Baal, pagan Lord of Heaven, god of rain and fertility. Baal, the first king of the Christian Hell, best known to us as Beelzebub. Milton's Baalim, one of those evilly ambiguous demons who, "when they please / can either sex assume". In the hands of the young Bertolt Brecht, he's the archetypal rebel poet and criminal anti-hero, a voracious appetite on legs, epic hater of womankind. The original title of the play was "Baal eats! Baal dances! Baal is transfigured!" What, asked Brecht, is Baal up to?

Baal was up to no good, that's for sure. The titular hero of Brecht's first play, written when he was only 20, he's a savagely ironic portrait of the ultimate Romantic outsider, stripped of his romantic dress. He's modelled on a range of sources. Perhaps the first is the Chinese poet and famous carouser Li Po, whose work Brecht devoured in his teens. Another is the 15th century French poet, thief and vagabond François Villon, whose contemporary equivalent might be Shane McGowan of The Pogues. Another strong influence is Arthur Rimbaud, the teen genius who horrified and intrigued literary Paris with his defiant lack of hygiene, and whose scandalous affair with fellow poet Paul Verlaine, which has echoes in this play, sparked the masterpiece A Season in Hell.


Perhaps most intriguingly, in 1926 Brecht himself named a real poet - Josef K, a car mechanic (perhaps a precursor of Ern Malley?) and the bastard son of a washerwoman - as the biographical model for Baal. Who knows if this had anything to do with the publication of Kafka's novel The Trial in 1925? All the same, the echo is suggestive: Kafka's Josef K is, like Baal, a passive character around whom events happen, but otherwise almost precisely his negative: where Josef K is sick with sexual guilt, Baal is sick with the lack of it.

What's unarguable is that Baal derives from an ancient genealogy of exclusively male poets: he is the archetypal troubador, the dark glint of male violence and amorality that inhabits the allure of every bad boy rock star. In Brecht's play, here given a starkly intelligent production at the Malthouse by Simon Stone, he remains as deeply problematic as he ever was, with his ugliness upfront. Whereas in the 1920s his deepest crimes would have been the outrage of bourgeois social mores, a century later it's his misogyny.

For my part, I don't believe the portrayal of misogyny is the same as its endorsement, and I'd argue strongly that this production is critique rather than advocacy. For art to ignore the existence of misogyny would be risible, given, say, the recent behaviour of football clubs or the Australian Defence Force: nothing Baal does is without its contemporary precedent. All the same, there's no getting past the sexism of the play, even given the reflexive nature of its argument, and because of the amoral (or perhaps, to pick up on Bataille, the hypermoral) light in which Baal is cast, its misogyny remains its most confronting aspect. The character of Baal reflects back in magnified form the society in which he lives, erasing its softening hypocrisies, and his use and abuse of women is brutal. Worse, although he is always culpable, he remains innocent.


Another thing worth keeping in mind in approaching this production of Baal is Brecht's own estimation of it: the play is not meant to provoke empathy or identification. As Brecht said in 1922, in an early version of the artistic intuition that later become Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect): "I hope in Baal... I've avoided one common artistic bloomer, that of trying to carry people away. Instinctively I've kept my distance… The spectator's 'splendid isolation' is left intact; he is not fobbed off with an invitation to feel sympathetically, to fuse with the hero and seem significant and indestructible as he watches himself in two different versions. A higher type of understanding can be got from making comparisons, from whatever is different, amazing, impossible to overlook."

Stone's production, co-translated with Tom Wright (not to be confused with Thomas M. Wright, who is playing Baal), is a serious and often brilliant attempt at Brecht's play. Although the script is hugely cut, it sticks closely to the original text, transposing its obscenities and undeniable beauties into contemporary colloquial English. Likewise, Brecht's songs are set to electric guitar by Stefan Gregory, but remain ballads rather than rock'n'roll. Baal is no Thyestes or The Wild Duck, in which a new text is spun out of the bones of the original, so here the estrangements of poetry are added to the alienations produced by its lead character.

The word that resounds through Brecht's text like a knell is "nothingness". Baal is the eye of the storm, the passive genius who absorbs the vacuum around him, and - in parallel with his hideous description of childbirth as the agonised expulsion of something that was received with pleasure - ejects it as a monstrous nullity. The poetry he creates, lyrical celebrations of disgust, is almost a by-product of this process; it neither redeems nor excuses him, and in fact he asks neither of it. This is where his innocence exists, and is why even towards the end, despite his vile behaviour, his friend Eckhardt calls him a child: his one virtue, if he can be said to have any, is that his actions, however selfish, lack the pettiness of self-interest.

All these complexities are given savage life in this production. There are aspects that remained (at least on opening night) unresolved; there were moments when the action was unclear, and when its physicalisation - notably the violence - was awkward, although these are minor points. Perhaps the biggest problem lies in how the production addresses the knotty gender question.

Stone has replaced all the secondary characters with a chorus of women taking multiple roles, who end up representing the broader society brutalised and challenged by Baal. Out of a cast of nine actors, three are (ambiguously) male. I suspect that this might have been conceived as a way of giving voice and weight to the women who are otherwise largely present as objects to be consumed and destroyed by Baal, but the immediate and (I hope) unintended effect is that women become the custodians of social mores, their traditional role in patriarchal societies.

Despite this, the show generates a compelling, chilly brilliance that I think is absolutely correct for Brecht. It's performed by a cast unafraid of its challenges, and delivers scenes of astounding poetic theatre. Wright as Baal carries the weight of performance, at once charismatic and abject, knowing and blind. As the composer Eckhardt, his friend, lover and victim, Oscar Redding is an assured (and relaxedly nude) presence: he is the troubled satellite drawn into and destroyed by Baal's presence, who attempts nevertheless to wake him to a consciousness of his crimes. And Geraldine Hakewill gives a luminous performance as Johanna, the young innocent who is Baal's first real victim.


This is followed through with an extraordinary design, a Manichean world of white and black designed (lighting and set) by Nick Schlieper. Human beings, often naked, move through these unrelenting abstractions, their bodies ever more exposed, more abused, more abject. It opens with a white rectangle, the antiseptic world of Baal's bourgeois admirers, the only object a black amplifier and guitar; as Baal continues his Rake's Progress to oblivion, the walls collapse and expose a black, featureless earth on which falls a punishing, endless rain, the manifestation of the godhead. Some of the visuals create arresting contemporary echoes of Renaissance images of crucifixion; still others recall Robert Mapplethorpe or Lucien Freud.

In short, Baal is a discomforting production of a deeply discomforting play. I've no doubt it will divide audiences; it certainly refuses a lot of easy options. As a work it wears its antecedents on its sleeve, and yet there were goose-bumping moments during the show when I realised that I had not seen anything like it. That's a rare feeling. One thing is for sure: those who go expecting titillation will be disappointed, because they'll get poetry instead. And what breath-taking poetry it is.

Pictures: Top: Thomas M Wright as Baal; middle, Shelly Lauman and Thomas M Wright; bottom, Wright and Oscar Redding. Photos: Jeff Busby

Baal, by Bertolt Brecht, translated by Simon Stone and Tom Wright, directed by Simon Stone. Set and lighting Nick Schlieper, costumes by Mel Page, composition and sound design Stefan Gregory. With Bridig Gallacher, Geraldine Hakewill, Luisa Hastings Edge, Shelly Laumann, Oscar Redding, Chris Ryan, Lotte St Clair, Katherine Tonkin and Thomas M Wright. Malthouse Theatre and Sydney Theatre Company. Merlyn Theatre, Malthouse, until April 23; Sydney Theatre Company, May 7-June 11.

In 1958, when the horrors of World War 2 were still fresh, Roland Barthes wrote a fascinating essay about Voltaire. Voltaire, said Barthes, was outmoded. For one thing, his enemies had all vanished - no longer were deists and atheists slugging it out in the public arena - and with this had vanished the spectacle of Voltaire's thought. "Better than anyone else, he gave reason's combat a festive style. Everything is spectacle in his battles ... the skirmishes between Voltaire and the world are not only a spectacle but a superlative spectacle, proclaiming themselves such in the fashion of the Punchinello shows Voltaire loved so much."

He was, said Barthes, not entirely as a compliment, "the last happy writer". "Voltaire's first happiness was doubtless that of his times," says Barthes. "Let there be no mistake: the times were very harsh, and Voltaire has everywhere described their horrors. Yet no period had helped a writer more, given him more assurance that he was fighting for a just and natural cause....What has disappeared is the theatre of persecution, not persecution itself: the auto-da-fe has been subtlilised into a police operation, the stake has become the concentration camp, discreetly ignored by its neighbours." The very enormity of racist crimes backed by a state and concealed by the apparatus of ideology "demands a philosophy more than an irony, an explanation rather than an astonishment".


No doubt Barthes would have been astonished to witness the contemporary return of theism as a force in fundamentalist ideologies of all stripes, so that court cases about the right to teach evolution in schools are as much as feature of contemporary life as they were in the late 19th century. And with the return of fundamentalism, so much a feature of millennial modernity, came the return of spectacle. The German avant garde composer Karlhein Stockhausen prompted a scandal when he remarked, a few days after 9/11, that the attack on the Twin Towers was Lucifer's "biggest work of art". (I feel compelled to explain that in Stockhausen's work, Lucifer is a figure of pure intelligence unmoved by love, whom even in that notorious press conference Stockhausen explicitly rejected).

Yet Stockhausen was correct in seeing 9/11 as an unparalleled media event, a murderous spectacle that galvanised the entire world, at once intimate and alienated as our own television screens. We had a preview of media war spectacle in the first Gulf War, but that was managed with admirable finesse: the graphics and distant tracer fire portrayed a technological fantasy, with surgical weapons making hygienic strikes that scarcely ruffled the hair of babes. In 2001, the Twin Towers collapsed again and again in our living rooms, and suddenly the spectacle of death was scorched again on the western retina: atrocity no longer occurred in secret, the product of mysterious famines or obscure ethnic wars. Three years later, we had the grim theatre of torture in Abu Ghraib, beamed out to a billion homes. The auto-da-fe as public spectacle was back.

So if the theatre of atrocity is returned to us, does it mean that Voltaire's sceptical game of reason, his stylish gaeity, has a new aptness? Is his theatrical irony again available as a response? Does, perhaps, the intimacy of theatre make it one of the few places where Voltaire can be realised, since it is a place where the massive scale of contemporary atrocity can be scaled back to a human size? For the counter-argument to Barthes' point about the "enormity" of the Nazi Holocaust is surely Genet's: that murder is an absolute crime and cannot be multiplied, for a universe is destroyed in each death.

Well, that's a long preamble, and it all spirals out of seeing Optimism, Tom Wright and Michael Kantor's adaptation of Voltaire's Candide, at the Malthouse last week. The word “optimism” first appeared in print in 1737 ("pessimism", which appeared around 60 years later, is supposed to have been coined by Coleridge: I guess it makes sense that a poet invented the term). At that time, optimism referred to a specific philosophical position embraced by thinkers like Rousseau and Leibniz: that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and that all is for the best.

The anti-philosophical satire Candide (Tom Wright’s adaptation uses its subtitle, Optimism) was Voltaire's famous riposte. It’s a picaresque, episodic frolic through catastrophe, in which Voltaire’s wide-eyed hero, clinging desperately to his doctrine of optimism, is exposed to all the reasons for despair: war, treachery, greed, folly, natural disaster and, finally, human mortality. Even so, Voltaire wasn’t arguing for pessimism. Rather, he was savagely challenging optimism’s claim that life was ruled by immutable forces, which was in Voltaire’s view a covert form of pessimism.

Optimism made me think that Voltaire's scepticism of systems and faiths is peculiarly apt now, his insistence on a human scale not merely a bourgeois evasion of responsibility, but a necessary ethics from which the only justice that means anything might emerge. There is something of Voltaire's scorching scepticism and supple wit, for instance, in the political writings of Slavoj Žižek.

Wright's script cuts Candide to the bone, but remains a surprisingly faithful adaptation of Candide's quest through catastrophe, preserving the essentials of Voltaire's story and argument. And there's no doubt this project plays to both Wright's and Kantor's strengths. Kantor's direction transposes Voltaire's relentlessly cheerful prose into a theatrical world of glittering curtains, puppet-like clowns and Eurovision musical kitsch. It's a world of constant speed that ultimately manifests, as Barthes points out, as immobility.

On Anna Tregloan's brushed steel set, a strangely modernist construction adorned by at least a dozen fans, the abiding metaphor is air travel, which at once encapsulates the hope and destructiveness of modernity. The show is punctuated by the brutal, obliterating noise of jet engines, and the chorus is provided by a series of air hostesses in purple uniforms, interchangeably played by the cast with no attention to gender. Frank Woodley, with his air of bewildered decency and unkillable hopefulness, is an inspired choice for the role of Candide, and provides some necessary intimacy with his stuttering monologues in front of the curtain. And he's an apt foil to Barry Otto’s Pangloss, the absurd philosopher who, despite everything, sees no reason to change his mind about anything.

They are backed by a superb cast, which includes the musical director, Iain Grandage. The characters, like Voltaire's "beloved Punchinello", are all puppets, or perhaps more properly in these times, cartoon characters: they undergo multiple rapes, obscene mutilations, horrific disease, even dissection, only to bounce back, scarred perhaps, but strangely unharmed, like Wil E. Coyote after he has been flattened by a hammer. When Alison Whyte in one of her several roles recounts her unlikely and tragic history as a former daughter of a pope, raised in luxury, the first response is laughter: Voltaire has her regaining consciousness after a massacre to a eunuch despairing that he is unable to rape her, and her buttock is sliced off and eaten by the starving defenders of a siege. And Amber McMahon's bitter despair as the prostitute Paquette is one of the funniest parts of the show.

Which begs the question: is such laughter inevitably heartless, unthinking and empty? I'm not so sure, although it is a real question. Perhaps the most uncomfortable parts of the show are those which reflect Voltaire's exoticising of the non-European world: the inflatable sufi mystic, for instance, or the ape-ish natives of El Dorado. When Candide reaches Surinam, he is confronted by a man who is missing an arm and a leg, both cut off by the colonial powers: this, he tells Candide, is what it costs to get cheap sugar in Europe. On stage, he is played by Hamish Michael in a bizarre plastic suit and blackface, howling a bleakly passionate version of Altered Image's I Could Be Happy. That was certainly not funny, but it's hard to say what it was. Do such images perpetuate or undermine racism? Or both? It seems to me suspended in its absurdity, at once tragic and bitterly grotesque; but perhaps its most unsettling aspect is what we might make of it.

Maybe the point is that the world, like the Eurovision Song Contest, has gone beyond parody, in the same way that no artistic spectacle can compete with the spectacles of our times. Is it brave or mistaken to tackle spectacle in the theatre, can entertainment ever really spark serious thinking about the issues it raises? Is it always merely evasion? Personally, I prefer this approach to the heavy-handed tackling of issues in so-called political plays; but it's worth remembering that Barthes accused Voltaire of being the arch anti-intellectual. "As a system of the non-system, anti-intellectualism eludes and gains... perpetually ricocheting between bad faith and good conscience, between a pessimism of substance and a jig of form, between a proclaimed scepticism and a terrorist doubt". Perhaps. But the downbeat image with which the show closes, with the cast members grouped hopefully around a pile of earth as Candide holds a watering can, stays with me, as a symbol of all that is beautiful and foolish about human beings.

Picture: (From left) David Woods, Francis Greenslade, Amber McMahon, Hamish Michael, Barry Otto, Frank Woodley and Alison Whyte in Optimism. Photo: Jeff Busby

A short review of Optimism was in Friday's Australian.

Optimism, after Voltaire's Candide, by Tom Wright, directed by Michael Kantor. Set and costume design by Anna Tregloan, composer Iain Grandage, lighting design by Paul Jackson, sound design by Russell Goldsmith. With Caroline Craig, Francis Greenslade, Amber McMahon, Hamish Michael, Barry Otto, Alison Whyte, Frank Woodley and David Woods, music performed live by Iain Grandage. Malthouse Theatre, CUB Malthouse, until June 13. Edinburgh Festival 2009, Sydney Festival 2010.

The Women of Troy by Euripides, adapted by Tom Wright and Barrie Kosky, directed by Barrie Kosky. Designed by Alice Babidge, lighting by Damien Cooper, musician Daryl Willis, sound design by David Gilfillan. With Robyn Nevin, Melita Jurisic, Arthur Dignam, Natalie Gamsu, Queenie van der Zandt, Jennifer Vuletic, Patricia Cotter and Kyle Rowling, Giorgios Tsamoudakis and William Larkin. Sydney Theatre Company presented by Malthouse Theatre, Merlyn Theatre, until November 22.

Sophocles is supposed to have remarked of Euripides that, while Sophocles portrayed men as they ought to be, Euripides showed them as they are. It's an observation that goes to the heart of his drama. While Sophocles and Aeschylus wrote heroic tragedy, Euripides was concerned with the everyday: his characters were often the despised and marginalised, the women, children, slaves and functionaries caught in the unforgiving machinery of larger events. Euripides was, in fact, western drama's first realist.

Yet even on Euripides's terms, The Women of Troy is an odd play. For all the archaic beauty of the original text, it has an air of unsettlingly modernity. It's a play of almost brutal simplicity that crystallises the traumatic shock of the aftermath of war. Originally part of a full-scale tragic trilogy that looked at different aspects of the war on Troy, The Women of Troy seems to have been a kind of coda, the final comment on the tumultuous events that preceded it. The other two plays are now lost, leaving us this fragment in which nothing happens because the worst already has.


The other thing to note about Euripides is that, for all his mythical framing, he was writing directly about contemporary events. When The Women of Troy was first performed, in 415BC, Athens was mired in the Peloponnesian Wars with Sparta and was about to launch its disastrous expedition to conquer Sicily, an invasion which ended with the humiliating defeat of Athens in 404BC. In the various conflicts, Euripides had ample opportunity to observe the cruelty with which each side treated its civilian captives: most commonly, the men were put to death and the women and children enslaved. Sometimes this happened to entire cities.

Barrie Kosky and Tom Wright's adaptation highlights this realism, bringing Euripides's steady gaze to bear on contemporary events. They've created a production which is probably as close as we can get to an experience of classical tragedy, which looks unblinkingly into catastrophe: from the beginning, its outcome is inevitable and unavoidable. It reveals that this is a play of our time as much as of Euripides, at once true to its ancient roots and opening up its contemporary aptness. And it's bleak indeed: no chink of light pierces the darkness. The emotional effect is cumulative, and ultimately shattering. It's extraordinary theatre.

This two-fold vision of the ancient and the contemporary is evident from the moment you enter the theatre and see that the auditorium is shaped like an amphitheatre. Every seat is draped in white; the fabric is reflective and has a weird effect on the fluorescent lighting, which is already alienating and harsh. We look down on a naked stage, which is dominated by a huge back wall constructed of old lockers, stacked like bricks up to the ceiling.

It begins with a figure draped in black and crowned in a tiara being pushed onto the stage on a flatbed trolley by a guard. The guard is wearing a white mask, like those worn by people who deal with corpses, which is subtly configured to look like the masks on Hoplite helmets worn by Greek soldiers. The woman - for we know at once it is a woman - is standing in the pose made famous through the photograph taken in Abu Ghraib, balancing precariously, her arms stretched out, trembling with strain, on either side. The guard (Kyle Rowling) takes a photograph with his mobile phone, and then begins to strip the woman's finery - her rings, her bracelets, her necklace, her tiara - putting them in a clear plastic bag. He leaves her face draped, anonymous and blind, helpless, until he also takes her sumptuous dress.

At last she is revealed as Hecuba (Robyn Nevin), former Queen of Troy, standing in her shift on a cardboard box as ordered by the guard, her face bruised and bloodied, her hair shorn. Then the guard leaves and wheels in the other women, also cowled in black: also brutalised, anonymous, stripped of all civic rights as they are of their clothes. They are the theatrical image of what Giorgio Agamben called "naked life", the "state of exception" that defines the sovereign power of the State.

What follows is the summary allocation of the women - in particular, Hecuba's daughters - as spoils of war. Some have been distributed to the Greek soldiers by lot, some will be shot. The play simply consists of the women waiting to discover their fate, and finishes when we know what happens to each of them.

The adaptation hacks what is already a minimal play to its bones, hewing closely to its original dramaturgy. Tom Wright's language is chillingly effective: utterly plain, with the weight of tragic necessity in every word. Basically, three things occur: Cassandra - the virgin cursed with second sight by Apollo after she refused his advances - is taken away and given to Agamemnon. The heavily pregnant Andromache, who enters with her son Astynax (Giorgios Tsmamoudakis or William Larkin) is sent to be the slave of Achilles, who killed her husband Hector, and finds that her small son is to be murdered. And Helen of Troy, whose abscondment with Paris started the whole thing, is given a short trial by Menelaus (Arthur Dignam) and Hecuba, and condemned. These three women are played by Melita Jurisic, making the play effectively a duet between Nevin and Jurisic.

This brutal reality is punctuated by singing, a diverse range of music which includes Dowland, Mozart, Bizet and Slovenien folk songs. The music is a lament for everything that the action of the play denies and destroys - love, beauty, harmony - and is the single human expression remaining to the women.

As in conventional Greek tragedy, the violence occurs off-stage, a most effective means of engendering imagination. We hear off-stage screaming and gunshots, and we see the fear before it and the effect afterwards - most desolately when the half mad Cassandra is raped in one of the lockers by the guard and returns, her bloodstained pants around her ankles, hobbling and violated, babbling incoherently of her marriage to Agamemnon, or when the blood-drenched corpse of the little boy is carried onto the stage.

This production is particularly effective in how it exploits the banality of atrocity. One aspect of torture is how it transforms ordinary objects, even household items, into instruments of pain. Here there is a rather grim moment when the guard walks across the stage, fiddles in a tool box and returns with a huge awl. We have no idea what he is going to use it for, and don't want to imagine. When the women are allocated, they are put in cardboard boxes which are sealed with masking tape and wheeled off, reinforcing their dehumanised status as cargo, mere trophies of war whose identities are not only erased but irrelevant.

What carries the grief and crushing inevitability of the horror enfolding these women is the performances. As Hecuba, an old woman witnessing the destruction of her life, Nevin is the lynchpin of the play: she is present on stage all through, and she is the medium through which we experience the tragedy. This is an unmissable performance: that voice vibrates in your bones, raging, lamenting, sorrowful, utterly broken and defeated and yet stubbornly refusing to be demeaned, even in this ultimate degradation. Melita Jurisic in her three roles is a brilliant foil, the hysteric counterpoint to Nevin's stoic refusals.

Perhaps what is most impressive about this production is its refusal to reach for easy theatrical manipulations. The contemporary allusions are never gratuitous: rather, they emerge as inevitable aspects of the reality this play is revealing. It's heartbreaking, but Kosky's restraint means that the effect goes deeper than tears. His directorial tact represents the reality of war without cheaply exploiting it: this seems to me to be a production of exemplary honesty, that openly and without showiness acknowledges its own artifice and by doing so reinforces the horrific realities behind it. It's a cry of grief, a keening, that resonates in its own present and then leaves us to deal with the aftermath. Because the worst part about it is that you know that it's true.

Picture: Melita Jurisic as Helen and Robyn Nevin as Hecuba in The Women of Troy. Photo: Tracey Schramm

Criminology, devised by Rosemary Myers and written by Lally Katz and Tom Wright. Design by Anna Tregloan, video design direction Peter Brundle, video design Chris More, lighting design Paul Jackson, composition Jethro Woodward. With Gemma Cavoli, Jing-Xuan Chan, Simon Maiden, Bojana Novakovic, Luke Ryan and Samantha Tolj. Arena Theatre and Malthouse Theatre @ the Merlyn Theatre, CUB Malthouse until August 19. Bookings: 9685-5111.

When you walk out of the doors of the Malthouse Theatre, the first thing that catches your eye is a huge yellow billboard across the freeway. It squats beneath the urban skyline asking, in brash red letters: “WANT LONGER LASTING SEX?” This garishly desolate image has a disconcerting continuity with the world explored in Criminology, a fascinating archeological exploration of the pathologies beneath the surface of middle-class suburban Australia.


It’s co-written by Tom Wright, who last week won a Helpmann for his work on The Lost Echo, and Lally Katz, best known for her work with Stuck Pigs Squealing. But Criminology is a theatrical collaboration in which the work of the director and its several designers is as important in creating meaning, through projected video and mise en scène, as the writing itself.

Devisor and director Rosemary Myers draws from Helen Garner’s controversial book The Consolation of Joe Cinque, which explored the bizarre 1997 killing of a young man by his girlfriend Anu Singh, both students at ANU in Canberra. Singh was convicted of manslaughter for deliberately overdosing Cinque with heroin, and served a prison sentence. Among the more disturbing aspects of the crime was that their circle of friends knew of Singh’s intention to kill Cinque, but did nothing to prevent it.

Criminology is almost an inverse picture of Garner’s book. Garner was concerned with the victim, filling out the anonymity of the headlines with the visceral reality of his grieving family. Notoriously, Anu Singh refused to speak to her, and the figure of the young woman remains mysterious, inscrutable and deadly. Myers has chosen to see the story from another angle, as if in a mirror darkly.

She and her collaborators create a nightmarish indictment of the pathological narcissism of contemporary society. Criminology reveals a world of unrelieved banality, in which the language of feeling is expressed through the cliches of blockbuster movies, values are taken from the gossip pages and sexuality is merely pornographic.

In this telling, everything is backwards: Anu is fictionalised as Una (Bojana Novakovic) and Joe Cinque becomes The Boyfriend (Hazem Shammas), a passive cipher who is a blank screen for the projection of Una’s warped desires. Even some of the performances are backwards: 1990s celebrities like Princess Di and Michael Hutchence appear on stage performed by actors with masks on the backs of their heads and their clothes on the wrong way round. It makes them move like zombies, jerkily and unnaturally, and they grotesquely focus Una’s fascination with the link between sex, death and fame.

This is theatre of a profound semantic richness – performance, image, design and Jethro Woodward’s brilliant soundscape combine to create a complex and confronting language. Anna Tregloan’s design capitalises on the banality of the world explored in the show – the walls are even beige, and the wide set is littered with comfortable furniture. The bedroom – the site of both sex and death – is a glass box. Above the stage hang a constellation of screens, on which are projected fragmented images – close-ups of bodies, plants, trees – that work in counterpoint to the action on stage.

Una exists in a haze of psychic distortions caused by her drug-taking and bulimia. She and her friends live in a world marked, more than anything, by sexual and spiritual impoverishment, and her psychosis is shaped by the desires projected upon her and the fantasies of an unreal world populated by visions of magazine-cover celebrities.

Aspects reminded me of George Bataille’s The Story of the Eye, which brutally explores the the excesses of adolescent sexuality: but unlike the children in Bataille’s story, who take a perverse and imaginative pleasure in their sadistic games, Una’s erotic provocations and manipulations seem strangely pleasureless. For Una, sex is not an end in itself, but a means to power: and her need for power is directly related to her own sense of feminine powerlessness.

What makes this show particularly riveting is the physically potent performances from all the cast. The body is at once celebrated for its perfection and tormented, distorted in sexual ecstasy or vomiting or death. Bojana Novakovic portrays Una with total commitment: she oscillates from a manipulative sexual succubus to desperate bulimic, unflnchingly performing Una’s self-loathing and extremity. Luke Ryan as the corrupt young drug dealer Alastair gives a nuanced, sinister performance, and Hazem Shammas as the Boyfriend is a cryptic, wordless shadow until he convulses in his death, which is perhaps the only time he is real to Una.

There are occasional longueurs in the dramaturgy, a feeling sometimes that the ideas aren't going anywhere – the grotesque image of Princess Di, for instance, dulls in repetition. And I felt ambivalent about the portrayal of Una, a sense that it exploits the archetypal power of the deadly, sexualised woman as much as critiquing its creation. I’m not sure that it’s an entirely successful piece, but it's undoubtedly powerful and confronting theatre.

Picture: Hazem Shammas (projection image), Jing-Xuan Chan and Bojana Novakovic in Criminology. Photo: Ross Bird

More blog responses at Post-Teen Trauma and Esoteric Rabbit.

A shorter version of this review appears in today’s Australian.

Babes in the Wood by Tom Wright, directed by Michael Kantor. Music by Iain Grandage, design by Anna Tregloan, lighting by Paul Jackson, choreography by Kate Denborough, sound design David Franzke, dramaturgy by Maryanne Lynch. With Caroline Craig, Diana Emry, Julie Forsythe, Max Gillies, Francis Greenslade, Eddie Perfect and Lucy Taylor. Malthouse Theatre until December 3.

Tomfoolery: The Words and Music of Tom Lehrer, adapted by Cameron MacKintosh and Robin Ray, directed by Ross Coleman and Simon Phillips. Lighting design by Matt Scott, design by Gabriela Tylesova. With Rhonda Burchmore, Mitchell Butel, Gerry Connolly, Bert Labonte and Melissa Madden-Gray. Melbourne Theatre Company @ the Playhouse, Victorian Arts Centre, until December 16.

'Tis the season to be decked out in tinsel, or so the supermarket tells me. TN's Scroogish instincts means that she thinks the Christmas season begins in a blinding panic about two days before Christmas Eve: but, luckily, there is always the Christmas panto to jerk me into the compulsory state of jolliness and goodwill &c towards my fellow man. This year the Malthouse is larking about with Babes in the Wood.


I haven't had a good history with Michael Kantor's collaborations with Tom Wright, but then, I missed the 2003 premiere of Babes in the Wood, Wright's wonderful pantomime set (kind of) during the Boer War. Before I discuss it, it's probably worth revisiting some of the conventions of the English pantomime, which are here exploited with such joie de vivre.

The traditional Christmas panto is a children's entertainment that stems back to the 1700s, and many of its established tropes were introduced by the famous British clown Joseph Grimaldi in the early 1800s. They evolved from a number of elements: Commedia dell'arte, ballets-pantomimes - which themselves have histories stretching back to Roman traditions of masked clowning performed by a dancer called Pantomimus - and the English Harlequinade. These traditions later collided with variety, introducing song and dance routines and vulgar jokes to amuse the adults who are accompanying their young charges.

It is always based, sometimes very loosely, on a fairy tale - Cinderella, Dick Whittington and Babes in the Wood are all favourite themes. Essential characters include the Dame (who is always a cross-dressing man), the Principle Boy (always a pretty girl in tights), and actors in unconvincing animal costumes. The plot always features a villain and a misused innocent, and a romance involving the Principle Girl (who is actually a girl) and the Principle Boy.

A basic feature is also audience participation, actively elicited by the cast, which often revolves around the stock jokes. There is always a scene where someone hides behind someone else, so the audience will shout out "He's behind you!"; and there is always an argument, where one side says (with the audience) "Oh, yes he is!" and the other, "Oh, no, he isn't!"

Tom Wright's version of Babes in the Wood sedulously observes all the proper conventions, and he adds on a kind of meta-theatrical context: the conceit of the production is that we are also watching a comic plot about the ragtag colonial theatre company that is presenting the panto. The Dame (Max Gillies, in fine fig), is tempestuously and not always faithfully married to the wicked kangaroo (Julie Forsythe).

Like a rather hilariously intoxicated porcupine, Babes in the Wood bristles with cheerful malice, leaving barbs in pretty much everyone. (Notoriously in this production, there is an Eddie Perfect song about Steve Irwin and Germaine Greer called "Let that stingray of love pierce your heart", with a chorus of dancing stingrays that obligingly help Irwin and Greer die doing the thing they love; though I laughed almost as much at Amanda Vanstone's performance of Nutbush City Limits).

The plot of Babes in the Wood - the panto within the play - could have been written by a right wing blogger. It features dire warnings about suspicious, seductive, drug-soaked Oriental types; much bruiting of Empire - a highlight is a song, drawn from a George W. Bush quote, called "They Hate Us Because We're Good"; wicked suicide bombers in burkhas and a final exhortation to breed lots of the right kind of white Australians. In between are the kind of incongruous non-sequitur asides that featured so brilliantly in shows like The Young Ones - a lecture on the natural history of Australia, a bunch of cheesy songs from the '80s, sly quotations from Donald Rumsfeld, and so on.

Michael Kantor's production gleefully exploits every theatrical cliche in the panto book. It features a ramshackle set by Anna Tregloan, with roughly painted backdrops and patchwork curtains that go up and down like, well, a whore's underpants. And he has an energetic cast that hams everything up to the required of degree of coarseness, while keeping the action as slick as a politician's dick. (I'm sorry; all that vulgarity is contagious. I promise I will calm down now).

Kantor certainly has the cast to work with. Max Gillies, in his double role as the impresario and Aunt Avaricia, the wicked Dame, is like a fully-rigged ship in full command of the stage, and he is strongly supported by the rest of the cast, all doing camp at around 120 decibels (but also, when called upon to do so, singing beautifully). Iain Grandage's songs, with Kate Denborough's peppy dance routines, are highlights. The whole thing is in the worst possible taste, and guaranteed to appeal to the horrible child that lurks in each of us. In short: it's a gas.

THIS YEAR, the MTC's version of a Christmas panto is Tomfoolery, Cameron Mackintosh and Robin Ray's collage of Tom Lehrer songs. It was already a nostalgia piece when it was first produced more than 25 years ago, and while there's no doubting Lehrer still has the capacity to please, his dour Cold War pessimism is a little outdated now. Satire, particularly political satire, depends so crucially on the issues du jour, that it's inevitable that what was extreme or shocking in 1955 is often going to miss its targets.

We have now a postmodern version of the Cold War, with an abstract noun replacing the Soviet Union's Evil Empire. And our apocalyptic fears these days focus on the hurricanes and rising water levels of climate change, rather than the nuclear immolation Lehrer celebrates with his appallingly catchy We'll All Go Together When We Go. When Lehrer levels his guns at the hippy protest song, it requires a little contextual explanation - the protest song has vanished into the op shop of history, to be replaced with the punk/folk of Billy Bragg, the Pogues or even Paul Kelly.

Still, it would be churlish to deny the charms of Lehrer's wittily Byronic rhymes, and classics like the Masochism Tango or Poisoning Pigeons in the Park still retain their perverse comic shine. I was shocked by how many songs I knew - like many people around 40, I guess, Tom Lehrer featured in my parents' record collections - and it was a pleasure to revisit them.

Simon Phillips gives Tomfoolery a full-blown production, with a design that's a kind of exaggerated fantasia of night-club sleaze (minus the filth, noise, cigarette smoke and gangsters) and some spectacular costumes (Rhonda Burchmore's green and red silk ballgown gets a particular mention - I watched it all night in fascination).

It's a bad sign when you're taking more notice of the cossies than the cast, and it has to be said that Phillip's directorial hand is all too busy everywhere. The overdressed set is matched by a actorly freneticism that doesn't quite substitute for genuine vitality. Gerry Connelly is fun, and always a showman, but here he is not at his sharp-witted best; and Bert Labonte's performance seems to consist almost entirely of mugging.

Even the legs herself, Rhonda Burchmore, appears to lack her usual lustre: perhaps it's all that stage business, which includes at one point pouring out two cups of tea, for reasons which remain wholly mysterious or are, at least, theatrically gratuitous. Only Mitchell Butel and Melissa Madden-Gray keep the home flag flying, with some sharp footwork and performances the right side of caricature.

Picture: (Left to right) Francis Greenslade, Max Gillies and Julie Forsythe in Babes in the Wood. Photo: Jeff Busby

Alison's Festival Diary #3

The Odyssey by Tom Wright, directed by Michael Kantor, designed by Anna Tregloan. With Paul Blackwell, Leon Ewing, Francis Greenslade, Jessica Ipkendanz, Rita Kalnejais, Benjamin Lewis, Belinda McClory, Suzannah McDonald, Kris McQuade, Margaret Mills and Stephen Phillips. Malthouse Theatre at the Workshop.

Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy...

So begins (in Robert Fagle's translation) one of the formative texts of Western civilisation, The Odyssey: the tale of Odysseus' long return home from war. At least 2700 years old, Homer's epic has inspired countless translations and retellings. The word "odyssey", which in its Greek root simply means "the story of Odysseus", is part of our language.



The Malthouse's production of this epic is an unashamedly ambitious undertaking. There should be much to like about it - the music, composed by Iain Grandage, is thrillingly theatrical, David Franzke's industrial sound design deeply textured, the mise en scene often arresting, the cast various and talented. But at its heart is a text of such unremitting banality that it compromises all these efforts. It is The Odyssey for Hi-5.

It certainly looks spectacular. Anna Tregloan's extraordinary set dominates the huge workshop space - a semi-circular rusty edifice like the wreck of some arcane and ancient piece of machinery. It is punctuated by doors on two levels, the top ones reached by iron ladders. In the central space is a revolve, turned by the actors, that can be flooded with water. A huge iron central door can be drawn up and closed with a metallic clang.

The highlight of the show is the appearance of the Sirens. Odysseus (Stephen Phillips) is suspended mid-air, lashed to an imaginary mast; the iron door opens to a song of unearthly beauty accompanied live on a violin, and the Sirens enter, dressed as veiled brides, while Odysseus writhes in frenzied desire. It's a wordless scene of dramatic and poetic beauty that makes you sigh for missed opportunity. Likewise, for Odysseus' visit to the Underworld, where he talks to the dead, a vast curtain of black netting covered with tickets - presumably the names of the dead - falls and divides the audience from the stage. A ragged grey screen bisects the revolve, and the dead appear lit by a naked flame in a bowl, pathetic in their nudity, to tell Odysseus their sad stories. A misjudgement of timing means this scene continues for too long, diminishing its power, but there's no denying its visual efficacy.

Ironically, one problem with this production is in fact the set - it dominates the space so much that all action is forced to be subordinate to its demands. But the real problem lies with the text. It is an unimaginative retelling of Odysseus' journey - compare it, say, with what the Coen Brothers did with the story in O Brother, Where Art Thou? or Kazantzakis' The Odyssey, where Odysseus returns home only to leave again. It gestures towards a crudely Jungian idea of the feminine that is startling for its misogyny, but otherwise all the imagination exists in the visual details of Michael Kantor's production, which sets the action after World War 2.

The language of the original epic, writes the classicist Bernard Knox, was at once heightened and popular, a difficult language that existed only in epic poetry but nevertheless lived on the tongues of ordinary Greeks. Homer's words "maintained their hold on the tongues and the imagination of the Greeks by their superb literary quality - the simplicity, speed and directness of the narrative technique, the brilliance and excitement of the action, the greatness and imposing humanity of the characters".

There is no sense that these qualities are carried over into Tom Wright's text. But more crucially, there is a puzzling absence in his language, evident in his earlier work but particularly highlighted here, perhaps because of the challenge of the original. Writers are people who respond to the materiality of language, its sensuous, sonic and dynamic qualities. This is especially true of poetry composed in an oral culture, and of writing for theatre, which is a place where language is physicalised and made gestic. This sensuous response to language is by no means a quality at odds with intelligence, but is embedded deeply within its turnings: even the most abstract thought has an erotic dynamic, the "wooing of a meaning" which is "inseparable from its absence" (Anne Carson).

When Wright reaches for the poetic, the language is almost completely emptied of this sensuous resonance. Repetition - a subtle and complex poetic art - becomes mind-numbing, and simplicity mere simple-mindedness. Epic grandeur is denoted by archaic grammatical reversals, like those in bad fantasy novels - "all corners of the earth have I seen". And so on.

The cliches and bathetic homilies roll out mercilessly. About half an hour in, disbelievingly, I started to write down some of the lines. "It's death," intones one unfortunate actor (I didn't note which one) "that makes life so important." "Your story is written on the breeze," says another. And another: "All around us History is marching!" Odysseus informs us nonsensically at one point that "I"m running out of time to fulfil my fate!" And the lesson we are to take away: "Life - life - that is it - that is all - ...Life! - fight for it!" So much for the rich simplicity of Homer.

It's a mystery to me how actors can say lines like these, or how they can deal with the dialogue, which sometimes reminded me of that curiously hypnotic anime cartoon Dragonball Z. They do their best, but the only possibility with language like this is declamation. And declaim they do.

On the structural level, Wright has removed the stories of Penelope and Telemachus, Odysseus' wife and son, thus emptying the home that Odysseus longs for (as we are told many, many times) of its major emotional significance. He has also made bizarre decisions, such as taking out Homer's best joke: when the Cyclops asks who it is who has blinded him, Odysseus cunningly replies "No one!", so that when the Cyclops complains later that no one blinded him, the gods laugh at him. But in this version, Odysseus gives his name and address, for reasons which remain completely unclear.

He has also pointedly made Odysseus a hapless victim, not of the Gods, but of women. Even Homer (Kris McQuade), who with writerly sadism puts her character through the mill, is a woman. The feminine - cloyingly maternal or sadistically and manipulatively sexual - represents only forgetting or death. "I have come from something dark," says Odysseus, referring presumably to Troy but also to Other Things. "We will all return to something dark...a deep hole in the earth". Penelope, the enduring symbol of fidelity, is erased almost altogether. Athena (Suzannah McDonald), the virgin goddess of war who orchestrates the events, is bafflingly infantalised as a little girl in a sailor suit. The virgin/whore dichotomy is here in spades.

The play finishes at the point when Odysseus is about to return home and slaughter Penelope's suitors, who have been making riot on Ithaca, thus underscoring heavily and without irony a patriarchal moral (a kingless country must inevitably turn to anarchy) that is actually mitigated in the original by Penelope's womanly authority. There is a conservatism embedded in this script that is deeply at odds with its gestures towards innovation. It is mystifying to me why so much money, skill and resources were lavished on a text of such intellectual and theatrical poverty.

Picture: Belinda McClory as Circe and Stephen Phillips as Odysseus in The Odyssey

The Ham Funeral by Patrick White, Journal of a Plague Year by Tom Wright. Directed by Michael Kantor, designed by Anna Tregloan. Lighting by Paul Jackson, costumes by Fiona Crombie. With Marta Dusseldorp, Julie Forsyth, Robert Menzies, Lucy Taylor, Dan Spielman, Ross Williams and Matthew Whittet. Malthouse Theatre.

As Michael Kantor's first presentation as Malthouse artistic director, this double bill is a provocative signal of intention. It offers an alternative means of imagining Australian theatre, outside the narrowly nationalistic or topical concerns which have dominated the Playbox aesthetic since the early 1990s. And although I don't feel it's an unqualified artistic success, I left feeling more hopeful about Melbourne theatre than I have for many years.

For a long time, mainstream plays in Melbourne have been presented under various aegises: as bearers of social issues, education, political commentary or, perhaps least offensively, as mere entertainment. As for theatre itself, it has sometimes seemed to be the Art That Dares Not Tell Its Name, a shameful embarrassment that has had to be decently cloaked in more palatable imperatives.



So it's a relief to be offered works that place themselves unapologetically in the culture and history of theatre itself. The paradoxical effect of this is to make theatre immediately less parochial in its concerns, to engage its tentacular ability to grasp social, literary and philosophical concerns and to thrust them onto the vulgar carnality of the stage. It's an aesthetic that is far from apolitical, but this is a politics which doesn't earnestly explore "issues", in order to coax from them a masochistically satisfying (but temporary) inflammation of the liberal conscience. Rather, it's a politics which begins by attempting to address some of the complexities of existence.

These two productions, presented in repertory with an ensemble cast, look back to major movements in 20th century theatre: the existential theatre of Beckett, the absurdism of Arabal and Ionesco, the revolutionary theatre imagined by Artaud. It's a truism that Australian theatre has marginalised these influences in favour of naturalistic conventions, but it seems to me that the truth of that story is much more complex than a simplistic naturalistic/non-naturalistic division. Our theatre has also ignored naturalistic writers like Peter Kenna; and some of the significant playwrights of the '70s, Jack Hibberd and John Romeril, for example, were certainly influenced by White and his contemporaries.

I suspect that the work which has been most marginalised over the past few decades is any theatre which refuses easy sentiment and pierces, instead, to the marrow of complex emotion. Which is to say, a tragic theatre. There is something in the Australian psyche which flinches against such difficult surgeries, preferring instead the "relaxed and comfortable" vision of life that was so attractively peddled by John Howard. All the same, I perceive a great and increasing hunger for this kind of work, as the world has darkened over the past few years. This cathartic emotional affect is also difficult to achieve. The Ham Funeral shows triumphantly how it can be done; the Artaudian Journal of a Plague Year how easily the grandiose gesture can flail and miss its mark.

The Ham Funeral was written in 1947 but was not produced until more than a decade later; astoundingly, this is its first professional production in Melbourne. It emerges from the formally adventurous theatre which grew out of European modernism, exemplified by playwrights like Arabal, Beckett and Ionesco. Watching The Ham Funeral, it seems strange that it is not mentioned in the same breath as Waiting for Godot (which it predates by two years) or Rhinoceros. Part of the answer might be in its stubborn Australianness; from its poetic cadences to its irreverent eclecticism to its joyous vulgarity, it's a profoundly antipodean work. But in Australia, it was simply considered too odd, or too obscene. We do not have a good record with our best artists.

The Ham Funeral is a post-romantic work written by an artist deeply uncomfortable with his own romanticism. It's about a young poet (Dan Spielman), who lodges with Mr and Mrs Lusty (Ross Williams and Julie Forsyth) in a boarding house full of "everlasting furniture". Mr Lusty suddenly drops dead, and Mrs Lusty takes the opportunity to give a lavish feast, "an 'am funeral", in his honour. Mrs Lusty, a woman driven by incontinent appetites, attempts to seduce the young poet, with comically tragic consequences. There's a fair bit of Jungian symbolism - the house as the self, the anima behind the door, the carnal desires in the basement - but this is merely a single strand in a play which works on a multiplicity of levels. One of its major obsessions is the insufficiencies of words in the face of life, the question of how language might escape its own imprisonments.

White's theatrical language is superbly dynamic, and imbued with a fearless vitality. It's resonant with allusion, prefiguring not only the slapstick of Beckett and the absurdist freedoms of Ionesco or Arabal, but also echoing poets as bizarrely diverse as Arthur Rimbaud and Walter de la Mare. Ultimately, the sophistication of White's linguistic skills works to evoke feeling at its most subterranean and mysterious. For all its vulgar comedy - among many other delights, it features a terrific fart joke - this is a play which reveals above all the anguish of consciousness, the pain and release which underlies any honest moment of self-recognition, and the price of risking the barren self to engage with the beauty and violence of the world. It's the kind of work which moves you to tears, without being quite sure why.

Michael Kantor's production is a beautiful realisation of the play. It's notable for its clarity: in one sense, Kantor has merely presented the text as simply and elegantly as possible. But this is a deceptive simplicity, gained through some thoughtful problem solving. Anna Tregloan has designed a flexible but evocative playing space: the boarding house is represented by a stage with a row of curtained windows backstage which can be lit or concealed, and fronted by the bare floor. The stairs - the liminal place between rooms where various characters pause to utter their uncertain thoughts - are indicated by bars of light. A red curtain drawn back by the Young Man foregrounds the artifice of the play, just as the text does. There are moments of memorable visual richness: a lyrical glimpse of Dan Spielman and Robert Menzies in overcoats, running through the rain with their umbrellas; the landlord's relatives, boxed behind windows, grotesquely attired in pyjamas like characters out of Endgame.

But ultimately the success of the production stands or falls on the performances; in particular, on the roles of the Young Man and Mrs Lusty, since this play is almost a two-hander with some extra characters. Dan Spielman and Julie Forsyth are up to the task. Spielman, always a performer notable for his emotional fearlessness, portrays the solipsistic romanticism of the Young Man and its violent fracture with scarcely a missed beat. If sometimes he subtly falls into what look like actorly habits, we can forgive him for his unfudged clarity of feeling and intelligent irony.

Julie Forsyth is a comic delight, always just this side of grotesque caricature: on the one hand in incandescent rebellion against the bleakness of her life, and on the other imbued with a touchingly innocent longing. The violent climax of the play, an extraordinary scene of miserable sexual violence between Mrs Lusty and the Young Man, is played by both of them with a raw passion that makes it devastatingly tragic. They are well supported: in particular, Ross Williams, one of the more underestimated actors in Melbourne, portrays the silent landlord with a deft tragicomic touch, and Robert Menzies has some gloriously black comic moments. Max Lyandvert's sound, a mixture of pre-recorded soundscapes and live piano music, also deserves mention.

The same cast also plays Tom Wright's Journal of a Plague Year. For this production, Kantor capitalises on the cavernous spaces of the Merlyn Theatre to create a huge black canvas on which he projects a series of tableaux. The cast creates a series of dramatic or grotesque images, some of which are strikingly memorable: the black-cloaked narrator (Robert Menzies) emerging from darkness, illuminated only by the lamp he is carrying; a plague victim (Matthew Whittet) crucified on a moveable panel, tormented by disembodied hands; Nell Gwynne (Lucy Taylor) in busty Restoration garb, singing '70s pop songs.

The major problem with this work is that these images, however striking, never amount to anything substantial; they are grotesquerie without emotional force, and so can never approach actual horror or tragedy. The problem begins with Tom Wright's script, which merits some discussion.

The pretext for this work is supposedly Daniel Defoe's 1722 novel A Journal of the Plague Year, an account of the plague that struck London in 1665. Defoe's novel is a early example of fictional journalism; it purports to be the memoirs of a pious Protestant merchant, H.F. It's a somewhat disorderly narrative, but all the same told with a meticulous attention to detail - Defoe researched the public records, and items like the death figures or public health measures are set down with an almost bureaucratic zeal. For all his piety, H.F.'s manner is free of pompous moralising or overblown religiosity: he is a practical and materialistic man, recording a tragic human phenomenon with an insatiable and sceptical curiosity.

Aside from its 17th century setting, its quotes from Defoe and the theme of the plague, Tom Wright's version has in fact very little to do with the original. A Journal of the Plague Year is essentially about survival; Defoe is fascinated by the endless ingenuity of human resistances against both the plague and its catastrophic economic effects. The novel ends with a rhyme about the plague which "swept an hundred thousand souls / Away; yet I alive!" Wright's Journal, on the other hand, is about apocalyptic extremity and exploits a religious fervour that Defoe's text pragmatically eschews. Its actual genesis is the avatar of the Theatre of Cruelty, Antonin Artaud.

Some artists are perilous influences; they tend to be innovative geniuses whose work is so idiosyncratic that imitators without equal abilities can only seem mannered. I'm thinking of writers like Dylan Thomas or Gerard Manley Hopkins; among theatre artists, Artaud is probably the most dangerous. Howard Barker's Theatre of Catastrophe or the plays of Sarah Kane are successful examples of the contemporary application of some of Artaud's ideas; both are fiercely moral writers who launch full-frontal attacks on the humanistic tradition of reason.

One problem with Artaud is that he means it, and any artist who decides to pick up on his ideas had better mean it, too. Another problem is that the logical end of Artaud's idea of "absolute revolt" is Pol Pot and Year Zero (Pol Pot was, it must be remembered, educated in Paris). Like Rimbaud, Artaud insisted on the collapse of any boundary between art and life: thought and act were to be completely identified. He despised empty formalism. "If there is one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time," he wrote in The Theatre and The Plague, "it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signalling through the flames." He insisted on a carnal theatre, a theatre that reinstated the poetry that had been corrupted by modernity and reason, a theatre that "recovers the notion of symbols and archetypes which act like silent blows, rests, leaps of the heart, summons of the lymph, inflammatory images thrust into our abruptly wakened heads".

Wright, unlike Kane or Barker, is altogether too cerebral to answer this kind of visceral demand. The contrast with Patrick White's theatrical language is stark; where White is dynamic, tactile and supple, Wright is static and abstract. But the work suffers also in comparison to writers who shape the banalities of language, playwrights like Michel Vinaver or Thomas Bernhard: neither of them speak in generalities, where Wright seldom escapes them.

Oddly, for all its gestures towards unreason, Wright's text seems tame; it is much more orderly than Defoe, who is quite happy for most of his book to ignore the demands of chronology or even literary logic. The details of urban life that swarm in Defoe's text are filleted out in favour of apocalyptic religiosity, and events taken from the novel are simplified and exaggerated into grand guignol melodrama. One example is the scene about plague victims being nailed into their houses; the actuality, as reported by Defoe, was both more complicated and less absolute. The victims in fact had their keys taken and a watchman set outside their door: and they often tricked the watchmen and escaped out the back. I personally find myself more attracted by the subversion of the original tale. And the constant equation of women with infection and sexual delirium has more than a whiff of misogyny. I think what bothers me most is that Wright has what poets call a "cloth ear"; a problem closely aligned to the lack of tactility or carnality in his language. He might get away with a lot more if he had more intuitive sensitivity to the cadences of a line.

The text is organised in a kind of modular prison, with Brechtian signs traversing the stage signalling each month (it's only a matter of time before you start calculating that there are five months until December). Each month ushers in a different theme - contagion's genesis, evil visions, interpretration of dreams, the pit of death - which the actors duly illustrate. But perhaps where Wright most inverts his apparently anarchic intentions is at the end, when he encloses the narrative with a moral homily about the essential bestiality of human nature. This is, despite its crazed dress, humanistic theatre after all.

I can't say I was bored, even if sometimes I was impatient. There was enough visual interest and flashes of wit to keep me from wanting to lay violent hands on myself. I particularly liked the philosopher's chat show, where Hobbes, Artaud and others seated at microphones dispute the nature of reality. Robert Menzies as the narrator generates enough energy to keep it together, despite what sounds like an almost unperformable text, and the rest of the cast does its best, which is in moments more than enough. It's a shame that all this effort amounts to little more than a procession of images.

Despite my reservations, it is a breath of fresh air to see mainstream theatre with ambition and intellectual clout, and that takes itself seriously as an art. I have no doubt this shift in artistic direction will generate a lot of controversy; Helen Thomson's bitterly hostile reviews (here and here) in the Age this week are probably symptomatic. I also have no doubt that this new phase at Malthouse is the best thing that's happened there in the past decade; and as a theatre goer, I am hoping that this is only the beginning of a more generous imagining of the Australian stage.

Picture: Matthew Whittet in Journal of a Plague Year
Malthouse Theatre