Watching Thomas Ostermeier's production of Hedda Gabler - the first of his works I've seen - was unexpectedly fascinating. Through directors such as Benedict Andrews, a stablemate of Ostermeier's at Berlin's Schaubühne, the aesthetic of Ostermeier and his peers has had a profound influence on contemporary Australian theatre. So much of the design language here - architectural spaces defined by mirrors and windows, revolves, projections, pop references - is immediately familiar. I felt as if I were looking through the wrong end of a telescope: in the face of what's followed Ostermeier, Hedda Gabler, which premiered in 2005, feels like a museum piece.


What's immediately striking is its deliberate affectlessness. This is a production which strikes a note of cool anomie, creating a surface elegance that expresses a monumental sense of boredom. The play has been updated, in a light adaptation by Marius von Mayenburg, to contemporary times. As is usual with such adaptations, violence has been done along the way: here Ibsen's play becomes a scathing miniature, a portrait of an emotionally numbed, intellectually trivial bourgeoisie. The problem, as always in contemporary adaptations of Ibsen, is how to make the social imprisonment of his feminine characters believable now. Here the solution is to make Hedda and her peers improbably shallow and stupid. Hedda's destructive actions become endowed with a vacuum of un-meaning: her twisted rebellion against the suffocation of her life becomes the moue of a spoilt child.

At this point, I started wondering if the theatre itself was as cynical as the actions of the characters it portrays. Which is to say, there's something too easy in this act of épater le bourgeoisie: nothing is at emotional risk, and so nothing matters. Compared with other recent Ibsen adaptations - Simon Stone's devastating Belvoir St production of The Wild Duck, for instance, or Daniel Schlusser's recent The Dollhouse - it felt like a one-dimensional experience: there was none of the textual radicality of those two very different productions, and little ambiguity of meaning. I admired the consistency, the almost bloody-minded formalism, of Ostermeier's approach, but coldly: and in the end, I left untouched.

Mayenburg's adaptation follows the play closely: the maid is cut from the character list, but otherwise all the characters and actions remain, albeit slightly updated (for example, the manuscript Hedda burns is changed to a laptop that she hammers to bits). The interpretation here is in the production, beginning with Jan Pappelbaum's design, an evocation of a sleek modernist house with walls of windows and polished concrete. It's set on a revolve and becomes the shifting planes for various between-scene projections. Above the set is a huge mirror, which gives us a voyeur's eye view of the actors when they move off-stage.

The performances are heavily naturalistic, with all the action set around the designer settee or on the verandah. This naturalism clashes with a stylised melodrama that attends the play's climactic moments. There is little sense - except in a couple of moments in Kay Bartholomäus Schulze's performance of the unstable Løvborg - of emotional pressure building under repression: most instances of emotional behaviour are play-acting, as studiedly conscious as Hedda's (Katharina Schüttler) feline restlessness. I don't know whether it's relevant that Schulze reminded me insistently of Julian Assange, but that association might have thrown a different kind of bomb into the action.

Hedda's motivations become almost an abstraction of the Pinteresque: she is solely interested in gaining power over others, and when she finds herself at the wrong end of the machinery, she tops herself. There is little sense of her initial powerlessness to illuminate this behaviour, and almost none of her radical longing for a more glorious, more beautiful world than the one in which she finds herself. Ibsen's Hedda has always been selfish, but has seldom been more trivial.

When the play steps into unreality - especially in its final moments, when Hedda's suicide prompts a ripple of dismissive laughter and shrugged shoulders from her husband and friends - it permits only cerebral response. Hedda and the gang are symbols merely, flattened-out representations of the conscious heartlessness of the middle classes, absorbed in their trivial pursuits as they turn their faces from the blood on the walls.

This insight may contain a general (and deeply angered) truth, but in the particular truths with which theatre deals it lacks any kind of emotional logic. I found it increasingly impossible to believe in people so determinedly shallow. We conclude that all these characters who we've been watching for the past two hours are psychopaths with empathy by-passes, and ... so? As audience members, no matter how selfishly middle class we might be, we all know that we are empathetic creatures, unlike those we've been watching on stage. Why else would we be here, elite beings, enjoying the fruits of culture? So what does this have to do with us?



Pan Pan's good-humoured production of The Rehearsal, Playing the Dane induced similar thoughts, although this production by no means seeks the cool affectlessness of Hedda Gabler. It too transforms a tragedy into a comedy, this time by opening up, Ayckbourn-style, the machinations behind the scenes.

The audience walks into a stage dressed as a rehearsal space, with the actors piled on a big table, like the heaps of corpses that finish most of Shakespeare's tragedies. Local academic Dr Sue Tweg stands forward and delivers a short lecture on Hamlet, one of the most performed of Shakespeare's plays.

The lecture, by Amanda Piesse, senior lecturer at Trinity College Dublin, is about the instability and polysemity of Shakespeare's texts, and introduces the premises of the work of theatre we're about to see. Tweg holds a handsome Great Dane, who tugged her impatiently as she mentioned instability, creating one of several ripples of serendipity that illuminate the performance, before finishing with an ear-rakingly awful rendition of Greensleeves on a recorder.

The instability of interpretation and role is then reinforced by the "director" arranging a reading of a scene from Hamlet, assigning the roles to the most improbable actors: the guy who's obviously Polonius (Daniel Reardon) plays Hamlet, and so on. At this point an audience member is called up on stage to read one of the smaller parts.

We then watch as three actors audition for the role of Hamlet before a table of people which includes the Melbourne Theatre Company's own casting director, Kylie McCormack. Each actor brings his own story and own twist on the role, and these are hugely entertaining comic pieces. They also permit, almost by-the-bye, a look at the different facets of a couple of scenes, as they are repeated by different actors. The upshot is that the audience is invited on stage, to choose which of the three auditionees ought to play Hamlet in the second half of the show.

What follows is a dramaturgically slashed version of the play, watched from backstage by the shadowy production crew. The connections between Hamlet's existential dilemmas and Beckett's Endgame - signalled in the first half by a short performance during an audition of a speech by Hamm - are here hammered (haha) home by a proliferation of dustbins arranged around the set. The action revolves around the players - here performed by drama students in school uniform from Trinity Grammar School - the grave scene, Ophelia's mad scene and the massacre at the end of the play. The show is rounded off with a brief conclusion from the academic.

It all passes pleasantly enough, but feels curiously unsatisfying. It's actually hard to see how this illuminates Hamlet beyond the points made in the introduction: Shakespeare's reflexive games with performance, identity and play; the ambiguities of his meanings; its essentially performative nature as a text. It did feel as if the lecture was a kind of safety net, ensuring that the audience "got" it, and lifting the risk from the rest of the production. And it seemed to me that the meanings given us enclosed possibility, rather than opening it through performance. There are times when it seems - deliberately, I'm sure - like a parody of bad avant garde performance: experiment without the danger of taking it too seriously. The dog provided some moments of anarchic interruption, as animals do, but I still wasn't convinced that it was more than a bad pun.

What I missed was more of the emotional realism Judith Roddy brings to the role of Ophelia, so the production might shift more radically between the realities it represents - rather as happens, say, in Ganesh and the Third Reich. (As a side note: on the strength of his performance as a Player and the Queen, watch out for Trinity Grammar student Tim Dennett.) There are lots of in-jokes for theatre nerds here, lots of audience-friendly invitation, but not, for all the activity around it, a lot of Shakespeare. I'm all for blowing up the classics: but I want the resulting fragments to add up to more than the sum of their parts.

Pictures: top: Katharina Schüttler as Hedda Gabler; below, Conor Madden as a possible Hamlet in The Rehearsal, Playing the Dane.

Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen, directed by Thomas Ostermeier. Set design by Jan Pappelbaum, costumes by Nina Wetzel, music by Malte Beckenbach, dramaturgy by Marius von Mayenburg, video by Sebastien Dupouey, lighting Erich Schneider. With Annedore Bauer, Wolfgang Bauer, Lars Eidinger, Kay Schulze, Katharina Schüttler and Lore Stefanek. Schaubühne Berlin and Melbourne Festival, Arts Centre Playhouse, until October 23.

The Rehearsal, Playing the Dane, by William Shakespeare, directed by Gavin Quinn. Designer Aedín Cosgrove, costumes by Sarah Bacon, dramaturge Simon Doyle. With Andrew Bennett, Derrick Devine, Conor Madden, Bashir Moukarzel, Gina Moxley, Daniel Reardon, Judith Roddy. Also Dr Sue Tweg, the Venerable Eden-Elizabeth Nicholls and students from Trinity Grammar School, Kew. Pan Pan Theatre, Melbourne Festival. Merlyn Theatre, Malthouse until October 22.

NB: This review contains spoilers

"Shakespeare," says Jan Kott, "is truer than life. One can play him only literally." It might seem counter-intuitive to some, perhaps, that Kott goes on to say that to play Shakespeare naturalistically is to butcher his plays. Shakespeare's world is not a mirror held up to mundane life, so much as an intensifier of its significant moments. The spectacle magnifies and absorbs reality, making it "truer". Kott is clearly not speaking of factual accuracy. It seems that to Kott, who demonstrates here a profound understanding of poetic, "literal" and "poetic" are pretty much synonyms.

Bell Shakespeare's production of Julius Caesar is poetic in this sense. Peter Evans examines the literal truth of the play, and forges a contemporary language in which to make it plain. The result is a lucid, profoundly exciting production that intelligently excavates a play for our political times. But first, some reflections on the politics of Shakespeare.

For Kott, Shakespeare was the artist non pareil of the Grand Mechanism of history, a tragic vision which Kott describes as a kind of metaphysical escalator peopled by the kings. "There are no bad kings, or good kings; kings are only kings," he says. As the kings claw their way to power, their actions reveal the contradiction between the world of action and the "moral order", a recognition that implicates their entire kingdoms. The kings step over the bloody heads of their predecessors to take their place at the top, only to be butchered in their turn. History is the amoral mechanism that turns good men to brutal and ruthless actions, and which deprives them of the choice to be otherwise. It is, as Kott says elsewhere, "the situation".

Betraying my intellectual crudity, I have never been sure whether the Grand Mechanism, a phrase so pregnant with portent and abstract agency, might not be more mundanely called "politics". At its most basic, politics (derived from the Greek for "citizens" or "city") is the means of making collective decisions. It is the complex mediation of power, the process of deciding who decides and who is at the mercy of decision.

Where Kott sees a monumental and crushing "reality", a world determined by a tragic mechanism called History, I see a web of intensely complex interactions through which power is produced, attacked and defended. The crux of this political reality is amplification: the kings are the productions, the amplifications, of countless actions, public and private, significant and insignificant, linguistic and military, historical and contemporary. This, however, may be merely a rephrasing for a latter time. The lack of choice that Kott describes as the condition of power remains the same, and the fulcrum of Shakespeare's historical tragedies is this recognition of powerlessness.

Two of Shakespeare's Roman plays - Coriolanus and Julius Caesar - reflect this more complex drama by explicitly bringing the state - the Roman Republic - into the purview of tragedy. As Kott says, the scene shifts from the staircase of kings to the arena of class struggle between patricians and plebians. In these plays, he says, history ceases to be a demonic history of the royal. "It is," he says, "only ironic and tragic". Certainly, Julius Caesar, in its language and dramaturgy as much as in its political insight, remains a startlingly modern play.

As Shakespeare can demonstrate, theatre is a powerful simulacrum of the political. Indeed, politics is often pejoratively described as "theatre", mostly by people with little interest in theatre itself: if politics is mere "theatre", then it is considered to be with without meaning, a dumbshow of empty gesture that has nothing to do with "reality". There is, however, a profound relationship between politics and theatre: theatre, as a conscious simulacrum of reality, mimics how politics itself is a show of simulacra, a series of simulations. Politics is a primary maker of simulations that stand in for reality, claiming to be the thing itself, and which at last infect the real with their own reality. Another is art.

The tension in politics is not between the authentic thing and its forgery, so much as between warring simulacra, those that have invaded the previous reality and themselves become "real", and those which have yet to realise their reality. (As an aside, I invite you to examine the close etymological relationship between the word "real" and "royal". Or that the real was once a unit of Spanish currency. Facing "reality" is not as straightforward as it might seem.)

There is, in this vision, no authentic "real", only a series of simulacra that stretch back through history, producing the reality that will in turn be usurped by the next simulation. In other words, it's elephants all the way down. If you follow this thought, it becomes clear that theatre is as real as anything that occurs in Parliament. It's certainly much truer.


*

So, to Bell Shakespeare's production of Shakespeare's political tragedy, Julius Ceasar. It's one of his shorter plays, based on Plutarch's account of the conspiracy to assassinate Julius Caesar (Alex Menglet), at this time Emperor of Rome in everything but name, by a cabal of plotters led by Cassius (Kate Mulvany) and Brutus (Colin Moody). The action moves swiftly and cleanly to its crisis - the murder of Caesar in the Capitol - and its aftermath, when the plotters lose their battle for power in Rome, and fall on their own swords.

Despite its title, the play is the tragedy of Brutus, the honourable man whose ideals lead him to murder. At issue is the Republic, the state run by citizens (defined as people who were not slaves, or poor, or women). Most of the conspirators, caviling against Caesar's absolute authority, have baser reasons for seeking to murder the proto-Emperor, but Brutus is a true believer, and his motives, as he explains again and again, are disinterested. Caesar must die because he threatens the ideal of Rome, because in his ambition he seeks an Imperial tyranny in which his word is law. The irony is that the blood shed in the Capitol is as fatal to the Republic as Caesar's ambition.

The other major actors in the tragedy are the people of Rome, the plebians whose support is crucial to Republic and tyrant alike. Peter Evans's elegant production approaches the play as both a private and a public tragedy: Brutus's destruction parallels the destruction of free Rome. It begins with the people celebrating Caesar's return after his defeat of Pompey, the first death blow to the Republic, and ends with Brutus alone in the dark, demanding of the audience that someone hold his sword so he might run on it and kill himself.

Evans and his co-dramaturg Kate Mulvany capitalise on the modernity of Shakespeare's language to make a text that moves swiftly and fluidly across the space. Most cuts are in the final acts: the battles are here reported by Portia's ghost speaking into a microphone, and there are no eulogies for Brutus in the final moments: he is left on the brink of death, facing the destruction of all his hopes. It makes a brutal vision.

As in the "real" world, politics in Rome consists of two main means of persuasion: force of arms, and language. The play turns on two speeches made at Caesar's funeral: the first by Brutus, a bluff honourable man who believes in decency and justice, and the next by Mark Antony (Daniel Frederiksen), Caesar's off-sider, whom Brutus's decency has spared against the pragmatic advice of Cassius. Antony understands the art of manipulation far more profoundly than Brutus, who is the kind of man of thinks a spade is a bloody shovel.

Antony's speech is a masterly work of oratory, in which he sedulously keeps to the letter of Brutus's stipulation that he "shall not in your funeral speech blame us". He says only that the conspirators were "honourable men", but in each repetition of the phrase, it becomes weighted with a dreadful irony, until he might as well have proclaimed them bloody murderers to the crowd. The people, who cheer Brutus one moment as a hero, now turn against the conspirators; and from that moment all hope for the Republic is lost.

*

Here we are watching something fascinating: the beginnings of a performance language. If it doesn't quite feel fully developed, it is already a powerful tool. You can see the influence of constructivist theatre in the disciplined physicality of the actors, especially in the choreography as they build a high scaffolding. But a strong and exciting sense of physical theatre imbues the details of the performances, in how they move and relate in space, in their observation of the edges of the stage (when each actor exits, he or she pauses briefly just before they step off). There are two microphones, which are used for private asides or for the voices of the public, and also as elements of Kelly Ryall's sparely brilliant sound design: actors strike the mics or breathe into them to make an earsplitting crowd noise.

There are extremely effective formal gestures as well: the actors use no props, and when Cassius shows his sword, Mulvany simply extends her hand. The murder of Caesar is performed by each actor striking him with their hands, and the violence is represented by white powder, which puffs out and floats in the light (a steal from Benedict Andrews's The War of the Roses, here given a different spin).

Alex Menglet as Caesar is the only actor who doesn't observe these formalities: as Caesar does, he breaks all the rules. His Caesar is huge: generously brutal, charismatic and careless. Moody's Brutus is his dark contrast, bowed by the weight of his conscience, unbending and breaking. As it should be, because it plays out the central meaning of the play, this is a powerful performance: Moody is as good as I have seen him in this role. We get a man in whom all passion is fiercely repressed, only to explode in rage and despair.

Kate Mulvany as Cassius is fluidity against Moody's implacability, all supple determination. It's a fascinating decision to cast her in this role, and it wiggles open the play's politics: she is left ambiguously gendered, the male nouns left unchanged, the pronouns all feminised. (Despite its contemporary relevance, the role recalls Margaret Thatcher rather than Julia Gillard.) The fight between the brothers, in which Brutus rebukes Cassius for taking bribes and betraying the ideals of the Republic, is a highlight, hair-raisingly and viciously passionate. In the supporting roles, Daniel Frederiksen's Mark Antony is in comparison disappointingly monotonal; the language carries him, rather than the other way around. I was especially taken by Katie-Jean Harding as Portia: she found a musical extremity in the language that reminded me a little of Melita Jurisic.

*

The Republic is represented in Anna Cordingley's design by a classical pillar that reaches up to the ceiling, surrounded by workman's railings. In the beginning, it is already a neglected ruin, with weeds growing around it. This reminder of old Rome glowers over the set, which is a performance square marked out by chairs and surrounded by arc lamps that throw a low, yellowish light (design by Paul Jackson) over the action. After Caesar's murder, the column is splashed with blood. 

Just before Antony's speech, the performers begin to construct a scaffolding. As the power struggle rages between the conspirators and the Triumvirate that eventually wins Imperial power, the scaffolding rises until it is the height of the column. In the final moments of the play, screens are let down down over the scaffolding. On them is drawn an anaemic, life-size sketch of the column that conceals the column itself. The simulacrum of the Republic is complete, and now the Empire can begin. It's as devastatingly eloquent an image of what has happened to western democracy as I have seen.

Disclaimer: I am under commission for a music theatre work with Bell Shakespeare's Mind's Eye.

Picture: Colin Moody and Kate Mulvany in Julius Caesar. Photo: Joe Sabljak

Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare, directed by Peter Evans. Designed by Anna Cordingley, lighting design by Paul Jackson, composer Kelly Ryall. With Keith Agius, Rebecca Bower, Daniel Frederiksen, Benedict Hardie, Katie-Jean Harding, Alex Menglet, Colin Moody, Kate Mulvany, Gareth Reeves and James Wardlaw. Bell Shakespeare at the Fairfax Studio, Victorian Arts Centre, until September 17. Opens Sydney Opera House October 25. National tour dates at Bell Shakespeare.

Back in another age, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was a copygirl in the Finance section of that long-gone afternoon daily the Melbourne Herald, I found myself unexpectedly fascinated by the captains of industry. In another life, I might have become a finance reporter. The Alan Bonds, Rupert Murdochs and Robert Holmes à Courts of that time, ruthless accumulators of wealth, power and privilege, were, I realised, our equivalents of the princes of the Renaissance.

Since then, we've entered an age of increasingly volatile hyper-capitalism in which corporate power has swollen monstrously to become the major global influence, eclipsing national governments in its power and reach. Many corporations have bigger revenues than entire countries: the giant US corporation Wal-Mart, for instance, has revenues equivalent to the GDP of New Zealand. And this has had a catastrophic influence on our politics (the News International meltdown in Britain is only one, obvious example: remember Tony Blair and Britain's defence industry?) and even more sobering implications for the future of the planet.


It's this background that makes Simon Phillips's corporate interpretations of Shakespeare so compellingly lucid. As the great critic Jan Kott elaborated, Shakespeare is the theatrical chronicler non pareil of the revolutions of power: and Phillips correctly locates contemporary power in the boardrooms and designer mansions of the filthy rich. His superb Richard III pulled on familiar techniques of propaganda and media spin, the political theatre of appearance, to generate a portrait of the deceptive glamour of tyranny. And now, with Ewen Leslie again in the leading role, he's turned his attention to one of the great tragedies.

Directed and performed with a brutal clarity, this production of Hamlet is a riveting evolution from Richard III. It gleams with Phillips's theatrical deftness, which is reflected in the sardonic wit of the prince; you can be sure that Shakespeare's comedy is well-buffed here. As in Richard III, but with more art, Phillips has ingeniously folded technology - mobile phones, iPods, laptops - into the action, so that the anachronisms create a stage language that places us simultaneously in the present and Shakespeare's past. His solution to the fight-scene in the final act is in fact a blindingly obvious stroke of genius.

But crucially, for all its cleverness, this production doesn't flinch from the darker aspects of the play. The world of the Danish court, with its murderous competitiveness, deception and surveillance, is brought unsettlingly into the present. Although the details of war are mostly excised, we are always conscious that it stirs in the shadows. This production brings to the fore Shakespeare's unillusioned examination of the brutality of power, and the foul dust floating in the wake of its dreams.

Hamlet is arguably the ur-play of modernity: as countless critics have said, in the figure of Hamlet, feudal notions of power and honour clash with modern introspection and self-consciousness. Many contemporary productions dispense, as Phillips has here, with the role of Fortinbras, making it a effectively a family drama, and also, not incidentally, removing the hopeful horizon of a return to order: the play finishes with the corpses.

One of the best Hamlets I've seen is Richard Pyros, in an astounding 2004 production performed in a shopfront in Northcote: he played Hamlet, as I said at the time, as a contemporary romantic, "at once sensuous and full of loathing, raging against the mortal trappings of his flesh", in the claustrophobic politics of a toxic family. In Phillips's Hamlet, by contrast, we are always aware of money and power: the prince is a scion of a toxic house, a son usurped of his inheritance.

Pyros's Hamlet, with Horatio as his hand-puppet, was mad from the beginning, a man locked in an existential crisis. Leslie's is a rational prince, at first playing at madness and at different points plunged into its outreaches, without ever quite succumbing to its escape. His madness is all act, and contrasts with the heartbreakingly real breakdown of Ophelia (Eryn Jean Norvill), one of the high points of this production. This interpretation makes the final conflict between Laertes (Tim Ross) and Hamlet, and Laertes's sudden doubt of his revenge, deeply moving, because Hamlet is unambiguously in his right mind; and it gives weight and meaning to Horatio's (Grant Cartwright) loyalty. Power here is an abstraction, like capital itself, which infects every relationship with fatal ambiguities: the single exception is Hamlet's friendship with Horatio.

If you like, this is an anti-Romantic Hamlet, a man broken by the impotence of his rationality, rather than by his excessive sensibility. He becomes a reflection of contemporary powerlessness, intelligently aware of what is rotten in the state of Denmark, and yet unable to act against it. The machineries of power, like those of tragedy, have their own force and logic, so even those who think they control it, as Claudius does, become its victim. It's impossible to watch this production and not think of Rupert Murdoch.

Shaun Gurton's set, a revolving maze of glass walls, is extraordinary: its abstract lines recall Benedict Andrews's obsession with windows and reflections, and with Nick Schlieper's lighting, permits a continuous shifting of perspective, with backlit glimpses behind the walls of other characters, or a sense of endless corridors that open into public or private spaces. The action moves swiftly from the sumptuous interiors of the rich to desolate vignettes showing the shabbiness or waste behind the luxury: Hamlet, for example, interrogates the ghost of his father (Robert Menzies) in a pile of rubbish, next to an overturned wheelie bin.

My one real criticism of the production is the sound design: there's clever use of amplification, necessary when the scenes are behind walls, but the blaring pop music was overdone, without adding anything much, and there were those creeping strings climbing up behind the scenes to indicate a Significant Moment which can be a bit of a curse in MTC shows.

As with Richard III, its success ultimately comes down to the performances of a strong cast. Leslie's Hamlet is an intelligently modulated performance: in the first half, his performance seemed oddly constrained to me, but after interval the constraint morphed into a finely judged restraint, in which passion and extremity throb beneath an increasingly distrait surface, as Hamlet begins to realise his true impotence against the powers that entrap him. Norvill's fractured Ophelia, clutching her box of precious objects, is the revelation of this show: Ophelia is not a big role, but it is critical, and very easy to get embarrassingly wrong. Norvill gives us not the melodrama of madness, but its tragic, mundane truth.

Grant Cartwright is an appealing Horatio: his friendship with Hamlet becomes perhaps the pivotal relationship in the play, the one true element in a world of masks and deception. Robert Menzies is at his actorly best as the Player King and is wholly compelling as the Ghost, bringing shades of Beckett to this desolate soul condemned to Purgatory. John Adams is a convincing Claudius and Garry MacDonald is a classically comic Polonius, with an uneasy edge to his pompous servility: as the eager servant of its corrupt power, he is the character who makes us most uncomfortably aware of the surveillance of the court.


I felt Pamela Rabe was somewhat underused as Gertrude, although her performance is first class as far as it goes. Stern, oddly vulnerable and sensuous, Rabe brings the passion for her son that uneasily underlies the role, although like everyone else she deceives him. Like Ophelia, Gertrude is an object of power, not a subject of it, and this aspect is under-explored. It makes Gertrude strangely static in the second half: she is trapped and damaged by her role, but it has little effect on her.

For all that, this is an excellent main stage production of Hamlet and, in its own way, surprisingly radical. It's a stark vision of the impersonal amorality and destructiveness of power that makes an intense and swift three hours in the theatre. I believe the show is sold out: if you don't have tickets, you'll have to pray that the MTC extends the season.

Pictures: Top: Ewen Leslie (Hamlet) and Robert Menzies (the Ghost); bottom, Leslie and Pamela Rabe. Photos: Jeff Busby

Hamlet, by William Shakespeare, directed by Simon Phillips. Set by Shaun Gurton, costumes by Esther Marie Hayes, lighting design by Nick Schlieper, composer Ian McDonald, choreography by Andrew Hallsworth. With John Adam, Ian Bliss, Jamieson Caldwell, Grant Cartwright, Travis Cotton, Ewen Leslie, Garry McDonald, Robert Menzies, Tony Nikolakopoulos, Eryn Jean Norvill, Pamela Rabe, Tim Ross, Brian Vriends and Lachlan Woods. Sumner Theatre, Melbourne Theatre Company, until August 31.

I'm a sucker for Shakespeare's comedies. They reveal his profound knowledge of the stage, and his pleasure in its vulgar tricks and conventions gives us some of the most sublimely funny scenes ever written. In Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare steals freely from a bunch of popular contemporary sources, from Luigi Pasaquaglio's Il Fedele to Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, in which a virtuous woman becomes the victim of vicious intrigue. Transposing the story from tragedy to comedy through the language of courtly wit, he invents two of his most charming lovers, Benedick and Beatrice.


It's a deeply enjoyable play, in which Shakespeare modulates his comedic satire with scenes of real feeling. And John Bell's production for Bell Shakespeare, now on at the Arts Centre, uses his own profound knowledge of stage business to burnish its pleasures to a deep lustre. This is the best production of Bell's that I've seen: exhilarating, vital and surely crafted, with nothing of the fustian.

Stephen Curtis's design sets the action in a quasi-fifties Messina, with full-circle skirts and army uniforms with red sashes. Here the concept runs seamlessly with the play, a fantasia that gives its fantasies life without intruding itself. The action takes place in a basketball court, an institutional setting wrested to other uses of pleasure, with lush Tintoretto-esque wall murals to lift it out of the literal. Alan John's music, performed live, springs organically out of the performances, heightening its sense of carnival. And in the play's tomb scene, a central turning point of death and rebirth, the music becomes ritual itself with a glorious a cappella drawn from male voice Corsican choirs.

Benedick and Beatrice are equals in intelligence and vivacity, sceptics whose condemnation of love arises from their distrust of its sentimental cliches. Their verbal fencing is, as their mischievous friends recognise when they decide to trick the two into marrying each other, the showiest of courtships. They keep each other "waking and in continuall exercise", each pushing the other to more dazzling feats of wit. As in almost every Georgette Heyer romance, all that needs to occur is for each partner to recognise this as attraction, rather than as hostility: what occurs through the play is not a transformation of feeling, but an understanding of it.

This love story runs parallel with the fortunes of Hero (Alexandra Fisher) and Claudio (Sean Hawkins). When Hero is maliciously framed as unfaithful, Claudio mercilessly shames and abandons her in the midst of their wedding. Here, despite his lack of faith in his beloved, he is not portrayed as merely shallow; the insecurity of his passion drives him to a display of cruel machismo. Both couples must negotiate the deception and tricks of others to find the truth of their feeling through the miasma of appearance.

The key is the depth of its casting: every performance is worth the watching. Toby Schmitz and Blazey Best as Benedick and Beatrice create true electric play, the enlivening contrast to the more conventionally drawn lovers of Hero and Claudio. The whole is rich with comic invention: notably Max Gillies's Dogberry, the malapropic watchman, and Sean O'Shea's Don John, a kind of evil Mr Bean in a Mafia suit, the asocial wrench in this otherwise genial machine of sociality. The darker themes of war and malice are threaded lightly, present as shade in a complex comedic texture. A delight.

*

Chris Summers's Crossed was the second of two plays by this promising young writer to premiere within weeks of each other. It consists of five intersecting monologues, all revolving around the same traumatic event - the police shooting of "the smiley-faced boy" - which loosely recalls the fatal shooting of a 15 year old boy in Northcote in 2008. It's hard to imagine a better production, done in traverse in La Mama's Courthouse Theatre under the direction of Matt Scholten with a more than capable cast. And it shows that Summers has a sure gift for demotic speech, and an ability to create contradictory characters that lift out of stereotype into vital life.

There's a touch of the worthily sociological here, however, that the play doesn't quite escape, and I couldn't help feeling that the play trips over its own ambition. Crossed consists of two distinct parts: an interwoven narration that culminates in the climactic shooting, and an afterword in which each character adds a postscript to their experience. Aside from the final scene, which ends the play powerfully, most of the epilogue could have been cut without hurt: mostly the writing here gives an unnecessary sense of ends being tied up, and it certainly has the clunkiest lines.

The most compelling role is that of Lee (Ioan Roberts), the young gay man with a cyber-crush on the absent protagonist. The other characters sometimes fall into a sense of having been constructed rather than imagined. The rebellious Muslim teen, the aging, ill mother missing her son, the bright wog boy, the surfie nationalist, are all carefully - maybe too carefully - turned to avoid cliche. But maybe what I wondered about most was the tense of the writing: it can slide into a prosaic sense of text written firmly in the past tense, rather than unfolding in a remembered present. As a consequence, there are moments when the writing seems more description than gestus. These are marks of an early work: equally clear is that Summers is a writer to watch.

Picture: Toby Schmitz and Blazey Best as Benedick and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing.

Much Ado About Nothing, by William Shakespeare, directed by John Bell. Designed by Stephen Curtis, lighting design by Matt Scott, composer Alan John. With Toby Schmitz, Blazey Best, Max Gillies, Tony Llewellyn-Jones, Matthew Walker, Sean O'Shea, Sean Hawkins, Alexandra Fisher, Nathan Lovejoy, Robert Alexander, Arky Michael, Andrew Tighe, Megan O'Connell, Lizzie Schebesta and Tyran Parke. Bell Shakespeare @ the Playhouse, Victorian Arts Centre, until June 25.

Crossed, by Chris Summers, directed by Matt Scholten. Set and costume design by Kat Chan, lighting design by Lisa Mibus, music and sound design by Pete Goodwin. With Prag Bhatia, Matthew Candeland, Nicholas Linehan, Jenny Lovell and Ioan Roberts. Platform Youth Theatre, Appetite Arts and La Mama, Courthouse Theatre. Closed.

It begins, as all imagination does, in darkness and silence. A door opens at the back of the stage, and we hear footsteps; a single wavering torchlight lights a patch of colour here, an object there. In the middle of the space is a giant pile of clothes, maybe three metres high, thrown together hurriedly for some emergency, perhaps... Then other people stumble in, and begin to explore the space. They're clearly refugees of some kind, their faces black with smuts of ash. Someone finds a television, fiddles with the controls, turns it on, and as snatches of television news begins to buzz through the static, the frame begins to focus.


It's Black Saturday. The actors are people fleeing from the firestorms, waiting in a place of refuge for news, supplies, help. One actor finds a guitar and begins to strum some chords. Another, a young woman, listens to a news story about missing fire fighters, and breaks down. Someone she loves is missing... Meanwhile, an old man (Max Cullen) finds a book, and begins to read it out loud. It's the beginning of Twelfth Night. Someone else picks up another line... and gradually, out of the imagined reality of the bushfires, spirals another reality altogether: Shakespeare's comic fantasy, a gossamer nonsense of which the entire purpose is delight.

The young grief-stricken woman (Andrea Demetriades) becomes Viola, mourning her brother Sebastian, lost in a storm at sea. The other nameless refugees transform into characters from Twelfth Night - Kit Brookman becomes Olivia, the Duke Orsino (Elan Zavelsky, brilliantly doubling as Sir Andrew Aguecheek), Feste the clown (Max Cullen), Olivia (Kit Brookman), and the bluff Ben Wood as an unlikely but compelling Malvolio.

The real gift of Lee Lewis's Twelfth Night, which I recommend whole-heartedly, is the immediacy with which it demonstrates that theatre is an act of complicity between those who make and watch it. Half this production's charm and a great part of its hilarity emerges from its ad hoc theatrical wit: the actors use low-tech props made of cardboard or rags gleaned from op shops, inviting the audience to participate in their transparent manipulations. The laughter bubbles up through the cracks in the credible: the knowing adult and the open-mouthed child sit hand in hand, laughing at the stratagems, and at the same time entirely seduced by them.

The aim of this ingenious foolery is, as Prospero says, to please: but when it's as well done as it is here, the pleasure has an edge of profound poignancy. It's a quality that strikes me as especially actorly, and maybe most of all, in its doubled vision and fragile, ephemeral conceits, especially Shakespearean. Lewis's astounding cast of clowns - there are no weak links in this show - perform the set pieces sublimely. The deception of Malvolio, with his tormentors hiding in plain sight in absurd costumes made of cardboard boxes, is a highlight, and outrageously funny in how it pushes its own conventions to the point just before they break altogether.

The vulgar comedy, and its cruelty (the malice brought to bear against Malvolvio is cruel indeed) plays against some of Shakespeare's most beautiful musings on romantic love outside the sonnets. The poetry is, perhaps, underplayed; certainly, the romances between the various smitten lovers seem little more than occasions for gorgeous wordplay, rather than true feeling. But when Viola and Sebastian reunite, each having believed that the other was dead, it breaks your heart: here, the brother and sister make the true love story. And this brings the tale back to its first reality, the disaster of the bushfires, and the partings that haunted so many families. Beautifully done, and a must-see.

*

Mix Tape, part of Chunky Move's Next Move series, is Stephanie Lake's first full-length dance work. It's a very simple idea - Mix Tape uses fragments of recorded interviews and a straightforward mix tape sound track to explore the idea of romantic love: situating itself, as Lake frankly admits in the program, right in the middle of the cliche. The work has a deliberately domestic setting, with a bookshelf-cum-entertainment centre dominating the back of the stage, on which are various noise-making machines: a reel-to-reel tape, a turntable, a cd player. Each machine turns itself on and off as the soundtrack requires, and the work modulates between differing registers of feeling, from the comic to the sad to the desolate.

The four dancers - Sara Black, Rennie McDougall, Timothy Ohl and Jorijn Vriesendorp - perform with a coruscating energy that lights up Lake's intense choreography with an exuberance that only comes with youth. The movement oscillates between a kind of zombie-mode, where the dancers seem almost asleep or dazed, before an awakening into something wrenchingly violent, in which movement seems to ripple through the dancers's flesh and explode in a flash of kinetic energy from their arms and legs.

The erotic metaphor of a duet is foregrounded to the point where it becomes literal: dancers kiss, as if they are making love in front of us. And about half way through, I began to wonder why the duets were so rigorously heterosexual; the bodies are locked in their genders, locked in their sexes, locked in their roles, in ways that suggest romantic love is, as the ALP would have it of marriage, a matter between a man and a woman. It wouldn't have occurred to me if I had thought these were particular couples, but here they were representative, speaking generally about romantic love. Then I wondered if this question was part of the zombie-movement that plays darkly through the dance, whether, in fact, the heterosexism functioned as self-aware critique or frank oversight. I still can't decide.

In the same way, a couple of the more narrative songs - Bob Dylan's Shelter from the Storm, for instance - dominated the performance so strongly that I found myself above all listening to the lyrics. At these and other times, the dance seemed reduced to mere illustration, a literal representation or playing out of gesture, rather than a dynamic language in itself. Again, I couldn't tell if this was deliberate or not: if it is, it doesn't strike me as an especially fruitful tension. The peril of this whole conceit is of falling into the merely sentimental, the mere cliche, and I'm not sure that Lake wholly escapes it. These reservations aside, all of which are to do with the framing rather than the choreography, Mix Tape is absorbing and often very beautiful: and the dancing is sensational.

Photo: Max Cullen as Feste taunts Malvolio (in the box) in Bell Shakespeare's Twelfth Night

Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare, directed by Lee Lewis. Designed by Anna Tregloan, lighting design by Luiz Pampolha, music and sound by Paul Charlier and Steve Toulmin. With Max Cullen, Ben Wood, Andrea Demetriades, Kit Brookman, Brent Hill, Elan Zavelsky and Adam Booth. Bell Shakespeare, Victorian Arts Centre, until September 18. Touring regional Australia, Canberra and Sydney until November.

Mix Tape, directed and choreographed by Stephanie Lake. Lighting design by Benjamin Cisterne (Bluebottle), sound design, Luke Smiles, costume design by Harriet Oxley. With Sara Black, Rennie McDougall, Timothy Ohl and Jorijn Vriesendorp. Next Move, Chunky Move Studios, until September 11.

With All's Well That Ends Well, Troilus and Cressida and, sometimes, Hamlet, Shakespeare's Measure for Measure is most often characterised as one of his "problem plays". This is an anachronistic label, placing Measure for Measure in the context of an early 20th century theatre conditioned by the socially-conscious plays of Shaw and Ibsen. But that doesn't mean that it's not a problem.

It's perhaps Shakespeare's strangest play: intellectually intriguing but dramaturgically absurd. Over the centuries it's prompted a wide variety of critical responses. Samuel Johnson thought the comic bits "very natural and pleasing", while the tragic themes showed "more labour than elegance"; Samuel Taylor Coleridge thought the whole play darkly disturbing, at once "disgusting" and "horrible". While William Hazlitt thought it a marvellous demonstration of natural morality, other critics saw it as variously an allegory of Christian doctrine on mercy and atonement, or as an example of extreme Jacobean negation and cynicism.


All these contradictory assessments suggest a play of considerable complexity: and there's no doubt that Measure for Measure is an intricate beast. It's probably best understood as an exploration of tragicomedy, which at the beginning of the 17th century was a new form. More than tragedy twisted to happy ending, tragicomedy was envisioned as a blending of disparate elements, a dramaturgy driven by contrast that through its violent juxtapositions sought to demonstrate the via media, the way of moderation and humane reason that tempers the extremes of idealism or cynicism, and which finds the middle path between divine justice and human mercy.

It's easy to see why this deeply problematic text would have attracted Benedict Andrews, perhaps the most intellectually rigorous of our directors. His Belvoir St production brings this baggy monster into the 21st century, rethinking it as a play of image and appearance. He presents Measure for Measure as a theatre of substitution, a mapping of lines of power and desire that expose the tensions of the modern state, especially in the perilous margins between private and social moralities.

Ralph Myers's set (beautifully lit, as one might expect, by Nick Schlieper) is a revolving hotel room surrounded by white curtains, which is plonked in the middle of a blank theatrical space. It's neither private nor public, but rather encompasses both spheres: the hotel room functions as an impersonal site of intimate sexual encounters, or becomes an incongruously private space in which the state makes its public pronouncements. On either side of the stage are two video screens which give us, in merciless close-up, images of the actors who are performing live in front of us. It's disconcerting how often the eye prefers the videoed image over the real actor, and this uneasy visual dance between raw and mediated performance underlines the tensions Andrews brings to this production.

The play begins with the Duke of Vienna, Vincentio (Robert Menzies) mysteriously absenting himself and giving all his authority to his deputy Angelo (Damon Gameau), a well-known hardliner on matters of sexual morality. As the Duke explains, Vienna is rife with vice and corruption, and he wishes to investigate this state of affairs as an anonymous observer, in disguise as a friar. Meanwhile Claudio (Chris Ryan) has impregnated Julietta (Maeve Dermody), and under Angelo's unyielding interpretation of the city's laws, is sentenced to death for fornication, despite his intention to marry his betrothed. When Claudio's sister Isabella (Robin McLeavy), urged by Claudio's louche friend Lucio (Tony Schmitz), pleads with Angelo for her brother's life, Angelo reveals his hypocrisy by striking a corrupt bargain: he will spare Claudio's life if Isabella surrenders her virginity to him.

This set-up heralds a comedy of substitutions: Isabella saves her chastity by sending the lovelorn Mariana (Helen Thomson) in her stead; Claudio is saved by the execution of another criminal. In the end, the Duke, having trapped his erring subjects in all their declared lies, throws off his disguise and marries everybody off in a series of judgments that demonstrate both mercy and justice. Finally, the Duke declares his own intention to marry the virtuous Isabella, who in the final dispensations of justice finds herself betrayed by the libidinous currents of power in the city.

Andrews has gathered an impressive cast, and they deliver excellent performances. Menzies is at his best as the Duke, who is played with a sardonic dignity that is disarmingly vulnerable, and there are excellent performances in particular from Frank Whitten as the old lord Escalus, Robin McLeavy as Isabella and Chris Ryan as Claudio. As Lucio, Toby Schmitz exploits the comedy of his role to the point of mugging: fun to watch most of the time, but I wished for more restraint.

What emerges unexpectedly, especially in the more successful first half, is an overpowering sense of human mortality: the production is dominated by a sense of the state as an arbiter of death. As the set itself is a human construction, an island of light propped in a space of edgeless darkness, so this humanly mediated justice plays out against a sense of supra-human fatality, the mortality that no human authority can control or escape. While in Elizabethan times justice was considered to be the worldly manifestation of divine justice, here justice seems profoundly secular, even existential, a human contrivance playing out against an abyss of meaninglessness. It's a sense that Shakespeare brought to fruition later in King Lear: here it's not so much expressed as intimated.

For all the power of this interpretation, the production never quite holds, and it finally founders on the clockwork mechanics of the play's heavy plotting (which is far more intricate than I can describe here). The text fairly creaks with contrivances that sit uncomfortably between the driving inevitability of tragedy and the nonsensical but satisfyingly symmetrical fictions of comedy. Within its absurd frame are, undeniably, dramatic treasures - highlights are the comic interludes where the cocky Lucio retails his shonky gossip about the Duke's corrupt bad habits to Vincentio himself, who fairly chokes with outrage but is unable to throw off his disguise, or the brilliant dialogue between Claudio and Isabella, where he begs and finally bullies her to sacrifice her virtue in order to save his life. But it never quite melds into a dramatic whole.

As it plays out its conceits, it seems more and more as if the production is at war with the play, attempting to drag it from its Jacobean roots into a contemporary reading that, for all the applied intelligence and passion, the play can't sustain. The fault is mostly Shakespeare's: without much more radical cutting than he attempts here, Andrews' elegant framing can't do much about the overwrought contrivances, which in the second half devolve interminably into the comedic tying up of loose ends that by then you no longer care about.

The effect is rather dizzying: close up, and especially in the details of the speeches, this play is all intelligence, rich with Shakespeare's wrought language and complex ideas: but from further back, at the cruder level of structure, it simply seems fudged. I suspect the primary problem with Measure for Measure is that, for all its teasing ambiguities, it's not a particularly good play: what becomes in the tragedies an organic marriage of action and idea is here tripping over its own form. But you can't deny its fascination, which - as is so often the case - stems as much from its flaws as its virtues. I suspect it's one of those plays that is much more interesting to think about than it is to watch.


Like Measure for Measure, Lucy Guerin's latest dance theatre piece, Human Interest Story, explores the mediation of human experience. Her recent works - Untrained and Corridor in particular - demonstrated an increasing preoccupation with spoken language, exploring speech as an imperative, controlling and directing dancers, or distorting it as sonic punctuation, so it became a pure physical act, dislocated from semantics. It's an approach that has more to do with contemporary poetry than with dramatic language, picking out the element in which we swim unthinkingly as communicative animals and revealing it to be abstract, arbitrary, opaque, even sinister.

Human Interest Story goes much further than her previous works, and is perhaps Guerin's bleakest and most powerful work yet. Paradoxically, it is also the funniest. It has an epic feel: it begins in the mundane comedy of domesticity, and winds out inexorably into an increasingly dark meditation on the limits of human autonomy. What, this dance seems to be asking, counts as an authentic human experience? Can we experience anything purely, or is all our being unconsciously mediated through the imperatives of the mass media? Is it possible to escape the wider conditioning of the consumerist society in which we live, or is its influence so saturating, so ubiquitous, that what we imagine as freedom can no longer exist?

Gideon Obarzanek's design is dominated by a huge television set, which in the opening sequences has its back to the audience. Behind it are six chairs, and behind them is a dark, edgeless space (one of the virtues of this production is Paul Jackson's miraculously subtle lighting, which seems almost to shape shadow as plastic matter). Six dancers emerge and begin to recite news stories in precise chorus, moving mechanistically, even neurotically, in tandem with their voices.

It's very funny, and yet it has an uneasy edge, as vastly different events and issues - Michael Jackson, climate change - are rendered down to identical packets of meaning (or meaninglessness) in the language of news stories. During the dance, the light lifts to reveal a vast, matte-black tank at the back of the stage. The tank emerges from the shadows and then vanishes throughout the show, opaque and threatening, a mute symbol of the war industry that underlies western capitalism like a bad conscience.

This opening sequence reminded me of Hans Magnus Enzensberger's discussion of the contemporary tabloid newspaper as the exemplary modernist text, in which each story - natural disaster, celebrity scandal, crime, war, politics - is endlessly interchangable with the others, stripped of context and translated into a module of prepackaged language that communicates nothing, because it is in fact designed not to communicate: it feeds a desire to consume, rather than to know.

Guerin explores how these mediations of reality reach into the intimacies of domesticity, shaping and refracting our personal lives. Her dancers become present not as abstract figures, literally playing themselves on stage and reminding us that dance is also a mediation, an illusion of reality which becomes, for the moments it exists, another simulacra. This is often purely comic: Stephanie Lake steps out in front of the others and speaks about cooking for her children and eating dinner in front of Master Chef in the hope that her culinary ineptitude will be transformed by the visual input of gourmet feasts. And there's an interlude where the television is turned around and Anton Enus ("the most fortunate vowel in showbusiness") reads a series of news stories about the dancers' private lives.

Interwoven with this comedy of the mundane is an increasing sense of anxiety, a subtext that is mostly expressed in the movement, which becomes in the second half of the dance the dominant mode of expression as speech is left behind. The hinge is an early BBC news report about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico; against the dry, factual and (in ironic retrospect) inaccurately optimistic report the dancers circle about it in ever-increasing loops and spirals, in a sudden and surprisingly moving explosion of pure dance.

The dancers turn their attention to written language, laying newspapers precisely on the ground and then crumpling the paper and incorporating them into extensions of their bodies, as heartbeats, as violent expressions of anxiety. In this sequence, the crumpled pages end up stuffed inside the costume of one of the dancers: he becomes a grotesque, distorted figure who is violently disembowelled by the other dancers. It's a compelling image of the contemporary soul, if the soul is what Foucault described as the surface on which is scored the tracks of social power and authority - the human figure overloaded, sickened and finally destroyed by metastasising tumours of information.

The final sequence plays with impatience and refusal, teasing the boredom of the audience, as dancers begin a series of movements only to be interrupted by one of them stepping out of the dance to retie her hair or perhaps walk out into the auditorium, leaving the rest in frozen stasis, waiting for her return so they can resume the dance. This felt like the longest sequence, although I'm not sure that it was; by then I was so enfolded into the performance I had lost all sense of objective time.

From a ground of the absolutely familiar and the commonly understood, Guerin leaps into the world of the body, where gestures are ambiguous, opaque, mysterious. Often in Guerin's work it has seemed to me that the body becomes a site of rebellion against the tyranny of linguistic meaning, which figures as didactic and imperative: the dance, which spirals into pure abstractions out of the impure medium of dailiness in which she works, plays in tension against the legislating impulses of language and choreography, becoming the physical expression of resistance and anarchy.

This seems much less the case in Human Interest Story, where it's clear that the gestures of the body are as mediated as spoken language: what we see are neurotic, truncated expressions of anxiety or violence, or the gestures of an illusory freedom which themselves are mediated through our systems of information and communication. They ultimately become expressions of our imprisonment in the economies of information and money in which we live. Which may be, for all its bleakness, no more than the truth.

Pictures: top: Benedict Andrews' Measure for Measure; bottom, Alisdair Macindoe (on floor), Jessica Wong, Stuart Shugg, Talitha Maslin and Stephanie Lake in Human Interest Story. Photo: Jeff Busby


Measure for Measure by William Shakespeare, adapted and directed by Benedict Andrews. Set design by Ralph Myers, costume design by Dale Ferguson, lighting design by Nick Schlieper, composition and sound design by Stefan Gregory. With Maeve Dermody, Damon Gameau, Ashley Lyons, Robin McLeavy, Robert Menzies, Arky Michael, Colin Moody, Steve Rodgers, Chris Ryan, Toby Schmitz, Helen Thomson and Frank Whitten. Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney (Closed).

Human Interest Story, choreographed by Lucy Guerin. Set design by Gideon Obarzanek, realising design by Anna Cordingley, costume design by Paula Levis, lighting design by Paul Jackson, composition and sound design by Jethro Woodward. Performed by Stephanie Lake, Alisdair Macindoe, Talitha Maslin, Harriet Ritchie, Stuart Shugg and Jessica Wong, with newscast by Anton Enus (World News Australia - SBS). Malthouse Theatre and Perth International Arts Festival, Merlyn Theatre. (Closed).

If one is an actor, a bare stage must be the most perilous place in the world: it leaves nowhere to hide. In last year's STC production of The War of the Roses, Benedict Andrews showed how this most naked of spaces can act as a burning glass, amplifying language and performance to a charring intensity. But exposure can equally reveal poverty: and sadly, this is mostly what happens in Bell Shakespeare's King Lear.


It's never comfortable reviewing a company when you suspect it is not at its best. After 75 performances around the country, Bell's Lear limped into town last week minus one of its key actors, Leah Purcell, who was forced to pull out two days before the Melbourne premiere. Instead, the part of Regan was played by Rachel Gordon, flown in the day before. Reading from the script, Gordon gave a most creditable performance, but the disruption must have had an impact. I got the feeling I was watching a tired production.

It's easy to see the ambition of Marion Potts' concept. This Lear is almost depopulated: isolated figures play across Dale Ferguson's starkly minimal stage, which features a small revolve in its centre, with a silver backdrop that looks like a screen of mist. Courtly pomp is represented by a suspended marquee above the revolve, a stylised crown that lifts out of sight as Lear divests himself of his kingly power. The simplicity is highlighted by the presence of Bree van Reyk playing her percussive score live on stage.

It's a cold stage, emphasised by Nick Schlieper's pitilessly revealing lighting and the furs which drape each character. At times it functions almost like a screen: there are hints here of painting and film, with visual references from Brueghel and Bergman. The frame is all there: what's missing is not so much the play itself - we hear every word - as the passions which inhabit its freezing void. Shakespeare's Lear is a terrifying portrait of human beings at the mercy of bestial forces in an indifferent and godless universe, and here we're missing at least half of the equation.

The furs and chill can't but recall Peter Brook's film of Lear, which stars Paul Scofield in a bleak, snowy landscape that evokes the existential desolation of Beckett. And the comparison unkindly shows what this production lacks: where Scofield's masterly performance maps the clashing forces - the pride and brokenness, the fierce will and the anarchic madness - of a king who is only, after all, a man, Bell gives us a journeyman's sketch of the soul.

Physically Bell looks the part, and there's nothing wrong with his bodily presence on stage: the problem is all in the language. Shakespeare's text is merely delivered, with a repetitive cadence that encloses the verse rather than opening it into the universe of human feeling. It seems astounding, but not one of Lear's harrowing speeches evoked a single responsive emotion: not the storm scene, nor the heart-rending reunion with his daughter, nor any of his tormented abjurations against madness; most notably not his anguished recognition of his own blindness, in which at last he sees humanity in its naked state.

With no Lear at the centre, the production inevitably splinters. It's left to Peter Carroll as the Fool to show what might have been. The Fool is Lear's other self, his conscience and his confidant; it's no accident that he disappears after the storm scene, when Lear is finally reunited, through his suffering, with himself. Carroll's performance is the most lucid I have seen of this opaque and tragic character: he is at once frail and fearless, comic and heart-breakingly poignant. Most of all, he brings multiple levels of light and shade to his performance, creating a rippling depth that fills the stage's cold emptiness. The show's worth seeing for Carroll alone.

The rest of the cast sits mainly between these extremes, with solid performances from Yalin Ozucelik as Oswald, Bruce Myles as Gloucester, Paul English as the Duke of Albany, Jane Montogomery Griffiths as Goneril and John McConville as Edgar. But for all their efforts, the production is ultimately no more than a competent reading of the play: not a harrowing of the soul, so much as a polite introduction to the idea that a soul might be harrowed.

Picture: Peter Carroll (left) and John Bell in King Lear.

King Lear by William Shakespeare, directed by Marion Potts. Designed by Dale Ferguson, lighting design by Nick Schlieper, sound design by Stefan Gregory, composition by Bree van Reyk. With John Bell, Jane Montgomery-Griffiths, Rachel Gordon, Susan Prior, Peter Kowitz, Peter Carroll, Josh McConville, Tim Walter, Paul English, Anthony Phelan, Yalin Ozucelik, Keith Agius and Justin Stewart Cotta. Bell Shakespeare @ the Playhouse, Victorian Arts Centre, until June 12. Her Majesty's Theatre, Perth, June 18-26.

The MTC's Richard III at last bears out the promise of the Sumner Theatre. Here is a show that is everything main stage theatre ought to be: exciting, contemporary, intelligent, beautiful, brilliantly achieved. Only the MTC can do work on this scale, and when they mount a production of this calibre, the whole game of Melbourne theatre is lifted several notches. Independent artists need to react against the mainstream, but a pallid establishment lowers the stakes: they need a substantial challenge. And here it is.


It demonstrates how fine a director Simon Phillips can be. He's given us some superb work: his 1988 production of The Importance of Being Earnest, with Geoffrey Rush, Jane Menelaus and a dyspeptic Frank Thring, remains etched in my memory. There was a lyric, deeply felt production of The Seagull in 2001, and his 2005 production of Marion Potts's and Andrew Upton's adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac was breath-takingly good. Given these, I have always assumed Phillips's gift is for profound surfaces, the joyous play of the comic, rather than the black chords of tragedy.

Well, critics live to be proved wrong. This is an outstanding production at every level. Phillips brings all his understanding of surface to Shakespeare in this production, and the result is a production which casts glittering illuminations into the abyss of the human psyche. Richard III is, after all, all about surface: the appearance that hides and reveals reality, the deceptive glamour of words, which create and destroy truth. If Machiavelli is the political theoretician behind this play, its philosopher is Friedrich Nietzsche.

Richard III is Shakespeare's first tragedy, but it is often placed as the last of the History Plays, ten plays which follow the bloody ventures of six kings of England. Although they were not written chronologically, directors have often put them together into historical sequence. As Benedict Andrews' brilliant STC production of The War of the Roses (which also featured a revelatory Ewen Leslie) demonstrated last year, the History Plays remain a devastatingly apt essay on the machinery of power. Phillips's reading of power is grim: Richard III is most often read as the final accession of peace after generations of vendetta, but in this rendition the ending, in which the just king ousts the bloody tyrant, is far more ambiguous.

The production casts shadows forward and back into the past and future of the action on stage. As with Ian McKellen's 1995 film of Richard III, it begins with the murder of Henry VI from Henry VI Part 3, but here the scene is used to different effect. It's not merely a device to signal the history behind the events on stage, but an illumination of Richard's twisted psyche.

He features in the earlier plays as the misshapen younger son of the Duke of York, and already there he speaks of how his deformed appearance blights his life. In Henry VI Part 2, he tells us: "The people fear me; for they do observe / Unfather'd heirs and loathly births of nature." In Act V of Henry VI Part 3, which opens this production, he knifes Henry VI to death, and turns to the audience to deliver a chilling monologue: "Since the heavens have shaped my body so, / Let hell make crook'd my mind to answer it... And this word 'love', which greybeards call divine / Be resident in men like one another / And not in me: I am myself alone."

Having never been loved, Richard refuses all human kinship, and resolves to become what he is seen to be. Since he is rejected anyway, he takes this rejection as the ground of his being: he becomes the supreme individual, self-sufficient and whole in himself, owing fealty to no one. This defiance is the core of all his subsequent actions. The counter-argument to Richard's "I am myself alone" is John Donne:

No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

This is the central argument worked out through the action of the play. In contemporary terms, it's the argument of individual power versus collective responsibility, right versus left. Phillips' Richard III brings both expressions into play by setting the action in a theatrical present: Shaun Gurton's beautiful design (assisted by Nick Schlieper's nuanced, various and sometimes astonishing lighting) exploits a revolve to whizz us through panelled corridors of power, into plush corporate boardrooms and aseptic offices and hospital wards. With some smart multi-media, the roles of the English nobles, who represent public opinion in Shakespeare's time, transform into the mass media and public relations shills and backroom hustlers.

Unlike many contemporary settings of Shakespeare, this works seamlessly all the way through the play: it's lightly and deftly handled through some intelligent editing and the sheer boldness of its theatricality. And this extra layer of mediation, in which action is flattened to reports on wide-screen television or on huge overhanging screens, throws an unsettling light over the play: I began to read the performances with the scepticism that attends political broadcasts on television. When Richmond (Bert LaBonté, giving an Obama spin to his role) promises peace and justice at the end of the play, it chillingly recalls Richard's empty promises at the beginning of his reign. Here comes the new boss, same as the old boss.

All this is realised with a theatricality I can only call showbiz. Shakespeare profoundly understood the sublime crudity of the stage, and this is where Phillips and his production team shine. The opening scene is thrilling, and from that moment every stage image is both unexpected and beautifully right. There are scenic transformations here that literally made me gasp out loud: for example, a miraculous shift from Henry IV's (Nicholas Bell) deathbed to his funeral is managed by lighting, casting the actors briefly into darkness and then into funereal silhouettes.

At the centre of this production is Ewen Leslie's performance as Richard. This is a deeply intelligent, passionate performance, physically and emotionally unafraid, in which Richard’s grotesquely misshapen body belies his agile treachery. By turns comic, savage, grotesque, bestial, sly and tragic, Leslie dominates the stage. More disturbingly, he exerts his evil fascination on the audience; we can’t but be moved by him, even as his charisma and physicality irresistibly recall photographs of Hitler brooding over his desk like a malign eagle. His Richard will be talked about for years: it marks the ascension of a remarkable actor.


Leslie is backed by an outstanding cast. There are some actors - LaBonté, for instance - who don't have the skill with Shakespearean language that others so amply demonstrate here, but it by no means impedes the enjoyment of the play. Jennifer Hagan in the bravura role of Queen Margaret is unforgettable. She first appears, muttering dire curses, in a hospital corridor, behind windows: she is dressed in a hospital robe and attached to an IV line: a "hateful withered hag" throwing her grief and hate into the faces of those who have robbed her of her royalty, and prophesying their downfall. When she next appears, clutching a chainlink fence as Queen Elizabeth (Alison Whyte) mourns her dead children, she is chillingly insane: the only thing that keeps her alive is her hatred, as all else has been burned out.

All the queens, embodying the grief caused by Richard, give rending performances. Whyte as Elizabeth is like a spring, so tightly wound that she becomes deadly, and her speech to the Tower of London, where she begs the stones to protect her children, is heartbreaking. Deidre Rubenstein's Duchess of York is played as a woman whose straight-backed self-control explodes in a terrifying imprecation against her son, and Lady Anne (Meredith Penman), broken and destroyed by Richard, is poignant and fragile. Humphrey Bower as Buckingham, Richard's amoral sidekick and PR man, gives this role a new, glittering energy, and Nicholas Bell in the double role of Edward IV and Stanley is quietly brilliant. And there are smaller roles, such as the Scrivener (Anthony West) or Roger Oakley's Tyrell, that offer unexpected pleasures.

But you should see it for yourselves. It's an exhilarating production, both for its own sake, and for the possibilities it opens. And if it's not a hit, I'll eat my hat.

Richard III, by William Shakespeare, directed by Simon Phillips. Set design, Shaun Gurton, costume design, Esther Marie Hayes, lighting design, Nick Schlieper, composer, Ian McDonald. With Nicholas Bell, Alison Whyte, Carl Nilsson-Polias, Ian Bliss, Ewen Leslie, Deidre Rubenstein, Jennifer Hagan, Anthony West, Meredith Penman, Humphrey Bower, Catherine Durkin, Zahra Newman, Roger Oakley, Ian Bliss, Paul Ireland, Bert LaBonte, James Saunders. Sumner Theatre, MTC Theatre, until July 12.

Anatomy Titus: Fall of Rome: A Shakespeare Commentary, by Heiner Müller, translated by Julian Hammond, and directed by Michael Gow. Designed by Robert Kemp, lighting design by Matt Scott, composition and sound design by Brett Collery. With John Bell, Robert Alexander, Thomas Campbell, Peter Cook, Scott Johnson, Nathan Lovejoy, Steven Rooke, Christopher Sommers and Timothy Walter. Bell Shakespeare and Queensland Theatre Company @ the CUB Malthouse until December 6.

Heiner Müller, the defining post-war playwright of the East German stage, understood power. Its machinations were the obsession of his art and his life. It's easy to see why he was so fascinated by Shakespeare who, like Müller, saw theatre and history as two sides of the same coin. He wrote three major adaptations of Shakespeare's work - Macbeth, Hamletmachine and Anatomy Titus - among a slew of other works that grappled with classic texts.


Müller's motives in approaching classical works were never pure, and expressed his intellectual and ideological restlessness, a certain necessary lack of respect. "A classical literature," he said in 1975, "is first of all a literature of a class". Just as his admiration of Brecht turned him into Brecht's most excoriating critic, so he approached the classics in order to subject them to explosive critique. His version of Hamlet was, as Müller said, "the shrunken head of the Hamlet tragedy", splintering Hamlet's subjectivity in order to expose the "something rotten" in contemporary society. And his version of Titus, which cuts the play and interpolates the text with commentary, exposes the blood-soaked, gratuitous violence of contemporary empire.

Shakespeare's original was an early text, heavily influenced by Seneca. It's gore-drenched schlock, so lurid with ultra-violence - rape, mutilation, murder, cannibalism - that the bloodiness becomes ludicrous. Müller's adaptation historicises Shakespeare's splatterfest. In Anatomy Titus, written in the shadow of the CIA-led coup against Chilean president Allende, the exploited colonies of empire - the Germanic Goths and Africa - take their revenge against Rome, even as Rome, decadent and swollen with power, betrays its own.

After the geopolitical adventures of the past decade, its contemporary aptness ought to be obvious. The amorality of power is here written starkly, a text of violence that inscribes itself on the bodies of its victims and leaves in its wake a pile of corpses. There is no lesson to be learned in this violence, no message to be taken (as Müller said - quite honestly I think - in a 1990 interview, "I'm no ideologue. I use Marxism as a material, in the same way I use a Shakespeare play... this becomes form and is valid as such.")

In the same breath, Müller speaks about the absurd obscenity of the first world's treatment of what was then the third world. His insistence that he was only interested in his writing often is taken as cynicism: in fact it is a form of idealism, an aggressive rejection of the contemporary insistence on looking for meaning behind a work, which he thought a sign of decadence. One cannot escape the political critique of Müller's work: at the same time, to think that political critique is the point is to miss the point entirely.

In Müller's Titus, we can't but be aware that the stage violence, however excessive or ludicrous, has literal analogies in the Middle East, in South-East Asia and India, in the mountains of the Caucasus and Pakistan. No playwright's imagination, not even Shakespeare's, outdoes human inventiveness in actual cruelty. But Müller's primary concern was with the politics of artistic form. "Perhaps Godard formulated it best," he said in a 1987 interview. "The task is not to make political movies, but to make movies politically. What is political is the treatment of the material. In other words, it's the form, not the content. That's the problem with young radical movements when they deal with art. What they end up with is philistinism."

Eager revolutionaries aren't the problem in this production, which is rather an exercise in muting Müller's formal radicality. All the same, it's good to see Bell Shakespeare tackling this challenging text, which is a welcome shift from its earlier, shonkily contemporised productions. Julian Hammond's translation, which includes a good deal of the original Shakespeare, is a tough realisation of Müller's savage and excoriating lyricism. (As an aside, it would be interesting to know whether Müller's play translated Shakespeare's English into contemporary German, or left it in a pastiche of, as it were, Elizabethan German - each would have a very different effect). But you have to listen hard to hear the language through the noise of Michael Gow's production.

Watching this very uneven show, I often felt as if I were witnessing a copy of something, a production that goes half-way. It is as if it begins with the best of intentions, only to waver at the sticking point: it has its moments, but they founder beneath a wider formal uncertainty. When you enter the theatre, the stylistic language looks promising enough: Robert Kemp's set is a simple box, white walls smeared with red. Back stage is a wall topped with books, the intellectual fruit of civilisation, which will be torn and besmirched with blood, and in the centre is an industrial barrel which, we soon find out, is full of gore. The all-male cast is dressed in contemporary casual clothes and, as with Dood Paard's meta-theatrical adaptation of Titus at last year's Melbourne Festival, assign each other their different roles.

Even though I know the play quite well, I found the first ten minutes deeply confusing. Müller dispenses with the first act, replacing it with a bald summary of events, but this is rushed through in the telling. I was so busy keeping up with the chorus work that nothing fixed in my mind. Once I'd sorted out the plot, I still had problems negotiating a mish-mash of theatrical intentions. If the production is so stripped back, why have herald's trumpets suddenly ringing out in isolated scenes? Wherefore lighting changes that transform the naked stage into more conventional theatrical spaces? Why does the Emperor (Nathan Lovejoy) sound like someone from Monty Python's Life of Brian?

There's no doubt (believe it or not) that Müller is funny. His humour is, however, blacker than the inside of a cat, corrosive and subversive. He's a specialist in the kind of laughter that arises from a literal apprehension of catastrophe, from the felt knowledge that there are wounds beyond the help of therapy or redemption. He would be the first to reject a holy reverence towards his texts. All the same, I find it very difficult to think of his work as camp.

But an undeniable campness runs through this production, from the Emperor's lisp to Lavinia's lipsticked pouts. Peter Cook's portrayal of the vengeful Goth queen Tamora, on the other hand, doesn't press so hard on gendered stereotypes, and is the more effective for it. I'm not sure why the decision to have an all-male cast should result in such posturings: one reason given, which suggests some of the problems in the direction, is that the rape and mutilation of Lavinia (Thomas Campbell) is less hard to take if she is played by a man. A major effect is to empty the play of its dark lusts; they become a joke, merely an exercise in pushing the boundaries of taste.

The treatment of the African slave Aaron (a bravura performance by Timothy Walter) pierces through the camp to something more interesting. It is played in crude blackface: when we first see Walker, he is wearing a gorilla mask, and the racial representations become successively more outrageous. Aaron's baby is even represented by a gollywog. Shakespeare's play is nakedly racist, and in this production it's amplified to acute discomfort.

However, even here the effect draws back from reflection on its larger implications - the wealthy world's exploitation of Africa, which is driven in its abjection to nihilistic revenge - to a more personally-sized racism. The action is divorced from its larger political implications and historical context - the very aspects highlighted in Müller's text - and the disturbance stirred by the racism becomes that much more manageable.

The cast, as so often in Bell Shakespeare productions, is uneven; and this text, even more than conventional Shakespeare, demands actors who can deal with complex language. This perhaps accounts in part for my feeling in many scenes that I couldn't quite grasp the words. John Bell plays Titus, and for the first third stalks around the stage as stiff as a board. Once Titus goes crazy, you begin to see why Bell is so respected as a Shakespearean actor: he eats up the role with gluttonous relish.

But all this beautiful language led me back to wondering why, if "poetry is murder", as Müller claims in the play, we have so much lovely enunciation of it. It's as if its beauty remains, at the core, an unquestioned good. I found myself longing for the language to be somehow assaulted in the performances, rather than preserved intact in the midst of mayhem.

In short, Anatomy Titus seems neither one thing nor 'tother. It's caught uncomfortably between radicality and convention, and ultimately blurs to something uncomfortably close to jolly japes about mutilation. In the chaos of gesture, Müller's formal inquiry is obscured, reduced to the merely sensational: punches are pulled everywhere.

It's Gow's misfortune to have mounted this play hard on the heels of Barrie Kosky's potent evocation of Greek tragedy in The Trojan Women, and with Dood Paard's brilliant and funny realisation of Titus still in recent memory. For all their different approaches, both the earlier productions were exemplary in their wrought simplicity, in how each production employed only the elements that were necessary to its purpose. What emerged was a burnished lucidity, a deep lustre in which the original text burned with renewed relevance. The most crucial lack in this production of Anatomy Titus is a concomitant sense of artistic necessity.

Picture: John Bell as Titus in Anatomy Titus.