Ms TN's brain has once again gone AWOL. I've released its description on Interpol, on the off chance that it's done something glamorous and illegal like running off with Julian Assange, although I suspect it's more likely to be lurking in the mean streets of the Western Suburbs, consuming custom-made pickles and designer lattes.

This abscondment means that, despite the fact that Melbourne's theatre scene is pulsating with pulsating stuff, all week I have found myself mute in front of the keyboard. So (to avoid the brickbats that come my way from writing about shows that have closed) this is a quick listing of recommendations from the past week's viewing. All will reward your ticket purchasing with actual theatre. And if you get to all of them, you will experience an excellent cross-section of Melbourne's quality independent scene.

To wit: Creditors, at Red Stitch; Peer Gynt, by Four Larks; and Elektra, by Fraught Outfit at The Dog. And a plug too for The Nightwatchman at Theatre Works. (Most of you will know it was written by my husband, Daniel Keene; the music is also composed by my son, Ben. Andrew Fuhrman, who is related to neither of them, has written a beautiful response in Crikey.)

For the first time I can remember, Daniel Keene has two productions on at once in his home town. One, the comedy Life Without Me, opened last month at the Melbourne Theatre Company to enthusiastic reviews and sell-out audiences as part of the Melbourne Festival. The other, the delicate generational drama The Nightwatchman, opens later this month at Theatre Works in St Kilda as an independent production.

Since he lives in the same house as I do, I sneakily exploited our proximity to ask him some questions.

And, eventually, he answered them.

AC: To Elizabethans, says the critic Jan Kott, the world was the stage and the stage was the world. What world is your stage? What does it become in the hands of others?

DK: The stage is a frame. I like the frame to be simple and unornamented.

To put it a different way: the stage is a metaphor. It doesn’t need any other metaphors added to it.

The theatre is a pragmatic art. When I write a play, the action of the play has to happen somewhere. In a room? On a street corner? Both? I make fundamental delineations.


When I imagine a play, I imagine a bare stage, a source of light, an actor. Depending on the content of the play, I might call what I imagine ‘the lobby of a hotel’ or ‘the kitchen of a suburban house’ or ‘a building site’. In other words, I locate my actor standing lit on a bare stage in the world outside of the theatre. I am suggesting a simple recognition, nothing more or less. Once that recognition has occurred, we can all get on with the play. In other words, we can ask ‘what will happen?’

I write plays for the hands of others; the hands that make them and the hands that applaud (or don't applaud) them. A play is a casting off.

When we speak of poetry in the theatre, what do we mean? You read a lot of poetry, and sometimes write it yourself. What is the difference between a poem and a work for the theatre?

In a very, very basic way, a poem and a work for the theatre share a need for rhythm: the striking arrival of the next line, the feeling of inevitability when the line ends (an inevitability that is created by the line itself).

Perhaps it’s simply that I think every line in a play deserves the same attention as every line in a poem.

Is writing plays another kind of thinking?

Yes. It’s a very delicate, very crude way of thinking.

Who are the writers who matter most to you?

I keep discovering them. But there is no ‘most’.

What do you seek to make? Do you want anything? Do you simply arrive with empty hands?

I don't seek to make anything in particular. When I begin to write a play I never know what I’m going to make. I sometimes surprise myself and actually write a play. I abandon more plays than I finish. I sometimes have, as Beckett once said, 'the itch to make but nothing to say'. I think it's a kind of pathology. I don't understand it and have avoided trying to.

Empty hands? Yes, always. To want nothing, to know nothing, to bring nothing. And then the making. It’s a kind of magic, as is baking a cake or building a house.

For as long as you have been a playwright, you have worked closely with particular actors. How important is the actor to your imagining of a play?

The art of the theatre is the art of the word made flesh.

I am always aware that I am writing for the voice. I think that perhaps poets might have the same awareness. But where for a poet the voice is their own firstly (familiar), and secondly that of the reader (unknown), the voice(s) I am writing for belongs to a known other: it is not my voice, but it is a voice that I know, that I can hear as I write, the voice of the actor. I can hear what I imagine are the possibilities of that voice. I am not talking about the interpretation of the lines, but their music, their rhythm and cadence, their tone and volume. You could say that the voice is an instrument that I am writing for. The more familiar I am with that instrument, the more freedom I have. I can write lines that I myself could never say, lines whose expression is beyond my capacity even to imagine uttering them.

The voice comes from the actor’s body. When I write for the actor’s voice I am writing for his/her body. Generally, I don’t write many stage directions. I want the language itself to (literally) move the actor, for the voice and the body of the actor to become one energy, one dynamic expression of the language, without the ‘prompting’ of prescriptive directions. In other words, I want the act of speaking the lines that I write to propel the actor’s body, I want the act of speaking to bring the actor’s body to life.

Is the actor, alone and vulnerable on a stage, caught in the light before the eyes of an audience, the secret of the humanity of your theatre?

There is no secret. The actor, alone and vulnerable on a stage, caught in the light before the eyes of an audience is the beginning and the end of the theatre that I want to make.

In its exploration of the possibilities of absurdist comedy, Life Without Me strikes me as a play with a close relationship to Half and Half (2002), a two hander which you also wrote specifically for specific actors, in this case Robert Menzies and Dan Spielman. Comedy has always been an important part of the dramas you write, as far back as Silent Partner (1991). How important is it to laugh?

People often forget that in almost everything I have written there are moments of comedy (I call them ‘the funny bits’). Perhaps they forget because this comedy rarely lasts until the end of the play. In my plays laughter is usually the prologue to its opposite. Comedy makes the audience more open to what is occurring on stage (makes them more vulnerable to it). I try to create that openness by offering the possibility of laughter. Comedy is an invitation that I extend.

How important is it to grieve?

To grieve is to openly acknowledge our mortality. I think grief should be embraced. The acknowledgment of our mortality may be all that can save the human race from itself.

The theatre can be a place that opens a space for grieving. To put it another way: I take it that a metaphor can be understood as a displacement of reality that allows that reality to be more clearly perceived. The theatre is a place where metaphors are literally made in front of our eyes, where they exist only at a particular time and in a particular place. When the performance is over, nothing remains except our memory of it. It is as if the performance shares the mortality of its audience. This fact is in itself a metaphor (which may in fact lead us back to ‘all the world’s a stage’). If to grieve is to acknowledge our mortality, then the theatre can be the place where that acknowledgment is made manifest, where we can, literally, experience that acknowledgment as an emotional, intellectual and physical event in time and space.

That’s at least the beginning of an answer to your question.

Picture: Robert Menzies and Kerry Walker in Life Without Me. Photo: Jeff Busby

Life Without Me, directed by Peter Evans, is playing at the Sumner Theatre, MTC Theatre, until November 21. The Nightwatchman, directed by Matt Scholten, opens at Theatre Works, St Kilda, on November 24 and runs until December 12. Details and bookings online here.

My Australian review of [Title of Show], a recent Broadway musical now making its Australian debut at Theatre Works, is online. No, you read that right: while one usually associates Broadway musicals with $10 million sets at the Princess Theatre, this is a show that makes a virtue of minimal staging. Like I say, it's a smart idea delivered with sheer exuberant charm.

A couple of pending reviews will occur presently. For the moment, I seem to have run out of words. I have written such a lot of them lately.

Yes, Ms TN has been whinging heroically this past fortnight, but that hasn't stopped her getting out to the theatre. Writing about it has been a different matter. But this morning she awoke from her slumber, brutally thrust aside the heap of used tissues that had accumulated overnight, and cried out: "Now or never!" Or something of the sort. (Witnesses differ: another report claims she actually said "Oh no! Not again!" Which reminds me of the Belgian theatre director who wakes up every morning, walks to his window, flings open the shutters, and shouts "Help!")


Existential angst is all part of life's rich whatsit, and it must be admitted that Ms TN does it exceptionally well. She does it, in fact, so it feels like hell. But it doesn't get the reviews done. So after a salutory kick in the arse from her alter ego, Ms TN will finally report on last week's theatre going. These reviews will be a little briefer than usual, for which Ms TN's better self apologises: but it's been a full week of mundane dread here, and that all takes up space.

First up was a production of Maxim Gorky's The Lower Depths at Theatre Works, which was on for a mere four days. I wanted to see this because of the personnel involved: it's a collaboration between John Bolton, Brian Lipson, Bagryana Popov and Joseph Sherman, with lighting by Shane Grant, and the cast included people from the St Kilda Uniting Care Drop in Centre. I expected something special, and I wasn't disappointed. Gorky's unsentimental expose of the Russian underclass had a production last year at 45 downstairs directed by Ariette Taylor (and there's more about the play itself in that review). Unlike Taylor's production, however, this company brought Gorky's preoccupations unflinchingly into the present day.

Bolton and his collaborators presented a savagely cut-down version of the play which lasted a little over an hour. It was promenade theatre, with the audience milling around with the actors in the large space at Theatre Works. The set filled the theatre with found objects that were probably rescued from rubbish dumps or skips, and bits of cardboard boxes, torn newspaper and rags covered the floor in a convincing simulacrum of squalor. In the centre was an area cordoned off by a walkway, in the centre of which was a bed where the consumptive Anna (Bagryana Popov) lay dying. Around the edges of the theatre were a series of booths or miniature stages. Phrases from the play and other kinds of graffiti were chalked onto the black walls.

It was one of those events which interlocked the fictions of the play with present-day realities, a decision reinforced by the qualities the non-professional actors from the drop in centre brought to the production. Working with non-professionals is a honourable tradition in realist art: neo-realist film directors such as Ermanno Olmi, for instance, worked with non-actors in films like Il Posto or The Tree of Wooden Clogs, bringing an unactorly authenticity to the performances which reinforced the political anger behind his films.

The effect of using non-professional actors in theatre is slightly different. On the one hand, it brings a direct immediacy of experience to the production; and in fact several of Gorky's monologues are replaced by the performers' own stories. But unlike film, theatre can't forget its own artifice. The performative effect is almost the opposite of authenticity: it's an unconscious artifice, a certain naivety, that paradoxically reinforces the emotional reality of the play.

Here these qualities - professional and non-professional - are skilfully woven together in a sharply contemporary work that seems very true to Gorky's bleakly humane vision, however radically it departs from the text. The Lower Depths has an organic vitality: the actors and audience occupy the same space, the actors watching as attentively when they're not performing, and emerging into focus when required. It seemed to me an exemplary work of community theatre, bringing together social and artistic ethics in a rare integrity.

It reminded me more than anything of the work of the British film and theatre director Lindsay Anderson. I never got to see Anderson's theatre (wrong age, wrong continent) but films such as If, O Lucky Man or This Sporting Life are brilliant examples of radical art. Like this production, Anderson's films examine human experience with a kind of tender democracy of vision that's underlaid by a clear-eyed social anger.

"Fighting means commitment, means believing what you say, and saying what you believe," said Anderson memorably. "It will also mean being called sentimental, irresponsible, self-righteous, extremist and out-of-date by those who equate maturity with scepticism, art with amusement, and responsibility with romantic excess. And it must mean a new kind of intellectual and artist, who is not frightened or scornful of his fellows." The Lower Depths reflects this kind of intelligent artistic commitment. I'd like to see more of it.

The following night I went to the opening of Peter Houghton's The Colours at the MTC's Lawler Studio. The Colours is the conclusion to a trilogy of monologues, made in collaboration with Anne Browning, that began with Houghton's hit satire The Pitch and continued through The China Incident (performed by Browning). The earlier two are concerned, in different ways, with the global US empire: The Pitch hilariously satirised the film industry, while The China Syndrome was about the PR spin of global realpolitics.

In this unexpected conclusion to the trilogy, Houghton summons the ghosts of the British Empire. He plays the reality-challenged Colour Sergeant Tommy Atkins, who is the final solitary remnant of Empire in a forsaken African outpost. Ventriloquising a dozen characters gives Houghton the chance to display his virtuosic comedic skills, and he’s a delight to watch. But the play’s more serious intent - an attempt to pay homage to the footsoldiers of colonial power – is undermined by sentiment: an edge of savagery is missing here, tipping its premise into naivety.

It's a fine line between paying homage to the bravery and belief of those who laid down their lives - usually unwillingly - for the British Empire, and sinking into a nostalgia that insidiously ignores some of the lessons of post-colonialism. Despite his parodic intent, Houghton falls off the tightrope here, although his evocation of Atkins, haunted by his dead comrades, is at times undeniably moving. And you can't but admire his control of the stage, shifting from pathos to comedy with razor timing. This is a brave play, if only for its defiant unfashionableness, but it left me feeling uncomfortably ambivalent.

Partly it's a feeling that I've seen this before, and done better: the 60s saw a lot of work which excavated the myths and price of the empire. Plays like John Arden's Sergeant Musgrave's Dance or films such as Joseph Losey's searing King and Country, which follows the court martial of a shell-shocked infantryman in the trenches of World War 1, tore apart the ideologies of empire building with intelligent anger. It's an anger that's missing in The Colours, for all its satire. And maybe the British Empire is still too close to home for me to forgive it so easily.

Finally, I saw Yumi Umiumare's En Trance at the CUB Malthouse. As its title suggests, En Trance is a work about liminal states, the thresholds of transformation between one mode of being and another. And it’s also a work that reaches for an ecstatic dissolution of the self, the loss of self-consciousness that occurs in a state of trance. Umiumare achieves these ambitions in a fascinating and complex one-woman piece that defies classification. Part dance, part theatre, part multimedia immersion, part dream, En Trance inexorably reels you into Umiumare’s subjective world.

Umiumare was a member of the influential Japanese Butoh company DaiRakudakan and moved to Australia in 1993. Here she extends the anarchic tradition of Butoh – a form of modern Japanese dance that emerged after the chaos of World War 2 – by introducing text and filmed images into what is ultimately a deeply personal narrative about shifting between different cultures.

En Trance begins with an almost classical simplicity. Dressed in a white shift, Yumi Umiumare enters a bare stage adorned with slim white columns, and tells us a surreal domestic story about her cat. Suddenly, in a moment that is like Alice’s fall into the rabbit hole, we are plunged into another reality. The stage is drowned in the harsh sounds and images of a city street, as Umiumare writhes and twists in a kind of panic, her body almost invisible behind the images that are projected onto her. This sequence is like an assault: the noise is alienating, the images confusing to the eye.

Just as suddenly, the performance transforms again. Umiumare changes on stage into a black, flowing costume, and becomes a whirling cat-like creature. This dance is where the performance began to come to life for me: Umiumare is riveting. Her body seems to defy its physical limitations, as if she is possessed by a spirit of transformation.

En Trance moves through several more sequences, each of them wholly unexpected yet each deepening the meaning of the others. In one, she explains the many Japanese words for tears. In another, she pounds out a hilariously kitsch Japanese pop song. In yet another, she combines Aboriginal and Butoh dance, reprising her earlier cat-dance, this time as a feral creature in a new landscape.

Bambang Nurcahyadi’s projected images and Ian Kitney’s sound design seamlessly combine with Umiumare’s performance into a singular unity of expression. It makes En Trance an impassioned and beautiful piece, constantly rich and surprising in its emotional range, and finally very moving.

Picture: Yumi Umiumare in En Trance. Photo: Jeff Busby

The review of En Trance was in Monday's Australian.

The Lower Depths by Maxim Gorky, directed by John Bolton. Designed by Brian Lipson, lighting by Shane Grant, music direction by Bagryana Popov. With Brian Pigot, Brett A. Walsh, Stewart Weir, Tom Moleta, Joseph Sherman, Maree Wesol, Brian Lipson, Pat Nyberg, Abdul Hay, Rodney Dean Mcleish, Ant Bridgeman, Bagryana Popv, Sharon Kirschner and John Bolton. Theatre Works and participants from St Kilda Uniting Care Drop in Centre @ Theatre Works. (Closed).

The Colours, written and performed by Peter Houghton, directed by Anne Browning. Design by Shaun Gurton, lighting design by Richard Vabre, composer David Chesworth. Melbourne Theatre Company @ the Lawler Studio, MTC Theatre, until September 12.

En Trance by Yumi Umiumare. Dramaturge and collaborator Moira Finacune, media art by Bambang Nurcahyadi, installtion artist Naomi Ota, costumes design by David Anderson, lighting design by Kerry Ireland. With Yumi Umiumare. Malthouse Theatre @ Tower Theatre, CUB Malthouse until September 13.

At first blush, the idea of reading the entire text of The Great Gatsby on stage seems intriguing. Rather than approaching F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great novel through the inevitable reductiveness of adaptation, New York’s Elevator Repair Service would, presumably, present us with the Real Thing in Gatz. All seven hours of it.

Novels are mostly read in silence, their imaginings populating the fluid stage of the mind, but there remains a child-like pleasure in being read to. All the same, writing for the stage has different imperatives to those of prose; as Peter Brook points out, speaking of the particular problem of writing for the theatre, words on the stage “are only powerful in proportion to what they create in the language of theatre”. An author “is compelled to begin at the very root – by facing the problem of the very nature of dramatic utterance. There is no way out.”


I suppose I arrived with expectations. Foremost was that this exercise would force the company to face the question of language in the theatre “at the very root”. How would they deal with the interior imaginings of prose in the exterior world of theatre? What would this exercise reveal about language on the stage? About theatre itself? And in the end, this is my disappointment with the show. Instead of bringing the novel to life, Elevator Repair Service turned it into a fetish object. Yes, every word, down to the last “and”, was there. Why it was necessary or interesting to do this escaped me entirely.

It begins promisingly enough. Louisa Thompson’s set is a hyper-realistic, dingy office (perhaps a business selling bonds, like Fitzgerald’s narrator, Nick Carraway). On one side are shelves of dilapidated files, in the centre a desk with an ancient computer, to the back a windowed wall with a door, and a glassed reception area. A rumpled man (Scott Shepherd) enters with a take-away coffee and begins his working day. He hangs up his coat and turns on his computer, but it won’t start. He presses the reset button, takes a swig from his coffee, opens a file and discovers a battered paperback copy of The Great Gatsby. Out of boredom and curiosity, he begins to read it out loud as the office comes to life around him.

Stroke by stroke, the office workers become the characters in the book, the fictional reality gradually inhabiting the humdrum world of the office until it takes over entirely. This transition, which takes place slowly (some might say, unremittingly) over the four parts of the show, might have had more power if the world of the office had had more reality in the first place. I began to get twitchy in the first twenty minutes: the actions of the workers made no sense at all. Every gesture was incomplete: the performers opened files and closed them, they waved bits of paper in each other’s faces, they made inaudible phone calls. Shepherd kept pressing his reset button, but without waiting for the necessary time for his computer to reboot. (I once had a computer just like that). I began, even then, to wonder how deeply thought this production was.

Part of my impatience stems from having recently seen Daniel Schlusser’s Peer Gynt, which similarly posited two simultaneous stage realities, a mundane present and a fictional imagining. In this case, the relationship between the two realities was complex and shifting; both were highly stylised, but each had its own integrity, a quality emerging in part from some profound theatrical thinking about the source text and its relationship to the present, and by focused performances. The approach in Gatz seemed, in comparison, startlingly tame and unthought. The office world looked more and more like a gimmick which never paid off: it was abandoned early, with scarcely a glance back, and the novel took over. This sense of uncertainty was intensified by the uneven performances, which ranged from Gary Wilmes’s powerful evocation of Tom Buchanan to shallow and obvious parody which involved a lot of mugging to the audience.

By part two, the company was – with occasional meaningless office interruptions - “acting out” the novel. Shepherd read every word of the narrative, with the actors providing the dialogue, down to the last “he said”. (This particularly bothered me, and is part of what I mean by their fetishising the prose. Why not cut these phrases? The tautological joke was funny for ten minutes but soon became merely tedious: dialogue indicators in novels are designed to be invisible to the reading eye, necessary pointers that become wholly redundant on stage). I began to suffer from a strange sort of double vision: every action described in the prose was slavishly illustrated by the performers. I began to long for the actors to do something different from the writing, for a little bit of spin or wit. Or anything, really. But no. This went on for the next three thousand hours.

You have to admire the athletic persistence of the actors, and it must be said that Shepherd has a nice reading style, although with a tendency, forgivable perhaps, to lose himself in the hypnotic rhythms of the prose. To be fair, there were times, amounting to perhaps an hour or two of the whole show, when I began to see how this approach might make exciting theatre – but these moments were always the most dramatic parts of the novel, where the dialogue was closest to a conventional play. The theatre presented was, in the end, informed by wholly conventional ideas and never questioned anything, beyond some obvious grammatical jokes, about the qualities of written or spoken language.

What saved me was the novel itself, which remains as brilliant as it ever was. But Gatsby’s tragedy and the “foul trash” floating in the wake of the American dream remain all Fitzgerald’s vision. If anything, Gatz demonstrates how futile the idea of geekish fidelity can be on stage. Or how contradictory it is: this faithfulness, if it did anything at all, merely diminished Fitzgerald’s prose.

It was a relief, then, to see Rochelle Carmichael’s Clickity Clack and Aoroi, two short dance pieces presented at Theatreworks. They are backed by a miscellany of music, including the soundtracks from The Matrix and Donnie Darko, a strange mulch that I ended up enjoying more than I expected. Combining circus, black light puppetry and physical theatre, Clickity Clack is a witty take on the erotics of dress with some wonderful costumes – a skirt levitated by red helium balloons, a cut-out paper business suit with a huge bow tie – and some fun reveals. Aoroi seems to be a concept taken straight from a fantasy art website, with fairies creeping out from beneath a curtain, half insect, half human, to play their amoral and predatory games. Despite some muddy movement, which took the edge off a little, these are seductive pieces, with a touch of the exuberant embrace of popular kitsch that animates so much of BalletLab’s work.


Lastly, I made an unplanned visit to the STC’s production of The Wonderful World of Dissocia, Anthony Neilson’s play about the psychotic breakdown of a woman called Lisa Jones (Justine Clarke). There’s something brilliantly crude about this work: the first half is a subjective enactment of delusional reality, the second a starkly minimal picture of its consequences. The excess of the first half is characterised by over-the-top, cabaret theatricality, delivered through some first-class performances. Lisa’s journey through Dissocia shows us a world that, like Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland, is at once funny, disorientating and darkly violent, a place where words have their own sinister life, like the ambiguous smile of a Cheshire cat. The second half shifts to another kind of theatre altogether, a minimal and unsparing realism that is all the more powerful for its contrast to what has happened earlier.

Marion Pott’s production is beautifully modulated. She catches the surreality of the first half through some hilarious and inventive theatre-making (with the help of some truly eye-burning costumes by Tess Schofield and Nick Schlieper’s lighting). After interval, the grassy field that constitutes the first stage lifts to become the oppressively low ceiling of the second set, lit with a neon harshness. Lisa’s bed and bedside table huddle forlornly in the corner, and the various staff and visitors who interact with her – making sure she takes her medication, confiscating her Walkman, blaming her for her lack of responsibility – have to walk in and out for the length of the stage. These scenes were delicately handled and cumulatively very moving. I don’t think I’ve seen a more compelling evocation of the isolating loneliness and disempowerment of mental illness.

Pictures: top: Elevator Repair Service's Gatz; bottom: The Wonderful World of Dissocia, STC.

Gatz, from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Directed by John Collins, set by Louisa Thimpson, lighting design by Mark Barton, sound design by Ben Williams. With Scott Shepherd, Jim Fletcher, Kate Scelsa, Sibyl Kempson, Lucy Taylor, Gary Wilmes, Vin Knight, Frank Boyd, Annie McNamara, Ben Williams, Laurena Allan, Mike Iveson and Ross Fletcher, Elevator Repair Service @ the Sydney Opera House until May 31.

Clickity Clack and Aroi, directed and co-choregraphed by Rochelle Carmichael. Lighting design by Thomas Lambert, costumes by Rochelle Carmichael, Michael Kopp, Sera Carmichael and Christina Smith. Danced by Kathryn Newnham, Caroline Meaden, Alice Dixon and Michael Kopp. Liquid Skin @ Theatreworks until May 31.

The Wonderful World of Dissocia by Anthony Nielson, directed by Marion Potts. Set design by Alice Babidge, costumes by Tess Schofield, lighting design by Nick Schlieper, music composed by Alan John, sound design by David Franzke. With Kate Box, Justine Clarke, Matt Day, Michelle Doake, Russell Dykstra, Socratis Otto, Justin Smith and Matthew Whittet. Sydney Theatre Company, closed.

Actually, you can if you like; but Ms TN can't quite believe how difficult it's been to get to the blog this week. I'm still intending to write about Gatz, which bothered me in so many ways that rants have been rising in my head like clouds of bats, and now the to-do list has been lengthened by the seductively charming dance/physical theatre pieces Clickety Clack and Aroi at Theatreworks (go see). At this point, I can't see either happening before early next week... as long as I don't plan to sleep between now and then.

This isn't, mind you, a complaint. The gods are being kind and life is good. Keep chatting amongst yourselves, and focus will be had when life stops getting in the way.

Over the weekend, Ms TN's body found new and nasty ways to remind her that she is human, all too human. I succumbed to a few minor but uncomfortable conditions, all of which are apparently "stress related". Ha! I am always reluctant to admit to myself that stress is an issue, since it seems really wimpy when all I do is write things. Imprinted somewhere in my psyche is the image of the lady of leisure at her Georgian writing desk, jotting menus for the cook on purple notepaper before she idly lops some roses into a basket.

Yes, my name is Alison, and I am a workaholic. Perhaps I should enter a 12-step plan of concentrated holidays and enforced idleness. In fact, I am planning soon to do just that. But before that, I have a little work to do. And as a practised procrastinator, in order to distract myself I have been also following the local hobby of pondering precisely what it is that makes being someone who values art and who lives in Australia a peculiarly stressful existence. Making art is hard anywhere, and here it is in fact more materially comfortable than in many other places. But that tends to elide its challenges.

Watching the US election yesterday, I couldn’t help comparing it to the last Australian election. Yes, there was euphoria (soon sobered into what one Labor politician in the 1980s called “the latest political reality”); but I confess my major feeling was an overwhelming relief that the Howard era was over. I spent some time as a young reporter following industrial affairs, and it disillusioned me so thoroughly that I refused to vote at all. And I had a certain scepticism – a feeling since borne out in many ways – about the Rudd government: Rudd was largely elected because he was Howard-lite, a younger and more progressive conservative model. I fear that the blackly funny ABC comedy series The Hollow Men got Australian politics right.

Obama’s election was different. Even though, when you get down to it, his stated policies weren’t a million miles from McCain’s, that wasn’t what was most striking about the billion-dollar theatre that is an American Presidential election. Obama so clearly embodies the desires and hopes of a constituency that wants to reinvent itself as what it believes it is: the Greatest Country in the World, the place of freedom and opportunity. Yesterday it was possible to believe that these aren’t just words falling idly from lips that meant the precise opposite. It was possible to believe, however briefly, that these weren’t just the lies of Empire. That belief shone in the faces of Obama’s supporters, in the people standing patiently in line waiting to vote, in the stories of old men and women, born just after slavery, voting with all their heart for what, only months ago, seemed a complete impossibility: a black president.

America’s great talent for myth-making suddenly stood large in its heart and seemed for once an admirable thing. And whatever I think about the American political machine, I’m not prepared to be cynical about the hope that yesterday's events so dramatically expressed. It’s real, and it’s a powerful force. Democracy is a contract that American people believe in, and yesterday that contract was observed.

To move to Australia, it illuminates harshly something that is missing here, and not just in our politics. In our artistic life, there is something something fundamental missing from our social fabric. It seems to me that what we lack, the ur-problem from which all others evolve, is a vital culture.

Culture isn’t the same as art. Culture is the contract, however defined, between an artist and his or her public. Culture is the lively communal yeast that makes everything rise. It’s the air that lets art breathe, the space where it can swing its arms, the multiple influences that flavour it.

If our theatre culture is deeply impoverished, it’s not because there are not committed and skilful artists, or that there aren’t audiences – even enthusiastic audiences – for what they do. It’s because something crucial is missing in between, in that implicit contract between the creation and reception of art. Whatever the causes – and they are manifold, historical and difficult to track – the effects are plain.

The first and major effect is the constant need to justify having art at all. No artist in Australia can assume that his or her work matters for its own sake, and the inability to make this assumption, the need to continually justify one’s existence, generates a corrosive spiritual exhaustion. At its worst, it makes our art at once reactionary and timid. Art becomes a package which delivers an aesthetic experience according to certain given guidelines: the matrix of “standards”. This underlying assumption – which is by no means confined to conservative critique – edits out the raw energy of actual innovation, which challenges those aesthetic standards, often by breaking them, always by interrogating them, sometimes by paying them serious homage rather than lip-service.

It’s been the same for as long as I have been thinking about these things.

What follows is an attempt to sketch out what I mean. It is, I fear, very long.

******

A couple of days ago, Jana Perkovic at Mono no aware posted an interesting quote from British theatre blogger Andrew Hayden, in which he compared a European production of a recent British play with its British premiere. In particular, Jana honed in on a major observation of Andrew’s: what he saw as British theatre’s “abandonment of metaphor”. By implication, Jana was pointing towards a crippling literalism in Australian theatre.

It’s an interesting and pertinent issue, and I began to write a reply. But it was like pulling the thread on a jumper: the whole thing began to unravel, and before long I found I was digging towards a fumbling definition of something that has been bugging me for some time. I don’t think Australian theatre lacks metaphor, or liveliness, or skill, or inventiveness, or innovation. I think it possesses all these things, in actuality as well as in potentia. Of course there are shows that are less exciting than others, but for every Scarlett O’Hara at the Crimson Parrot you can point to a Food Court.

Andrew Haydon’s comparison of the difference between English and European approaches towards text made me think of Daniel Keene's play, To Whom It May Concern. This is a 20 page play which premiered here in the late '90s as a 20 minute piece in an evening of three short works. It was a straightforward poor theatre production by the Keene/Taylor Theatre Project, performed as a modest two-hander.

When it premiered in France in 2004, directed by Didier Bezace at the Théâtre de la Commune, this 20 page play went for seventy five minutes. It was performed on a big stage on a set that required a dozen technicians to make the transformations. It starred two very famous actors, including Jean-Paul Rousillon, who was a very old Comédie-Française actor (in fact, it was his last role) who had been directed by Beckett in Waiting for Godot. It was a sold-out hit and drew a lot of hyperbole, including a claim from an excited France Inter critic that it was the most important Paris premiere since the first production of Godot in 1953.

There is obviously an enormous difference of resource here. Théâtre de la Commune has suffered from the Sarkozy cuts, which have slashed French cultural funding by two thirds over recent years, but it regularly plays to 90 per cent capacity. Before the cuts, its state funding amounted to something like 70 per cent of its total budget (as compared, say, to the MTC's 13 per cent). But the difference in scale and notice is about more than funding - it's about the theatrical possibilities that are easily reached for within a culture, the space given both culturally and personally to artistic imagination. It’s also about an ability to read the theatrical potential and meaning of a text, an ability to discriminate critically that stems from a basic intellectual and social confidence in the value of art.

La Commune is a mainstream company, if proudly radical (it is in the middle of the last Communist arrondissement in Paris). Bezace himself was part of the radical theatre movement of 1968; he founded La Cartoucherie with Ariane Mnouchkine, and their work plugs into a French cultural history that places theatre at the centre of social revolution, right back to the Revolution itself. (In connection with this, it's worth remembering how the theatre was at the centre of the Velvet Revolution, eventually making playwright Vaclav Havel president of the country). Theatre has seldom been so literally a force for change in English speaking countries, although it has of course a tradition of political radicality, and this is a major difference from Europe. English-speaking culture is much more tied to the idea of theatre as entertainment. This is not all bad, but it's not all good either.

This European tradition creates a different kind of literacy and feeds into different audience expectations: unlike Australian audiences, French and German audiences will sit through three hour plays without a murmur. A Paris production of the Scottish playwright David Harrower's Knives and Hens, another 20-page play, went for four hours (and then afterwards most of the audience stayed on for a lively and long discussion). Which is as unimaginable here as actors going on strike.

However, it’s ridiculous to complain that we are not Europe. Of course we aren’t. Some time ago I decided to live where I am, instead of wishing to be somewhere else. I see enough exciting work to make it worthwhile, and over the past four years the parameters of our theatre culture have changed out of sight. Specifically, the expectations of main stage theatre have changed: the Malthouse, the Melbourne Festival and the STC have all contributed to this change. Most astonishingly, this change has been wildly successful.

It is no longer possible to assume – as theatre academic Hilary Glow did only last year – that “mainstream” means naturalistic, populist and consciously “Australian” plays while “fringe” means weird non-naturalistic “internationalist” experiment. This binary, which has always been highly dubious, informed the theatre establishment through the 90s, cheer led by critics like the Age’s Leonard Radic. Now we are as likely to see so-called avant garde work on our main stages and new experiments in naturalism from new companies.

Richard Watts rang me earlier this week to discuss this change. He perceives what he called a “lull” in independent theatre in Melbourne, and expressed a fear that the fact that the Malthouse “cherry picks” the best independent work in Melbourne has resulted in a concomitant lack of energy. I confess that I was surprised by this: independent theatre here has been strong for years, and surely main stage exposure can only give it more confidence and brio. When you look at fortyfive downstairs, The Eleventh Hour, Ranters, La Mama, Red Stitch, Theatreworks, Hoy Polloy, White Whale, Black Lung, Liminal Theatre, the Dog Theatre and the overwhelming local content of the Fringe Festival, it’s hard to think there’s not much going on.

But I suspect that Richard is onto something. Now that the categories of mainstream and fringe have been so thoroughly destabilised, it is possible that “alternative” theatre has lost a major reason for its being: to be a reaction to the mainstream, to be “new”.

This begs a very big question. If innovation in our theatre has only been driven by these reactionary impulses, this suggests a concomitant lack of depth in our artistic vision and possibility. There are reasons to make art that go beyond mere reactiveness. How much is our culture driven by a desire for novelty rather than the expression of individual artistic vision, the responsiveness to the world we live in? How interested are we, really, as artists, as audiences?

Louis Nowra complained many years ago that Australians have no sense of metaphor. This explains the radical shift from his early work - brilliant plays like Inside the Island, Inner Voices and The Golden Age - to the more palatable naturalism of Summer of the Aliens or Cosi, plays which were much more commercially successful and for which he is much better known. Perhaps he is right.

One of the ironies of Australian culture is that we have produced more brilliant poets per capita than practically anywhere else. Australian poetry is rich, diverse, intelligent and inventive; yet hardly anybody knows this. Aside from a couple of names like Les Murray, Australian poetry is a dark and unknown country, and our poetic history remains practically unknown outside a small coterie of readers. Francis Webb (whom Sir Herbert Read hailed as the peer of Rilke, Pasternak and Eliot ,"one of the greatest poets of our time . . . one of the most unjustly neglected poets of the century") is out of print. David Campbell, Randolph Stowe and untold others are forgotten. The situation is little better for most contemporary poets. The work is there, but very few people either know about it or are interested. It is certainly hardly a source of national pride.

This irony persists, to a lesser extent, through all our artistic disciplines. Even compared with Britain, Australia's grasp of the idea of a living culture embedded in its society is rather tenuous. This manifests in many ways: in the infantilism of the conservative criticisms made against Kristy Edmunds, which were more or less the equivalent of Nagg in Endgame crying "I want me pap!" You also see it in the impatience that demands Results, and hangs artists when they don't deliver. George Devine’s oft-cited “right to fail” – a most misunderstood right, which has to be earned through honest work – is not a concept that really exists in public discourse.

As regular readers will know, I will always call failure if I perceive it, and although I do attempt to be fair even when I loathe a work, calling failure always looks – and no doubt is – brutal. If I am to be honest as a critic, I have no choice. I personally feel that I owe it as a duty to art. (Yes, it sounds high-minded and even prim, but then, I was ever thus). How else is success to mean anything? I have never believed my opinion is the last word on any work: to do so seems to me the highest hubris, and is directly contradicted by some famous historical examples of critical maulings (Ibsen, Puccini, Kane spring to mind).

But nevertheless, as the Sydney critic James Waites said recently, there is an unease in doing so. Not because of the fact of failure, which is the risk of making art. But because perceptions of failure enter the public discourse in ways that can be crippling.

As a culture, we do not know how to deal with artistic failure, a judgment that is always – and must be – arguable. I have adored shows that others have loathed, and vice versa: that is how it should be. Having failed myself, and spectacularly, on many fronts, I don’t consider failure a life-blighting shame. (Some of the things I consider failures, I should note, have been publicly considered “successes”, and some of my private successes have publicly been considered failures – but perhaps, being a critic myself, I have a different relationship to criticism than most artists.) Success and failure have always seemed to me to be, as Giacometti said, secondary questions. Yet to fail in Australia gathers around itself a moral dimension, as if it’s a sin and a personal defect, rather than part – sometimes a necessary part – of the continuum of artistic endeavour.

This seems to me to denote a more general failure of attention. The evolution of artists is not considered an interesting phenomenon. It is a common complaint from practically every artist – unless they're popular superstars like Tim Winton or David Williamson – that to launch a new work always means starting from scratch. There is no sense in how art is received of a cumulative credit earned through the production of good work, no sense of continuity. Each work lands on the cultural stage existentially alone, hermetically sealed from its individual history, from its social context and artistic tradition. It is presented as a object that we consume, before we move onto the next, and is quickly absorbed and forgotten.

A telling example this year has been how the STC's Actors Company - one of the most ambitious mainstream experiments in our theatrical history, and certainly the most ambitious in the past decade - disappeared without a ripple. I have not seen a discussion anywhere that considered the implications of its failures or evaluated its successes (which, in my view, were considerable and exciting). Perhaps the commentators are waiting for the final production (the History plays, starring Cate Blanchett with the company) in January before they write their obituaries; but I still find the lack of comment after the announcement of the STC’s 2009 season startling. The end of the ensemble surely means, for example, the death of the persistent dream of a permanent ensemble that has haunted Australian theatre for decades. But even that barely raised an eyebrow.

Aside from some major problems of vision, and what was no doubt an increasingly unjustifiable expense in the light of complaints from subscribers, the major problem with the Actors Company seemed to be that audiences got sick and tired of seeing the same faces. They got bored seeing Pamela Rabe being brilliant in yet another role, or watching Hayley McElhinney again demonstrate that she is one of the best young actors in Australia.

As Diana Simmonds put it on Stage Noise:

Although the repertory company is now viewed through the rosy specs of nostalgia, there were many reasons for its demise: economics, television, bingo - and boredom. Boredom!

Boredom has arisen with Sydney's incarnation not necessarily because of play choice (more of that later), nor because the company actors are not - in the main - the crème de la crème, but because what started out as a glorious indulgence for a bunch of very lucky performers has turned into something much less for punters. Not least because there is even more crème left out in the cold, unable to get a gig because of this mob.

Even during the first season in 2006 variations on the following were overheard on a number of occasions in STC auditoria: "I love John Gaden and Pam Rabe is lovely, but I'm sick of them. I don't want to see them in every single show. I'm not renewing my subscription."

Aside from the fact that the Actors Company was actually not doing "every single show", and the palpable ressentissement of envy, this made me reflect. The Comédie-Française has survived for centuries, despite boring a large part of the Parisian theatre audience rigid. And “boredom” isn’t a complaint levelled against Mnouchkine’s ensemble, the Théâtre du Soleil – perhaps helped by the fact that they make one new show every couple of years, rather than 12 in two. (A major complaint was in fact that the Actors Company wasn’t as achieved as the Théâtre du Soleil. But how prepared are we to support an ensemble that will produce a new show every two or three years?) Rather than its failures, it seems to me to be more notable that the Actors Company produced some real triumphs in its brief life, despite a gruelling schedule and some dubious programming.

What does this suggest about Australian audiences and, perhaps more tellingly, commentators? It says to me that, while they might be briefly interested, even at times entertained, by art, they are not interested in culture. They are not interested in the kinds of evolution of practice that the Actors Company displayed in shows like The Lost Echo to The Season at Sarsaparilla. Watching the evolution of particular artists is for me of enormous and abiding interest, whether it's reading the oeuvre of a poet or novelist or following the trajectory of an actor. But perhaps in this I am a little odd.

What Australian audiences want, it seems, is the either the new or the expected. Whatever falls in between - being neither new nor a repeat of what went on before - falls through the cracks into a strange invisibility. It’s hard not to think of this as an inability to perceive art for its own sake; in either case it expresses a need for art to feed a desire that is extrinsic to the work itself: either a desire for novelty or a desire for consumable distraction. If neither of these things are present, the cultural mind glazes over.

In other words, success – the redefining of mainstream expectations – can open up another kind of failure (and not in the Eliotic sense). “Success” means the loss of the patina of the new. This is in fact right and necessary, part of the continuous dynamic evolution of culture. But in our case, it comes at a heavy price that is perhaps the reason why so many people complain that our culture is as thin as our topsoil.

We have little vocabulary to describe the evolution of artistic work. There are two choices: the new, young and “alternative”, which is its own justification, or a slide into torpid mainstream repetitions, which seems to be the mainstream definition of "success". What about artists who do not rest on their laurels, who are constantly exploring the possibilities mapped out in their early work? Where do they fit in? So far as I can see, precisely nowhere. And this, more than anything else, betrays the essential lack of depth in our culture.

What it means is that is very difficult in this country to build early success into deep achievement. Daniel Keene is a lucky exception – he has the resources of European theatre supporting his work, which means he can dream of big stages, large casts and imaginative directors, and has the freedom to explore all sorts of impulses in his work, in the knowledge that these investigations will be realised on stage. That this freedom is not available to most of our writers has been very clear in our playwriting over the past three decades. Its debilitating effect is nowhere clearer than in our film industry, where directors routinely disappear after their second film.

The crisis for mid-career artists - those who have a track record and experience and now are poised to make the work of their lives - was recognised by Paul Keating. His Australian Artist Creative Fellowships were introduced to counter this very problem, after he famously met the pianist Geoffrey Tozer and discovered to his shock that he earned less than half the yearly income of Keating's 18-year-old secretary. Predictably enough, those fellowships created not excitement, but envy and resentment, especially from those taxpayers who couldn’t see why money should be “given away” to artists, and they were scrapped quickly under Howard in favour of smaller grants to younger artists, which were, as always, easier to justify.

I should emphasise at this point that this is not the disgruntled plaint of a middle-aged artist against the brash interpolations of youth. If a young artist is valued more for her youth than her artistry, she is in as much trouble as the middle-aged concert pianist struggling away on $6000 a year. Although perhaps she is less tired.

The reasons for this blind spot in our cultural attention have been endlessly discussed for decades over every kind of table. I suspect one reason is that we are the only nation on earth that was founded as a bureaucracy, a fact which has had a much more lasting impact on the creation of our cultural mores than our convict past or the slaughter of bronzed Australian sons at Gallipoli. Crucially, the cultural contract between artists and their public is to a large extent formed by how art is written and spoken about in the public arena. And there's no escaping the fact that much of our cultural commentary, particularly in our mainstream media, has left a lot to be desired.

This doesn't erase the work of journalists who struggle against the limitations of daily newspapers or radio or television to cover the arts. Outside the mass media, there are many people attempting to bridge the gap: people like theatre historian Julian Meyrick, who addresses the persistent problem of Australian cultural amnesia, or initiatives like Currency House's excellent Platform Papers, which is a bold attempt to build public discussion. The situation now is a definite improvement on a decade ago, when aside from RealTime there was almost no intelligent discussion about the performing arts anywhere. In addressing the question of the cultural contract, the problem is that most of these outlets are specialist and remain outside the wider public discourse.

What I fear is what has always happened in Australian culture, the possibility which flares with wild promise and then splutters out into ashes of amnesia, the exhaustion which stems from the necessity for hope's constant resuscitation. Here culture has seldom suffered swift execution: much more often it is death by a thousand cuts, the gradual suffocation of the soul. The Rudd Government is presently giving little encouragement that much has changed since Michael Dransfield wrote in Like This For Years:

In the cold weather
the cold city the cold
heart of something as pitiless as apathy
to be a poet in Australia
is the ultimate commitment.

I guess the truth is that any real change is incremental and long term. And I am ever hopeful.

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh, directed by Görkem Acaroglu. Design by Emma Kingsbury, lighting design by Katie Sfetkidis, sound design by Ben Grant, music arranged and performed by Caitlin French. With Luke Elliot, Ben Grant, Mark Treginning and Gemma Falk. Tiny Dynamite Theatre @ Theatreworks until September 21.

The Time Is Not Yet Ripe by Louis Esson, directed by Jane Woollard. Design and set painting by Amanda Johnson, lighting design by Bronwyn Pringle. With Kurt Geyer, Ming Zhu-Hii. David Adamson, Don Bridges, Melanie Beddie, Tom Wren, Grant Cartwright, Georgina Capper, Sharon Davis and Mike McEvoy. Here Theatre and La Mama @ the Carlton Courthouse until September 14.

There is an interesting, if elliptical, continuity between these two vastly different plays. One, Martin McDonagh's The Lonesome West, was written in the late 1990s in Ireland; the other, Louis Esson's The Time Is Not Yet Ripe, a hundred years earlier in Australia. Both are black comedies which in different ways satirise the social and historical emptiness of a colonised culture.

There are parallels, as well as illuminating differences, between Ireland and Australia, even if they are rather more interesting than those outlined by The Lonesome West director Görkem Acaroglu in the program. (Acaroglu wins the prize for fatuous program notes for pointing out that "Ireland, like Australia, is an island surrounded by water. The Irish and the Australian's (sic) love travelling. Yet Australians, unlike the Irish, also suffer from the tyranny of their distance. The distance creates loneliness...a feeling of imprisonment, and often yearning and despair.")


Perhaps it's unfair to begin by criticising a program note; or it would be if the cliches expressed here weren't reflected in the production. Despite a couple of bravura performances from Luke Elliot and Ben Grant, McDonagh's play deserves a little more directorial sharpness: the production gives a sense that emotional complexities are here simplified, going for an easier, more clownish humour than the tragic comedy the writing aspires towards.

It's hard not to feel that Acaroglu might have been better off following up the common historical themes of colonisation and its legacies of concealed violence - the corpse in the attic about which everyone knows and nobody talks - and the cultural and personal amnesia that follows. As well as that sense of no-place - the conviction that life goes on elsewhere more richly and fully and meaningfully - that sucks the vitality out of any engagement with the present. This sense of displacement is, with its twin emotion, parochialism, the defining nostalgia of the colonised mind.

Certainly, McDonagh's black comedy, the final instalment of the Leenane trilogy he wrote in the 1990s, examines a kind of hell in which people are so brutalised they no longer recognise the realities of their own feelings. The Irish town Leenane becomes bleak portrait of contemporary Ireland, a consciously brutal counter-argument to the sentimentalised view of the land of poetically melancholic peasants larking about with shamrocks in quaint pubs.

A four character play like The Beauty Queen of Leenane (and Sam Shepard's True West, with which this play bears some affinities), The Lonesome West concerns two brothers, Valene (Luke Elliot) and Coleman (Ben Grant), whose sibling relationship is defined by vicious rivalry. Valene is a miser of Gogolian proportions, who conceals his hoarded poteen in a biscuit tin sealed by (re-used) tape and marks all his possessions, including his cherished collection of plastic Virgin Marys, with his initial. His violent brother Coleman has just murdered their father with a shotgun, and in order to prevent Valene going to the police has signed over the house to his brother.

The two characters who dream of something better are the young alcoholic priest Father Welsh (Mark Tregonning) and the foul-mouthed but innocent schoolgirl Girleen (Gemma Falk). Welsh is so ineffectual in his attempts to reform the village ("the murder capital of Europe") that no one gets his name right. Predictably enough, these two fail to survive the village - one drowns himself and the other goes mad. But it's a moot point whether the brothers have survived either: the worst, one senses, has already happened to both of them, and the long trail of mutual crimes between them is itself the result of unhealable damage.

How this play might situate itself in an Irish history marked by centuries of political violence and British occupation is beyond the scope of this review, but my bet is on a strong connection. It's probably worth pointing here to an essay I read recently about the early 20th century Irish revolutionary Ernie O'Malley, who has been heavily criticised as callous and unfeeling for his indifference to his brother's death. The Irish post-colonialist David Lloyd comments:

[O'Malley] writes with considerable cultural as well as personal insight in a long—and invaluable—auto-biographical letter from prison... about his middle-class Irish family and its inability to foster loving relations: “There was very little love in the family. I can honestly say that I never loved my parents, but I respected them.” Home life, he explains, “was none too congenial as its ties were never strong enough.” The sense of lack of affect is hardly unique to the O’Malley (or Malley) family in the Ireland of the time or for many generations since, and it would be valuable to have further study of the ways in which the intersection of Victorian values and colonial culture may have impacted the “structures of feeling” in Ireland at the time of the revolution.

This production aims for a sense of Irish authenticity, emphasised by the fiddler who plays Irish folk airs between or, at certain moments of emotional heightening, beneath the scenes. Given McDonagh's dialogue is written in Irish brogue, it would be difficult to perform without accents, but the violin blurs the anti-romanticising of the play (a broken fiddle might have been more appropriate). And it's certainly performed with energy and brio, bringing out the slapstick comedy between the warring brothers, if without a tragic sting. What emerges is a creditable but strangely underwhelming production.

The Time Is Not Yet Ripe is, on the other hand, a colonial oddity, like the paintings of misshapen kangaroos and oak-like gum trees that dot our galleries. Like the national argument about becoming a Republic - which, as Robert Hughes sardonically points out, has been hotly debated since the 1850s without our ever leaving the Monarchy - it demonstrates how Australian cultural amnesia results in a constant cycle of repetition. Perhaps the real (if somewhat depressing) virtue of this play is its demonstration of how little has changed in our mainstream cultural discourse. Even as things shift under the skin, the same repressive responses rise to counter them.

Esson's political satire was first performed in 1912 - five years before the October Revolution in Russia, two years before the outbreak of World War 1. Edwardian England was rife with new political ideas - a mood of public anti-Imperialism driven by the Second Boer War had seen the Liberals elected in a landslide, with Labour holding the balance of power.

Reading the literature of the time, it's fascinating to see how many preoccupations Edwardians had in common with us - feminism, republicanism, the endless question of national identity recur again and again. But with a few signal differences - the 20th century revolutions of Fascism and Socialism brought modern totalitarianism into being and left millions of corpses in their wake. Utopian belief is much harder to sustain in the 21st century than it was in 1900. And the political struggles of Indigenous people in Africa, Asia, America and here scarcely registered on the European map in Esson's time. Politics was a white man's burden.

Esson reflected the general European conviction that Australia was a "prose dull land" bereft of poetry (our first poet, the superbly named Barron Field, lamented Australia was "where Nature is prosaic, / Unpicturesque, unmusical, and where / Nature-reflecting Art is not yet born.") Esson the social satirist portrays a colonial society in which the present of elsewhere repeats itself here as farce, and in which a leaden inanition mitigates against change.

The occasion for the play is an election, where the Prime Minister Sir Joseph Quivington (Kurt Geyer) is defending his conservative government. The action revolves around two characters in rivalry for the same seat - Quivington's daughter Doris (Ming Zhu Hii), who represents a Woman's temperance party, and her fiance Sydney Barrett (Grant Cartwright), who is standing for the Socialists. Both represent repressive extremes at odds with The People, but in the end Woman wins with her mission to make politics, and everything else, more polite.

Jane Wollard's production takes on all the melodramatic cues, with varying degrees of success. There are a couple of wonderful theatrical conceits - Barrett's absurd speech, for example, in which he makes a call for more Egyptologists and poets, results in a stirring rendition of the Red Flag. Much of the time the artifice degenerates into shameless mugging, but there are very decent performances from Georgina Capper as the uptight Temperance activist Miss Perkins, Tom Wren as Tom K. Hill, an American investor, and Grant Cartwright.

Esson's insistence on an authentically Australian drama has made him an attractive figure in later periods of Australian theatre, but unlike, say, Oscar Wilde (whose wit this piece aspires towards) his work remains enclosed in its time. It bounces along painlessly enough, but all the same I felt sorry for the VCE students forced to believe that this play is anything more than a historical curiosity.

Picture: Luke Elliot (left) and Ben Grant in The Lonesome West. Photo: Ponch Hawkes

Venus in Furs, by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, adapted by Neal Harvey, directed by Marcel Dorney. Design by Lucie Sprague, lighting design by Tristan Bourke, sound design and compisition by Dani Kirby. With Angus Grant, Joel Radcliffe and Karen Roberts. Elbow Room @ Theatreworks, St Kilda, Melbourne, until May 18. Bookings: (03) 9534 3388

The 19th century writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch earned himself a dubious form of immortality when the psychiatrist Krafft-Ebing named a sexual perversion after him. These days, with the Marquis de Sade, he is best remembered as half of the term sado-masochism. But the contemporary image of a leather-clad dungeon mistress that this evokes is a poor reflection of the literature that inspired it. Neither the monstrous boredom of Sade’s vicious fantasies nor the cruel utopian desires of Sacher-Masoch are straightforward texts.

Both can be argued to be about liberation. Sade’s novels Justine or 120 Days of Sodom, written in prison during the French Revolution, enact a philosophy of the libertine, a succession of endless orgies and increasingly cruel sexual permutations which evoke a loathsome tedium, a savage view of human behaviour that directly argued with the basics tenets of the Enlightenment. Sacher-Masoch’s novel, Venus in Furs, is on the other hand a product of late romanticism. And although his novel is often called, with some justification, a misogynist book that takes the ancient war of the sexes to a logical conclusion, it contains an interesting paragraph that ought to give pause to easy dismissal.

Woman, claims Sacher-Masoch, is inevitably man’s enemy. "She can only be his slave or his despot, but never his companion," he says. "This she can become only when she has the same rights as he, and is his equal in education and work." Sacher-Masoch shares Nietzsche’s insight that passive, destructive femininity is a creation of men themselves.

The “woman question”, in fact, haunted the intelligentsia of the late 19th century. The same idea illuminates Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, in which Nora is trapped in a marriage that infantalises her, playing the role of a frivolous, expensive woman to please her husband. Sacher-Masoch’s critique of the crippling effects of socially determined gender roles on sexual relationships is a crucial key to the novel, and perhaps the most radical statement in it.

This idea is vaguely present in Neal Harvey’s theatrical adaptation, but never as explicit as it is in the book. Harvey’s adaptation is elegantly theatrical, with only a couple of dramaturgical hiccups (notably towards the end), and has focused more on the destructive force of idealism, which through the force of its visionary desire can scorch reality to bare earth.

The hero Severin (Angus Grant) is a bored, independently wealthy young man who encounters his nemesis, Wanda (Karen Roberts) while he is staying in a hotel. She is an unconventional and sensual woman who unashamedly pursues her own pleasure without heed for societal conventions. Severin immediately falls obsessively in love with her and, unable to contemplate the prospect of losing her, begs to be Wanda’s slave.

She is initially reluctant to fulfil his fantasy, but discovers an inner capacity for tyranny that thrills and alarms her, and which she takes further than Severin intended or imagined. He literally creates his cruel mistress out of his desire for a pure, ecstatic love: a love that clearly has very little to do with Wanda’s own desires, but which inevitably schools her in a new and vicious pleasure.

Marcel Dorney gives us a production of intelligent clarity, enacted on a minimal set. Lucie Sprague’s design consists of draped black curtains that can be lit to be opaque or transparent, exploiting the cavernous space of Theatreworks by at once defining a domestic interior and – through the transparencies – a darker emptiness outside it. The luxurious fabrics of the costumes and furniture summon a fin de siecle aesthetic of sensual pleasure.

The direction focuses on Sacher-Masoch’s lushly beautiful language, and elicits two courageous performances that are leavened with a cool and bitter irony. As the reluctant goddess released into her power, Roberts steps unerringly between brittle dismay and disturbing pleasure in her cruelty and power. And Grant’s performance as Severin gives a startling verisimilitude to a role that embraces both comic desolation and passionate obsession. It’s worth seeing for the performances alone.

I did feel afterwards that something was missing, although it’s hard to put my finger on it: perhaps it’s as minor as a slight lack of sharpness in the lighting and the writing, subtle beats missed or held too long. Or perhaps I would have liked to see a tougher exploration of those gender questions, which remain vexed and pertinent 130 years after they were written.

This production made me wonder why so many young theatre artists here are obsessed with the 19th century. What is it about late romanticism or early modernism that is so sparking imaginations? As well as Venus in Furs, recently we’ve seen several productions, mainly courtesy of The Hayloft Project: they've mounted Platonov and Spring Awakening, and later this week I'm off to see Stravinsky’s A Soldier’s Tale.

Aside from the obvious attractions of the beautiful language of these texts, it’s hard not to speculate that some kind of reclamation is taking place, a return to some of the nascent explorations that were blown apart by the catastrophic events of the 20th century, in particular the second world war. It’s not nostalgia I’m sensing here, but a certain curiosity, a certain desire, and I’m intrigued to see where it leads.

A shorter version of this review appeared in yesterday's Australian.

The Chosen Vessel, from stories by Barbara Baynton, directed by Stewart Morritt. Design by Peter Mumford, lighting design by Felicity Hoare. With Chloe Armstrong, Joe Clements and Margot Knight. Petty Traffikers @ Theatreworks until November 18. Bookings: 9534 3388

In the Dictionary of Australian Biography (1946 edition), Barbara Baynton gets fairly short shrift. After noting her three marriages, Percival Serle says brusquely: "Barbara Baynton's reputation rests on half a dozen short stories, written with much ability and power, and uncompromising in their stark realism. The building up of detail, however, is at times overdone, and lacking humorous relief, the stories tend to give a distorted view of life in the back-blocks."

The 1970s advent of second-wave feminism and histories such as those of Henry Reynolds, which recorded the hitherto unacknowledged violence of European settlement, led to a reconsideration of Baynton's slender oeuvre, a recognition that perhaps her stories captured an uncomfortable truth, particularly about the lives of women, that was ignored in the preferred canon of Henry Lawson, Banjo Paterson or Steele Rudd. They certainly disrupted the narrative of rural battlers that still infects Australia's myth of itself: Baynton painted a world of harsh masculine domination, of brutalised relationships and terrifying sexual violence.


Her reputation rests, as Serle noted, on a few short stories, published as Bush Studies in 1902: a series of vignettes of bush life varying from a comic description of a bush christening to the three grim tales retold here by Petty Traffickers. Baynton's realism and air of Gothic horror shows the influence of Guy de Maupassant, the French equivalent of Edgar Allan Poe. And her short narratives - especially in what is probably her best story, Squeaker's Mate - still have the power to move and shock.

Sadly, in this staging by Stewart Morrit you are more likely to notice the Victorian sentiment than the brutal power of these stories, though there are moments when these adaptations - if they are indeed adaptations - lift out of their literalness and genuinely access the horror Baynton sketched so well. Here the credit mostly lies with the committed performances rather than with the direction: this production features some fine acting from Chloe Armstrong and Margot Knight. But oh, the literalness...

The show opens with A Dreamer, an account of a young woman, newly pregnant, visiting her mother in the bush. She is not met at the station, and must make a nightmarish way through storm and darkness to her mother's house, during which she nearly drowns. I couldn't see any cuts to the story at all, although there may have been; it is narrated in its third-person entirety by the three actors who, as they speak the words, illustrate every phrase, practically every pronoun.

If a pipe dripping into a tank is mentioned, the pipe - with water gurgling through it - will magically appear against the theatre wall. If there is lightning, the lightning will dutifully flash, every time, with the proper accompaniment of thunder. If a tree must be grasped, the branches of eucalyptus will be there to be grasped. I am not sure that I have ever seen anything quite like it. That Armstrong, struggling across a bath full of water (representing the river) holding on to said branches - there were a lot of branches in this show - manages to be genuinely riveting is, on reflection, quite amazing.

Squeaker's Mate had more than one character, so at least featured a little dialogue to leaven the narration. In its pitiless description of how the useless are discarded and forgotten, this brutal story about a crippled woman reminds me of Kafka's Metamorphosis; but again, its power was muted here. While Margot Knight as the paralysed woman generates a performance of compelling physicality, it also features a performance by Joe Clements as Squeaker, the oaf who first exploits and then abandons his partner, that somehow made Baynton's picture of insensate brutalisation merely comic.

The final piece of the night, The Chosen Vessel, provides the best theatre of the night. This is a story of a woman, left alone with her baby in her isolated house, who is stalked and then raped and murdered by a passing swagman. A sequence where the terrified woman lies in the dark, as the swagman breaks a hole in the wall of her hut, is genuinely frightening: Armstrong's nervy fragility and a rather brilliant lighting design make it a scene of total suspense. Unfortunately, the structure of the story itself - it shifts perspectives from the lone, frightened woman to other characters - is not translated with any lucidity into the narrative on stage, which makes the end anti-climactic, as well as puzzling to those unfamiliar with the story.

It must be said that this show is visually rather gorgeous - Felicity Hoare's inventive lighting plays across the vast Theatreworks space, picking out with warm colours the sparse objects on Peter Mumford's set. But otherwise, it is by no means a successful transposition of prose into theatre. To be frank, it left me rather baffled: The Chosen Vessel seems to demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of theatrical storytelling. Theatre, as was thrillingly demonstrated recently in shows like Dood Paard's Titus or Barrie Kosky's The Tell-Tale Heart, is much more than moving pictures that go with words. Otherwise, why not just pick up a book?

Picture: Chloe Armstrong and Joe Clements in The Chosen Vessel. Photo: Peter Mumford

Apropos of a discussion of Adam Broinwoski's Know No Cure in the review and comments of Hotel Obsino, Age writer Maher Mughrabi sent me a response to the Theatreworks production that he wrote at the time, and which remains unpublished. As it gives a very interesting slant on a controversial production that I didn't see, and picks up on some of the aspects of the play's language that most interested me, I think it's worth a splash here. Read on for Maher's take:

An appeal to me in this fiendish row – is there? Very well; I hear; I admit, but I have a voice too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced. 1

IN THE car on our way to St Kilda to see this play, my wife and I listened to a news item about a corporation called Dia-B Tech which had “discovered” a treatment for diabetes and obesity. The source was a plant that grows in Tonga and “traditional knowledge”. The use of this plant for medicinal purposes by generations of islanders was acknowledged in Dia-B Tech’s press releases, but they weren’t willing to name it until they could complete the patent process.

An academic suggested that the company owed it to Tonga and its people to share some of the financial benefits from this “discovery”, that there should be a “re-negotiation” with the communities that had provided the knowledge.

Since we’re unlikely to be granted a seat at that meeting, if indeed it ever occurs, Adam Broinowski’s Know No Cure offers a compelling alternative view of such talks. Like most meetings, it is slow to get going, but by the end it has a rhythm, an inner life – and death – all of its own.

The play is a negotiation between two actors, each charged with a multitude of roles. Matt Crosby is by turns the Lonely Planet tourist in search of his own personal Shangri-La, the multinational boss on the make and the colonist mapping out an undiscovered world which he hopes might give his own wanderings meaning. At the same time he is drugged up, liquored up and ruptured, a wide-eyed doomsday merchant but still unable to take that last step into the unknown.

His counterpart, played by Majid Shokor, is the native agent, the local guide, passport control and the exotic temptress (veil or no veil, your choice). He is the one-time inhabitant of a jungle, a swamp or a desert in the land where Crosby’s jet-engined magic carpet touches down. He dreams of being a “lazy, lazy fisherman” and sitting in the river again, until he is rudely reminded by his new employer/customer/governor that he doesn’t even remember how his forefathers fished and anyway, that river has long since become a waste valve for some “vigorous, dynamic” enterprise.

How much of this and other exchanges you actually pick up over the course of an hour and a half will depend largely on your ability to absorb jargon of all kinds – medical and military, economic and advertising. This language is all around us, but Broinowski must be listening to and reading it very carefully, since he writes largely in its cadences and phrases. It is a language that, despite its blandishments and all the unpleasant things it tidies up for our viewing, most people find either offputting or bewildering in such concentrated doses, which is a shame because apart from the odd bum note here and there, which may be as much the pressure of delivery on the actors as the writing, there’s a hell of a lot of meaning squeezed into these lines.

“Where are you from?” the passport officer asks. “Remote,” replies our intrepid adventurer, suggesting at once distance and control. “I am a civil engineer,” he says later, defending himself against the charge of plundering resources. “Your civil is member-exclusive,” the native accuses. “My civil is legitimate,” the engineer parries, before snapping under the close questioning: “I COME WITH NO MALICE!”

To come without malice, however, is not the same as coming in peace, or with love. At various points in the play, Crosby and Shokor’s relationship – their episodes of contact – are those not of explorer and indigene but of lovers, or even husband and wife. Arguments, silences, billing and cooing in German and Arabic, the public and private faces of coupledom, all lead us back to the same point on the map: the terra incognita at the heart of our dealings with every other human being. “You’re holding out on me,” Crosby rails. “You’re holding on to me,” Shokor replies, shaking free.

It is this fabled hold-out that Crosby’s explorer, his businessman, his secret agent needs to penetrate. “Can you take me to the interior?” he asks again and again. “No visa,” Shokor’s insider, all sunglasses and slicked-back hair, assures him at first. “The jungle is air-conditioned, mosquito-free.”

But what will the explorer bring to that place? And what will that mean for his faithful Man Friday? Both men begin to wonder, and to doubt. In the first sequence of the play, we are asked the question from a surgical perspective: how can we be sure that the foreign body will accept or reject a transplant? For me, this segment, with Crosby and Shokor in white coats and hairnets, hung at a rather awkward angle to the rest of the play, though its meaning eventually became clearer.

Transplant procedures are governed by the codes and practicalities of medicine, but the codes that govern sojourns in foreign lands are altogether less predictable, as the Bali Nine or the three Australians held in the United Arab Emirates for their alleged drunken misbehaviour on board an international flight attest. “I pride myself on being universal,” Crosby proclaims. But we do not yet live in a “borderless Babylon”, and there are still boundaries one can cross – and transgress.

For Shokor’s tourist guide, it turns out that the opposite of malice is not love but . . . golf, a sport of the universal jet set, in which the grass is as green in the desert of Dubai as it is in St Andrews or Augusta, Georgia. “Hate is a four-letter word,” the guide insists. “So is golf,” the tourist reminds him.

It takes a lot of water to maintain a golf course in a desert, a lot of air conditioning to keep the superstars of the PGA tour in the comfort to which they’ve become accustomed. It is this cost that begins to erode the native’s certainty, to make him wonder if he can even find the interior anymore, and what will be left of it if he does. He has become a stranger in his own land, a half-man who reminds us of the African fireman on Marlow’s boat in Heart of Darkness as it steams down the Congo:

. . . upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat . . . A few months of training had done for that really fine chap . . . he was hard at work, a thrall to strange witchcraft, full of improving knowledge . . . neither that fireman nor I had any time to peer into our creepy thoughts.2

Broinowski and his actors do plenty of peering, at footage of windswept refugees, rivers of rush-hour traffic, burned and blighted forests and endangered species. Shokor’s native, like Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, begins to wonder if he is not already a “living fossil”, as Crosby dubs him, someone who can never connect with the prayers and daily life of his own father. Broinowski coins the word “endohistory”, which means internal history but also reminds us of the “end of history”, the universal triumph of free-market liberalism predicted by Francis Fukuyama in the 1990s. Has the latter been substituted for the former, or must the former “betray” the latter to survive?

These are questions which today have their pivot not in the scramble for Africa but the war for the Middle East. Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, recently returned to office as the country’s defence minister, once warned his countrymen that they live in “a villa surrounded by a jungle”. But what does it mean to talk about a jungle here? And whose jungle is it, anyway?

Sitting in the theatre, my mind spun back to the time of the millennium, when I was in London to meet a fellow Palestinian. At one Tube station I caught sight of Jerusalem’s golden Dome of the Rock. It was a poster of the Israeli Tourism Ministry. “In the land where the first millennium began . . .” it read, with a silhouette picture of fishermen on the Sea of Galilee, “. . . The dome has already been built.”

For a moment, the cheeky reference to London’s troubled Millennium Dome distracted me from the use of a sacred Muslim site in occupied territory to entice holidaymakers to the Jewish state. Then I felt it, all at once: anger, humiliation, the irretrievable loss of my own past, powerlessness to remove the advert and what it stood for in the present.

The publicity for Broinowski’s play mentions that it was written in “the countdown to September 11”, a countdown few indeed can claim to have heard. Yet I wondered if Broinowski, or anyone in his audience, knew the story of September 11 terrorist Mohammed Atta’s return to Cairo in 1995. Atta had won a German grant to study plans to convert the capital’s old “Islamic city” into a tourist complex:

The government planned to “restore” the area by removing many of the people who lived there . . . repairing the old buildings and bringing in troupes of actors to play the real people they would displace. Bodenstein (a fellow student) described what happened: “We had a very critical discussion with the municipality. They didn’t understand our concerns. They wanted to do their work, dress people in costumes. They thought it was a good idea and couldn’t imagine why we would object.”

It was Atta’s first professional contact with the Egyptian bureaucracy and it distressed him, Bodenstein said. 3

To say that this episode alone might explain what followed is absurd. Yet there is a series of encounters and power relations at work in this story, and that of Dia-B Tech and the Tongan healers, or those tourists taken to specially enclosed African reserves to hunt big game provided for the purpose, that Broinowski clearly has an ear for. Safari itself is a Swahili word that comes from the Arabic word for travel. The two players bring such journeys to life in startling, moving and amusing fashion, giving us a sense of what is at stake and the dangers into which we venture. As Shokor tells Crosby, with a smile fresh from a brochure: “Choose your clubs carefully.”

Maher Mughrabi
July 2007

Notes
1 Marlow floating down the Thames narrates his memories of floating down the Congo in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (Penguin, 1995), p. 63.
2 Heart of Darkness, p. 64.
3 Terry McDermott, “A Perfect Soldier”, Los Angeles Times, January 27, 2002, cited in Gilbert Achcar’s The Clash of Barbarisms: Sept 11 and the Making of the New World Disorder (Monthly Review Press, 2002), p. 55.