Little Alison is still in reset mode. On Wednesday night she saw Lucy Guerin's Aether, a work of exquisite complexity and beauty, but can she find the words to describe it? (The audience is expected to shout out: "no, she can't!") It takes a certain answering complexity in the mind to respond to work, and for the moment - I live eternally in hope of tomorrow - TN has the aesthetic sophistication of a shoelace. This lack of creative brio must be why I find myself coming over all editorial. What the hell. It's Sunday, the newly cleansed house is sparkling, and I'm sure you've got a nice cool beverage by your elbow. Right then.

This week, for example, the Short and Sweet Festival is back again at the Victorian Arts Centre, apparently bigger and better than ever. Now, in blogland Short and Sweet has a controversial history. Some of you will remember the wrath visited upon Ming-Zhu last year, when she blogged as a participant in the 2006 season (Chris Boyd's useful summary here, my commentary on the commentary here, and my review of some plays here.)

Patrick White winner Patricia Cornelius is one of the participating playwrights this year, and she was in the Age last week doing the PR thing. Though I noticed Cornelius seemed to argue against the idée fixe that audiences now have the attention spans of the above-mentioned shoelace. (Wherefore the wowed audiences at Ariane Mnouchkine's six hour epic Les Dernier Caravanserail, I wonder? surely if theatre is considered exciting in itself, it doesn't have to be marketed as something that won't hurt for long? - but I digress...) It is this attention span that, it seems, necessitates such festivals, which provide "access" to the arts.

I have all sorts of problems with the word "access". For a start, in my experience the demand for "accessible" art usually comes from people like Andrew Bolt. I am all for community arts, an aspect of culture that was sidelined by the Australia Council's restructure under the Howard Government, which saw off the Community Arts Board and left institutions like La Mama struggling to carry the slack. But I'm hoping - given that S&S organiser Alex Broun has been very active organising arts policy forums for the new Labor Arts Minister, Peter Garrett - that S&S isn't seen as a model for a brave new accessible arts world, because I think it is, at best, harmless and, at worst, a way of seeming to support emerging artists while actually doing very little of substantial worth.

(Aside from good community theatre programs - of which I think organisations like Big hArt are a model - I actually think that the best thing that could be done for access to theatre would be to make tickets cheaper. In Paris, you can pay 10 euro to see Pina Bausch at the very comfy Théâtre de la Ville, whereas a ticket to The Madwoman of Chaillot in Melbourne will set you back almost $80. But again, I digress...)

The short play festival concept is at best a dubiously scattergun way of nurturing new work. But it's attractive in many ways - it's very feelgood, and it's cheap. Participants volunteer their services for a chance at the prize money, thus removing at one stroke the major problem in performing arts budgets: the wages bill. There's something strangely circular about it. As I said in my review of one of last year's shows:

There's a whiff of the MFA creative writing circle here, a phenomenon common in the US, where aspiring poets (for example) learn how to write poetry in an MFA program, are published because they have an MFA, and go on to become creative writing teachers who run MFA programs...a rather pernicious professionalisation, as many have suggested, which explains the smooth edges of so much contemporary American poetry. Short & Sweet has its own version - aspiring S&Sers can enrol for the Short & Sweet playwriting course in early 2007, where they can presumably learn how to write plays for the festival.

It's almost, as a quick look at the website will verify, a small industry, and it's expanding rapidly: there are now S&S festivals for dance and music theatre. On the face of it, as I said, it's mostly harmless. But if Short and Sweet is embraced as a way forward for theatre, I worry.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about at all.

What caught my attention in the Age was a comment by Patricia, where she talked about the "desperation" felt by many writers about the lack of outlets for their work. I don't argue with the desperation; we have all - those of us of literary dispositions - felt this at one stage or another. "There are so few avenues for people wanting to write for theatre now," she goes on to say, "especially with the exclusion of Australian work from our major theatres."

This is where I do a double take. Which major theatres "exclude" Australian work? Even the MTC, which is surely among the most backwards of the major companies in this area, has this year programmed new works by David Williamson, Joanna Murray-Smith and Justin Clements (it has a rather better record in previous years). I can't say I'm excited by the Murray-Smith/Williamson duet, but there's no arguing that it's new and it's Australian.

Cornelius is by no means the only person to say this - it's a common perception. The formation of PlayWriting Australia out of the two former bodies, the Australian National Playwrights Centre and Playworks, is a new attempt to address the difficulties playwrights face. There's an organisation mooted called Melbourne Dramatists which, aside from having the worthy aim of getting playwrights to talk to each other, aims to mitigate the prejudice theatre companies allegedly hold against Australian work. There are playwrights' conferences all over the map, there are workshops and masterclasses and competitions. Playwrights, it seems, need all the help they can get.

I do not doubt that it's hard to get new plays on, despite the support of champions of new writing like La Mama or Griffin Theatre, nor do I wish to dismiss the concerns of writers. But I will point out that it was ever thus. I only need to ask my husband, who is now approaching (or even in) his third decade as a full-time playwright, a "profession", if it so might be called, which combined with my own, means that we do not own a house, a car, shares in Telstra, a country estate or any of the other material accoutrements considered necessary for a comfortable bourgeois life. (Although we do own a lot of books, cds and dvds). And he's successful, accounting - according to the Australia Council anyway - for a quarter of Australia's entire literary exports.

Yes, there's no doubt that it's tough - though equally, it's tough for directors and actors and all those other parts of the industry that face the prospect of 90 per cent unemployment. But is it really as bad as claimed? Do major companies really ignore Australian work?

Robyn Nevin, former artistic director of the STC, addressed this head-on earlier this year. "There's been a perception out there that I've been unwilling to program new Australian plays. Obviously there have been new Australian plays that I've not produced. I've rejected them. Perhaps that's what has generated this criticism because the facts tell a different story."

In fact, says Nevin, the 2008 STC season includes seven Australian plays. "Forty-seven per cent of the plays done over my time here have been Australian," she says. "Thirty-five people have been commissioned and next year we're doing seven Australian works."

The company that gets most schtick for ignoring writers is the Malthouse Theatre. Rodney Hall was one of the first to accuse it of "abandoning" writers, just after the new team took over from Playbox in 2004, and it's been a constant bone of dissatisfaction ever since. The Playbox, the story goes, programmed playwrights, and the Malthouse doesn't. I've heard this so often that I think it's worth looking in detail at the facts.

The past three years' programming doesn't bear out this assertion at all. In 2004, the final Playbox year, the Playbox produced six new Australian plays, its total work for the year (the previous year, the Playbox presented eight). The following year, the new writer-free Malthouse put on, in a season of 11 works, seven new Australian plays - and I mean, plays, texts written for theatre - by Wesley Enoch, Tom Wright (two), Lally Katz, Patricia Cornelius, Margaret Cameron and Ben Ellis. Plus a production of Patrick White. There were seven plays- plus a literary adaptation - in 2006, as well. Since 2005, it's mounted new works by Stephen Sewell, Gareth Ellis, Michael Watts, Ross Mueller, Lally Katz, Tom Wright, Rebecca Clarke, Melissa Reeves and Peter Houghton.

It beats me how that is abandoning writers, although there's no argument that the Malthouse is programming a broader vision of theatre. But the perception that writers are ignored persists, despite the facts. Are writers simply responding to the fact that there are many more plays than stages to put them on? (And perhaps I have answered the S&S question above - is it a place for the overspill, a kind of valve to let the pressure off some dangerous cultural steam?) But it seems to me that these persistent complaints are actually part of a deeper and more complex conflict about the place of writers in contemporary theatre. Which is, actually, quite an interesting discussion.

But now I'm hot and I have to move my desk (only writers know what this means). So I'll leave it to others to tease that one out...

Today, for a couple of reasons, I was going through some old work, and I found this essay. I don't think it has ever been published, and some of you might find it interesting. Among other things, it outlines how my brilliant career at the Bulletin went bung, and gives a snapshot of how I saw things in 1997. And it also articulates many of the reasons why I started this blog. Those who regularly read Theatre Notes will know that I feel rather more hopeful about Melbourne theatre now than I did then, and of course my views have evolved considerably. But of course there is the other argument, that the more things change, the more they remain the same...

Little Alison and her battle against the eunuchs

VLADIMIR: Moron!
ESTRAGON: Vermin!
VLADIMIR: Abortion!
ESTRAGON: Morpion!
VLADIMIR: Sewer rat!
ESTRAGON: Curate!
VLADIMIR: Cretin!
ESTRAGON: (with finality). Crritic!
VLADIMIR: Oh!
He wilts, vanquished, and turns away.

EVERYONE loves to hate critics. All too often, they make it easy. No matter how much you believe in the importance of public debate, no matter how passionately you argue that a vigorous, informed critical culture is essential to the health of a democratic society, some pompous ignoramus will prove to the world in the Saturday supplements that critics are on the bottom rung of intelligent life forms. Nevertheless, one must fight the good fight. This is the story of part of my personal battle, the three years I spent as a theatre critic for the Bulletin and the absurd results of my high-minded crusade to get cultural debate happening in Australian theatre. It is all, like all comedies, tragically illuminating.

In considering the contemporary disappearance of the moral authority of the critic, Hans Magnus Enzensberger comments:

... it seems that the appearance of the critic is related to the rise of bourgeois society, as if he had dominated this society for just as long as this society held on to the idea that the public discussion of cultural norms is something essential: that is, crudely put, from Boileau to Sartre, from Samuel Johnson to Edmund Wilson, from Lessing to Benjamin, from Belinsky to Shlovsky. What characterises these fabulous intellectual beasts? Legend has it, and it is confirmed by reading the works they left behind, that they were writers who wrote about the books of other writers. Further, these critics are said to have been independent people, who owed their significance solely to their work, not to an institution or an industry, at whose service they had placed themselves. Apparently the essay was their preferred form, the journal their favoured medium. They are said to have known what they wanted - obstinate, uncomfortable spirits, looking to long-term results instead of quick turnover.

Enzensberger concludes the days of the critic are over, that what remains are the mouthpieces of an industrial machine. I think he is correct, but at least he has the privilege of speaking out of European culture. Australians might well yearn for such a dilemma. Here, in a culture scarred by colonial insularity, there has never been the cultural curiosity that permitted serious public discussion of literature or art or anything else. Now that snappy advertising allows us to delude ourselves that we are a serious culture, we can catch up breathlessly with the ruins of Europe - a culture polluted by fashion, public relations and the imperatives of the culture industry.

Unlike Germany, we do not have several centuries of brilliant public thinking to shore up at least the idea of critical thought. In a country that has an insecure sense of its place in the world, the merest whiff of criticism is enough to send the so-called aesthetes screaming towards the courts of special pleading. No one thinks of donning their armour for a pyrotechnic bout of intellectual fencing for the delight and illumination of anyone who cares to watch. At best we get a bit of mud slinging, with all its attendant crudity and mess. At worst, we have the edifying anthropological spectacle of tribal groups of cultural heavies licking each other’s bottoms.

It is no accident that some of our most famous exports - Robert Hughes, Germaine Greer and Clive James - are all critics. Nor that they all appear to be singularly isolated talents. One can only speculate what might have happened had they chosen to remain here. The grim guess is, not much. The impregnable fog of stupidity would have stifled them in the end. But this can only be fantastic speculation. There was nothing to keep them here in the first place.

One of our fondest myths is that everything has changed since the dull daze of Menzies. My suspicion is that, despite a glittering cosmopolitan veneer, things are probably worse. At least then it was obvious how bad things were. Australia has proved to be a good breeding ground for brilliant, isolated talents - among them a disproportionate number of extraordinary poets - the only kind tough enough to survive the death by a thousand cuts that is the lot of the artist working in Australia. Nothing is as deadening as apathy. Nothing is as savage as pettiness called to question. Nothing is as unanswerable as wilful ignorance.

I came to theatre reviewing by accident. The first job I was offered as a freelance journalist after I resigned from the Melbourne Herald in 1985, was to write the theatre pages for TV Scene, an execrable tabloid that met its unlamented demise when Rupert Murdoch bought the Herald and Weekly Times. My job for the Bulletin came about because the publicity person for the Melbourne Theatre Company suggested my name to James Hall, then the Bulletin’s art editor, when his incumbent critic couldn’t cover a play. I have no doubt my name was suggested because it was expected that, out of gratitude for the chance to move up the career ladder, I would write glowing quotes for the PR blurbs.

However, I was naive enough to take the job seriously: the chance to write something of substance had come my way rarely as a journalist. The production was Hedda Gabler. I read the play closely, mugged up on Ibsen, went to see the show and was disappointed. I said so, and why, in my review. The publicity lady was grossly offended and the director didn’t speak to me for two years. Invitations to MTC opening nights mysteriously stopped arriving, although this made me perversely ensure I went along anyway. In my beginning, as Eliot was wont to say, was my end.

Two months later James Hall offered me the position of Melbourne reviewer for the Bulletin, a post I held for the next three years. I was, in most ways, a fairly typical reviewer. I had, at best, a sketchy and local knowledge of theatre: I knew only a little of its history, its theory and its techniques and almost nothing at all about contemporary theatre elsewhere. However, in other ways I was not typical.

One was a sound intuition that, in order to write well about theatre, I had to watch it. I wanted to abandon the privileged role of “critic” and participate in the theatre as a member of the audience. I never took notes; I found that if I did this I couldn’t watch the stage. I thought note-taking accounted for the fact that many reviews seemed to be about a completely different play to the one I had seen. I found that with concentration and practice my memory served me very well. I also, whenever possible, read the plays I reviewed, especially if they were new work.

I used the style of tabloid journalism in order to write seriously about art, for two reasons. One was to destabilise the privileged art-speak that dismissed an audience as stupid. I wanted to demonstrate to the people who read my reviews that the audience, also, has a vital place in the theatre, that it isn’t there merely to worship at the hallowed shrine of culture, which is often more accurately the hollow shrine of money and cultural status.

The other reason was pragmatic. Newspaper and magazine editors believe that reviews serve two purposes: to tell their readers where, when and how a production is on, and to act as a consumer guide. To talk about art is considered a wank, as art in itself is not considered interesting. I think art by itself is interesting and wanted to talk about it: and this technique was one way of subverting the formalities of a newspaper review and getting serious ideas in, as it were, under the door.

My ideas about art were informed by the belief that, as Trotsky said, true art is truly revolutionary. I don’t mean that art exists as a form of social engineering - it is ultimately too private an act for such grandiose designs, too complex for ideologies - but that true art can shatter the comfortable constructions we all build within our lives, privately and publicly, and force us to a radical reappraisal of ourselves and our world. “A book,” said Franz Kafka, “must be the axe to break the ice within.”

Theatre can offer such radical experiences. Australian theatre usually doesn’t, because theatre is by its nature a social act. One person cannot make theatre on her own and repressions, conscious and unconscious, operate at almost every level of its production and reception. A major repression is the fear of ridicule and dislike. Our theatrical institutions ensure that the work they produce is acceptable to its audience. This is not a problem confined to Australia; in every Western culture, theatre producers face the bogey of the subscription audience, which is too often the death of theatrical courage. Everything is carefully airbrushed to a nice beige, in order not to offend anyone, and younger artists, rebelling as they must against the prevailing order, produce a lot of radical - beige. It is worth remembering that Patrick White, one of our really great writers, became a monster, a popular cultural icon of artistic nastiness who fulfilled public expectations of his behaviour most obligingly. It is difficult not to suspect that a source of his corrosive anger was the need to assert within himself the validity of excellence in the face of the indiscriminate acceptance of mediocrity.

My own critical practice was largely shaped by my practice as a poet. My work had always been informed by astute and rigorous criticism from other people. I learnt early to distinguish between what I thought of as “useful” and “useless” criticism. Useful criticism was specific, attuned to the ambitions of the work, honest and carefully argued; useless criticism was characterised by generalised statements that responded to a nimbus of preconceptions surrounding the work rather than the work itself. Useful criticism stimulated me to heighten my own critical faculties: it raised questions that forced me to scrutinise my work and evaluate what I was doing there. Useless criticism, positive or negative, stimulated nothing. Perhaps the most important aspect of useful criticism is its implicit love of the art form it interrogates. Useless criticism is devoid of love; it is at best indifferent to art’s imperatives.

I wanted, first of all, to be a useful critic. I saw that theatre and criticism have a dialectical relationship and I wrote my reviews as part of the dialogue, or polylogue, of a continuum called theatre. I never believed they bore the imprimatur of irrefutable judgement: I wrote them to stimulate discussion, to raise questions, to disturb assumptions. I never saw any point in denying my subjectivity, because I thought subjectivity was an essential admission. I worked to make my subjectivity informed, to understand as much as I could of the techniques, histories and ideas that make theatre what it is. In this aim, I was influenced particularly by David Mamet’s passionate address to critics in Writing in Restaurants. I wanted to be a critic like that. I don’t believe I achieved my ambition. But it wasn’t for lack of trying.

The more I reviewed, the more clearly I understood the fraudulence of what often passes for art and arts commentary in our culture. Art in Australia is massively beauracratised and stupidly written about in our mass media: and these things conspire to ensure that art as a genuinely radical dynamic is all but invisible. All art, interesting or not, is blurred into a sludge called culture, an industry which mainly exists to employ mediators who ensure that the “products” are passively consumed. The essentially uncommodifiable quality of aesthetic is pushed off the agenda.

As a substitute we have celebrity, watered-down social issues and the odd trite controversy. The effect is the creation of an “official” culture, well-oiled by public relations, which keeps in place a number of cherished assumptions and careers by the simple expedient of appearing to be challenging, cutting edge, exciting and everything else a culture is supposed to be, without any of the substance. This hypocrisy is endemic in all of our arts and is reflected in the repression of dissenting voices.

While I was reviewing, I was the only critic I knew who regarded it as a full-time job. Most critics worked part-time, having other jobs in academia and journalism, because otherwise they would have been as poor as I was. The media is not interested in having good critics: a mediocre critic serves its purposes just as well and is far less trouble. And there’s no doubt I was troublesome. The Bulletin copped a law suit over one review and many angry letters from outraged recipients of my altruism. I was only 25 when I started, so my innocence is perhaps excusable: I was amazed that people became so angry with me, because I thought it was obvious that everything I said stemmed from my love of theatre, and didn’t they love theatre too?

The major row during my time with the Bulletin was with the Playbox theatre. Contrary to the wisdom of gossip, that harassment didn’t get me sacked. But perhaps it is only from this distance that I recognise with clarity how extensive, malicious and unremitting it was.

The facts are simple and petty. When, during the season of 1990, the Playbox Theatre’s first in its swish new Malthouse Theatre, I reviewed awful play after awful play, Carillo Gantner, who was then artistic director, decided that I was a blot on the landscape that had to be removed for the good of Australian culture. He started with a series of phone calls to the arts editor, Diana Simmonds, in which he suggested it may be a good idea to sack me. When that failed, he tried the Bulletin’s editor, James Hall. When that also failed, he started a smear campaign that attacked my credibility. It included a highly libellous letter to the Victorian Council for the Arts that asked for their help in getting me sacked for my alleged campaign against Playbox caused by my “psychotic” personality (there could be no other reason why I found the plays below par). Finally, he banned me from the theatre for “unprofessional conduct” after an unspecified “incident in the foyer”. James Hall rang me and asked what I had done: had I drunkenly abused the actor involved, or what?

The “incident” bears some examination. Then, as now, I had many friends who worked in the theatre. One day, an old friend, an actor then employed in a Playbox production, rang me and asked me out for a coffee because he was troubled. He told me that the day before, he had been called into Gantner’s office and cross-examined because he had been seen talking to me in the foyer at the Malthouse on the opening night of the play. Our conversation had been, briefly, about the play: I hadn’t liked it and had apologised to him, in advance, for the review.

It was after this that James Hall rang me about Gantner's complaint. Clearly, my speaking to my friend was the “incident”, given some considerable spin by the Playbox machine. I couldn’t ask the actor concerned to stand up for me in public: he would probably never have been able to work in Melbourne again. I had no recourse against this gross slander except to say it wasn’t true. Argument was reduced to the level of the pre-school sand pit - “Did so!” “Did not!” “Did so!” - in which the loudest always wins.

Gantner’s strategy transparently sidestepped the censorship at the root of his actions; he claimed that my banning from Playbox was nothing to do with what he called my “vitriolic” and “personally abusive” reviews. I wrote a letter passionately arguing against the censorship of debate, pointing out how damaging such censorship was to the arts and to the culture. (I have a thick file of the correspondence between the Bulletin, myself and Gantner which is probably most notable now for its absurd comedy.) I even attempted to explain that to criticise someone’s work was not the same as a personal attack. I was making a fundamental mistake: although even Gantner was forced to concede that my reviews were accurate, what was at stake was Playbox’s funding and stature, which he claimed I was directly threatening. The larger arguments of artistic quality, the only questions with which I was concerned, were pushed aside and remained unanswered. It began to dawn on me that some artistic organisations are interested in anything but art.

When it became obvious even to Gantner that he was making a fool of himself, the whole fracas sank into a silent pool of embarrassment. It was tacitly agreed that everyone should just get on with their jobs. By then I was exhausted and sick of the whole affair and its attendant notoriety. I wondered why I had worked so hard, for so little money, for such trivial results. If I had “played the game”, if I had refused to have any thoughts of my own and had simply followed the line of least resistance, no doubt I would still be attending opening nights and dozing my way through reviews. But why would I want to do that? Life’s too short.

Shortly afterwards, on the strength of the free publicity I had given the Bulletin, I wrote and asked for the retainer that I had been promised for two years. I had already decided that if I was to live in abject poverty, it would be more profitable to resign from journalism and concentrate on my real work, poetry. Unfortunately, at the Bulletin my old mate James Hall had been replaced as editor. (The media is a volatile profession). The new editor impolitely told me to go jump. So, impolitely, I did. I think it is no coincidence that I resigned at the same time that I finally felt I knew enough to do the job properly.

It was a most unedifying affair. It did teach me a lot about pettiness, dishonesty and why Australian theatre is peculiarly insulated from ideas.

There is one crucial aspect of theatre that doesn’t apply to most other arts: its temporality. A poem can be read five hundred years later, a film can be watched fifteen times. But if you’re not there at the theatre, you’ve missed it. This means that theatre criticism has another function: as a record. Our theatre history is seriously compromised by our theatre criticism.

I’ll cite one example: former Age critic Leonard Radic’s 1991 book The State of Play. Anyone looking for an informed and stimulating discussion of the past 25 years of Australian theatre will be disappointed. The book is a cliche-ridden, limp regurgitation of received wisdom, written with the false objectivity that masks an entrenched subjective smugness. What it tells you is what we all know: that David Williamson, John Romeril, Jack Hibberd et al started at the Pram Factory and La Mama and thus was Australian theatre born. Williamson scores a whole chapter to himself, and a cringing, crawling summation it is.

There is only the briefest mention, for instance, of the work that was occurring simultaneously in the early 70s and which helped to make that time so exciting: the productions of work by European playwrights like Arabal, Handke, and others, some of which was the first to be performed in English anywhere in the world, or the work by women such as Sue Ingleton. There is no critical intelligence exploring, except in the crudest nationalistic terms, the political agendas that were operating within the theatre. Radic, whose analysis of plays only approaches that of an intelligent high school student, is simply not up to it. The history of the Pram Factory in the early 70s has yet to be written. All the ferment, all the excitement, all the variousness, is pared down to the level of a press release: and now, for a student like me, it may as well not exist.

This uninteresting book wouldn’t matter if other useful critical commentaries were easily available: but they’re not. There is a scrappily researched history produced by Currency Press, but that is as useless. Nowhere do we have, for instance, books like Michael Billington’s One Night Stands or Kenneth Tynan’s collected reviews of British theatre, that can tell you what it was like to be there, why it mattered, why it was exciting.

Radic was the senior theatre reviewer in Melbourne for more than two decades. I have no doubt that in that time he caused immeasurable damage to Melbourne’s theatre culture, by sins of omission as well as commission. For 20 years he told audiences that theatre’s greatest aim was to be “warm hearted” and informed theatre practitioners that the only thing that counted was box office approbation. The theatre of ideas, of imagination, of spiritual and intellectual struggle, of beauty and tragedy, of vulgar comedy and robust protest, the theatre that bore Shakespeare and Aeschylus and Beckett, simply did not exist for him. And Melbourne theatre slowly went into a disenchanted sleep, from which no prince’s kiss has yet awakened it.

Amid the snores, I haven’t been able to rid myself of the desire to write about my responses to art. I do so when I am asked and sometimes when I’m not, for my own reasons. I do not expect any real debate to result from my work. The work, and the rewards, are purely private. I’m quite aware of how ridiculous a position it is since, unlike almost any other literary mode, criticism is primarily a public act. Theatre reviewing remains as dull and ill-informed as it ever was - perhaps a little duller, since no doubt other reviewers took note of what happened to me and took more care not to think. The theatre has, sadly, the critics it deserves: the critics have the theatre they deserve. Who is cheated? Theatre’s audience, and any artist attempting serious work. And most of all, theatre itself.

It's that time of year again, when it is conventional to drink too much, to rush around snarling at your fellow harrassed shoppers, and to say things like, where has this year gone? And of course, time for the annual Olympian view of the year's theatre, as seen from the critical eyrie.

Glancing through my reviews, what strikes me principally is how much good theatre, of many different kinds, that I've seen this year. And, perhaps perversely, I finish this year feeling more optimistic about the state of Melbourne theatre than I began it.

2005 was dominated by two very different events - the radical shift of artistic direction at the Malthouse Theatre, and this year's extremely successful Melbourne Festival. Under Michael Kantor's artistic direction, the Malthouse has done the unimaginable - turned around the stale post-70s aesthetic of the Playbox Theatre and made a space for a broader perception of theatrical possibility. Likewise, the Melbourne Festival's 2005 program, by general agreement the most exciting for years, was a sell-out success. Artistic director Kristy Edmunds foregrounded innovative work by local and international artists which galvanised everyone who attended, sparking engaged (and often vastly differing) responses. Theatre is looking sexy again: more importantly, the broadening of aesthetic possibility is beginning to attract a different demographic, younger people who have heretofore rather spent their dollars on film or books. We can only hope that this trend continues.

On the other hand, theatre, as always, teeters in a state of permanent crisis, and there are many reasons to be worried about the future of the arts here. If even Hannie Rayson's absurd melodrama Two Brothers can prompt Federal Ministers to talk about abolishing the Australia Council, what happens if there's some real critique? This year also saw the abolition of the Australia Council's New Media and Community Arts Boards - both of which supported innovative artforms - under a major restructure, to the wide disquiet of the arts community.

The recent bundle of legislation passed through Federal Parliament includes amendments to the archaic sedition laws that potentially affect artists as much as journalists or anyone interested in social critique, and the banning of compulsory union fees at universities with a consequent disastrous effect on cultural life in our tertiary institutions. These laws represent the latest and most damaging salvos in an ongoing war by the right wing against Australian culture: only this week, the attack dog of the Right, Andrew Bolt, savaged the alleged "group think" of arts funding bodies (conveniently ignoring the fact, for instance, that the Australia Council also funds the right wing magazine Quadrant) , and it's hard not to wonder how much this indicates more aggressive government interference in - and ultimately, repression of - art that doesn't toe the official line.

More particularly, to return to theatre itself, there has recently been a rash of doom-laden opinion pieces about the lack of new Australian theatre writing. Even Helen Thompson, who has certainly seen more Melbourne theatre than I have this year, comments that there has been "a dearth of new Australian writing for the stage".

I am frankly puzzled by this perception. This year I have seen a lot of new Australian writing, in conventional and innovative forms. I don't want to minimise the difficulties playwrights face here, which are complex, and at once familiar to anyone working in theatre anywhere and particular to this culture. The fact remains that I've seen a lot of new Australian theatre writing this year, ranging from full-on mainstream adaptation (Andrew Upton's marvellous version of Cyrano de Bergerac at the MTC) to the innovative - Subclass26A at 45 Downstairs, for example, or Stuart Orr's brilliant operatic riff on Nazism, Telefunken and Margaret Cameron's poetic meditation The Proscenium, at the Malthouse.

We had Wesley Enoch's breathtaking (and breathtakingly directed) Black Medea, a Belvoir St/Malthouse co-production; ambitious, if ultimately flawed adaptations by Tom Wright (The Odyssey and Journal of a Plague Year); Ben Ellis' Kafka's Metamorphosis and Patricia Cornelius' Love - both of which, sadly, I missed as I was overseas. And in the smaller independent companies there were productions of a new generation of young writers - Lally Katz, Tee O'Neill, Angus Cerini, Robert Reid and others. And that's without even looking at the work La Mama constantly does in creating a haven for new writing, both with regular readings of new playwrights and productions.

So where is this dearth of new Australian writing? It's underfunded, no question; it struggles to be seen and heard - even, it seems, by those who have seen and heard it. But it's most undoubtedly there. And the best of it has a promising energy and intelligence, a restlessness which challenges the artform and the society in which it's produced.

Perhaps this perception has, in part, been fed by the tendency of independent companies like Theatre@Risk and Red Stitch to put on international plays. But it seems chiefly to derive from the change of direction at the Malthouse, and its abandonment of the Playbox program of doing only new Australian plays. This has led to assertions that the Malthouse no longer supports new Australian work, an argument that a quick look at their 2005 program would quickly dismantle. The policy does signal a move away from a conservative aesthetic dominated by the idea of the "well-made play", towards a more integrated model of theatre writing - the idea that, like Shakespeare, the playwright is a theatre worker who collaborates with others to create his art.

In any case, Australian theatre seems more broadly imagined than it was a year ago, and for that I am profundly grateful.

So, to my stand-out productions (or, at least, those I haven't mentioned yet). It will be no surprise to anyone that Ariane Mnouchkine's Le Dernier Caravansérail gets my vote (as well as, it seems, everyone else's) for the most significant production of the year. I suspect that Théâtre de Soleil's tour will come to be seen, in retrospect, as influential as Pina Bausch's tour was on Australian dance in the 1970s - its achievment, beauty and power were nothing less than inspiring.

At the Malthouse, Michael Kantor's production of Patrick White's The Ham Funeral was sheerly beautiful, and placed White where he belongs - squarely in the Australian theatrical tradition, from which he has been carefully edited for the past three decades or so. And Barrie Kosky's 21st Century cabaret with the amazing Paul Capsis, Boulevard Delirium, deserved its standing ovations.

Among the independent companies, I remember Anita Hegh's extraordinary one-woman performance of The Yellow Wallpaper; Act-O-Matic's very classy production of The Laramie Project; Chamber Made Opera's return season of its wonderful and witty send up of film noir, Phobia; and the poignant fairytale Felix Listens to the World, made by the young company Suitcase Royale. And I also would like to mention Out on a Limb, Sarah Mainwaring's moving performance art piece at La Mama, which has stayed with me a long time.

Theatre Notes is taking a short break for Christmas, but will be back with bells on - and perhaps the remnants of tinsel - for what looks like a fascinating 2006. The big question for me is, what now for the Malthouse? Will they be able to keep the momentum going? Tune in here to find out...

And a very Merry Christmas, or other seasonal greetings, to all my loyal readers and to the companies who have supported this blog. You've made it all worthwhile. Thanks too to those who brought the comments section to life this year - the more debate, the better for theatre, and the better for all of us.

Have a good one.

The Ham Funeral by Patrick White, Journal of a Plague Year by Tom Wright. Directed by Michael Kantor, designed by Anna Tregloan. Lighting by Paul Jackson, costumes by Fiona Crombie. With Marta Dusseldorp, Julie Forsyth, Robert Menzies, Lucy Taylor, Dan Spielman, Ross Williams and Matthew Whittet. Malthouse Theatre.

As Michael Kantor's first presentation as Malthouse artistic director, this double bill is a provocative signal of intention. It offers an alternative means of imagining Australian theatre, outside the narrowly nationalistic or topical concerns which have dominated the Playbox aesthetic since the early 1990s. And although I don't feel it's an unqualified artistic success, I left feeling more hopeful about Melbourne theatre than I have for many years.

For a long time, mainstream plays in Melbourne have been presented under various aegises: as bearers of social issues, education, political commentary or, perhaps least offensively, as mere entertainment. As for theatre itself, it has sometimes seemed to be the Art That Dares Not Tell Its Name, a shameful embarrassment that has had to be decently cloaked in more palatable imperatives.



So it's a relief to be offered works that place themselves unapologetically in the culture and history of theatre itself. The paradoxical effect of this is to make theatre immediately less parochial in its concerns, to engage its tentacular ability to grasp social, literary and philosophical concerns and to thrust them onto the vulgar carnality of the stage. It's an aesthetic that is far from apolitical, but this is a politics which doesn't earnestly explore "issues", in order to coax from them a masochistically satisfying (but temporary) inflammation of the liberal conscience. Rather, it's a politics which begins by attempting to address some of the complexities of existence.

These two productions, presented in repertory with an ensemble cast, look back to major movements in 20th century theatre: the existential theatre of Beckett, the absurdism of Arabal and Ionesco, the revolutionary theatre imagined by Artaud. It's a truism that Australian theatre has marginalised these influences in favour of naturalistic conventions, but it seems to me that the truth of that story is much more complex than a simplistic naturalistic/non-naturalistic division. Our theatre has also ignored naturalistic writers like Peter Kenna; and some of the significant playwrights of the '70s, Jack Hibberd and John Romeril, for example, were certainly influenced by White and his contemporaries.

I suspect that the work which has been most marginalised over the past few decades is any theatre which refuses easy sentiment and pierces, instead, to the marrow of complex emotion. Which is to say, a tragic theatre. There is something in the Australian psyche which flinches against such difficult surgeries, preferring instead the "relaxed and comfortable" vision of life that was so attractively peddled by John Howard. All the same, I perceive a great and increasing hunger for this kind of work, as the world has darkened over the past few years. This cathartic emotional affect is also difficult to achieve. The Ham Funeral shows triumphantly how it can be done; the Artaudian Journal of a Plague Year how easily the grandiose gesture can flail and miss its mark.

The Ham Funeral was written in 1947 but was not produced until more than a decade later; astoundingly, this is its first professional production in Melbourne. It emerges from the formally adventurous theatre which grew out of European modernism, exemplified by playwrights like Arabal, Beckett and Ionesco. Watching The Ham Funeral, it seems strange that it is not mentioned in the same breath as Waiting for Godot (which it predates by two years) or Rhinoceros. Part of the answer might be in its stubborn Australianness; from its poetic cadences to its irreverent eclecticism to its joyous vulgarity, it's a profoundly antipodean work. But in Australia, it was simply considered too odd, or too obscene. We do not have a good record with our best artists.

The Ham Funeral is a post-romantic work written by an artist deeply uncomfortable with his own romanticism. It's about a young poet (Dan Spielman), who lodges with Mr and Mrs Lusty (Ross Williams and Julie Forsyth) in a boarding house full of "everlasting furniture". Mr Lusty suddenly drops dead, and Mrs Lusty takes the opportunity to give a lavish feast, "an 'am funeral", in his honour. Mrs Lusty, a woman driven by incontinent appetites, attempts to seduce the young poet, with comically tragic consequences. There's a fair bit of Jungian symbolism - the house as the self, the anima behind the door, the carnal desires in the basement - but this is merely a single strand in a play which works on a multiplicity of levels. One of its major obsessions is the insufficiencies of words in the face of life, the question of how language might escape its own imprisonments.

White's theatrical language is superbly dynamic, and imbued with a fearless vitality. It's resonant with allusion, prefiguring not only the slapstick of Beckett and the absurdist freedoms of Ionesco or Arabal, but also echoing poets as bizarrely diverse as Arthur Rimbaud and Walter de la Mare. Ultimately, the sophistication of White's linguistic skills works to evoke feeling at its most subterranean and mysterious. For all its vulgar comedy - among many other delights, it features a terrific fart joke - this is a play which reveals above all the anguish of consciousness, the pain and release which underlies any honest moment of self-recognition, and the price of risking the barren self to engage with the beauty and violence of the world. It's the kind of work which moves you to tears, without being quite sure why.

Michael Kantor's production is a beautiful realisation of the play. It's notable for its clarity: in one sense, Kantor has merely presented the text as simply and elegantly as possible. But this is a deceptive simplicity, gained through some thoughtful problem solving. Anna Tregloan has designed a flexible but evocative playing space: the boarding house is represented by a stage with a row of curtained windows backstage which can be lit or concealed, and fronted by the bare floor. The stairs - the liminal place between rooms where various characters pause to utter their uncertain thoughts - are indicated by bars of light. A red curtain drawn back by the Young Man foregrounds the artifice of the play, just as the text does. There are moments of memorable visual richness: a lyrical glimpse of Dan Spielman and Robert Menzies in overcoats, running through the rain with their umbrellas; the landlord's relatives, boxed behind windows, grotesquely attired in pyjamas like characters out of Endgame.

But ultimately the success of the production stands or falls on the performances; in particular, on the roles of the Young Man and Mrs Lusty, since this play is almost a two-hander with some extra characters. Dan Spielman and Julie Forsyth are up to the task. Spielman, always a performer notable for his emotional fearlessness, portrays the solipsistic romanticism of the Young Man and its violent fracture with scarcely a missed beat. If sometimes he subtly falls into what look like actorly habits, we can forgive him for his unfudged clarity of feeling and intelligent irony.

Julie Forsyth is a comic delight, always just this side of grotesque caricature: on the one hand in incandescent rebellion against the bleakness of her life, and on the other imbued with a touchingly innocent longing. The violent climax of the play, an extraordinary scene of miserable sexual violence between Mrs Lusty and the Young Man, is played by both of them with a raw passion that makes it devastatingly tragic. They are well supported: in particular, Ross Williams, one of the more underestimated actors in Melbourne, portrays the silent landlord with a deft tragicomic touch, and Robert Menzies has some gloriously black comic moments. Max Lyandvert's sound, a mixture of pre-recorded soundscapes and live piano music, also deserves mention.

The same cast also plays Tom Wright's Journal of a Plague Year. For this production, Kantor capitalises on the cavernous spaces of the Merlyn Theatre to create a huge black canvas on which he projects a series of tableaux. The cast creates a series of dramatic or grotesque images, some of which are strikingly memorable: the black-cloaked narrator (Robert Menzies) emerging from darkness, illuminated only by the lamp he is carrying; a plague victim (Matthew Whittet) crucified on a moveable panel, tormented by disembodied hands; Nell Gwynne (Lucy Taylor) in busty Restoration garb, singing '70s pop songs.

The major problem with this work is that these images, however striking, never amount to anything substantial; they are grotesquerie without emotional force, and so can never approach actual horror or tragedy. The problem begins with Tom Wright's script, which merits some discussion.

The pretext for this work is supposedly Daniel Defoe's 1722 novel A Journal of the Plague Year, an account of the plague that struck London in 1665. Defoe's novel is a early example of fictional journalism; it purports to be the memoirs of a pious Protestant merchant, H.F. It's a somewhat disorderly narrative, but all the same told with a meticulous attention to detail - Defoe researched the public records, and items like the death figures or public health measures are set down with an almost bureaucratic zeal. For all his piety, H.F.'s manner is free of pompous moralising or overblown religiosity: he is a practical and materialistic man, recording a tragic human phenomenon with an insatiable and sceptical curiosity.

Aside from its 17th century setting, its quotes from Defoe and the theme of the plague, Tom Wright's version has in fact very little to do with the original. A Journal of the Plague Year is essentially about survival; Defoe is fascinated by the endless ingenuity of human resistances against both the plague and its catastrophic economic effects. The novel ends with a rhyme about the plague which "swept an hundred thousand souls / Away; yet I alive!" Wright's Journal, on the other hand, is about apocalyptic extremity and exploits a religious fervour that Defoe's text pragmatically eschews. Its actual genesis is the avatar of the Theatre of Cruelty, Antonin Artaud.

Some artists are perilous influences; they tend to be innovative geniuses whose work is so idiosyncratic that imitators without equal abilities can only seem mannered. I'm thinking of writers like Dylan Thomas or Gerard Manley Hopkins; among theatre artists, Artaud is probably the most dangerous. Howard Barker's Theatre of Catastrophe or the plays of Sarah Kane are successful examples of the contemporary application of some of Artaud's ideas; both are fiercely moral writers who launch full-frontal attacks on the humanistic tradition of reason.

One problem with Artaud is that he means it, and any artist who decides to pick up on his ideas had better mean it, too. Another problem is that the logical end of Artaud's idea of "absolute revolt" is Pol Pot and Year Zero (Pol Pot was, it must be remembered, educated in Paris). Like Rimbaud, Artaud insisted on the collapse of any boundary between art and life: thought and act were to be completely identified. He despised empty formalism. "If there is one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time," he wrote in The Theatre and The Plague, "it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signalling through the flames." He insisted on a carnal theatre, a theatre that reinstated the poetry that had been corrupted by modernity and reason, a theatre that "recovers the notion of symbols and archetypes which act like silent blows, rests, leaps of the heart, summons of the lymph, inflammatory images thrust into our abruptly wakened heads".

Wright, unlike Kane or Barker, is altogether too cerebral to answer this kind of visceral demand. The contrast with Patrick White's theatrical language is stark; where White is dynamic, tactile and supple, Wright is static and abstract. But the work suffers also in comparison to writers who shape the banalities of language, playwrights like Michel Vinaver or Thomas Bernhard: neither of them speak in generalities, where Wright seldom escapes them.

Oddly, for all its gestures towards unreason, Wright's text seems tame; it is much more orderly than Defoe, who is quite happy for most of his book to ignore the demands of chronology or even literary logic. The details of urban life that swarm in Defoe's text are filleted out in favour of apocalyptic religiosity, and events taken from the novel are simplified and exaggerated into grand guignol melodrama. One example is the scene about plague victims being nailed into their houses; the actuality, as reported by Defoe, was both more complicated and less absolute. The victims in fact had their keys taken and a watchman set outside their door: and they often tricked the watchmen and escaped out the back. I personally find myself more attracted by the subversion of the original tale. And the constant equation of women with infection and sexual delirium has more than a whiff of misogyny. I think what bothers me most is that Wright has what poets call a "cloth ear"; a problem closely aligned to the lack of tactility or carnality in his language. He might get away with a lot more if he had more intuitive sensitivity to the cadences of a line.

The text is organised in a kind of modular prison, with Brechtian signs traversing the stage signalling each month (it's only a matter of time before you start calculating that there are five months until December). Each month ushers in a different theme - contagion's genesis, evil visions, interpretration of dreams, the pit of death - which the actors duly illustrate. But perhaps where Wright most inverts his apparently anarchic intentions is at the end, when he encloses the narrative with a moral homily about the essential bestiality of human nature. This is, despite its crazed dress, humanistic theatre after all.

I can't say I was bored, even if sometimes I was impatient. There was enough visual interest and flashes of wit to keep me from wanting to lay violent hands on myself. I particularly liked the philosopher's chat show, where Hobbes, Artaud and others seated at microphones dispute the nature of reality. Robert Menzies as the narrator generates enough energy to keep it together, despite what sounds like an almost unperformable text, and the rest of the cast does its best, which is in moments more than enough. It's a shame that all this effort amounts to little more than a procession of images.

Despite my reservations, it is a breath of fresh air to see mainstream theatre with ambition and intellectual clout, and that takes itself seriously as an art. I have no doubt this shift in artistic direction will generate a lot of controversy; Helen Thomson's bitterly hostile reviews (here and here) in the Age this week are probably symptomatic. I also have no doubt that this new phase at Malthouse is the best thing that's happened there in the past decade; and as a theatre goer, I am hoping that this is only the beginning of a more generous imagining of the Australian stage.

Picture: Matthew Whittet in Journal of a Plague Year
Malthouse Theatre

Trapped by the Past: Why our Theatre is Facing Paralysis, by Julian Meyrick. Platform Paper No. 3, January 2005, Currency House, ISBN 0 9581213 7 0

"Those who cannot remember the past," said George Santayana, "are condemned to repeat it". Applied to theatre, this is a vision of terrifying sterility: some outer circle of Hell, decked out like a cross between an English drawing room and the set of Neighbours. And as Julian Meyrick argues in his very interesting polemic, Australian theatre's ignorance of its own history dooms it to an endless cycle of "forgetting and despair".

Too right, say I: if memory is a form of consciousness, then Australian theatre, as a discrete if debatable entity, is a dead duck. We barely have a repertoire: how often do we see reinterpretations of classic texts by White, Hewett, Beynon, Kenna, Hibberd, or any other playwright who has made a mark in the past fifty years? And how many new plays have any life beyond a single four week season?

I'm grateful to Meyrick - that rare beast, a theatre historian - for his careful delineation of this problem in his paper Trapped by the Past. He spends some time discussing how institutional and governmental structures and assumptions have formed the present, and he chronicles a depressing history of botched or even hostile public policies and damaging intercinine rivalries. But Trapped by the Past is, most importantly, an impassioned plea for cultural memory.

"Donald Horne's complaint that the industry's idea of cultural debate is a one-line telegram signed by twenty artists points up the lack of articulated vision coming from theatre professionals on the ground today," says Meyrick. "At a recent public meeting on the future of Playbox, I was not the only one struck by the lack of specific knowledge about the company we had come to discuss. And when, at the end, someone stood up - as someone always does - and said 'Who needs the past anyway?' - as someone always does - a vision rose before my eyes of a wheel of fire on which Australian theatre was to be endlessly wracked, our historical forgetting a constituent part of our on-going suffering."

The Greeks said (they got a lot of things right) that Memory was the mother of the Muses, so cultural amnesia is probably about half of the thousand cuts that are currently bleeding Australian theatre dry. But Meyrick's thesis is not so much that Australian theatre has forgotten its past, as that it only remembers certain parts of it. He points out that theatre is an art form with a history that extends far beyond our sea-girt shores and into a past far deeper than the past thirty years, facts which too seldom seem to enter our theatrical conversations; but here his main concern is with local history.

His experience of finding teasing glimpses of alternative, unwritten histories echoes my own when, as a young critic, I was attempting to inform myself about Australian theatre. I remember being told about all sorts of interesting things - the international avant-garde edge in the APG, for example, or the feminist theatre of the '70s - to which I could, frustratingly, find little or no reference in the histories and overviews I consulted. Meyrick mentions how whole swathes of experience - that of older actors trained in the "Anglo" tradition of theatre, who remember the Tiv and music hall - have been forgotten, and how much poorer we are for this loss. The commonly accepted story is how this kind of theatre, colonial and hidebound, was swept aside in the larrikin "New Wave" of the late 60s and early '70s, when Australian theatre, as the myth goes, first found its "voice". These other, overshadowed histories made the prevailing myth - which is, of course, not entirely inaccurate - both more interesting and more complex.

As Meyrick says, "Australian theatre is an art form in wilful ignorance of its own past, and the upshot is an industry that appears less interesting than in fact it is... the truth is fabulous, intriguing, high coloured, a story of titanic struggles, colossal achievements, massive defeats, murderous betrayals..." Which, if it recalls one of those thrillers with raised gold lettering so prominent in airport bookshops, has the virtue of sounding more exciting than the usual unquestioning narratives of nationalism vs. colonialism.

Although he focuses on generational change and, in particular, on the disastrous dominance of Playbox Theatre in the recent development of new Australian work, the true value of Meyrick's paper resides elsewhere. Meyrick does claim that a generation of theatre artists who are now in prominent positions through Australian theatre are, deliberately or not, stifling innovation in the art. But he says this is the result of a fracture that occurred when the New Wave first appeared, polarising the culture - on the one side, the conservative, authoritarian model, on the other the brash, questioning, anti-authoritarian Vietnam protesters - and the twain ne'er met anywhere. And he claims that the lack of a perception of a common ground - a recognition that, whatever their differences, they were pursuing to their best abilities a mutual passion for an abstract but real thing called "Australian theatre" - led to an impoverishment of theatre culture that is now having disastrous consequences for younger artists.

"The real problem," says Meyrick, glancing over the tangle of spats and rivalries which characterise the discourse, "is that the 'debate' is founded on such a fierce determination not to understand other points of view that any intellectual gain from the sparring of competing minds is lost."

Bravo, Mr Meyrick: that's the underlying problem in a nutshell. What he is describing is a pervasive anti-intellectualism that has been the bane of Australian theatre on all sides, and a lack of disinterested commitment to theatre itself. As much as reducing discourse to pitched battles and skirmishes between rival interests, this often expresses itself in a puzzling incuriosity about theatre as an art form. Most bizarrely, given its often nationalistic dress, it manifests as a condition of cultural cringe which very often marginalises new or original Australian voices which (as they should) challenge prevailing mores. Meyrick, whose main concern is with what he calls "verbal drama" (aka plays), correctly questions where that leaves new playwrights and other emerging theatre artists.

There is, in fact, a surprising number of young and engaged theatre writers; but as things stand, their outlook is fairly bleak. As Meyrick says, the lack of a well-supported middle sector of theatre, between co-op fringe productions and the major state institutions, means that it is extremely difficult for new artists, and especially new playwrights, to evolve. He fields some depressing statistics, courtesy of Geoffrey Milne, about the shrinkage in contemporary theatre. Between 1986 and 2003, the number of new productions by state theatre companies declined from 49 to 29.8 - a drastic fall approaching almost 50 per cent. And, even worse, the production of new plays by local and overseas writers in alternative companies has declined by 30 per cent in twenty years.

This situation is in part a result of the withdrawal of funding for the middle tier companies - Anthill, The Church, Theatreworks, the Red Shed and others - which actively commissioned and produced new works. Australian theatre has never recovered from this policy-driven act of cultural vandalism. In Victoria, Playbox Theatre was supposed to pick up the slack, providing a greenhouse for the tender young shoots of new work; but Playbox's devastatingly poor audience figures reflect the failure of this policy. It is neither possible nor desirable to replace what was once the province of many alternative theatres with a single, corporatised entity: like all ecosystems, theatre needs diversity to survive. And it is a measure of theatre's ill-health that its diversity has been declining in both absolute and generic terms over the past two decades. Not only are fewer plays being produced, but fewer kinds of plays.

All the same, in the general atmosphere of gloom one shouldn't overlook the energies and vitalities that do exist. Out of the vacuum have sprung many small, independent companies which produce new plays, both Australian and international, with minimal or no funding. And one should not forget La Mama either, a unique treasure which actively supports the notion of an open and diverse theatre culture. Yet the fact remains that, however hard-working and imaginative they may be, these independent companies struggle with a paucity of resources that severely limits what they are able to achieve. The genius of Australian theatre has so often lain with "poor theatre": great things have happened there. But as a default policy, it is no way to grow a vibrant and stimulating culture. There is a point where companies, simply, need money to make the art they should.

There's no getting away from the fact that part of the many-faceted crisis facing Australian theatre is the increasingly tight availability of funds, a complex issue in itself bedevilled by the whole problem of arts advocacy. Meyrick often refers to the "theatre industry"; a common enough phrase, but a symptom of a deeper problem. As I said in an essay last year, picking up on Donald Horne's observations on the "economisation" of the arts:

I can remember when people started talking about the "arts industry", back in the early '90s. I thought at the time it was a harbinger of doom. The argument used to lobby for arts funding was almost exclusively economic: the arts created employment, generated tourism, and so on. (There was, I think, a little discussion about social capital.) This focus seems to have modelled almost all subsequent advocacy for the arts. And what we have created is a monster, to which all the arts must now pay tribute: the arts industry is here to stay, and arts companies are expected to function like other economic entities, and to justify their existences by making a profit for their "stakeholders"....

Given its devastating impact ... it is not surprising that the idea of the "arts industry" has been attacked recently by several eminent Australians, including Donald Horne. Horne says the "economisation of culture" is a fundamentalist creed. "It's not supported by public stonings or beheadings but its effect can be pretty ruthless," he said in a speech in 2002. "It's the kind of language that turns our society into 'the economy', our citizens into 'the consumers' and our public funds into 'taxpayers' money'." He described the phrase "the arts industry" and the adoption by arts advocates of the vogue-ish terminology of the markets as a Trojan horse. "How is it, "he asks, "that people concerned with speaking up for 'the arts' and other cultural activities have been reduced to that kind of twaddle?"

Yes, we need another phrase. But that aside, Meyrick's main claim is that theatre practitioners need to overcome their distaste of the nationalistic connotations of the term "Australian theatre", and to regain a concept of a "whole" Australian theatre, a sense of common endeavour and generosity which admits difference (and history). Which raises two questions for me, neither of them rhetorical: when was this golden age, before we lost this sense of "over-arching identity"? Might it not rather be an imaginary Eden that now must be, to mix my metaphors, forged fresh in the smithy of our souls? And, secondly, do we need the term "Australian" at all, or could this sense of identity be found simply in the term "theatre"? It sometimes seems to me that the term "Australian" is so vexed that often the idea of "theatre" gets elided altogether.

This is not to ignore, but rather to embrace, Meyrick's point about specific Australian traditions. To think of a common practice of theatre is to enfold these traditions into a wider and richer context which includes all theatre, in all times and all languages. Australian theatre is still overwhelmingly Anglophone, looking over its shoulder towards London and New York - even the name of this series, Platform Papers, is taken from a National Theatre initiative. And I would suggest that this linguistic parochialism is one of its problems, and one reason why such a narrow range of aesthetic is admitted into mainstream discussion.

With the Anglophone bias goes the traditional Anglo suspicion of "intellectuals". Meyrick digs up some classic artist-bashing, of the kind made familiar by such pundits as Andrew Bolt; but what is less easy to see and, I think, ultimately more damaging, is the anti-intellectualism within the artform itself. I remember speaking to a distinguished literary critic, then reviewing theatre, who told me airily that he never read new plays as they weren't "literary", something that astonished me. What is sadder is that playwrights themselves, mistaking "literary" for meaning "prosaic" or "untheatrical", often have a similar idea about their own work. At one stroke, this removes the art of writing plays from the entirety of experiment and argument that is imaginative and critical literature, and places it - where? In an isolated playpen with crayons and dolls?

A result of this is that much theatrical experiment in Australia has been confined to "non-verbal drama" of various kinds, out of a feeling that "verbal drama" is aesthetically limiting, and the writing of plays itself has desiccated into a hidebound naturalism. It is common to hear "text-based theatre" spoken of in a dismissive way, as the conservative wing of theatrical artistry. This is inaccurate in terms of wider history, where writing has been the engine for most innovations in modern theatre, but here it has a certain self-fulfilling truth. And this raises a crucial issue, which is the lack of a critical discourse which can discuss aesthetic qualities in any useful manner. In the absence of this, no amount of structural institutional analysis - useful and necessary though it is - can make any sense. The mere presence of new Australian work is no guarantee of cultural health; it has to be Australian work that matters. But how one determines what makes it matter is another, and even thornier, question.

Links

Currency House
SMH - Talking 'Bout Another Revolution
The Age - Getting Bums on Seats

Julia 3 by Michael Gurr. Directed by Bruce Myles, with Kate Fitzpatrick, Peter Curtin, Todd MacDonald and Greg Stone. Designed by Christina Smith, lighting design by Glenn Hughes, sound design Andrew Pendlebury. Playbox at the Malthouse Theatre, until September 25.

In the past, Michael Gurr's plays have left me either bored out of my skull or shaking with rage. Or both. Given my extreme reactions, I have sometimes wondered if Gurr represents everything I fear in myself about being a middle class writer with a humanitarian conscience.

Julia 3 gave me a chance to look again in this dark mirror. In this play, directed with a stylish minimalism by Bruce Myles, Kate Fitzpatrick plays a wealthy philanthropist who invites her three lovers - recipients of the favours of her foundation, as well as her bed - to her husband's funeral. Her husband represents, I suppose, Global Capitalism (he has "no character", but he has lots of money, a predatory sexual attraction towards third world children and a karmic cancer). The three lovers represent Science (Greg Stone), Culture (Peter Curtin) and Literature (Todd MacDonald). Julia herself, if we are to follow the allegory - if, indeed, it is an allegory - is the desperately compromised human conscience, haunted by the world's evils and attempting to change what she can.



Gentle reader, I confess; I was mainly bored. But I must be growing up, for I didn't walk out spitting with anger. Instead, Julia 3 left me worrying at a bunch of questions. For instance: is this play really as vacuous as it appears to be, or is Gurr being ironic? Has he in fact written an attack on the covert corruption of the liberal humanist, pointing out the complacency of the cultural imperialism which writes the whole world in the West's image? Or, instead, is he serious when he seems to be saying that nice rich people can change the world, by arranging the murders of the nasty rich people who cause all the suffering?

If he's serious on that last point, which is possible, the play begs a lot of questions. For instance - global capitalism is surely not a phenomenon driven, like a nineteenth century steel mill, by a top-hatted Captain of Industry, but a staggeringly complicated, gargantuan network of financial forces and institutions. Gurr is certainly not advocating structural change - the money can stay where it is, it seems, as long as it behaves decently to those less fortunate than itself. Or is it that the assassinations are supposed to be ironic, the ultimate corruption: capitalism turning on itself, like a senile mother cat eating her kittens?

But then again, if Gurr is being ironic, why all the conscience tweaking, the endless descriptions of third world suffering, those poor Others who live in appalling circumstances because of Us? And (more insidiously) why is Charlie the writer, a young man with pretensions worthy of the pen of Stella Gibbons, the only representative of Western culture who gets away with a shred of moral probity? (More troubling still, he is writing a book of ponderous ineffability, about Love...)

So it is that I can't get any purchase on this work; my mind glides off it. Watching it, I found myself gloomily remembering Harold Pinter's 1996 play Ashes to Ashes, which inhabits similar territory to Julia 3. But unlike Gurr, Pinter can take the minutae and superficialities of middle class life and reveal its hidden profundities, its beauty and and its atrocity.

Ashes to Ashes is a dialogue between a man and a woman in a drawing room, a conversation which keeps circling around an infidelity. Pinter ritualises the dialogue, which is allusive, evasive and, indefinably, more and more threatening, until he is able to make a real imaginative connection between the atrocities of Nazi Germany and this drawing room conversation. He builds towards a profoundly intimate sense of shock, which illuminates Hannah Arendt's argument about the banality of evil with a new emotional understanding.

Like Mountain Language, another of Pinter's later political works, Ashes to Ashes is a poetic play which deals with questions of moral complicity. But Pinter takes Emily Dickinson's advice, and tells the truth slant. His moral and political subtleties highlight what is fuzzy or badly thought through in Gurr's work; and most importantly, as a dramatist Pinter generates a charge of feeling which is seriously lacking in Julia 3.

It troubled me also that Gurr does not question the actual representation of atrocity. It is enough, he suggests, to describe it, to imagine it, to be aware of the "soft avalanche of disasters" which fill the morning newspapers. Yet the representation of atrocity as we know it becomes a kind of voyeurism, yet another form of exploitation; even, perhaps, a subtle form of colonisation, in which the victim as abject Other is enfolded into a wholly Western subjectivity. This is never questioned in this play. And the constant iteration of suffering in Julia's monologues has, like its equivalent on the news, an anaesthetic effect.

Gurr has written a poetic play, the kind of drama which depends on metaphorical connections and a dynamic of feeling, rather than more conventional dramatic machineries. My problem with it is that it contains scarcely any poetry. Aside from a little time travel between the present of the funeral and six months before, Julia 3 seldom pushes its realities beyond the literal. What does stay with me from the play is a dreamlike monologue in which Julia describes buying a hairbrush from a woman in a department store whose name tag has "apostrophes in it".

She began to brush her hair to show me how soft and delightful it was. And as she brushed, the blood began to come. First in drops, then in clusters and streams.... She wanted me to have the best. And by the time I left the blood was in her eyes and she had to blink it out, that black-red blood spreading from her scalp to her neck, but she never stopped smiling and she never stopped brushing.

This speech conjures a more complex subjective reality than is otherwise offered, and for me signalled a point where the writing began to become alive, to truly imagine itself, and the horror Gurr had been attempting to describe in monologue after desensitising monologue at last became visceral and disturbing.

(A serendipitous aside: while thinking about this, I stumbled across an interview with the performance artist Marina Abramovic. She describes her work Art must be beautiful, Artist must be beautiful thus: "I brush my hair with a metal brush held in my right hand and simultaneously comb my hair with a metal comb held in my left hand. While so doing, I continuously repeat: 'Art must be beautiful. Artist must be beautiful', until I have destroyed my hair and face".)

I realise it's unfair to worry the play to the exclusion of the production, especially as it has a fine design and a committed cast. Kate Fitzpatrick is so well cast the part might have been written for her, and she is ably supported by her "gentlemen", despite the thinness of the characters they must play. Peter Curtin gives a complex and humane performance as Leon, the art curator who is making his own compromises, and Greg Stone is all aggression and testosterone as the oncologist Joe. Todd MacDonald does his best as the young writer Charlie, and I really don't think he is responsible for the fact that his character annoys me beyond measure.

In Christina Smith's design, the stage of the Beckett is at first shrouded by a black theatre curtain. But instead of the curtain rising when the play begins, it is lit from behind, so it becomes a funereary veil, an image which beautifully introduces the notion that the whole of this reality exists within Julia's mind. And there was one moment of extraordinary stage magic - a newspaper on a table, its pages turning by themselves, as if it were being read by a ghost.

Kate Fitzpatrick and Greg Stone in Julia 3. Picture: Ponch Hawkes

Playbox Theatre Company

Minefields and Miniskirts, adapted by Terence O'Connell from Siobhan McHugh's book, directed by Terence O'Connell, with Robyn Arthur, Tracy Bartram, Debra Byrne, Tracy Mann and Wendy Stapleton. Playbox Theatre, until July 31.

I'm sure I'm not the only person who started reading about the Vietnam War again earlier this year, when the word "quagmire" was redefined as a no-go zone and the comparisons with Iraq started getting insistent. The US military were again talking of "winning hearts and minds" while Marines razed foreign villages and got blown up on foreign highways. General Kimmitt was holding his Five O'Clock Follies, and the indie journo was back, as hip as ever, telling the real stories: the art galleries in downtown Baghdad, the graveyards in Falluja, the deadly taxi rides to Baghdad Airport.



The first book I picked up was Michael Herr's Despatches, the classic account of his time as correspondent for Esquire during some of the worst years of the Vietnam War. It's a hallucinatory book which has fundamentally shaped the perceptions of the Vietnam War for later generations. His soundtrack is the suicidal guitar of Hendrix, and through his pages stumble the brutal, innocent GIs, out of their heads on fear and marijuana and speed: boys from the mid-West who had never left America before, poor kids from industrial cities, thrust into the adrenalin chaos of war. Then, as now, losing their friends, their legs, their minds, their lives.

No one has described the Vietnam combat like Herr, with a vividness that's as close as you will get to understanding without having been there: for there is a barrier between imagination and experience no words can bridge, no matter how vivid or how passionate they are, no matter how true. Herr put down on paper the unspeakable seduction of homicidal psychosis, later swollen to screen size in Brando's portrayal of Captain Kurtz in Apocalyse Now. He spoke, as Wilfred Owen did in an earlier age, of terror and pity: most of all, of pity. Though in an interview years later, he said he had no pity for the vets who beat up their wives, who sat in bars with dark glasses on, haunted by the awful things they had done. They deserved to be haunted, he said. I found myself admiring his moral pitilessness: it bespoke, I thought, a truer compassion.

This is, however intelligent, however aware, however passionately anti-war, the stuff of Boy's Own journals. War stories are traditionally the business of men: so Siobhan McHugh's book, a collection of interviews with more than fifty Australian women whose lives were touched by the Vietnam war, opens up a hitherto shadowy area of experience. This book has been adapted by Terence O'Connell into a play and, strangely, the territory covered by the play is only subtly different from Herr's. Maybe it's because atrocity doesn't distinguish between the sexes: men and women are alike capable of compassion, perception, cowardice, toughness, grief, appalling brutality and astounding love.

Here are the same soldier's wallets with the souvenir atrocity photos, the same heart-wrenching portrayals of civilian suffering, the same cruel interrogations, the same descriptions of Saigon prostitutes (but not the thuggish American contractors who bought them), the same choppers and ceiling fans, the same agonising, pointless deaths. I guess these things are now so familiar they amount to cliches. There are some gendered twists: the description of the birth of a baby, or the war correspondent condemned to the Women's Pages in civilian life, or the story of the veteran's wife, brutalised by her traumatised husband.

What you do get in this play, unlike most US portrayals, is a sense of the Vietnamese experience of the war, even though there is still a feeling that the Vietnamese were extras in this most Western of dramas. I had to wait until I read Bao Ninh's The Sorrow of War until I truly understood that the Vietnam War was, first of all, a Vietnamese tragedy.

Although the source material is rich, as theatre it remains half-baked. For the purposes of the play, Terence O'Connell has adapted and conflated these fifty interviews into five representative characters: the Correspondent, the Entertainer, the Nurse, the Volunteer and the Vet's Abused Wife. He has then sliced and spliced to make five interleaving monologues punctuated by archetypal songs from the 60s and 70s - Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Joan Baez.

When I opened the play and saw page after page of dense prose, I felt apprehensive: I couldn't see how O'Connell's adaptation had grappled with the idea of what a theatrical utterance might be, what it means to say words on stage. This play relies heavily on the intrinsic interest of its source material, some snappy choreography and the charisma of its performers, but none of these are enough to make it theatre. It's not primarily a question of the play's structure, although that counts. The problem goes deeper, into what you might call the DNA of theatrical language.

The director Peter Brook put the problem of theatrical writing in his book The Empty Stage: "If one starts from the premise that a stage is a stage - not a convenient premise for the unfolding of a staged novel or a staged poem or staged lecture or a staged story - then the word that is spoken on this stage exists, or fails to exist, only in relation to the tensions it creates on that stage within the given stage circumstances. ...The choices (the dramatist) makes and the values he observes are only powerful in proportion to what they create in the language of theatre."

Which is to say that writing for theatre is an extremely specific art, in which, as David Mamet says, language is not about action: it is action. O'Connell's adaptation stays in the realm of the "staged story": little imagination has been devoted to making this material theatrical, except in the most superficial sense of that word. O'Connell, who also directs the show, says his major concern was to "give (the material) a beginning, a middle and an end", and this, in the most earnest traditions of deadly narration, is precisely what he does.

The signals are given early: there's a projection on a scrim as the audience enters which tells us exactly what we are about to see. After the first song, during which the characters are serially introduced, each telling the first instalment of their story, the rhythm is set: the women will speak their monologues, and sing, and speak their monologues, and sing; and you know they will do so until they reach the "present", which for the purposes of the play is an ANZAC Day march.

What saves the evening from tedium is the performances. Minefields and Miniskirts has a celebrity cast, and these women belt out some great songs. Perhaps it is worth it to hear these amazing singers tackle Carole King's Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow, which is a genuine show-stopper. But in all the performances there is a tendency to over-act, perhaps from a subconscious recognition of the inherent non-theatricality of the text; a dragging out of tears which has the perverse effect of draining the stories of their power.

The show's other saving grace is its visual spectacle. Catherine Raven's design, stunningly lit by Phil Lethlean, uses the simplicity of bamboo blinds to create a flexible and evocative theatrical space, swathed in the gorgeous colours of Thai silks. The set has some breathtaking moments of its own - when the blinds are drawn back and silhoheutted to reveal a backdrop of blue sky, for example, or a moment where it goes dark and "stars" come out all over the theatre. It reminded me of one of the most beautiful sets I've ever seen, for Steve Berkoff's Salome, which was also backgrounded by a luminous sky.

It is impossible not to wonder what might have been, if these resources had been applied to an inspired (or even slightly more imaginative) script: in the hands, for example, of a David Hare, whose Fanshen is surely the exemplary documentary play. O'Connell applies biopic conventions of music theatre to a "serious" topic, with mixed results, and the writing is bogged down by a ploddingly literal approach.

Sadly, the unsolved aesthetic dilemmas presented by the material muffle its political impact: for there is no doubt that these experiences have particular resonances today, when Australian soldiers are again at war in a far country. These stories simply should not be boring. It seems that O'Connell can't decide whether Minefields and Miniskirts is feel-good commercial theatre or worthy documentary, and so falls between two stools. Using the commercial musical as a vehicle does raise the question of whether the experiences described in the play can really be approached as sheer entertainment. In the end, it escapes trivialising them, I think; but only just. All the same, you are probably better off reading the original book.

Picture: Lisa Tomasetti

Playbox Theatre