Last Wednesday, Lally Katz's A Golem Story and Robert Reid's The Joy of Text premiered at the Malthouse and the MTC. The same week, the Malthouse opened its remount of Declan Greene's 2010 hit, Moth. Meanwhile at the MTC, Joanna Murray-Smith's The Gift is running at the MTC's Sumner Theatre, and tonight Ian Wilding's new play The Water Carriers opens at the Lawler Studio. At the moment, Melbourne's main stage theatres are exclusively devoted to new Australian work.


Has this ever happened before? If it has, I missed it. For this reason, and not without a certain astonishment, it's worth sticking a small, patriotic and ironically tasteful flag in June 2011 and admiring the view from the hill. Well done, MTC and Malthouse: despite all the commercial wisdoms that mitigate against producing contemporary Australian plays, together you've curated a mini-showcase of new writing, flung a spotlight on it, and put it out there.

Last week's openings are noteworthy: they're all well worth seeing, and they're all very different from one another. (Discussion of A Golem Story will follow in a separate post, because it started going on, and on...) Katz, Reid and Greene all grew up in Melbourne's independent theatre scene: Katz developed most of her early work with Chris Kohn and Stuck Pigs Squealing, while Reid had, and Greene has, their own companies, respectively Theatre in Decay and Sisters Grimm.

It's a point worth noting: these playwrights learned how to do it just as Shakespeare did, by writing plays, finding collaborators and putting them on. They put them on in carparks (and sometimes in cars), in tiny alternative venues, under the umbrella perhaps of institutions such as Theatre Works or the Melbourne Fringe or the Store Room, sometimes with money, often with no funding at all. They didn't ask permission, and they created audiences.

Moth, a co-production by Malthouse and Arena Theatre, is unquestionably the pick of the bunch. This is exquisite theatre: in my view one of the most accomplished new plays of the past few years, here given a superbly restrained and devastatingly powerful production by Chris Kohn. This is a remount of last year's sell-out production, and what I said the first time round still holds: it's a play notable for its needle-sharp accuracy, its sure theatricality and its unforgiving emotional honesty.

Its conceit - a retelling by two friends, Claryssa (Sarah Ogden) and Sebastian (Thomas Conroy) of a traumatic incidence of schoolyard persecution and subsequent breakdown - is both ingenious and cleverly maintained, but its heart-cracking power exists in our understanding that this retelling is impossible: reality, it tells us, is different from what we hope.

As enactment, Moth has a sense of the un-illusioned redemption Allen Ginsberg grasps in Kaddish, his great poem of mourning for his mentally ill mother Naomi: "Work of the merciful Lord of poetry, / that causes the broken grass to be green, or the rock to break in grass - the Sun to be constant to Earth - sun of all sunflowers and days on bright iron bridges..." Suspended in the force of this impossible longing, the tragedy of madness - in all its horror, obscene comedy and abjection - opens as an unhealed wound. The truth of that unhealedness is the only redemption there is: it's the ferocity of the desire that things be otherwise that most tellingly reveals its pain.

This production demonstrates the value of remounting work. The premiere was hugely impressive: this time round, with a new cast member replacing Dylan Young, I was struck by the beautiful detailing of Ogden and Conroy's performances: every moment thought through and articulated, every gesture accurate. Each aspect of the design - Jethro Woodward's soundscape, Jonathan Oxlade's set, Rachel Burke's lighting - unobstrusively strokes in texture and contrast. I don't remember the script well enough to know how it's changed, but its fragmentations seemed sharper to me, the comedy more telling, the action more lucid. Small, but perfectly formed.


The Joy of Text, on at the Fairfax, is another kettle of sardines altogether. Robert Reid has clearly considered a major problem of contemporary art: how do you deal with complex ideas and simultaneously find a wide audience? "It is not enough to simply preach to the converted," he says in a program note. "If it is not kept open and accessible to us all, cultural discussion risks becoming obsessively self-referential and irrelevant to all but a narrow band of self-elected cultural elites." Quite.

Reid's solution is to take a popular generic form and remodel it to his own ends: in this case, farce. The Joy of Text is a satire on language and authority, and examines how language, far from being a vehicle for truth, creates its own destabilising realities. Here traditional reason and authority grapple with irrationality and inauthenticity. It's no accident that it's set in a school, where authority and anarchy regularly meet and attempt to discipline each other: nor that the play's title spins off a famous 1970s sex manual.

From its opening scene, in which the acting head master Steve (Peter Houghton) and English teacher Diane (Louise Silverson) have an argument about syntax, it's clear that we are in a parallel reality close to, but by no mean identical with, our own. For one thing, people speak in perfect sentences, like Samuel Johnson. I've never been a teacher, but somehow I doubt that most of the staff-room conversation concerns itself with the finer points of grammar, debating favourite authorities. They're mighty creaky ones too - Fowler's A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926) and Strunk and White's Elements of Style (1918) - which place the arguing teachers in a fustian, outmoded matrix of authority, of certainty shored up by textual jurisdiction about correct modes of behaviour.

This mode of authority meets its nemesis in the persons of a bright student, Danny (James Bell), and an ambitious young teacher, Ami (Helen Christinson), both of whom represent different models of inauthenticity. Danny appears first in an argument with Ami, where he is heatedly accusing her of humiliating him in front of the class. Asked to deliver an essay on satire, his assignment consists of a copy-and-paste of the Wikipedia entry on Jonathan Swift. Ami is not impressed by his argument that his essay is a performance of satire itself ("We are all Lilliputians!) and Danny retires, hurt and vengeful.

Meanwhile, Ami's identity is called into question when Diane decides to put The Illusion of Consent - a book written by a 16-year-old schoolgirl which details her alleged affair with a teacher - on the school syllabus. Ami is fiercely against it, claiming that the book is a fiction by a girl seeking attention, and pointing out that the publication of the book led to the teacher's suicide. When Steve casually gives the book to Danny to read, Danny (in an unlikely feat of textual scholarship) deduces that the book's author is Ami herself. And then, pursuing his performative method of learning, he re-enacts scenes from the book with various teachers, spreading chaos and confusion.

Farce, the most self-conscious of theatrical modes, is in fact the perfect form for a satire of language - it is all about confused identity, self-destructing authority and sexual shenanigans. Joe Orton took farce to a logical conclusion, becoming, as the critic CW Bigsby said, a "crucial embodiment of the post modernist impulse": "by means of farce he gives expression to the conviction of a dislocated self, of a reified experience, of a brittle and contingent language". Here Reid takes that post modernist impulse and makes it explicit.

Marx's famous dictum about history repeating itself, "the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce", is not wholly inappropriate here: the first time the teacher shoots himself, the second time the teachers, as a result of the first event, find themselves lost in a maze of bureacracy, definitions of "appropriate behaviour" and uncertainty.

Reid's play is an often brilliant, and very funny, enactment of all these ideas: the first act steps through a minefield of uncertainty with a deft theatrical wit. The second act, in which all these energies reach their various climaxes, collides with an impulse hostile to the suspensions of farce and somehow collapses under its own weight.

Behind this is a desire that these characters be relatable, that we identify with them and feel sympathy with them: a laudable desire for human emotion to emerge from these alienating language games. Characters in farce provoke interest and hilarity for different reasons: because they are absurd, because the unremitting logic of their behaviour inexorably leads them into chaos. Act Two changes gear into something more akin to naturalism (with the odd reference to tragedy), and Reid hasn't quite managed the marriage of these opposing impulses in his text or, I suspect, in his ideas. It feels grafted in, rather than an evolution from the premises of the first act.

For all that, it's a very enjoyable production. Aidan Fennessy's direction straddles, somewhat uncomfortably, the contradictions of the text, approaching it primarily as farce; the actors deal with the stage business very well, but then are left with the difficulty of creating empathic characters out of these brittle theatrical constructions. Houghton as the morose acting head master, both panic stricken by his temporary authority and longing for its status, manages this best of all the cast, although I liked Louise Siversen's astringent Diane. And Andrew Bailey's multilevel institutional set places the action gloriously in a mundane, utterly recognisable present which, fascinatingly, works best of all in the dislocations of the first act.

Pictures: top: Sarah Ogden and Dylan Young in Moth; bottom, James Bell and Peter Houghton in Joy of Text. Photo: Jeff Busby

Moth, by Declan Greene, directed by Chris Kohn. Designed by Jonathan Oxlade, lighting design by Rachel Burke, video design by Domenico Bartolo, composition and sound design Jethro Woodward. With Thomas Conroy and Sarah Ogden. Malthouse Theatre and Arena Theatre Company, Beckett Theatre at the Malthouse, until June 25.

The Joy of Text by Robert Reid, directed by Aidan Fennessy. Sets and costumes by Andrew Bailey, lighting design by Matt Scott, composition by David Franzke. With James Bell, Helen Christinson, Peter Houghton and Louise Siversen. Melbourne Theatre Company @ the Fairfax Studio, until July 23.

* It's all over US newspapers, but I can't seem to find it in any local sheets, at least online: former MIAF director Kristy Edmunds has landed a plum job at UCLA as artistic director of its renowned live performance series. As the LA Times puts it, "Her four years as artistic director of the Melbourne International Arts Festival in Australia extended her reputation as an impresario with impressive contacts and a flair for the adventurous and the offbeat." Indeed. She'll be a busy woman: for the first year she'll also be continuing her present job as consulting artistic director for a new performing arts program at New York City's Park Avenue Armory.

* Meanwhile, the Melbourne Theatre Company yesterday announced an interim triumvirate of artistic directors, who will program the 2012 season before soon-to-be-former MIAF AD Brett Sheehy takes up the reins. They are Aidan Fennessy, Robyn Nevin and Pamela Rabe. The 2012 season will be annoounced in September.

* Lastly, get your greedy hands on Robert Reid's new Platform Paper, Hello World! Promoting the Arts on the Web. You don't have to be a performing arts nut to find this fascinating: it's an intelligent and broad look at the impact of digital technology with implications beyond Reid's areas of focus. Available now from Currency House.

A Mile in her Shadow by Robert Reid, directed by Aidan Fennessy. Design by Anna Cordingley, lighting design by Matt Scott, original music and sound design Kelly Ryall. With Ben Harkin and Katie-Jean Harding. The Store Room Theatre Workshop until December 10.



The Store Room has an enviable history of premiering excellent independent theatre - Construction of the Human Heart and The Yellow Wallpaper, among the best work on at the Malthouse this year, began here. Recently it proposed a fascinating new initiative, the Store Room Theatre Workshop, which asks theatregoers to subscribe to a notion of works in progress rather than a series of programmed product. To this end, artistic director Ben Harkin has collected a rather stellar group of theatre artists to develop work together over a three year period.

Each season, the Store Room plans to announce a series of works which will be put into development, some of which will go into production. This seems to be a flexible structure that permits artists to work seriously on projects without the pressures of programming work that isn't necessarily ready for it, while at the same time having the chance to try them out on a public stage.

A Mile in her Shadow is the first production from the Store Room Theatre Workshop, and it certainly bears out its creative promise. Robert Reid is a Melbourne writer of unruly but real talent, and here he attempts something very difficult: to create a theatrical analogue of the subjective state of mental illness; in this case, dissociative disorder.

Here comparisons become inevitable. It is impossible to watch this play and not to think of Sarah Kane's 4:48 Psychosis, to my mind the most brilliant of this brilliant writer's works. Reid doesn't possess Kane's faultless ear, the tough poetic that permits her to examine such a rawly subjective state as mental illness through the focus of fiercely disciplined language. Kane is both more extreme and more restrained than Reid.

That said, and given that it's no disgrace not to be as good as Sarah Kane, Reid has made a pretty good fist of it here. There is no moment of this play that slackens into the merely confessional, and despite moments of over-writing, it balances finely between the aesthetic demands of a work of art and the raw expression of the sheer terror and confusion of disordered mental states. It's well structured, effectively using repetition to destabilise its various realities, and shifts ingeniously between differing states of mental being.

True (Ben Harkin) is, in all senses of the word, the subject of this play, and we watch him play out his relationships with the Other, represented by She (Katie-Jean Harding). While True is always himself, She is many people - True's lover, his psychiatrist, strangers. True's distress and terror is played against his sometimes bewildering and cruel behaviour towards She, and his world, in which nothing is stable enough to be confidently called "reality", is compellingly evoked.

What makes A Mile in her Shadow so deeply interesting is the close knit between the text and all aspects of its production. Aidan Fennessy has given the production a stylised edge which at its best moments throws the molten emotional core of its subject into sharp relief. Anna Cordingley's design is both clever and beautiful. We witness the play through a curtain, drawn around the two sides of the L-shaped stage: when we enter it is black, but when action is lit behind it, it becomes as transparent as a scrim, alienating us subtly from the action on stage. In such a small theatre, this is particularly effective.

The set itself is an upside-down room of unrelieved squalor: on the ceiling are a mattress, a blanket, rubbish, a collection of empty bottles. On the floor are two chairs. The room at the back of the set, usually off-stage, is drawn surprisingly into the design by the ingenious use of a mirror. The whole is sumptuously lit by Matt Scott with a startling depth of sensual colour.

It's physically demanding of both actors. Harkin negotiates the extremities of his character with utter commitment and an ability to move precisely between contrasting states of mind, although there were moments when I thought a cool restraint might have been more effective than than reaching for emotional extremity, which risked being histrionic.

As all the "other" characters, Katie-Jean Harding distorts her willowy body with the grace of a dancer, creating a physical language that is dislocating and disturbing, although sometimes her vocal skills don't quite match her physical capacities: where Harkin was in danger of over-reaching, Harding's coolness could sometimes slip into mere blankness.

The text is presented almost like an aria or a musical poem, with Kelly Ryall's textured score of original music and sound punctuating the spoken language. It complements the action beautifully, except at times when it is simply too loud, and obtrudes over the words rather than bringing them to a fuller life.

A Mile in her Shadow is a compelling, if not entirely successful, production, which shows what can happen when artists are given the room to experiment. It bodes extremely well for the Store Room's future as a generator of independent theatre. The only real criticism is the shortness of the season, although perhaps there will be a chance for this production to return again, polished by the experience of this first presentation.

Picture: Ben Harkin and Katie-Jean Harding in A Mile in her Shadow.

The Store Room

The True Amazon Adventures of Roger Casement by Andrew Shaw, directed by Robert Reid. With Mike McEvoy, Elliot Summers, Robert Lloyd, Michael F. Cahill, Tobias Manderson-Galvin, Johannes Scherpenhuizen, Liz McColl, Simon Morrison-Baldwin and Alicia Benn Lawler. La Mama until February 18.

The so-called Black Diaries of Roger Casement are a kind of Turin Shroud of modern history. Sir Roger Casement was a distinguished Victorian human rights advocate whose reports on colonial atrocities in the Belgian Congo and rubber plantations in Peru earned him a knighthood.

But Casement, an Anglo-Irishman, was also a believer in Irish Independence. In 1916 he arranged for a German ship to sail for Ireland with "several machine-guns, 20,000 rifles and a million rounds of ammunition" for the Irish Volunteers. But his plans were exposed, and Casement was arrested and imprisoned in London for three months awaiting trial. He was hanged by the British for treason on August 3, 1916, for his part in the Easter Rising.

While Casement was in prison, the diaries - supposedly seized in a raid on his house - were used to destroy his credibility and character. The diaries contained explicit details that revealed Casement to be a promiscuous homosexual with a taste for rough trade. Selected extracts were shown to public figures and known sympathisers, who consequently shrank back from appealing for clemency for a "degenerate". The Black Diaries effectively hanged him.

Predictably, perhaps, given the underhand way in which the British authorities used the diaries, and their subsequent keeping in conditions of extraordinary secrecy (the first independent examination of the documents only happened three years ago), their provenance has always been surrounded by controversy. Particularly in Ireland, there has been a widely held belief that the diaries were forgeries, partly out of a disbelief that a hero and martyr could possibly be gay: as de Valera said, he was "too noble to be a degenerate".

The unequivocal 2002 judgment of handwriting expert Dr Audrey Giles that the diaries "were genuine throughout and in each instance" has done nothing, however, to end the controversy. Many experts argue that her examination was incomplete, and failed to take into account inconsistencies in the text and other issues which, at the very least, throw doubt on their authenticity.

In our times, Casement is in danger of becoming a martyr for gay pride as much as for the Irish Nationalists. Poor ghost. Playwright Andrew Shaw has no doubt: "we can accept the diaries as real, why shouldn't they be?" he says, dismissing the arguments for their inauthenticity as "a claim designed to safeguard an Irish martyr against the perversion of homosexuality".

I'm not so sure; in this age, the counter-arguments may have nothing to do with homophobia, and everything to do with concern about the lengths to which the British authorities could go in order to hang a troublesome dissident. However, Andrew Shaw has created an intelligent and witty play out of the hallucinatory realities that circle around this case.

In the opening scenes a young civil servant Thomson (Mike McEvoy) is blackmailed by two Foreign Office officials (Robert Lloyd and Michael F Cahill); the police have certain information on his private life, and he will be prosecuted for homosexuality - unless, that is, he reads the private diaries of Roger Casement and uses them to create a forgery which fits in with the known details, but which proves Casement to be a degenerate.

Thomson likes to think he is a humanitarian - he admires Casement's work in the Congo and the Amazon - and is something of a naive romantic. But he takes the job to save his own skin, knowing that he will help to hang a man whom he admires. He hopes to salve his conscience by showing that, even though Casement is queer, he is also a human being capable of love; and the project also appeals to a certain literary vanity. The irony is that when the actual diaries turn up and Thomson's forgeries are no longer needed, Casement's adventures are not the romantic idylls of Thomson's imaginings, but something altogether more ambiguous and disturbing.

Shaw interleaves scenes between the civil servants and others between Thomson and his lover with dramatisations of events from Casement's diaries, which relate a somewhat brutal narrative of what we would now call sex tourism as well as the corruptions and brutalities of plantation life. He artfully illustrates not only the hypocrisies of Victorian society - at least one of Thomson's superiors is himself homosexual - but also its mechanics: the levers of class and money and exploitation that constitute a colonial empire. Sharp and subtly inflected performances from these three actors (I especially enjoyed the panicked vulnerability of Thomson, too intelligent to hide from himself the implications of what he is doing) intensify the ironies of these scenes.

In the middle of this machinery is the hapless character of Casement (Elliot Summers) himself, who is a cipher - on the one hand condemning the exploitation of "natives", while on the other exploiting them sexually. But instead of creating a truly complex contradiction, Casement comes across merely as a hypocritical prig, weakly shoring up his own authority at the expense of the man he claims to love but, in fact, exploits and betrays. It's a factor of Summers' rather blank performance, I think, as much as a question not quite resolved in the script. While Shaw's Casement is certainly flawed, it is difficult to see how such a moral quisling could be fired by the desire for justice that motivated his reports of human rights abuses or the support for an independent Ireland which finally ended his life.

Robert Reid's direction is arresting, if perhaps a little ambitious for the intimate stage of La Mama: the artifice of this production might work better with the distance of a proscenium. The actors are in white face, and half masks are used to indicate the masks of colonial rule, effectively theatricalising the roles and selves of colonial rule. The English servant and the plantation slave, both at the bottom of the class hierarchy, are represented by a bunraku puppet. Sometimes the staging is very effective indeed: a scene where Casement's assistant is whipped is startlingly violent and unbearable, especially from a distance of less than a metre - hard to do in a small theatre. It's a production that doesn't quite achieve its own ambition, but is well worth a look.

Sweet Staccato Rising by Robert Reid. Directed by Lauren Taylor, with Hamish Michael and Lauren Urquhart. Theatre of Decay at The Store Room, until August 22.

Talking about my g-g-generation: nothing is calculated to make me feel more like J. Alfred Prufrock than some bouncy young artist insisting on his or her youth. It is unarguable that 40 is older than 20, and I guess quoting Eliot says it all: how last century can a creaking old ague-ridden carcass get?

But I can't help it, the ague or the age. So here one stands, rolling up the bottoms of one's trousers, checking out the crows' feet around one's eyes and that lascivious softening of the flesh that occurs around one's middle, if one pays too little attention to lifestyle clubs and botox. It is indisputable that I am over 38 (eew, old! they say with disgust of 38 in Sweet Staccato Rising) and wear my age gracelessly, if only to point out that disaffected youth didn't spring new-minted from the ground in 1984. And if Robert Reid's play Sweet Staccato Rising makes me feel my age - so what? Was it worth the discomfort? Or - perhaps more pertinently - was it in fact as discomforting as it sought to be?

Sweet Staccato Rising covers familiar territory. It tracks the alienated young lovers Gunner (Hamish Michael) and Slitfish (Lauren Urquhart) as they implode in mutual self-destruction. It's that old romance of sex and death, Bonnie and Clyde or Sid and Nancy for a new generation. I've never really bought into the generational concept, which seems to me a device invented by market researchers, but, for the record, Reid claims to speak for those born in the mid-80s "between two Gulf Wars", articulating a familiar nihilism which is nevertheless aggressively particular to contemporary Melbourne.

The play's parochial focus gave me pause, for a number of reasons. One danger is that its brand of suburban angst runs the risk of seeming little more than self-indulgent, a cry of rebellion which turns out to be no more than "nobody loves me". (But is there anything more, after all, to the young Brando's iconic sneer?) And admittedly, the endless eastern suburbs of Melbourne, especially when seen from a train window, are bleakness itself: the heartland that spawns Neighbours and Kath & Kim is mile after mile of identical suburbia, sterile and heart-shrinking, the only sign of vitality the graffiti which blazes garishly along kilometres of fencing. It's not surprising that, in this landscape, youth suicide statistics are among the highest in the world.

Still, it was the stifling petit bourgeois respectability of Charleville which engendered the incandescent talent of Arthur Rimbaud, probably the first and still arguably the greatest of adolescent rebel angels. It is poverties of spirit that are germane here, not material poverty, despite the statistics about youth poverty flashed, a la Brecht, onto the theatre wall. Gunner and Slitfish are from the disenfranchised white middle class, not the underclass who inhabit towerblocks and caravan parks; they are not migrant workers or asylum seekers or disenfranchised indigenous people or, to begin with, homeless. Gunner might burn down his house, but he has a house to burn down in the first place: and it's a house with a lawn. Slitfish can afford a ticket to New Zealand, even if she is raped there. There are claims made for disenfranchisement which sit rather nervously over what is revealed in the play; I would have felt less bothered if there had been no claims, if I had been permitted simply to watch the story of these two abusive and abused young people. But this is theatre which seldom escapes a didactic edge.

Reid has written a series of dialogues which outline the limited arena of Gunner's and Slitfish's lives. They are given a high-octane delivery by Hamish Michael and Lauren Urquhart in two very interesting performances. Both are in clownish white-face make-up and lit only by white light in a black box theatre, and their physicality is jerky and artificial, as if they are marionettes or anarchic dolls. It's a risky strategy: these alienations only work sometimes, most effectively in the final scene, when the artifice of the direction and performance pays off in a true heightening of feeling. There is little attention to nuance in Lauren Taylor's direction, and although I admired the full-on, relentless assault of the energies of the performers and the play, the shock of dialogue delivered in a monotonal shout is one of diminishing returns. The effect is more often numbing than awakening.

The major problems with the production seemed to me to be in the writing itself. Sweet Staccato Rising aims for a tragic arc which drives towards a cathartic climax, but Reid has an uncertain grasp of the dramatic mechanics which make this possible, and the energies of the play are consequently largely dissipated in meandering dialogues. Despite a surface appearance of action, very little in fact happens until the final scene, where at last a real conflict occurs between the characters and the dialogue becomes forceful and dynamic and, dare I say it, moving.

The challenge in work like this is to create a mimesis of pointless and meandering lives without making the work itself meandering and pointless: it's a hard ask, and Reid only partially succeeds. I admire the ambition, which is the first ingredient of achievement, but I suspect this work is not ambitious enough. If it were, it might reach past its own naivetie, a nagging sense of narcissism which ultimately compromises its politics.

The Store Room