4:48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane, directed by Alyson Campbell. With Richard Bligh, Olivia Connolly, Tom Davies and Suzette Williams. Red Stitch Actors Theatre, until July 26. Bookings: 9533 8082

Like Heiner Mueller’s 1977 play Hamletmachine, Sarah Kane’s 4:48 Psychosis, at last having its Melbourne premiere at Red Stitch, is the kind of work that redefines the possibilities of language on a stage. Hamletmachine, most famously realised by Robert Wilson, is a six-page text in which Mueller’s political and psychological obsessions are given explosive expression through the traumatised figure of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It’s a densely allusive, almost cubist text that at once expresses a deeply personal sense of despair and critiques the social conditions that produced it.


It has other suggestive connections to 4:48 Psychosis. "It became, more than ever anticipated," says Mueller, "a self-critique of the intellectual … It is the description of a petrified hope, an effort to articulate a despair so that it can be left behind. It certainly is a 'terminal point', I can’t continue in this way."

Kane’s 4:48 Psychosis, as is well known, was her last play: this vastly talented young writer hanged herself in 1999, at the age of 28. While Mueller went on to create other works – although Hamletmachine was the last play of its kind that he wrote – Kane reached both a personal and an artistic end point with this play. Contemplating it is rather like looking at Rothko’s final bleak canvases: it is impossible not to feel the weight of the artist’s suicide behind the work.

But an artist’s life is not the same as her work, and it’s unfair to conflate the two. For all its terrifying expressiveness, 4:48 Psychosis is a work of art, not a diary entry: it may be an expression of personal despair – written, perhaps, as Hamletmachine was, in an effort to leave it behind. But that is not why it matters as a work of art. What I find most terrifying about it is, in fact, how Kane manages to draw so rawly from her personal experience of mental illness and yet to frame it with an absolutely icy intellectual and aesthetic discipline. In this achievement – her ability to successfully objectify, critique and theatricalise her own pain – she is arguably only matched by Antonin Artaud.

Stylistically, 4:48 Psychosis is most certainly a "terminal point", the logical end of a continual stripping away of theatrical convention, in which she was influenced by artists like Howard Barker and his Theatre of Catastrophe and the plays of Caryl Churchill. Her first play, Blasted, scandalised theatrical London by conflating sexual violence with the extremities of civil war, physicalising on stage the traumatic wounds of the psyche. Its crudity is at once brilliant and shocking. And she continued through her tragically slim oeuvre of five plays to refine her aesthetic, questioning every aspect of the contemporary stage, until she reached the terminal point of 4:48 Psychosis: a text with no stage directions, no characters, no direction even of how many actors might perform it.

Some people question if it’s even a theatre text. A critic colleague claims that it’s a poem, a text that is whole on the page and doesn’t “demand to be performed”. For me, 4:48 Psychosis falls on the theatrical side of that shadowy divide that distinguishes a play from a poem, even while it sits uncomfortably close to the boundary: it’s definitely language that’s written to be voiced and physicalised in space. But there's no doubt that part of its radicality exists in how it brings modes of interior expressiveness to the stage that more traditionally live in the realm of the lyric poem.

Under Alyson Campbell’s direction, Red Stitch gives Melburnians their first chance to see this extraordinary text on stage. It’s a creditable production, intelligently staged with some excellent performers, but it left me with a nagging sense of disappointment. There’s no doubt that this is a difficult play to realise: again like Hamletmachine, which on its US premiere was judged a “dull monodrama” and was only fully realised when Robert Wilson got his hands on it, to experience its full power requires a production as radical as the writing.

Given that there’s no direction on who says the text, or how many actors might perform it, there have been a wide number of interpretations. In France it was performed as a monologue by Isabelle Huppert; the Royal Court used three actors. For this production, Campbell has distributed the text between four actors, Richard Bligh, Olivia Connolly, Tom Davies and Suzette Williams, perhaps calling on an anima/animus model of the human psyche.

Campbell has carefully ignored the possible division of the play into different “characters” – the psychiatrist, for instance, or several “I”s. While this deflects the possibility of turning the play into a more conventional drama in disguise, making all the voices interchangable splinters of a shattered psyche, it also has a curiously muffling effect on its emotional power. Most seriously, when the lines themselves are split, word by word, between different voices, it destroys the careful orchestrations of Kane’s linguistic rhythms: and I couldn’t see what these splintered lines added to the performance. The production’s most powerful moments are, in fact, where the actors are permitted monologic moments, when the rhythms of the language begin to exercise a fatal power.

Here psychosis is imagined as a place of unbearable cold and endless perspectives: the stage floor is covered with fake snow, which attaches to the performers’ clothes as the work progresses, and the set itself is a series of receding doors or frames, dwindling into an imagined distance. The actors perform a series of “scenes”, with pauses between each one, discovering an ingenious variety of physical correlatives for the language.

It is, as I said, a creditable attempt, and worth seeing for its serious and uncompromising realisation of Kane’s text. Strangely, given my reservations about Campbell's attack on Kane's rhythms, I suspect it is all too reverent of Kane’s poetry, too respectful of her language: this text might be traumatic and traumatised, but it is not, as it sometimes seems to be here, catatonically frozen. It is, in fact, a passionate struggle for life itself: and I wish I could have felt a little more of that passion.

Eldorado by Marius von Mayenburg, translated by Maja Zade, directed by Benedict Andrews. Design Anna Tregloan, lighting design Paul Jackson, music and sound Max Lyandvert. With Gillian Jones, Robert Menzies, Hamish Michael, Bojana Novokovic, Greg Stone and Alison Whyte. Malthouse Theatre until July 2. The Session written and performed by The Ennio Morricone Experience: Patrick Cronin, Graeme Leak, Boris Conley and David Hewitt, with Steph O’Hara and Stephen Taberner. Directed by Barry Laing, designed by Emily Barrie. Sound design by Steph O’Hara with Graeme Leak, lighting design Gina Gascoigne, sound consultant Kelvin Gedye. Malthouse Theatre until June 25.

When you enter the Merlyn Theatre under the dim house lights, you see before you a huge window built into a black wall that stretches the width and height of the stage. It's disorientating: with no lights behind, it acts as a mirror in which you see yourself and everyone else darkly reflected.



A black mirror is a fit metaphor with which to begin this riveting play, a parable about human self-destruction. Marius von Mayenburg presents a vision of humanity as desolate as that of WG Sebald in his novel Vertigo, when he speaks of the slow, inevitable conflagration of the earth: we consume all life on our planet with the creeping flame of desertification or the swift fire of war, leaving behind us a wasteland of ash.

Eldorado begins with a monologue murmured by the property speculator Aschenbrenner (Robert Menzies), who leans half-lit against the window, his voice artifically miked so we hear every inflection of his speech. He reports, seductively, tenderly, on the progress of an urban war. It is unsettlingly familiar: the language could be taken from any contemporary news report on the invasion of Baghdad or the destruction of Falluja. Only, it seems, this war is occurring in the same unnamed western city in which our suave businessman is living, not in some distant theatre of conflict in the Middle East or the Third World; this is a play which collapses perspectives of distance and time. It finishes with Aschenbrenner again, but this time he speaks as one of the dead: and now he tells us of a new life on Mars, of atmospheres artificially created by water, where humanity can find a new home. Like Aschenbrenner (whose very name conjures flame and ash), planet Earth is dead.

Bracketed between these two monologues is an epic family drama of the kind that Stephen Sewell attempted in Hate. But von Mayenburg, one of the new lights of contemporary German theatre, brings to this 2004 critique of post-industrial corporatism an emotional complexity and moral ambiguity that recalls the Brecht who wrote Baal. His spare, almost clinical poetic intensity traces a lineage from Georg Büchner to Brecht, through Caryl Churchill to Sarah Kane, who is his contemporary and whom he has in fact translated.

Anton (Greg Stone) is a real estate agent employed by Aschenbrenner, who in the opening scenes is sacked for fraud. When his wife Thekla tells him she is pregnant, he is unable to confess that he has lost his job, and instead rips off his wealthy mother-in-law Greta (Gillian Jones) by selling her expensive speculative apartments in the "government sector" that is currently under attack by insurgents, using the money to finance his household.

Greta is a woman who no pity for anyone, least of all herself. She has a young lover, Oskar (Hamish Michael), whom she treats with contempt, and who openly admits that he is with her because of her wealth, and she lacerates her daughter when Thekla despairingly gives up her dream (clearly her mother's dream) of being a concert pianist. She is played with a sick relish by Jones, who invests her with a compellingly predatory sexuality that suggests that Oskar's attraction towards her is more complex than mere greed.

Meanwhile Anton is living the life of a vagrant to keep up the appearance that he is still working, hiding out in hotels or in the country so he won't be seen. Every time he attempts to tell his wife the truth, it becomes at once farcical and tragic: it's the one time she doesn't believe him. Thekla herself is dealing with a neurotic music student, Manuela (Bojana Novakovic), who at first rejects her as a teacher and then demands to return.

Then disaster strikes: the insurgents take over the "government sector". Aschenbrenner is ruined, and resolves the situation "honourably": he hangs himself. Anton has a breakdown, crouching half-naked on top of a wardrobe in a nightmarish scene in which Greta and Oskar pound on the front door demanding their money, and the ghost of Aschenbrenner, locked in the wardrobe, beckons Anton towards his own "honourable" solution.

The moral culpability of each character is exposed early on, and yet none of them is without innocence. Even Aschenbrenner, the very model of a ruthless businessman, considers himself an honourable man and values integrity, as is evident in the sadistic contempt with which he fires Anton. Secretly aware of their complicity with their own abnegation, each character is riven by self-contempt and loathing. They are all monstrous and yet, strangely, illuminated darkly by a desire to love: but it is as if this love is stillborn, a possibility that dies in the air even as it is spoken, leaving only the cinders of language, a vocabulary of cruelty and unexpressed pain.

This poignancy is most evident in the young couple, who are given particularly strong performances in a production notable for its acting. Alison Whyte is an intriguing blend of brittleness and misplaced strength as Thekla, and Greg Stone is as desolatingly good as I've seen him as Anton, a man inhabiting the hollow shell of himself. The only thing alive in him his love for his wife and unborn child; yet it is this love which forces him to keep up the lie about his job, and the lie finally destroys his life. And yet, as Thekla despairingly recognises, he has in fact betrayed and abandoned her: if not sexually, as she imagines, through his retreat into madness and suicide.

These behaviours are directly recognisable: Mayenburg might be showing us the extremities of bourgeois banality, but they are not exaggerations. Greta's ruthless greed will be familiar anyone who has watched The Apprentice; Thekla's paranoid jealousy and self-obsession are the grist of Dear Dorothy columns everywhere. And anyone who has seen mental illness close up will know that the madness presented here is almost clinically accurate. Part of Mayenburg's boldness is in being quite literal about the phenomena he is reporting: he creates, as Marianne Moore has it, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them". The links between interior wasteland and exterior desolation are metaphorically very clear: these people consume everything, beginning with their own hearts.

Benedict Andrews, who also directs in Berlin at the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz theatre where Mayenburg is dramaturg, directs Eldorado with a brilliant austerity. The idea that human beings are fish in an aquarium, a recurring motif in the text, is literalised in both the performances and in Anna Tregloan's design. We witness the play through the massive window as if it were a giant peepshow, which gives the experience a peculiar intimacy spiced with the discomfort of voyeurism.

For all its moments of breathtaking visual flair, the production is inflected with an admirable subtlety and focuses attention wholly on the text and performances. I was chiefly impressed by Andrews' orchestration, which creates such various rhythms out of von Mayenburg's poetic text that two and a half hours seems like less than half the time. He discovers a surprising richness in the simple convention of the window: with the help of lighting and a lot of apocalyptic smoke he creates claustrophobic domestic spaces, into which we peer, or we find ourselves looking out onto imaginary streets. The actors delineate nightmarish spaces of psychic and phsyical desolation in which the only fixed perspective is the unremitting horizon of the window.

Most of the action occurs jammed up against the glass, although gradually unsettling depths open behind the playing space. As the play progresses the window's initially pristine surface is smeared with human fluids - sweat, saliva - literal traces of the physicality of the actors; just as when an actor eats a lobster, the amplified sounds of its flesh being sucked out of the shell is a repugnant reminder of our carnivorous natures.

Perhaps the most beautiful trick is when, around 20 minutes from the end, gold foil leaves begin to fall onto the stage, glittering in the theatre lights and making a brittle rustling sound. This continues for longer than seems bearable, graduating into a soft, insistent torture. (And here I also ought to mention Max Lyandvert's beautifully textured and atmospheric sound score, which is at once unobstrusive and evocative.)

The production doesn't escape the "porsche effect". Such class throws into relief any moments that don't match its own high standards: a gesture that is a little too stagily self-conscious, for example, or a theatrical illusion (Robert Menzies, say, unhooking himself from a suspension harness) that is neither achieved nor usefully exposed. But these are just quibbles. This is a beautiful realisation of a significant play, and shows that the Malthouse is by no means resting on its laurels. Its ambitious programming is about placing this company in the frontline of international contemporary theatre, and a production like this demonstrates that it belongs there.

With The Session, on in the Beckett as the second play in its winter season, the Malthouse ventures into the realms of New Music and genre film. The Ennio Morricone Experience consists of some of Melbourne's best musicians, and they have garnered a devoted following over the past five years with their po-faced performances of Morricone's classic spaghetti western film scores.



The conceit of The Session is that a group of musicians and sound technicians is locked in a sound studio, recording a series of sound effects and musical scores for a "master tape". It begins and ends with the slamming of a door, and in between we are treated to high-spirited pisstakes of various New Music tropes (if I were more musically literate, I would have got more of the jokes) and ingenious sound effects, executed with increasing freneticism from an enormous variety of sound sources, ranging from conventional instruments, whistling and voice, to teaspoons of Eno in a glass of water or cabbages being struck with knives.

All these are recorded and mixed live, and here the performing skills of the Ennio Morricone Experience come to the fore: under Barry Laing's direction, they create a disciplined and witty choreography as they set up and perform each take. They do everything with absurd seriousness: they prepare to play a cabbage as if they were handling a Stradivarius. The tempo of the evening is exactly that of a working session, with intense bursts of activity punctuated by inaudible gossiping and jokes that are as tightly choreographed as the other parts of the show.

The master tape is finally delivered back to us as a surreal film score. It is the kind of film one might imagine occuring in the head of a genre film buff having a bad night's sleep after a highly spiced curry. I tracked detective movies, science fiction, samurai films and some serious Eastern European piece with a male vocal choir singing (one assumes for no reason) about boating, but I'm sure there was more.

It is great fun, if at 80 minutes perhaps about a quarter of an hour too long. But it is absolutely impossible not to think of Phobia, Douglas Horton and Gerry Brophy's witty take on film noir, which had a very similar set-up - it even featured a door - and which also involved these musicians. But Phobia, one of Chamber Made Opera's best shows, has a theatrical flair and cohesion that The Session is yet to find.

Pictures
Top: Greg Stone as Anton in Eldorado. Bottom: The Session (Back, left to right) Boris Conley, David Hewitt, Stephen Taberner, Patrick Cronin and Graeme Leak; (front) Steph O’Hara. Photos: Jeff Busby

Wondering what to do this Sunday? Of course you are. So head on down to the Malthouse, where your faithful blogger is hosting the next Things on Sunday session.



The theme is "theatres of violence", and it will be a treat to hear the distinguished actors Robert Menzies and Lindy Davies reading excerpts from the work of four exciting playwrights: to wit, Peter Weiss, Jasmine Chan, Sarah Kane and Daniel Keene.

Sunday May 28, 2.30pm, running for approximately one hour.
Venue: CUB Malthouse
Cost: $10, free for Malthouse Theatre subscribers
Bookings highly recommended: Box Office (03) 9685 5111

Cruel and Tender by Martin Crimp, directed by Julian Meyrick, design by Ralph Myers. With Catherine McClements, Jacek Koman, Paul Ashcroft, Kim Gyngell, Colin Moody, Betty Bobbitt, Melissa Chambers, Katerina Kotsonis, Ratidzo Mambo, Dino Marnika, Elliot Noble, Jasper Swarray. MTC at the Fairfax Studio, Arts Centre until April 23.

I'm unconvinced by Cruel and Tender, Martin Crimp's new take on on the "War on Terror". There's a certain over-artfulness in its art, a shallowness in its metaphor. Put it beside coruscating theatrical imaginations like Howard Barker (whose play The Castle remains one of the political masterpieces of recent British theatre) or the visceral sexual politics of Sarah Kane, and its lustre dims considerably.

The first play of Crimp's that I encountered was the genuinely impressive Attempts on her Life, and on reflection I think this vertigo-inducing text, with its cumulative excavation of the way mediated representations enter and distort our realities, is a much more pertinent and powerful comment on our times than Cruel and Tender, despite the latter's overtly contemporary attention to issues like the war in Iraq. This play is an updated take on Sophocles' tragedy The Trachiniae, or The Women of Trachis, and I can't help thinking it might have been more interesting to stage the original play.

Sophocles' tragedy has the grand clarity of Classical Greek theatre, in which human action is drenched in a kind of transparent inevitability, the capricious workings of Destiny or the Gods on fragile mortals. It is based on the myth of the hero Herakles, who in the opening scene is away from home conquering Euboas, a region of Greece. He sends some of his booty - the captured princess Iole - to his pining wife Deianeira. Alarmed and jealous, Deianeira sends her erring husband a shirt impregnated with the blood of a centaur who tried to rape her and was killed by Herakles. In his dying moments, the centaur told her that his blood will magically ensure her husband's fidelity.

But the centaur, predictably perhaps, turns out to be vengeful rather than generous. The shirt has a very different effect to that Deianeira intends - Herakles is stricken with a "blood-fed flame" that devours his skin, and in his agony seeks the escape of death. When Deianeira's son Hyllus charges her with murdering his father, Deianeira kills herself. In the final scene, Herakles orders Hyllus to kill him, to release him from his agony, and to marry Iole, both of which charges he accepts reluctantly.

Crimp follows this basic storyline, but updates it with contemporary references. Herakles becomes a General (Jacek Koman) who is pursuing the hydra-headed War on Terror by means of bloody campaigns in Africa. Deianeira is his spoiled wife Amelia (Catherine McClements) , who is waiting his return amid rumours that her husband is a war criminal. Iole is Laela (Ratidzo Mambo), an African princess for whom the General has razed an entire town. The Chorus is replaced by Amelia's attendants, and various messengers and other dramatic dogsbodies become UN or government officials. The centaur's blood is transformed into a phial of biochemical liquid, the gift of a former spurned lover who now works in a germ warfare institute.

On the evidence of this play, Crimp simply doesn't possess a tragic muse. And while he deftly handles the various levels of language - from high Classical rhetoric to naturalism - it doesn't translate into effect. It's a play written with avowedly political intent but, unlike its model, it suffers from a certain metaphorical fuzziness. If it's meant to be read as an analogy - and this is what it seems to ask - it actually doesn't throw any but the most general of illuminations over our darkly flickering modern world.

The notion of terror as a hydra which grows two heads each time one is slashed off is one I can get, sure. But that's a very minor motif. A reference to germ warfare rebounding on those who use it is fine - but as a love philtre - even a revengeful love philtre - it's beginning to stretch even my credulity. The idea of the war hero-turned-criminal, spurned and betrayed by those who initially supported him, is perhaps more interesting - but the public politics of this durable theme is better pursued in Shakespeare's Coriolanus. Crimp's main point is to set the play in Amelia's bedroom, looking to sexual politics as a metaphor for warfare. In doing so, whether he intends to or not, he literally domesticates the politics of the War on Terror.

It's not as if this idea hasn't been explored before, and brilliantly: the connections between war and sexuality were assayed with damning force by Sarah Kane, most notably in her play Blasted. What Kane has, and Crimp lacks, is a heightened sexual anger, and the ability to express it. This difference is perhaps best discussed by looking at the character of Laela, the General's African mistress whom he has sent to Amelia to care for until his return.

Laela is all Otherness, knowingly exploiting her sexuality as material leverage. Her violent capture, despite her initial refusal to speak, seems to disturb her surprisingly little: she is a willing accomplice in her own subjugation. Her main concern is to be "nice" to the General so he will buy her the dresses she wants. Perhaps this is an ironic portrayal of the Stockholm Syndrome, or perhaps this is Crimp's commentary on corrupt regimes complicit with the War on Terror; but to my mind it backfires badly. If Laela is meant to symbolise "Africa", or any nation ravaged by the West's "diplomacy by other means", it's a portrayal full of the traditional Imperialist cliches: Africa is amoral, grasping, childlike, inscrutable, and willingly connives in its own rape.

In the original tragedy, the captured princess Iole is not from a distant land, but from a neighboring province of Greece. Her grief and shock at her abduction by Herakles is conveyed with poignancy and dignity by her total refusal to speak: her muteness holds all her protest. The transformation of this character into Laela matches the mutation of the character of Deianeira - queenly, distracted and tough - into the egocentric narcissism of Amelia.

The metaphoric blur that results is partly because of a collision between the literal realities to which the play is referring and the poetic myth of the original tragedy. There's nothing wrong with keeping both aspects in play, but I never felt free to enter either reality: somehow, instead of highlighting each other, they cancelled each other out.

Cruel and Tender was originally produced (in English) at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, directed by Luc Bondy, who commissioned it. From what I have read, Bondy's production foregrounded the media portrayals of the "War on Terror" and the knickknacks of contemporary technology, and may have filled out some of the complexities and ambiguities signally lacking in the MTC version, directed here by Julian Meyrick.

And perhaps my doubts arise as much from Meyrick's rather one-dimensional and sometimes clunky production as from any shortcomings in the script itself. Amelia's cry that she is not a victim resonates especially uneasily. In this play, she is nothing but a victim, a bored and faithless trophy wife eating her heart out for her absent husband, and she suffers her fate in gratifyingly traditional ways.

In this production, which lacks any ironic distancing, the gesture towards the archetype of the "strong woman" remains only a gesture. “I could be mistaken for a victim,” cries a defiant Amelia, “and, that’s not a part I’m prepared to play!” This is not a feminist rallying cry, as it is played: like everyone else, Amelia is a victim. Her defiance is a luxury, the result of her privilege, which comes at a terrible and unacknowledged cost to others. This subtext is simply absent from Meyrick's production.

The performances themselves are never less than competent, but I feel that most of the cast has problems in pitching the differing registers of the text as it shifts from realism to mythic grandeur. Many of the more heightened passages or monologues are actually obscured by the music which rises, increasingly predictably, to signal another "poetic" bit. The stage comes alive late in the play when the General (Jacek Koman) finally appears, horribly disfigured by his disease. Koman, always a reliably skilled and committed actor, is the only one who really handles Crimp's challenging shifts in linguistic register.

The design - basically a naturalistic bedroom of hotel-style blandness and luxury - is unsuited to the Fairfax Studio, where the audience sits diagonally on two sides of the stage. Like Luc Bondy's original production, the design of which was more abstract and clinical, it features a reflective window back stage. Behind the darkened glass, lighted figures can suddenly appear and vanish. It's an interesting device; but on a stage that is not a proscenium arch its effects are obscured from those who aren't watching it front on - which includes at least a third of the Fairfax audience.

In short, Cruel and Tender strikes me as a fair bit of sound and fury signifying, when you really examine it, surprisingly little. On the other hand, this is the latest in a number of recent productions which confront the important issues of our times and, if nothing else, it places theatre squarely in the charged social arena where it belongs.

Melbourne Theatre Company

Phaedra's Love by Sarah Kane, directed by Julie Waddington, design Julie Waddington and Luke Hails, sound by Nicholas Albanis. With Ben Noble, Georgina Capper, Fabienne Parr, Peter Roberts, Nick Austin, Pablo Calero, Alison Boyce, Jacinta Perry and Keira Lyons. Abstract Chaos with Instorage at the Store Room, until November 21.

Sarah Kane is the most exciting British playwright to emerge in the past decade. Her work was long overshadowed by the tabloid frenzy sparked by the 1995 production of her first play, Blasted, notoriously greeted as the product of a "sick" mind by a succession of rabidly foaming reviewers. The Daily Mail's Jack Tinker memorably labelled it a "disgusting feast of filth".

In common with many English-language writers treated without honour in their own countries (Samuel Beckett, Edward Bond, Howard Barker), European theatre was quick to recognise Kane's significance and welcomed Blasted as one of the most important plays of the 1990s. Critical opinion in Britain began to turn in 1998 with the premiere of Crave, but her suicide the following year made her the poete maudite of her generation. After her suicide, Kane's plays - like Sylvia Plath's poetry, and to their equal detriment - were mostly read as autobiographical expressions which foreshadowed her untimely death. As much as the claim that she wrote to shock for shock's sake, this romanticised notion obscured her uncompromising theatrical innovation.

In Australia, despite her steadily growing international reputation, Kane's work is still the province of the "fringe". She has been staged by theatres like Brisbane's La Boite and Sydney's New Theatre or the Stables, or by small independent theatre companies in Melbourne. I mean no disrespect to independent companies when I say that it's a shameful reflection on Australian theatre that one of the most important contemporary playwrights in the English language is unable to get a gig on a major stage.

Kane was one of a post-Thatcher generation of playwrights which emerged in the 1990s and challenged the pedagogic "theatre of journalism" exemplified most notably by David Hare. Many of them looked to playwrights like Caryl Churchill and Martin Crimp, or to Howard Barker's "theatre of catastrophe", as animating inspirations. As Kane's work evolved, her plays successively attacked the notion of theatrical naturalism in a distinctively visceral way. The revulsion and shock her plays invoke is never gratuitous, but is intended to provoke a re-evaluation of reality.

Although these playwrights were called the Nihilists or the New Brutalists, Kane's vision is far from nihilistic. It exposes a moral universe in which, as Hamlet says, "there is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so", and searches uncompromisingly for an ethics which can survive the violence of our contemporary world. But even 4:48 Psychosis, her final, excoriatingly beautiful masterpiece, finishes with a fragmentary but stubborn hope that should not be dimmed by her subsequent suicide.

Abstract Chaos' production of Kane's second play, Phaedra's Love, is an uncertain rendering of Kane's work, but worth seeing nevertheless. The night begins promisingly, but by the end has fallen off the unforgiving tightrope that Kane sets up with such deceptively simple assurance. It exemplifies the kind of difficulties - lack of resources, lack of time - faced by independent theatre productions. I should add that some of its problems may resolve as the season progresses.

Phaedra's Love is Kane's take on Seneca's and Euripides' tragedies Hippolytus, which tell the legend of Phaedra, the wife of Theseus. She is cursed by Aphrodite and falls desperately in love with her stepson, the beautiful and chaste youth Hippolytus, with catastrophic results. It is most famously adapted by Racine in his play Phaedre, which is written in what are allegedly (I have to take George Steiner's word for it) sublimely beautiful alexandrines.

Kane's take couldn't be more iconoclastic, although it still has traces of the naturalism which she afterwards abandoned altogether. Phaedra's Love is the most darkly funny of her plays and is also the first which explores the nature of love, a theme that became the major obsession of the later work. Here she perverts Phaedra's tragedy to create what is at once a chilling vision of the nature of obsessive love, and a strange liberation from despair.

In Phaedra's Love, Hippolytus (Ben Noble) is very far from being the chaste and beautiful youth of the original story. He is physically and emotionally repugnant, seen in the opening scene watching tv while wanking into a sock. (He checks that he hasn't blown his nose in it first). Phaedra's (Georgina Capper) fatal passion for him is therefore inscrutable and terrifying; when she declares her love, in a scene of skin-crawling humiliation, she performs oral sex on him while he watches television and snacks indifferently from a bag of lollies.

Yet in his monstrous boredom, his disgust with the falsity of everything that surrounds him, Hippolytus is also a curiously attractive character. Behind his joylessness and refusal of any human contact lies a desire for absolute honesty, a ruthless integrity which will have no truck with a world that disgusts him. The only time he shows anything like wonder is after he hears of Phaedra's suicide: "She really did love me... Bless her." And it becomes clear that Phaedra's accusation of rape against him is not the act of revenge that it appears to be, but a gift: the orgy of violence which follows is, at last, a real moment, in which there is no trace of human deceit. Hence his final words: "If there could have been more moments like this."

Phaedra's suicide is the logical result of the fire which has so consumed her, her abnegation the utter loss of self which is, as Kane perceived, tragically attracted to its opposite, the self that will compromise nothing. The gravity exerted by these extremes detroys everything around them - Phaedra's daughter Strophe (Fabianne Parr) is raped and murdered by Theseus (Peter Roberts) in the final carnage. But Kane's humour here is wicked: the murders of the Royal family are represented as a barbecue, with Hippolytus' genitals becoming a gruesome sausage.

Kane's grand guignol violence contains a serious critique, of classical theatre as much as of the nature of human love and the dilemma of the self. It's in eight tautly written scenes, which move rapidly to its horrifying and obscenely funny conclusion. Unfortunately, Julie Waddington's direction seldom matches the icy clarity of the text, so nothing is ever quite in focus.

Stylised acting at the pitch this play demands requires a depth of polish that the standard four weeks' rehearsal simply cannot achieve with any certainty. Georgina Capper's performance as Phaedra is the most successful in negotiating the challenges of the play's stylistic formality, and has some genuinely thrilling moments. Ben Noble's Hippolytus achieves his character's grossness, but falters at the extremity of his despair and so cannot reveal his perverse nobility. I had the feeling that often the other performances were hesitant or even, at times, without conviction. This means that the final scene has all the faults of stage violence when it doesn't work: despite the liberal application of tomato sauce it merely looks fake, and the audience laughs for the wrong reasons.

I thought the set design a major problem in this production. Admittedly, Kane wrote with a fine disregard for the difficulties of designers: at one point Phaedra's body is meant to be set on fire, which defeated the ingenuity of this production team. At times, however, the set literally gets in the way of seeing the action, and the pace is hindered by cumbersome moveable blocks which are rearranged between scenes. The set changes impede the flow of the tragedy, stilting its emotional movement so it achieves neither apotheoses of horror nor comedy. Despite these reservations, it's a rare chance to see - if through a glass darkly - a fascinating work by a major contemporary dramatist.

Links
The Store Room
Sarah Kane