Fringe Festival: Hitlerhoff, written by Tom Doig, directed by Erin Kelly. Video by Anto Skene and Puck Murphy, sound by Keith McDouglass. With Tobias Manderson-Galvin, Simone Page Jones and Ezra Bix. North Melbourne Town Hall until October 11.

Villanus by Vlad Mijic and Rhys Auteri. Set design by Philippa Barr and Caroline Comino, lighting by Natalie Vincent, music by Raphael Hammond. Performed by Vlad Mijic. Welcome Stranger @ J-Studios, North Fitzroy (closed).

Well, what with her various attacks of the vapours, and mindful that from Thursday on her life is no longer her own, Ms TN hasn't got out to much of the Fringe. But there's been no shortage of coverage elsewhere in the blogosphere - Born Dancin' has been stunning observers all over Melbourne with his Quixotic quest, posting his seventh multiple post of capsule reviews; Richard Watts and Michael Magnusson have been out there, as has tyro blogger Long Sentence No Suggestions; Jana Perkovic has posted a must-read review of Rawcus; and Ming-Zhu Hii used the Fringe to begin her tracking of racial casting in Melbourne theatre. My Esteemed Colleague Mr Boyd has been coming at things obliquely, as always, with a post on Dancehouse. And no doubt there have been others which have escaped my notice.

Take a bow, bloggers. It's so great to see the oxygen of response livening up the performance scene here. Not one, not two, but lots, all cheerfully disagreeing. Now, that's what I call civilisation.

But on to my notes on what I did see. I made my way to the North Melbourne Town Hall on Friday to see Hitlerhoff, intrigued and curious. And came out with a similar feeling to Born Dancin's succint response (possibly the review of the Fringe). A deep desire to go hmmmmm...

This is YouTube theatre. It's like those remixes of Downfall where Hitler is getting upset about Barak Obama (or X-Box or Real Madrid). Tobias Manderson-Galvin plays a genetic collision of Adolf Hitler and David Hasselehoff, star of Baywatch and some awful music videos (and Spongebob Squarepants, although that doesn't get a look-in), a man in speedos who's got a fake moustache and is not afraid to use it.

The premise behind this show, according to the website anyway, is that there is an ethical imperative in disrespectful satire that lampoons sacred cows. Marrying the images of Hitler and Hasslehoff is a way of signalling parallels between the nude-Aryan-youth-and-muscles Nazi aesthetic and the blonde, busty babes (male and female) of Baywatch. And, of course, the Nazis were big on showbusiness. The opening video, a mash-up of Leni Reifenstahl and Californian beaches, does in fact make this parallel quite well.

And the spoof which follows is undeniably fun. It's not as if the Holocaust is beyond satire - look at the work of absurdist Polish playwright Tadeusz Rosewicz, which is as black as it gets. Baywatch and the theatrics of the Third Reich are a deliberately provocative conjunction, but what's perplexing is that it's hard to see in the show what insights this provocation actually generates beyond its initial frisson. To discuss it with any seriousness feels like making some heavy weather about an essentially harmless and diverting pisstake.

It's witty and fast-moving, and performed with the necessary brio by its very energetic cast. But somehow it elides the discomfort of its subject matter and its humour, crucially, depends on that elision. It doesn't feel heartless to laugh at it. And perhaps that's the point, that the hyperreality of mega-celebrity reduces everything to the affectless image, shorn of context and meaning. Again like Born Dancin', I'm curious to know what others thought.

The one time where I felt some prickle of reality was towards the end of the play, when Hitlerhoff himself was passionately declaiming about the necessity to act now, which gave an echo of the state of permanent emergency that drives the emotive politics of Fascist regimes (and our current political situation). Otherwise, it made me feel a little nostalgic for Mel Brook's 1968 masterpiece, The Producers, which cornered the market on Nazi bad taste.

The following evening I trekked out to J-Studios in North Fitzroy to see Villanus, a show which is as deeply concerned with the idea of image and identity as Hitlerhoff, but to rather more profound effect. This is deeply interesting theatre. I saw this show on its premiere at Trades Hall last year, and don't have much to add to what I said then. To quote me:

The apparent artlessness belies the intelligence of the theatre that follows, a series of discrete verbal arias in which notions of self and identity are put under intense interrogation.

The show opens with a stumbling disclaimer from Mijic, in which he explains that although this performance is partly autobiographical, it is also a tissue of lies and half truths. Playing a version of himself called Vlad, Mijic launches into a paranoid exploration of what it means to be called a “villain”. Wearing a piece of paper taped to his back which says "Vlad is dead", he begins with the obsessively repetitive recording of a video diary. “If you are watching this now,” he says intently into a camera, “I have been murdered”.

Mijic and his co-creator Rhys Auteri are most concerned with the notion of mediation, with how much our self-image - individually and collectively - is formed by expectations projected onto it. Much of the text, which is both spoken and written in Texta on butcher's paper or projected onto a screen, consists of lists (a major trope of much contemporary poetry): lists of personal characteristics, of fragments of text rescued from unlikely places, of scraps of received reality that enter a world-view and then form it.

At the centre is the question of Vlad's Serbian ancestry: Serbs being, before the sudden stardom of Saddam Hussein, the arch-villains on the international global stage. He was born in Yugoslavia, he tells us, but now Yugoslavia no longer exists: like his primary school, which was shut down by Jeff Kennett, it is now a place that only lives in memory. What is the fiction called Vlad to make of this? Is his inescapable ethnicity a reflection of an inherent monstrousness, or is his villainousness simply a desire "not to disappoint" expectations (a desire immediately ironised by this show's anti-aesthetic presentation)? This question splinters and fragments through fantastic or even surreal obsessions, several posthumous death scenes and a comedically dislocated self-reflection on the process of making Villanus itself.

Rhys Auteri and Mijic have refined the show considerably, cutting out some of its circular excesses and introducing some new elements (a brief take on Eurovision, for example). It is a now an excellent, tightly poetic text. And it has a set design this time, rather than a jumble of objects on a stage.

Although this made for a slicker and more focused show, and it certainly benefited from cutting the long ending, I missed some of its initial roughness, which gave it a nimbus of imminent collapse, an air of uncertainty that fed fruitfully into the experience of the performance. But I still walked away with the feeling that this is a piece of theatre made with real courage and theatrical curiosity, and which, in a world driven by mediated images, radiates a genuine and fertile unease.

This Is Good Advice: This Is A Chair by Caryl Churchill, Advice to Iraqi Women by Martin Crimp, directed by Lauren Barnes. Sound design by Rueben Stanton, set design by Rhys Auteri and Vlad Mijic, set illustrations by Vlad Mijic and Harriet O'Donnell. Welcome Stranger @ Trades Hall, Carlton, until February 10.

Sometimes the concept of "British Political Theatre" seems synonymous with David Hare, whom the SMH describes this week as "Britain's most committed left-wing playwright". I'm not sure how one measures such things, but in a field that includes barnacled warriors like Edward Bond or Harold Pinter, this seems, to say the least, highly arguable. Hare takes the prize - in the mass media, at least - because he writes about issues that everybody recognises as politics, from Israel to Iraq, in ways that are utterly familiar to anyone who has watched television. Hare's finger, it seems, is ever sensitively pressed to the pulse of current affairs.

But Britain has produced deeply committed political playwrights whose artistic achievements far overshadow the narrow oeuvre of David Hare. Caryl Churchill is among the first rank of these. Since the early 1960s, she has steadily written plays that express her commitment to socialist and feminist ideals and, later, a disturbingly prescient vision of a natural world being destroyed by the relentless progress of global capitalism. She is also one of the most exciting formalists now writing in the theatre.

This Is A Chair is a case in point. This short and elegant play, premiered by the Royal Court in 1997, is a sardonic evolution of Bertolt Brecht's Fear And Misery of the Third Reich, a series of fragmentary and realistic sketches of the impact of Nazism on the ordinary lives of Germans. Brecht's examination of the nexus between politics and social behaviour is at once oblique and direct, focusing on the apparently inconsequential to illustrate the rapid erosion of rights and freedoms under Hitler's regime.

Churchill has shaved this form to the bone; at first sight, her sketches of mundane social interaction have nothing to do with their purported titles - War in Bosnia, The Northern Ireland Peace Process, Genetic Engineering. They are at once domestic and strangely iconic: a young woman stands up a man with whom she has a date, a couple order their child to "eat up", two old women watch television while discussing a medical procedure. The only overt sign that something else is going on - in the text, at least - is in the scene titles, which, in classic Brechtian fashion, are to be displayed or announced before each scene.

The cognitive dissociation that vibrates between the labelling of significant public events of the mid-90s and the brief sketches that supposedly illustrate them has an effect that becomes progressively more and more uneasy. One hunts for the connections, and finds more usually a disconnection. What comes closer and closer to the surface is the carelessness people display towards each other in their ordinary lives, an ethical callousness that might appear minor and unimportant, but which, in the magnification of the theatre, demonstrates how little people actually perceive each other's pain.

The amplification from the micro to the macro is not a simple question of metaphor, of these domestic mise en scenes illustrating in miniature the larger public events. Rather, Churchill is sketching out an ecology of human affairs, creating a sense of how these small events accumulate into a social ethos. Just as climate change is created by billions of individually insignificant choices, so a callous public ethos is linked to countless smaller events, such as a doctor persuading an old woman not to use anaesthetic during a procedure in order to save money. In each case, the capacity of empathetic responsibility - one of the better human traits - is imperceptibly worn away.

More, Churchill is playing with the nature of knowledge and its relation to reality. The statement "This is a chair" is a common philosophical cue for investigating knowledge: how we know things, whether they exist apart from our knowing of them, what the nature of this knowing is, what role language plays in constituting human realities, and so on. These are the kinds of questions at play, as the program points out, in Magritte's famous painting Ceci n'est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe). All the same, I can't escape a nagging suspicion that Churchill is also employing a playwright's direct literalism in her titling: an insistence that, indeed, things are as they are seen, which is not at all the same as how they are said to be.

It's a subtle thesis which is largely trampled by Lauren Barnes' production for Welcome Stranger, although she makes a creditable attempt at what is an extremely challenging play. Only a writer of Churchill's calibre and precision could even attempt such a stylistic coup, and the demands of this kind of spare text are unforgiving to even the most experienced actors. The actors employ blackboards, emphasising an pedagogic element that might exist in Brecht's play, but which in Churchill's remains ambiguous: it is not a lesson play, a Lehrstücke, so much as an attempt to destabilise the simple categorisations that make it easy for us, in our media-driven age, to ignore the actualities of our actions.

So what is written as a simple interaction is labelled for us: the opening scene, for example, has blackboards behind each actor: He is Bosnia, She is Britain. (I confess, I was at first confused: I thought they had just got their grammar mixed up, not that they were different nations). The effect is to simplify its complexities, to read the play in a directed way that removes much of its jangling affect. In order to play with a proper metaphorical potency, a text of this kind requires an intensity of realism in the performance which is here side-stepped by the approach: the subtext is, as it were, written out for us, and I'm not certain that it's the correct subtext.

All the same, there is enough ingenuity in this simple staging and enough energy in the performances to keep it interesting. It's not surprising that the lesser play - Martin Crimp's 10 minute Advice to Iraqi Women - is by far the more successful piece. Here the actors are working well within their limitations, and Crimp's piece, which depends - albeit in a far less nuanced way - on an ironic dissonance between its text and its content, finds the comedy and depth that eludes the earlier piece.

Advice to Iraqi Women is a litany of the advice routinely given out to mothers to ensure the safety of their children - always supervise children near water, lock away poisons, give them good food. It has long irritated me that such advice is couched in terms that feed parental paranoia, thus no doubt ensuring that we are the most protective parents in history. (Yes, I am all for sensible safety standards...) Crimp picks up on this rhetoric to create what becomes a blackly ironic comment on the hypocrisy of the British Government's slogan "Every Child Matters" while it was simultaneously bombing children in Iraq.

It's performed by three actors seated in a row on three chairs. Beneath them is a stretch of sand, scattered with lit tealight candles that suggest a memorial to the dead. They glance anxiously at each other before blurting out the standard exhortations. "Your kitchen," they intone, "is a warzone." Your garden is a minefield. Death awaits your children around every corner. Beware! Beautifully judged performances, taking their cue from the tone of earnest social welfare and magazine television, highlight the comic unreality of the rhetoric in the face of those who live in actual warzones. It's simple and powerful and very effective.

For all my reservations, This Is Good Advice is a chance to see a couple of plays by two of Britain's major playwrights that otherwise wouldn't get an airing here, performed by an interesting young company. Well worth a look.

Villanus, by Vlad Mijic and Rhys Auteri. Performed by Vlad Mijic, with Raphael Hammond (video). Lighting and set design by Vlad Mijic, music by Raphael Hammond. Welcome Stranger Theatre Company, Old Council Chambers, Trades Hall, until September 2. Bookings: (03) 9782 2625.

Lately I've been thinking about the poetic language that's turning up in so much of Melbourne's contemporary theatre. There's a lot of it about, and it's an interesting - and I think healthy - phenomenon. Many inquisitive minds are turning back to the word, after a period of its banishment from any serious exploration of theatrical form.

A decade or so ago, "text-based theatre" was most often a pejorative term, considered synonymous with the faux naturalism that then dominated our main stages. But, as Robert Musil illuminatingly pointed out in 1926, this is a mistake, even if the so-called laws of the stage are "nothing but a dramaturgy of cutting real spiritual cloth down to marketable size". "Many of our contemporaries," he wrote, "have rebelled against the mindlessness of the stage, with the result that all parts of a stage performance were 'discovered' and made, one after the other, the chief part." He goes on to elucidate the "new theatre" of the time:

The actor's theatre, the director's theatre, the theatre of acoustic form and that of optical rhythm, the theatre of vitalised stage space, and many others have been offered to us.... They have taught us much that is worthwhile, but about as one-sidedly as the assertion that one should throw a man who has a cold into the fire,which is also fundamentally based on a correct idea. ... As incomparably as something unutterable may be expressed at times in a gesture, a grouping, a picture of feeling or an event, this always happens in immediate proximity to the word; as something hovering, so to speak, around its core of meaning, which is the real element of humanity.

Musil suggests that the danger of radical reforms that ignore the intellectual possibilities of the word is an inescapable inner banality. "The experience of our senses are almost as conservative as theatre directors," he says, and only language can take us beyond what we already know.

Musil's statements, which pertain to the German theatre of his time, are of course highly arguable. But they remain provocative and, I think, pertinent to some of the work I'm encountering around Melbourne. I'm thinking of, for example, the work of Stuck Pigs Squealing, who last week had a showing of a work-in-progress that dislocated linguistic meaning using techniques imported from sound poetry, or Luke Mullins' exploration of Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, or Carolyn O'Connors' Material Mouth (having a remount soon at Arts House), or Adam Broinowski's unrapturously received Know No Cure, the text of which, at least, deserves some notice for its densely poetic attack on theatrical language.

There's a lot of rethinking of how written language can be used in theatre: attempts to expand the vocabulary, that are in part reactions to the banalities of both text-based and non-text based theatre. As Musil's statement shows, there's nothing new under the sun; but there are always new contexts in which these old things can be reilluminated.

Which brings me, at last, to Villanus, the latest work of Welcome Stranger, one of a rash of young independent theatre companies in Melbourne that are exploring a vein of what might be called junk theatre. This is theatre that questions conventional theatrical aesthetic, defying the idea that theatre is a consumable object. In junk theatre, you are unlikely to see anything resembling a three-act play, or expensive and lavish sets. What you will often encounter is a dramaturgy ordered along poetic, rather than narrative, principles. The connections in the text will be metaphorical and allusive, and its apparent meanings and stories will be ironised, subjected to an aggressive and restless interrogation.

It's all to different ends, of course, and very much a work in progress. Junk theatre is occurring under the aegis of tiny companies like the Black Lung, which last year saw its very rude – in all senses – Rubeville sweeping the awards at both the Adelaide and Melbourne Fringe Festival. Uncle Semolina and Friends presented a lo-tech version of Gilgamesh at the 2005 Melbourne International Arts Festival that featured toy cars and a sandpit. They appeared in a double bill with the charming Suitcase Royale, who make their ingenious and intricate props out of discarded objects like old telephones and typewriters.

Like these others shows, Villanus looks defiantly messy. The set consists of a jumble of television screens and other electronic equipment, a table, a bookshelf on which are placed random objects, and various rough scaffoldings. A major design element is packing tape. The apparent artlessness of the set belies the intelligence of the theatre that follows, a series of discrete verbal arias in which notions of self and identity are put under intense interrogation.

The show opens with a stumbling disclaimer from Mijic, in which he explains that although this performance is partly autobiographical, it is also a tissue of lies and half truths. Playing a version of himself called Vlad, Mijic launches into a paranoid exploration of what it means to be called a “villain”. Wearing a piece of paper taped to his back which says "Vlad is dead", he begins with the obsessively repetitive recording of a video diary. “If you are watching this now,” he says intently into a camera, “I have been murdered”.

Mijic and his co-creator Rhys Auteri are most concerned with the notion of mediation, with how much our self-image - individually and collectively - is formed by expectations projected onto it. Much of the text, which is both spoken and written in Texta on butcher's paper or projected onto a screen, consists of lists (a major trope of much contemporary poetry): lists of personal characteristics, of fragments of text rescued from unlikely places, of scraps of received reality that enter a world-view and then form it.

At the centre is the question of Vlad's Serbian ancestry: Serbs being, before the sudden stardom of Saddam Hussein, the arch-villains on the international global stage. He was born in Yugoslavia, he tells us, but now Yugoslavia no longer exists: like his primary school, which was shut down by Jeff Kennett, it is now a place that only lives in memory. What is the fiction called Vlad to make of this? Is his inescapable ethnicity a reflection of an inherent monstrousness, or is his villainousness simply a desire "not to disappoint" expectations (a desire immediately ironised by this show's anti-aesthetic presentation)? This question splinters and fragments through fantastic or even surreal obsessions, several posthumous death scenes and a comedically dislocated self-reflection on the process of making Villanus itself.

In its sensibility and diction, the text isn't a million miles from the Serbian poet Vasko Popa, who often explores how the hidden, even murderous self relates to its social masks. His unsettling poem In The Village of My Ancestors is not untypical:

Someone embraces me
Someone looks at me with the eyes of a wolf
Someone takes off his hat
So I can see him better

Everyone asks me
Do you know how I'm related to you

Unknown old men and women
Appropriate the names
Of young men and women from my memory

I ask one of them
Tell me for God's sake
Is George the Wolf still living

That's me he answers
With a voice from the next world

I touch his cheek with my hand
And beg him with my eyes
To tell me if I'm living too

Mijic is a strangely uncertain presence, at once summoning and deflecting attention; "acting" seems the wrong word for what he is doing here (in a short extract from Edmund's "bastard" speech in King Lear, he gives us an extreme version of acting that parodies the whole idea). But he holds your attention, standing in that uncomfortable place where a performer is not quite removed from his quotidian self, in which role-playing becomes the whole of identity.

In any case, Villanus is a show that provokes a lot of thought. I'm not sure that it's wholly successful - whatever success might mean in this context. For example, it feels tautologous to criticise its dramaturgy, which towards the end deliberately and wickedly tests the audience's patience, although I suspect that if there are future incarnations, it might be shorter and structured in such a way to make its final monologue seem less like a postscript. But it certainly transcends the dangers of narcissism that attend a project like this, and it's well worth a look for anyone interested in the livelier edges of Melbourne theatre.

Little Ms Alison is a bit wan today: the last week has been full-on, and I've been out and about and missing my burrow. So I'm putting my feet up and Mrs Rabbit is making me some nice chamomile tea. In the meantime, let me point you to Villanus, performed by Vlad Mijic and co-authored with Rhys Auteri, which I saw at the Trades Hall last Thursday. It's well worth a look, as I briefly report in today's Australian. Hoping to say more later, when my ears are less rumpled.