So yesterday the Malthouse launches what is, on first sight, its best balanced season yet, demonstrating diversity, depth and - addressing a weak spot - a lot of work by women. It includes classical tragedy (Kosky's production of Euripides' The Women of Troy, with Robyn Nevin and Melita Jurisic) and a new Indigneous play (Dallas Winmar's Yibiyung, directed by Wesley Enoch). It includes dance (Shaun Parker's Blue Love), music theatre by Meow Meow (Vamp) and a remount of Ranter's exquisite Holiday. They've invited the bad boys from Black Lung in for a residency at the Tower. And - to my mind one of the biggest attractions - they've programmed Jenny Kemp's long-awaited new show, Kitten.

And what do we hear from the Age? That its "aesthetic vision is too limited" and lacks "diversity"! How much diversity do you want? But hey. Look at the byline. It's no surprise that this beat up is by Robin Usher, who has never permitted the facts to get in the way of a good snark.

Now, I could imagine criticising the Malthouse for having too much diversity: perhaps you could argue that by producing such a variety of work by such a variety of artists, they fail to create an autonomous identity as a company. But the Age critics complain, rather, that they have a house style that stamps everything they do into identikit theatre. Apparently Marius von Mayenburg is paying homage to Barrie Kosky (which is probably news to Mayenburg and to Kosky, but there we are). Ionesco's Exit the King was "too vaudeville". Too many pop songs. Etc.

Instead of being "too fringe" and "elitist", their crime a couple of years ago, these days they're producing too much "entertainment". ("Is this what we want from a subsidised theatre company?" asks Martin Ball). But people seem to have forgotten last year's experiments like Anna Tregloan's theatrical installation Black, or Uncle Semolina & Friends' OT, or Brian Lipson's A Large Attendance in the Antechamber or the achieved theatrical mastery of The Tell-Tale Heart - all, surely, examples of precisely what a subsidised theatre ought to be doing.

It goes on: Geoffrey Milne has dragged out that old canard, that they have "shot the writer". Now Geoffrey, I did some counting a while back (scroll down) and added up how many new Australian plays - actual plays - were produced in various years under the Kantor/Armstrong diumvuriate compared to the Playbox, and the figures show - unambiguously - that it's not true that the Malthouse has "abandoned" writers. Even this year they're producing five new plays - six, if you count Andrew Upton's libretto of Through the Looking Glass - which compares fine to the six new plays produced in Playbox's final year of operation.

And even a success story can be turned into failure - although ticket sales have increased by 20 per cent in the past year and they're running at 70 per cent capacity, more than twice the average capacity of Playbox days, Usher snitches that their audiences are "tiny" compared to the MTC. Although he strangely fails to mention that the MTC has theatres with twice (or even eight times) as many seats.

This kind of stuff makes me throw up my hands in bafflement and despair. Of course the Malthouse is not beyond criticism - all our companies ought to be scrutinised and held to account. But let's base criticisms on the work to hand, not on a bunch of lazy and unexamined assumptions.

There's rather more balanced coverage by Corrie Perkin in my home paper The Australian, here.

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Ollie and the Minotaur, by Duncan Graham, directed by Sarah John. With Sarah Brokensha, Adriana Bonaccurso and Wendy Bos. floogle in association with 9minds, @ fortyfivedownstairs, until May 10. Bookings: 9662 9966.

Naturalism is a term that is all too easily used and abused in Australian theatre. There was a time when theatre was divided into two camps, the naturalistic (represented by playwrights such as David Williamson or Hannie Rayson) and non-naturalistic (weird stuff like Barrie Kosky). I think - or at least, I devoutly pray - that those times are past, and that artists as diverse as Eugene Ionesco or Ben Johnson are no longer shovelled casually into the same basket.

But perhaps what most deeply puzzled me about these categorisations was that what was often called naturalism - more properly, a derivation of tv soap opera that a friend last night labelled "user-friendly theatre" - seemed to me to bear very little resemblance to plays that were properly described as naturalistic. Naturalism was considered to be an uncomplicatedly transparent reflection of "life as it is", rather than another form of theatrical artifice.


The great exemplar of theatrical naturalism, Henrik Ibsen, adapted the term for his own uses from the naturalistic novelists of the 19th century, such as Zola, whose literary ideas evolved from Charles Darwin. It is often forgotten that Ibsen's work was as influential to modernists such as James Joyce or the Surrealists as he was in the genesis of 20th century realist and naturalistic aesthetics. Or that a profound poetic underlies the work of those whom naturalism inspired, from Chekhov to Strindberg to Gorky to Shaw. Naturalism as we know it is most often a decadent idea, informed most of all by its alleged invisibility. It's become a default position of aesthetics, a form paradoxically defined by its absence.

Which brings me to floogle's production of Ollie and the Minotaur. floogle is an independent Adelaide company whose work I encountered last year, via an impressive production of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming. Then I was struck by this young company's unshowy stylishness and close attention to detail in language, design and performance. Ollie and the Minotaur is a profoundly intelligent exploration of naturalism that solidifies my respect: here the playwright Duncan Graham and director Sarah John resuscitate a deeply unfashionable theatrical form and demonstrate that there's a lot more to it than jejune representations of talking heads.

It's clear from the opening moments that Graham's play revisits a contemporary cliche, the reunion of old friends over a weekend, during which secrets are revealed and friendships unravelled. It's a plot that's been exploited in everything from the classic 80s movie The Big Chill to the tv comedy series Black Books. In this case, it's three women, Thea (Wendy Bos), Bec (Sarah Brokensha) and Carla (Adriana Bonaccurso), who have reunited at a beach house where they spent their some formative times in their adolescence.

They drink astounding amounts of gin: the most common gesture during the play is probably the refilling of glasses. And this constant impulse towards self-anaesthetisation is the first hint of the pain and brutality that the play reveals. Among other things, Ollie and the Minotaur is a confronting picture of contemporary Australian mores.

However, it's is as notable for how it confounds expectations as for how it fulfils them. Underneath its taut naturalistic surface - a deceptively transparent texture of frank colloquial language - is a poetic consciousness that unobtrusively draws on the potency of myth and tragedy, giving this apparently simple story of betrayal and self-deception a compelling resonance.

For all its surface comedy, it reveals an almost unrelievedly bleak vision. Its vocabulary is familiar, a casually obscene, colloquial slang that exploits contemporary icons from popular tv and movies. But it becomes apparent that this language is not there in its usual function of provoking the laughter of uneasy recognition. Rather, as the play progresses, the language gradually and inexorably exposes its own poverty, revealing the brutalisation that underlies contemporary attitudes to sexuality. In particular, perhaps, it exposes the self-inflicted misogyny of raunch culture, although this play is never explicitly moralising: its characters are presented without judgment, although they judge each other without mercy.

Thea and Bec are former lovers, bound together by an uneasy friendship cemented by Ollie, Thea's nine-year-old daughter, the product of a casual encounter when she was 18. Carla is the necessary third friend, ironic witness or butt of their jokes. It becomes clear that all of them are sexually damaged: Carla still lives with her adored father, and has a long-term relationship with a man who is serially unfaithful to her; Thea blames all her failed relationships with men on her daughter; and Bec has never had a relationship longer than five months.

This unpromising Sex and the City premise gradually winds you into a theatrical experience not unlike Long Day's Journey Into Night: a gruelling and ultimately shockingly honest exploration of the ways human beings damage each other and themselves. The myth of the minotaur underlies the structure: it is the ravening beast at the centre of the labyrinth of their mutual deceptions. And, we are given to understand, the only way out is through the slender thread laid by the mutual love these women have for the child we never see, Thea's daughter Ollie.

It's hard to fault the writing, although there are perhaps moments when scenes could be more economical. And the production, directed with an unerring eye for detail by Sarah John, is exemplary; this is a play that is all conversation, but the stage is always alive and dynamic, never merely a frame for static dialogue.

The staging is minimal, defined by black curtains that enclose the space: an uncluttered set - a kitchenette, an old lounge suite - gives us enough detail without compromising a subtly heightened sense of theatricality. The lighting too is unforgivingly minimal, with only one major change of state. It focuses your attention on the committed and nakedly honest performances from all three actors. Bos, Bonaccurso and Brokensha deliver detailed portrayals that, like the writing itself, shift unobstrusively towards a tragic denouement.

It's a reminder that naturalism isn't the child of television, but of poetry and classical tragedy. And of the true power of the form, which is its ability to directly confront contemporary language and mores within the heightened reality of theatre.

Picture: Wendy Bos and Sarah Brokensha in Ollie and the Minotaur.

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Ms TN set some kind of record this week - I inadvertently managed to book myself into three separate shows on a single night. (Apologies to the patient people who have rebooked my tickets). Together with my desk, which looks like a hurricane has hit it, it reflects my state of mind, which this week is very post-everything. It was symptomatic of how the past month has been that I returned home last Friday to find my publisher had sent me the proofs of my next book of poems, with a request that I reorder it for a shorter but hardback edition (good news, since being a poet between hard covers will make me feel really grown up but, ah, dammit, more work).

But my lack of posts this week doesn't mean the blog has been quiet. Oh no. The Serpent's Teeth has been prompting lively discussion (and very lively difference) in the blogosphere: not just here, where the discussion has ranged all around theatre and back again, but also at Australian Stage Online and over at Arts Journalist, where Nicholas Pickard has posted a kind of pre-review.

Meanwhile, speaking of Nicholas: he has also posted his Crikey story on the Creative stream's dissatisfactions at the 2020 Summit, which has prompted a couple of other bits of commentary. From the bunker, the plaint of misrepresentation is a big one - and not just from the creatives, but from other streams. (See Marcus Westbury's useful wrap-up too). Artists - perhaps predictably, and to my mind unjustly - seem to have copped most of the crap flying around. But it seems that a lot of 2020 participants are taking the idea that this is only the beginning of the conversation very seriously. This is certainly true of the creative stream. Also, the complaints about the lack of practitioners among the delegates puzzled me, so I went and counted: out of 102 people, there were at a rough estimate 33 practising artists. More than on your usual committee, I would venture...

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The Serpent's Teeth: Citizens and Soldiers, by Daniel Keene, directed by Pamela Rabe and Tim Maddock. Set design by Robert Cousins, costume design by Tess Schofield, lighting design by Nick Schlieper, composer/sound design Paul Charlier. With Brandon Burke, Peter Carroll, Marta Dusseldorp, Eden Falk, John Gaden, Steve Le Marquand, Ewen Leslie, Hayley McElhinney, Amber McMahon, Luke Mullins, Pamela Rabe, Emily Russell and Narek Armaganian/Josh Denyer. STC Actors Company @ the Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, until May 17.

1.

There is something about the act of theatre that can annihilate language. It can silence the critical voice that runs in the head, that background chatter that is continually questioning, taking notes, making impatient comments. Despite itself, that voice finds itself wholly absorbed in the present, its attention held, its sceptical distance destroyed. All sense of the passing of time vanishes.

It’s a rare experience, but that total absorption is what I seek in the theatre. And it’s what happened when I watched The Serpent’s Teeth, a diptych by Daniel Keene that opened last week at the Drama Theatre, performed by the STC’s Actors Company. When the lights came up at the end, I found in its immediate aftermath that I had nothing to say, that what I had just experienced had emptied my mind of anything so superficial as an opinion. I felt that the only proper reponse was to write a poem.


Yet it is probably true that I have never devoted so much thought to writing about a work of theatre. Ever since I heard, in the middle of last year, that The Serpent’s Teeth was to be programmed by the STC, I’ve been debating the ethical question of whether I should write about it. (Those interested in that internal debate can find it here: I would ask anyone who wants to attack me for writing about my husband’s work to consult this document, to save me the trouble of defending things I never asserted in the first place).

But in the end, all the laborious justifications fell away, swept aside by the theatre itself. More than anything else, I think this production is its own magnificent justification. Yes, my response – afterwards, if not in the intense experience of watching it – is conditioned by a certain personal pride. This is an ambition, a possibility, that I have believed in now for so many years – and not only in Daniel’s writing (I have long been aware, for example, of the austere integrity of Tim Maddock’s directing).

I know such work can call out of other artists their most serious and principled thinking, and permit the expression of their most ambitious art. I know this ambition is possible because I have seen it realised, but most often thousands of miles away from here.

But last week I saw it at the Sydney Opera House: a work of theatre in which every aspect held the others in a profoundly delicate formal balance, a work in which the differing disciplines of lighting, performance, direction, sound and text were each suspended in synthesis, bent towards a common desire.

At its most profound, theatre is always about the dissolution of the individual ego, which seeks instead a more permeable expression of its soul. The one and the many cease to oppose each other, and become the necessary elements of a complex, living dynamic. To achieve this is difficult: it is why failure is and must be part of the lexicon of theatre (“Fail again. Fail better.”) But on the rare occasions when this ambition is fully realised, it offers a brief glimpse of human possibility: a larger, more generous way of being.

2.

“Beauty,” said Ezra Pound, “is difficult”. It is difficult to see, difficult to create, difficult to negotiate. Yet at its core is always something very simple: one human being perceiving with newly rinsed eyes the world that he or she lives in. Beauty is something that only belongs to human beings: it is an aesthetic order we make out of the chaos of experience, the vulnerability of truthfulness. There is always an ethical aspect to representation, a moral question in the making of beauty, which is why, when it is most terribly honest, it is sometimes considered neither ethical nor moral.

Beauty is what artists make. Very often the beauty they create is not considered beautiful at all: it is too full of human sorrow, human flaws, human danger and violence. Artists take the unbeautiful world and show us its beauties. In order to do this, they sometimes destroy our cherished ideas about what we consider beauty to be. That is as it should be: flux and change and ambiguity are all we will ever know of certainty.


Artistic beauty emerges from structure: artists make things. Daniel Keene has offered, in Citizens and Soldiers, two objects made out of words. They are sculpted with a stern, even fierce poetic, austere and plain and finely honed as a surgeon’s scalpel. They are two very different explorations of the formal possibilities of theatre, but each rhymes with the other to make a third thing: a diptych that meditates on different aspects of the price of living with war.

It is possible to read these plays and experience them as you might any other work of literature, as autonomous worlds made out of language. But they are plays, designed to be expressed by the breath and bodies of actors, to be choregraphed in the three-dimenional space of a stage. They are words written for theatre, designed ultimately to be written on the air and to vanish in their saying, into the past, into memory.


Citizens and Soldiers are plays about love. Not love as it is understood in romance novels or Hallmark greeting cards, but love as it is: the generous wound of need, the binding that draws people together, the anguish of the understanding that we are not alone, and that our fate depends upon others. It is love that makes one face more precious than another, that makes us understand that our private selves are embedded in other lives, that we are larger than we realise. In love lies the seeds of hatred and betrayal and sorrow; it contains all the trivial and mundane irritations of human relationship, the silences of what cannot be expressed, the gulfs that open between people, the desire that speaks across these gulfs but can never close them. The possibility of love is the only thing that gives me hope for the human race.

Everyone in these two fictions – one set before the wall that bisects Palestine, the other in an aircraft hangar in Australia where five families wait for the remains of their men to be flown home from war – acts out of love. A man takes his mute grandson on a long walk to swap an olive tree for an orange tree, a token of peace exhanged for a token of beauty. A woman seeks schoolbooks so her daughter can study. Each person present in the hangar is there because they loved the man who is now dead and must now face the anguish of his absence. And it is this difficult love that illuminates the tragedy and comedy of these humble stories about war, that gives them their meaning, that invites us towards understanding.

One can moralise about war, but these plays do not invite such moralising. It is impossible to moralise about love. It is too complex, too contradictory, too necessary. This is not art that seeks to moralise. It simply says: on either side of this stage, we are all human. All of us.

3.

The central character in Citizens is a wall. It has been built hurriedly out of concrete blocks, a raw fact that bisects the world between here and there, ours and theirs. It looms at the front of the stage, defining a narrow strip strewn with rubble. The actors may only enter from the right or the left: all other choices are forbidden them. The wall has a voice that rises and falls. It might be surf or the low rumble of a hidden city. It might just be the wind.

It pulses in the light.

***

When we return for Soldiers, the wall has vanished. In its place is a cavernous, industrial space. We cannot see the ceiling. In the first play, we are confronted by the brutal, horizontal line of the wall. The second is dominated by a high vertical, the huge double doors of the hangar at the back of the stage, which the actors open and close, letting in sharp diagonals of light.

There is no sound except the actors' voices and footsteps and the metallic clang as the doors close.

***

Narrative here is about place. Light sculpts the narrative, binds it together, gives it meaning. It shapes time into the measure of a human breath. It carves the emotional spaces through which the actors walk, so we are aware of the darkness that surrounds them, of the shadows that stir in their hearts and spring behind each gesture of their hands. Light heightens the intimate vulnerability of their bodies, mercilessly illuminating every nuance of expression, and then it dwarfs their human measure, and they vanish into its harsh brilliance.

***

We are always aware we are watching a stage, on which actors are performing. There is no pretence otherwise. The few objects we see -- an orange, a shopping trolley, a toy plane -- become richly imbued with our attention. An orange is simply an orange, but it is also a metaphor. What that metaphor means is up to us.

We are watching a dance. In Citizens, it is a dance of bodies restricted to a narrow strip, "contained, pure, narrow, human", in which we briefly witness fragments of very ordinary lives: a married couple painfully squabble as they rest from an exhausting journey, or a man and his daughter journey to a funeral beneath an absurd yellow umbrella, or a young woman takes her injured dog to the vet in a cardboard box.


In Soldiers, we are watching a theatrical liturgy, a meditation on grief. The empty stage is stripped to its most essential elements -- actors, light, space. The space is alive: it breathes, changes, swells and shrinks. In one moment we are watching a man alone in a strip of light that knifes across the darkness. He is weeping. The single action of his grief fills the theatre:

The man we surround, the man no one approaches
simply weeps, and does not cover it, weeps
not like a child, not like the wind, like a man
and does not declaim it, nor beat his breast, nor even
sob very loudly—yet the dignity of his weeping

holds us back from his space, the hollow he makes about him
in the midday light, in his pentagram of sorrow,
and uniforms back in the crowd who tried to seize him
stare out at him, and feel, with amazement, their minds
longing for tears as children for a rainbow...

In another moment, almost without our noticing, the stage inhales: before us is a chorus from a classical tragedy that echoes our own witnessing, that stands and watches as we watch. In each moment, a sense of absolute, razor-sharp spatial intelligence, a restraint that releases emotional pressure only when it is most telling, when it will break our hearts.

Echoes everywhere, fragments of our theatrical past: the ghosts of Beckett, Miller, Kroetz, Chekhov, flit across the stage and vanish.

***

It is not real: it is a work of theatre.

What is real is feeling. Every detail of voice and breath, each gesture, each step, is shaped into the communication of feeling. Within the stark formality of the direction and design is the discipline of the performances, and welling within each of those is a vast generosity, an ocean of tears veined with laughter.


We recognise each gesture, each expression, each voiced nuance of emotion. If we do not know what it is to live with war, we understand thirst and weariness. We might not have mourned a dead son, but we all understand loss. The performances enter embodied experience and pierce the membrane of imagination. We recognise, with pained delight, the shape of our own own sorrows. And our joys.


4.

I haven't yet named anybody except the writer. This is a true ensemble production: there are no stars, nor even any major roles, and it is impossible to pick out a single aspect of production or performance without feeling that I am doing an injustice to the rest.

But credit must be given. Nick Schlieper's lighting design is revelatory: I am not sure that I have seen lighting so richly expressive, so deeply integrated into text, design and performance. Robert Cousins' stark staging eschews any hint of naturalism. He offers the integrity of a theatrical space, employing an absolute minimum of elements to maximum effect. As crucial as Cousins' spare vision are the acutely noted details of Tess Schofield's costumes and, in Citizens, Paul Charlier's unobstrusive but pregnant soundscape.

The performative depth of this production would not have been possible without the Actors Company ensemble. These plays are demanding, formally and emotionally, and the slightest misjudgement would smudge their delicacies. They give actors no time in which to establish character: they must be immediately present in all their fullness, or they will not be there at all. Only a group of accomplished actors who have worked together for years could attain the richness, complexity and emotional honesty these plays demanded. Perhaps for the first time, this production exploits the full capacities of this remarkable company.


Citizens and Soldiers are beautifully directed, by Pamela Rabe and Tim Maddock respectively; they reveal two different visions of theatrical possibility, each of which profoundly understands how the larger dynamics of space and time interact with the detail of performance and text. In each, the meanings and formal shapes of the plays emerge organically through the action on stage: nothing is inessential, nothing is signposted. Together, Rabe and Maddock have created a stern and deeply gentle beauty, a pure act of theatre that uncompromisingly reveals the impure complexities of human beings.

Pictures from top (left to right): Josh Denyer and Pamela Rabe in Soldiers; Peter Carroll and Hayley McElhinney in Citizens; cast, Soldiers; Steve Le Marquand and Marta Dusseldorp in Citizens; Brandon Burke, John Gaden and Steve La Marquand in Soldiers; Josh Denyer and John Gaden in Citizens. Photos: Brett Boardman.

Other views
Australian Stage Online
The Sydney Morning Herald
The Australian
Daily Telegraph
Nicholas Pickard (Sydney Arts Journalist)
Variety
Kevin Jackson's Theatre Reviews

References
Worstward Ho by Samuel Beckett
The Second Duino Elegy by Rainer Maria Rilke
An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow by Les Murray

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In today's Australian, art critic Sebastian Smee ponders whether criticism is at all defensible. And confesses that critics "are hobbled by jealousy". (I'm not, believe me - I suspect I enjoy looking at other people's work principally because I want to get away from mine, in the spirit of TS Eliot's observation that "only those with personality know what it means to want to get away from it").

Smee cavils at the thought of criticism playing any kind of educative role, or that it plays any important part in stimulating a culture. Here I'd take issue: without pumping criticism up as more important than it is, it's all too easy to trace the direct effects of a dull, ill-informed critical culture. Or to see what happens when critical responses are more than exercises in establishing some kind of snarky superiority over the reader or the artists. And Smee goes on to remark something I think is crucial, if often more observed in the breach: that criticism ought to be pleasurable to read. And his conclusion is on the money:

Good criticism (and I mean this as an expression of an ideal) should be risky, challenging, candid and vulnerable. It should be urbane one moment, gauchely heartfelt the next. It should kick against cant wherever it sees it, and cherish and applaud not only art but the impulse to make art, for that impulse, which comes out of life as it is lived, is the real mystery, and the source of everything that makes it wonderful.

PS: It seems to be a week for navel-gazing. Andrew Haydon ponders the dwindling British blogosphere and his own changing critical practice - in particular, he pokes the dilemma of "what one does with reviewing the work of people who, by no fault of one's own, one turns out to know to some extent". (I say, simple: be as honest as you can, and use your privileged insight to become a better critic: but then, I would say that...) And across the Atlantic, George Hunka questions utilitarian attitudes towards art, suggesting that "an art of theatre disclaims any responsibility for culture or politics even as it examines most intently cultural and political concerns – its interests are elsewhere." And is steadily posting those meditations he calls Organum, which this week includes the superb art of Paul Cava.

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Just back from Sydney, of which more in due course (once I plant a few trees to offset my carbon footprint, get some sleep and find my brain, which I know I left somewhere...) In between hopping on and off planes, I've been furiously journalising. To think that I thought I had given all that up! One bit of which, my report on the 2020 Summit, ran in the Culture section of yesterday's Guardian.

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Venus & Adonis by William Shakespeare, directed by Marion Potts. Set and costumes by Anna Tregloan, lighting design by Paul Jackson, composition by Andrée Greenwell, sound design by David Franzke. With Melissa Madden Gray and Susan Prior, music performed by Ben Hauptmann, David Hewitt and Ryan Williams. Malthouse Theatre and Bell Shakespeare, @ The Beckett, CUB Matlhouse, until May 4. Bookings: 9685 5111

Reading the scholars on Shakespeare can sometimes be unexpectedly diverting. F.T. Prince, who edited the Arden edition of Shakespeare’s poems, remarks of his early poem Venus and Adonis that “few English or American readers nowadays will respond to such happily wanton fancies”.

Prince says that this explains why, for all its artistic success, Venus and Adonis is considered a lesser achievement in the Shakespearean canon. How times change. It is precisely this pagan lubriciousness that makes it seem so fresh and vigorous in the 21st century.


The poem is based on an episode in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which the goddess of love, Venus, takes the beautiful Adonis as her first mortal lover, before he is killed in a hunting accident. Shakespeare’s innovation was to make Adonis spurn Venus’s advances.

The poem becomes a dramatic paean to erotic desire, frustration and sorrow. Its melding of delicate rhetoric and blunt colloquialism, forged in an urgent poetic vision, presages Shakespeare’s later plays. Marion Potts’ stunning theatrical adaptation, Venus & Adonis, joyously celebrates Shakespeare’s Elizabethan frankness and the sensual eloquence and wit of his language.

As in the poem, the dominant voice is that of womanly passion, amplified through the two performers who play the part of Venus, Melissa Madden Gray (best known by her cabaret nom de plume Meow Meow) and Susan Prior.

Adonis is the audience, whom these performers must seduce. And although the hero remains elusive, we become putty in Venus’s four hands as she finds herself suspended in torment between animal lust and divine love.

Madden Gray and Prior pant, writhe, plead and weep as they prowl around a luxurious 1970s-style hotel room. Anna Tregloan’s stage, gorgeously lit by Paul Jackson, is enclosed in a curtained, low-roofed box. At the back is another curtain which opens to reveal the band playing behind a barred window amid a riot of tropical plants.

The performance moves from self-conscious displays of seduction – the offering of the body, or comically staged tantrums and tears – to a profound enactment of the anguish and ecstasy of love.

This is in no small part due to Andrée Greenwell’s exquisite score, which sets some of the verses to subtly updated Elizabethan harmonies that take full advantage of the vocal talents of the actors. When fused with the opulent artistry of Shakespeare’s language, it creates moments of sheerly bewitching beauty.

Here, as Shakespeare said in a later play, is indeed “art to enchant”.

Picture: Melissa Madden Gray and Susan Prior in Venus & Adonis. Photo: Jeff Busby

This review was published in today's Australian. There's much more to say about this production, but I don't have time to say it; I'm off to Sydney today after a Very Important Interview this morning (of which, I hope, more later), and hoping like hell life returns to what passes for normal next week.

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Yesterday, I felt like Wil E. Coyote after he's been thumped by a giant hammer. That little flattened concertina shape was Ms TN, just back from the 2020 Summit. On Friday afternoon, I registered as an official 2020 Summiteer, put on the blue-ribboned lanyard of the Creative Australia stream (for "best in show", as poet Peter Goldsworthy remarked), and entered a surreal parallel universe.

It was a world of corridors and party rooms and the Lego gigantism of Parliament House. It was instant media feedback via huge screens in the Great Hall, in which events I had witnessed live that morning were rendered in the afternoon as image and symbol, already swollen into myth. It was a thousand conversations. It was an exhilarating, bruisingly exhausting experience, and I wouldn't have missed it for anything.

The 2020 Summit was at once exciting, frustrating and disappointing. It was, above all, a startling expression of collective goodwill, a fascinating and – for all its faults – inspiring experiment in open government. The weekend ran the whole gamut, from the genuinely moving opening event to the bizarre disconnection of Sky Channel vox pop interviews which seemed to have nothing to do with anything under discussion.

I spent most of the weekend on a steep learning curve, attempting to understand some new and strange vocabularies. The first was the language of “facilitation”. This process, run by volunteers from private corporations, involves industrial quantities of butcher paper, textas and white boards, and is supposedly designed to permit the rapid transmission and synthesis of ideas.

The second was the language of politics, the massaging of message into digestible chunks. Or, as many Creative Australia delegates complained on Sunday after they heard the presentation of the interim 2020 report, into pap. Nobody felt that what was presented on Sunday was a fair representation of what had emerged from our collective labour. (A rather less hurriedly put together report has since emerged).

There were 102 Creative Australia delegates (or Creatives, as we were inevitably tagged). The mix was diverse and by no means predictable. It included, as has been dutifully noted by the press, a fair proportion of glamour, and this rather obscured the collective intellectual weight, which included economists, commentators, producers, curators of museums and galleries, broadcasters, artists, bureaucrats and philantropists.

This weight was evident in the discussions that ensued, and equally in Cate Blanchett's accomplished handling of proceedings. Her co-chairs were media academic Julianne Schultz and Arts Minister Peter Garrett. They, and the increasingly grey-faced facilitator Andy Schollum, always faced a difficult task: it was, as Blanchett remarked, a question of "herding cats".

Creative Australia represented a dizzying range of interests, and it was always going to be a challenge to shape all these voices into coherent policy suggestions. But it happened. It's just going to be a few weeks before the full breadth of the thought that happened that weekend is clear. What will be even more interesting will be the continuing conversation that has been invited by the government.

Evident from the beginning was a palpable pragmatism. Contrary to popular belief, arts workers tend to be very practical. And they’re also used to collaborating and negotiating difference, so the individual discussions were notably free of conflict or grandstanding.

Everyone expected the Creatives to ask for more money. The Creatives were more concerned that the rest of Australia understood what they had to give. Among the benefits discussed were social and individual health, cultural intelligence, economic stimulus and international status.

And, for all the multiple interests, there were clear areas of common concern.

As it was across many streams, education was a big issue. It was seen as a means of ensuring cultural literacy and fostering a community open to new ideas, and of demonstrating in the only way that counts - in the fabric of people’s day-to-day lives – what the arts and creativity have to offer.

Education was connected with the need to strongly address the issue of inclusion. There was a broad awareness that too many Australians feel disenfranchised from culture, either because of social issues (ticket prices are too high, or it’s only for perceived “elites”) or geographical isolation.

Another area of major concern was that, while the creative economy supports many jobs, from arts managers to ushers, the artists whose work underpins this economy still find it difficult to scrape a living. Yet another was to place Indigenous identity at the centre of Australian identity, as is the case in New Zealand. Probably the major understanding underpinning discussion was the need to seek resources outside governmental support.

Even in the few hours allotted on Saturday, the stream came up with a wide range of ideas, though on Saturday night many people felt dissatisfied. More than a few felt they had been hijacked by a pre-set agenda, and that they hadn’t been able to speak to their areas of expertise.

On Sunday morning, when they presented the document that supposedly summed up the previous day’s work, the co-chairs and facilitators faced a minor revolt. Overnight, the plethora of ideas that the delegates had produced had been presented to the Prime Minister and then boiled down by the facilitators into “Priority Themes” and “Top Ideas”. And it seemed to many delegates that some major concerns had been lost in translation.

It was here that we hit the central conflict in the notion of the 2020 Summit. On the one hand, we were being encouraged to boldly imagine a new Australia. On the other, the message was clear: whatever we came up with had to meld with ALP policy if it had to have a chance of being implemented. And a key phrase was “cost neutral”.

Politics, remarked Otto von Bismarck, is the art of the possible. Grasping that nettle, the delegates hijacked the agenda back to their own concerns, and got down to some serious work outlining specific policy ideas. However, that work was barely visible in the plenary session report, which left a number of Creatives stunned and disappointed. (“There were,” said one delegate dryly, “issues of collation”.)

Some points seemed disappear completely in the process: among them, a strong call for rethinking public broadcasting and the issue of responsibility towards climate change. Others surprisingly appeared: when Mr Rudd mentioned summer schools, the entire Creative stream went blank ("summer schools? who said summer schools?") More generally, some concerns never quite made it to the whiteboards: a major oversight in the general debate was the digital gaming design industry, supposedly an area slated for discussion.

It was clear from the beginning that the issue of the income of individual artists was a hot potato. Even a low-cost, low administration and effective scheme like the creation income tax exemption, which has been a successful arm of Irish arts policy for 36 years, was too much like giving money to artists. Which demonstrates how much public discourse is still conditioned by the culture wars of the past decade. Not to mention upcoming economic gloom.

For all the criticisms, the general mood was upbeat, excited and hopeful. Nobody present felt the 2020 Summit was a cynical exercise in public relations. Far from it: it was an inspiring invitation to a participatory democracy, and it resulted in some valuable and stimulating discussions and ideas. If even a few ideas are adopted, it will change things. And the placing of the arts and creativity so prominently in the centre of a new identity for Australia signals a radical shift.

Delegates were continually assured that the missing issues will be noted in the full 2020 report, which will be available in a few weeks, and will each be considered by the government. And Mr Rudd – and the Creative Co-Chairs – have been at pains to emphasise that this is the beginning of the conversation, not the end of it.

They can be sure that delegates will take them at their word. Perhaps the most interesting part of this Summit will be watching what happens now.

A shorter version of this report appears in today's Australian. Picture: the "best in show" lanyards.

Links
Summiteer Julian Meyrick's report in today's Age
Summit observations from music lawyer Adam Simpson

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The Green Room Awards were announced on Sunday. I would have been there - I'm on the Theatre - Companies panel and had more than a passing interest in the results - but had that other pressing commitment up in Canberra. But other bloggers are onto it - Chris Boyd has the lowdown on The Morning After, and Ming, who is presently putting the fire back into feminism, quotes panel convenor Katerina Kokkinos-Kennedy's judging notes, which comment on the continuing gender imbalance in major company directors.

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I'm back home, feeling like I've been through a mangle. I'm writing a report for tomorrow, so watch this space.

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