In 2007, Raimondo and Adriano Cortese's company Ranters had an independent hit with their production Holiday, which saw a return season at the Malthouse the following year. Featuring Ranters regulars Paul Lum and Patrick Moffatt, Holiday was an apparently artless construction of inconsequential conversations between strangers at a resort, punctuated by some beautiful baroque singing. Absurd and gently comic, it opened up the vulnerabilities and innocence of its characters, leaving you with a mysterious buoyancy and joy.


Since then, Ranters have further explored the idea of the inconsequential through different scenarios. Importing Beth Buchanan into their ensemble, they produced Affection at the Arts Centre's Black Box, which followed the conversations of friends in a lounge room. I thought this show exposed the perils of this kind of theatre, which walks a fiendishly narrow line between an artful transparency and the merely banal. Is it enough to frame the apparently "ordinary" to make it art?

Their much-anticipated show Intimacy, Malthouse Theatre's festival offering, explores the same conceit again, but does little to deepen the inquiry. Here the narrator (Lum) approaches strangers in St Kilda (Buchanan and Moffatt) and asks if they would like to talk. "A surprising number," he reports, "said yes." What follows is a kind of documentary relation of these conversations, presented as theatre.

Anna Tregloan's set is a consciously theatrical, abstract space: the stage is naked except for several large rocks, like those you might find on a foreshore, its walls surrounded by plain blue curtains. St Kilda itself is evoked by an introductory video and a burst of ambient sound. Then there's a close-up of Moffatt's face, labelled "Russell, 62", and the first conversation, with a man who is a roller-coaster geek, gets under way. The conversations are punctuated by longish silences, and the odd spot at a karaoke bar, where one or other of the performers shows how badly they can sing. (Though anyone who has seen Holiday won't believe it). And there are a couple of deliberately amateurish dance routines.

There's no doubt Intimacy makes affable and often funny theatre, but it seldom reaches beyond what has become a comfortable convention. It's coyly self-conscious: the silences are mannered pauses, rather than spaces in which unspoken desires and longings anxiously reveal themselves, and the conversations are too often consciously shaped to reflect back on the work itself. This isn't, in itself, a problem: but I did have a quote from Endgame echoing in my ears through the play: "We're not beginning to... to... mean something?"

I was too aware of a hand at work directing its meanings, which mitigates the airiness that made Holiday such a beautiful piece. David Franzke's maddening sound design, which seems to be at once everywhere and nowhere, flooding all available space while somehow flattening out its texture, contributes to this sense of dilution. But it might also be the premise of the show, which depends on an interlocutory framework. What do people actually reveal about themselves in interviews with strangers? The "intimacy" of its title describes the consequenceless trust between people who will probably not meet again, and the play itself seems to be about people who are unable, for whatever reason, to form close relationships. Which is to say, it's not about intimacy at all, but its avoidance.

There is a point to exploring what people might be, if released from the prisons of the selves that others project onto them: but I seldom felt that I was watching more than the construction of another self, the artful construction of performance. What's lacking is difficult to articulate. This piece evades the nagging loneliness that seems to exist in its centre, and at the same time fails to achieve the delicate tact of Holiday. I suspect that on both counts, this is because it gives its audience little space in which their understanding might bloom: paradoxically, it's too controlled, too theatrical, to maintain its own anti-theatrical conceit. A comparison might be with an artist of the ordinary like Jérôme Bel, who balances with superb restraint the contradictions of apparently spontaneous performance.

Perhaps this emotional avoidance is the point. As I said, it's affable theatre, generating a lot of laughs: but I don't think that's enough. The tightrope of risk seems to me to be carefully chalked on the ground here, rather than airily stretching over our heads. Painless, but disappointing: and who wants theatre to be painless?

*


Robert Lepage’s The Blue Dragon, a continuation of his mid-1980s work The Dragon Trilogy, is also naggingly disappointing. As a piece of visual theatre, there's no doubt that it’s an achievement: with the help of a huge crew (who came out for some deserved applause at the end), Lepage and his set designer Michel Gauthier create a kind of theatrical film, complete with credits.

The design works in a two-dimensional plane: there is no perspective of depth, a sense that is highlighted by the clever interactive projections. Like the cartoon frames in a graphic novel, the set is divided horizontally and vertically into eight frames, which can unite into a single image or be isolated into different cells, as in a series of images towards the end. This generates some completely gorgeous moments: snow falling on a black screen; tiny Miyazake-style trains crawling along the stage before a dark industrial cityscape; an airport departure lounge; a train station: most frequently, the hero's double-storey apartment in the old quarters of Shanghai.

For all its graphic influences, this show generates a naturalism that is more usually associated with film. The play itself, co-written by Lepage and Marie Michaud, seems like a romcom movie: take away the technical wizardry, and what's left is pure soap opera. The story revisits Pierre LaMontagne (Henri Chasse), the protagonist of The Dragon Trilogy. Now 50 years old, he has abandoned his own art in favour of running a gallery in Shanghai. He is sleeping with one of his protegees, Xiao Ling (Tai Wei Foo), a young artist he discovered in Hong Kong when she gave him the blue dragon tattoo of the title, and who specialises in self-portraits taken on her mobile phone, a supposedly revolutionary aesthetic of individualism.

The story begins when his ex-wife Claire Forêt (Marie Michaud) turns up. A late-40s alcoholic advertising executive, she is visiting China to adopt a baby. Pierre attempts, unsuccessfully at first, to rekindle their relationship: he is at a loss, belonging neither in Quebec nor in China, and hopes that Claire will solve his problems for him. Claire returns from the adoption agency without the child, and develops a relationship with Xiao Ling, not knowing that she is Pierre's lover. And then Xiao Ling falls pregnant... so will Claire adopt this baby instead?

And so it goes on, narrating a story that is bafflingly trite. Xiao Ling - the desirable, sexual young woman - begins to represent China itself, even though the two western characters do not, in anything like the same schematic fashion, represent the West. This is partly because her character is so secondary to the others, but it is also a sense reinforced by Lepage himself. In his director's note in the program, he suggests that The Blue Dragon is about "our contradictory feelings about China today", our fears that it is a "gigantic whale about to swallow us whole", a "golem that will crush us all". It's hard to relate these statements to the work itself, which is really about a love triangle with exotic furnishings and with a baby thrown in to make things interesting: but it does highlight a surprising Orientalism.

The Blue Dragon in fact tells us very little about China, which figures mostly as exotic backdrop to the relationship between the two aging and lonely French Canadians, who are attempting to deal with their lost idealism and interior emptiness. The few moments of real feeling are between these two. Despite a vivid performance by Tai Wei Foo, Xiao Ling is little more than a catalyst for their relationship, a sense that becomes increasingly clear when you begin to wonder about the gaping holes in the narrative around Xaio Ling - why does she keep the baby, when she clearly doesn't want it, and abortion is so easy to arrange? If she does want it, why does she so easily give it away? And so on.

In short, The Blue Dragon seems like a nicer, updated version of Madame Butterfly, which ends with everyone smiling: this time, the West gets to keep the baby. Unambiguously gorgeous to look at, but in the end, troublingly empty.

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

Pictures: Top: Beth Buchanan and Paul Lum in Intimacy, Malthouse. Photo: Jeff Busby. Bottom: Tai Wei Foo in The Blue Dragon. Photo: Louise Leblanc.

Intimacy, devised and directed by Adriano Cortese, text by Raimondo Cortese. Set and costumes by Anna Tregloan, lighting by Niklas Pajanti, sound design by David Franzke. With Beth Buchanan, Paul Lum and Patrick Moffatt. Malthouse Theatre, @ the Beckett, until October 23.

The Blue Dragon, by Robert Lepage and Marie Michaud, translated by Michael Mackenzie, directed by Robert Lepage. Set design Michel Gauthier, sound design by Jean-Sebastien Cote, choreographer Tai Wei Foo. With Henri Chasse, Marie Michaud and Tai Wei Foo. Ex Machina. Playhouse, Victorian Arts Centre, until October 12.

Melbourne International Arts Festival: The Busker's Opera, directed by Robert Lepage. Music composed, arranged and performed by Frederike Bedard, Martin Belanger, Julie Fainer, Claire Gignac, Frederic Lebrasseur, Veronika Makdissi-Warren, Kevin McCoy, Steve Normandin, Marco Poulin and Jean Rene. Dramaturge Kevin McCoy. Ex Machina. The Return of Ulysses by Claudio Monteverdi, directed by William Kentridge, puppets by Adrian Kohler and Handspring Puppet Company, music performed by Ricercar Consort. Playhouse, Victorian Arts Centre.

There are times when the blindingly obvious clambers over the event horizon of my mind and gives a big friendly "hoy!" Such a moment occurred somewhere in the middle of The Busker's Opera, Robert Lepage's exuberant, sexy, vulgar take on John Gay's 18th century The Beggar's Opera. I thought, oh gosh (or expletives to that effect): opera's just a bunch of songs that tell a story.

The story, it must be confessed, doesn't make a lot of sense. But as John Gay himself wrote, "you must allow that in this kind of drama 'tis no matter how absurdly things are brought about". In The Busker's Opera, unlike the original, the over-wived Macheath is actually executed (by lethal injection), although he takes off his orange suit straight afterwards and comes and sings in the epilogue of how "the wretch of today may be happy tomorrow". And thus death shall have no dominion. To be honest, I wasn't entirely sure why he was condemned to death in the first place, although it seemed to have something to do with his getting rather friendly with a soprano in a silver dress on top of a piano.

I hesitate to call The Busker's Opera an adaptation of Gay's piece. It is more a kind of merry pillage: Lepage appears to have simply filleted out the songs and then has given them to the cast and musicians, who set them in a bracingly various set of styles, ranging from rock to hiphop to 17th century baroque, and perform them with all the rough vitality of street performers. He uses almost no dialogue and none, that I could see, from The Beggar's Opera. But I do think it's entirely in the spirit of the original.

Gay's opera opens with a dialogue between a Beggar (who has written the opera) and a Player, who discuss the piece we are about to see. Similarly, Lepage opens with a conversation between a Busker, who for the purposes of the show has authored the piece, and an Agent. It then swings, like Gay, into a nonsensical story about various exotic lowlifes, including "a prison scene, which the ladies always reckon charmingly pathetic".

But there, more or less, the similarities end. Lepage himself claims the opera is a tilt against corporatisation, or in particular, the "Weill corporation", which cancelled his production of Brecht's Threepenny Opera (Brecht's own take on Gay). It's hard to see anything so grandiose as a critique of corporatisation in the sketchy narrative of sleaze in the music business which follows, but there are certainly a couple of fingers up to the Weill family.

Lepage seems to have decided to out-Brecht Brecht, but it is fair to say that he lacks Brecht's political perspicacity. Nevertheless, his direction possesses considerable wit and style, and attains the kind of simplicity which only comes with a great deal of thought and money. The stage is divided into two main areas: backstage, where are the musicians and instruments, and the forestage, where performers come forward to do their numbers and scenes. A huge flatscreen video is moved around the stage by some complicated mechanics. It provides all the lyrics and scene details, a la Brecht, occasional live footage and various complementary images.

What makes the two hours fly is the high-octane performances by a wonderful ensemble cast, which give the production both the roughness and skill it needs. It's like a rather beautiful rock concert, or a mutated, overblown cabaret. Lepage also has the absolute gift of Gay's tough lyrics, which somehow make the transition to contemporary rock or blues as if they absolutely belong there. Perhaps this makes perfect sense. Gay's opera, after all, contained no original music, for all the songs were set to popular airs of the period; and if they are sung here in another mode, it is still a mode all their own.

I had a fabulous time. So, judging by the cheers, did a lot of other people, although by the end I was surrounded by a sea of empty chairs. I was wearing my most delicious - in my fact, my only - perfume, so I really don't think I smelt that bad. It must have been the opera. There is a rather undergraduate statement on the program that warns hopefully: "this opera may offend everybody". Frankly, I was surprised that it offended anybody, but I assume that it must have.

I had a different kind of fabulous time at The Return of Ulysses. This is the kind of art which makes profound connections below the level of everyday consciousness. The effect is rather like being ambushed: it liberates feelings at some primeval strata of thought, and then, while you're innocently enjoying some exquisite music, they sneak up behind and pole-axe you with your own unsuspected emotion.

This is, to digress for a moment, an experience I always associate with beauty: a word which is abused to meaninglessness but which nevertheless means something to me. The idea of beauty often exercises poets, as it mercilessly exposes the inadequacy of words in attempting to communicate states of extreme subjectivity. Despite this difficulty, in my novella Navigatio I attempted to analyse what my experience of it is:

"...beauty is nothing, sang Rilke, but this terrifying beginning... The terror of beauty is that everything is beautiful. It is the chaotic self, the chaotic body, the chaotic world, fragmentary, diffuse, unassigned to meaning, against which form, an aesthetic armour, a self by which we understand our given selves, defends itself from the chaos within and without it. And yet art contains the terror of obliteration, which inhabits the centre of beauty. It admits the reality of death, of human finitude and failure, it admits that the world is not us and that we do not control it. This admission is love: the voluntary renunciation of self-tyranny, the ascension to the place of ordinary beauty, which redeems nothing."

The Return of Ulysses, which is directed by the extraordinary South African visual artist William Kentridge, seemed to me to be dealing very directly with this idea of beauty. It is a production which is multiple at every level; I would have liked to have seen it at least once more, in order to absorb more of its complexities. Yet one of its achievements is that what is really a very complicated event is given an air of illusory simplicity.

It is a co-production between the South African group Handspring Puppets, with whom Kentridge has had an on-going collaboration, and the Belgian ensemble Ricercar Consort. The story of Ulysses' return home to Ithaca and his reuniting with Penelope and Telemachus (after the slaughter of all his rivals) is told simply in Monteverdi's baroque opera, here cut to half its normal length by Philippe Pierlot and scored for a viola da gamba trio and plucked instruments such as the harp, theorbo and guitar. Pierlot's adaptation creates a work of great clarity and poignancy, performed to great emotional effect by an extremely accomplished cast of singers.

From the opera, the production builds up in two main layers: the puppets, which are manipulated by the singers as well as the animators, and Kentridge's own animated drawings, which are projected onto the back of the stage. Adrian Kohler's expressive puppets are almost life-size, and hand carved from wood. They are operated bunraku style, with the manipulators visible to the audience. I am always fascinated by how, in the hands of master puppeteers, this artifice isolates human gesture and endows it with feeling in ways that can't be achieved by actors. Anime masters like Miyazake can manage exactly the same thing: a schematically drawn cartoon of a child can be utterly convincing if its movement is meticulously accurate.

The puppets follow a simultaneous double narration: firstly a literal illustrating of the opera; and secondly a man, represented by a second, identical Ulysses, dying in his bed in hospital. These stories intertwine with the much more abstract narration which is unfolding on the screen backstage. It's hard to describe the impact of Kentridge's allusive, transformative animation, which is hand-drawn in charcoal using an austere palette of greys and browns. The images are incredibly various, and include sonar scans of the body, x-rays, video footage of water or heart operations, landscapes which transform from ancient Greece to bleak visions of contemporary South Africa, or lushly sensual flowers and vines. The images circle a constant refrain of death, decay and regeneration, metamorphising liquidly from one state to another with a dynamic which is disturbingly erotic.

The whole is brought together on a stage which is shaped like a lecture theatre, the musicians seated around in a half circle while the action flows before and behind them. It is lit by a rich play of Rembrandtian colours that highlight the nuances of the woods of the instruments and puppets. The opening scene, in which the gods discuss Ulysses' fate and mortal frailty, is in fact modelled on Rembrandt's painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp. The singers and manipulators gather around the prone body of the second Ulysses, and introduce the tenor of this production. It is in fact a memento mori, a theatrical version of those mediaeval images which urged people to remember that they, too, would die. In contemporary contexts, the capricious figures of the gods become the equally mysterious workings of the interior of the human body: an angiogram of a heart attack, for example, is the equivalent of Zeus' thunderbolts.

With such a subtle and multifarious work, it is hard to trace the motion of action and effect; it works cumulatively and patiently at levels which are often subconscious. At the end, the death of the hospitalised Ulysses, which occurred while the other puppet was enjoying a rapturous reunion with his long lost wife Penelope, was unexpectedly devastating. I found myself suddenly and embarassingly in tears. I suppose I was crying for myself. As Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote to a young girl grieving for the dead leaves of autumn, "It is the fate that man was born for. / It is Margaret you mourn for."

Melbourne International Arts Festival