My mini-essay on Antonin Artaud in my review of Jet of Blood, in particular my (yes, provocative) speculations on the connections between extremist politics and Artaud's writings, has provoked some interesting discussions in the blogosphere. George Hunka at Superfluities has a couple of thoughtful responses here and here. I also got a nice note from Pierre Joris of Nomadics, saying he thinks I'm a bit unjust to Artaud. He included a soon-to-be-published essay in which Pierre considers the Theatre of Cruelty as the basis for a contemporary poetics and extends a useful Deleuzian distinction:

This ... distinction between combat-against (which is war, is will to destruction, is judgment by god proclaiming destruction as something “just,” is mutilation, reduction, will to domination) and combat-between which is the on-going expression of a powerful vitality that is involved in change, in becoming (Deleuze uses the example of the baby). Turn the word “war” around and you get “raw” — the crudo, the cruel is the opposite of “war.” As I put it in the Nomad Manifestos: being is on the side of death, becoming is on the side of life, is always a violent action, “cruel” in the terms we are using right now. Becoming is also an, if not for me the, essential incarnation of the “nomad war machine.” The prevailing new-agy, peace-loving, peace-nicky, p.c.-y sit-down, sit-in approach to both external conflict and internal struggle refuses to make the distinction between combat-against and combat-between and is therefore unable to acknowledge the sheer violence — cruelty —that inhabits & is the growth-vector of all living forms, of life. And so the life that is creative, that is a becoming, will be “cruel” — it will be involved in what the Islamic mystics have called a “jihad” — here is another term that was kidnapped by judgmental Islamic (i.e. monotheistic) clerics in an effort to change its meaning from combat-between to combat-against.

It's a distinction I ignored in my comparing Artaud to Osama Bin Laden and Pol Pot. However, I'm not entirely convinced that it's a distinction Artaud is careful to make himself, although some of us might want to: it seems to me that Artaud, in arguing against the objections to his conception of the Theatre of Cruelty, made a different argument. "Cruelty," says Artaud, "is not synonymous with bloodshed, martyred flesh, crucified enemies. This identification of cruelty with tortured victims is a very minor aspect of the question. In the practice of cruelty there is a kind of higher determinism, to which the executioner-tormenter himself is determined and which he must be determined to endure when the time comes. Cruelty is above all lucid, a kind of rigid control and submission to necessity. There is no cruelty without consciousness...It is consciousness that gives to the exercise of every act of life its blood-red colour, its cruel nuance, since it is understood that life is always someone's death." Artaud is not saying that torture, for example, is a distortion of the Theatre of Cruelty: he is saying that it is only a minor part of it. What mattered to Artaud was not brutality, which is too brutish to call up in him anything but distaste (although he does not reject it), but the consciousness which understands its own suffering in practising it.

Nick at Rat Sass went off the deep end:

Alison Croggon at theatre notes has obviously read more criticisms on Artaud than actual writings by Artaud. She parrots the negative critiques that have always been attached to this singularly important theatre theorist. So nothing new in her attempt to marginalize Artaudian theatre by classifying it to the experience of the lunatic asylum, war zone and concentration camp. However, Alison extends this old criticism to new a level by outrageously and unconscionably comparing Artaud to violent terrorist killers Osama bin Laden and Pol Pot. She goes so far as to suggest that Artaud would have celebrated the 9/11 attacks as “the greatest work of art there has ever been!”

Nick read my review again, calmed down, and in his comments we're having an interesting coversation. My (slightly polished) answer, in part, to his objections, might be of interest here:

What is a terrorist? It’s a word that is almost meaningless, given that the same acts (randomly killing people in order to manipulate a civilian population through fear) are labelled terrorist in some cases and legitimate warfare in others. An artist like Artaud illuminates the hypocrisies of these false divisions. I wouldn’t apply Bush’s false definitions to an argument about Artaud: Artaud is a better tool for applying to Bush.

Of course revolutionary artists are, in a crucial and profound sense, activists, and many actually are activists, although artists always fit uncomfortably in political worlds. Artaud was not interested in social revolution (though there are very few modernist artists who did not flirt with the huge ideologies of the time, whether communism, socialism or fascism), but he was still interested in changing the world. And his ideas, from the point of view of a State that wishes to exert absolute control, are as dangerous - maybe more dangerous - as any social activist. And he meant them to be, he wanted them to exert real effects in a real world.

What worries me about what you’re saying here about separating “poetic” from “political” activism is that they are not so easily divided (from the Romantics to the Modernists on) and you run the danger of doing what the State wants, ie, of claiming that art is “above” politics and has no relation to or purchase on the “real” world. This is a very complex argument, and I don’t have the space or time to make the proper distinctions here. Art is an enactment, of course, and creates its own alternative and virtual space, which is a different space to that in which those acts which we call terrorist (and those other acts which are not called terrorist) exist. It is a space of possibility. That is what is dangerous about it as far as the State is concerned; it does not want certain possibilities to be articulated. That is also, of course, why the State objects to terrorism. It does not object to people being murdered or tortured or having their homes or families destroyed, although this is what it claims is wrong about terrorism. If it did object to these things, it wouldn’t practice them itself. As far as the State is concerned, terrorism is wrong, as art is wrong, because it suggests other worlds than this one are possible.

The difference between terrorism and art is that terrorism, unlike art, is almost wholly nihilist and so, unlike art, kills people. I don’t think even Artaud is nihilist: no artist can be, because he or she practises art, which makes as well as destroys. The best description of terrorism I ever read is in Blaise Cendrars’ amazing short novel, Moravagine, where he describes the anarchists in Russia: it’s a terrifying description, because he shows the attraction of the pure act. But again, this is where I come back to Artaud, because the pure act is what he wanted to achieve, and I personally have problems with the whole idea of purity.

Some of your objections seem to me to come out of fear. Well, I guess there’s good reason for that. My country has passed new Sedition laws that mean that I could go to prison for seven years for things I have already written. Even, perhaps, this post. As far as the State is concerned, Artaud’s ideas and Osama bin Laden’s are equally threatening. Hence the bizarre and otherwise reasonless prosecution of the Critical Art Ensemble. But what if they are equally dangerous, even though one is art and the other is “real”? I think the State is pretty good at identifying threats to its pursuit of absolute power. And make no mistake, that kind of State is what we’re getting, in Britain, the US and here.

Which brings me to the question of Sedition. Via the excellent Freedom of Expression blog, and of course Ben over at Parachute of a Playwright, the latest on Attorney-General Phil Ruddock's summary rejection of any changes to the Sedition provisions in the Anti-Terror Bill, despite the recommendations of the Senate Committee last year and a review by the Australian Law Reform Commission.

As media organisations, lawyers, artists and anyone interested in human rights have all pointed out, repeatedly, the Sedition laws are a fundamental and serious threat to freedom of speech, since they do not distinguish between legitimate dissent and incitement to violence, and they are already having pernicious effects as the culture self-censors to avoid breaking the law. And here's the rub: in order to defend freedom of expression, must we claim that art has no political or social agency at all, that it exists, in effect, outside the world we live in?

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First on the list is Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, now being performed by Eleventh Hour. This is a real miss - guys, I really tried to get there, but family problems last Wednesday and being buggerised around by public transport on Friday meant that my attempts were ill-starred. It features a very good cast, including Greg Stone and David Tredinnick, and I have heard wonderful reports. On at the Eleventh Hour Theatre at 170 Leicester St, Fitzroy, until October 7. Bookings 9419 5649.

And this Wednesday begins the mayhem of the Melbourne Fringe Festival. What can I say? I'll be getting along to a couple of events, but there's more, more, more...all I can suggest is that you scan your program and fill your diary. Even the most die-hard theatre goer will be pushing it to see everything here. Any suggestions on must-sees?

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Jet of Blood, adapted from Antonin Artaud, directed by Olivia Allen. Designed by Adam Gardnir, lighting by Luke Hails, sound by Hayley Forward. With Simon Stone, Amelia Best, Lara Tumak, Austin Castiglione, Katherine Tonkin, Julian Crotti, Roderick Cairns and Grant Cartwright. Ignite @ Theatreworks, until October 15.

This production of Antonin Artaud's rarely-performed Jet of Blood reminds me of the joke in Educating Rita. Q: How do you solve the staging problems of Peer Gynt? A: Do it on the radio. How does one realise Artaud on stage? By doing something else.

To be fair, not even Artaud could realise Artaud; his own productions in Paris in the 1920s were dismal failures. He is, however, the most influential failure in theatrical history: his mark on 20th century theatre is indelible and profound, and is only rivalled by Brecht. The ideas articulated in Artaud's writings inform the work of groundbreaking directors as diverse as Roger Blin, Judith Malina and Julian Beck, Joseph Chaikin, Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski and, more locally, Barrie Kosky. Edward Bond, Howard Barker and Sarah Kane are unimaginable without him.



But Artaud straight is a phenomenon that is, ultimately, unassimilable. The first and last thing you notice about his writing is its anguish: all his life, Artaud delineated a landscape of pain, in which the agony of the body is indistinguishable from the agony of the mind. This, he says again and again in his acute self-analysis, is a result of his mental illness. From his adolescence, Artaud was periodically incarcerated with a condition that looks very like schizophrenia.

What makes Artaud different from most mentally ill people is that, in what is almost a contradiction in terms, he was coldly conscious of his madness, and was capable of describing it with an almost savagely clinical intelligence. He never romanticised his sickness: he experienced it as horror and obliteration, and his experiments in theatre and mysticism were in part driven by a desire for transformation, for a resolution of the polarities that tormented him. His entire desire was to transform dualities - art and life, spirit and flesh, rationality and irrationality - into a unified consciousness; and the means he proposed was violence. The "cruelty" he demanded from theatre had an austerely moral purpose.

The second thing you notice about Artaud's work that's it's revolutionary. However, Artaud was completely hostile to any idea of social revolution, breaking in disgust from the Surrealists when they briefly embraced Communism. His revolution was solely cultural: a stance that, as Susan Sontag points out in her marvellous essay Artaud, is inherently conservative. Like many modernists, Artaud was only interested in individual transformation: for him, social revolution was worse than meaningless.

Artaud envisioned a theatre was, at its core, religious: what he sought was an experience which, like the "chemical marriage" of the Alchemists, would resolve his warring dualities into a coherent whole. Sontag is correct when she points to the extremity of his "moral rigour", commenting that Oliver Cromwell and Girolamo Savanarola might well have approved the theatre he proposed.

Certainly, Artaud shares with figures like Osama bin Laden or Pol Pot a singular and apocalyptic moral vision that seeks purification through destruction and violence. It is not hard to imagine Artaud following Stockhausen, who in a widely reviled remark shortly after the 9/11 attacks, called the destruction of the Twin Towers "the greatest work of art there has ever been!" "I am not a madman," Artaud said, late in his life. "I am a fanatic." Like all Artaud's self-diagnoses, this statement has the cold coruscation of truth.

What, then, to make of competing claims for an "authentic" experience of Artaud? Outside a lunatic asylum, a war zone or a concentration camp, I am not sure whether there can be such a thing. It is possible to think of the theatrics of torture in Abu Ghraib - the posing for photographs, the obliterating of the human body, the totalising word, the sexual loathing - as the ultimate Artaudian theatre. Like many poets, Artaud was lamentably literal.

I can't think of anyone who has taken Artaud's ideas in toto and realised them in the theatre; and in my heart, I can't imagine why anyone would want to. He is a catalyst and a provocation, rather than a model. Grotowski's actor-centred quest for sacred truth or Brook's aesthetic sensuousness are far too humane to be genuinely Artaudian. Making Artaud is, in many ways, also an unmaking of Artaud.

Which leads me, finally, to Ignite's production of Jet of Blood. Ignite is a company of young theatre artists drawn mainly from WAAPA and the VCA, and their ambition in choosing to work on this inscrutable and unperformable text is admirable. Jet of Blood, written in 1925, contains some of the most blackly comic, extreme and misogynist stage directions ever written. They culminate in this nightmarish vision: "an enormous number of scorpions emerge from under the WET NURSE's skirts and begin to swarm in her vagina, which swells and splits, becomes vitreous, and flashes like the sun. The YOUNG MAN and the BAWD flee like victims of brain surgery."

It's fair to say that nothing like that happens on the Theatreworks stage. Ignite has made, I think, a brave and sometimes successful attempt at surrealist theatre; but what it lacks is Artaud. It must be said, however, that in freely adapting the text, using it as an occasion for their own imaginative explorations, director Olivia Allen and her cast have taken an Artaudian approach - as Artaud said himself, "Subservience to the author, dependence on the text, what a dismal tradition!"

Allen has framed the performance with Death (Grant Cartwright) in whiteface and top hat, who evilly welcomes the audience into the theatre, promising - or threatening - a life-changing experience, and throws us out afterwards, forbidding applause, as the performers light up post-coital cigarettes. He introduces the first scene of the play, a Young Man (Simon Stone) and Young Woman (Amelia Best), sitting up in twin beds, proclaiming their love for each other and their satisfaction with the state of the world.

The world is torn apart almost at once: the Knight (Austin Castiglione), dressed in a breastplate, nappy and cheese-grater, and the Nurse (Lara Tumak) erupt screaming from the couple's single beds like bad conscience. The Young Man, the only character costumed in ordinary clothes, is spilt into a world of bewildering confusions, populated by a Priest with a Swiss accent (Roderick Cairns), his canine Sexton (Julian Crotti) and a Whore (Katherine Tonkin).

Allen has taken her lead from the Surrealists: a series of oneiric scenes sweep through the theatre to the accompaniment of a bruising soundtrack by Hayley Forward. The tableaux she creates are often comic as well as dreamlike: the Knight tosses dead birds out of a paper bag, in a parody of feeding pigeons; the nurse attempts to breastfeed a baby, which spills to the ground as a bag of grain; the Priest eats baked beans while his Sexton snuffles at his feet like a dog.

Allen and designer Adam Gardnir use the perspectives and cavernous spaces of the Theatreworks stage to advantage here, creating blacklight theatre that is lushly and precisely lit by Luke Hails. The strange characters emerge from darkness and vanish in a vortex of dream images. The performers are impressive, meeting the challenges of this production with polished physical skills and commitment.

However, there is a certain clumsiness in the mise en scene, a repetition of thought perhaps, that even in a show as short as this (50 minutes) begins to be felt as a numbing of surprise: actors too often arrive on stage in the same way between "scenes", for example. But more problematically than that, the show demonstrates limitations of imagination, rather than its liberation. Turning the lights up on the audience, for example, felt like an obvious gesture, whereas the same action in Stuck Pigs Squealing's Lally Katz and the Terrible Mysteries of the Volcano, a show that scraped the raw nerves of the subconscious, was genuinely discomforting.

Perhaps the most telling symptom is the lack of disgust in this show. The other half of Artaud's exhortation against subservience to the author is: "The spirit of the text, not the letter!" Here there is none of the spiritual anguish or the passionate sexual loathing that winds through Jet of Blood. The parade of theatrical images, interesting or beautiful as they may be, are too often detonated by laughter, and they never add up to the exhilarated revulsion or shock that Death promises us at the beginning of the show.

One reason might be that the whole is enclosed in a narrative of dream. The Young Man is afflicted by these visions of a demented world while he is asleep; this leaves an exit for all of us, since all he has to do is to wake up. Artaud, on the other hand, claimed he was recording intolerable realities from which there was no escape. Ultimately this is a polite and untraumatising imagining of Artaud: no tormented naked flesh, no seminal fluids or shit, no spurts of blood from the wrist of God.

For all that, Jet of Blood is never boring and gives us glimpses of true theatrical flair. It certainly marks the debut of a promising new company, and I'll watch their evolution with interest.

Picture: (Right to left) Lara Tumak, Amelia Best, Roderick Cairns, Katherine Tonkin, Austin Castiglione and Grant Cartwright in Jet of Blood. Photo: Ponch Hawkes.

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Theatre Notes is all flustered with excitement this morning, having scored a mention - along with some of her favourite theatre bloggers - in The Guardian's Culture Vulture, via the generous Maxie Szalwinska of Webloge. How cool is that? Even cooler is that the theatrical blogosphere is being pegged as a class act. Cooler still is the international theatre map it draws - New York, Melbourne, London...

And, in case you've missed it: an interesting discussion in the comments of Honour Bound, Nigel Jamieson's piece on David Hicks now on at the Malthouse, where Chris Boyd and David Williams vehemently disagree with my take on it...

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Was it me who said I had to pull back on this blog? I'm good at foolish statements like that. No sooner do I say that poetry has burned itself out in my soul, than I start producing epic sequences; if I mutter that I'm giving up prose, suddenly I start writing novels. You'd think I'd understand my perverse nature better by now. I've just noticed that since announcing the newer, slimmer blog, I'm posting nearly every day.

All by way of irrelevantly introducing the new Store Room initiative, launched last night (I'm told) at the swish BMW Edge Theatre. It's called the Store Room Theatre Workshop, and it's pretty interesting.

Eleven invited Associate Artists will work on five selected projects during the year, and instead of subscribing to a season of plays, audience members can subscribe to a process: exclusive invites to work-in-progress showings (with, I notice, "opportunity to offer feedback", a perilous enterprise - hopefully these won't be the equivalent of movie industry pre-release screenings, with questionaires, nor the confused good intentions that mostly animate the workshop model...)

What catches my eye is the Associate Artists. They're a very interesting bunch, and include among others writer/director Rob Reid, actor/director Todd MacDonald, actor/writer Tyler Coppin, writer Ross Mueller, designer/creator Anna Tregloan and director Wesley Enoch. The five projects also look extremely promising. More details at thestoreroom.com.

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Autobiography of Red, based on the novel by Anne Carson, devised and performed by Luke Mullins. Sound design and composition by Jethro Woodward, co-designed by Anna Cordingley and Adam Gardnir, physical text Leisa Shelton, light by Richard Vabre, video design by Nicholas Verso. Voices by Rob Meldrum, Mary Sitarenos and Alan Knopfler. The Tower @ the Malthouse until September 24.

Anne Carson is the arch theorist of desire. Her writings - genre-defying works of criticism, poetry and novelistic essaying - are passionate inscriptions of intellect, adumbrating writing as an act of love and love as an act of passionate imagination.

Given that Carson's poetry and fiction are also works of critique and that her critical work is profoundly poetic, I suspect that I think her real masterpieces are her critical writing. Eros the Bittersweet, her astonishing examination of classical conceptions of romantic love, was written in the 1980s and is closely related to her verse novel Autobiography of Red, which was published in 1998. In both she examines the phenomenon of winged Eros with a precise, ironic wit that eroticises thought, knowing and writing as acts of desire. For Carson, Eros embodies a geometry of lack and desire which is "poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence in its poles, love and hate its motive energies".



One can't fault Luke Mullins, then, for his ambition. To theatricalise such deeply literary work - to bring this multidimensional and subtle thought into the essentially cruder arena of the stage - is no small challenge. Perhaps what is most admirable about his adaptation of Autobiography of Red is how he manages to physicalise the text without compromising its nuance and complexity. He does this primarily by accessing the eroticism of performance, the dynamic of desire that - as another poet, Muriel Rukeyser, points out - vibrates between audience and stage, effectively translating what Carson does with language into the four dimensions of theatre.

Describing the "delightful activity" of the reader's mind shifting between levels of understanding and absorption in a romantic novel by the classical writer Longus, Carson quotes Montaigne: "My page makes love, and understands it feelingly". For Carson, the "imaginative effort" of a novel, "like the verbal innovation we call metaphor, is an erotic action, reaching out from what is known and present to something else, something different, something desired". The meaning composed is "a dynamic meaning, not a still point, that comes alive as the novel shifts from plane to plane..."

This seems like a fair description of the energies moving in Autobiography of Red, in which Carson creates a contemporary love story from the ancient myth of Geryon, the red, winged monster who is slain by Herakles in his tenth labour, and the subject (or perhaps, more accurately, the object) of a poem by the classical poet Stesichoros. Carson's novel is in part an arch literary joke, framed by critical disquisitions on Stesichoros which in fact illuminate Carson's own procedures:

… the fragments of the Geryoneis itself read as if Stesichoros had composed a substantial narrative poem then ripped it to pieces and buried the pieces in a box with some song lyrics and lecture notes and some scraps of meat. The fragment numbers tell you roughly how the pieces fell out of the box. You can of course keep shaking the box.

In the narrative, which is among other things an exploration of the notion of the subject, Geryon is transformed into a contemporary boy who is sexually abused by his brother, and who is sure he is a monster. He begins his autobiography at the age of five, in which he "set down all inside things / ...He coolly omitted all outside things". At 14 he meets and falls shatteringly in love with the young hood Herakles, in "one of those moments / that is the opposite of blindness". Instead of killing him, as in the myth, Herakles breaks Geryon's heart. After a life of numbness ("there are no words for a world without a self"), he meets Herakles by chance in Lima many years later. Herakles has a new lover, and the encounter explodes in degradation and violence, finally releasing Geryon from the abjection of the rejected lover into flight, his full selfhood.

Mullins, one of the talented group of artists which orbits around Stuck Pigs Squealing, narrates this story through a mixture of stylised physical performance and pre-recorded audio/visual material. The first images of the performance - half-lit images of one naked male body raping another - herald the ingenuity and sensory power of the physical vocabulary that Mullins invokes throughout this solo performance. Carson's literary framing is hinted in the chapter headings, words written on boxes and signs on the set that are illuminated as the story moves from one "chapter" to another, but for the most part Mullins has wisely concerned himself only with the story of Geryon, the abused monster who learns to embrace his monstrousness and so gains the power of flight.

He has created a kind of theatrical aria which accumulates power as it progresses, reinforced by an evocative score and soundscape by Jethro Woodward. It makes the beauty of Carson's complex synaesthetic language rivetingly and sensually present:

It was the year he began to wonder about the noise that colors make. Roses came roaring across the garden at him.
He lay on his bed at night listening to the silver light of stars crashing against the window screen. Most
of those he interviewed for the science project had to admit they did not hear
the cries of the roses
being burned alive in the noonday sun. Like horses, Geryon would say helpfully,
like horses in war…

Such precise language requires a concomitant precision in performance, but it also needs an answering passion and emotional nakedness. Mullins is more than equal to these demands. As he progresses from impassioned lover to desiring and nauseated ex-lover to, finally, bitter but liberated self-knowledge, Mullins is riveting. In turn seductive, ironic, witty, broken or desolate, he embodies for us Carson's bittersweet paradox of romantic love.

The set looks beautiful, set against the stripped-back brick walls of The Tower, and is moodily and inventively lit by Richard Vabre, with moments where Mullins is holding a torch or lighting effects at crucial moments that imitate the explosive shock of a flashbulb (photography is a major metaphor through this piece). But for me the design is a major problem.

Anna Cordingley and Adam Gardnir have run the set the length of the Tower Theatre, with the audience facing the narrow stage. Mullins moves from one extreme end of the theatre to the other, from left to right. I presume that this inevitable movement across the stage is to reflect the text's obsession with the motion of time with a concomitant movement through space (the focus on time is reinforced by illuminated clocks either side of the stage which record the real time of the performance, almost exactly one hour, which dissonantly knocks against the stage time of a life story).

I was sitting a little to the right of centre, not so far from the middle, and for the first 20 minutes felt the distance; the necessity to lean to see and hear the performance impeded my absorption. The closer Mullins came, the more powerful the performance; I wondered if those seated at the other end of the theatre experienced a mirror-effect, losing intimacy as Mullins moved away from them. For a show of such delicacy, that depends crucially on the erotic dynamic between audience and performer, this seems needlessly alienating.

Mullins is the recipient of this year's George Fairfax Memorial Award, which he will use to create a new work with Anne Carson. Autobiography of Red makes me impatient to see what ensues from what is already a fascinating collaboration.

Picture: Luke Mullins in Autobiography of Red. Photo: Jeff Busby

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Your hostess with the mostest is up for the next in the Things on Sunday series at the Malthouse. It is the screening of the award-winning documentary The President versus David Hicks (2004), followed by a conversation with its writer-director, Curtis Levy, about his experiences in making the film and its relationship to his other works. Both promise to raise intriguing questions about the relationship between art, ethics, politics and everyday life. The President versus David Hicks won the 2004 AFI Best Documentary Award and the Most Outstanding Documentary Series at the 2005 LOGIE Awards. Curtis Levy’s other films include Hephzibah and The Queen Goes West.

Date: Sunday 24 September
Film screening: 1pm (81 mins)
Conversation with Curtis Levy: 2.30pm (60 mins)
Host: Alison Croggon
Cost: $10, free for subscribers
Subscribers will need to ring the Box Office 9685 5111 to book their free ticket. Bookings by phone or visit The CUB Malthouse, 113 Sturt Street Southbank

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I am going to renovate my lacksadaisically-updated and chaotic blogroll, promise - some new things there but it's all looking unalphabetical or something. And there are lots of other good non-theatre blogs I feel wicked for not including. While I wait for inspiration, check out the blog of Chris Goode, poet-at-large and director of Signal to Noise. It's called Thompson's Bank of Communicable Desire, and not only makes me laugh out loud but has good oil on, well, all sorts of things, but in the latest, on the Edinburgh Festival. Also, via Ghostlight, a fascinating 1996 interview with Theatre of the Oppressed director Augusto Boal.

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Honour Bound, conceived, directed and co-designed by Nigel Jamieson. Choreographed by Garry Stewart, composition and sound design by Paul Charlier, co-designer Nicholas Dare, lighting by Damien Cooper, video art by Scott Otto Anderson. Created in consultation with Terry and Bev Hicks. Performed and co-devised by DJ Garner, Alexandra Harrison, David Mueller, Marnie Palomares, Brendan Shelper and Paul White. Malthouse Theatre until October 1.

The correct question regarding the horrors committed in the camps... is not the question that asks hypocritically how it could have been possible to commit such atrocious horrors against other human beings; it would be more honest, and above all more useful, to investigate carefully how - that is, thanks to what juridical procedures and political devices - human beings could have been so completely deprived of their rights and prerogatives to the point that committing any act toward them would no longer appear as a crime.

Honour Bound, Nigel Jamieson's beautiful and harrowing physical theatre work about the Australian Guantanamo detainee David Hicks, begins with a recording of a reading of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is almost an exercise in nostalgia to hear this statement of ideals read with such solemnity and dignity:

"Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world; Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people..."

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is where legislative language, in its passion for clarity and unambiguous precision, attains an intensity of meaning akin to poetry. In 2006, it is hard to remember the force of the horrified revulsion which in 1948 deemed that such barbarities as Auschwitz must never happen again. Now such ideas are considered the province of left wing extremists and troublemakers. How we have moved on.

With his collaborators, Nigel Jamieson investigates the ways in which these UN ideals have been dismantled and destroyed through the story of David Hicks, who was captured fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001. Like many others, Hicks has been imprisoned since by the US Government in Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba as an "enemy combatant", a category invented to sidestep the Geneva Convention's laws on the treatment of prisoners of war, and has endured treatment which most civilised people would call torture.

In four years of captivity, he has been held without charge and without a chance of having any allegations against him tested in a court of law, and he has been allowed only one visit from his family, during which he was shackled to the floor. One of the shameful scandals of the Howard Government is how, unlike Britain - which brought its nationals held in Camp Delta home out of concern that they would be denied the due process of law - it has abandoned Hicks to his fate. So much for the rule of law.

But equally, and equally importantly, Honour Bound is a revelation of human pain: on the one hand, a father's grief at being unable to help his troubled son, and on the other, the physical pain inflicted on bodies by the State. Honour Bound demonstrates, in its darkest manifestations, the power of language to change and remake reality. It is exemplary political theatre-making of a rare intelligence and power: neither didactic nor exploitative, appealing neither to sentiment nor special pleading, it reveals its argument with a devastating visceral impact which left the first night audience stunned into silence.

Honour Bound takes its title from the slogan above Camp Delta's gate: "Honor Bound to Defend Freedom". The staggering irony of this - as profound as "Arbeit Macht Frei" above the gates of Auschwitz - seems to have escaped those who put it there, but it resonates with increasing force throughout this show, which exposes at once the relentless logic of the bureaucracy in which Hicks is imprisoned, and its terrifying irrationality.

In some ways, Jamieson and his collaborators have simply done what is obvious. An admirable moral clarity informs every aesthetic decision, which gives this show a weight of honesty which can be difficult to find in the medium of theatre. This is clear from the beginning, when the dancers enter in their underwear and put on the familiar orange jumpsuits of detainees: this gesture, which reveals to us the artifice of theatre, permits its subsequent truthfulness.

What follows is a collage of dance and movement, audio and visual documentary footage, music and digital projections, which Jamieson weaves seamlessly together into a sensually searing theatrical experience. Paul Charlier's sound design, Damien Cooper's lighting and Scott Otto Anderson's video art are all potent elements in this equation.

Nicholas Dare's set is a giant metal cage, a space of harsh edges against which is flung the fragile human body. Invoking both guards and prisoners, the dancers embody the brutalisation of imprisonment and torture with Garry Stewart's thrilling choreography. The sides of the cage become multi-dimensional, with dramatic aerial sequences that continually shift the ground of physical gravity. Tormented, shackled, distorted with pain and, above all, fully present in their physical vulnerability, there are times when the dancers are nigh unbearable to watch; and yet you cannot tear your eyes away.

Against these stylised representations, the documentary footage - most of which will be familiar - exerts a new power. It is as if the real and the imagined refract each other into a potent sense of darkness visible, which then turns its black illumination onto the audience (for we are complicit here, for better or worse, as witnesses, as citizens). The documentary material include interviews with David Hicks' father Terry and stepmother Beverly, images of Camp Delta, speeches by George W. Bush, letters from David Hicks, deliberations on the "enemy combatant" status of detainees and the infamous "torture memos" in which Donald Rumsfeld outlines permissible interrogation techniques.

This last is the occasion for one of the most spectacular images in the show: the memos are projected on the back of the cage like a long road of text, along which a dancer is running. The text flips and the dancer falls into an abyss of darkness; and then he begins to run and climb again, and again falls, and again, and again. As an image of the impact of the language of the State on real human bodies, I have never seen anything so cogent and powerful. Unless it is a sequence later in the show that reduced the audience to total, shocked silence: not a cough, not a rustle, not a breath.

It is important to emphasise that the potency of this theatre does not come from the revelation of appalling facts or from its ideological viewpoint, that it does not depend on flattering an audience's sense of moral superiority. Its ambitions are much more courageous and honest than that. It takes images that have become all too familiar in the past five years and reveals afresh their meanings and human implications by invoking their realities within our sensory imaginations.

The only opinions ventured in the show are those of Beverly and Terry Hicks, very ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances, and we are free to make of these what we will. Among the most devastating moments are where Terry Hicks is struggling with his inability to articulate the horror of what is happening to his son. The closest he comes is to say "it is not a good situation", which in its banal understatement is wrenchingly moving.

This is passionately committed art, but it eschews emotional manipulation, thus avoiding the traps of so-called "documentary theatre" or the theatre of journalism roundly condemned by the playwright Howard Barker. "There is great safety and security to be enjoyed in the exchange of conscience-ridden observations, affirmations of shared values, humanistic platitudes," says Barker. "But the stage remains essentially sterile, and the insistence on the representation of what passes for the real world only enhances the decadent sense of social responsibility while devastating the landscape of dramatic invention".

Such charges can't be leveled here: Jamieson and his collaborators compromise neither the theatre nor the realities they are representing - in this show there is neither pretence nor exploitative aestheticisation of human suffering. It is rigorous, intelligent work that takes big risks; it walks very consciously along an ethical and aesthetic tightrope. But, like its aerial dancers, it never falters.

I don't think it is an accident that some of the most powerfully affecting political theatre I have seen in the past couple of years has been physical theatre - Bagryana Popov's movement piece on asylum seekers, Subclass26A, and, more recently at the Malthouse, Kage Physical Theatre's Headlock. Fascinatingly, and I don't know why this is so, all three are about imprisonment. All these shows are very different from each other, but maybe what they have in common is their ability to communicate with devastating effectiveness the vulnerability and fragility of the human body.

Perhaps most tellingly, after this show (once they emerged from the stupefaction that is the initial response) everyone was talking: not only about the theatrical experience, but about the issues it raises. Honour Bound is theatre that demands its audience not only feels, but thinks: it throws the moral responsibility back onto us. It ought to be compulsory viewing for every Australian citizen. Don't miss it.

Picture: Alexandra Harrison and Brendan Shelper in Honour Bound. Photo: Jeff Busby

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A slight divagation in normal broadcasting to plug Em 4 Jay, Alkinos Tsilimidos' new film, which opens tonight at the George Cinema in St Kilda. There is a theatre connection - Em 4 Jay is Tsilimidos' film adaptation of Daniel Keene's 1980s play Low (full disclosure: I am married to this Keene fellow, so take the following comments how you please).

It premiered at this year's Melbourne International Film Festival, which is where I got to see why Alkinos has been looking so pleased with himself for the past year. This is a lot more than just another Australian junkie film: it's a haunting parable about sex, money and addiction, but most of all a tragic love story, in the tradition of Romeo and Juliet or Sid & Nancy.

For my money, this is Tsilimidos' best yet: the stripped aesthetic that was hinted at in films like Tom White and Silent Partner - his previous collaborations with Keene - is here fully realised. Performances of an almost unbelievable emotional authenticity from Nick Barkla and Laura Gordon, and film-making so unshowily classy that many people will miss it altogether. This is style that is all substance.

It's guaranteed to be on in the cinemas for about a week, so hurry to see it on the big screen before it disappears. It's worth it.
PS: For another view, aside from Jim Schembri's predictable dribblings, have a look at Nick Prescott's interesting discussion of the recent rash of junkie films in Australian Book Review, in which he comments: "Tsilimidos has drawn raw and edgy performances from young actors Laura Gordon and Nick Barkla, and has generated provocative and haunting results with this unflinchingly graphic film...this is stark, bleak drama, the stuff of the darkest imaginings of Mike Leigh or Ken Loach. Tellingly, though, Tsilimidos opens his film with a shot of the characters’ intertwined hands; despite every devastating thing that occurs throughout the course of the film, the narrative’s emotional centre is made very clear. This is a jarring love story, and it doesn’t provide anything like an uplifting conclusion....while much of that material is deeply confronting, what Tsilimidos is really showing us, in a superbly affecting way, is the inevitability of the film’s bleak conclusion. The moment Jay resorts to violence, we realise that the descent has begun. Em 4 Jay’s concluding images will haunt viewers’ minds and viscera for some time after they have faded from the screen."

Well, that's the film I saw.

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