Terrorism by the Presnyakov Brothers. Directed by Victor Bizzotto, designed by Douglas Iain-Smith, with Adam May, Romy Lor, Sophie Kelly, Paul Denny, Julie Eckersley, Paul Reichenstein, Lyndal Hall and Luke Elliot. Theatre@risk, Fortyfive Downstairs until September 12.

Writing plays is a delicately negotiated compromise between the subtleties of literary ambition and the pragmatic limitations of the stage. On the evidence of Terrorism, the Presnyakov Brothers negotiate with style. It has a brutal elegance, the kind of brilliantly nuanced crudity which heralds notable theatre.

The play opens with a bomb scare at an airport that sparks a banal discussion between three passengers on the nature of terrorism. Terrorism, we are told, gains its power by its reasonlessness: anyone might be its target, and being an innocent civilian is no protection. Its only aim is fear, by which we are manipulated and controlled...

This was one of a few occasions where I sniffed didacticism, feeling that I was being patronised by the writers. But on reflection, I suspect that this is a problem with the production rather than the text. The dialogue reflects the media-driven discourse around the word "terrorism" that the play is seeking to subvert, and I think is meant to function ironically, being the kind of anxious gossip that attempts to deflect or control fear. In this production, perhaps by default, it comes across as a frame through which the audience is directed to interpret the play. But as it unfolds, it becomes clear that Terrorism is by no means straightforward: by the end, it is not even clear if any of the events have actually happened, or if they have merely occurred inside the traumatised mind of one of the characters.

The play consists of six connected but autonomous scenes, through which the panic instilled by the bomb scare ripples and amplifies into something truly deadly. There are the adulterous lovers whose sexual games cross the line from play to real danger; the two grandmothers discussing murder; the boss who bullies his underlings to suicide; the brutal hazing of a soldier. In each of these scenes the Presnyakov Brothers peel back the veneer of normal social behaviours to reveal their potential murderousness. These scenes are where the real power of the play exists and, at their core, they are shockingly cruel. It is not so easy to sort out victim from criminal, the innocent from the guilty: everybody is implicated and no one, not even a child, is blameless. Terrorism is presented as a tyranny of fear which corrupts and brutalises even the most minute and everyday aspects of our lives.

The play is specifically Russian in many ways: its black absurdity, for instance, draws from a literary tradition as old as Gogol. The Presnyakov Brothers know that comedy is inherently cruel and voyeuristic, that the man slipping on a banana skin isn't as far from souvenir atrocity photos as we would like to think, and they fully exploit this knowledge in their writing. But the play's clear-eyed dissections of brutality strike uncomfortable resonances, and touch some of our deepest contemporary fears.

It ought to be both frightening and hilarious, but theatre@risk gives it a rather prophylactic production. Apart from the problems of a largely young and under-rehearsed cast, Victor Bizzotto's direction has a fussy, drama-school feel about it, with over-choreographed scene changes which diffuse the energy of the writing. There is also a strange sense of kitsch, an edge of camp: I suspect this is an attempt to grapple with the comedic aspects of the writing which substitutes for dealing with its confrontational brutality. As a result, performances waver in and out of focus, giving occasional glimpses of what the play might be; only Julie Eckersley consistently achieves the unsentimental accuracy which can release the text's comedy and pathos.

These problems are amplified by Douglas Iain Smith's set, which consists of a number of pastel-coloured canvases neatly hung around the white gallery space. The setting muffles rather than illuminates the play, containing its confrontations within a context of consumable cultural display. The seating is arranged lengthwise, perhaps the least felicitious arrangement for this space since, unless you are in the front row, there are almost no good sightlines. It also means that getting actors on and off stage includes a long walk, which slows down further the orchestration of the action.

The first thing I noticed when I got into the theatre was that the program was printed on high quality glossy paper. Not, to quote Seinfeld, that there's anything wrong with that; if the gloss had heralded a deeper lustre, this might not have lodged in my mind. A small but telling detail was the absence of any credit for the English translator, whom I assume is Sasha Dugdale, the translator for last year's production at the Royal Court in London. Lack of resources is a constant dilemma for independent companies, and it's understandable that they might aspire to a mainstream PR slickness. But given that the production of this very interesting play was so drastically undercooked, I wondered if this company's resources might not better be directed to the substance of its art.

theatre@risk
Fortyfive Downstairs

Dinner by Moira Buffini, directed by Julian Meyrick, designed by Ralph Myers, lighting by Paul Jackson. With Pamela Rabe, Neil Pigot, Alison Whyte, Brian Lipson, Stephen Curry, Robert Jordan and Ming-Zhu Hii. Melbourne Theatre Company at the Fairfax Studio, Victorian Arts Centre, until October 2.

Dinner left me at odds with myself. On the one hand, I was neither bored nor pained, and, in a general way, enjoyed myself. On the other, it scarce ruffled the surface of thought; if I hadn't had to write this, I should have almost totally forgotten about it by now. Back to the first hand, why should I object to something so totally harmless? And on the other, how can I not object to theatre so totally harmless?

And again - watching Pamela Rabe being febrile, feline, sexy, desolate, acidly witty and despairing all at once is a treat. Rabe is an Actress with a capital "A", and in a long black evening frock with diamantes she generates the sort of presence that makes strong persons swallow hard and lesser mortals involuntarily bow. The play is a perfect star vehicle, and Rabe adorns it with a predatory glitter among a high quality cast who, if they seldom challenge Rabe's centrality, each shine in their own way. I couldn't help wishing all this talent was lavished on a more worthy object, but I seemed alone in my reservations (I often am). The full-house audience loved it.

You see my difficulty: it's not as if I don't enjoy fluff, or even pap, especially if it's presented with style. It's just that I would prefer it to have a little substance.

As its title promises, the play follows a dinner thrown for her husband Lars (Neil Pigot) by society hostess Paige (Pamela Rabe) to celebrate the success of his sub-Nietzschean self-help book, Beyond Belief. She (or Buffini) has invited some carefully chosen representatives of Britain's intellectual elite for what is, I suppose, a kind of existential dinner party, in that its culinary meaninglessness reflects the pointlessness of life. The lucky guests include a dippy visual artist Wynne (Alison Whyte), who also happens to be Lars' mistress. Wynne's politician lover is invited but absent, as their relationship has just broken up because Wynne exhibited a painting of his genitals. The electronic media is represented by bimbo newsreader Sian (Ming-Zhu Hii), and the sciences by her new husband microbiologist Hal, an old friend of Paige and Lars who left his ex-wife suicidal when he abandoned her for younger flesh.

As a necessary sociological contrast, working-class van driver Mike (Stephen Curry) crashes in the fog and, after he comes to the house to ask for help, is installed as a guest in the place of the absent Member for Camberwell Green (he of the unwillingly publicised penis). Finally, a sinisterly efficient and silent waiter (Robert Jordan), hired through a mysterious web page whose motto is "Let me hold your coat and snicker", completes the set up. As the motto is meant to suggest, he is Eliot's "eternal Footman", an avatar of death.

Naturally, as the play progresses we understand the hypocrisies of these characters, how unpleasant, weak, selfish and vulnerable they are, blah blah (at this point I found my attention wandering, like it does, in fact, at the sorts of dinner parties where competitive wit substitutes for actual conversation). Wynne claims to be an artist of eroticism, but unsurprisingly is distinctly prudish; Lars' pseudo-Nietzschean philosophy turns out to be really a front for his mean-minded egocentricity; the bimbo news reader is in fact the brightest and bravest of all the guests, and the working class van driver - who has possibly burgled the house next door - the most honest.

So far, so BBC situation comedy. Dinner is dressed up with lashings of literary allusion, but that doesn't lift it into the realm of the literary. The literary allusion might in fact be part of the problem - kind of like what faux Stoppard would be if Stoppard were not faux in the first place. The effect is as if Buffini had rummaged through the attics of Western culture, emerging with a text that's nostalgically encrusted with decorative trinkets from a time when high culture really mattered. But in fact, its aesthetic heart is firmly with The Good Life.

In Julian Meyrick's stylish production the play fizzes from witticism to witticism, lurching through Paige's surreal and disgusting courses (Primodial Soup, Apocalypse of Lobster and, for dessert, Frozen Waste, each as nasty as they sound) towards what you know will be a black conclusion. Meyrick and designer Ralph Myers boldly set the play in the round, on an unadorned parquet revolve. Although this mucks up Buffini's "Last Supper" metaphor - the play is clearly written to be performed on a proscenium arch stage, with Da Vinci's painting as a visual reference - it permits some pretty flash scene changes, with neurotic violin music by Tim Dargaville highlighting a choreographic satire of social manners.

I am no nationalist, and abhor nationalistic arguments about art. But Dinner reminded me that we are a colony: we still bow to the Queen of England, although our interest is now lodged in the US Reserve Bank. Even if it did live up to its pretensions as social satire (the jury's out on that one), Dinner is so specifically English that it's hard to see the point of producing it here.

After all, what has Cool Britannia, Tony Blair's amoral and materialistic Brave New World, got to do with us? Our local brand of moral bankruptcy is of an entirely different breed: lacking the strange arrogance of having lost an empire, our crassnesses are underlaid by insecurity - what Donald Horne once famously dubbed the "cultural cringe". One of the cringe's symptoms is, not unincidentally, the way that insubstantial West End hits are picked up for our main stages. Dinner is as determinedly superficial as its characters or the social milieu it purports to criticise, and while it aims for the profundities of tragedy, can only attain the brief frisson of shock or surprise. Its pretensions towards absurdist drama can't excuse the emotional falsity of some its dramatic surprises, and it's this lack of emotional torque which makes it so forgettable.

If Dinner were a more profound play, it wouldn't matter where it was set. Unlike the work of Chekhov, or Orton, or Wilde, Buffini's play doesn't transcend its specific origins to enter the generous amplitudes of art. An afternoon's diversion, for sure; but one that painlessly drains out of your psyche, changing nothing.

Melbourne Theatre Company

Sweet Staccato Rising by Robert Reid. Directed by Lauren Taylor, with Hamish Michael and Lauren Urquhart. Theatre of Decay at The Store Room, until August 22.

Talking about my g-g-generation: nothing is calculated to make me feel more like J. Alfred Prufrock than some bouncy young artist insisting on his or her youth. It is unarguable that 40 is older than 20, and I guess quoting Eliot says it all: how last century can a creaking old ague-ridden carcass get?

But I can't help it, the ague or the age. So here one stands, rolling up the bottoms of one's trousers, checking out the crows' feet around one's eyes and that lascivious softening of the flesh that occurs around one's middle, if one pays too little attention to lifestyle clubs and botox. It is indisputable that I am over 38 (eew, old! they say with disgust of 38 in Sweet Staccato Rising) and wear my age gracelessly, if only to point out that disaffected youth didn't spring new-minted from the ground in 1984. And if Robert Reid's play Sweet Staccato Rising makes me feel my age - so what? Was it worth the discomfort? Or - perhaps more pertinently - was it in fact as discomforting as it sought to be?

Sweet Staccato Rising covers familiar territory. It tracks the alienated young lovers Gunner (Hamish Michael) and Slitfish (Lauren Urquhart) as they implode in mutual self-destruction. It's that old romance of sex and death, Bonnie and Clyde or Sid and Nancy for a new generation. I've never really bought into the generational concept, which seems to me a device invented by market researchers, but, for the record, Reid claims to speak for those born in the mid-80s "between two Gulf Wars", articulating a familiar nihilism which is nevertheless aggressively particular to contemporary Melbourne.

The play's parochial focus gave me pause, for a number of reasons. One danger is that its brand of suburban angst runs the risk of seeming little more than self-indulgent, a cry of rebellion which turns out to be no more than "nobody loves me". (But is there anything more, after all, to the young Brando's iconic sneer?) And admittedly, the endless eastern suburbs of Melbourne, especially when seen from a train window, are bleakness itself: the heartland that spawns Neighbours and Kath & Kim is mile after mile of identical suburbia, sterile and heart-shrinking, the only sign of vitality the graffiti which blazes garishly along kilometres of fencing. It's not surprising that, in this landscape, youth suicide statistics are among the highest in the world.

Still, it was the stifling petit bourgeois respectability of Charleville which engendered the incandescent talent of Arthur Rimbaud, probably the first and still arguably the greatest of adolescent rebel angels. It is poverties of spirit that are germane here, not material poverty, despite the statistics about youth poverty flashed, a la Brecht, onto the theatre wall. Gunner and Slitfish are from the disenfranchised white middle class, not the underclass who inhabit towerblocks and caravan parks; they are not migrant workers or asylum seekers or disenfranchised indigenous people or, to begin with, homeless. Gunner might burn down his house, but he has a house to burn down in the first place: and it's a house with a lawn. Slitfish can afford a ticket to New Zealand, even if she is raped there. There are claims made for disenfranchisement which sit rather nervously over what is revealed in the play; I would have felt less bothered if there had been no claims, if I had been permitted simply to watch the story of these two abusive and abused young people. But this is theatre which seldom escapes a didactic edge.

Reid has written a series of dialogues which outline the limited arena of Gunner's and Slitfish's lives. They are given a high-octane delivery by Hamish Michael and Lauren Urquhart in two very interesting performances. Both are in clownish white-face make-up and lit only by white light in a black box theatre, and their physicality is jerky and artificial, as if they are marionettes or anarchic dolls. It's a risky strategy: these alienations only work sometimes, most effectively in the final scene, when the artifice of the direction and performance pays off in a true heightening of feeling. There is little attention to nuance in Lauren Taylor's direction, and although I admired the full-on, relentless assault of the energies of the performers and the play, the shock of dialogue delivered in a monotonal shout is one of diminishing returns. The effect is more often numbing than awakening.

The major problems with the production seemed to me to be in the writing itself. Sweet Staccato Rising aims for a tragic arc which drives towards a cathartic climax, but Reid has an uncertain grasp of the dramatic mechanics which make this possible, and the energies of the play are consequently largely dissipated in meandering dialogues. Despite a surface appearance of action, very little in fact happens until the final scene, where at last a real conflict occurs between the characters and the dialogue becomes forceful and dynamic and, dare I say it, moving.

The challenge in work like this is to create a mimesis of pointless and meandering lives without making the work itself meandering and pointless: it's a hard ask, and Reid only partially succeeds. I admire the ambition, which is the first ingredient of achievement, but I suspect this work is not ambitious enough. If it were, it might reach past its own naivetie, a nagging sense of narcissism which ultimately compromises its politics.

The Store Room

Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare, directed by David Freeman, designed by Dan Potra, lighting by Nigel Levings. Bell Shakespeare Company at the Arts Centre Playhouse to 21 August, Canberra Theatre Centre 25 August to 11 September, Illawarra Performing Arts Centre Wollongong 15 to 18 September, Sydney Opera House 23 September to 6 November, Orange Civic Theatre 10 to 13 November.

Twelfth Night is a confection supposedly written for Queen Elizabeth I and performed on Twelfth Night, the last day of Yule, which was traditionally celebrated with plays and mumming. Shakespeare whipped up a syllabub of gender-bending, drunken foolery and loutish mockery, punctuated by some exquisite speeches and haunting songs. It's a charming froth to sweeten the end of the midwinter season, and while it doesn't make a lot of sense, it does make a lot of theatre.

David Freeman, directing his first Australian production since he left these shores for Europe more than 30 years ago, is not shy of its sheer theatricality. Instead of forcing a leaden metaphor onto the hapless play, "updating" it by making it "relevant", Freeman permits Twelfth Night to play in a purely theatrical space which exists only in the imaginations of the actors and the audience. Any pandering to the literal is off the menu, and the comedy, released into the absurd, takes wings. And it's gloriously, bracingly vulgar: my inner groundling was tickled into irresponsible happiness. If there had been orange pips to spit my pleasure, I would have spat them.

However, Twelfth Night is not just a play of bawdy jokes and pratfalls: like all Shakespeare's comedies, it has its own brand of enchantment. The famous opening lines in which Orsino declares his love for Olivia, surely some of the loveliest in Shakespeare's lexicon, set the tone:

If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more:
'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.

Signalling his intentions early, Freeman changes Shakespeare's beginning. Instead, focusing on the twins Viola and Sebastian, Freeman swaps the first and second scenes, and opens with Viola (Caroline Craig) washed up on the shores of Illyria and vowing to dress as a man and serve the man she loves, Orsino (Julian Garner), in order to win his heart. This permits a spectacular curtain raiser, with a storm and real rain - and it also makes a neat rhyme with the fool's closing song ("the rain it raineth every day"), when the rain machine is again called into action. Orsino's famous speech comes second, and is undercut by a joke - Orsino is hooked up to an i-pod. It gets a good laugh, but I still missed the poetry.

There's no doubting the success of the comedy. This is character clowning as good as it gets; Sir Toby Belch (John Batchelor, in a suit that gives the irresistable impression that it must have grease on the collar), his brainless sidekick, Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Philip Dodd, replendent in black leather jacket and stove-pipe jeans) and Jonathan Hardy's Feste (in various states of tank-top-and-shorts undress) are the avatars of low humour, ably helped in ridiculousness by Billie Browne as Malvolio. The highlight of the night is the scene where Malvolio reads the forged letter which purportedly exposes Olivia's love for him, overheard by three conspirators unconvincingly posing as bushes. Here Freeman takes the unreality of the theatrical aside and pushes it to an extreme of absurdity, with Malvolio lounging against the very foliage that eavesdrops on him.

I couldn't help wondering whether the hilarity really had to be at the expense of the play's poetry: enchantment is as germane to this play as is laughter, and one of Shakespeare's masteries is that he saw neither quality as cancelling out the other. And it seems to me that there is a prurience in denying beauty as much as in the editing out of obscenity. Outrageous bum-flashing is, after all, always going to appeal to the hoi polloi, including me: and the introduction of a gratuitously Strine song after the interval, to underline the Australian-ness of this production, our necessity to recognise "ourselves" in it, made me suspect that the obscenity was pandering to the audience, rather than disrupting its expectations into delight. It's a fine line, after all.

For this is a Twelfth Night in which the poetry is strictly sidelined. I ought to explain that by "poetry" I do not mean a reverential rendering of the Bard's language: far from it. It is merely to remember that Twelfth Night is a romance as much as it is a farce, and that part of its power is in how, however lightly, it touches the heart. The despair of exile and alienation, the erotic obsessions of romantic love, the grief of loss, are all made minor themes, occasions only for the joke of the play. And consequently, the play's meanings are muddied: the romantic scenes have an air of confusion, unlike the comedy, in which every action is absolutely clear. For all the production's strengths as popular theatre, and even Caroline Craig's appeal as a lively and charming Viola, this is a considerable diminishment of the play's enchantment.

The way into this enchantment is, as Orsino's opening speech indicates, through music. Much has been made of James Reyne, of Australian Crawl fame, composing the songs for this production, and so it is a little disappointing to report that the music mostly amounts to fairly indifferent balladeering. Freeman has gone for a cracked instrument, malodorous rather than melodious, which is an idea not without potential. But in practise the songs are, like the loveliness and feeling of the poetry, again undercut. It's not until the finale, sung off-key by Jonathan Hardy, that this decision pays off: its plain rendering exposes the bones of the poetry, its sour-sweet melancholy filling the theatre with a true poignancy.

The costumes are eclectically contemporary, and Dan Potra's design is an intriguing and practical cross between a farce and the traditional Shakepearean stage. To reinforce the artifice of the action, the stage is dominated by a huge picture frame, which is itself a stage within the stage, with doors right and left that can be forced open and slammed shut with proper comic effect. I've seen more elegant designs by Potra, but this serves the production most efficiently. For all my reservations, it's by far the best Bell Shakespeare production I've seen, and delivers Shakespeare defiantly and greedily alive.

Bell Shakespeare

Caresses, by Sergi Belbel. Directed by Scott Gooding, with Simon Kearney, Danica Balara, Merrin Canning, Dawn Klingberg, Barry Friedlander, Tim Kelly, Kirk Westwood, Chloe Armstrong, Gareth Ellis and Penelope Bartlau. Vicious Fish Theatre, at Theatreworks. Until August 22.

Caresses marks my first acquaintance with the work of the Catalan playwright Sergi Belbel, for which I dips me lid to Vicious Fish. I am certainly richer for the introduction. This is tough, muscular writing, at once lyrical and obscene, humane and cruel, hilarious and tragic. Caresses represents the first part of an on-going commitment by Vicious Fish Theatre to Belbel's works, and I am looking forward to the next three productions of the Belbel Project with lively interest.

Sergi Belbel is part of a generation of playwrights which emerged in the 1990s. The international success of Catalan companies such as Els Comediants and others created a field where new writing could flourish, and this led to the development of a new generation of Spanish theatre writers, including Sanches Sinisterra, Angel Guimera, Benet i Jornet and Rodolf Sirera. Belbel is one of the most popular of these playwrights - Caresses has been performed all around the world and it was also adapted into a film by the Barcelona director Ventura Pons by 1998.

Its structure is taken from Arthur Schnitzler's 1896 play La Ronde, which scandalised fin de siecle audiences by tracking a series of sexual encounters through ten dialogues, in which one character from each scene moves into the next. It completes the circle of the title by coming back to the beginning, with the final scene including a character from the opening dialogue. It is an elegantly satisfying form, a dramatic equivalent of terza rima, which democratically gives each character two scenes each. It also has the virtue, like all interesting aesthetic decisions, of being a metaphor in itself.

Belbel's play has one more scene than Schnitzler's, and what binds the action here is not just sexual desire, but a complex dynamic of emotional dysfunction that often erupts into a blackly funny comedy of human absurdity. About five minutes into the play, I realised that the title of the piece is ironic. It opens with a dialogue which is apparently a conventional exposition of domestic violence, but this quickly mutates into a black satire on heterosexual domesticity. In the next scene, the woman from the first encounter is visiting her mother, who reads her an extravagantly poetic peroration on the night before the dialogue segues into a bitter conversation about their relationship, and the mother's decision to move into a home for the elderly. The following dialogue is set in the old people's home, and is between the mother and an old woman who was formerly her lover; but the old woman no longer remembers her. And so it swings from scene to scene, the disconnections as disconcerting as the connections.

Every scene enacts some moment of emotional extremity in which the characters are confronted by their inability to articulate their desires and react instead with violence and cruelty, the lees of love. Each dialogue is an attempt at love: between lovers, parents and children, siblings, or even the vagrant and fleeting love that is possible between strangers. But by the end of the play, I no longer thought the title ironic: the blows the characters inflict on each other are caresses, the stricken means by which they express their love, rather than love's lack. And the poignant final scene is tranformative and hopeful in a way which belies the apparent darkness of the play's vision.

This suggests a work of considerable complexity that operates at a number of emotional and metaphorical registers. Director Scott Gooding brings it to the stage with creditable style, although his cast doesn't always meet the mutiple resonances of the text, sometimes overstraining for effect, at others perhaps a little mono-dimensional. To fully explore the subtleties of this dialogue would require a longer rehearsal period than most Australian companies are funded for. Even so, there was no point where the energy flagged or I found my attention wandering: the inventiveness of the situations and the writing's theatricality are compelling, and there are standout performances by Barry Friedlander, Dawn Klingberg and Chloe Armstrong.

Kathryn Sproul's design fills the Theatreworks space with secondhand furniture: mattresses are stacked up against the walls, and the stage is full of old beds and bedsteads, tables, chairs, sideboards, wardrobes and battered suitcases. On walking into the theatre, it was impossible not to flash back to the earliest productions of the Keene/Taylor Theatre Project, mounted in 1997 at the Brotherhood of St Laurence's Fitzroy warehouse. The furniture donated there for those in need had a brief life as sets for a series of short plays by Daniel Keene, which were themselves concerned with the marginalised and emotionally dispossessed.

The KTTP connection is reinforced by Alison Halit's choreography. In the same way that Ariette Taylor used extras in many KTTP shows, Halit employs the actors not immediately involved in scenes to inhabit the space and amplify the action, creating the movement of a city around these isolated dialogues. To drive the connection further, Belbel's work is very reminiscent of Keene's. From this play at least, it seems that Belbel is stylistically less spare than Keene, more given to sonorities of repetition; but they share an ability to generate cruel humour while retaining a compassionate vision, and an unsentimental preoccupation with an urban geography of despair and alienation. Their connections betray a common lineage of European theatrical writing, of which Schnitzler is only the most obvious.

Gooding uses an English translation by John London, and I was slightly puzzled why he didn't change the specifically English references to more local ones; it would have been the work of a moment to convert pounds and pence to dollars and cents, and no middle class Australian woman refers to "Mummy" and "Daddy". It's a small quibble, but the poetic tightness of the writing does focus detail, and these slight hiccups in the lexicon seemed unncecessary.

Melbourne audiences can see Belbel's work thanks to Theatreworks' new policy of supporting innovative independent companies. So far, so very good: last month it hosted The Old Van's extraordinary production of Macbeth, and this play is a worthy successor. It reinforces my growing conviction that Melbourne's independent theatre scene is where it's all happening.

Theatreworks

Toby by Abe Pogos, directed by Catherine Hill, designed by Peter Mumford, lighting by Richard Vabre,with Tim Stitz, Adam Cass, Janine Watson, Christopher Brown, Benjamin Fuller and Tess Butler. La Mama at the Courthouse Theatre, Carlton, until July 31.

The stage is empty, apart from a huge wooden desk on which sits a giant typewriter. Seated at the desk, the CRITIC is industriously at work, staring vacantly into space and drumming his fingers.

CRITIC: Tum te dum. Tum te dum.

The CRITIC picks up a book from the desk and prowls restlessly, muttering. Reads the back of the book and is illuminated. Leaps back to the desk and types, copying from the book.

CRITIC: A fable. "A timely and darkly comic fable, Toby explores racism, genocide and the politics of power." Oh yes. That's good, that's very good. But then...what about... the set? The set! The set, the acting, the directing....all these require attention...and they have written nothing here about the set!

The CRITIC throws the book down on the desk. He is disconsolate.



CRITIC: Why is it so hard to write? For example - if I was writing about - Joseph Roth - the words would fly off the tips of my fingers like - like bushflies in summer. But instead, I feel like I'm swimming through molasses. It's not a terrible play. If it was terrible, I would feel inspired, I would be inhabited by a daemonic wit. And yet, it's no work of genius, either, so all my sensitivities, my - aesthetic antennae - are to no avail. They twitch sadly, lost and discombobulated...

Sighs.

How to say - anything at all... It's the playwright's fault.

The PLAYWRIGHT enters.

PLAYWRIGHT: Did you say it was my fault?

CRITIC: Yes, it's your bloody fault. The first page or so, I thought to myself, hey, something is happening here. There's Toby, the village idiot, and your other character -

PLAYWRIGHT: Christie -

CRITIC: Christie, that's right. Having an argument. The idiot and the ambitious friend who is betraying him. But then, what happens?

PLAYWRIGHT: What?

CRITIC: Suddenly it's not about these people arguing, instead they're talking about the Law. Suddenly a whole lot of imponderables and abstracts enter the conversation. Suddenly the life goes out of it.

PLAYWRIGHT: But the directing is good.

CRITIC: Yes, the directing is good. Very quick, very fluid, so the audience doesn't get bored - all that getting people on and off stage is done very well - although sometimes the performances are a little - a little -

PLAYWRIGHT: Stilted?

CRITIC: Something like that. But I think that's your fault too.

PLAYWRIGHT: Is everything my fault?

CRITIC: Usually. Usually. You see, if you're dealing in imponderables and abstractions, if the characters are telling us all the time what they're thinking instead of, well, just thinking it - or even not just thinking it, but being it, at a level below consciousness - then it all becomes a bit too self conscious. And seeing as it's set (The CRITIC checks the back of the book) in a nineteenth century European village - don't you think it could have been a little more - specific? More like a nineteenth century European village?

PLAYWRIGHT: It's a play, not a documentary. Aren't you being pedantic?

CRITIC: It didn't seem like a nineteenth century European village at all. Maybe that wouldn't have mattered, if I had believed the characters. But there were only a couple of times when I did.

The PLAYWRIGHT is suddenly burdened by the sadness and existential weight of life. There is a pause.

CRITIC: And yet - when I walked into the theatre, I thought, oh, what a beautiful set - just autumn leaves strewn over the stage, and a couple of branches, and it was a real wood - and I walked over the leaves to my seat, smelling the autumn, feeling the papery stuff beneath my feet - and that beautiful auburn light -

The CRITIC starts typing, inspired.

PLAYWRIGHT: I wanted to show how easy it is for people to become - other. For people to be made afraid of anyone different, and then to become cruel and murderous.

CRITIC: The Blood Libel.

PLAYWRIGHT: Yes, all that.

CRITIC: It's worthy. I don't deny that. I can see why you've attached the Blood Libel to Gypsies rather than Jews: it's been used against all sorts of minorities for millennia, including Roma, so it focuses on the mechanism rather than the issue of, say, anti-Semitism. And there are some terrific bits.

PLAYWRIGHT: I'll write the review for you, if you like.

CRITIC: There are a couple of really interesting performances. That Tim Stitz, who plays the idiot, he's something, isn't he? So unafraid, so full of young energy - But I just don't understand why that girl Joan - played by Tess Butler - had to be so Pollyanna. She seemed the most symbolic of the characters, she might as well have had "WOMAN" tattooed on her forehead, how the men all owned her, how obedient she was, how her sexuality was her only means of power. I didn't believe her for a second. What can a performer do with that? It all ends up being like the shape of things, rather than the things themselves. A little dull, maybe. Like this, to be honest, like this conversation, which is all rather -

PLAYWRIGHT: But some terrific bits.

CRITIC; Oh, yes, but where's the whole thing? I reckon you should have cut most of the scenes in half. (CRITIC holds up a piece of paper and dramatically tears it in two.) Like that! But tell me. I just didn't get the Silver Alien.

PLAYWRIGHT: That's what everyone says.

CRITIC: I thought the pods that hung around the play were some kind of fungus. I mean some kind of real fungus, not an alien creature. So when the Silver Alien first appeared, I just didn't connect it with the pods at all. And how did that fit with the nineteenth century European village thing? But anyway, there was this Silver Alien... So then I thought, well, the pods are supposed to be ugly, disgusting, the lowest forms of life, and when people try to kill them they are blinded by some poison that squirts out of them, and then the Silver Alien - who is a kind of pod or something - promises some kind of transcendent, pure moral life - and - I guess, it's about some kind of polarising perception, how an idea of absolute Good creates an idea of absolute Evil... But the more I thought about it, the less it made any sense. The metaphor seemed awfully confused to me. I thought maybe it was something about the lowest being the highest, about the meek inheriting God's kingdom, all of that. But then, I also wondered if it was a hallucination...

PLAYWRIGHT exits.

CRITIC: I thought and thought. Racism isn't about hallucinations and madness. Most racists aren't mad, even if their realities are strangely skewed. It's about a certain kind of emotional logic. I can see how you're trying to illuminate these issues - but aren't you meaning it all a little - earnestly? And doesn't the Silver Alien, and the nineteenth century European village which is not like a village at all - isn't this somehow a way of avoiding the very banality of evil? When neighbours start killing each other, isn't it somehow a lot simpler and a lot stupider and a lot more complicated and a lot more brutal than that?

And then, I remembered Woycek. Some of the scenes in Toby are very reminiscent of Woycek. But in Georg Buchner's play, there's no recourse to complicated plotting or any structural machinery which points towards a meaning. Buchner relies instead on an incandescent emotional realism which welds together the impressionistic nature of the play's structure and argument. It's why Buchner is still so modern, three centuries later. He didn't worry about other kinds of logic, about connective tissue - he took the essential parts of a situation and exposed them with an unflinching rawness, and it is left to the witnesses to draw their own conclusions. Even despite its intentions, perhaps, Toby still feels as if it is reaching for a moral, the instructive couplet which neatly ties up the fable; but the kinds of issues the playwright wishes to address - genocide, racism - just won't fold up into a moral...

Mumbling, the CRITIC starts typing again, then stops, defeated, and stares into space.

FINIS

Picture: Tim Stitz as Toby

La Mama Theatre

Macbeth by William Shakespeare, directed by Fiona Blair, with Richard Bligh, Stewart Morritt, Julia Zemiro, Mark Hennessy, Grant Mouldey, Georgina Naidu and Jeannie Van De Veld. The Old Van, at Theatreworks, until August 1

In Macbeth, it is always night: an endless darkness which brings no sleep, a waking dream from which there is no escape. As the critic Jan Kott says, this is history as nightmare: not a grand cyclical mechanism by which power replicates itself, but rather the infection of a murderous insanity.

From the moment Macbeth is hailed as King of Scotland by the witches on the heath, he is doomed. Already, as he toys with murder and betrayal, his existence begins to enter the penumbra of madness. "Nothing is," says Macbeth, "but what is not". And so matter itself changes: darkness becomes corporeal, and what appears solid dissolves into thin air. In such a world, as obsessive as any Shakespeare created, the dead might walk again, the earth bubble with witches, the ground itself bleed crimes.

This is the night as an active, malign force, a "darkness visible", and it is the substance of The Old Van's magnificent production of Macbeth, now on at Theatreworks. The Old Van, based in Daylesford, comes to Melbourne under Theatreworks' new programming policy of sponsoring independent productions. This Macbeth, which premiered four years ago, toured regional Victoria last year, and so comes to this season with an unusual depth of performance behind it.

Director Fiona Blair begins the action outside the theatre, around a brazier which represents a man's burning armour and introduces an idea of human sacrifice. In the cold July drizzle, it wasn't hard to make the imaginative transition to the fog of a Scottish heath: and the ritualistic chanting of the witches accompanied the audience, now accomplices to a dark enactment, into the theatre proper.

The theatre is stripped bare, opening a cavernously empty space. Although visually impressive, this does have a downside; the bare walls bounce the sound around and muffle some of the dialogue. The set, if it can be called that, is basically Rob Irwin's ingenious and dramatic lighting design: the action moves through a dynamic sculpture of darkness and light, constantly various and surprising within its austere pallet, in which human figures appear and vanish like tormented ghosts. This visual richness is enhanced by a soundscape created by the actors: the cast is present on stage for the whole performance, and those who are not active in the scenes create sonic texture by singing, whispering, wailing, or creating a percussive score with their hands or with sticks.

The set and sound act as a burning glass, heightening the emotional power of the performances. Apart from Lady Macbeth, who is identified by a long skirt and a crimson sash, every performer is dressed identically in a black buttoned coat and trousers, conferring a sexless anonymity which permits some ingenious doubling among the cast of six. The doubling is used in part to highlight the idea that we are entering Macbeth's private nightmare: so the same actor who plays Duncan (Grant Mouldey) also plays Macduff, underlining the continuity of Macbeth's crimes and also his karmic fate: for it is Macduff who in turn kills Macbeth and exacts his revenge.

The costuming permits the actors to literally vanish into the dark spaces of the theatre, to move backstage as shadows or echoes of the foreground action, or to appear out of nowhere simply by turning around. The performance is all in their faces and hands, which are lit with spectral pallor. I was surprised, all the same, when they took their bows, to see how few they were - not counting sundry spear carriers and bottlewashers, there are forty three parts in Macbeth, and six actors play all of them.

The take on gender is particularly interesting in this production. One of the witches is male and many of the minor male characters are played by women. This permits a particularly Shakespearean fluidity of gender and identity, and highlights the play's concern with masculinity, most clearly written in the scenes between Macbeth and his wife, but recurring obsessively throughout the play.

It is clear that the mockery with which Lady Macbeth drives Macbeth to murder Duncan emerges from an unspoken failure in their marriage, and that Macbeth is driven by his fear that he is not quite a man. For all Macbeth's concern to protect his bloodline, he and Lady Macbeth have no children, and this childlessness sounds through the play again and again: in his jealousy and eventual murder of Banquo, who will, unlike Macbeth, father kings; and in the heartbreaking scene when Macduff is told of the murder of his family. "He has no children", says Macduff, in a particularly barbed line. And when Ross tells him to "dispute it like a man" and put aside his grief, Macduff posits a different view of masculinity, which does not eschew love: in order to act, he must first "feel (his love) like a man". Macduff knows he is a man, while Macbeth deeply fears that he is not; and the implication is that Macbeth's bloody tyranny stems from this fear.

But mainly this production is an evocation of insanity, driven by the tragic passion between Macbeth (Richard Bligh) and Lady Macbeth (Julia Zemiro). Early on, there are flashes of psychosis in Julia Zemiro's performance, but it is always controlled by a steely will. Macbeth's resolution to murder Duncan is the only occasion in the play when the two touch: after the murder, which Lady Macbeth demands as proof of Macbeth's love for her ("When you durst do it, then you were a man"), they are irrevocably divided. In a particularly poignant gesture, Macbeth reaches out to cup his wife's belly; but his hand is arrested six inches away, as if it strikes an invisible barrier. A void has opened between them, and all that is left of their erotic obsession is its sterility.

Richard Bligh's Macbeth travels through madness to total nihilism, unable to feel fear, or even grief for his dead wife. "I gin to be aweary of the sun," he says: his life and his death are now equally absurd and meaningless, and all that remains is the relentless playing out of the logic of murder. This total alienation makes Lady Macbeth's madness especially heart-wrenching, and Julia Zemiro's performance of this famous scene is both potent and poignant, escaping cliche through the sheer force of its emotional truthfulness.

This is true of all the powerful moments of the play; the performances are beautifully nuanced, working with admirable restraint until the crucial scenes, when suddenly there are no boundaries. In terms of invoking pity and terror, this production has scenes as powerful as any I have seen: the murder of Banquo is genuinely frightening, Macduff's grief and guilt devastating. Richard Bligh, Stewart Morritt and Grant Mouldey have peak moments, and I'm sure I was not the only audience member in tears. But it feels unfair to single out particular actors from this tight ensemble; those who played a dozen characters each are equally as responsible for the power of the whole.

In its conception and execution, this production is a brilliant vindication of poetic imagination in theatre: using the simplest of resources, The Old Van creates a complex and potent metaphor of the world. And it's a rare example of the idea of theatre as a holy space, in which all present participate in a cathartic enactment of ritual. It also struck me as particularly Australian, although this may sound like a peculiar observation: its approach to the text was utterly serious and committed, but without a trace of reverence, and nobody felt any need to be anything but unselfconsciously Australian in speaking Shakespeare's blank verse (unless they were English, like Morritt). And guess what? It works: Shakespeare's language comes fully alive with a touch of the vernacular. Underneath this production's boldness and ingenuity, there is a self-belief in the emotional arc of the play which can only emerge from a true naivety, a freshness that takes these old ideas and makes something utterly new.

Theatreworks

Minefields and Miniskirts, adapted by Terence O'Connell from Siobhan McHugh's book, directed by Terence O'Connell, with Robyn Arthur, Tracy Bartram, Debra Byrne, Tracy Mann and Wendy Stapleton. Playbox Theatre, until July 31.

I'm sure I'm not the only person who started reading about the Vietnam War again earlier this year, when the word "quagmire" was redefined as a no-go zone and the comparisons with Iraq started getting insistent. The US military were again talking of "winning hearts and minds" while Marines razed foreign villages and got blown up on foreign highways. General Kimmitt was holding his Five O'Clock Follies, and the indie journo was back, as hip as ever, telling the real stories: the art galleries in downtown Baghdad, the graveyards in Falluja, the deadly taxi rides to Baghdad Airport.



The first book I picked up was Michael Herr's Despatches, the classic account of his time as correspondent for Esquire during some of the worst years of the Vietnam War. It's a hallucinatory book which has fundamentally shaped the perceptions of the Vietnam War for later generations. His soundtrack is the suicidal guitar of Hendrix, and through his pages stumble the brutal, innocent GIs, out of their heads on fear and marijuana and speed: boys from the mid-West who had never left America before, poor kids from industrial cities, thrust into the adrenalin chaos of war. Then, as now, losing their friends, their legs, their minds, their lives.

No one has described the Vietnam combat like Herr, with a vividness that's as close as you will get to understanding without having been there: for there is a barrier between imagination and experience no words can bridge, no matter how vivid or how passionate they are, no matter how true. Herr put down on paper the unspeakable seduction of homicidal psychosis, later swollen to screen size in Brando's portrayal of Captain Kurtz in Apocalyse Now. He spoke, as Wilfred Owen did in an earlier age, of terror and pity: most of all, of pity. Though in an interview years later, he said he had no pity for the vets who beat up their wives, who sat in bars with dark glasses on, haunted by the awful things they had done. They deserved to be haunted, he said. I found myself admiring his moral pitilessness: it bespoke, I thought, a truer compassion.

This is, however intelligent, however aware, however passionately anti-war, the stuff of Boy's Own journals. War stories are traditionally the business of men: so Siobhan McHugh's book, a collection of interviews with more than fifty Australian women whose lives were touched by the Vietnam war, opens up a hitherto shadowy area of experience. This book has been adapted by Terence O'Connell into a play and, strangely, the territory covered by the play is only subtly different from Herr's. Maybe it's because atrocity doesn't distinguish between the sexes: men and women are alike capable of compassion, perception, cowardice, toughness, grief, appalling brutality and astounding love.

Here are the same soldier's wallets with the souvenir atrocity photos, the same heart-wrenching portrayals of civilian suffering, the same cruel interrogations, the same descriptions of Saigon prostitutes (but not the thuggish American contractors who bought them), the same choppers and ceiling fans, the same agonising, pointless deaths. I guess these things are now so familiar they amount to cliches. There are some gendered twists: the description of the birth of a baby, or the war correspondent condemned to the Women's Pages in civilian life, or the story of the veteran's wife, brutalised by her traumatised husband.

What you do get in this play, unlike most US portrayals, is a sense of the Vietnamese experience of the war, even though there is still a feeling that the Vietnamese were extras in this most Western of dramas. I had to wait until I read Bao Ninh's The Sorrow of War until I truly understood that the Vietnam War was, first of all, a Vietnamese tragedy.

Although the source material is rich, as theatre it remains half-baked. For the purposes of the play, Terence O'Connell has adapted and conflated these fifty interviews into five representative characters: the Correspondent, the Entertainer, the Nurse, the Volunteer and the Vet's Abused Wife. He has then sliced and spliced to make five interleaving monologues punctuated by archetypal songs from the 60s and 70s - Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Joan Baez.

When I opened the play and saw page after page of dense prose, I felt apprehensive: I couldn't see how O'Connell's adaptation had grappled with the idea of what a theatrical utterance might be, what it means to say words on stage. This play relies heavily on the intrinsic interest of its source material, some snappy choreography and the charisma of its performers, but none of these are enough to make it theatre. It's not primarily a question of the play's structure, although that counts. The problem goes deeper, into what you might call the DNA of theatrical language.

The director Peter Brook put the problem of theatrical writing in his book The Empty Stage: "If one starts from the premise that a stage is a stage - not a convenient premise for the unfolding of a staged novel or a staged poem or staged lecture or a staged story - then the word that is spoken on this stage exists, or fails to exist, only in relation to the tensions it creates on that stage within the given stage circumstances. ...The choices (the dramatist) makes and the values he observes are only powerful in proportion to what they create in the language of theatre."

Which is to say that writing for theatre is an extremely specific art, in which, as David Mamet says, language is not about action: it is action. O'Connell's adaptation stays in the realm of the "staged story": little imagination has been devoted to making this material theatrical, except in the most superficial sense of that word. O'Connell, who also directs the show, says his major concern was to "give (the material) a beginning, a middle and an end", and this, in the most earnest traditions of deadly narration, is precisely what he does.

The signals are given early: there's a projection on a scrim as the audience enters which tells us exactly what we are about to see. After the first song, during which the characters are serially introduced, each telling the first instalment of their story, the rhythm is set: the women will speak their monologues, and sing, and speak their monologues, and sing; and you know they will do so until they reach the "present", which for the purposes of the play is an ANZAC Day march.

What saves the evening from tedium is the performances. Minefields and Miniskirts has a celebrity cast, and these women belt out some great songs. Perhaps it is worth it to hear these amazing singers tackle Carole King's Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow, which is a genuine show-stopper. But in all the performances there is a tendency to over-act, perhaps from a subconscious recognition of the inherent non-theatricality of the text; a dragging out of tears which has the perverse effect of draining the stories of their power.

The show's other saving grace is its visual spectacle. Catherine Raven's design, stunningly lit by Phil Lethlean, uses the simplicity of bamboo blinds to create a flexible and evocative theatrical space, swathed in the gorgeous colours of Thai silks. The set has some breathtaking moments of its own - when the blinds are drawn back and silhoheutted to reveal a backdrop of blue sky, for example, or a moment where it goes dark and "stars" come out all over the theatre. It reminded me of one of the most beautiful sets I've ever seen, for Steve Berkoff's Salome, which was also backgrounded by a luminous sky.

It is impossible not to wonder what might have been, if these resources had been applied to an inspired (or even slightly more imaginative) script: in the hands, for example, of a David Hare, whose Fanshen is surely the exemplary documentary play. O'Connell applies biopic conventions of music theatre to a "serious" topic, with mixed results, and the writing is bogged down by a ploddingly literal approach.

Sadly, the unsolved aesthetic dilemmas presented by the material muffle its political impact: for there is no doubt that these experiences have particular resonances today, when Australian soldiers are again at war in a far country. These stories simply should not be boring. It seems that O'Connell can't decide whether Minefields and Miniskirts is feel-good commercial theatre or worthy documentary, and so falls between two stools. Using the commercial musical as a vehicle does raise the question of whether the experiences described in the play can really be approached as sheer entertainment. In the end, it escapes trivialising them, I think; but only just. All the same, you are probably better off reading the original book.

Picture: Lisa Tomasetti

Playbox Theatre

Theatre Notes has been going for six weeks! My, how time flies when one is having fun! And I think it's probably a good time to pause and consider what, if anything, the blog has achieved since early June, when I had a rush of blood to my head and began this quixotic enterprise.

I've remembered what I think a theatre critic can be: a privileged representative of the audience; a witness; a chronicler; a locus of theatrical memory; an informed and responsive subjectivity. And I've been revisiting a few favourite texts, among them Peter Brook's The Empty Space, surely one of the most inspiring books ever written about theatre. I'd forgotten that Brook speaks about criticism, and in terms very close to those in which I think of my aspirations and responsibilities as a critic.

The critic's angriest reaction, says Brook, is perhaps the most vital, because it is a "call for competence", when incompetence is "the vice, the condition and the tragedy of the world's theatre at any level". But he also says the critic is a pathmaker, one who collaborates with theatre makers in the desire for "a less deadly, but as yet undefined, theatre". "The vital critic," says Brook, "is the critic who has clearly formulated for himself what the theatre could be - and who is bold enough to throw this formula into jeopardy each time he participates in a theatrical event." Yes, that is precisely the kind of critic I would like to be. I see no reason why I should be any less at risk than anyone else in the theatrical equation.

But that doesn't mean that people necessarily like me for it. I am also remembering that slight social embarrassment, the natural resentment of those who wonder what gives me the right to comment on their work. It's a delicate business, my friends. There is perhaps something rather deformed about a compulsive desire to critique, something distasteful, like a vaguely unhygienic skin disease. Unlike everyone else, the critic says what she thinks in public; and although she has every right to do so, and even if she is as just as Solomon, who doesn't feel a slight frisson at her temerity? Conversely, I've had some astoundingly positive feedback, which confirms my suspicion that there is a real hunger for serious discussion of theatre, and a broad consciousness that the terms in which theatre is generally discussed are restricted and restricting.

So far, I think my six month experiment is justifying itself, and it's certainly enjoyable. My site minder tells me that in terms of readership, Theatre Notes has been modestly successful. Through June it had an average of 240 visits a week, climbing to an average of 336 in July. Bafflingly, most of my readers - 45 per cent - come from the UK, with the next highest figure - 17 per cent - from the east coast of Australia, mainly Melbourne. The rest are scattered fairly evenly through the rest of the world, with a couple of larger bumps in Western Australia and North America.

My reviews are also appearing in the State of the Arts ezine and are included in its email newsletter, which is sent out to 10,000 recipients every week. It's one of those mutually beneficial relationships, like those you see on natural history programs, and it means that the reviews are getting out to many more people than those who visit the blog. So many thanks to Chloe Flynn.

It's not a million hitter, but all in all it's not too bad, considering that Theatre Notes has come from a standing start. My first ambition is to pick up the local content. I figure, from various observations over the years, that there are probably about 5000 serious theatre goers in Melbourne; that is, those who are ready to follow new ideas in contemporary theatre, and whose interests might be provoked by the kind of ideas I'm pursuing here. I have had some postcards printed and am dropping them around Melbourne, to alert anyone who might be interested but might not otherwise hear of Theatre Notes (when I mention the blog to theatre people here, I most often get a stunned silence - cyberculture and the theatre world seem to have few intersections). So if you're reading this and think it's worthwhile, tell all your friends. And if you have any suggestions on how to spread the word, let me know.

I'm grateful to the theatre companies in Melbourne who have all politely, even if sometimes puzzledly, provided me with tickets. I like to think that I'm offering something positive in return, but of course I remember from the past that the recipients of my eager altruism haven't always been grateful for it. My one big disappointment is that almost no one has picked up on the interactive possibilities of the blog - that is, the ability to comment on my comments. If people have something to say to me, they email me privately. I can't believe that everyone who reads this blog agrees with everything I say, and I am always interested in conversation. And it's good to be diagreed with, it sharpens my own questioning of what I do. Are people just shy? Am I flogging a dead horse? Or is it true that in Melbourne, nobody hears you scream...?

Bedtime for Bastards, three plays by Van Badham. Directed by Dan Walls and Paul Shea, with Liv Hogan, Brett Whittingham, Paul Shea, Catherine Kohlen, Ron Kofler and Dan Walls. Upstairs at the Terminus Hotel, 605 Victoria St, Abbotsford. Until July 17.

The Terminus Hotel is a classic, sticky-carpet Melbourne pub, complete with open fire and space invaders machine, which has somehow escaped the developers. Upstairs, the bar is furnished with a rainbow of sofas in '70s colourings and fabrics: shiny black vinyl to orange to purple plush. I'm waiting for the Sunday matinee, and the light spilling through the windows is the dull silver of winter afternoons the world over, lending a melancholy tenderness to the faded faux-Gauguin reproductions which punctuate the crimson textured wallpaper. This decor calls up memories so old I can't even visualise them, imprints from the youths of my parents. It's far too authentic to be slick. The theatre itself is at the end of a passage: you step through a makeshift curtain, past the tiny stage, into a small, rather likeably proportioned room. The lights go down, there's that hush, the caught breath: and the show begins.

It's a while since I've been to this kind of performance, which is maybe why it strikes me with a particular force. This is the real poor theatre: two planks (or a borrowed lounge suite) and a passion. It happens the world over, in basements or warehouses or pubs or even somebody's loungeroom. Nobody might be there, or the audience might be crammed up to the rafters. No matter: this is theatre's lifeblood, the core of its self-belief. If it ever stopped happening, theatre would be dead.

I've caught the RER to outer suburbs in Paris, eating an unfeasibly huge baguette stuffed with egg and tuna in one of those tatty bistros crammed between concrete highrises, on the way to see some show in a basement. Because it's Paris, it's easy to believe it matters: everyone knows that new, significant work happens first in these out-of-the-way venues, and the show is preceded and followed by long conversations and passionate analysis. It lacks any genteel veneer of glamour: this is the undiluted romance, hard-core and memorable as home-brewed vodka. Without it, theatre is just what it often threatens to be, a mere commodity, a "leisure activity", an entertainment.

Bedtime for Bastards is certainly the real thing. Act-O-Matic 3000, an unfunded independent company of mainly young actors, presents three short plays by Van Badham, a young Australian writer who has been making waves in the UK. Over the past couple of years Badham's work, in productions at the Edinburgh Fringe and the Royal Court, has attracted favourable notice as a feisty theatrical voice speaking a new politics for a new generation.

And it's easy to see why: these plays, each very different from the others, reveal a tough and versatile talent. Badham has a vicious theatrical wit which is perhaps best displayed in the final piece, Capital, in which two PR flacks (Dan Walls and Ron Kofler) are given the job of a lifetime: to "positivise" a video which shows American Marines, high on crack, murdering and raping Afghani children. They have 15 minutes before Colin Powell phones them for their spin, and they use the time to role-play some scenarios of Sadean cruelty.

This is comedy so black you feel guilty for laughing, an unflinchingly angry indictment of a hype-driven, morally bankrupt society. It's intelligent political writing, intelligently directed and performed, which through its pitiless satire escapes the traps of agitprop and earnestness. As the cliche says, truth is the first casualty in war; but this play shows truth in the chair with its hands tied, getting the full Rumsfeldian treatment. From three feet away, the violence is real enough to make you involuntarily flinch. But it's the off-stage violence that stays with you; not only the atrocity of war, but that karmic sense of impending threat the CIA calls "blowback", which is, post 9/11, now an indelible part of the West's subconscious.

The opening play, Morning on a Rainy Day, is less successful. It's a straightfowardly naturalistic portrait of an obsessive and masochistic sexual "friendship". I liked the courage of Liv Hogan and Brett Whittington, who give performances of a disarming candour, but I preferred the heightened styles of the other plays. An Anarchist At Dinner is basically a one-joke play which knows exactly when to stop; I won't say more, for fear of giving away the punchline. It's a deadly accurate satire of the naturalistic conventions of middle-class Australian theatre, and performed with a proper edge of grotesquerie. But Capital is the main event, and tapes Badham as a writer to watch.

There's no credit for a designer, perhaps because there is nothing to design with. There is nothing pretty about Act-O-Matic 3000's production. They have at most maybe half a dozen lights and basic sound, and the props are what the plays require and no more. This theatre aims for a different kind of sophistication, a transparency of emotional affect which relies on nothing except actors and text. It doesn't always get there; but when it does, it's brilliant.

The Act-O-Matic 3000