This is a brief good bye - I'm off on a six week tour of England and Ireland, where I'll be reading poetry to those foolish enough to invite me. If you happen to be in that part of the Northern Hemisphere, you can check out my reading dates here.

After a tedious succession of colds and viruses, I'm more than happy to be missing the bulk of the Melbourne winter. But I'm not so happy to miss out on the first production of King Lear (MTC) I can remember in my home town, or Pamela Rabe at the Malthouse in Woman-Bomb. There's some seriously interesting theatre on while I'm away... But hey, them's the breaks.

Meanwhile, my thanks to the readers of this blog. There are more of you every week, and your comments, public and private, keep me going and make me believe that what I'm doing is worthwhile. And thanks also to the theatre companies for their support. I'll be back at the end of July, refreshed and reinvigorated. See you then!

Boulevard Delirium with Paul Capsis, directed by Barrie Kosky. From Schauspielhaus Wien, @ the Malthouse Theatre, June 1 until June 26.

Now I've been to Boulevard Delirium, I see what all the fuss is about. Paul Capsis is something else. But how do you begin to describe a talent like this?



About half way through the show - and this is a show - I began to wonder if there was anything that Capsis couldn't do with his voice. By the end, I was pretty well convinced that he can sing anything. I might be wrong, but I wouldn't bet money on it. Capsis must be one of the great theatrical voices of this century.

But that incredible voice - so flexible it can gravel up for Janis Joplin, tenderise for Nina Simone, scream, bark or howl in the middle of an impassioned pop aria - is only half of it. Capsis is a performer of rare quality: he's on, full throttle, from the first moment he appears on stage in top hat and tails, his eyelids gleaming with sequins, lasciviously inviting his audience into the gritty, sensual, passionate delirium of his world.

Boulevard Delirium eschews, immediately, the misogyny that sometimes creeps into drag shows. Capsis opens with an obscenely hilarious monologue about lust. ("I'm horny!") What I found interesting was how Capsis' expression of desire for a man was at once that of a man and a woman. He doesn't merely impersonate women; but neither does he wholly become them. He enacts a series of transformations that are all, ultimately, aspects of himself. By the end of the evening, the masks drop to reveal Paul Capsis - whoever he is - singing on stage in a black tank top.

This is a magic which doesn't depend on gowns and diamente; it's a lot more subtle and radical than that. And its multifacedtedness is rather hard to describe, and as much reflected in the musical arrangements as the performance.

It's unsettling, for example, how the bewitchment of this performer can make you believe (as when he is being Judy Garland) that you are watching a beautiful woman; unlike the aesthetic of drag, you completely lose sight of any sense of artifice. But this illusion will be harshly dispelled almost at once, making you totally aware of his masculinity. And in the next moment he is neither, an androgynous trickster and parodist giving us a grotesquely exploding Marlene Dietrich.

I suspect it's a sorcery that is ultimately powered by emotional, rather than sexual, identification. Behind the energy of these songs are implicit stories of tragedy and courage. Beyond all his talent, the secret to Capsis' coruscating presence is his bravery as a performer. He holds nothing back.

His performance of Billie Holiday's Don't Explain was something like channelling. He adopted some classic props, dressing backstage with his back turned to the audience, and slowly coming into the light. In silhoette, the effect was spooky: it might have been Lady there, swaying to the music. And then, if you shut your eyes, you would swear it was Holiday singing. The whole audience seemed to be holding its breath. I thought of Frank O'Hara's great poem, The Day Lady Died:

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

I can find no greater compliment. The same goes for his heartbreaking rendition of Nina Simone's Little Girl Blue ("Sit there, count your little fingers / Unhappy little girl blue") which had the audience pin-drop silent. This is homage in its truest sense: the interpretation of the work of one great artist by another.

Barrie Kosky's direction takes cabaret conventions and gives them a 21st century twist: abrasive, confronting, exhilarating and moving, it does to cabaret what Capsis does to female impersonation. It draws lovingly on conventions from vaudeville and cabaret and marries them with the aesthetic of a rock concert and a contemporary theatrical intelligence: it's theatre dressed as cabaret, rather than cabaret itself.

The stage is straight cabaret: huge red curtains which draw back to reveal a proscenium edged with lights like a dressing table. The band is arranged in a semi-circle around the back, and Capsis moves between the band members and a thrust forestage that juts out into a row of candle-lit tables where some audience members have close-up views. The rest is created by Michael Zerz's inventive lighting design.

The band - Chris Bekker, Tom Fryer, Roman Gottwald, Niko Schauble and Geri Shuller - is hot, hot, hot, and Roman Gottwald's musical direction unfalteringly bold, with astounding arrangements of some classics. The musical references range from contemporary funk to Kate Bush to blues to gospel. You might get 30 seconds perfectly-phrased and performed Sex Pistols in the middle of another song. At no point, as an audience member, can you stop and say, oh, it's that kind of music. It's as live as you can get.

Don't miss this one: you'll regret it if you do.

Malthouse Theatre

Wars of the Roses by Williams Shakespeare, directed by John Bell, designed by Stephen Curtis. With Joe Manning, John Batchelor, Robert Alexander, Christopher Stollery, Greg Stone, Timothy Walter, Matthew Moore, Richard Piper, Peter Lamb, Darren Gilshenan, Georgia Adamson, Julian Garner, David Davies, John Turnbull and Julia Davis. Bell Shakespeare at the Arts Centre Playhouse until June 4.

Shakespeare's early history plays have preoccupied many an ambitious director. The eight plays make an extraordinary epic drama covering five generations of brutal power struggles. The second tetralogy, Henry VI parts I, II and III and Richard III, dramatises the ruinous civil wars between the houses of Lancaster and York that tore England apart before the ascension of the Tudor dynasty to the throne.

John Bell follows luminaries like Peter Hall, Michael Bogdanov and Adrian Noble in tackling the second tetralogy. And like Hall (Wars of the Roses) and Noble (The Plantagenets), he has elected to adapt the four works into a single play. To be more precise, he has worked the Henry VI trilogy into a play, and then appended as an epilogue the shortest version ever of Richard III, whose Machiavellian ascension to power over a pile of corpses takes the length of a song.

This is a self-consciously irreverent Australian adaptation of works which are, to the marrow of their bone, about Englishness. Why, then, should we be interested in them? Shakespeare's analysis of the tragic, inexorable cycle of power suggests one answer. But rather than delving into the harsh morality of Shakespeare's complex political world, Bell sidesteps the question and plumps for cheap populism.

Perhaps the most obvious symptom of this is the Monty Python accents affected by the French, who are presented as a bunch of fops. At any moment you expect them to start hurling dung at the Eengleesh. Worse, it makes it hard to believe that the French are capable of mounting any defence against the English, let alone winning any battles. Worst of all, when Joan of Arc (Georgia Adamson, mercifully free of the foppishness) is captured, Bell makes an allusion to the Abu Ghraib torture scandal by having her brought on in a shopping trolley, her head in a black bag, and pushed around while soldiers take photos of the abuse.

This snatch at contemporary events is gratuitously shallow: are we now supposed to equate France with occupied Iraq? And if so, why are we caricaturing the enemy? Or is the whole issue of torture merely the occasion (as I fear) for a jokey aside? The same kind of metaphorical confusion happens when Jack Cade (Christopher Stollery) quotes a line by George W. Bush ("Watch this drive!") So the most powerful leader in the Western world, the scion of a wealthy oil dynasty, is actually like a rebellious and powerless peasant?

Aside from a scene showing Joan's dealings with demons and witchcraft (absent from this version), Shakespeare is fairly even-handed in his portrayals of the French and the English, with both armies demonising each other. Dehumanising the enemy is one of the time-honoured (or dishonoured) staples of warfare, and Shakespeare clearly demonstrates its mechanisms. By eliciting easy laughs at the expense of the French, Bell neatly fillets out this moral equivalence, and with it a great deal of tragic power.

These merry quips are among aspects of the production that are supposed to appeal to the young. They certainly got laughs from the not-very-young audience, making me reflect on Howard Barker's now disavowed dictum that laughter in the theatre is a kind of death. But mainly I wondered whether obscuring Shakespeare's seriousness and emotional potency wasn't, in fact, cheating young people of a potentially astounding experience.

Certainly the teenagers I took, media sophisticates that they are, were rolling their eyes at the contemporary references ("what's with the Bush thing?") They also knew it didn't make sense. And such panderings dilute any moments of genuine audacity - Darren Gilshenan, for example, singing the famous opening lines to Richard III as a sardonically dark rock song.

Richard Curtis' design sets the play in a sports stadium, with echoes of the Colosseum, and many of the soldierly costumes are versions of athletic body armour. The motley costumes strike a balance between being brashly contemporary and theatrically timeless, and the harsh, flat lighting accentuates the unrelenting brutality of the action. For the most part the battle scenes, staged as aggressive dance or with elements from Asian fight films, are exciting and theatrical.

The most powerful moments revolve around the performances of Richard Piper as Warwick and Greg Stone as the Duke of York. They imbue their roles with a masculinity that wavers between swagger and amoral ruthlessness, complicated by epiphanies of real, tragic feeling: half gangsters, half noblemen. Piper plays Warwick, the Duke of York's chief henchman, as a bluff mercenary, pragmatic and pitiless in pursuit of his goals, but also unwaveringly loyal to York and touchy about his honour.

Stone's performance is remarkable: the scene on the molehill when the captured Duke of York is mocked by Margaret of Anjou, who throws him a handkerchief stained with the blood of his dead son, is one of the few times when the play truly reaches Shakespearean heights. York's railing against Margaret, and the unbearable poignancy of his grief, is a heart rending evocation of the tragedy and bloodiness of war.

They are surrounded by generally strong performances, notably from John Batchelor, Christopher Stollery, Georgia Adamson and Peter Lamb, but at times the characterisations seemed a little one dimensional. The pious, unworldly Henry IV is an ambiguous figure, at once pitiable, morally admirable and contemptibly irresponsible. He is played somewhat wanly by Joe Manning, who mostly succeeds in seeming bewildered. There are more subtleties and strengths to this role than pathos; an inescapable bitterness at his destiny, for example, and the irony that knows the true worth of the crown for which so many others are prepared to murder.

Margaret of Anjou is played by Blazey Best as a manipulative sex bomb, an interpretation that, like her outrageous accent, obscures her warrior ruthlessness. Darren Gilshenan plays Richard of Gloucester, York's hunchbacked son (soon to be Richard III) as a pastiche of Laurence Olivier and Anthony Sher's spidery performances. It works - kind of - but as caricature rather than characterisation.

These interpretations strike me as failures of direction rather than performance, a marred understanding of the plays which often mistakes novelty for originality and crassness for crude vitality. It's a shame, because in its best moments, Wars of the Roses has the lineaments of a tantalisingly excellent production.

Bell Shakespeare

Phobia: text and direction by Douglas Horton, music and sound concept by Gerard Brophy. Design coordination by Jacqui Everett. With Teresa Blake, Boris Conley, Patrick Cronin, David Hewitt, Graeme Leak, Daniel Witton. Chamber Made Opera at Melbourne Town Hall.

wit 1 (wt)
n. 1. The natural ability to perceive and understand; intelligence.
2. a. Keenness and quickness of perception or discernment; ingenuity. Often used in the plural: living by one's wits. b. wits Sound mental faculties; sanity: scared out of my wits.
3. a. The ability to perceive and express in an ingeniously humorous manner the relationship between seemingly incongruous or disparate things. b. One noted for this ability, especially one skilled in repartee. c. A person of exceptional intelligence.

Perhaps the chief pleasure of Phobia is its wit. In all senses of the word.

It's a fond and deft tribute to the genre of film noir: the black and white world of hard boiled detectives, blonde dames, mysterious violent deaths and high heels clicking down shadowy alleys: a Hitchcockian universe in which the key to a mystery, instead of comfortably knitting up the world like Miss Marple, opens up to existential blankness. But here the medium really is the message.

Described as "the sound track to an imagined film", Phobia is set in a chaotic sound studio, in which each of the performers sit behind desks littered with various objects chosen, as becomes clear, for their sonic qualities. The narrative follows the employment of a detective by a man concerned by the erratic behaviour of his wife, whom he fears is having a breakdown. There follows a story of love, suicide, surveillance and mistaken identity, where of course the dame, under various identities, gets it (three times).

The narrative really exists to create a pallet of colours and moods, an occasion for the sound world shaped by Gerard Brophy and given life by the performers. The subcutaneous narrative, the detective story, the post-mortem dissection of film and the dissolution of identity are all familiar staples of post-modernity, but here they are given a fresh twist.

The focus of this opera is on the performances, which bring multi-tasking to a new level: the cast plays a multiplicity of instruments and performative roles with a tightly disciplined precision which gives the impression that they're all inter-dependent parts of a single organism. Part of the reason for this must be the intensely collaborative nature of its creation. Composer Gerard Brophy worked closely with the performers and the director Douglas Horton in creating scored elements and improvisatory frameworks.

As the credits make clear, the conventional roles of composer, director, performer and so on have been blurred, as have the distinctions between music and noise/sound (although some might argue that much 20th century music has done this). And there's a fair bit of play with gender and identity as well, as none of the dramatic roles is assigned to any particular performer, and an individual role might switch from one cast member to several others in the space of a few seconds.

A fascinating miscellany of objects - black telephones, crumpled paper, celery, egg beaters, books - are transformed into instruments. There's something of the obsessed geek in this relentless tapping of the secret sound-life of found objects, and even a touch of the Goon Show. This intricate soundscape segues into lush and seedy jazz numbers or other fragments drawing on a wide range of musical influences.

Horton's direction makes Phobia - surprisingly perhaps, since it also seems strongly ascetic - visually lush. The lighting plays on the cavernous spaces of the Town Hall, creating soft, lamplit oases in a world where it always seems to be night-time. In the darkness behind the playing space, performers act out film tropes - for example, the looped image of a woman running upstairs and casting herself into darkness, or a man in a suit lighting a cigarette. This sense of chiaroscuro and distorted perspective reinforces a pervading nostalgia that is underwritten by menace.

With its sly cultural referencing and absurd gender-bending, Phobia has many comic moments, but often what makes you laugh is delight at its sheer ingenuity. Like that hardy production Recital, about to be revived again at the Malthouse Theatre, it's high camp refined through a rigorously disciplined aesthetic, a mode which best illuminates Horton's considerable talents.

Chamber Made Opera

Disclosure: Douglas Horton has directed two operas by Michael Smetanin, of which I wrote the libretti: The Burrow (1995) and Gauguin (2000).

Boy Gets Girl by Rebecca Gilman, directed by Kate Cherry. Designed by Christina Smith, with Belinda McClory, Stephen Phillips, John McTernan, Kenneth Ransom, Rebekah Stone, Terry Norris and Kellie Jones. Melbourne Theatre Company at the Fairfax Studio, Victorian Arts Centre, until July 2.

I don't think my ho hum feeling about Boy Gets Girl was entirely to do with the revolve, but it's fair to say that the orchestration of the play didn't help. Director Kate Cherry had an idea, and stuck to it grimly. Like so: scene ends, turn up thriller-type music and industrial lighting effects, whirl those desks and beds sedately around the theatre, cue hurried prop preparation by the actors, and bingo! new scene...

Don't get me wrong, I like revolves, they're funky. But as somebody said of love making, repetition either enhances or deadens. In this case, the inexorable rhythm set by the revolve had me yawning by half time and longing for a static stage where lights could just come up, bang, without all this technological fuss. And although Cherry's direction flattened any dramatic arc the play might have had, I'm not sure that it had much in the first place. The only real virtue of this production is that it frames a virtuoso performance by that fine actor, Belinda McClory.

Rebecca Gilman's play is an earnest exploration of the effects that stalking has on its victims, in this case a bright literary journalist Theresa (Belinda McClory) who works for a swank New York magazine. Single and workaholic, she is set up for a blind date with Tony (Stephen Phillips) by a well-meaning friend. When she decides that she's not interested, Tony won't take no for an answer, and bombards her with flowers, letters, phone calls and emails that become steadily more sinister.

Being stalked is no fun at all, as I know myself, and Gilman does a good job, at least initially, of portraying the powerlessness, paranoia and frustration that it can induce, and demonstrating the frightening lack of legal recourses for stalking victims. Theresa finds her whole life invaded by her stalker: she loses her home, her job and even her identity. And she can do nothing about it.

Less successfully, Gilman ties the issue of stalking, via some conversations with Theresa's workmates Mercer (Kenneth Ransom) and Howard (John McTernan), to the sexist objectifying of women. Her fellow office workers engage in painful and somewhat tedious self-examination, and decide that stalking is at the dark end of a continuum which begins with male sexual desire.

This argument is extended in Theresa's comic interviews with an aging John Waters-type film director, Les Kennkat (Terry Norris), whose porno horror movies have become cult classics, and the young bimbo secretary Harriet (Rebekah Stone) who is, mystifyingly, dressed like Bubbles from Absolutely Fabulous.

In blaming the phenomenon of stalking squarely on media stereotypes and patriarchal attitudes to women, Gilman glosses over the fact that 20 per cent of stalking is done by women. Stalking is obsessed and delusional behaviour that isn't inherently to do with gender, although its behavourial peculiarities are naturally inflected through gendered behaviours. To claim that male sexual attraction is simply a milder version of stalking is, to say the least, problematic.

But this is a play with a message, designed to hold the mirror up to society so we can then question it, yadayadayada. Forgive my cynicism, but this idea of theatre bores the pants off me: it's all very worthy, but mightn't it be, perhaps, a teensy bit patronising...? Its analysis never moves beyond the realms of pop psychology, and its emotional high points are all confessions, a version of what my friend called the "emotional pornography" that drives shows like Oprah and Jerry Springer. Pace the disillusioned Hester Bell of a few posts ago, might not this be the kind of skilful, dull naturalism that makes people wonder why they don't stay home and hire a DVD?

Belinda McClory gives an excellent and nuanced performance as Theresa, the emotionally spiky and increasingly vulnerable journalist, and the cast generally supports her well. But even decent performances can't make up for the essential banality of this play. It reminds me of a lot of contemporary American poetry: it's very competently written and it's literate. As a play, it moves from scene to scene efficiently and has the requisite comic relief. But as theatre, it's about as interesting as the telemovies it so closely resembles.

Melbourne Theatre Company

Black Medea by Wesley Enoch, directed by the writer. Designed by Christina Smith, lighting by Rachel Burke, sound design by Jethro Woodward. With Margaret Harvey, Aaron Pedersen, Michael Morgan/Jesse Rotumah-Gardiner and Justine Saunders. Beckett Theatre @ The Malthouse, until June 5.

A while back, around Nietzsche, the gods deserted classical tragedy. They were scaled back to psychological symbols: the Furies became externalisations of Orestes' guilt, and Oedipus' fate - to kill his father and marry his mother - became an expression of subconscious desires.



These interpretations are a reasonable response by post-Enlightenment culture to the questions posed by these capricious arbiters of human fate. To the rationalist West, pagan gods could seem perilously silly. But it can be argued that tragedy lost as much as it gained by the psychological domestication of the gods: the sacred and the divine are as much part of the tragic experience as catastrophe.

One of the fascinating aspects of Wesley Enoch's adaptation of Medea is that the gods are back, as potent, implacable and bloody as ever. Enoch has freely transposed the legend of Medea to indigenous themes, and his muscularly poetic text excavates an often obscured aspect of its chthonic energy. Here Cypris (Aphrodite), the main mover of events in Euripides' play, is replaced by the vengeful ancestral spirits of Central Australia. Since the ancestral spirits are also the land, they have a literal potency that can resonate with even the most secular white.

Like the original, Enoch's Medea (Margaret Harvey) is a wise woman, a witch privy to the magical traditions of her people who betrays her heritage for the love of Jason (Aaron Pedersen). She leaves her desert home to marry a handsome, ambitious Aboriginal from the city, her "ticket out". By marrying the stranger she violates the complex kinship codes of her people, and she compounds her crime by selling her knowledge of the land to mining companies, leading them to the sacred places where she knows they will find ore.

Jason is, however, as much an exile as Medea. What destroys their relationship - as much businesslike pact as passionate sexual love - is the desert wind brought into his house, unwittingly, by Medea herself; a fate that howls through the front door and which speaks to him, through Medea's ancestral spirits, as his madness. His faithlessness is in some ways more profound than the original Jason's; he doesn't marry another, but instead completely loses touch with himself. He can't keep a job or support his family, and descends into a cycle of alcoholism and violence; a fate, it becomes clear, also suffered by his father.

Finally, despite Jason's deep emotional dependence on Medea, he obeys the promptings of the elder spirit (Justine Saunders) and throws Medea out of the marital home. Medea, who no longer has a home to return to, and who can see for her son only the same future as his father, murders her own child in revenge and despair, savagely ending the paternal cycle of violence.

Medea's act seems, interestingly, also a revenge on those spirits that drive her husband mad and demand that she bring her son home to the desert: she will hand her son over neither to his father nor to her own people, where he will suffer only another kind of disposession. It's a startlingly bleak expression of the conflict between traditional and urban indigenous cultures, offering no chink of hope. Perhaps what makes this story genuinely a tragedy is that there is no hint of moral judgement: Medea and Jason are trapped in the tension between conflicting imperatives which are both, on their own terms, in the right. The spiral towards catastrophe unravels from the wider injustice of their situation.

Enoch's production is unapologetically theatrical. As Medea, Margaret Harvey is skin-tighteningly compelling; the force of her curse literally gave me goosebumps. Harvey's full-blooded cry "I am Medea!" stands with "I am the Duchess of Malfi still!" as a great theatrical moment of defiance against fate. Aaron Pedersen's performance matches Harvey's, switching between terrifying violence and snivelling weakness. Justine Saunders plays a double role, as Old Medea narrating the story and the tribal spirit manipulating Medea and Jason, and her performance shifts from benign comedy to implacability.

Christina Smith's claustrophobic corrugated iron set, spectacularly lit by Rachel Burke, frames the story in brooding darkness. Among the most potent scenes are a number of swift, wordless vignettes, flashing out of the dark to a driving score, that give poignant glimpses of a disintegrating family. For all its classical provenance, Black Medea is powerfully contemporary. Enoch seamlessly weaves together with naturalism the heiratic, ritualised action of classical tragedy, giving the play both the intimacy of a domestic drama and the grand, extreme gestures of tragedy. It makes thrilling theatre.


Picture: Margaret Harvey and Aaron Pedersen in Black Medea

Malthouse Theatre

The Maids by Jean Genet, directed by John Bolton, lighting by Armando Licul and Govin Ruben. With Suzannah Bayes-Morton, Zoe Ellerton-Ashley and Shelly Lauman. Victorian College of the Arts School of Drama Autumn Season, Grant Street Theatre

I vividly remember my first encounter with the writing of Jean Genet. I was around nineteen and for reasons I forget - perhaps no reason - I picked up his first novel, Our Lady of the Flowers. I read it in a kind of daze: I found myself hypnotised by the sheer decadent sensuality of the prose, and at the same time completely confused. I did not understand this moral universe at all.

Yet, when I reached its final pages, there occurred one of those perceptual shifts that art can occasionally produce, a kind of click; the mental equivalent, I suppose, of those Victorian optical puzzles where you suddenly realise that what appears at first to be a white vase is also two faces in profile. It was as if, through the experience of reading it, I had insensibly been given a key to the book. I went straight back to page one and read it again. And it's probably fair to say - though I can say this of a number of books, thus demonstrating the vicious effect of reading - that I have never been quite the same since.

My naive bourgeois assumptions had, all the way through the book, been kicked, trampled and spat on; and even so, I had probably understood about fifty per cent of its violations. (In many ways I had a sheltered upbringing). Genet turned all the values I didn't realise I held violently inside out.

It was all very exciting. But it was also much more than that; if it had been merely shocking, it would not have disturbed me so profoundly. What I realised, however foggily, was that Genet is a sternly moral writer.

Much later, I read Jean-Paul Sartre's monumental study, Saint Genet, which explores this basic illumination to great depth. But, however much I admired Sartre's scholarship and perception, I couldn't help feeling dubious about his breathless sanctification of Genet, which itself seemed a little bourgeois, underlaid by a wide-eyed boyish fascination with the romantic beauty of criminal revolt.

I think Genet was neither a saint nor a demon. These extreme identities were masks: behind them stood a complex, anonymous and, perhaps, even detached intellectual (a title he despised). He seems to me to be at once driven by deep anger and love, and yet standing at a profoundly ironic angle to himself. This generates the passion of his artifice, which is deadly serious: Genet's vision is not camp, as is often claimed, but tragic. It may elude and mock the fatal trivialities and sentiment of the intellect, which are the death of love, but it doesn't eschew, as camp does, seriousness itself. That's one of the things that can make Genet, still, an authentically shocking writer.

Georges Bataille's term "hypermorality" - used to describe a moral system which challenges received morality to the extent that it is regarded as either amoral or immoral - is pertinent here. Somehow in Genet's writing, despite the extremity of experience it enacts, one is always aware of the cold witnessing eye. Perhaps this is no more than to say that he was a great writer. Whatever the case, it is true enough to say that all his life, Genet was concerned with the question of power: what it is, what it does to those who lack it, what it does to those who possess it.

It's a theme already clear in The Maids. This play, his first to be produced, was actually his second work for theatre after Deathwatch, a blackly absurd drama set in prison. The Maids was written in 1945, the last year of World War 2, which is not insignificant. It has been said that the dropping of the nuclear bomb was the act which inaugurated the Theatre of the Absurd: the possibility that human beings could completely annihilate themselves suggested a world of such madness that only real madness could be considered a sane response.

The Maids, inspired by a notorious 1933 murder when two maids brutally killed their employers, collapses fantasy and reality. It is a play of heiratic roles, all of them ultimately cruel: the two maids, Solange (Suzannah Bayes-Morton) and Claire (Shelly Lauman), act out their sadistic mistress-servant fantasies and their social roles as servants; Madame (Zoe Ellerton-Ashley) her performances as tyrant, beneficient employer and lover.

All these roles circle each other, as increasingly malevolent reflections; each character switches without warning from total abjection to an equally total tyranny. Between these switches are poignant articulations of love, distorted by the cliches which express and imprison them, a yearning which is at once instransigent and ungraspable, because inexpressible. Literally, within the paradigm of power this play expresses, there is no language for love. Consequently, as becomes evident through the play, all these gestures are ultimately expressions of despair, rhetorics of behaviour which conceal a devastating inner emptiness. Beyond the paradigm of dominator and dominated, there is an unfillable vacuum.

This makes The Maids, to say the least, an extremely challenging play. John Bolton's production makes a very creditable fist of it. It opens with the fantasies of the maid servants performed on an over-the-top stage of velvet drapes and flowers, placed in the middle of an empty space. When the alarm goes off, signalling Madame's imminent arrival, Solange and Claire "tidy up": their makeshift stage is Madame's bed, the velvet drapes her bedspread, and so on. This opens the action out to the "real life" of the stage, which turns out to be as histrionic as their own fantasies.

Genet's famous advice to women playing The Maids (it was originally written for men) was that they must not "put their c***ts on the table". In other words, this is not a play which looks specifically at how women relate, and must not be played as if it is. By virtue of a certain toughness and edginess, this production avoids the traps that Genet warned against.

The Maids really requires an older cast; not because older actors might be more skilled, but because there are some understandings that come, except in very rare instances, only with time. In the absence of the extreme emotional sophistication Genet's writing requires - a lived understanding of the intolerability of what Genet is portraying - the passion of these young actors is a good substitute. They give performances that are at once fearless and controlled, and attain performative fineness without losing an essential, naive sense of emotional rawness.

I admired especially Zoe Ellerton-Ashley as Madame. Her predatory performance evoked both Madame's shockingly violent egocentricity and her fragility, the source of a genuine pathos. And it was great also to see an indigenous actor cast, without comment, in this play.

It is a good and honest production that reveals the despair that drives The Maids, its merciless portrayal of the intolerable poverty of emotional worlds wholly trammelled by capitalistic power. Yet it is a mistake to regard Genet's black vision as nihilistic: his work is far from that. The erotic dynamic in the play is, in a way, its own subterranean counter-argument. And, to quote John Berger, one of the great writers of our time: "The naming of the intolerable is itself the hope".

The blog's running late this week. Yes, your indefagitable crrrritic has had a minor brain implosion, due to a number of trivial domestic and biological emergencies. Even so, I am ruminating - somewhat more slowly than I would like - on Jean Genet, whose play The Maids I had the pleasure of seeing last week, courtesy of the VCA autumn graduation season at Grant Street. It will be up in the next day or so, if the gods are kind to me.

Meantime, I share with you an article which caught my eye in the Guardian. It's one of those personal pieces which come around fairly regularly on "why I hate the theatre". Hester Lacey went to see an Alan Bennett play which was "jolly good", but next time, by George, she's going to stay home and watch a dvd. The seats are uncomfortable at the theatre. It's too hot. It's full of pretentious people. It cost a fortune.

She goes on to say:

"I am looking forward to seeing The History Boys again, though, once the BBC gets hold of it and turns it into a two-part TV drama. This I will be able to record and watch whenever I want. I will be able to cough, blow my nose and go to the loo at will. Rather than attempting to recreate Rievaulx Abbey on stage, they will be able to film there. I will be able to see the actors' faces without squinting from half a mile away. There will be nobody tall in front of me. It will be near as dammit free, and it will be piped into the comfort of my own room.

"Which is the only location where I will now ever watch a drama which consists of people sitting round and talking. The exception comes with genuine spectacles whose sheer scale is too enormous for the box. The Lion King? Bring it on. The Cirque du Soleil is another good example - seeing this live on stage is exhilarating."

These aren't illegitimate complaints, particularly the cost; but I find them incredibly depressing. If a punter goes to a film and dislikes it, she will say she disliked that particular film, not film in general. But if people go and see a play and don't enjoy it, they almost always will blame the whole art form.

But really - a "drama" is something that consists of "people sitting round and talking"? (Yes, it is Alan Bennett). And the only alternative is sheer spectacle? My heart plummets.... I suspect that Hester was just plain bored, although she probably didn't realise it - I expect the production was, as she said, "jolly good", and that everything was jolly well done, and Bennett's play was jolly decently written. The problem is, that isn't enough to make theatre. As per the quote in my header, theatre emerges from a "monstrous hunger".

The downside (and upside) of theatre's liveness is its magnification: there is no comparable cultural torture, except possibly an awful poetry reading, to being bored in the theatre. On the other hand, when it's doing the things only theatre can do - which are so much more than either talking heads or lion cossies - it's the most exhilarating thing in the world. You don't worry about heating or seating when real theatre happens in front of you. Alas, it's also very difficult to achieve, but it happens all the same: and when it does, it's unforgettable. But, sadly, Hester will never know that now.

Torque: Liquid Paper 1: Making Light of Gravity by Hellen Sky and The Proscenium by Margaret Cameron. Three performance "showing" @ the Malthouse Theatre.

One of the definitions of torque is "the moment of a system of forces producing rotation". It's easy to see why Hellen Sky and Margaret Cameron chose Torque to title this double bill: Liquid Paper 1: Making Light of Gravity and The Proscenium stand in dynamic relation to each other, circling around common concerns and creating a deeply interesting theatrical conversation between two extremely accomplished and very different solo performers.

Hellen Sky's background is mainly in dance and new media; she is artistic director of Dancehouse, and the co-director of Company in Space, whose work focuses on the intersections between technology and art. Margaret Cameron is a performer/writer, whose profoundly poetic work has for years been stubbornly challenging conventional theatre practice in Melbourne. Seeing their two solo pieces in tandem was fascinating. Both are challenging works of considerable beauty, and both, in different but deeply related ways, interrogate notions of the self and the body.

Liquid Paper 1: Making Light of Gravity is an elegant and multidimensional work which synthesises a number of approaches to theatre. Hellen Sky uses performance, text and new media image-making to create a densely poetic work on the mediated, technological body.

For me, new media works in the theatre when it sets up a tension between the living, immediate performer and the mediated image. Liquid Paper not only sets up this tension: it's about it.

Three sides of the stage are hung with long rolls of paper, on which are projected animated images: elemental images of flames and water, words which break up into their constituent letters, disconcerting close-ups of a woman's body. Hellen Sky moves between and within the projections: sometimes she dances, sometimes she sits at a desk reading from a computer screen, pushing it around the space. A monitor forestage captures her live movements on a screen.

Her stage presence flickers from complete anonymity, silhouetted against the febrile projected images, to a particular, if nameless, individual. This performance interrogates an idea of the body which attacks the notion of the individual self. It shifts between differing angles and states of perception, oscillating between expressing the body as conscious subject and describing it as technological object. The tension in this work is partly between ideas of the body and this body; that is, an Aristotlean tension between the universal, which can be described, and the particular, which no term can wholly capture and which, therefore, becomes the province of the poetic.

In a text which is a collage of quotation, poetic epiphany, snatches of anecdote and ironic observation, Sky draws connections between the social /political body, computer technology, media networks and cellular processes like the neural networks of the brain. The boundary between one self and another is skin, but skin is by no means a certain border: it is permeable, fluid, a layer of "liquid paper".

The connection between different systems - social, biological, technological - is code: the codes of spoken language, DNA, computers, social encounters; all the subliminal systems that shape meaning, place and identity. With code, as with language, the question is whether we define it, or if it defines us. Sky's answer is by no means definitive: she opens with a sinister example, the Bush Government's colour-coded "Homeland security defence system", which controls power by manipulating social fear. "Green - 'low'; blue -'guarded'; yellow - 'high'; orange - 'elevated'; red - 'severe'...."Safe," Sky notes, "doesn't even merit a hue. Safe, it would seem, has fallen off the spectrum of perception."

That is, of course, if "safe" ever existed as anything more than a comforting illusion. Sky explores a reality in which nothing is safe or certain, in which the self threatens to disappear entirely in a haze of pixels, to "fall like Alice down that virtual hole". But rather than vanishing, the self adapts and transforms. "The body is a conduit … making meaning…making new bodies and senses of the languages of media, codes and scripts codes of inscription... The key to my code is in my skin, is in my blood, and is in my brain," says Sky. This recalls cruder ideas that remain, despite the vertigo of virtuality, as tangible and intransigent as her dancing body is in the space before us.

The text is pre-recorded, and shifts between clarity and distortion. The distorted sound makes the language work as if it were a score, with phrasal repetitions acting like musical motifs. The audience listens, half hears, misinterprets, then collides with a shock against a clear passage, an intimate anecdote or a repeated poetic line. The effect is grating, disconcerting, alienating and intriguing: like some contemporary poetries, it asks you to focus on the sonic qualities of words, their rhythms and sounds, as much as on their meanings.

Margaret Cameron, in startling contrast, is an actor standing barefoot on a stage, mediated by nothing except the masks of her words and performance, which reveal as much as they conceal. For Cameron, the mind itself is the theatre, and thinking is a kind of performance. The stage is a space of dream, a threshold where anything might be possible, "the scene of thought, the proscenium".

The Proscenium is subtitled "A childhood speaking against the drying wind", and the text constantly returns to some very specific childhood memories: the vivid image of her father being hosed through a window, making it "rain inside", which becomes for Cameron a primary metaphor of possibility in the theatre; and a memory of standing at a doorway, a threshold, on the other side of which stands her unhappy mother. The threshold is also a central image: the doorway where an artist hesitates, neither in one place nor the other.

"Our work," says Cameron, "enunciates thought / becoming shape". The Proscenium doesn't seek to express a finished thought, but rather to catch it on the wing, in the moments where thinking is still not quite articulate, when it is indistinguishable from physical embodiment or dream. It's an ambitious and fascinating undertaking, and suggests a profound idea of the theatre.

This performance dramatises a return to the very genesis of creation, its a priori. Where Sky uses code as a primary metaphor, Cameron speaks of the dream image "embedded within the ancient erotic curve / of the imaginary of the symbolic of that / which forms us". Which could equally be an image of DNA, as much as a description of dream.

Cameron's only prop is a large stone, which she stands on, plays with, or lays on her belly in a series of fluidly linked scenes that are differentiated by David Franske's evocative lighting states and soundscapes. The stone's obdurate materiality becomes the outward embodiment of primordial imaginative form, the expression of a freedom which is the return to "a bare child of imaginings / prancing barefoot / with a stone".

An avowed ambition of this piece is to embody ambiguity, a state when form is still shaping itself and has not solidified into singular meaning: and here Cameron resorts to the language of paradox. It is in this language that it's possible for a stone to symbolise a liminal state of becoming, to be at once a literal outline of form and an allusive and elusive symbol. She speaks of a "return" to an interior landscape of memory and desire, a movement which folds back against itself in a spiralling motion or which she describes elsewhere as a "vertical descent". "I must advance to return," says Cameron; but clearly also she must return to advance. This double movement is, as is Cameron's project to physicalise thinking, essentially erotic: a motion of fluid exchange between substance and the insubstantial, the literal and the metaphoric, act and thought.

Like all Cameron's solo pieces,The Proscenium is a strikingly personal work, an impression reinforced by the astounding mix of vulnerability and forceful presence that Cameron achieves in her performance. But it is a mistake to think of Cameron's work as merely personal and impertinent to assume it is autobiography; its authenticity stems from other qualities. Cameron's concern with aesthetic as a process pushes her work past the personal into something like the anonymity of poetry. Memory is not locked into a nostalgic past: it insists itself actively into the making of the present, the atemporal space Cameron creates so compellingly on the stage.

It's the latest and perhaps the most lyric of Cameron's ongoing explorations of the "solo female performer". Its contrasts with Liquid Paper are as interesting as its cross references, and seeing both together was an experience which resonated well beyond their performance. No doubt these works will return to Melbourne, though perhaps not as a double bill. They are each well worth the attention they demand.

Company in Space
Knowledge and Melancholy by Margaret Cameron

Fellow theatre blogger Spearbearer Down Left has a post on Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Paula Vogel (how's that for alliteration, folks?) which caught my eye, because it talks about crrrrritics.

Paula Vogel has, it seems, invited theatre critics along to a day-long "boot camp", during which they'll be asked to write plays "on the spot". This is an idea that has a history: I remember some years ago the Guardian's theatre critic Michael Billington writing about an exercise in which he was invited to direct a play, in order to understand better how difficult it is. And there are those panels (I've participated in at least two) which "criticise the critics". It's part of the endless quest by the theatre world to grapple critics to its heart, all the better to strangle them (only joking).

Spearbearer writes:

Vogel has an open, yet somewhat skeptical view of theatre criticism.  Readers of this blog will find it no surprise that it resonates with me.  She says, "I disagree with the stance of critics being objective journalists outside the theatre community.  Such an attitude is becoming destructive to our field, and I imagine it's hard for them to maintain their love of theatre as outsiders."

Linda Winer of Newsday, worries that critics writing plays poses "a slippery ethical—or appearance of ethical—problem.  If a critic's plays are circulating and productions being considered by various theatres, doesn't that critic have a conflict of interest at those theatres?"  To which my first reaction would be: with all due respect, let's talk about it once you have that problem.

Of course in theory, she does bring up a valid issue.  And full disclosure is the answer.  Such a problem doesn't seem to have prevented Robert Brustein from engaging in both criticism and theatre creation.  He simply discloses when he's discussing someone with which he may have a conflict of interest.  And readers can draw their own conclusions.  In other words, he doesn't pretend to be, in Vogel's words, "an objective journalist outside the theatre community."

Robert Brustein was an early inspiration to me, back when I was a tyro-critic doing what Clive James described once as an "iceberg on a raft" impression (the art of appearing to reveal only ten per cent of one's knowledge, when what is on show is everything that one knows). Another touchstone was David Mamet's plea to critics in his book of essays Writing in Restaurants (that was in the old days, before he became a Hollywood-bloated Guru).

That old stance of critics being objective reporters on the theatre has always seemed to me to be a load of hooey. And it is, as Vogel claims, profoundly destructive: it's the attitude at the root of the deadly criticism that has been the bane of Melbourne theatre for decades. It's an idea which hermetically seals a critic from the experience of theatre, being forced thereby to sit above it on a higher, purer plane, uncontaminated by anything that is actually going on.

Back in my Bulletin days I remember the former Age critic Leonard Radic telling me, when I innocently queried him about a play we had both just seen, that he couldn't possibly talk about it in case he was "influenced". I was amazed: what thoughts were so delicate that they could be immutably changed by a conversation? And what's so bad about being "influenced", anyway, if it means being more thoughtful?

The most profound experience of theatre - in fact, of all art - is intensely subjective; to deny that is to miss the point. This is not to say that a critic is not a privileged audience member: a critic sees more theatre than the average person, and gets to air his or her opinions about it in public. This suggests a certain responsibility: but that responsibility is not, I suggest, towards this faux objectivity, which is almost always a mask for an unacknowledged agenda. Rather than the death cap of some final "judgment", the criticism I like reading presents itself as an informed and responsive subjectivity that is part of a many-sided conversation.

Anyway, that's what I'm trying to do here. I figure that I'm part of the theatre community - as, in fact, is any person who buys a ticket and rocks up for the show. I'm an artist who thinks theatre is a brilliant art form, and I will argue with it until I turn blue, out of sheer fascination. I have my preferences and advocacies, which I hope are clear in what I write, and full disclosure of my particular interests are up there in the side bar. I hope I'm always fair, or at the least honest. And all you out there have permission to kick me if I ever pretend to be "objective".