Anatomy Titus: Fall of Rome: A Shakespeare Commentary, by Heiner Müller, translated by Julian Hammond, and directed by Michael Gow. Designed by Robert Kemp, lighting design by Matt Scott, composition and sound design by Brett Collery. With John Bell, Robert Alexander, Thomas Campbell, Peter Cook, Scott Johnson, Nathan Lovejoy, Steven Rooke, Christopher Sommers and Timothy Walter. Bell Shakespeare and Queensland Theatre Company @ the CUB Malthouse until December 6.

Heiner Müller, the defining post-war playwright of the East German stage, understood power. Its machinations were the obsession of his art and his life. It's easy to see why he was so fascinated by Shakespeare who, like Müller, saw theatre and history as two sides of the same coin. He wrote three major adaptations of Shakespeare's work - Macbeth, Hamletmachine and Anatomy Titus - among a slew of other works that grappled with classic texts.


Müller's motives in approaching classical works were never pure, and expressed his intellectual and ideological restlessness, a certain necessary lack of respect. "A classical literature," he said in 1975, "is first of all a literature of a class". Just as his admiration of Brecht turned him into Brecht's most excoriating critic, so he approached the classics in order to subject them to explosive critique. His version of Hamlet was, as Müller said, "the shrunken head of the Hamlet tragedy", splintering Hamlet's subjectivity in order to expose the "something rotten" in contemporary society. And his version of Titus, which cuts the play and interpolates the text with commentary, exposes the blood-soaked, gratuitous violence of contemporary empire.

Shakespeare's original was an early text, heavily influenced by Seneca. It's gore-drenched schlock, so lurid with ultra-violence - rape, mutilation, murder, cannibalism - that the bloodiness becomes ludicrous. Müller's adaptation historicises Shakespeare's splatterfest. In Anatomy Titus, written in the shadow of the CIA-led coup against Chilean president Allende, the exploited colonies of empire - the Germanic Goths and Africa - take their revenge against Rome, even as Rome, decadent and swollen with power, betrays its own.

After the geopolitical adventures of the past decade, its contemporary aptness ought to be obvious. The amorality of power is here written starkly, a text of violence that inscribes itself on the bodies of its victims and leaves in its wake a pile of corpses. There is no lesson to be learned in this violence, no message to be taken (as Müller said - quite honestly I think - in a 1990 interview, "I'm no ideologue. I use Marxism as a material, in the same way I use a Shakespeare play... this becomes form and is valid as such.")

In the same breath, Müller speaks about the absurd obscenity of the first world's treatment of what was then the third world. His insistence that he was only interested in his writing often is taken as cynicism: in fact it is a form of idealism, an aggressive rejection of the contemporary insistence on looking for meaning behind a work, which he thought a sign of decadence. One cannot escape the political critique of Müller's work: at the same time, to think that political critique is the point is to miss the point entirely.

In Müller's Titus, we can't but be aware that the stage violence, however excessive or ludicrous, has literal analogies in the Middle East, in South-East Asia and India, in the mountains of the Caucasus and Pakistan. No playwright's imagination, not even Shakespeare's, outdoes human inventiveness in actual cruelty. But Müller's primary concern was with the politics of artistic form. "Perhaps Godard formulated it best," he said in a 1987 interview. "The task is not to make political movies, but to make movies politically. What is political is the treatment of the material. In other words, it's the form, not the content. That's the problem with young radical movements when they deal with art. What they end up with is philistinism."

Eager revolutionaries aren't the problem in this production, which is rather an exercise in muting Müller's formal radicality. All the same, it's good to see Bell Shakespeare tackling this challenging text, which is a welcome shift from its earlier, shonkily contemporised productions. Julian Hammond's translation, which includes a good deal of the original Shakespeare, is a tough realisation of Müller's savage and excoriating lyricism. (As an aside, it would be interesting to know whether Müller's play translated Shakespeare's English into contemporary German, or left it in a pastiche of, as it were, Elizabethan German - each would have a very different effect). But you have to listen hard to hear the language through the noise of Michael Gow's production.

Watching this very uneven show, I often felt as if I were witnessing a copy of something, a production that goes half-way. It is as if it begins with the best of intentions, only to waver at the sticking point: it has its moments, but they founder beneath a wider formal uncertainty. When you enter the theatre, the stylistic language looks promising enough: Robert Kemp's set is a simple box, white walls smeared with red. Back stage is a wall topped with books, the intellectual fruit of civilisation, which will be torn and besmirched with blood, and in the centre is an industrial barrel which, we soon find out, is full of gore. The all-male cast is dressed in contemporary casual clothes and, as with Dood Paard's meta-theatrical adaptation of Titus at last year's Melbourne Festival, assign each other their different roles.

Even though I know the play quite well, I found the first ten minutes deeply confusing. Müller dispenses with the first act, replacing it with a bald summary of events, but this is rushed through in the telling. I was so busy keeping up with the chorus work that nothing fixed in my mind. Once I'd sorted out the plot, I still had problems negotiating a mish-mash of theatrical intentions. If the production is so stripped back, why have herald's trumpets suddenly ringing out in isolated scenes? Wherefore lighting changes that transform the naked stage into more conventional theatrical spaces? Why does the Emperor (Nathan Lovejoy) sound like someone from Monty Python's Life of Brian?

There's no doubt (believe it or not) that Müller is funny. His humour is, however, blacker than the inside of a cat, corrosive and subversive. He's a specialist in the kind of laughter that arises from a literal apprehension of catastrophe, from the felt knowledge that there are wounds beyond the help of therapy or redemption. He would be the first to reject a holy reverence towards his texts. All the same, I find it very difficult to think of his work as camp.

But an undeniable campness runs through this production, from the Emperor's lisp to Lavinia's lipsticked pouts. Peter Cook's portrayal of the vengeful Goth queen Tamora, on the other hand, doesn't press so hard on gendered stereotypes, and is the more effective for it. I'm not sure why the decision to have an all-male cast should result in such posturings: one reason given, which suggests some of the problems in the direction, is that the rape and mutilation of Lavinia (Thomas Campbell) is less hard to take if she is played by a man. A major effect is to empty the play of its dark lusts; they become a joke, merely an exercise in pushing the boundaries of taste.

The treatment of the African slave Aaron (a bravura performance by Timothy Walter) pierces through the camp to something more interesting. It is played in crude blackface: when we first see Walker, he is wearing a gorilla mask, and the racial representations become successively more outrageous. Aaron's baby is even represented by a gollywog. Shakespeare's play is nakedly racist, and in this production it's amplified to acute discomfort.

However, even here the effect draws back from reflection on its larger implications - the wealthy world's exploitation of Africa, which is driven in its abjection to nihilistic revenge - to a more personally-sized racism. The action is divorced from its larger political implications and historical context - the very aspects highlighted in Müller's text - and the disturbance stirred by the racism becomes that much more manageable.

The cast, as so often in Bell Shakespeare productions, is uneven; and this text, even more than conventional Shakespeare, demands actors who can deal with complex language. This perhaps accounts in part for my feeling in many scenes that I couldn't quite grasp the words. John Bell plays Titus, and for the first third stalks around the stage as stiff as a board. Once Titus goes crazy, you begin to see why Bell is so respected as a Shakespearean actor: he eats up the role with gluttonous relish.

But all this beautiful language led me back to wondering why, if "poetry is murder", as Müller claims in the play, we have so much lovely enunciation of it. It's as if its beauty remains, at the core, an unquestioned good. I found myself longing for the language to be somehow assaulted in the performances, rather than preserved intact in the midst of mayhem.

In short, Anatomy Titus seems neither one thing nor 'tother. It's caught uncomfortably between radicality and convention, and ultimately blurs to something uncomfortably close to jolly japes about mutilation. In the chaos of gesture, Müller's formal inquiry is obscured, reduced to the merely sensational: punches are pulled everywhere.

It's Gow's misfortune to have mounted this play hard on the heels of Barrie Kosky's potent evocation of Greek tragedy in The Trojan Women, and with Dood Paard's brilliant and funny realisation of Titus still in recent memory. For all their different approaches, both the earlier productions were exemplary in their wrought simplicity, in how each production employed only the elements that were necessary to its purpose. What emerged was a burnished lucidity, a deep lustre in which the original text burned with renewed relevance. The most crucial lack in this production of Anatomy Titus is a concomitant sense of artistic necessity.

Picture: John Bell as Titus in Anatomy Titus.

Lifting my studious head from the bloody skirmishes of 5th century Denmark, I stumbled over a report which claimed that things appear scarcely less bloody in Melbourne. Today Nicholas Pickard passes on an unconfirmed tip from Crikey which claims that Arts Victoria is about to defund some important local arts bodies.

Names named include Chamber Made Opera, Ballet Lab, Elision and Astra. An alarmed Ms TN phoned Chamber Made - which this year lost its Australia Council Music Board funding, another story to warm the cockles of the heart - and was assured that Arts Victoria is still on board. "In fact," said general manager Geoffrey Williams, "the State Government has increased its funding this year. I can assure you, if our funding were cut, you would hear the screams from there."

So that's good news, and it seems we can put the kybosh on that story. Chamber Made is pushing on stubbornly, despite losing, along with a number of other local organisations, its triennial funding status with the Oz Council. This focuses the dilemmas that face arts organisations which cross artform boundaries - in this case, music and theatre. There's been a fair bit of a musical comedy going on in the Music Board recently, who are the body of choice for funding music theatre. Among other things, they wonder why music theatre companies need so much more money than companies that just put on concerts... It culminated, according to Williams, with their deciding this year to fund no music theatre companies at all.

Instead, they've set aside $350,000 next year - "our money", as Williams said - which anyone interested in mounting music theatre can apply for. This rather broad category includes Broadway musicals and classical operas as well as the more difficult area of contemporary music theatre. Despite the difficulties, Williams says that they're optimistic that they'll mount at least one production, and possibly two, next year. So rumours of their death are definitely premature.

It's gone quiet because I'm back with Beowulf and the Geats, squinting through the Anglo-Saxon and picking out another version. I'm now about halfway through. Why? It's not like the world needs a new translation. Maybe I just want some light diversion from the mayhem and slaughter of crrriticking.

Back later this week.

(Image: first page of the Beowulf codex, British Museum)

Care Instructions by Cynthia Troup, directed by Margaret Cameron. Music by David Young, lighting design by Danny Pettingall. With Jane Bayly, Liz Jones and Caroline Lee. La Mama @ The Courthouse until November 29.

I Like This, choreographed and directed by Antony Hamilton and Byron Perry. Lighting and sound by Antony Hamilton and Byron Perry. Costumes by Paula Levis. With Antony Hamilton, Stephanie Lake, Alisdair Macindoe, Byron Perry and Lee Serle. Chunky Move - The Next Move, Chunky Move Studio, until November 29.

O, my back, my back, my bach! I’d want to go to Aches-les-Pains. Pingpong! There’s the Belle for Sexaloitez! And Concepta de Send-us-pray! Pang! Wring out the clothes! Wring in the dew! Godavari, vert the showers! And grant thaya grace! Aman. Will we spread them here now? Ay, we will. Flip ! Spread on your bank and I’ll spread mine on mine. Flep! It’s what I’m doing. Spread ! It’s churning chill. Der went is rising. I’ll lay a few stones on the hostel sheets. A man and his bride embraced between them. Else I’d have sprinkled and folded them only. And I’ll tie my butcher’s apron here. It’s suety yet. The strollers will pass it by. Six shifts, ten kerchiefs, nine to hold to the fire and this for the code, the convent napkins, twelve, one baby’s shawl. Good mother Jossiph knows, she said. Whose head? Mutter snores? Deataceas! Wharnow are alle her childer, say? In kingdome gone or power to come or gloria be to them farther? Allalivial, allalluvial!

Sometimes it's assumed that the sheer pleasure of playfulness indicates a concomitant lack of seriousness. This makes me think of a Chinese ink drawing I saw many years ago at the old Melbourne Museum, a portrait of an enormously fat Buddhist monk reclining idly on the ground. I have seldom seen such knowingness so economically expressed in a few brushstrokes. He was looking out with an expression of profound, unmalicious mischief, his face luminous with some deep, mysterious joy: he seemed to hold within him a bubbling fountain of laughter on the verge of erupting. I know just about everything, the monk seemed to be saying. But, in the face of eternity, human knowledge is a huge joke. So pass me the rice wine and the dumplings...

At the other end of the scale - or maybe not - is the seriousness of children at play. For children, play is crucial means of discovering their worlds, of beginning to grapple with the things that baffle or frighten or fascinate them. The truthful aspect of the oft-cited (and pejorative) description of artists as "childish" is that artists have never stopped playing. Why, after all, are plays called plays? And this playfulness is particularly clear in these two pieces of theatre, one a dance, one a beautiful realisation of a poetic text.

The Women of Troy by Euripides, adapted by Tom Wright and Barrie Kosky, directed by Barrie Kosky. Designed by Alice Babidge, lighting by Damien Cooper, musician Daryl Willis, sound design by David Gilfillan. With Robyn Nevin, Melita Jurisic, Arthur Dignam, Natalie Gamsu, Queenie van der Zandt, Jennifer Vuletic, Patricia Cotter and Kyle Rowling, Giorgios Tsamoudakis and William Larkin. Sydney Theatre Company presented by Malthouse Theatre, Merlyn Theatre, until November 22.

Sophocles is supposed to have remarked of Euripides that, while Sophocles portrayed men as they ought to be, Euripides showed them as they are. It's an observation that goes to the heart of his drama. While Sophocles and Aeschylus wrote heroic tragedy, Euripides was concerned with the everyday: his characters were often the despised and marginalised, the women, children, slaves and functionaries caught in the unforgiving machinery of larger events. Euripides was, in fact, western drama's first realist.

Yet even on Euripides's terms, The Women of Troy is an odd play. For all the archaic beauty of the original text, it has an air of unsettlingly modernity. It's a play of almost brutal simplicity that crystallises the traumatic shock of the aftermath of war. Originally part of a full-scale tragic trilogy that looked at different aspects of the war on Troy, The Women of Troy seems to have been a kind of coda, the final comment on the tumultuous events that preceded it. The other two plays are now lost, leaving us this fragment in which nothing happens because the worst already has.


The other thing to note about Euripides is that, for all his mythical framing, he was writing directly about contemporary events. When The Women of Troy was first performed, in 415BC, Athens was mired in the Peloponnesian Wars with Sparta and was about to launch its disastrous expedition to conquer Sicily, an invasion which ended with the humiliating defeat of Athens in 404BC. In the various conflicts, Euripides had ample opportunity to observe the cruelty with which each side treated its civilian captives: most commonly, the men were put to death and the women and children enslaved. Sometimes this happened to entire cities.

Barrie Kosky and Tom Wright's adaptation highlights this realism, bringing Euripides's steady gaze to bear on contemporary events. They've created a production which is probably as close as we can get to an experience of classical tragedy, which looks unblinkingly into catastrophe: from the beginning, its outcome is inevitable and unavoidable. It reveals that this is a play of our time as much as of Euripides, at once true to its ancient roots and opening up its contemporary aptness. And it's bleak indeed: no chink of light pierces the darkness. The emotional effect is cumulative, and ultimately shattering. It's extraordinary theatre.

This two-fold vision of the ancient and the contemporary is evident from the moment you enter the theatre and see that the auditorium is shaped like an amphitheatre. Every seat is draped in white; the fabric is reflective and has a weird effect on the fluorescent lighting, which is already alienating and harsh. We look down on a naked stage, which is dominated by a huge back wall constructed of old lockers, stacked like bricks up to the ceiling.

It begins with a figure draped in black and crowned in a tiara being pushed onto the stage on a flatbed trolley by a guard. The guard is wearing a white mask, like those worn by people who deal with corpses, which is subtly configured to look like the masks on Hoplite helmets worn by Greek soldiers. The woman - for we know at once it is a woman - is standing in the pose made famous through the photograph taken in Abu Ghraib, balancing precariously, her arms stretched out, trembling with strain, on either side. The guard (Kyle Rowling) takes a photograph with his mobile phone, and then begins to strip the woman's finery - her rings, her bracelets, her necklace, her tiara - putting them in a clear plastic bag. He leaves her face draped, anonymous and blind, helpless, until he also takes her sumptuous dress.

At last she is revealed as Hecuba (Robyn Nevin), former Queen of Troy, standing in her shift on a cardboard box as ordered by the guard, her face bruised and bloodied, her hair shorn. Then the guard leaves and wheels in the other women, also cowled in black: also brutalised, anonymous, stripped of all civic rights as they are of their clothes. They are the theatrical image of what Giorgio Agamben called "naked life", the "state of exception" that defines the sovereign power of the State.

What follows is the summary allocation of the women - in particular, Hecuba's daughters - as spoils of war. Some have been distributed to the Greek soldiers by lot, some will be shot. The play simply consists of the women waiting to discover their fate, and finishes when we know what happens to each of them.

The adaptation hacks what is already a minimal play to its bones, hewing closely to its original dramaturgy. Tom Wright's language is chillingly effective: utterly plain, with the weight of tragic necessity in every word. Basically, three things occur: Cassandra - the virgin cursed with second sight by Apollo after she refused his advances - is taken away and given to Agamemnon. The heavily pregnant Andromache, who enters with her son Astynax (Giorgios Tsmamoudakis or William Larkin) is sent to be the slave of Achilles, who killed her husband Hector, and finds that her small son is to be murdered. And Helen of Troy, whose abscondment with Paris started the whole thing, is given a short trial by Menelaus (Arthur Dignam) and Hecuba, and condemned. These three women are played by Melita Jurisic, making the play effectively a duet between Nevin and Jurisic.

This brutal reality is punctuated by singing, a diverse range of music which includes Dowland, Mozart, Bizet and Slovenien folk songs. The music is a lament for everything that the action of the play denies and destroys - love, beauty, harmony - and is the single human expression remaining to the women.

As in conventional Greek tragedy, the violence occurs off-stage, a most effective means of engendering imagination. We hear off-stage screaming and gunshots, and we see the fear before it and the effect afterwards - most desolately when the half mad Cassandra is raped in one of the lockers by the guard and returns, her bloodstained pants around her ankles, hobbling and violated, babbling incoherently of her marriage to Agamemnon, or when the blood-drenched corpse of the little boy is carried onto the stage.

This production is particularly effective in how it exploits the banality of atrocity. One aspect of torture is how it transforms ordinary objects, even household items, into instruments of pain. Here there is a rather grim moment when the guard walks across the stage, fiddles in a tool box and returns with a huge awl. We have no idea what he is going to use it for, and don't want to imagine. When the women are allocated, they are put in cardboard boxes which are sealed with masking tape and wheeled off, reinforcing their dehumanised status as cargo, mere trophies of war whose identities are not only erased but irrelevant.

What carries the grief and crushing inevitability of the horror enfolding these women is the performances. As Hecuba, an old woman witnessing the destruction of her life, Nevin is the lynchpin of the play: she is present on stage all through, and she is the medium through which we experience the tragedy. This is an unmissable performance: that voice vibrates in your bones, raging, lamenting, sorrowful, utterly broken and defeated and yet stubbornly refusing to be demeaned, even in this ultimate degradation. Melita Jurisic in her three roles is a brilliant foil, the hysteric counterpoint to Nevin's stoic refusals.

Perhaps what is most impressive about this production is its refusal to reach for easy theatrical manipulations. The contemporary allusions are never gratuitous: rather, they emerge as inevitable aspects of the reality this play is revealing. It's heartbreaking, but Kosky's restraint means that the effect goes deeper than tears. His directorial tact represents the reality of war without cheaply exploiting it: this seems to me to be a production of exemplary honesty, that openly and without showiness acknowledges its own artifice and by doing so reinforces the horrific realities behind it. It's a cry of grief, a keening, that resonates in its own present and then leaves us to deal with the aftermath. Because the worst part about it is that you know that it's true.

Picture: Melita Jurisic as Helen and Robyn Nevin as Hecuba in The Women of Troy. Photo: Tracey Schramm

Avast & Avast II - The Welshman Cometh, by Black Lung Theatre Company, presented by the Malthouse. With Sacha Bryning, Gareth Davies, Thomas Henning, Mark Winter, Thomas Wright and Dylan Young. Sound design and music by Liam Barton, lighting design by Govin Ruben. Tower Theatre, CUB Malthouse, until December 6.

In a model of enlightened patronage, the Malthouse Theatre this year offered the Black Lung Theatre Company and Whaling Firm (to give it its full moniker) a three month residency in the Tower. And, it seems, basically left them alone to see what would happen, in the spirit of a scientist leaving a petri dish at the back of a laboratory. The result is Avast - a reprise of this company's first show - and Avast II - The Welshman Cometh, a new work which is (apparently) a prequel to Avast.


The Black Lung is a collective of seven startlingly fearless performers, who devise a particular kind of anti-theatre that at once brilliantly exploits and destroys theatrical artifice. They attracted particular notice with their Fringe hit Rubeville, which deservedly carried off the gongs in the Melbourne and Adelaide Fringe Festivals with its blackly hilarious assault on the delusions of celebrity culture.

A crucial element of their previous work has been the sense that the audience enters a self-contained environment, in which the events they perform (it’s hard to call them “plays”) follow their own inscrutable laws. This environmental element could easily have been compromised by their move to a main stage, but the three month residency seems to have been spent on extensive renovations. The Tower is almost unrecognisable; it has the air of a bizarre, ramshackle domicile rather than a conventional theatre, a place that is lived in rather than a mere stage.

It's fascinating to see what is, in effect, a mini-retrospective, jamming together their first and most recent works. The two shows, for all their common provenance, are actually quite distinct from each other. Both exploit clichés from mass culture – The Lord of the Rings, samurai movies, westerns, role playing games, apocalypse fiction – and, like all parodies, also pay them fond homage. And each has a narrative of sorts. Avast concerns two brothers meeting again after long estrangement, while Avast II is a post-apocalyptic western in which a stranger arrives at an isolated settlement to rescue the doomed inhabitants.

However you look at it, there's no escaping that the Black Lung is men's business. The company is all male, and squinting through the shambolic disorder of Avast and Avast II reveals a deep preoccupation with contemporary male anxiety.

In both these shows, the contradictory construction of masculinity - the delusions and mythlogies that sustain it - is put under extreme pressure. Like the theatrical conventions that are invoked only to be exploded, these delusions collapse, leaving in their place the raw and absurd presence of the (often) naked and (always) sexually ambiguous body. The abject incontinence of the feminine body - its uncontrollable leakages of blood, sexual fluids, tears, saliva - is, in traditional ideas of masculinity, contrasted with self-sufficient, impermeable manliness. But here the naked male body leaks various fluids with as much promiscuous abandon as Woman.

Avast II (the prequel, remember) opens with a tour de force: the baptism of a baby that, with a touch of gothic horror, lots of smoke and moody lighting and a brooding Nick Cavean guitar accompaniment, invokes the ritualistic nature of theatre. (Ritual is, in fact, not at all inappropriate as a way of understanding these shows: they are, among other things, enactments of psychic expiation.) Here a wild-eyed priest figure (Mark Winter) shouts incantations into a microphone before raising a cleaver and cutting off the baby's hand in a sacrifice that is intended to protect his frontier community from some dreadful evil that assails it.

We then strike the Gunslinger figure (Gareth Davies), the lone hero who encounters the handless baby (Dylan Young), now grown up. Gareth is The Welshman, and he lassoos young Dylan and drags him around in a way that rather irresistibly recalls Lucky and Pozzo in Beckett's Waiting for Godot. They make their way to the frontier town, where the luckless inhabitants, led by the Mayor (Thomas Henning in top hat, pyjamas and wheelchair) are assailed by some supernatural beast at nightfall and lock their doors in terror. The strangers are left outside to die.

The Hero and his sidekick are attacked, saved by God (a deux ex machina puppet lowering from the flies), shoot Him dead, and enter the amazed township. Then they do the Seven Samurai/Magnificent Seven thing, rousing the inhabitants with an exhilarating spoof of sumarai fight sequences and boldly striding off to do battle. The hero gets the Girl (Thomas Wright in an appalling black wig and nightie), stealing him/her from the town's blacksmith (Sacha Bryning). They fight the monster, the Girl dies, and then...

Well, then the story gets kind of forgotten. One of the intriguing aspects of Black Lung's practice is how the company quite genuinely channels the power of gothic melodrama and epic grandeur, while at the same time mercilessly taking the piss. This is not suspension of disbelief so much as its constant levitation, before the tightrope snaps with loud twang. And maybe what happens after that twang gets terminal is most interesting, as the theatre cuts closer and closer to literal reality: a recitation, for example, of the various ways the cast will die in the future, which generates a superstitious creepiness, as if it's a curse; or an extraordinary monologue which is a gem in itself and which takes the show into entirely different emotional territory.

And then it kind of finishes with a song, with no clear signal to indicate it's over. Certainly no bows. Like other Black Lung shows, it just stops, and leaves you to wonder what just happened.

Avast (their earliest show, which supposedly follows their latest - are you with me?) is similar in how it constructs and brutally destroys staged realities. The narrative here is simpler - a long estranged brother (Gareth Davies) returns home, and confronts his brother (Thomas Wright). Davies, who most of the time stands in a washing machine, is covered in blood, and Wright is wearing black speedos and appears to be covered in semen.

The dialogues continue through all the necessary clichés (the dead mother, the revelations, the recriminations - "you were never there!"), interrupted by various strange visitations - a man in a ten-gallon hat and outrageous moustache, a polar bear. And then the whole thing explodes. I'm reluctant to describe how, but suffice to say that I've seldom seen meta-theatre done so effectively. It left my theatre partner, young Ben, sleepless with outrage, distress and dilemma.

These brutal interventions of literal reality go way past parody, generating a sense of genuine abjection and discomfort. There really is no way of predicting what will happen in the next moment and, with the help of some remarkable performances, it makes for riveting theatre. It's risky stuff that could easily slump into boring mayhem or mere embarrassment, and The Black Lung only gets away with it because their apparent anarchy is underlaid by some steely discipline and accuracy. And sheer front, of course.

Another version of this review is in today's Australian.

Picture: The Black Lung Theatre Company and Whaling Firm

MESHWORKS - the Miami University Archive of Writing in Performance - has uploaded several videos of readings from the Soundeye Cork International Poetry Festival which, as some of you might remember, I attended earlier this year in Ireland. The whole event was something like this:



The videos on the university site don't stream well, but those interested in the readings can check out the Meshworks YouTube page, which works rather better.

The Hypocrite by Molière, adapted by Justin Fleming, directed by Peter Evans. Designed by Stephen Curtis, lighting by Matt Scott, music by Ian McDonald. Melbourne Theatre Company @ the Playhouse, Victorian Arts Centre until December 13. Bookings: 1300 723 038.

Melbourne this year has felt like a little outpost of France. There have been no less than three main stage productions of Molière’s plays, including two of Tartuffe. This new version at the MTC, adapted by Justin Fleming as The Hypocrite, follows a rambunctiously vulgar adaptation presented earlier this year by the Malthouse Theatre.


It’s easy to see the appeal of Molière’s unforgiving satires of human folly and greed, and in particular why Tartuffe – about a conman masquerading as an evangelist – should strike a chord. In our time religion is a locus of deep anxiety, and the gap between language and action in public life has become an almost unbridgeable abyss.

Like the Malthouse production, this new version is contemporised, but its 17th century antecedents are stamped on the design and performances and, with less felicity, onto the script.

There are many things to like about Peter Evans’s direction, which features a stripped down and deeply theatrical elegance. Stephen’s Curtis’s set emphasises its own artifice and his absurd costumes unite frou-frou opulence with contemporary simplicity.

Evans has gathered a cast with depth as well as breadth. Garry McDonald plays the hapless Orgon, who falls under the spell of the charlatan holy man Tartuffe (Kim Gyngell), sacrificing his family and property before realising that Tartuffe is a greedy, lustful weasel (dressed rather unsettlingly like a ‘60s intellectual) who has worked out that he can do what he likes as long as he cloaks his actions in pious intentions.

The first 10 minutes, with Kerry Walker in full flight as Madame Pernelle, are very promising. But for all its fine elements, the production ends up being less than the sum of its parts.

The major problem is Fleming’s script. Most puzzlingly, it makes Orgon’s family innocent victims of Tartuffe’s nefarious strategies, rather than themselves ambiguous objects of satire. This blunts its comedy and transforms Molière’s play into a straight defence of bourgeois values.

The language occasionally achieves a balance between colloquial and literary, and when it does, it works beautifully. But more often it’s staid, with a stitled vernacular featuring rather too much forced and clunky rhyme (varied, apparently, between quatrains and couplets, but all with the same punishing rhythm).

To sustain rhyming couplets for any length of time in English – a language with very few rhyming words – requires the linguistic dazzle of a Byron. Fleming is simply not that inventive. In his hands, Molière almost becomes earnest, which is new indeed.

This review was published in yesterday's Australian.

Picture: publicity shot for The Hypocrite: Marina Prior, Kim Gyngell and Garry McDonald.

The Australia Council yesterday released its Draft Children in Art Protocols, which will determine council funding where artists are working with children. They are available for comment and response online.

The immediate response from arts organisations is that areas of real concern are already covered by existing laws and that key recommendations are unworkable. For example, among the recommendations are that all photographs of children (who are defined as anyone under 18) - clothed or unclothed - can only be exhibited with the permission of their parents or guardians. Which will make life a little difficult for documentary makers and street photographers. Moreover, there is concern that such protocols shift the Council's role from funding body to regulator.

And don't think that these protocols only apply to photographers. They apply to all artists - as the documents says, "photography, painting, printmaking, performance, sculpture, written text, digital imagery, etc". Young adult fiction writers will, I imagine, be particularly concerned about the insistence that young people cannot be portrayed in writing in an "indecent" manner.

As always, the question is what constitutes indecency: while in law such restrictions are clearly made to forbid pornography involving children, the inclusion of this clause in an arts protocol means that it can be more widely applied to include any literary depiction of the sexuality of anyone under 18. The conflation with pornography of - say - Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, or the beautiful and sensitive books of David Almond, draws ever closer.

I keep wondering if no one remembers what it's like to be 13.

At present the protocols are disturbingly vague, which means they can be extended far beyond their original purpose. They were originally foisted on the Australia Council as a kind of deal after the fact-free shockjock hysteria that surrounded (and still surrounds) the work of Bill Henson: if you don't make them, said Garrett, Rudd will. And that will be worse. Anyone who doubts this is over can check Hetty Johnson's comments in the Australian today, where she claims that the controversy over Bill Henson's work demonstrated that "the existing legal framework is far from adequate".

In the meantime, the nightmare of compliance these protocols imply suggests that their main effect will be to make childhood a no-go area for artists. And I'm not at all sure that's a good thing, for children or for artists.

Summer is icumen in, meaning that 2008 is rushing to its close with, on my part, a feeling of inexpressible relief. Wasn't it March only yesterday? The past six months seem to have vanished. Perhaps they were gobbled up by the voracious amnesia of the internet. Who knows?

Before they plunge into the abyss of forgetting, allow me to point you to some interesting things I've read recently. The estimable Guardian critic Lyn Gardner shares some reflections on the uncertainties of reviewing, which is well worth a squiz. Chris Goode asks what the fuck am I doing?, a question which in his case is always fruitful. He describes pretty well the loneliness that goes with (so far as I can see) making any kind of art, and which he says adheres with a particular paradoxicalness (paradoxality?) to theatre:

What is that loneliness? It's the signal, I suppose: which will always be broken in transit, and the sacrifice of which is itself ineluctably and bountifully theatrical. But the impulse that begins within me, as a vision -- often tremblingly indistinct or inchoate or literally impossible to hold: but a vision, if we can say that, if that's not too histrionic....talking about which, even (or perhaps especially) among fellow practitioners, is sometimes like describing a dream: elusive in the mind, banal on the lips, boring as it arrives in the other's ears.

Meanwhile, Richard Watts begins a series of meditations on Indie theatre in Canvas Magazine, which made me wonder rather hopelessly if anybody can remember a time before 2000. Speaking tangentially of which, on Sunday ABC Radio National's Artworks broadcast a feature on Daniel Keene which examines what actually goes on in Europe with his work. They managed to spell his name two different ways on the website, but the program - which features interviews with his translator Severine Magois and a couple of French actors as well as the man himself - is worth a listen. I only mention it here because so many people have mentioned it to me.

And while I'm talking family: yesterday my 10-year-old nephew, Rory Young, won the Primary Schools section of ACMI's Screen It animation competition. We're all proud as anything, especially since he's totally self-taught and makes his charming animations on his kitchen table. Here's his prize-winning entry, stolen from Rory's MySpace page, Tin Robot Animations.