broader consideration of the semiotics of the stage: meaning is expressed through movement, design, music and performance as much as through words. On the other hand, is that emphasis really new? Meaning is an unstable quiddity, sure, but it's been unstable since modernity began to erase the certainties of church and state (and reading Lucan can make you realise that such instabilities are about as ancient as human civilisation). And after all these years, I'm still not sure what a "linear narrative" really is: I'm not sure I've ever met one.


In any case, I see text everywhere. Even an exploration like 3xSisters (which must by now have generated the longest ever discussion on this blog) depends on a source text, however it spirals around it. And that old-fashioned concept, the play, is a hardy one. People keep writing them, and people keep putting them on stage. I saw two last weekend. They were definitely plays, done in the old-fashioned way of getting actors to remember the words and enact them on stage. They were even, in very different ways, naturalistic plays.

In fact, I think that the diversity of contemporary practice means that the grim days of default naturalism - the idea that theatre is divided into "accessible" (meaning televisual) "naturalism" and weird "non-naturalistic" experiment - are well and truly over. Instead, naturalism as a formal device has been injected with something like its original energy and urgency. Recently there have been some vivid reminders of how powerful - and how poetic - naturalism can be in the theatre - Peter Evans' brilliant production of David Harrower's Blackbird for the MTC, for example, or Duncan Graham's Ollie and the Minotaur.

Perhaps this is why Hoy Polloy's production of Tom Fool by Franz Xaver Kroetz seems so timely: Kroetz is one of the major invigorators of naturalism in post-war theatre. Although there are more obvious reasons for its aptness: Kroetz's portrayal of the alienating mechanisms of capitalism, of how human beings are reduced to disposable cogs in a gigantic economic machine, is as relevant in 2009 as it was in 1977, when it was first written. Beng Oh's exemplary production, directed with a profound and compassionate clarity, brings this home with devastating, painful emotional force.

Tom Fool (a loose and perhaps slightly judgmental translation of the more neutral Mensch Meier, which means, more or less, "Everyman Meier") is a fable of late 20th century capitalism. It's the story of Otto Meier (Chris Bunworth), a semi-skilled factory worker who lives in a tiny apartment with his wife, Martha (Liz McColl) and son Ludwig (Glenn van Oosterom), and is written in a series of short, titled scenes that focus on the banal domestic minutae of their lives. Kroetz is a master at digging the tragic meaning out of moments that appear on the surface to be trivial, and this production meets his demanding poetic with an admirable honesty.

Tom Fool would be very easy to get very wrong; so much depends on the play of the emotional subtext of each moment, and that in turn depends on a larger wisdom about human behaviour that must meet the playwright's. Every decision in this production hits the right note, neither overdone nor glossed. Beng Oh hasn't attempted to update or Australianise it: Chris Molyneux's stylisedly naturalistic set is a perfect simulacrum of late 70s decor, and the actors, speaking an unobtrusive lower-middle-class Australian, refer to German currency and social conditions.

The scenes are punctuated with a sure rhythmic hand: as the scene title is projected onto the wall, the actors and a couple of stage hands arrange the props, which becomes in itself part of the texture of domestic routine. Then there is a snap, the lights come up and the scene begins. (Tim Bright's sound design and Ben Morris's lighting find a brilliant variousness in this stern aesthetic.) These structural decisions create a solid frame for the actors, which permits them to explore the emotional nakedness of the play. Bunworth, McColl and van Oosterom generate their characters with deft, accumulating touches, gradually excavating their extreme loneliness. This production is notable for its precise detail, which is particularly noticeable in Kroetz's long silent scenes - here the smallest gesture, a shrug, a glance, becomes pregnant with meaning.

They create unforgettable portraits of the fragmentation of the self in contemporary capitalist society. Otto Meier, the "human screw-driver", a "car-screw in-screwer, a screwologist", knows he is dehumanised by his work, but the knowledge doesn't help, as he sees no way out: it emerges in violent rages of frustration that only serve to further alienate his family. Each character becomes more alone, more isolated, although each deals with their alienation in a different way. What makes this play so painful is that their recognition of their isolation, their abandonment of their various dreams in the face of obdurate reality, collides with a heightened realisation of their yearning: the further the dream retreats, the more they desire. It is all the more painful for their inability to communicate their longings to each other.

It's a beautifully performed, tactfully produced realisation of a play that is, for all its apparent banality, a work of great poetic delicacy. The evening passes with astounding swiftness; for all its grim concerns, this production has a nicely judged lightness of touch, and is infused with moments of surprising comedy. It's a rare chance to see Kroetz done as he ought to be. Don't miss this one.

Inevitably, Philip Ridley's Leaves of Glass suffers by comparison to Tom Fool. It's another family drama, and again written in a series of naturalist scenes. Although it features some astounding writing, especially in the monologues, it's doesn't have anything like the imaginative sweep of Ridley's Mercury Fur, a dark fantasia about snuff parties which also centred on the relationship between two brothers. Put next to Kroetz's sparely judged writing it seems fussy and melodramatic, and its social commentary - an exploration of the human capacity for denial, of how we can erase reality with language - not nearly as deeply thought.

I suppose the title, Leaves of Glass, is an elliptical nod to Whitman's Leaves of Grass, though it's difficult to make the connection. There are certainly touches of Tenessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie in its exploration of human fragility and damage. It's a family drama with all the expected Ibsenite elements - dark secrets, deaths, dramatic revelations, murderous sibling rivalry - given a 21st century twist. Steve (Dan Frederiksen) is a picture of materialist Britain, a successful, emotionally stunted businessman married to a WAG-style shopaholic wife (Amelia Best). His younger brother Barry (Johnny Carr) is an artist, traumatically scarred by the suicide of his father, and both still live in the shadow of their mother, Liz (Jillian Murray). What makes it interesting how the writing turns on its cliches, especially in the climactic scene where language itself becomes a means for murder.

Simon Stone gives it a spare and well-judged production, with a design by Peter Mumford in which the stage is divided into parallel sections by clear plastic curtains, which are drawn back or closed to reflect the degrees of separation between the different characters. The performances are excellent; I especially liked Johnny Carr and Daniel Frederiksen as the two brothers. Although it's a bit of a disappointment after Mercury Fur, it's well worth seeing all the same. And certainly the best production at Red Stitch since Tom Holloway's Red Sky Morning.

Post script: my opening speculations are further illuminated by David Williamson's attack on "capital-T theatre" in today's Sydney Morning Herald.

Picture: Chris Bunworth as Otto in Tom Fool. Photo: Tim Williamson

Tom Fool by Franz Xaver Kroetz, translated by Estella Schmid and Anthony Vivis, directed by Beng Oh. Design by Chris Molyneux, lighting design by Ben Morris, sound design by Tim Bright. With Chris Bunworth, Liz McColl and Glenn van Oosterom. Hoy Polloy, Brunswick Mechanics Institute until May 23.

Leaves of Glass by Philip Ridley, directed by Simon Stone. Design by Peter Mumford, lighting design by Kimberley Kaw. With Dan Frederiksen, Johnny Carr, Jillian Murray and Amelia Best. Red Stitch, until May 30.

Mercury Fur by Philip Ridley, directed by Ben Packer. Designed by Adam Gardnir, sound design by Kelly Ryall, lighting design by Danny Pettingill. With Paul Ashcroft, Gareth Ellis, Fiona Macys, Luke Mullins, Aaron Orzech, Russ Pirie and Xavier Samuel. Little Death Productions @ Theatreworks, Melbourne until September 16. Bookings: 9534 3388. Griffin Theatre, Sydney. September 27-October 13. Bookings: 1300 306 776.

If you want to see the best show in town, head down to Theatreworks and buy a ticket to Mercury Fur. It is, quite simply, brilliant theatre. But don’t expect to walk out with a song in your heart and a smile on your lips.

British playwright Philip Ridley’s dystopian work offers darker pleasures. It’s set in a parallel London in which mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. Britain is in the grip of an unspecified war, savage gangs rule the streets and most people escape reality by eating hallucinogenic butterflies.


In such total societal collapse, anything goes. Brothers Elliot (Luke Mullins) and his brother Darren (Xavier Samuel) are part of a small family business: they are party planners. The parties have only one guest, and their aim is to realise the violent sexual fantasies of those with sufficient cash to pay for it.

For all its fantastic dress, Mercury Fur is, as Anthony Burgess said of Clockwork Orange, a play about now. It’s a savage indictment of a world in which conscience is a luxury that people can ill afford. At the same time, it’s a deeply touching meditation on how, even in the worst of circumstances, human beings cling to those they love with a desperate and hopeless loyalty.

Mercury Fur was considered so shocking on its UK premiere that Ridley’s publisher, Faber, refused to publish it. While some critics loved it, Ridley was also accused of peddling filth and of getting off on his own sick fantasies. Such criticisms miss the mark widely. For one thing, the realities Ridley deals with are no more shocking than those digested nightly with the evening news bulletin.

It is, after all, only a play. I have never quite understood the logic that gets outraged by the representation of unpleasant realities, as if it were somehow worse than the realities themselves. Certainly, those who accuse Ridley of indulging a sick imagination are ignoring the fact that some of the worst stories revealed in the play were taken verbatim from accounts of the massacres in Rwanda. And it’s hard, for example, not to see a direct connection between Ridley’s play and this. Anyone who thinks that theatre should stick to “nice” topics and leave the world alone is arguing for its irrelevancy. One of the most exciting aspects of this play is how urgently it speaks out of the present.

Ridley’s text evokes a horror that is all more potent for its matter-of-fact delivery. Thankfully – and sensibly – the real violence takes place off-stage, although we overhear it, but the language itself is violent, jammed with every linguistic obscenity that Ridley can think of. This brutalised language plays against a jagged and surprising lyrical beauty, the love between the broken family at the centre of the play, for example, or in the yearning memories of a time “before”, when things were different.

Mercury Fur might be said, in fact, to be more than anything else a play about memory. Here memory – the means by which we know ourselves – is dislocated, distorted and erased by drugs and trauma. The notion of history, or cultural memory, barely exists. Elliot is the repository of story, the one who, despite his apparent brutality, attempts to hold on to his humanity through his recollections of a kinder past; but it becomes clear that his memory is equally the locus of his anguish. It is much easier not to be conscious, to escape into the drug-fuelled virtual reality offered by the butterflies.

Mercury Fur derives in part from the work of writers such as Heathcote Williams or Howard Barker. But it has more in common with young “blood and sperm” German playwrights like Marius von Mayenburg. Like Mayenburg’s Eldorado, seen here at the Malthouse last year, Mercury Fur describes a literal, rather than a fantastic, reality. In both plays, the act of imagination collapses geography, bringing home to the west the atrocities that are usually a comfortable distance from us in places like Rwanda or Baghdad.

This insistent sense of reality is reinforced by the style: it is actually written in a distorted naturalism, occurring in one scene over real time. Again intriguingly like Eldorado, the central relationships are familial. Both plays are, curiously enough, forms of domestic drama, troubled examinations of what a family might be under the pressure of social anarchy. Although Ridley seems to imagine a family in which the female - blinded and maddened by atrocity - is all but extinct, it's a vision which is paradoxically shot through with a teasing shimmer of optimism. He is quite correct to claim that it is a play about love.

Ben Packer’s production powerfully realises the extremities of the play. Adam Gardnir’s design recreates the Griffin Theatre’s small triangular stage in the cavernous space of Theatreworks, making the action uncomfortably intimate. The rest of the space is curtained off, so we are aware of the emptiness of the rest of the building, as if we really were in a towerblock.

With Danny Pettingill’s subtle lighting design, mostly consisting of a bank of yellow lightbulbs filling the “window” at the back of the stage, and Kelly Ryall’s almost subliminal score, the set unobtrusively and effectively creates an environment for the play that permits no escape for the audience. But the real value of this production is in its performances, which are remarkably unafraid.

In the role of Elliot, Luke Mullins strengthens his claim to be the best actor of his generation. He is breathtakingly good, leavening a disillusioned, dead-eyed menace with a profound tenderness that makes the anguish of Elliot searingly legible. As his brain-damaged brother Darren. Xavier Samuel manages a mixture of brutalised innocence and poignancy that goes nowhere near the sentimental, and is a great foil for Aaron Orzech as the hapless but disarmingly honest intruder Naz.

Young actor Russ Pirie, showing that he’s another talent to watch, gives a standout performance as the transvestite Lola, and Fiona Macys, playing the blind Duchess, is a revelation. In comparison, Gareth Ellis’s perfectly able performance as Papa Spinx, the patriarch of this unlikely clan, lacks a little verisimilitude: there are marvellous moments, as when he gently outlines the Duchess’s lipstick, but it’s difficult to see why people are so afraid of him. And as the psychopathic "guest", Paul Ashcroft is the most chilling character in the whole play; he behaves like a young city executive who's going abseiling.

So what are you waiting for? Hie thee hence and book your tickets; this is theatre of the first order, and you’ll be sorry if you miss it. Just take a deep breath before you go in.

Picture: Luke Mullins in Mercury Fur. Photo: Dan Stainsby

A shorter version of this review was published in yesterday's Australian.