Thom Pain (Based on Nothing) by Will Eno, directed by Julian Meyrick. Lighting by Kerry Saxby, design consultant Meredith Rogers. With Neil Pigot. Melbourne Theatre Company @ the Beckett Theatre, CUB Malthouse, until August 11. Bookings: 1300 136 166.

The Eisteddfod, by Lally Katz, directed by Chris Kohn. Design by Adam Gardnir, lighting design by Richard Vabre, sound by Jethro Woodward. With Luke Mullins and Katherine Tonkin. Stuck Pigs Squealing @ the Tower Theatre, CUB, produced by Malthouse Theatre, until July 29. Bookings: 9685 5111

It’s a common idea that if a work is “intellectual” or “cutting edge”, it must be cold and emotionless, a thing of steel and ice that is above the messy, smelly business of the human heart. Conversely, it’s assumed that anything with feeling can’t also be “intellectual”. Feeling and intelligence, so this logic runs, are opposites, and an excess of one means an inevitable lack of the other.

This weird binary has long puzzled me. For one thing, it’s so manifestly untrue: writers like Edward Said, Robert Musil or Hélène Cixous show that the intellect is in fact an instrument of passion. Far from being incompatible opposites, I think that feeling and intelligence are both required to articulate the process of consciousness. Particularly, it seems to me, in works of art.


Anyway, that is a long and complex argument, and I should drag myself to the matter to hand. These ruminations occurred after seeing Thom Pain (Based on Nothing) and The Eisteddfod, both now on at the CUB Malthouse. I suppose they both might be placed under the deathly rubric of “cutting edge” art, which is to say that they don’t obey conventional ideas of narrative or dramatic structure. Both, in this sense, are experimental (another useless term, since art is, strictly speaking, always experimental, unless it is dead).

But what strikes me primarily about both plays is that they are, fundamentally and crucially, about love. And loneliness. And all those other human, messy things.

Thom Pain is an MTC show, and it’s frankly brilliant to see them programming writing of this quality from the more innovative edge of contemporary Amercian writing. It’s had an interesting history, considering Will Eno is a New Yorker - this play premiered at the 2004 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where it won a swag of awards, and transferred to a successful season in London before finally opening in New York. It was ultimately shortlisted for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize.

It makes me wonder what American theatre is thinking, if a work as funny, smart and moving as this has to prove itself in the British provinces before it gets a look at an American stage. It’s really a poem: a highly theatrical poem which owes much to the plays of Edward Albee and Thornton Wilder. But the writer who kept insisting himself as I watched it was the 1950s New York poet, Frank O’Hara. It’s not so much style – though both O’Hara and Eno have plenty of that, and Eno shares O’Hara’s wit and lyrical gift – as sensibility. Like O’Hara, Eno is a writer who perceives human fragility and imperfection with a sceptical but wholly unironic compassion.

There is much here of sheer writerly intelligence, that witty play of allusion and metaphor that (sometimes rightly) is often taken as an evasion of feeling. But, as its name suggests, this show is actually about human pain. The comedy is often cruel (as comedy almost always is), but it functions as a kind of tact which permits us to see this fictional character’s vulnerability and, through his, our own. In its honest examination of the emotional cauterisation of trauma, it is very moving; but it is not – save for a misstep at the end, a direct plea to the audience that somehow lets us off the hook – in the least sentimental.

In the figure of Thom Pain, Eno has created a fragmented Everyman, a damaged soul ill at ease in his mortal body. Thom Pain – performed with a mixture of superbly nuanced restraint and sheer front by Neil Pigot – recounts for us, in an ad hoc, disorderly manner, the injuries that have marked his life. His wounds are at once absurd and tragic – from the electrocution of his beloved childhood dog to his broken love affair (as he sums it up, in a particularly beautiful line, "I disappeared in her and she, wondering where I went, left.")

He is, in fact, an unexpectedly gentle reflection of our own unacknowledged pain, the shaping hurts that damage us for the rest of our lives. “When did your childhood end?” he asks. “How badly did you get hurt, when you did, when you were this little, when you were this wee little hurtable thing, nothing but big eyes, a heart, a few hundred words?” And, responding almost involuntarily to this direct question, we find out with a pang of memory that yes, the loss of innocence happens to all of us.

Julian Meyrick directs with a light hand: it is given a stripped, bare production, forgoing any sense of theatrical illusion in order to focus attention on the script and the performer. The set is a bare stage, marked out in squares, with a life-size cardboard image of Pigot in one back corner, and a chair in another. Neil Pigot realises his fractured character with subtlety, comic chutzpah and heartbreaking candour. He stands before us, slightly dishevelled, in a plain suit and glasses, and delivers a painfully funny stand-up routine (complete with a raffle that never actually occurs) that works off our own sense of discomfort.

As he makes clear at one point, Thom Pain (a wry spin, I presume, on the famous American revolutionary Tom Paine) is a contemporary version of Tom O’Bedlam, a truly urban “unaccommodated man” who, for all his suit and tie, is no more than “a poor bare, forked animal”. If this play has a message - not that a message is the point - it is simply that those wounds never actually heal, and we cannot live hiding from our own anguish. “Isn't it wonderful,” says Pain, with deceptive blandness, “how we never recover?"

The unhealable wounds of childhood is also an abiding theme of The Eisteddfod, Lally Katz’s disturbingly funny fantasy of suburban childhood. I saw its first full production at the Store Room three years ago, my first experience of Stuck Pigs Squealing, and was impressed. The Malthouse is now giving it a welcome remount in the Tower.

Since its first outing, The Eisteddfod has had seasons at the PS122 and Ontological-Hysterical Theatre in New York and Belvoir St in Sydney, and a cast change (Katherine Tonkin takes the role of Gerture, originally played by Jessamy Dyer). But it remains as fresh as ever, a darkly comic meditation on the perversities of longing, loneliness, pain and erotic love.

Gerture and Abalone (Luke Mullins) are brother and sister, living together, after the bizarre death of their parents, in a claustrophobically destructive relationship of mutual need and resentment. Their longings are played out through various fantasies – Gerture’s masochistic relationship with a sadistic lover, Ian, or their parents’ dysfunctional marriage – as Abalone rehearses the part of Macbeth for an upcoming eisteddfod, in which he plans to unleash his true genius on a dazzled world.

Lally Katz is a true original, and so confounds all attempts at categorisation. She is not quite like any writer I have encountered, although her work calls up shades of Pirandello, Cocteau, Chekhov and a bunch of other people. There is an anarchy in its core which means that anything might happen, a perilous sense that the whole might disintegrate into total nonsense: but it never does, because also at work is an unobtrusively steely discipline and a very sharp wit.

She’s well served by her performers, who match Katz’s precision and wit as they scramble over Adam Gardnir’s ingeniously claustrophobic set. Mullins’ performance is a sheer joy, and often simply hilarious, as he metamorphoses between Gerture’s brutish lover, his own father, a Sean Connery-inspired Macbeth and the vulnerable, jealous persona of Abalone himself. Tonkin is a perfect foil as the alienated Gerture, the victim of every male she encounters, who finally reaches out and discovers her own freedom.

Calling on my frustratingly imperfect memory (I’ll read my earlier review later) it seems to me that Chris Kohn’s production is, unsurprisingly, a highly polished version of what I saw three years ago. Certain details – a puppet, a balaclava – have vanished, and the play itself somehow seems cleaner and more focused, perfectly complemented by Jethro Woodward’s unobtrusive but beautifully textured soundscape. And while its humour always emerged from a dark place, and the violence in the centre of Gerture’s and Abalone’s childish games was always close to the surface, this time I was struck most forcibly by its sadness.

I think this production has grown in depth: it was always a play of brilliant surfaces, but now those surfaces open to unsettling abysses, and the final dialogue, a meditation on a pathetic suicide, resonates with an acute and haunting melancholy. It’s a wonderful piece by some of our most unfairly talented young artists. Miss it at your peril.

Picture: Luke Mullins and Katherine Tonkin, The Eisteddfod

A version of my review of Thom Pain appeared in Monday's Australian. Weblink if and when one appears on the site.

Good to have news of local pigs kicking up their heels in New York. The inimitable George Hunka of Superfluities reports on Lally Katz, Chris Kohn and the rest of the Stuck Pigs Squealing gang, who this week did a showing of a work in progress at Richard Foreman's legendary Ontological-Hysteric Theatre.

Clearly George was charmed. But us Melburnians, we're charming, no?

This preview was the result of a collaboration with US writer Mac Wellman and other American artists, and the plan is to return to New York next year with the finished production. Meantime as a sidenote, I see that the Malthouse is producing a Richard Foreman play - Now That Communism is Dead My Life Feels Empty, directed by composer Max Lyandvert - as part of its most interesting upcoming spring season.

Addendum: Chris Kohn has posted in the comments a link to the Stuck Pigs' rehearsal blog, for those curious about what they've been doing over there...

Lally Katz and the Terrible Mysteries of the Volcano by Lally Katz, directed by Chris Kohn. Design by Adam Gardnir, lighting by Richard Vabre, sound by Jethro Woodward, video by Chris Kohn. With Christopher Brown, Margaret Cameron, Tony Johnson, Brian Lipson, Luke Mullins, Jenny Priest and Gavan O'Leary. Music performed by Chris Kohn and Jethro Woodward. Stuck Pigs Squealing @ Theatreworks, St Kilda, until June 18.

Lally Katz's universe points me irresistibly to Wittgenstein's remark in Tractatus: "What the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest. The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language...mean the limits of my world.... I am my world".

Lally Katz and the Terrible Mysteries of the Volcano might have been written to illustrate this statement. The most ambitious of her collaborations with Chris Kohn and Stuck Pigs Squealing, it generates a theatre of potent beauty, shot with the sinister clarity of nightmare.

The play makes the idiolect of an individual mind theatrically manifest in a way that I can only compare (hoping not to be misleading) with Sarah Kane. The theatrical poetics of Kane begin from literalising on stage the metaphoric workings of the psyche: as she says in 4:48 Psychosis, "the defining quality of metaphor is that it is real".

In the work of both these playwrights, this process unearths terror, despair, myriad cruelties and strange beauties, unanswerable longings and, ultimately, a sense of astringent, even desolate, liberation. Like Kane, Katz is haunted by the possibility of death, and questions what meaning life can hold if it can be reasonlessly snuffed out at any moment. And also like Kane, she is deeply concerned with, and perplexed by, the question of love.

There the resemblances end. Lally Katz is not quite like any playwright I know of. Her work emerges from a theatrical universe that includes artists like Arrabal, Ionesco, Cocteau and Jodorowsky, but unlike these artists, her world situates itself squarely in middle-class suburbia.

I'm beginning to wonder if this avant garde theatre of suburbia is a uniquely local phenomenon. Sweet Staccato Rising, A View of Concrete, Headlock, Lally Katz's Eisteddfod and even The Black Swan of Trespass all have this suburban consciousness in common, perhaps in the same way that street art - one of Melbourne's hidden or, at least, seldom acknowledged treasures - surges as a vital, anarchic energy from the "relaxed and comfortable" order of suburban sprawl.

Lally Katz and the Terrible Mysteries of the Volcano is a concatenation of oneiric realities that, like Eisteddfod, circles obsessively around the terrors and desires of childhood. Again the author, as unstable an invention as any of the characters in the play, intrudes into her invention: as Mr Lally Katz, world-famous detective (Luke Mullins), or as Miss Lally Katz, child of an oppressively loving family (Luke Mullins), and even as her alter ego, Wendy (Margaret Cameron), who surely bears some familial relationship to the Wendy of Peter Pan or even, perhaps, Peter Pan himself. (To make it more confusing, playwright Lally Katz (Lally Katz) is taking the tickets at the door.)

The plot, if it can be called that, concerns Mr Lally Katz's commission, with his sidekick Lion (Brian Lipson) to investigate the mystery of a volcano that is on the verge of eruption and thus to save an alternative-universe Canberra, now a tropical island, from its destruction. Mr Katz has made, in a murderously childish game of hide and seek, a "deal" with Wendy: he will save himself from the panther that wishes to eat him by sacrificing her. Wendy then disappears...

In another, later, time, Greg (Christopher Brown) is abject with priapic lust for Wendy: no matter what he tries to fuck - and he tries to fuck everything in sight, including theatre lights, poles, a dinosaur, a kangaroo, a prostitute "with burned out eyes" and a doll - he cannot orgasm. He has to find Wendy, and he and Lion, who hopes to save Detective Lally Katz from a terrible mistake he made earlier, head off on a gruelling trek to the volcano. Greg's orgasm, it seems, will "open the universe" and cause the volcano to erupt.

Meanwhile, the urbane detective and Lion catch the boat to Canberra, where they are initiated into a sinister Wendy fan club run by a mysterious South American, Sanchez (Christopher Brown). They are helped in their investigations by Miss Marple (Tony Johnson), who has her own obsession with quilts and manchester, and meet her crooning fiance (Gavan O'Leary) and Lally Katz falls shatteringly in love with Sanchez' sister (Jenny Priest)...

There are many more loops and whorls in this far from linear script, but that's probably enough of cack-handedly attempting to explain a narrative which moves by a system of metaphorical association and transformation, building up its own idiosyncratic theatrical language as the show progresses. But it gives some idea of the surrealist complexity of the world created here, and also hints at the sexual trauma that lies at the core of its dissociations and fractures.

Staging a text that constantly threatens to disintegrate under its own impulses presents challenges which ought to be self-evident. That Chris Kohn realises it with such sureness is a tribute to the intelligence of his direction as much as the imagination of his design crew and the commitment of his first-class cast.

Like Katz's text, Adam Gardnir's design both exploits and destroys the illusions of theatricality. At the beginning of the show, the audience waits before a huge red curtain that stretches the entire width of the theatre. The curtains pull back to reveal a stage space defined by floor-to-ceiling lengths of fabric, broken diagonally by white goal posts.

With the help of mini-sets unobstrusively swept on and off the stage and Richard Vabre's inventive lighting design, Kohn exploits seemingly every possibility of the space. There are constant shifts of perspective and focus, from intimate scenes surrounded by threatening darknesses to bleak, impossible distances, and text or graphics projected onto the back of the stage provide further dislocations. The effect is disconcertingly like being inside someone else's dream. The emotional intensities are heightened by Jethro Woodward's brooding soundscape, and by selectively miking the actor's voices.

A production as multilayered as this requires performers with a sure sense of theatricality, capable of creating extreme emotional realities without the safety harnesses of "character" or sequential narrative. Kohn has a remarkable cast which includes some of the most distinguished artists in the business, and there's no point where you don't believe them. No one is less than excellent, but the performances of Luke Mullins, Brian Lipson and Margaret Cameron stand out for their authoritative playfulness, their ability to generate naked feeling from even the most absurd of theatrical masks.

Something slumps in about the third quarter: it is as if the metaphorical underpinnings of the production, which up to then I hadn't questioned, loosen their moorings. I can't identify why; it might be only an effect of the performance I saw, though I suspect at that point the writing flies just a little too wide of itself; it is perceptible when the energy comes back. Theatre like this walks a perilously thin line: working with such displaced realities, it has to be utterly focused in every moment.

However, this by no means reduces the achievement of the show. Lally Katz and the Terrible Mysteries of the Volcano is remarkably accomplished theatre that plucks chords deep in the subconscious. It's a hauntingly sad, mysterious work, braced by the vulgarity that marks truly original theatre. In pushing their aesthetic to this pitch without losing their nerve, Stuck Pigs Squealing has truly come of age. It will be fascinating to see where they go next.

Picture: Clockwise from front-centre: Anthony Johnson, Jennifer Priest, Margaret Cameron, Brian Lipson, Luke Mullins. Photograph: Vivian Cooper Smith

Links
Stuck Pigs Squealing
Theatreworks
Ontological-Hysteric Theater
Mac Wellman

The Black Swan of Trespass by Lally Katz and Chris Kohn. Directed by Chris Kohn, with Jacklyn Bassanelli, Christopher Brown, Gavan O'Leary, Katie Keady and Chris Kohn (musician). Stuck Pigs Squealing at The Tower Theatre, Malthouse, until August 7. Stalking Matilda by Tee O'Neill. Directed by Chris Bendall, with Jude Beaumont, Irene Dios, Odette Joannidis, Ron Jordan, Toby Newton and Jeremy Stanford, Theatre@Risk at Theatreworks, St Kilda, until August 21.

People speak easily about the poetry of theatre, as if it were self evident, as if it were merely an ornament available to those who might choose to employ it. But poetry is not an easy thing. It is the pith and passion of plays, the molten spine of them; it is the profundity that is summoned by the carnality of language, the mystery of the corporeal and the mortal: this particular body in this specific time, speaking what cannot be repeated.

The Black Swan of Trespass and Stalking Matilda are very different plays; but both have been described as "poetic". It must be said that the poetry of theatre differs, markedly and importantly, from poems: but it is also related, in ways which are not necessarily obvious but which remain profound. Predictably I suppose, given my own predelictions, what struck me in both productions was a conviction that theatre practitioners would benefit from a better understanding of poetry.




The Black Swan of Trespass concerns itself with one of the most celebrated hoaxes in Australian literary history. In 1943 Harold Stewart and James McAuley, two poets with a particular animus towards the modernist work of writers like Dylan Thomas and Henry Treece, cooked up a fictional poet called Ern Malley. They created his life's work (sixteen poems called The Darkening Ecliptic) in an afternoon's hijinks of creative collage using, among other things, a Complete Works of Shakespeare and an army training manual on mosquitos. They concocted a letter from Ern's sister Ethel that described his life as a garage mechanic and his tragic early death from Graves disease, and sent the lot to Max Harris, then the young, iconoclastic editor of the modernist journal Angry Penguins.

As is well known, Harris enthusiastically published the poems, proclaiming Malley a genius. When Stewart and McAuley exposed the hoax, he stuck to his guns; whether or not they had intended it, he said, the poems were still extraordinary. But the story took another twist when Harris was prosecuted for obscenity in a courtcase which has shades of Pythonesque black comedy. The ultimate irony is that the poems have passages of undeniable beauty, and are now probably the most famous pieces of writing either Stewart or McAuley published. Malley generated a compelling reality: there is even a celebrated portrait of him by Sidney Nolan.

In The Black Swan of Trespass, writer Lally Katz and director Chris Kohn conjure some charming theatre from the ghostly figure of the imaginary poet. Ern Malley is summoned by Stewart and McAuley, who are represented by comically grotesque puppets - a chicken and a cat - on either side of the stage, and Ern himself (Christopher Brown) stands before us, tall, rangy, surreally Australian, all his suburban pathos framed in the velvet curtains of a puppet theatre.

The irony of Malley's situation as a poet who does not exist is not lost on him. As a theatrical creation, he is uneasily aware, as in fact any conscious writer must be, that his language is at best only partly his own and may be, in fact, writing him, that his writerly self is a fiction that trespasses hesitantly on the "alien waters" of reality. As the poet says in Dürer: Innsbruck, 1495, the work from which the show takes its title and which is to my mind the loveliest of the Malley poems:

"I had read in books that art is not easy
But no one warned that the mind repeats
In its ignorance the vision of others. I am still
The black swan of trespass on alien waters."

The theatrical realisation of these complexities is often enchanting. Chris Kohn employs music, stylised performance and projected text as well as an ingeniously surreal design to create a show that works on multiple levels, and which seeks to express the pathos and irony of both Malley's unstable existence and his writings. Characters which are imaginary even in Ern's reality - Anopholes (Gavan O'Leary), a kind of mosquito-muse/narrator, and Princess (Jacklyn Bassanelli), his Keatsian love object - thicken the texture further. There are moments in this show - most often when Malley says his own poems - when all these complexities fold together into a shimmering, vital present.

One such scene is when Ethel (Katie Keadie) and Ern venture out into the real world, and speak about the people hurrying home - a description reminiscent of John Brack's painting Collins St, 5pm. Here the force of their yearning to be like other people, to be real, attains a potent and fragile poignancy. But too often this delicacy and poise is blurred in Lally Katz's script, which cannot but suffer by comparison to the complexity of the Malley poems: sometimes merely simplistic in its responses to them, it often veers dangerously close to sentimentalisation.

In the final scene, where Ern speaks his Petit Testament, I writhed at the bad judgement of punctuating each verse with lyrics from a sentimental love song. It was as if the dislocations of the poem, the contradictions of the poet and the poetry itself, could be resolved through a comfortingly simple narrative of unattainable and tragic love. No, it's not that simple.

Tee O'Neill's Stalking Matilda, directed by Chris Bendall for Theatre@Risk, addresses a more familiar theatrical poetic, that of the chorus. But this chorus is not a formal Greek convocation of witnesses, but something more like Brecht's idea of epic theatre in his essay The Street Scene, in which members of the cast enact the events they are describing, fluidly moving in and out of character.

Stalking Matilda was originally commissioned in Ireland, and has apparently been rewritten to reflect "an Australian setting and spirit". Perhaps its first problem is that, despite its concern with the plight of asylum seekers, common to both countries, it does not easily make the transition from Ireland to Australia. Local conditions, I couldn't help reflecting as I watched, do count; the English/Irish "hoodies" are not the same as Australian gangs; we have not had a celebrated racist murder like the Stephen Lawrence case in England (obliquely referred to in the play); and racism here is, if equally ugly, different in its ugliness.

The major difference between Ireland and Australia is perhaps that Australian history since settlement has been characterised by successive waves of immigrants and so is, whether we admit it or not, deeply multicultural, whereas Ireland is a racially homogenous society marked more by emigration than immigration, in which the sudden intrusion of "aliens" registers as a shock. The notion of "aliens" - central to the metaphor of the play - is somewhat muffled here by the immigrant status of so many of us. This uneasiness of locale undermines the play's potency; it might have been better to present it in its full Irishness.

Despite this, there is much to like in O'Neill's writing, in particular her robust embrace of human complexity and her refusal of easy moralising. The dilemmas faced by asylum seekers are sketched briskly and without sentiment. O'Neill portrays the injustices they face, desperately fleeing their own countries only to become persecuted non-citizens in a country that does not want them, but she also reveals the resilience and comic subversiveness of the oppressed, the small but vital ways in which human beings can help each other survive.

Central to the play is the figure of Matilda (Jude Beaumont), a charismatic, beautiful woman whose decision to walk into the sea and disappear is the mystery that sparks the action. The chorus - Irene Dios, Odette Joannidis, Ron Jordan, Toby Newton and Jeremy Stanford - discover her mobile phone on the beach and read a series of text messages, which reveal complexities, hypocrisies, strange elisions. The play is structured around a gradual enactment - not necessarily in chronological order - of the events that led to those cryptic notes.

Matilda is in many ways a symbol of European liberal ambivalence and its inevitable complicity with power. On the one hand, she is devoted to helping her asylum seeker friends, getting them false documents, spending hours with them in the bureaucratic maze of applying for citizenship, celebrating with them their small triumphs, even marrying Suleyman (Rob Jordan), a refugee from an unnamed African country. (Although ethnicities - Eastern European, African - are broadly suggested, countries are referred to by number - "First World", "Sixteenth World" - which is an economical and effective distancing device).

On the other, Matilda has a perverse affair with the General (Jeremy Stanford), a shadowy and sinister military commander who puts money into her bank account after every sexual encounter. And she may be also responsible for the death of Suleyman, who appears to be the victim of a brutal race hate crime, and for the burning down of the boarding house where her immigrant friends live.

The chorus sets off to discover the truth of these contradictory signs, but the murder mystery impulse isn't enough to sustain the energy of the play, despite a gallery of skilfully drawn characters and some interesting scenes. On the night I saw it, the action flagged considerably in its second half; it was a bit of a race to see whether the play would end before I lost interest entirely in why Matilda had walked into the sea. Jude Beaumont turning in anguish to the waves became, in truth, a rather over-used image during the course of the show. Though, in mitigation, I note that the given running time is 90 minutes, and the show I saw went for two hours. It could have been an exceptionally slow night that exaggerated the longeuers and repetitions in the production.

But there were other problems that were not to do with pacing. Especially towards the end, the chorus was often written with a self-conscious, literal clumsiness that slowed down the play. The physical-theatre aspect of the performances, together with the day-glo circus set, at times reminded me of those breathlessly earnest Theatre In Education shows English teachers used to inflict on unwitting adolescents in the name of culture. At its best, the production transcended these associations, but not often enough to lift the show out of its problems.

There is a poetic of a promising muscularity at work in this play, but it stumbles. Poetry exists in the silences between words, in what is not said, at least as much as it does in the words spoken; and sometimes in Stalking Matilda there were just too many notes.

Picture: Christopher Brown as Ern Malley in The Black Swan of Trespass. Photo: Heidrun Lohr

Links

Malthouse Theatre
Ern Malley: The Complete Poems
Theatre@Risk
Theatreworks

The Eisteddfod by Lally Katz, directed by Chris Kohn, with Jessamy Dyer and Luke Mullins, Stuck Pigs Squealing Theatre, The Store Room, Fitzroy. Until July 11.

The Eisteddfod is like a series of Chinese boxes - a play inside a play inside a play. And what do we find, gentle reader, once we peel back those endless layers of performance? As Peer Gynt discovers with his onion, there's nothing in the middle: just a comfortless question, which happens to be the same as Albert Camus' - given life's tragic absurdity, why don't we just hang ourselves?

In fact, this play provokes a veritable cornucopia of allusions, which is, I'm sure, a good sign - about the production, if not the junkroom of my brain. I found it intriguing both to watch and think over, and its every aspect - writing, direction, design and acting - is characterised by a witty, sardonic intelligence. The Eisteddfod might be subtitled "Kath and Kim meet Cocteau"; it is a kind of Les Enfants Terribles set in surburban Caulfield or Box Hill, the story of a brother and sister who withdraw into an imaginary world where they play out games of an increasingly disturbing eroticism.

Gerture (Jessamy Dyer) and Abalone (Luke Mullins) are orphaned early by a "pruning accident" and subsequently become agoraphobic, creating fantasy lives of a strangely rich banality. Gerture's private world is her career as a German teacher (her name is pronounced, for what it's worth, the same as "Goethe", just as, in a nod to Chekhov, the prize for The Eisteddfod is a ticket to Moscow). Abalone, threatened by his increasing exclusion from her private fantasies, lures her back into their mutual bedroom with his ambition to win the local Eisteddfod by performing Macbeth, with Gerture alongside as Lady Macbeth.

I wondered, given its play-within-a-play format, whether Hamlet might not be a better foil for the action, but this idea is raised and dismissed early on: Macbeth it is, not only for the chance to play off Lady Macbeth's ambition, neatly inverted in Katz's play, but also perhaps for how the sheer bleakness of Macbeth's famous valediction to his wife underlines The Eisteddfod's desolate subtext: "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, / Who struts and frets his hour upon the stage / And is heard no more. It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound fury, / Signifying nothing."

In between rehearsals, they play out various erotic roles - their parents' unhappy marriage and, in particular, an abusive relationship between Gerture and her lover Ian, a man who fully deserves the epithet "sleaze". The sexual games circle towards rape, touching a sadism disturbing enough to recall those notorious photos from Abu Ghraib (especially when Abalone dons a balaclava); but like most of the allusions in this play, these connections operate subliminally, flickering darkly beneath the surface sparkle.

And there's plenty of sparkle in this young company's production. Chris Kohn's direction is assured, whipping up a high level of energy from the start by precise shifts of orchestration, helped along with a cheesily bright sound design by Jethro Woodward and Richard Vabre's snappy lighting. Adam Gardnir's design is similarly smart: a raised platform which signifies the bedroom, with useful storage spaces and nifty detailing which permits this tiny space to have a surprising number of defined performing areas. Jessamy Dyer and Luke Mullins handle the shifts from grotesque parody to authentic grimness with a wholly engaging air of innocence, which gives the later shift to darker realities all the more punch. The only time I felt a glitch was in the final duologue, which seemed just slightly - three or four beats - too long.

The writer herself, Lally Katz, makes a couple of appearances as an introductory voice over and as a puppet, which serves to destabilise the already deranged theatrical realities even further. This introduces another level of satire: the vanity (in both senses) of performance itself. As the various layers of performance within the play - the Eisteddfod, the siblings' games, a puppet show - ripple inwards towards emptiness, so the idea that all human behaviour is performance ripples out into reality. The Eisteddfod is not only a mordant critique of the banality of suburban life, but also suggests that all the selves people present, even the most private, are merely surfaces; roles which play us, rather than roles we play. Its irreverent echoing of Cocteau, perhaps the 20th century's most profound artist of appearance, goes much deeper than surface allusion.