Note: there are spoilers in these reviews

Ms TN is bereft of complaint (which is, as Rilke said, the abiding vice of poets). It's glorious to be in Adelaide: the days are fine and hot, the evenings mild and clear, and there is no shortage of interesting things to see and to think about. At night the buildings along North Terrace transform into absurd and beautiful fantasias in a light display that exactly paints each facade of these superb buildings - the museum, the art gallery, the university - in saturated colour. The display, called Northern Lights, changes every two minutes, so the same building is at one moment a fantasy neo-classical Renaissance palace, at the next a fairytale hardware store (with gnomes). As the hundreds of people out oohing and taking photos attest, it's enchanting public art.


It is a gorgeous walk from the Torrens River, which is a riot of Spiegeltentian lights, and then along North Terrace. This was my route home from the Festival Theatre, where last night I saw the much anticipated production of Le Grand Macabre. György Ligeti's only opera, and the work widely judged to be his masterpiece, it's presented as a massive co-production between four major European companies - Brussells' Théâtre Royale de la Monnaie, the English National Opera, Barcelona's Gran Teatro de Liceu and Italy's Teatro dell'Opera di Roma.

The vast scale of this production has been judged to be the reason for the relative thinness of the theatre component of this year's festival, at least for a visitor from Melbourne. Artistic director Paul Grabowsky has included a number of first-class Australian shows (Eleventh Hour's King John, Back to Back's extraordinary Food Court, Lucy Guerin's Untrained, Wesley Enoch's The Sapphires, and so on). Not, as Seinfeld said, that there's anything wrong with that: it's not as if these shows have been seen in Adelaide, and they deserve this further exposure. But as far as spectacular international theatre goes, Le Grand Macabre is about it. There is Elevator Repair Service's The Sound and the Fury, but after suffering through Gatz I've passed on seeing what they do to Faulkner, even if this one is five hours shorter. The one festival show that I'm sorry to miss (or which I haven't already seen or won't, like Wrong Skin, see later in Melbourne) is the Irish Druid Theatre's The Walworth Farce, of which I hear glowing reports.

Its status as the big show of the festival throws a weight of expectation onto Le Grand Macabre: you want it to be extraordinary. I confess here, gentle reader, to a tiny twinge of disappointment. There's no doubting the beauty and wit of Ligeti's music, nor the opera's status as a modern masterpiece, nor indeed the spectacularity of Alex Ollé and Valentina Carrasco's production. I wish I had the musical literacy to describe Ligeti's composition: the attraction of his score is its depth and lushness, which emerges perversely out of stern modernity. There are references everywhere, from Monteverdi to Beethoven, clashing gloriously with a riot of percussion and unexpected juxtapositions. It's rich, layered, complex and witty, and it is a profound pleasure to hear it.

The libretto is from a play by Flemish dramatist Michel de Ghelderode, La Balade du Grand Macabre. The opera has a complex history of production: it premiered in Stockholm in 1978 but reached its present form in 1997, when most of the spoken text was cut or scored, and the preferred language changed to English. The play itself is set in an imaginary world called Breughelland, and its abiding hauntings are Breughel - in particular his painting The Triumph of Death - and Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights. Both these paintings are inscrutable nightmares, emerging from the chaotic late mediaeval period in Northern Europe, which was devastated by plague and war. They are informed by fantastic depictions of proverbs and other folk motifs, now mainly lost to interpretation, and behind each painting broods the Christian visions of Apocalypse and Hell, of the fiery damnation and waste of eternity.

Ligeti's art emerges from a time in which the horrors of the Holocaust and the destruction of the cities of Europe were still a recent memory: Ligeti's immediate family were sent to Auschwitz, from which only his mother survived. The irony and savage satire that inform Le Grand Macabre - in which Death himself (Nekortzar, sung by Roderick Earle) is mocked as a drunken sot and fraud - is the same black vision of absurdity that haunts post-war dramatists such as Tadeusz Różewicz, Thomas Bernhardt, or Heiner Müller. Here, the Europe that rose from the ashes of World War 2 - as fearful, corrupt and self-serving as it was before the war that seemed, at the time, like the end of the world - is mercilessly satirised in scathing Dadaist takedowns.

The paranoid security state is, for example, mocked in the absurd police chief Gepopo (Susanna Andersson); the corruption of democracy in the White and Black Ministers (Adam Goodburn and Christopher Tonkin); pusillaninous authority in the figure of Prince Go-Go (Brian Asawa). Even science gets a serve in the figure of the masochistically married astronomer, Astrodamors (Frode Olsen), ever at the mercy of his sexually voracious wife Mescalina (Ning Liang). Through this world walks a confused Everyman, Piet the Pot (Chris Merritt), who unwittingly finds himself the slave of Death, and a rather poor substitute for his Pale Horse.

The only ambiguous hope is in the figures of the lovers, Amanda (Ilse Eerens) and Amando (Annie Vavrille), who alone refuse to succumb to fear, and who insist on the earthly pleasures of their love and the brief, vivid intensity of the present moment as the only truth. They are like the lovers in Breughel's The Triumph of Death. There, the entire canvas is dominated by a terrifying vision of the armies of death marching through human life, laying everything waste. The only patch of green is a tiny lawn in the bottom corner of the painting, on which is seated two lovers playing music to each other, their backs turned to the desolation. They are at once an image of the solipsism and blindness of sexual love, heedless of everything but itself, and a poignant reminder of human resistance and beauty. In this opera they are portrayed as skinless, like those images in an anatomical diagram of muscles and tendons, their nerves utterly exposed and unprotected.

Directors Ollé and Carrasco situate the action in a giant, grotesque woman's body, bookending the opera with a short filmed narrative about a woman called Claudia who, after gorging herself on pizza and Macdonalds hamburgers, and smoking ashtrays full of cigarettes, has a brief moment of physical collapse during which she believes she is dying. Her naked body becomes the huge puppet that dominates the stage: performers emerge from various orifices (except, interestingly, the ears, the nose and the anus), clamber about her collapsed legs, screw off her nipples and hide inside her, or (literally) worm through her entrails. Some extraordinary video is projected onto the woman: at various times her body is a charnel house of bones, a site of apocalyptic flame, or becomes a three-dimensional image of her skeleton as the body rotates. It ought to be spectacular, and it is, generating beautiful stage images: but for the first half it is also static, more like watching visual art from a distance than the dynamic invitation of performance.

After interval the staging becomes more dynamic, and consequently more engrossing: it is in this half too that a scrim descends for one of the more beautiful scenes, when Piet and Astradamors float together in shifting clouds, believing that they have died and gone to heaven. There is much that is spectacular, obscene, lyrical and comic in this production, and I wouldn't have missed Gepopo's big Dadaist solo for anything: but what is ultimately missing is a real sense of the tragic, however removed at an ironic distance. I suspect this is because of its framing in the small domestic moment of Claudia's indigestion. This has its pertinence and intelligence as a metaphor for Ligeti's abortive and drunken apocalypse; yet it makes the opera not so much a defiant mockery of death and its mechanisms, as a removal of death altogether. It is only, after all, a phantom of western over-indulgence. Still mulling over this one. But I feel that I ought to have felt more.

I felt a similar nagging disappointment in Vs Macbeth. This is a collaboration between the STC's actors ensemble The Residents and Adelaide's The Border Project, and it demonstrates a laudable desire to return to a dirtier, rougher theatre after the extravagant spectacles of the Actors Company. There is much to like in this production, but as a project it still seems to me to be at the level of potential rather than actualisation. I felt I was watching a production that rehearsed gestures I've seen elsewhere in the work of Benedict Andrews or Melbourne's Black Lung (the concept was, in fact, something like a cross between the practice of these two); but without the disciplining intellect of one or the outrageous anarchy of the other, it ends up falling between two stools.

Where it succeeds is in its exploitation of the central metaphor of Macbeth: darkness. The entire play takes place at night, when the clear borders of day are erased and moral certainties waver in the vaporous air, when evil deeds are hatched and nightmare crawls into insanity.At night the uncanny and the demonic emerge from the shadowy reaches of the psyche: from its shadows emerge the witches, with their riddling prophecies that, like all oracles, perilously hold the seed of their undoing. Sleep - a recurring motif - is the softer face of death, the means by which we are unconscious to ourselves; it is sleep that deserts Macbeth and his wife and exposes them to the full horror of their inner darkness.

Backed by the growls of an electric guitar, director Sam Haren lets loose the action on a black stage that is curiously both cavernous and claustrophobic, with two monitors on either side that mostly track the live action. The performers are exposed in unforgiving, harsh light, or vanish into the shadows. Ambiguity is the order of the day: in a canny piece of casting, Macbeth (Cameron Goodall) also plays the traitor Cawdor, whose title Macbeth takes. The witches (Ursula Mills, Zindzi Okenyo and Alirio Zavarce) are ambiguously gendered underworld denizens, mocking Macbeth's doubtful certainties with voices amped and sonically treated to an unhuman weirdness. The most brilliant scene in the production - Macbeth's final visit to the witches - is in fact played out in total darkness, with Macbeth's face filmed in infra-red camera on the monitors.

The chief conceit is Macbeth's history as a cursed play, notorious for the unluckiness of its productions: we are reminded of this tradition by a game of Chinese whispers that runs along the audience (although the night I went, the audience rebelled and sent it backwards down the line). Consequently, there are a few moments where things go wrong: a prop catches fire, and must be extinguished; Macbeth's crown is too big and falls around his neck; a lighting rig falls down from the flies. The actors stop and deal with the "mistake", or have sotte voce conversations with technicians or each other, before getting on with the show. There's no point at which these small accidents derail the play or, conversely, illuminate it - they act chiefly as reminders that we are watching a live play - and ultimately it seems like a timid interpolation of carefully engineered anarchy that, inevitably, is thus not anarchic at all. But perhaps faintly annoying.

The other conceit is the use of paintball guns as the weapon of choice. For the execution of Cawdor, executions being a formal business, this is very effective: a safety curtain is drawn across the front of the stage, actors run on with a rack of guns, masks and armour are donned, and at last the Thane of Cawdor is spattered with green paint and theatrically dies. Later in the play, these formal safety procedures neutralise any sense of violence - only once, when an anonymous paintballer bends over and casually shoots Lady Macduff's baby (who is thankfully spared the "egg" speech) does it have any charge of crime.

All the lead performances are excellent, although the cast is a little uneven in the minor roles. Cameron Goodall is a nervy, wired Macbeth, driving, like a junkie, towards his own destruction. Amber McMahon as Lady Macbeth at first seems too delicate for the role, until she channels some termagent and sets ice in your blood with those murderous speeches. They're supported by powerful performances from Tahki Saul (Macduff), Brett Stiller (Banquo) and Malcolm (Richard Pyros).

Yet, for all its virtues, the production as a whole never quite generates the unnerving instability it seeks. Maybe, like the random dates that were flashed up on the video monitors, it's a bit over-clever. (I dutifully wrote them down but, despite some heavy googling, couldn't work out the significance of "London 1928" or "Amsterdam 1674" - was it because Madame Tussaud's opened? Or New Amsterdam becoming New York? Or just there to stimulate some pointless research? Or what?) Or maybe, like the - yes, legally necessary - signs outside the theatre itself, it was all a bit too careful to assure us that, after all, we were quite safe.

Picture: Northern Lights, North Terrace, Adelaide Festival.

Le Grand Macabre, libretto by Michael Meschke and György Ligeti after Michel de Ghelderode. Theatre Royale de la Monnaie, English National Opera, Gran Teatro de Liceu and Teatro dell'Opera di Roma. Festival Theatre, Adelaide Festival, until March 4.

Vs Macbeth, by William Shakespeare, directed by Sam Haren. Design, Sam Haren and Melissa Page, sound design and composition David Heinrich, lighting design by Govin Ruben. With Alice Ansara, Cameron Goodall, David Heinrich, Amber McMahon, Ursula Mills, Zindzi Okenyo, Julia Ohannessian, Richard Pyros, Sophie Ross, Tahki Saul, Brett Stiller and Alirio Zavarce. Sydney Theatre Company and The Border Project, Odeon Theatre, Adelaide Festival, until March 6. Opening Wharf 2 Theatre, Sydney, on March 20.

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Beginning with King John and ending with Henry VIII, the ten works known as Shakespeare’s History Plays dramatise five generations of brutal power struggle in mediaeval England. Although they were never written to be performed as cycles or as single epic works, the contemporary stage has seen a number of notable versions of the history plays as epic theatre. Peter Hall inaugurated the Royal Shakespeare Company with a cycle of eight plays, The Wars of the Roses, in 1964; again with the RSC, Adrian Noble made The Plantagents, an adaptation of the second tetralogy in 1988. Michael Bogdanov directed another famous seven-play adaptation, The Wars of the Roses, at the English Shakespeare Company in 1987. And so on.

Less illustriously, Bell Shakespeare did their own version, Wars of the Roses, in 2005. That production begged the question: why should 21st century Australians be interested in plays that are so crucially concerned with the question of Englishness, and which in fact have been formative of the fiction of English national consciousness? Can our staging these plays be anything more than a colonial gesture of defiance or obsequiousness, either being different sides of the same cultural coin? Or is there something else going on in these plays that can elicit a proper contemporary attention? Is there still something they can reveal?

Tom Wright and Benedict Andrews answer these questions authoritatively with their adaptation, The War of the Roses. Rendering eight plays in four acts over eight hours, this is a work of massive intellectual and theatrical ambition that will be impossible to encompass properly here. Trying to think about it is rather like a pleasurable version of Hercules's adventures with the Hydra: every time I address a thought, another two spring up and demand attention. But, as Wittgenstein so comfortingly says, one has to begin somewhere.

The War of the Roses is theatre of a rare and desolating beauty. It generates its startling visual richness from a poverty of illusion. Andrews strips the stage to its back walls and finds for each of the four acts a single informing (and utterly transparent) theatrical metaphor. This lyric simplicity has the effect of framing and foregrounding Shakespeare's language. It highlights the literary beauty, wit and power of the speeches, not by reverent attention to their formalities, but through excessive physical demands on the performers, which excavate the visceral truths of poetry.

In these plays, The War of the Roses is no longer plural. It is a single war, an Orwellian total war without end, a war in which peace is only war by other means, a war very close to that within which we live. And yes, in this intellectually epic realisation, Wright and Andrews demonstrate that there is indeed a reason to mount these plays in this day and time. Yes, they are parables that concern themselves with much more than narrow questions of British nationalism or pretty kings. Yes, in these old stories of English kings we can see, reflected in their faces, our own complicities, our own shames. They reflect for us the nightmare of our history, the blind, murderous tragedy that continues in our own time.

Power never goes out of fashion.


Power

Giving it the proper capitals, Shakespearean critic Jan Kott called it the Grand Mechanism: the eternally revolving machine of History that raises high and casts low, so that he who at first believes he makes history becomes at last history’s plaything, the executioner executed. In the History Plays, the primal violence that inaugurates the State is laid bare; the illusions that conceal its bloody origins are torn roughly aside. Pomp and ritual, the notion of justice, the vision of an “anointed king” whom God blesses, or a President with a personal phone line to the Almighty, all fly up like the painted scenery on a stage to reveal a bleak world driven by the machinery of power, in which the only thing that counts is who is stronger. In this world, the world that Shakespeare brought to artistic fruition in the dark, bestial universe of King Lear, history is Godless and bereft of meaning.

The wheel turns: the pretender murders the king and seizes the crown, only to become himself a victim. Thus, as Camus sardonically observed, you might witness the true meaning of Revolution. Hegel thought history had a deeper and rational purpose, the evolution of the human spirit towards freedom and enlightenment: Marx, following Hegel, thought it a mechanism that would generate freedom for the masses enslaved by capital. But Shakespeare’s view of history is altogether starker.

It is, in many ways, a pre-Christian vision. As a young man, Shakespeare encountered the Latin poets, in particular Seneca, whose bloody tragedies influenced works like Titus Andronicus, and Lucan. Marlowe's translation of Lucan’s Pharsalia, his epic poem about the Roman Civil Wars, was popular in Elizabethan England when Shakespeare was writing the Henry VI plays, and may in fact have been their model. In this poem, Lucan describes the cosmos as a malfunctioning machine facing inevitable collapse under its own weight, a universe without meaning or purpose. Certainly in both works, ruinous civil wars lead to the creation of a tyrant – Caesar in one, Richard III in another.

Like Lucan and Seneca, Shakespeare saw history as an endless wheel of pain, a cycle of suffering that serves no purpose but its own continuation, and whose only production is corpses. The wheel turns and turns again: blood oils the axle, its iron rim crushes the human body under its irresistible weight, the next king rises and murders and falls. And for what? For the golden circle that is without beginning or end, the empty crown of state, the beautiful delusion that, once it has seduced its victims, reveals its true face:

...for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court...

Time

Eight hours, eight plays, one hundred years. Shakespeare’s medium was time, his tool was language. He used language to sculpt time, revealing the sinews of History, its dynamic, dramatic form. Andrews and Wright have sculpted Shakespeare, cutting back the eight plays to their essential speeches, laying bare the bones of language and time that underlie the flesh of history.

The War of the Roses is an oratorio, a series of soliloquies made by people in agonising solitude. The protagonists are caught outside historical action, in the isolating interstices when they become conscious of the implications of their acts. As the audience, we become their silent witnesses, their co-conspirators, their allies and enemies and subjects. It's a bold reworking that seems to create theatre at its purest and most essential, and yet the result continuously demands comparison to other arts, demonstrating its essential impurity: you think it is pure music, pure sculpture, pure poetry. Pure vision, pure dream.

Wright and Andrews have loosened the self-consciousness of the Renaissance stage, summoning an earlier idea of theatre. As the Shakespearean scholar Anne Richter noted, mediaeval drama implied both audience and player in one transcendent reality: the Easter plays were originatory rituals, where time future and time past were resolved into an infinite present. Shakespeare’s plays were part of a reality that splintered this holistic pageantry: his plays were the culmination of the secularisation of the dramatic stage, the zenith of the self-contained, self-conscious, articulate world that was the great invention of the Elizabethans.

Yet when the fire-curtain silently rises on the first stunning image of the cycle – Cate Blanchett as Richard II seated in a throne, surrounded by her unmoving courtiers, while an endless fall of gold leaf rains down onto the stage – what we see is not a Renaissance image, nor even a modern image. It is a mediaeval image, recalling in its hieratic formality nothing so much as the famous portrait of Richard II that is now in Westminster Abbey. And like the mediaeval pageants, this is a theatre that directly addresses us, which seeks to makes us implicit in its world. Through the four acts, we are begged, importuned, commanded, rebuked; we weep and laugh and are bewitched. We are not apart from this world. It even makes us flinch in immediate, visceral fear at the end of Part One, in an extraordinary coup of lighting: a huge shadow seems to fall from the top of the theatre as the curtain closes, as if a wall of darkness is falling onto us, a winged omen of dread. This theatre is more than a mirror. It is us.

There are of course still dialogic scenes – most notably the brilliant scene in Richard III when Richard (Pamela Rabe), the killer of Anne’s (Cate Blanchett) father and husband, seduces her as she follows the corpse of Henry VI, whom Richard has also murdered; or the scenes between Falstaff (John Gaden) and the wild, contemptuous young Hal (Ewen Leslie) in Henry V. But these play out in relief against a frieze of grinding existential solitude, and call into question the very basis of human communication. This is what makes The War of the Roses a contemporary production, rather than a nostalgic glance back to a romantic history: each character here is as pitilessly exposed, as cruelly alone, as any character in Beckett.

The War of the Roses begins and ends with two tragedies, Richard II and Richard III, which between them comprehend the decadence of power. They rhyme in more than name. Where Richard II is accompanied for more than an hour with a rain of gold, Richard III is performed on a children’s playground on which falls, silently and mercilessly, an endless rain of ash that blurs and conceals the corpses that accumulate about the stage.

In Richard II, we witness something more profound than mere regicide: we see the death of the idea of the king, the humanising of the sacred mouth of God to a mere mortal man, a foreshadowing of Lear’s realisation that he is but a “poor bare, forked stick”. In Richard III, we see what happens when desacralised power is put into conscious action. Richard II believes, up to the moment of his death and despite his forced abdication, that he is a king by divine right; Richard III knows he is king by right of his own malice, deception and violence. Richard II is a melancholy dream of a vain but sacred illusion that is ultimately destroyed by the concealed power that sustains it; Richard III a terrifying vision of amoral brutality.

In between the two tragedies, six plays are compressed into two acts. These follow the histories of three King Henrys, IV, V and VI. We witness the remorseless mechanism that is the engine of historical tragedy: an abattoir, an endless parade of death played out across the rich garden of the kingdom, ultimately reducing it to the final desert of ash, an endless winter of discontent.

In Part One, Act Two, a conflation of Henry IV and V, the stage is utterly bare, the only decoration to the action the guitarist Stefan Gregory, who stands by a giant amp, his back to the audience, picking out a growling lyric on his guitar. This act plays out the crisis of royal legitimacy, reminding us that the etymology of the word “royal” is the same as the word “real” (and that the Real was also a currency of the Spanish realm: gold and divine authority, the ultimate realities, were – and still are – closely linked). Henry IV (Robert Menzies), the murderer of Richard II, the anointed king, is haunted by doubt in the legitimacy of his power. He rules a realm riven by rebellion and is shamed by his wastrel son, Hal (Ewen Leslie), a stark contrast to the bellicose young Hotspur (Luke Mullins), who is fomenting rebellion against the monarch.

Henry IV's desired legitimacy only comes after his death, when Hal, now Henry V, forswears his debauch. The state demands sacrifice for its inauguration and legitimation, and Henry expiates the sin of regicide with French blood. Defeated France marries Henry V in the person of Katherine of France (Luke Mullins), who, in one of the more chilling images of the play, rises from the floor as a French corpse covered with blood, and is washed and dressed in wedding clothes before being offered to Henry V.

This foreshadows the mechanical violence of Part Two, Act One, which follows the conflicts between the houses of York and Lancaster, symbolised by the white rose and the red. This slaughter takes place on a ground of flowers, a garden that becomes a battlefield. Each character plucks out their assigned colour in the legendary scene in the garden, when the nobles chose the red rose or the white to indicate their loyalties. But the colours are given a darker meaning: they are echoed in the blood spat into the face of actors, to signify murder, and the flour thrown over their bodies as corpse pallor. The flour hangs in the light like the phosphorous bombs hung over Gaza at Christmas time.

The Players

A hundred years, five kings. Outside the Globe Theatre, a sign read Totus mundus agit histrionem: All the world’s a stage. It’s a sentiment as ancient as Petronius, who is credited with its invention, and it was a commonplace of the Elizabethan age, when theatre was considered the mirror of the times. No one worked this metaphor with more variety, wit and point than Shakespeare.

This metaphor is woven through the entire production, but there are telling moments when it steps into the foreground. One is in Richard III, when Richard is plagued by nightmares before the Battle of Bosworth Field, assailed in his dreams by all those he has murdered. Each ghost curses Richard – Pamela Rabe in bloodied t-shirt and black trousers, her hair curtaining her face like an evil Joey Ramone – and blesses his enemy, Richmond (Luke Mullins). And then they all gather front stage, as actors do when the show is finished, and bow. And we see that the stage is Richard’s mind, a macabre playground where at first he is king of the castle, the playground bully and liar murdering his way to the top of the class with macabre glee. When the ghosts bow to us, heedless of death since the worst has already happened to them, Richard discovers that he is no longer playing history. Now, like all his forbears, all those kings who thought they were the authors of their own action, Richard finds that he is merely history’s plaything, after all. The role is playing him.


In this moment and others like it, we are also made pricklingly aware that Richard is an actor, a player who is, moreover, a woman, Pamela Rabe, who after the play is over will walk off the stage, strip off her costume and take a shower. This double consciousness of performance is a particularly Shakespearean trope, and Andrews has exploited it to the hilt in The War of the Roses. The ambiguity of the Player King – the king whose pomp is all performance, the actor whose performance is all kingliness, each reflecting the perilous illusions and realities of the other – is a constant motif through the History Plays and the tragedies, and its double meaning expands still further in this production in the ash-strewn playground of Richard III.

The metaphor generates its power from the compelling reality of the performances: if we did not believe in the cruel grace of Richard II, if we were sceptical of the grief opened on the whetstone of Bolingbroke's ambition, if the lewdness of Hal and Falstaff played false or Anne’s tragic death were laughable instead of pathetic and sad, then the mundane reality beneath the playing would have no power to enrich our watching, and to unite our quotidian and imaginative worlds into a single complex reality.

What does it mean to “believe” a performance? This production gives plenty of occasions to consider this question: the acting is superlative, as good as you will see anywhere, with performances of breadth and disturbing depths, with nuance and skill and delicacy and the kind of passion that hooks the heart on barbed wire. To "believe" an actor means, I think, to become more conscious, to open the imagination to the full scope of emotional possibility. It means to understand better the meaning of our own humanity. It is not always comfortable.

This is the final production of the STC’s Actors Company, the beautiful dream of a permanent ensemble that foundered on the Scylla and Charybdis of Sydney public opinion and uneven programming. To my mind miraculously, the Actors Company produced some unforgettable work along the way. And it seems to me that if it took three years to make this show, and The War of the Roses were all that the Actors Company produced, it was well worth the bother. After all, there are companies in Europe – much lauded by critics here who have been very quick to claim that the Actors Company was a waste of resources – who have done no more than work on a single production for three years.

Every time I’ve seen the Actors Company, I’ve been impressed by the fluidity of its performance, the depth of the ensemble's dynamic on stage. The War of the Roses takes this several steps further, with Andrews’ direction springing off those relationships to generate the terrifying alienation that is the harsh lesson of this production. Above all else, one is watching a practised group at work, by now polished by three years’ daily intimacy. The stage glows with the genius of the ensemble, which generates a lucidity of performance that you simply cannot attain in the job-to-job schedule of normal acting work.

A month into the season, I didn’t see a single weak actor, and the two guest actors – Cate Blanchett and Robert Menzies – sit brilliantly within the cast. And this show features individual performances that are simply remarkable, portrayals that deserve to be lauded and remembered years hence as moments when greatness graced our stage.

Images that remain with me: Cate Blanchett as Richard II, luminous and sly, the image of arrogant wit and grace, heartless and heartbreaking, walking over broken glass to the crown; Robert Menzies as Bolingbroke, Henry IV, driven by anger, grief, regret and bitterness, surrounded by his likenesses in a macabre dance that stirred real horror; Ewen Leslie as Henry V, a revelatory performance, charismatically sexual, violent, his body drenched with honey and oil and blood in a diabolical anointing of royalty; John Gaden, brilliant and desolately moving as John of Gaunt and Edmund Duke of York, wickedly knowing and irrepressibly lustful as Falstaff; Marta Dusseldorf, terrifying in her hatred and ambition as Margaret of Anjou, teaching Queen Elizabeth (Amber McMahon) how to curse; Eden Falk, fumblingly innocent and somehow frightening as the child king Henry VI; Pamela Rabe, wickedly juvenile, blackly witty, clumsy, terrifyingly amoral and charismatic as Richard III. But none of these individual moments would be possible without the context around them.

And now, having reached this pitch of real greatness, the Actors Company is to end, to be replaced by a humbler workshop version of fresh faces that, according to the 2009 program, will be mainly working behind the scenes, “refining new work in the rehearsal room”. No doubt it is a sensible decision, given the controversy that has surrounded the Actors Company; perhaps Sydney will heave a huge sigh, to be relieved of such difficult and expensive beauty. But I can't help wishing that Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton had held their nerve and persisted in the grand folly of the Actors Company. Having seen the brilliant work that is The War of the Roses, dropping the company that made it seems like nothing so much as a terrible failure of imagination.

The War of the Roses Part 1 and Part 2, by William Shakespeare, adapted by Tom Wright and Benedict Andrews. Directed by Benedict Andrews, designed by Robert Cousins, lighting by Nick Schlieper, music and sound design by Max Lyandvert, musician Stefan Gregory. Performed by Narek Armaganian, Cate Blanchett, Brandon Burke, Peter Carroll, Marta Dusseldorp, Eden Falk, Holly Fraser, John Gaden, Louis Hunter, Michael Kilbane, Ewen Leslie, Steve Le Marquand, Hayley McElhinney, Amber McMahon, Robert Menzies, Luke Mullins, Pamela Rabe, Emily Russell, Billy Shaw-Voysey and Leo Shaw Voysey. Sydney Theatre Company @ Sydney Theatre, season closed. Perth Festival, Her Majesty's Theatre, February 27 - March 8.

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Festival diary #10: Wednesday

Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare, directed by Oskaras Koršunovas. Designed by Jurate Paulekaite, costumes by Jolanta Rimkute, lighting design by Eugenijus Sabaliauskas, choreography Vesta Grabštaite, music composed by Antanas Jasenka. OKT/Vilnius City Theatre @ the Playhouse until October 25.

Freud would have a field day with this remarkable production of Romeo and Juliet. Oskaras Koršunovas, director of Lithuania’s OKT/Vilnius City Theatre, never permits a cigar just to be a cigar. A dizzying range of objects – a length of dough, a ladle, a knife, a tie - become ribald symbols of masculine power. Or, as the case might be, impotence.

However, this cheerful obscenity is far from gratuitous. Here Romeo and Juliet is a satirical and ultimately deadly critique of male violence. A theme that begins as a joke transforms inexorably into a savage attack on the macho culture of vendetta.


This is, of course, a prominent theme in Shakespeare’s play, but seldom drawn out with such theatrical power. Koršunovas’s rambunctious production is not concerned merely with telling the story of star-crossed lovers. Rather, the child lovers are stark symbols of a possible freedom that is murdered by the harsh exigencies of their warring society. It's a theme which has considerable contemporary poignancy.

The play is set in the kitchens of rival pizzerias, with a design cluttered with objects that reminded me of nothing so much as the surreal illustrations of Maurice Sendak. The stage becomes a setting for extreme theatrical and emotional transformations.

It begins with the cast looking blankly out into the audience, as if posing for a photograph. This pose is held so long one cast member falls asleep against another, stirring laughter at its audacity, until at a signal the stage is instantly alive with activity. The play ends with another still pose, only now this is the stillness of death, not life.

So much happens in between that it’s difficult to encompass in a review. This is a production of enormous detail that plays with extremes. The comedy does not relieve the tragedy so much as clash electrically against it, the pathos or passion or sheer uncanny beauty of some scenes heightened by the parodic clowning of others. The dramaturgy is driven by emotional shifts that turn on a knife edge: in a split second, the stage transforms from absolute stillness to frenetic movement, low comedy to high tragedy.

The first two acts are grotesquely playful satire that scrapes against the shy passion of the childish protagonists (one thing we never forget in this production is how young Romeo and Juliet are). There are gorgeously choreographed street scenes that are reminiscent of parts of The Godfather, leavened with a good deal of that lewd comedy. A sense of what is to come occurs during Mercutio's speech to Romeo before his fateful meeting with Juliet: a dramatic shift of lighting transforms the stage into a dreamlike moonscape, hinting of the inhuman workings of fate.

After interval the mood changes irrevocably: the stage becomes a memento mori adorned with skeletons and coffins. The final three acts are stunning, a danse macabre in which Romeo and Juliet’s doomed marriage is played out as nightmare. The comedy becomes a blackly sardonic note against which is played some startling stage images: when Romeo hears of Juliet's death, for example, it comes from a bestial spirit, a boar, in a scene that genuinely touches the uncanny. And the violence is disturbingly real, as in a brutal scene where Juliet's father - heretofore a mildly comic patriarch - demands that she marry Paris, in which the physical force that underlines his familial authority is revealed in an ugly enactment of domestic violence.

Koršunovas's employment of objects is dizzyingly imaginative, richly detailed and constantly surprising. In the first half there is much use of dough, a symbol of life. In the second, the performers use flour, most notably masking their faces white in a spookily effective image of death. When the mourning families gather on stage for the final scene, they sift flour onto the floor, like a constant fall of tears or rain. The final image of the dead young lovers slumping into the huge dough basin - an object which itself has been many things in the course of the play - is one of those indelible theatrical images that sear themselves into memory. It had the chilling finality of corpses being thrown into a pit.

The performances are fantastic, meeting the demanding extremities of the production. The only bother was the sound design, which was frankly naff, and only saved by its abrupt switches from one state to another: at no point did the sound seem integrated with the production, serving rather as sonic wallpaper. Compared to the rest of the production, it seemed surprisingly naive. The other minor irritation was the sometimes puzzlingly ill-spelt surtitles (a feature, as someone remarked last night, of many festival shows). But it's more than worth these glitches to experience Koršunovas’s depth of imagination and masterly command of theatrical image.

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

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