Watching the development of theatre companies is a fascinating business. They are organisms subject to all the travails of being alive: growth, change, decay, death and renewal. They are networks of individual energies which seed in unexpected places, producing unexpected syntheses and collaborations. The Hayloft Project and Chamber Made Opera are cases in point. Both have had a major impact on performance in this town, and both are under new artistic leadership.

Hayloft was begun by Simon Stone in 2007, pulling together a bunch of recently graduated talent for a notable production of Franz Wedekind's Spring Awakening (review here). Since then, Melbourne, and later Sydney, has seen a series of productions that re-examined classics and mounted new works, sometimes controversially, and Stone has catapulted to the main stage at the STC and is now resident director at Belvoir St. Hayloft, which has never been short on talent, is now under the artistic leadership of Anne-Louise Sarks, who as well as being assistant director on Stone's recent Belvoir production of The Wild Duck, directed the Fringe hit Yuri Wells and last year's exquisite version of Gorky's The Nest.


Chamber Made, on the other hand, has been around since 1988, until last year under the artistic directorship of Douglas Horton. From its first production, the oft-returned Helen Noonan solo work Recital, it defined itself as the place for modern opera in Melbourne. Its production of Phillip Glass's The Fall of the House of Usher, which featured an outstanding design by Trina Parker, remains one of my peak theatrical experiences. And this company too has a new artistic director - David Young, formerly AD of Aphids and a composer in his own right.

The continuities are much more obvious in Hayloft, which is not so much reinventing itself as continuing its previous explorations, using much of the same talent that drove their earlier work. Delectable Shelter, directed and written by Benedict Hardie, is Hayloft's second production under Sarks. Under the umbrella of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, it's an SF apocalyptic satire, produced with all the style we've come to expect from Hayloft. It's a stylish three-act nonsense with savage undertones and a surprisingly optimistic feel.

The conceit is that a bunch of fanatics have decided that the world is past saving and have ramped up climate change to a catastrophic degree that destroys all life on earth. Five people - an engineer and four members of an upper-middle class Melbourne family - are in a bunker underground, readying themselves to repopulate the planet, once it is possible to reinhabit it, with a new, utopian society.

The bunker itself, represented in Claude Marcos's design by a kind of open-sided cabinet propped on the stage, is decorated with the most eye-burning wallpaper I've ever seen which, even more than the walls of the box, emphasises the claustrophobia of Hardie's black vision. (The single sign of real life, a painting by Van Gogh, sits jarringly on the wall, representing everything that has been destroyed). In between the three acts, we are given performances of 80s pop songs rearranged by Benny Davis as Bach madrigals, sumptuously sung by the performers in eye-popping salmon-pink choral robes.

There are touches of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Red Dwarf and Chris Morris's deeply unsettling Blue Jam in the text. The first two acts follow the fortunes of this dysfunctional family, immediately after the catatrsophe and then a couple of years later. Privilege functions here as emotional and intellectual cauterisation, a complete inability to empathise with anyone, or to grasp any reality beyond the immediate situation. It emerges as careless cruelty and a carefully meaningless dialogue that skates over an abyss of neuroticism. The family obediently bows to the necessities of their situation: breeding schedules and survival.

The action then leaps three centuries, to the eve of their re-emergence onto the surface of the planet. Hardie examines the (il)logical results of a vastly depleted gene pool - a bunker populated by hundreds of people who are all identical to their five progenitors, and a musical culture that has evolved from two Ur-texts, Bach chorales and 80s pop songs. Idle suggestions written down three centuries earlier have risen to the status of religious texts, cannibalism is a way of life and the Chinese - according to rumour, the only other survivors of the destruction of the earth, and masters of leaping backwards onto buildings - are The Enemy. But how to greet the Enemy? With guns or with songs?

Alistair Mew's sublimimally rumbling sound design adds to the dissociative realities, suggesting a world crumbling in chaos outside the bright, airtight box where the increasingly unhinged characters dutifully pursue their deluded dreams. Hardie's play is sharp and clever, paying off all its jokes, although I thought the middle act a little overwritten and consequently slow. The cast brings an infectious energy and some beautiful voices to this bizarro world, with an especially sharp comic performance by Yesse Spence; the early scenes were a little sticky on opening night, but relaxed as the evening progressed. Very funny, with enough sting to create a lingering aftertaste.


Chamber Made's Minotaur: The Island is another cup of tea entirely. Something between a New Music concert, an installation, a ritual or invocation and the kind of performances children make for their families, it's part of an initiative by David Young that literally brings opera into the living room. For this performance, co-commissioned by Tasmania's 10 Days on the Island festival and a private sponsor, Dr Peta Gillingham, we were invited to an apartment 17 floors above St Kilda Rd. The event was catered by a chef and involved some good wines and a stunning night-time view over the Shrine: I imagine it was a very different experience from the opera's premiere at Bruny Island, where it was developed among the community.

Quite aside from its loungeroom setting, the reverberations with theatre made at home are irresistible. Once everyone was seated, we were asked to close our eyes, in lieu of a blackout. The costumes are all repurposed - dress-ups, headgear made of baskets and handbags and pencil-cases. There is a percussion kit, a small harpsichord and a double bass, but music is also made from a series of props: cane coffee tables, wooden objects, a conch shell. The event is immediately domestic and improvised, but the effect is fascinating: it's a re-enactment of a myth that draws out of these humble objects a compelling sense of ritual. I found the performance wholly absorbing, and started thinking about the Lares, the household gods of the Romans, where the domestic sphere is also the site of the sacred.

Margaret Cameron's text is a fragmentary poem of considerable beauty that bookends the performance. The opening section is spoken by Caroline Lee, lying as Venus washed up on an imaginary shore, "the worst place I can imagine", and the final stanzas are sung by Deborah Kayser as Ariadne, who has lost her way and now must "start again". In the centre is the question of ecstasy and loss.

Venus recalls the conception of the Minotaur, half bull, half man, the result of Pasiphaë's passion for a white bull - a punishment meted out to her by the Goddess of Love for the husband's refusal to sacrifice the bull. That perverse copulation is the precursor of Ariadne's treacherous passion for the Athenian champion Theseus who, once he has used her insider knowledge to find and slay the monster in the Labyrinth, abandons her on the Isle of Naxos on his way back to Athens. The opera is about this place of abandonment.

In this opera, "identity is all timbre". David Young's score is about detail, silences and sounds drawn from ordinary objects as well as conventional instruments - the scraping along a plank, the rustling percussion from striking a basket, the breath of the performers - that build to concanetations of musical energy and then dissipate. It has a feeling of something ancient behind it: there are sounds that gesture towards the music scored for the Classical Greek theatre when it was first performed. Transformations are minimal and uneasy, and demand close listening. It's a familiar enough menu of sound for those at least a little acquainted with New Music, but what it's not is theatrical: Minotaur explores other senses of rhythm and fragmentation and attention.

The music evolves alongside highly stylised, hieratic performance. The performance walks a fine line, always with the threat of falling into the risible, but it never quite falls over. This is because its unstable tensions retain their suspension, and is also due to the performances themselves, which are utterly focused. And it creates some memorable images: a woman with a bird's head, playing the harpsichord; a multiple vision of a bull, made of six bodies; Ariadne holding a conch shell, perched like a ship's figurehead on a island made of a jumble of furniture. I couldn't always read the symbolism, but somehow that didn't matter. Fascinating work.

Images: promotion shots. Top, Hayloft's Delectable Shelter; bottom, Chamber Made's Minotaur.

Delectable Shelter, written and Directed by Benedict Hardie. Composed by Benny Davis, musical direction by Nathan Gilkes, set design by Claude Marcos, lighting design by Lucy Birkinshaw, costumes by Esther Hayes, sound design by Alister Mew. With Thomas Conroy, Simone Page Jones, Anthony Mackey, Josh Price and Yesse Spence. The Hayloft Project @ Theatre Works, until April 17.

Minotaur: The Island, composed by David Young, directed and written by Margaret Cameron. Performers: Deborah Kayser, Caroline Lee and Hellen Sky. Musicians: Mark Cauvin, Matthias Schack-Arnott and Anastasia Russell-Head. Commissioned by Ten Days on the Island and Dr Peta Gillingham, performed at a private apartment. Closed.

A fascinating phenomenon over the past few years has been the revival of naturalism as a theatrical force. For years, commentators divided Australian theatre into two strands: "naturalism", the accepted form of the mainstream or proto-mainstream; and "non-naturalism", which covered everything from mime to Barrie Kosky. Naturalism was linked to the so-called "well-made play", in which theatre did its best to imitate the conventions of television. Non-naturalism had a suspicious internationalism about it, and was best left to the Europeans or people who dressed exclusively in black and lived in Fitzroy.


This did theatre no favours, since the artform overspills such simplistic binaries. And not unsurprisingly, this binary - which also masquerades as the division between the "mainstream" and the "fringe" - has been collapsing, along with many other theatrical truisms, over the past decade. It's worth remembering, however, how recent this collapse is: only three years ago, critic Hilary Glow argued in her book Power Plays that naturalistic, character-based drama was a defining form of the "mainstream".

The state theatre presence of artists like Benedict Andrews or Tom Wright is a telling symptom of this shift. Just as telling is as the fact that some of the most interesting independent work around Melbourne in recent years - ranging from Beng Oh's production of Franz Xaver Kroetz's Tom Fool at Hoy Polloy, to floogle's production of Duncan Graham's Ollie and the Minotaur, to Daniel Schlusser's theatrical reworkings of classics - has been re-examining naturalism. Which brings me to The Nest, Hayloft's exquisite version of Maxim Gorky's first play, The Philistines.

Written by Benedict Hardie and Anne-Louise Sarks, The Nest at once returns naturalism to its radical, poetic roots, and liberates it into the present. It's an impressive work of adaptation: Hardie and Sarks have cut Gorky's unwieldy two and a half hour drama back to a finely-honed 90 minutes, filleting out its essentials from Gorky's baggily structured original. In doing so, they have created a piece of theatre that situates itself convincingly in contemporary Melbourne, while at the same time retaining an unmistakeable sense of Russianness, an achievement which almost feels like sleight of hand.

The Nest is a scathing indictment of a bourgouis family, which in Gorky's original play is a metaphor for Tsarist society on the brink of the Bolshevik Revolution. Here it's shifted, with a surprising aptness, to middle class Australia: a generation that defined itself through stability, security and authority is threatened by a world of bewildering global and technological change. Anti-globalisation protests are not quite the 1917 Revolution; the Revolution has already happened. And this is key to the poignancy of this adaptation, in which the shadow of the past is a dark smudge beneath the present.

The action revolves around Victor (James Wardlaw), in this version a widower, who is the miserly and viciously angry father of Tanya (Julia Grace) and Peter (Benedict Hardie). Victor is embittered and bewildered by his loss of authority over a rebellious new generation - his children and their friends, his young lodgers, even the maid. His avariciousness extends to his children: unable to let them go into adulthood, he finds he is equally unable to keep them. He is desolatingly lonely: some of the most powerful moments of the evening feature Victor alone in his house, tidying up the kitchen in rubber gloves, punching uselessly at the buttons of an iPod to turn off the music his children have left carelessly blaring through the house, or sitting emptily in his patriarchal seat in the dining room.

The Nest isn't simply about the divisions between generations; it is also about the profound connections - of habit, affection, grief, memory - between them. The young are as lost as their elders are, falling into patterns of which they are not even conscious. It's clear, for instance, that for all his rebellion against his father, Peter will follow in his footsteps. That these complexities play so beautifully is a tribute to the Hayloft ensemble: this is a strong, focused cast, each member of which deserves mention, and the various characters are played with beautiful emotional detail.


Claude Marcos's design sets the action in the round; the audience sits one deep around a wide playing area, dotted with the solid furniture of an old, middle-class Australian house representing a loungeroom, a kitchen, a hallway, a bedroom, a dining room. Russell Goldsmith's sound design unobstrusively heightens this reality with ambient sound and music - passing traffic, bird calls. The imaginary walls and doors are at first meticulously observed in the performances; as the work subtly shifts into a heightened stylisation, the "walls" dissolve, becoming a poignant sub-conscious metaphor for the dissolution of the family.

The audience is almost in the house, visible and invisible just as the walls are. This makes scenes like an impromptu party in the loungeroom intensely direct, almost as if we are at the same party; it's this directness of communication, placing events explicitly in the same social space as the audience, that is the real strength of contemporary naturalism. Anne-Louise Sarks's direction modulates this immediacy with subtle reminders of artifice: this is not theatre that aims to seduce us into an unthinking acceptance of its conventions.

Attention constantly shifts, without apparent effort, from one space to another; as the action progresses, there are more and more simultaneous moments - a couple making love in a bedroom, Tanya swallowing poison in the kitchen, a group on the back verandah - which gives a textured, increasingly powerful sense of individual privacies crossing in a mutual space. It's one of those shows which manages the delicate balance between deep polish, the result of craft and work, and yet in which each moment glows with spontaneous discovery.

Since their first production, in 2007, I've learned to expect a lot from Hayloft: I rather suspect, after Thyestes and The Nest, that my expectation has wound up another notch. Looking over this company's body of work, what's most striking is that they have never repeated themselves, although each project has deepened what appears to be a very singular exploration. Which seems to me the very definition of exciting art.

Pictures: Top: James Wardlaw; bottom, The Nest cast. Photos: Jeff Busby

The Nest, by Anne-Louise Sarks and Benedict Hardie, after Maxim Gorky's The Philistines. Set by Claude Marcos, costumes by Mel Page, lighting by Lisa Mibus, sound and composition Russell Goldsmith. With Sarah Armanious, Stuart Bowden, Stefan Bramble, Alexander Englabnd, Brigid Gallacher, Julia Grace, Benedict Hardie, Carl Nilsson-Polias, Meredith Penman and James Wardlaw. Northcote Town Hall, Studio One. Until December 19. Details and bookings.

Since 2007, The Hayloft Project has established itself as one of Australia’s leading independent companies with a string of elegant, razor-intelligent productions. In particular, they've attracted attention for their reworking of modern classics, such as Wedekind's Spring Awakening, Chekhov’s Platonov and, controversially, a fascinating version of Three Sisters, 3XSisters. For Thyestes, Malthouse's Tower Theatre residency for 2010, director Simon Stone reaches much further into the past, to the plays of Nero's tutor and adviser, philosopher and sometime dramatist, Seneca the Younger.

He's linked forces again with Black Lung stalwarts Mark Leonard Winter and Thomas Henning. Others include Chris Ryan (seen most recently in Malthouse’s Elizabeth and Benedict Andrews’s Measure for Measure at Belvoir St), Hayloft dramaturge Anne-Louise Sarks, one of the brains behind Hayloft's Fringe hit Yuri Wells, and sound designer Stefan Gregory, who was responsible for the astonishing sound in the STC’s The War of the Roses. The result is Hayloft’s best work yet, and one of the highlights of the year. Thyestes is rock'n'roll theatre: confronting, transgressive, uncomfortably hilarious, obscene, horrifying, and desolatingly beautiful.

Yet it's hard to know where to begin talking about this show. Thinking about it is very like contemplating one of those breeding tangles of snakes that David Attenborough's Life featured a couple of weeks ago on the ABC: it's an orgy of forms and ideas, each writhing about the others, which makes the mind slide distractingly from one thought to the next. I think that above all, you're dazzled by the sheer outrageous excess of it, its shockingly wasteful expense of energy. And yet this impression of excess is created by what is surely one of Hayloft's most austere productions.

The austerity begins with the design, which is stark black and white, reflecting the absolute moral world of classical tragedy. The Greeks didn't do shadows: this is a universe of darkness visible, where the hidden is dragged into the unforgiving light. Claude Marcos's traverse set - effectively a black, narrow, enclosed box, with a white interior exposed by Govin Ruben's harsh fluorescent lights - embodies this sense of continuous revelation. When the blinds that serve as curtains are down, as they are between every scene, it's impossible to see the audience on the other side: each new scene reveals the audience as well as the actors. This becomes increasingly disconcerting, because one of the paradoxical effects of this show is to erase distances: between then and now, them and us, the actors and ourselves.

A major reason for this sense of collapse between boundaries is Stefan Gregory's sensually enveloping sound design. Gregory shamelessly exploits the capacity of music to locate us ecstatically in the present: the soundtrack includes Schubert and Handel, Wu Tang Clan and Ice Cube, Roy Orbison and Queen. This connects with another convention - the use of surtitles - to make Thyestes seem like a kind of opera. It looks like theatre, sounds like theatre, but in its strangely abstracted narrative, and especially in its emotional excess, it works more like an operatic history.


And what of the story itself? Simon Stone and his collaborators claim their version of Thyestes is "after Seneca", but it's probably more true to label it "before Seneca". Seneca's actual play - notoriously "modern" in that very little happens aside from the climactic event - is enacted in a mere couple of scenes, right at the end of the show. The rest is an excavation of the bloody history of the House of Tantalus: the first and worst of all unhappy families.

From Tantalus himself, who stole ambrosia from Olympus and who most notably slaughtered and cooked his son Pelops to feed the gods, to Menelaus and Agamemnon, who besieged Troy for 10 years to recover the faithless Helen, this single family constitutes the DNA of what we think of as canonical western literature. The doings of Tantalus's descendents exercised, among countless others, Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and, later, Seneca. And through his influence on Jacobean and Elizabethan tragedy, and especially on Shakespeare, Seneca is arguably the biggest classical influence on English drama. What Hayloft presents isn't recognisably Shakespearean. It's not particularly Senecan, come to that. And yet its effect is surprisingly close to both: which I think is a result of a complexity of texture on the one hand, and a primitive, unforgiving harshness on the other.

Its narrative genius is the surtitles, which flash up before each scene, describing the plot of the story, before the curtains rise on the stage, revealing another, altogether more mundane reality. It's a brilliant way of coping with the tale's anachronisms, which are mostly removed from the actual performances, and become instead a framing device. And this convention means that the dozen or so short plays or tableaux that make up the whole need not concern themselves at all with plot. When the curtains rise, we are suddenly pitched into 21st century Melbourne, into the unremarked spaces between larger, tragic events. What we see are overwhelmingly domestic scenes.

The story begins with the murder by Thyestes (Thomas Henning) and Atreus (Mark Leonard Winter) of their half-brother, Chrysippus (Chris Ryan), at the urging of their mother Hippodamia, who is angry that her sons have been passed over to inherit the throne. The first scene is brilliant in how it winds you into its double reality: the three actors perform with an almost documentary realism that at first almost makes you believe you're overhearing three young men passing time, late at night, at a party. Until, that is, Chrysippus turns his back, fiddling with his iPod to get a favourite song, and the two brothers stand up, suddenly full of menace, and pull out the gun, and the machinery of tragedy is activated. Oddly, not so much on stage, as in our minds.

It's clear from the beginning that this version of Thyestes is primarily about the relationship between two brothers. The show has a genuinely Freudian edge, and not just in its unafraid confrontations of sexuality. Its increasing sense of disturbance is in how it echoes those dark jealousies that only exist between siblings, and that can continue lifelong, coloured into adulthood by the uncontrolled passions of infancy. Chrysippus's murder is at first presented as the originatory crime from which emerges the others, but as this bloody family history unrolls before us, it becomes clear that even this is an echo of earlier crimes, that these brothers are trapped in a hell of repetition that is the curse of their family.

This understanding has both a symbolic and a literal value: we understand the story in wholly contemporary terms, in how incest, for instance, can be passed down from generation to generation, the parent visiting on the child his or her own suffering; and we also understand it as myth, as a representation of something larger than it is. This dislocatedness is why it is, at times, very funny indeed. Some of its most powerful moments are when these double recognitions, which weave a complementary dance through the show, suddenly unite into a single breathtaking image.

The most memorable perhaps is when the curtain rises on the suicidal Pelopia (Chris Ryan), singing a Schubert lieder: mother of a child who is the product of incestuous rape, she is the image of unhealable damage, lifted suddenly into an ecstatically operatic moment, pain and beauty united. In such moments - there are others - the performers embody Nietzsche's idea of the tragic: a Dionysian image of absolute negation becomes, through the ecstasy of performance, "the absolute limit of affirmation". It's a quality that Barrie Kosky also achieves, although in very different ways: and the secret is in the balance between restraint and excess.

Winter, Henning and Ryan are astounding, on the one hand achieving a naturalistic authenticity that locates these extreme events in the middle of the mundane present, without on the other losing a sense of heightened reality. We believe in these ancient tales of warring kings, because we also understand, through these performances, that betrayal, violence, sexual excess, greed, despair and madness are, in fact, the most ordinary of human realities. Scratch the history of any family, and you will find such behaviours lurking not far beneath the surface. I'm not the first, for example, to link Thyestes's eating of his children with incest: in Hayloft's rendering of the story, this connection is even clearer, as it becomes a mirror of Thyestes's rape of his daughter Pelopia.

There's much more to tease out, but I've probably said enough. If you can possibly get there, don't miss it. The word is out, and it is wildly good: and the critics are in unusually rhapsodic alignment. The season has been extended an extra week, so there is still a chance to see it. But I suspect you'll have to be quick.

A short version of this review was in Monday's Australian.

Pictures, R-L: top, Mark Leonard Winter and Chris Ryan; bottom, Mark Leonard Winter, Thomas Henning and Chris Ryan. Photos: Jeff Busby

Thyestes, co-written and directed by Simon Stone, after Seneca. Co-written and performed by Thomas Henning, Chris Ryan and Mark Leonard Winter. Set and costumes by Claude Marcos, lighting by Govin Ruben, sound design by Stefan Gregory. The Hayloft Project and Malthouse Theatre, Tower Theatre. Melbourne Fringe Festival. Until October 9.

In one of those interesting synchronicities, there is a rash of contemporary theatre examining the foundational Christian myths. As Hayloft's BC - a rewriting of the Annunciation - plays in Melbourne, the STC is hosting Genesis, a contemporary look at the first chapters of the Bible performed by the Residents, their new ensemble. Black Lung last week put Christianity on the rack of its traumatic anarchy in Glasoon. Looking further back, two years ago Uncle Semolina & Friends reworked the Old Testament in OT.

It suggests that religion, especially Christianity, is an acute locus of both anxiety and curiosity among those companies exploring the outer edges of theatre. I guess it's unsurprising, given that God has risen from Nietzsche's grave to stalk modernity like a brain-eating zombie in a splatter movie: the rise of mediaevalist fundamentalism is the dark story of our time. As the sublime Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski said in the 1980s as he witnessed the disintegration of the Soviet Empire, the three great challenges to world peace in the following decades were religion, nationalism and racism. In the past few years, we've seen that prophecy playing out in our global politics.


But this focus on religion is also a curiosity about the foundations of western culture. Christianity shaped the West: it has been a defining force in its art and thought for hundreds of years. It's influenced our metaphysics, philosophy, law and social conventions. And for those raised in the shadow of that tradition, it is a primary expression of transcendence and the divine.

It's this last aspect that debut playwright Rita Kalnejais explores in BC, which takes the story of the Immaculate Conception and sets it in an outer suburb of a nameless Australian city. After attacking the modern classics - Chekhov, Stravinsky, Wedekind - it's good to see Hayloft taking on the risks of new writing, with Benedict Hardie's Yuri Wells earlier this year and now BC.

Here Mary is the teenage daughter of Joachim (Tyler Coppin), a depressed real estate agent, and Anne (Margaret Mills), who is in recovery from cancer and is perilously on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Her learning-challenged brother, Gabriel (Dylan Young) is obssessed, not entirely healthily, with birds, the angelic possibility of flight. Elizabeth (Yesse Spence), in the original story Mary's confidante and the first to recognise that Mary's pregnancy is the fruit of God ("Blessed are you among women!") becomes a pleasant, well-meaning neighbour. There are disturbing threads running through it: foremost the suggestion of incest between Mary and her father and, more directly, her brother.

It's an interesting idea that, despite some moments of coup de theatre and an outstanding cast, doesn't quite come off. Kalnejais can certainly write: she has the gift - perhaps because she is also an actor - of understanding direct dramatic action, and of creating characters who immediately assert their reality. And there's no faulting her ambition. However, the play falters in its formal balance between the naturalistic and the surreal: the naturalistic scenes are not nearly as focused as the others and often are simply too long, creating longueurs. And there's a more basic problem with the larger structure, which leads to a couple of false endings.

The play aims to illuminate moments of ordinary grace, investigating the divine immanent in quotidian existence, but a conceptual muddiness gets in the way. For instance, it's not the angel who impregnates Mary, but God: Gabriel merely announces the fact. I simply didn't understand the point of the brotherly incest or why God was absent from the shenanigans. And the Christian idea of grace is actually deeply interesting: the simple idea presented here of unmediated grace fudges its sternness and beauty, and begs the question of why Christianity is introduced in the first place. This kind of fuzziness means that the writing doesn't escape the problem of conjuring sentiment rather than real feeling.

All the same, director Simon Stone and his team create moments of genuine comedy and theatrical power. The immaculate conception itself - in which the angel and Mary unite as reflections separated by glass - is a beautifully thought and realised image of transcendence. And although some of the characters - Ashley Zuckerman's Joseph, for example - veer dangerously close to caricature, they are strange and individual enough to escape the worst perils.

Claude Marcos's set, an evocation of a suburban house bisected by a diagonal window that can turn into a mirror, vividly recalls Benedict Andrews' obsession with windows and mirrors, but works well on its own terms. Stone elicits some excellent performances, with a stand-out role by Dylan Young as Gabriel. I'm not sure Kalnejais could have asked for a better production of her first play. What she needs is some sharp dramaturgy.

Bagryana Popov's Progress and Melancholy is also a nice idea laid low by uncertain dramaturgy. It's one of a number of recent shows that reworks a classic, in this case, Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. The idea is to excavate its subtext, radically resituating the play in the present - not only the contemporary present, but in the immediate present of the performers and the audience. Maybe the test of this kind of exercise is whether you're sitting in the audience wondering why the company doesn't just do the play: and in this case, I would have preferred to see Chekhov Uncut.

Popov has the chops here: her 2005 physical movement piece Subclass26A, which explored the realities of asylum seekers in detention, was riveting, sharply thought political theatre. So how come this one went so wrong? The play's subtext - focusing on personal, social and economic change - is shallowly explored, the connections made between the present of the actors and the imagined past of Chekhov are generalised and even sentimental, and when the physical movement aspires to the condition of dance, it is sometimes embarrassing. As a work, it seems frustratingly half-formed, and the informing ideas - the economic rise of China, the oncoming disaster of climate change, the feudal/capitalist exploitation of workers - all seem to operate at the level of naivety.

And yet there's the core of a great idea inside it. For all my reservations, the show features a couple of excellent performances. Natasha Herbert's Ranevskaya is (when it is allowed to occur) a moving and accurate performance of a middle aged bourgeois woman in denial of her disintegrating present. But the highlight - the performance that made this show worth watching - was Todd Macdonald's electrifying Lopahkin, the former-serf-turned-businessman who buys and destroys the cherry orchard, revenging the humiliations of his humble birth. In Macdonald's performance the intersecting realities - the big-talking developer, the ambitious nouveau riche serf - united and made sense, and the actor himself took a back seat. Given this, I wondered why the show didn't focus on Lopahkin, filleting that ambiguous character out of the play and attending to the realities that he both embodies and represents. But hey, it wasn't my show.

At one point they stopped the show and handed cake around the audience. It was good cake. It was well-meaning. And this was a well-meaning show. But I do think Chekhov would have threatened to shoot himself.

Picture: Dylan Young and Nicole Da Silva in BC. Photo: Jeff Busby.

BC by Rita Kalnejais, directed by Simon Stone. Set and costumes by Claude Marcos, lighting design by Kimberly Kaw, sound design by Stefan Gregory. With Tyler Coppin, Nicole Da Silva, Margaret Mills, Yesse Spence, Dylan Young and Ashley Zuckerman. The Hayloft Project @ Full Tilt, Black Box, Victorian Arts Centre, until December 19.

Progress and Melancholy, directed by Bagryana Popov. Design by Adrienne Chisolm, lighting design by Richard Vabre, composition and sound design by Elissa Goodrich. With Natasha Herbert, Todd Macdonald, Majid Shokor, Sara Black, Paea Leach, Christophe Le Tellier, music performed by Ernie Gruner. Fortyfive downstairs. Closed.

In the interests of organisation, Ms TN has been tidying her desk. This bland, anodyne phrase cannot begin to comprehend the dimensions of the task. It's like the fifth labour of Hercules (Augean Stables, Cleaning Of), only instead of incontinent cows, I have constant incoming drifts of press releases, programs, drafts, invoices, notebooks, permission requests, bills, receipts, postcards, lists, chocolate wrappers, magazines and books, books, books - phalanxes of them diving in like migratory flocks of starlings, and taking up disordered residence anywhere there's a spare centimetre.

I have often thought my desk is a reflection of my state of mind, and this tells you more than you, gentle reader, need to know. But having reached the point where annihilation by domestic avalanche was more probable than not, I girded my loins, sinews, teeth and anything else that needed girding, and now my study appears to be the habitation of a marginally sane and reasonably organised woman. Appearances may deceive, certainly, but it's nice to have the surface at least, even if it's undermined by a faintly hysterical loquacity.


And now at last I can begin to speak, if briefly, of last week's fringedwelling, which has been sidelined not only by the Labour of the Desk but by my upcoming departure from these sea-girt shores next Monday. I saw three shows last week, making five in all out of a possible menu of around 400 acts, which is pretty wimpy compared to some others. On the upside, I enjoyed all of them. And if the Fringe is conceived as a showcase for the energies throbbing beneath Melbourne's sedate skin, I reckon it's filling its brief nicely. Perhaps what I found most interesting about these shows is that there are all, crucially, works of imagination. It's about time imagination came back.

A Black Joy is one of two Declan Greene plays on at the Fringe. The other, Home Economics, is running at the Store Room until Saturday, so if you missed the first, I recommend the second, sight unseen. I wasn't especially enamoured of Greene's Rage Boy, which I saw in 2007 in a production directed, like this one, by Susie Dee; but two years is a long time in an artist's life, and Greene's been working hard. Now his quality is clear and unambiguous. He's a dark, explosive talent, a playwright who channels the anxieties of 21st century living into a tunnel of comedic nightmare that is as grotesque and pitiless as Bosch.

The conceit of this play is that the characters are all celebrities - John Candy (Tom Considine), Diane Keaton (Anne Browning), Bette Davis (Carole Patullo), Joseph Cotten (Chris Bunsworth), Dakota Fanning (Miriam Glaser), Corey Haim (Ash Flanders) and Megan Twycross playing a character who looks suspiciously like Paris Hilton. They are addressed, all through the play, by their full names, which is a device that gets weirder through repetition. As the author says in the program, the play emerged from a documentary about the fetish called "Feeding", where one partner overfeeds the morbidly obese other in a perverse co-depedency. The centre of A Black Joy's action is John Candy lying beneath his enormous stomach, being fed baked beans by Bette Davis.

This morbid dysfunction sets the cue for the action in the play - the plot, as such, includes Diane Keaton neurotically pumping iron so she won't be raped by her lesbian house cleaner; Keaton's husband Senator Joseph Cotten imprisoning Paris Hilton and feeding her the liver of her murdered daughter, Dakota Fanning; and Corey Haim's romance with Dakota Fanning and the Neo-Nazis. It could be simply a schlock-fest, but Greene's frankly beautiful writing - which ranges from spikily hilarious dialogue to extraordinarily lyric monologues - and Dee's focused and unafraid production makes it something else altogether.

Each time I've contemplated this play, I find myself thinking about mediaeval or Renaissance art - yes, Bosch, because it's enacting a kind of hell; but the celebrity "characters" also recall the stock characters of Commedia dell'arte or even Punch and Judy, obscene and grotesquely exaggerated types who refract our human foibles. It's maybe not so odd - Bosch and the vulgar theatre emerged from another age haunted by apocalyptic fantasy, a world as unstable and strange as ours. It's a comedy for a contemporary apocalypse, underpinned by millennial fears - climate change, mass species extinction - in which the idea of the self is emptied out by celebrity-fuelled consumerism, in which appetite devours itself.

The production is done in the round, with Candy's prone body - swollen under a huge sheet with horrifically rotting feet poking out the end - the centrepiece around which the action revolves. The performances tackle the extremity of the text with relish, excavating at once the cruel comedy and strange pathos of the text. They're all good, but I particularly enjoyed Carole Patullo's Bette Davis, Tom Considine's John Candy and Anne Browning's hyper-neurotic Diane Keaton. Really something.

From the large to the small: Yuri Wells is a one-man show (with added musician) written and performed by Benedict Hardie, and co-devised and directed by Anne-Louise Sarks. It's a change of direction for Hayloft, whom we last saw creating mayhem among the commentariat with their huge and ambitious production 3XSisters, for which Hardie directed a third of Chekhov's play. Maybe it's not so much a change of direction as of scale: in its conception it's as ambitious as anything this company has done.

Yuri Wells is a beautiful piece of theatre, created with deeply thought artfulness and craft. It begins as the audience enters the small, curtained space, with Hardie and musician Stuart Bowden doing a kind of pre-show warm-up, greeting audience members, playing the odd song and passing a toy xylophone around for people to cautiously plink. It's all very relaxed, and with lots of meta-theatrical friendliness. Once it's time to begin, Hardie tells us he's starting the show. So far, so avant garde familiar. Then Bowden sits down among the audience, and Hardie removes all the props from the stage, leaving it totally bare. (The props all gain their significance in the subsequent monologue, but by then we must imagine them).

Hardie tells us that he is playing Yuri Wells, an aged care nurse who, it is rapidly clear, has problems relating to women. And then comes a miraculous and unexpected transition, from an actor playing an actor, with the expected nods to the audience, to an actor becoming Yuri Wells, lonely and possibly homicidal human being. The power of this transition is in the words as much in Hardie's strangely unsettling performance: he takes techniques more at home in contemporary lyric poetry and applies them to theatre, creating an allusive, rich language that is subtle and full of ambiguity, while still remaining emotionally lucid. The writing is theatrical in the best way, and turns on a dime. Yuri Wells is, in the end, a portrayal of human loneliness; but its power comes from its being a portrait of a particular person's loneliness, and all the more desolate and complex for that.

The show is unsettling, disturbing and surprisingly gentle, all at once. But perhaps its greatest invitation - and reinvention - is into the world of imagination, ours and the actor's. I thought this show utterly enchanting, in the proper sense of the word: "to subject to a magical influence, to bewitch", "to delight". Remembering of course that spells have their darker side.

Finally, I saw In the Absence of Sunlight, a one-on-one show that began at the Town Hall pub in Erroll St, North Melbourne, as an assignation in a bar with a stranger. I confess that, given its set-up, I was expecting something like the controversial hit of the Edinburgh Fringe, Ontoerend Goed's Internal: something that turned the intimacy of theatre into a disturbing collision between fantasy and reality. It turned out not to be that at all. Or if it turned out to be something like that, it was not in the way I expected.

When you arrive at the right table, there is a card under the "reserved" sign that says: I need to ask you something. The performer, Tamara Searle, turns up and there's a stilted conversation, the kind that happens between strangers who are meeting for a reason only one of them understands. She talks about where she lives, about John the barman, her room upstairs. She talks about how she has seen me in the street (and I almost say, but I never hang out around here, but don't). Then I'm invited upstairs, to a room that opens out on a balcony. She pours some elderflower cordial, she tells me she has been ill, she takes me out on the balcony and we blow bubbles.

By this time it's clear that the invitation of this show is to be part of the fiction. I am the woman that she has observed obsessively during her illness, unknowingly seen in all my intimate moments. And I guess how you might respond to this show would depend on how you feel about entering a fictional self. It's something I do all the time, one way or another, so once I understood this, I found myself playing this woman. After all, I might have lived on my own across the road from the pub. I might have been observed in my solitude. I might have something to forgive a woman I have never seen in my life.

I thought it a delicate and brave performance, only half shielded by its fiction. Oddly, the more I became my fictional character, the less chatty I became: the more prepared to be silent, to watch Tamara to see what she would do or say next. It was strangely liberating, just as sitting in the dark of the theatre is liberating. Perhaps one of the fascinations of art is the chance not to be yourself, or to escape the carapace of imposed selves into other aspects of who you are. I don't know how useful it is to know that this theatre piece is an adaptation, or perhaps more strictly speaking a kind of coda, to Marjorie Barnard's lyrical short story about illness and recovery, The Persimmon Tree. It gives it an added depth, I guess; but I'm not sure that it matters.

Picture: Benedict Hardie in Yuri Wells. Photo: Lachlan Woods

A Black Joy by Declan Greene, directed by Susie Dee. Design by Emily Barrie, lighting by Katie Sfetkidis, audiovisual by Nicholas Verso, sound design by Ben Bourke. With Anne Browning, Chris Bunsworth, Tom Considine, Ash Flanders, Miriam Glaser, Carole Patullo, Megan Twycross and Alastair Watts on cello. Fortyfive Downstairs, Melbourne Fringe Festival, until October 4, closed.

Yuri Wells, written, co-devised and performed by Benedict Hardie, co-devised and directed by Anne-Louise Sarks, music and performance by Stuart Bowden. The Hayloft Project, Melbourne Fringe Festival, North Melbourne Town Hall, until October 10.

In the Absence of Sunlight, devised by Katerina Kokkinos-Kennedy, Dayna Morrissey, Danny Pettingill, Ivanka Sokol, Xan Colman, performed by Tamara Searle. A is for Atlas, Melbourne Fringe Festival, until October 11. Bookings here.

This Sunday The Hayloft Project is hosting a panel on “the art of direction” with some of Melbourne’s leading directors. Mediated by your humble blogger, the panel features 2008 Green Room Award-winning director Mary Sitarenos from Liminal Theatre, Daniel Schlusser (Peer Gynt), Hayloft’s Artistic Director Simon Stone (Platonov), Mark Winter (The Black Lung) and Benedict Hardie (3xSisters). Rather than a discussion of 3xSisters, which has generated a long and passionate debate here, this conversation is intended to throw some illumination on what it is directors do.

It's at 1.30pm on Sunday May 10 in the Meat Market at 5 Blackwood St, North Melbourne, and admission is free.

In his stories and plays, Anton Chekhov is a pitilessly intelligent observer of human beings. A writer of enormous moral scrupulousness, he lets fall a cruel light on the excesses of his characters without ever losing sight of their frailties and contradictions. He’s most often seen as a poster boy for naturalism, but this is inevitably reductive. A play like Three Sisters, for instance, can be seen as a moral tale about the decadence of the pre-Revolutionary bourgeoisie, or a nostalgic evocation of a society on the brink of collapse. But like any simple interpretation, this is far from the whole truth.

Its real fascination is in its details, how it is constructed as a kind of collage of social performance: each character’s self-insight is questionable, conditioned and repressed by his or her consciousness of the presence of others, and each is ultimately trapped in a state of existential solitude. It is this aspect of Chekhov which makes him so attractive to successive generations of artists, among whom must be counted Samuel Beckett. In last year’s drop-dead beautiful production of his early play Platonov, the Hayloft Project, one of Melbourne’s most vital new companies, began an excavation of his work.


Under the restless direction of Simon Stone, they’ve continued their exploration with 3xSisters, now on at the Meat Market in repertory with a remount of the Belvoir St version of their first show, Spring Awakening - a performance so radically changed (different script, different design, different concept, different cast) from its original Melbourne outing that it is effectively an entirely new production. Hayloft's take on Chekhov is an attractively ambitious conceit: three directors - Benedict Hardie, Simon Stone and Mark Winter – oversee different acts, effectively giving us three radically different interpretations of the play. But it's telling that the names of the writers who feature in this mini-Hayloft retrospective - Franz Wedekind and Anton Chekhov - figure nowhere on the program credits.

3xSisters is fascinating and frustrating in equal measure. The production shifts neurotically through three different sets, costumes and interpretations. Stone, who begins and ends the play, sets it in a place like a waiting room in an airport, under a row of clocks showing the time in Buenos Aires, Johannesburg or Moscow, with the characters in formal dress, as if waiting for some festive event. The actors speak straight out to the audience, their more intimate thoughts sometimes whispered through a microphone, their movements constrained by the narrowness of the stage. It suggests a promisingly stern aesthetic - Stone even inserts the famous quote ("Fail again. Fail better.") from Samuel Beckett's Worstword Ho - but, in the major problem that runs through this entire production, neglects to follow this promise through. The hint of Beckett remains merely decoration, and peters out in the end, disappointingly, into the borrowed emotion of Cat Power.

Hardie directs a deftly choreographed rehearsal of the play, complete with actorly interpolations. It's a reminder of the performance heritage that has so conditioned western interpretations of Chekhov: Chekhov's first and most famous interpreter was Stanislavski, one of whose most famous acolytes was Lee Strasberg, father of the Method. In Hardie's first scene, the black slacks and casual shirts evoke the 1950s cool of the Actors Studio; in the second, the actors have evolved into brainless noughties dweebs, dressed in "I heart Chekhov" t-shirts. This permits a metatheatrical shifting, a consciousness of artifice overlaying the moments when the actors step into character. It's not that new as an idea - David Mamet's film Vanya on 42nd St features actors workshopping the play, similarly shifting between their "real" and performative characters - but it's still effective, and perhaps in its minimalist approach the most satisfyingly thought-through of the evening.

The middle acts, courtesy of Winter, are a psychotic explosion seen through the mind of Solyony, an asocial soldier with Romantic delusions who ends up killing his only friend. Here Chekhov collides with Taxi Driver, with Travis Bickle’s slaughter presaging the Revolution’s murders of the Romanov family. This middle act is at once the most interesting and the most problematic of the lot: there are moments of genuine power, moments when the wholesale destruction of Chekhov suggests wider implications - the repressed violence and sexuality squirming beneath bourgeois social conventions, the classist cruelty that led to the Russian Revolution, even a reflection of how a production can be a forensic dissection of a cultural corpse.

But these possibilities are undermined by cheap gestures: its excessive bath of sexual transgression and violence ends up being brutalising and boring (and sometimes - what was with the Indian head-dress? - simply baffling). As with the rest of the production it's full of quotations, most obviously from Martin Scorcese, but also from a menu of pop cultural and theatrical references. Again, a directorial quote from Romeo Castellucci will mean nothing without the aesthetic rigor that underlies Castellucci's practice: and a swipe at Benedict Andrews is simply a gratuitous in-joke which illuminates nothing except the director's insecurities. At its worst, it justifies the outraged criticisms of those who claim this kind of theatre is simply self-indulgent bullshit only interested in generating offence, in the absence of doing something more challenging (such as engaging with Chekhov); which is a pity, because at its best it has the potential to be something far more substantial.

In short, the line between intellectual provocation and gratuitous shock-value is crossed too often, and the whole production oscillates between genuine insight and shallow gesture. It's interesting to compare these explorations, for instance, with Daniel Schlusser's recent production of Peer Gynt, or more directly, Chris Goode's transcendently beautiful ...Sisters, both of which radically dismantle a classic text. The difference is intellectual rigor, and an illuminating respect for the source text. All the same, I found 3xSisters riveting. The performers are astoundingly good (and very well cast - you can't help reflecting that a straight production with this cast would be really something), and Chekhov, tellingly, survives the rough treatment. It’s well worth seeing, if only for the arguments you’ll have afterwards.


Simon Stone's production of Spring Awakening is a far less problematic prospect. I was expecting a polished version of the show I saw at fortyfive downstairs three years ago, and found very quickly that I was mistaken: the Belvoir St version is a complete rethink, with Adam Gardnir's chicken-coop set literalising the social barriers that confine and destroy Wedekind's young characters. Stone solves some of the problems of the original text - most notably, the Man who appears at the end - by simply editing them out, transforming the play into a series of impressionistic dialogues and monologues.

The most compelling aspect of the initial production was the tension it established between sexual desire and childish innocence, a collision that was ultimately tragic. Literalising the subtleties of physical interaction between the actors, and perhaps even neatening up the original messiness of Wedekind's play, has a concomitant cost: it's undoubtedly more elegant, and perhaps more impressive, but it has lost something important. Innocence, perhaps.

A shorter version of this review is in today's Australian.

Pictures: top: rehearsal shot of 3xSisters. Photo Pia Johnson. Bottom: Production shot of Spring Awakening.

3xSisters from Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov, directed by Simon Stone, Benedict Hardie and Mark Winter, additional text from the directors and cast. Set design by Claude Marcos, lighting design by Danny Pettingill. With Gareth Davies, Angus Grant, Thomas Henning, Joshua Hewitt, Shelly Lauman, Eryn Jean Norvill, Anne-Louise Sarks, Katherine Tonkin and Tom Wren.

Spring Awakening by Franz Wedekind, adaptation and direction by Simon Stone. Set design by Adam Gardnir, lighting design by Niklas Pajanti. With Andrew Dunn, Amanda Falson, Angus Grant, Shelly Lauman, Aaron Orzech, Russ Pirie and Edwina Wren.

In repertory at the North Melbourne Meat Market, 5 Blackwood St, North Melbourne, until May 10. Bookings: 9639 0096

A number of bits and pieces catch my eye this morning:

1. Arts Minister Peter Garrett has asked the Australia Council and Screen Australia to draft protocols to deal with the depiction of children in art. This forestalls what could possibly be more hardline measures direct from the PM's office, and would entail wide-ranging consultation with the arts community. Responses so far have been cautiously upbeat.

2. The Age reports that the long-mooted Melbourne "arts precinct" development is apparently being given the State Government nod, at a price reported to be $700 million and which may involve the creation of a new Music School by Melbourne University. A Good Thing, surely, unless the heavy investment in bricks and mortar means a concomitant governmental shyness about investment in art itself.

3. In the must-read of the day, our favourite rabbit Matthew Clayfield - now snaffled up by News Ltd as a journalism cadet - has found time to post a thoughtful overview of the work of Simon Stone and the Hayloft Project. (And in the process explains some hitherto puzzling comments on the Sydney season of Spring Awakening).

The Soldier's Tale by Igor Stravinsky, adapted by Simon Stone, directed by Michael Robinson, conducted by Fabian Russell. Lighting design by Kerry Ireland, set design by Michael Robinson, sound by Richard Buxton. Actors: Frank Gallacher, Bonnie Paskas, David Whitely and Mark Winter; musicians: Zoe Black, Frank Celata, Tristram Williams, Robert Cossom, Kieran Conrau, Jill Griffiths and Adam Mikulicz. The Hayloft Project @ the Abbotsford Convent until May 10.

The Soldier's Tale is a fascinating adaptation, which - in what is becoming a hallmark of Hayloft's work - takes the original work and unobstrusively brings its aesthetic into the 21st century. The Hayloft Project's productions are accumulating into an intriguing oeuvre: there is most certainly a serious investigation occurring here, one which has nothing to do with nostalgia and everything to do with formal inquiry.

The clue here is the modernity of their aesthetic choices, which for all their period dress attain a performative immediacy and elan that remains wholly of the present. When Igor Stravinsky premiered The Soldier's Tale in Switzerland in 1918, it was indeed topical: Europe was still in the throes of the mechanised carnage of World War 1. The libretto, a conflation of a couple of Russian folk tales about encounters between a soldier and the Devil, was put together by the Swiss poet and novelist Charles Ferdinand Ramuz.

It was perhaps the first of a form that became known as "mixed media" work, incorporating dance, music, design and theatre. Despite that, The Soldier's Tale is mostly performed as a musical sequence. Last week, The Hayloft Project, with an adaptation by Simon Stone directed by Michael Robinson, gave us a rare chance to experience it as a work of theatre, with Stravinsky's score performed by musicians from The Orchestra Project, a loose group of musicians culled from Australia's leading ensembles and orchestras.


Stone has vamped up the original libretto, bringing the realities of wartime into the foreground and removing any sense of romantic pastoral: for example, where the original opens with the soldier sitting by a stream, Hayloft's version opens in a disreputable 19th century tavern strewn with bottles and wooden chests and buckets, lit as if by candlelight. But here the romantic glow reveals an unromanticised poverty.

Three performers are on stage already - the barman/narrator (Frank Gallacher), who is washing tin cups in a bowl of grimy water; the Devil, who is playing solitaire (David Whitely); and a woman (Bonnie Paskas) who is on her hands and knees, scrubbing the floor. The colours are warm, highlighting the wood and hessian tones of the set and the instruments of the ensemble, who are standing mid-stage to the left, dressed in vaguely 19th century clothes.

The performance begins with the sounds of artillery which is getting nearer and nearer, until at last one shell is so close the three performers flinch. Then someone is hammering on the door, and in stumbles the Soldier (Mark Winter) in a state of hysteria and shock. He tells the barman that he was marching with a friend who was hit and killed with a shell. When he at last wipes the blood from his face, he crumples into a foetal position, and for the rest of the night gives what looks like an almost clinically accurate performance of a soldier who is suffering from shell-shock (or, as it is known these days, "combat stress reaction").

This sets the tone for the performance, which has an air of nightmare or hallucination. It's the tale of a Faustian bargain - the Devil, whom Whitely plays with an air of subtle, snake-like menace, persuades the Soldier to give up his grandfather's violin in exchange for a book in which the Soldier's future is written. In one of the more poignant moments, the Soldier confesses he can't read; when the Devil suggests that he accompany him to his house for three days, where in return for being taught how to play the violin, he will show the Soldier how to read his book.

After the three days are up, the Soldier returns home, only to find that his appearance causes terror among his friends and relations, who treat him as if he were a ghost. When he sees his fiancee married and nursing children, he understands that he has been away for three years, not three days, and that his former life - and his soul - is lost to him. Eventually, however, he outwits the Devil, wins a Princess and finds happiness - but the the deal is that he can never go back. As always in these stories, he breaks the magical ban, and returns to his village to visit his mother: and the Devil, triumphant at last, claims his soul.

As presented here, it's a stark, resonant and ultimately mysterious tale. The action is punctuated by Stravinsky's music, so focus shifts from music to performance and back again, giving a sense of complementary autonomy to both elements in what is a very difficult balance. Under Fabian Russell's conducting, Stravinsky's score is spectacular, enriched with motifs from jazz, folk music and traditional dances, and here it's performed with exemplary clarity.

There are many beautiful moments in this production, which features four very strong performances from the actors: but perhaps the most surprising is the dance, performed by Paskas (whom I later found out performs with Chunky Move). Up to this moment, Paskas has been the image of a submissive, modest woman, in the background on her hands and knees; and then she explodes into this slow, strangely disturbing tango, in which the soldier is passive, even sometimes overwhelmed by the woman's sensuality. She begins with snake-like movements that suddenly foreground the picture of Adam and Eve on the back wall of the stage, at once vulnerable, potent, joyous and damaged.

The Soldier's Tale doesn't give us a satisfyingly dramatic arc of action, as in, say, a play by Chekhov; rather, the story begins, continues in an episodic fashion, and then it finishes. It follows the naive logic of oral narrative or dream, which has very little to do with psychological continuity or any sense of realism; folk tales, for example, tend to begin the middle, rehearse a number of recognisable tropes (for example, the magical ban) and then may end abruptly.

In this case, the episodic structure highlights the production's hallucinatory air: it is almost as if, when the soldier is killed and claimed by the devil at the end, the whole story has been a nightmare dreamt on the brink of his death, as if the Soldier was actually killed in the first moments of the show. This sense of dislocation is intensified by Winters' remarkable performance of a shell-shocked soldier; he never, for instance, changes out of his bloodstained, ragged uniform, as if the trauma has only just happened to him.

It's this surreal tinge that for me lends the production its particular power and resonance. When I went to see it, I was in the middle of reading Michael Herr's classic book about the Vietnam War, Dispatches, one of the best books about soldiers in war that I have read. (I'm reading it again because the parallels with Iraq now are illuminating, if depressing). For all the differences between Stravinsky's chamber work and Herr's nakedly evocative, strung-out 1960s prose, the two works rhyme painfully in a nakedly honest evocation of the irreversible damage of war.

Picture: Mark Winter and Bonnie Paskas in The Soldier's Tale.

Ms TN has been dabbing her forehead with lavender water since Monday, attempting to mitigate what the redoubtable Miss Austen called "a sick head ache". Which is why a review of The Hayloft Project's A Soldier's Tale hasn't come forth as yet... It will appear, since I believe in "for the record", but I wanted to heartily recommend it before it closes tomorrow night. Meanwhile, I'm off to the osteopath.

Chekhov Re-Cut: Platonov, by Anton Chekhov, adapted and directed by Simon Stone. Design by Evan Granger, lighting by Danny Pettingill, sound by Jared Lewis. With Jessamy Dyer, Amanda Falson, Angus Grant, Adrian Mulraney, Eryn-Jean Norvill, Meredith Penman, Simon Stone and Chris Ryan. The Hayloft Project @ The Hayloft, corner Harris and Whitehall Steets, Footscray, until March 16. Bookings 0435 165 117 or online

Platonov is Anton Chekhov’s first play and, in ways that recall Georg Büchner’s unfinished work Woycek, has a rather curious history. It was written in the 1880s when Chekhov was 20, living with his parents on the edge of the Black Sea in the village of Taganrog. He abandoned it when it was rejected by the Maly Theatre in Moscow and the play was forgotten until someone discovered the manuscript in a bank vault in 1923, 19 years after Chekhov’s death. It was first published in 1933, under the title Fatherlessness, but it didn’t premiere in Russia until 1957.


By all accounts, the original is a sprawling mess that runs for more than five hours. As the Russian critic Mikhail Gromov put it: "The play was put together with a profligacy that was inexcusable, and conceivable only in the writer's youth. At one and the same time it is a drama, a comedy and a vaudeville; or more accurately, it is not any one of these three. But that said, it is chaotic in a way that bore a remarkable resemblance to the reality of Russian life."

For a play generally regarded as juvenilia, Platonov is produced more often than you might expect. A full-length version was a hit at the 2002 Avignon Festival, and (perhaps ironically, given its rejection a century ago) the Maly Theatre of St Petersburg toured its celebrated production, now a decade old, to London last year. It inspired a celebrated film, An Unfinished Piece for Mechanical Piano, made by Nikita Mikhalkov in 1976, which in turn inspired Trevor Griffiths’ 1990 play, Piano. Michael Frayn adapted it in 1984, and David Hare in 2001. Which isn’t doing too badly.

Like Woycek, which was found in Büchner’s papers after his early death and has been the subject of endless dramaturgical speculation, it might be Platonov’s very disorder, this unfinished quality, which has ensured its continuing life more than a century later. Or perhaps the age has caught up with Chekhov’s instinctive dramaturgy: it could be that the play’s mimetic sense, the chaos that Gromov remarked as so realistic, appeals to contemporary sensibilities.

Certainly a sense of contemporary realism illuminates the Hayloft Theatre Project’s extraordinarily beautiful production, its first at its newly opened warehouse theatre in Seddon. As with this company’s impressive debut, a passionate production of Franz Wedekind’s Spring Awakening - itself opening at Belvoir St later this year - Chekhov Re-Cut: Platonov is elegantly poised between fidelity to the 19th century origin of the work and a very 21st century aesthetic.

Simon Stone’s adaptation cuts the play to a swift two and a half hours, with eight speaking parts instead of 20. I haven't read the original text, so I can’t comment on the details of the adaptation (in passing, it was brilliant to experience a Chekhov play with no idea of what was going to happen). But even so, Stone demonstrates – as he did with Spring Awakening – a sure instinct for filleting out essential action; and he certainly hasn’t messed with the original four act structure.

Platonov (Simon Stone) is the first of Chekhov’s disillusioned provincial intellectuals. He is the local school teacher, an idealist in his (very recent) youth, but already, in his late 20s, soured and bored by the comfortable meaninglessness of his life. He is fascinating because he is a totally passive protagonist: he permits events to happen, always taking the most yielding option, permitting the desires of others to dictate his flaccid will. For all his appearance of profundity, he is a man who takes on the colours of those around him. He most startling lack is an interior life: he is all surface, all reflection. And his inner emptiness has disastrous results for everyone around him.

None of the men in the play is immune to his charisma - even those he cuckolds still love him. And as he is desired by every woman in the play - even the chemistry student Maria, whom he treats with sadistic contempt - his love life is complicated. In a curious reversal of gender roles, he is the blank screen on which these women project their frustrated desires. He is a different lover to each of them – to Sascha, his wife, he is a faithful husband and father; to the general’s widow Anna (Meredith Penman) - an amazing character for the time, being both intellectually and sexually forceful - he is the image of a grand passion; to his former lover Sofia (Jessamy Dyer) he represents freedom from a stiflingly respectable marriage.


The play's melodramatic elements reflect the theatre of its time, but in this adaptation they are at once absurd and realistic, winding out of the tragic aimlessness of the characters' situations. Platonov demonstrates that Chekhov's gently merciless insights into human behaviour were there from the beginning: more than anything, it reminds you that in its less pleasant moments, life tends more to melodrama than to the grave horror of the tragic. Chekhov's enduring attraction lies in how he traces the absurd sorrow of modernity; he understood, with Oscar Wilde, that “the dreadful thing about modernity is that it puts tragedy into the raiment of comedy”.

The play is written with a youthful passion that makes it a peculiarly apt choice for this young company. Stone has collected a very fine cast, and elicits performances that impress on all levels - technical accomplishment, emotional accuracy, courage and nuance, the last being perhaps the most important element in acting Chekhov. They're so good that they rather show up Stone himself in the central role: although he is effective as Platonov, the original hollow man, he only just gets away with it, and certainly doesn't reach the lustre of his colleagues. The one problem with this production is that it's difficult to understand why Platonov is so irresistible: of course, it's understood that in a more exciting context he might not be desirable at all, that these destructive desires are frothed out of ennui; but as a man of surfaces he might glitter more fascinatingly. Stone might have to settle for merely being a brilliant adaptor and director.

Perhaps the greatest compliment you can pay the actors is that they aren’t overwhelmed by the set. Evan Granger’s design, sensuously lit with an air of fin de siecle decadence by Danny Pettingill, is spectacular. The huge stage is defined by the ruinous walls of an elegant house, and filled with about a foot of water, in which are placed the tables, chaise lounges and standard lamps of a 19th century bourgeois home. The immediate effect is jaw-droppingly beautiful, but the set is much more than a gorgeous background: the water becomes an expressive part of the emotional action in ways that recall (forgive me, but it’s true) how water is used in Tarkovsky's films. As the actors wade across the stage, the ripples create a constant susurrus, and the splashing underlines the violence or gentleness of bodily gestures, just as the water's reflections suggest the deceptive, shifting surfaces of Chekhov’s characters.

It's an exquisite production and, as everyone is telling everyone else, you'd be mad to miss it. On a purely personal note, I'm delighted that it's happening on my side of town, and I'm hoping that all exciting theatre will now move westwards. The one disadvantage of the Hayloft space is the band that plays next door, mostly destroying Jared Lewis's delicate sound design all through the first half. Again, it's a tribute to the performers that they were both audible and unfazed, even weaving the ambient noise into the dialogue, and the band wasn't nearly as intrusive as it might have been.

I'm told that the space will be soundproofed soon: in the meantime, don't let a little unprogrammed music put you off. With Platonov, The Hayloft Project proves that it's the real thing, and that it's here to stay. This is a show that people will be talking about years from now.

Pictures: (Top) Chris Ryan and Meredith Penman. (Below) The cast of Platonov by The Hayloft Project. Photos: Jeff Busby

This weekend the National Play Festival kicks off in Brisbane. Under the aegis of PlayWriting Australia, the national body that has absorbed the Australian National Playwright's Centre and Playworks, artistic director Chris Mead has put together a program of showcase readings, seminars and performances that aims to get some blood moving through the blocked arteries of Australian playwriting. As he says, he is encouraging people to talk to one another - for example, working to bridge the apparent gulf between those who devise and those write. An admirable aim, and Mead has put together an interesting and diverse bouquet of talkers, with a wide range of both public and private events. Writers - and not only writers - will be watching this event with deep interest.

Meanwhile, closer to home (in my case, much closer), last weekend saw the launch of a new theatre space, the Hayloft Theatre Project, at the corner of Whitehall and Harris Streets in Footscray. It's the brainchild of Simon Stone and company, who pulled off one of the highlights of last year, a skin-tingling realisation of Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening. No word yet on what they will do there, but Ming has a full social report on Mink Tails, and it sounds like some soiree (I was being even older than Ming, and stayed home altogether). I am of course delighted that they've chosen to open their new venue just down the road from me, since verily the West Rocketh.

Spring Awakening by Frank Wedekind, adapted and directed by Simon Stone. Design: set by Jolyon James, Mark Leonard Winter and Simon Stone; costume by Mel Page; sound by Rob Stewart; lighting by Lucy Birkinshaw. With Angus Grant, Sara Gleeson, Katie-Jean Harding, Shelly Lauman, Rhys McConnochie, Beejan Olfat, Russ Pirie and Dylan Young. The Hayloft Project @ 45 Downstairs until June 17.

Even as a self-confessed stirrer of the chicken soup, it can be a shock to discover how heartily disliked you are. (In these times, of course, you also discover your allies). Yes, Ms Alison is licking her wounds after a salutary dust-up among the poetasters, which reminds me of nothing so much as Blake's proverb that "The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow". (Nothing against crows, of course, whom I consider to be birds of a particular charm.)

And yes, these storms in thimbles waste time that should have been better spent discussing art. Say, Frank Wedekind. Right at the moment, Wedekind feels like my kind of man. As the director Berthold Viertel (1885-1953) said of him: "With a satanic sneer as polite as an abyss and full of cold melancholy, he introduced us to the mysteries of reality which began where the views of the pacifying poets end."


Wedekind could never be remotely described as pacifying. He emerges from a line of radical German writing that can be traced through poets such as Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) and playwrights like Jakob Lenz (1751-1792) and Georg Büchner (1813-1837). The plays of Büchner and Lenz, in contrast to the English writers of the time, express an unsettling and harsh modernity, and their impact is still a dynamic force in contemporary drama.

In turn, Wedekind's influence on modern theatre can't be overstated. Brecht, who was 20 when Wedekind died, was an obsessed admirer; he cited Wedekind's style as exemplary and even named his son after him. Wedekind's fierce attacks on the naturalism of his day made him an important forerunner of Expressionist theatre, and he was an inspiration for major European playwrights like Ödön von Horváth and Friedrich Dürrenmatt. In the 1960s, writers such as Botho Strauss and Franz Xaver Kroetz emerged from the same tradition, and it continues to the present day in writers like Marius von Marienburg, whose play Eldorado was seen at the Malthouse last year.

This is a strand of modern theatre that is often overlooked in Australia, although it's a major influence in the plays of Daniel Keene. Excitingly, Ödön von Horváth's masterpiece Tales of the Vienna Woods is coming up at the Sydney Theatre Company later this year. And this week in Melbourne you have an exhilarating opportunity to see why Frank Wedekind continues to make waves. His classic Spring Awakening, which caused riots when it was first performed, remains confronting a hundred years after it was written, and The Hayloft Project, a new company stuffed to the gills with youthful talent, deserves high praise for bringing to the stage this very contemporary, intelligent and passionate interpretation.

Spring Awakening is set in a provincial town in 1890s Germany, and is a full-frontal attack on life-hating bourgeois hypocrisy and ignorance. For all the specifics of its time and place, its portrayal of the amoral innocence of adolescent sexuality in collision with repressive authority still resonates with surprising force. I suppose when the Catholic Church is threatening MPs with excommunication in Scotland and Australia, when US educationalists claim that chastity-led sex education is the way to go, when Amnesty International is condemned by church authorities for supporting abortions for raped women, the idea of "progress" in these issues comes under question. We are more like the 19th century than we care to admit.

Wedekind's references to abortion, homosexuality, rape, masturbation, sadism and so on made the play so scandalous that, although censored versions played long and successful seasons in Germany during his lifetime, the full play wasn't performed on the British stage until 1974, when it finally premiered in a translation by Edward Bond. This version is a new adaptation by director Simon Stone.

It is considerably cut back: the original cast of 37 characters is here rendered down to 13, performed by eight actors. To Stone's considerable credit, he has filleted out the bones of the work without losing its substance, and he preserves the complexity and force of Wedekind's poetry. Stone renovates the 19th century structure, giving it - except for a longueur towards the end - a very 21st century form. This version also preserves the comedy, which is at least as important as its poetry; this is, for all its sturm und drang, often a blackly funny play.

Spring Awakening concerns a group of fourteen year old boys and girls, all of them feeling the first stirrings of sexual desire. Their confusions and, finally, their tragedies stem from the wilful ignorance in which they are kept by their parents and other authorities: the awakening of their bodies drives them to actions they do not understand, and that often bewilder and frighten them. In the case of Melchior (Angus Grant), his discovery of the facts of life - through observing dogs and fragmentary reading - leads to a comprehensive disillusion and atheism. His friend Moritz is terrified and ashamed even of his dreams, and for him sex is a horror that can only be escaped through an even more driven obsession with death.

The girls are equally trapped in their own ignorance. Wendla (Katie-Jean Harding) is caught between childhood and burgeoning womanhood; she is desperate to know where her sister's babies come from, but is kept in such ignorance by her mother's explanations that her innocence is impenetrable, even when she is raped. Her friend Martha (Sara Gleeson) is brutally beaten by her parents, whose sadism has unsettlingly sexual overtones; Wendla is excited by this and, in one of the more disturbing scenes in the play, demands that Melchior beat her. ("I've never been beaten my whole life!")


Wedekind's condemnation of the hypocrisy and repression that destroys or maims the burgeoning life in his young characters is comprehensive. But this is far from a nihilistic play: it's primarily a celebration of life's transient, uncertain joyousness. "Sometimes," says the doomed Wendla,"I'm so happy - there's so much joy and the sunshine is so bright! I want to go out and walk over the fields when it's dusk." Or as Rilow (Beejan Olfat) says, confessing his love for his schoolfriend Robel (Russ Pirie): "We musn't be sad! Perhaps when we look back in thirty years we'll jeer - but now, everything is beautiful..."

Simon Stone's use of the space at fortyfivedownstairs is dynamic and imaginative, and demonstrates that he has a gift for creating memorable theatrical image. A corner of the space is heavily curtained to enclose an intimate auditorium facing the corner of the room, with two dramatic arched windows on either wall and the audience on two sides of the stage. The set consists of about a dozen old-fashioned school-desks, which are manipulated to become hills, walls, doors and so on as required. Sensibly, there is no attempt to update the play to make it more "relevant", and Mel Page's costumes are neutrally 19th century, theatrical rather than accurate. Rob Stewart's sound design is deliberately up-front; sometimes this works, and sometimes it ceases to battle fruitfully with the dialogue and becomes merely overwhelming. But I'll forgive him everything for the stunning opening after interval.

It's worth noting that the bulk of this cast is drawn from recent Victorian College of the Arts graduates, and it's a reminder of how much the VCA is contributing to the theatre renaissance that is presently making Melbourne such an interesting place to be. The actors embrace the considerable challenges of this text with passion and discipline and, sometimes, forgiveable excess. It is, after all, a consummate play for young people, and aside from Rhys McConnochie, who is the Masked Man - the role Wedekind himself played - they are all young actors. There is no doubting their physical and emotional commitment: it is exciting simply to be in the same room. And they are fearless in approaching the extremes of eros and thanatos Wedekind works through his text (and in dealing with his complex language). I especially liked Angus Grant as Melchior and Katie-Jean Harding as Wendla; perhaps they best managed the tricky, even perverse, balance Wedekind attains between sexual desire and childish innocence.

In fact, much of this play's comedy, as well as its entire tragedy, exists in Wedekind's acute grasp of his characters' essential innocence. Its dramatic force comes from the clarity with which Wedekind exposes the damage that is caused by the projection of the adults' own fears and desires onto their children. It's there not only in Martha's savage beating for a shy expression of her womanhood in wearing a satin ribbon, but also in the condemnation of Melchior by the school authorities for writing about sex. In the loathing expressed by the adult world - the criminalisation of Melchior's questing intelligence, the disgust and shame invoked by female desire - is all the damage that has been wrought on those adults, all the fear of everything that has been repressed within their own bodies.

It's a fair bet that Freud saw Wedekind's plays; certainly, Wedekind's "tragedy of childhood" anticipates Freud's theorising of sexuality. But the true power of Spring Awakening is in how Wedekind opens up the mystery and strangeness of being alive, the "tormenting doubt of everything" which is, in the end, the only true key to joy. And, of course, to poetry.

Pictures of Spring Awakening: Top: (Left to right) Katie-Jean Harding, Russ Pirie, Beejan Olfat, Angus Grant, Shelly Lauman and Sara Gleeson. Bottom: Angus Grant, Katie-Jean Harding, Shelly Lauman and Sara Gleeson.