The Winterling by Jez Butterworth, directed by Andrew Gray. Set design by Peter Mumford, lighting design by Stelios Karagiannis, costumes by Naomi Clegg. With Steven Adams, Nicholas Bell, Ella Caldwell, Adrian Mulraney and Martin Sharpe. Red Stitch Actors Theatre until April 19. Bookings: 9533 8082

The Ghosts of Ricketts Hill, directed by Neil Gladwin. With Joseph O'Farrell, Miles O'Neill and Glen Walton. Suitcase Royale @ The Bosco, Federation Square, Comedy Festival, until April 5. Bookings: 1300 660 013

The intimacy of Red Stitch theatre is peculiarly suited to creating claustrophobic spaces. And for its production of The Winterling, designer Peter Mumford has conjured a derelict farmhouse, an eyescape of greys and dun browns that generates a tangible sense of poverty-stricken gloom. What's fascinating about this, however, is that while the space itself is claustrophobic, it calls up a powerful sense of a dark, huge emptiness offstage, inviting your imagination into the harsh, bare landscapes of rural Dartmoor.


It's an evocative visual setting for Jez Butterworth's play, which places the petty and brutal dealings of human beings against a wider natural setting. Here humankind, like nature, is red in tooth and claw, trapped in a remorseless struggle for survival.

It's a play that isn't driven by plot so much as by the imperatives of dialogue; the story is really secondary to the moment-by-moment interactions of the characters. In The Winterling, former hard man West (Nicholas Bell) is hiding out in a remote farmhouse in Dartmoor after he has suffered a nervous breakdown. His former associate Wally (Steven Adams) has driven from London with his stepson, Patsy (Martin Sharpe). During their visit, they encounter two Dartmoor natives, the tramp Draycott (Adrian Mulraney) and Lue (Ella Caldwell), a homeless girl who has holed up at the farmhouse.

Butterworth is a writer who has clearly learnt much from Harold Pinter, especially from his early plays like The Birthday Party and The Caretaker. Like Pinter, his major concern is the relationships between men, and his characters remain largely mysterious: language is not so much a vehicle for communication, as a means of exerting dominance, of establishing territorial rights. Power is a game, and dominance shifts without explanation, sometimes within the space of a line. Again like Pinter, he employs the techniques of surreal interrogation to create a potent sense of menace.

The dialogue - and Andrew Gray's production - are compelling enough to keep your interest throughout the play. And Butterworth is gifted at forging a rich and poetic colloquial speech, especially in the many monologues. But while Butterworth has clearly understood Pinter in the details of dialogue, he doesn't demonstrate a concomitant understanding of larger dramatic structure.

Given the play's linguistic dazzle, The Winterling is puzzlingly clumsy. It is written in three scenes, the middle scene being an unnecessarily explanatory flashback, and draws to a close that supposedly presents a dilemma, but which in fact is too pat, too redolent of a playwright's conscious control of meaning, to resonate with anything but a superficial menace. The larger metaphor of the play ends up being less than the sum of its parts, and consequently Butterworth never crawls out of Pinter's long shadow.

For all that, it's an impressive production, featuring a very strong cast. It's worth seeing for the performances alone, which call up enough neck-prickling moments to justify the price of admission. It's carefully orchestrated, permitting the actors to negotiate those razor-sharp shifts of power with total commitment. I enjoyed all the performances, but a monologue of Adrian Mulraney's involving a real sheep's heart cooked off-stage (where the director invokes the audience's sense of smell) and a rapid-fire dialogue between Bell and Sharpe were standouts.

I'VE FOLLOWED Suitcase Royale since I was enchanted in a Fitzroy back room in by their first show, Felix Listens to the World. They moved on from that irresistible piece of whimsy to the black surrealism of Chronicles of a Sleepless Moon. The Ghosts of Ricketts Hill is their third piece, directed - if indeed this anarchic lot can be directed - by former Los Trios Ringbarkus member Neil Gladwin.

Suitcase Royale's signature is its junkyard aesthetic and the set - largely constructed out of roughly hacked pieces of cardboard - is, if anything, even more low-rent than their previous shows. And the plot pays little heed to any kind of narrative sense. Three aviators in various stages of psychological confusion crash in the middle of the desert. Two depart to look for help, heading for a nearby lighthouse, while the third, in the grasp of some mysterious obsession with the cargo, remains behind. The ensuing story might have been written by George Lucas on a bad acid trip, and involves an evil wolfman, a sentient lighthouse, a battery-powered magical amulet and David Bowie.

But the plot is merely an excuse for the real action, which is the disintegration of the show amid a profusion of boy jokes, groaningly recognisable quotations from popular songs and profane language. Light cues are missed, arguments break out among the cast, actors forget their lines or assault each other. And it all happens at breakneck speed, pulling you along with its raw, anarchic energy.

It's all great, even irresistible, fun, but I miss the delicacy that informed their previous shows, in which the performers' full-on testosteronic energy was put in tension with a genuine poignancy. This extends to their use of objects, a feature of all their work: a great deal of the charm of both Felix Listens to the World and Chronicles of a Sleepless Moon was the ingenuity of the props, the compelling realities that could be made out of discarded objects. Here objects are treated with an awesome disrespect, and everything is mugged for laughs. On its own terms, it works: but you can't help feeling this is too easy.

What The Ghosts at Ricketts Hill lacks is the multiple layering that makes a show more than an occasion for transient laughter, the image that punctures the joke and enters a darker and more troubling space. It seems to me that this is a transitional work, Suitcase Royale on the way from one mode to another. In which case, the show to look out for might be the one after this.

Picture: Ella Caldwell and Adrian Mulraney in The Winterling. Photo: Jodie Hutchinson

Chronicles of the Sleepless Moon written, devised and performed by Joseph O'Farrell, Miles O'Neil and Glen Walton. The Suitcase Royale @ The Black Lung Theatre, Kent St Bar, 201 Smith St, Collingwood, until June 17. Vaudeville X by Michael Dalley, with Grant Cartwright, Michael Dalley and Daniel Fletcher, music by John Thorn. High Performance Company @ Dantes, Gertrude St, Fitzroy until June 18.

Are we in the throes of a theatre renaissance? I was saying so to a friend just last week, and bingo! there in yesterday's Australian is an analysis of Melbourne's theatre revival, which claims that after a bleak sojourn in the Slough of Despond all through the '90s, theatre in Melbourne now has new vim in its step and light in its eyes as it marches onwards to the Celestial City. So it must be true.

Corrie Perkin's article is on the money, citing the Malthouse Theatre and a vibrant Victorian College of the Arts as particular catalysts for nurturing a feisty new generation of independent theatre artists. The success of the Malthouse bears out my hopes early last year that the radical shift in philosophy there was "the best thing that's happened there in the past decade; and ... the beginning of a more generous imagining of the Australian stage". Without any doubt, by plugging into a richly diverse and vital independent scene, the Malthouse has legitimised and often realised approaches to theatre that were previously marginalised as "fringe".



Such nurturing depends, however, on having something to nurture. Maybe the most significant sign that something truly is sparking here is the theatrical liveliness off the main stages, in tiny venues above funky little bars and pubs in the inner city. If you have an idle evening or two next week, you could do a lot worse than to wander down to Fitzroy and see Chronicles of the Sleepless Moon, the second offering from the young auteurs of The Suitcase Royale, or drop into Dante's and spend an hour being wickedly entertained by the wits of Vaudeville X. In both cases, it might be advisable to book.

Chronicles of the Sleepless Moon extends the "junkyard theatre" The Suitcase Royale developed in their first show, Felix Listens to the World. Perhaps the major character of the show is the set itself. It's an artfully artless clutter of discarded objects (they include a typewriter, an old film projector, a toy piano, bits of bedsteads, ear phones, lamps, switches, cardboard boxes) which are ingeniously manipulated and transformed to illustrate the narrative.

It can't be said that the story - like Felix Listens to the World, a fairytale of sorts - makes a lot of sense (perhaps it makes an uncommon sense, since it is, in the proper sense of the term, absurd). It must be a real play, though, because it is in three Acts. Set in outback Australia, it concerns a maniacal Butcher who has just murdered his wife, a Doctor possessed with a vision to map the Underground with his engine fuelled by the blood of cows, and the Newsman who seeks to expose them both and scoop the world.

A collision of melodrama, surreal comedy, theatrical ingenuity and Tom Waits-style folk/blues, Chronicles is a high-spirited pisstake on any number of Australian cliches - the outback pub, the hard-bitten newsman, the homoerotic relationships of lonely men. It's like Wake In Fright on acid. We find out that Suitcase Royale are also pretty hot musicians - a highlight is the ballad about Sheila, the Butcher's wife, in which he laments that "if I hadn't killed you, you'd still be here". And it's also a love story of sorts; the Butcher holds a candle for the Doctor, who rejects his tremulous advances.

The humour is black and pitiless, but the show somehow retains a poignant sense of humanity. How can you dislike three madmen when they are po-facedly eating pickled onions in front of you? (I wish I could describe how funny this scene is). And there is a strange innocence in all these characters, a sense that their various lunatic idealisms are attempts to transcend a grinding emptiness within their existence. As in Buchner's Woyczek, the earth beneath them is hollow. One could probably excavate from this anarchic narrative a bleak subtext about Australia's vision of itself, and of the loneliness and yearning of masculinity; but it might hang a little heavily on a show which is really a riff of ingenious jokes.

The three performers use almost every device of animation - banraku puppetry, animated projections, shadow puppets - as well as highly stylised performance, a rich recorded soundscape and live music to tell their story. Part of the delight of this show is the intricate minature models, painstakingly crafted out of cardboard or other junk, of houses or pubs. The performers are enchanted by the world of objects, and their enchantment is infectious.

Worth mentioning too is the theatre in which they perform - the Black Lung Theatre, which opened in April this year above the Kent St Bar in Smith St. Co-directed by Thomas Wright and Thomas Henning, it specifically seeks to host experimental and devised theatre. It's a friendly, comfortable space, and you can smoke downstairs in the cosy bar. I liked it a lot.

A couple of days later I found myself in Fitzroy again, this time at Dante's in Gertrude St where Vaudeville X is packing them into the unlikely upstairs bar. This room is panelled in warm wood, with red velvet curtains and blue-lit wall niches in which are placed art nouveau figurines and rows of dusty wine-bottles, and its air of tatty elegance frames this show perfectly.

This the the third season for Vaudeville X; it's been an alternative hit since it premiered in 2004. And from the moment the three performers apparate from behind the bar in their impeccable tuxedos, it's easy to see why. Darling, it's just fabulous.

Michael Dalley's songs are an irresistibly funny series of satires on all things middle class - his net is wide and his barbs are deadly. There are digs at the snobberies of inner-suburbia ("Things Aren't Going Well When Girls Called Narelle Drink Caffe Latte"), a ditty called "Spirit Song" which is a painfully accurate take-off of ABC-FM choral music, a spit in the direction of braindead morning radio DJs and some severe criticism of the hypocrisies of touristic exploitation of the Third World by wannabe alternativistas.

And plenty of laughs, too, at the pretensions of aesthetes, although these songs are sophisticated parodies that clearly expose the satirists themselves as, well, aesthetes. "The Sewers of Berlin", a brilliant pastiche of Weill and Brecht, and "The Ghost of the Postmodern Dancer", which flays the pretensions of innovative movement, are highlights of the show.

It's performed with style and plenty of physical brio by Dalley, Grant Cartwright and Daniel Fletcher, all performers of no small abilities. The show is slicker than a Porsche full of Eddie Maguires, and infinitely more intelligent. Hie thee there by whatever means you can. And you can smoke downstairs at Dante's, too. Is a pattern beginning to emerge here?

Picture: The Suitcase Royale in Chronicles of a Sleepless Moon

Links
The Suitcase Royale
The Black Lung
Dante's

Felix Listens to the World, devised and performed by Joseph O'Farrell, Miles O'Neil and Glen Walton. Suitcase Royale @ Gertrudes, Fitzroy.

Gentle reader, sometimes to be a critic - even a self-appointed creature such as I - is a question of commitment. Commitment and resolve. Commitment, resolve and guts of even a Quixotian nature. So it was recently, when one evening I sallied forth, via the peripatetic Melbourne public transport system, to see Felix Listens to the World.

Picture, if you will, the said critic (me), miserable with the depradations of a particularly vicious virus, venturing forth from her cosy fireside into the snow and sleet - oh, all right, into the somewhat brisk breezes of Fitzroy. Glamorously garbed in hat, scarf, gloves, coat and thick woollen underwear, the red-nosed one shivers her way across town, pathetically clutching cough lollies and her copy of the London Review of Books, her major defence against unreliable timetables.

And for what? An inextinguishable curiosity? A heroic desire to bring the word back from the Olympian heights of art? Sheer idiocy? All of the above? For as theatre goers know, theatre is a perilous enterprise...all this effort could have left me sulking soggily for an hour in a dark room, wishing I was home filing my nails.



But this, reader, was not one of those occasions. (Yes, I'm getting to the theatre now). I was to be translated out of my quotidian existence, by an enchantment particular to theatre; and since that existence was at the time fairly pitiable, this seemed to me an unalloyedly good thing. The sign that greeted the audience on their way to the assortment of cushions and couches that was the auditorium said: "Please turn off all links to the real world". I, for one, was only too happy to oblige.

Felix Listens to the World is the first work made by Suitcase Royale, a new company of three young performers, Joseph O'Farrell, Miles O'Neil and Glen Walton. They describe what they do as "junkyard theatre". The discarded objects of the not-so-distant past litter their stage: manual typewriters (remember them?), gramophones, lamps, fishing rods, battered suitcases, film projectors.

These objects are refugees from the 20th century, drenched with a nostalgia as gentle as the yellow lamplight that illuminates them, and they form the materials for the performance. The fear of giving an erroneous impression makes me hesitate to say that this show is child-like: it has a naivety that properly lives in the heart of all theatre, the "let's pretend" factor, but it rigorously avoids any sense of the saccharine. And this work draws on some sophisticated influences: in particular, European puppetry and physical theatre.

The story is as simple as possible: they enact a fable about the lovelorn Felix searching for his wife Rose, who has for unknown reasons sailed away in a teacup. Felix is played interchangably by the three performers, who are each dressed identically.

A large part of the delight of this show is in its ingenuity: Suitcase Royale employs performer-operated lighting, puppetry techniques, sound and clever inventions to continually surprise you with a shift in perspective. These techniques, like the comedy, depend on sharp timing and placement for effect, and the performers unobtrusively get it right. I especially loved all the changes in scale: a suitcase might open and reveal a tiny city, or a lamp suddenly transform into the moon.

It is enchanting in the best sense. The performance is suffused by an amiable comedy that strikes me as peculiarly European: the same kind of pleasure in the absurd that infuses films like The Triplets of Belleville or puppetry shows I've seen in Paris. Behind its charm is a tremulous sense of the mystery, unpredictability and absurdity of love. But there's a roughness in it I liked too, that stems from the insistence on using found objects, on noticing the humble and discarded aspects of our world.

This show won, deservedly, the 2004 Malthouse 3D Festival, and Best Performance in the 2004 Fringe Festival. Now Suitcase Royale are taking it to tour Canada. If it gets another showing in Melbourne, mark it in your diary. And watch these boys: it's hardly rocket science to predict that we'll hear more of them.

Picture: Joseph O'Farrell, Miles O'Neil and Glen Walton in Felix Listens to the World

Suitcase Royale