Here at her outrageously messy desk, Ms TN feels like a cartoon character running as fast as she can, while still going backwards. Given the piles in front of me, it's going to take me a few days to get to discussing Miracle, the amazing new dance from Phillip Adams and BalletLab. It's such a rich work I really look forward to thinking about it; in the meantime, let me say that I haven't seen anything like it. It's extraordinary, extreme, uncompromising. And it closes on Sunday, so run.
Brett Sheehy, the artistic director of the Melbourne Festival, freely admits that he's nervous about announcing his first program. "I know I've done it before," says Sheehy, who has directed both the Sydney and Adelaide festivals. "But you don't get any less nervous. Melbourne's status as the cultural capital is an additional pressure. But obviously, that's also why I wanted the job."
Certainly, Sheehy has reasons for feeling a little flighty. This time last year, he took over from Kristy Edmunds, whose four-year stint from 2005 produced much critical adulation, especially among younger audiences, and an unprecedented load of vitriolic commentary from the more conservative constituency of our cultural capital.
Sheehy was widely perceived to be a director who wouldn't frighten the horses, a steady pair of hands who would steer the ship into less stormy waters. On the other hand, Edmunds' tenure has generated a strong expectation among Melbourne arts fans that the festival will be challenging, exciting and full of the shock of the new. The depth and range of her festivals brought out stars like Ariane Mnouchkine and Peter Brook, created mini-events within the festival such as Merce Cunningham's 2007 residency and mixed the highbrow and the lowbrow in an intoxicating whirl.
Coming hard on her heels, Sheehy faces a tricky task: to generate a program that doesn't disappoint the keen audience built up through Edmunds' tenure, but which also doesn't bring down the wrath of those who think the main stage belongs to the MSO and the MSO alone. Certainly, Sheehy is anxious to differentiate his program from those which went before; but it looks to me more of an evolution than a revolution. And I think he's pulled it off: MIAF 2009 promises to be a really interesting festival, and will attract a wide range of people.
The feature of this festival is probably the visual arts program. "I've always been enamoured of the Melbourne pride in its built environment," says Sheehy. "And so from the beginning I was thinking of something structured around this great feature of this city." To this end, he galvanised the local boutique galleries, who have each curated their own exhibition around the theme. The centrepiece is Callum Morton's 2007 Venice Biennale piece Valhalla, a monumental sculpture that seems to be part biography, part reflection on modernity. There's also a free large scale video installation at Federation Square, The Living Room, which will intriguingly dress the square as an actual living room.
The performing arts are various, with an emphasis on exclusive international events. 90 per cent of the festival works are exclusive to Melbourne, so those interstaters who want to see them will have to come here. The centrepiece is Sasha Waltz, whom Sheehy describes as the most influential choreographer in Europe after Pina Bausch. Waltz is bringing out her production of Medea, with a score by Pascal Dusapin set to the play Medeamaterial by Heiner Müller, and also her her dance masterwork Körper. If I were you I'd be booking tickets now: these look to me like must-sees.
Other theatrical highlights include Deutsches Schaulspielhaus Hamburg's production of the British playwright Simon Stephens' (Motortown) play Pornography and a dance theatre piece, Le Salon by Belgian group Peeping Tom. And Ireland's Abbey Theatre is bringing a verse play called Terminus, a work on the darker aspects of Ireland written and directed by Mark O'Rowe, which was a hit at last year's Edinburgh Festival.
The Store Room Theatre is part of the local talent, with a new piece by theatre designer Anna Tregloan, The Dictionary of Imaginary Places. The MTC, which has been absent from the program for some time, is presenting two shows - Andrew Bovell's When the Rain Stops Falling, which Sheehy premiered at last year's Adelaide Festival, and Lally Katz's Apocalypse Bear Trilogy, which is sure to attract much interest in the Katz demographic.
As well as Sasha Waltz, the dance program includes British Israeli Hofesh Shechter, who is bringing two pieces - Uprising and In your rooms, and a new piece from Chunky Move which is not choreographed by Gideon Obarzanek but by two stars of the European scene - Erna Ómarsdóttir and Damien Jalet.
Film maker Peter Greenaway is the subject of several events, including an intriguing installation at North Melbourne Town Hall, Leonardo's Last Supper, a video exploration of the famous mural. He'll be giving a lecture about nine classic paintings and contemporary visual illiteracy, as well as showing two films he's made about Old Masters. And there's some Andy Warhol as well.
And I haven't even got to the music. Orchestra fans, who have been somewhat disgruntled over the past few years, won't be disappointed: the MSO will be performing a concert of music by Brenton Broadstock and Julian Yu, and the London Philharmonic will be playing pieces from Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Ravel and Beethoven. The Melbourne Town Hall's organ is a feature of one of the more impressive free events - a 16 hour marathon of the whole of Bach's repertoire, to be played by Calvin Bowman. And, in a clear sign of continuity with Edmunds' festivals, the Black Arm Band is back.
Another innovation is Beck's Rumpus Room at the Forum Theatre, a larger version of Beck's Bar at the Meat Market. It's basically a club where for $15 you can hear the hippest music from all corners of the globe - from a crowded program that includes a lot of Australian acts, you can hear the West Bank group Ramallah Underground (who recently did a piece for Kronos Quartet), the Cuban Brothers from Havana, Brain Failure from China, Fischerspooner from New York, and the noise band Melt Banana from Japan.
There's lots more, but I'm running out of puff. I'll leave you to trawl through the rest of it yourself. Sadly, I'm going to miss this year's festival - in October, I'm off to the northern hemisphere for a month, being an Ambassador for Australian poetry with Robert Gray. I think every poet in Australia applied for this one, which was offered by the Australian Poetry Centre, and I was pleased to be chosen; but there's enough in this festival program to make the prize of an overseas trip a mixed blessing.
Update: some early industry responses on the Ragged Claws blog.
The Productivity Commission today released its long awaited report on the parallel importation of books. I've only had time to read through the overview, but the conclusions are clear. The commission unequivocally recommends the total abolition of restrictions. Surreally, it says that any "contraction" in the publishing industry or in "cultural externalities" (I think they mean all the things that make books different from clothes pegs or fridges) caused by this decision should be countered by... the Federal Government giving more subsidies to literature!!!
That free market ideologues could actually recommend a higher rate of state subsidies, in the name of increasing competitiveness in the publishing industry, totally does my head in. They're effectively passing the responsibility for cultural value from the market to the state. It makes no sense, certainly from my understanding of what free market ideology is supposed to be, but I'm sure this is what it says. Perhaps someone else has a better translation?
RECOMMENDATION 1
The Government should repeal Australia’s Parallel Import Restrictions (PIRs) for books. The repeal should take effect three years after the date that it is announced.
RECOMMENDATION 2
The Government should, as soon as possible, review the current subsidies aimed at encouraging Australian writing and publishing, with a view to better targeting of cultural externalities. Any revised arrangements should be put in place before the repeal of the PIRs takes effect.
It further recommends an assessment after five years, presumably to see what the damage is, while openly admitting that there isn't enough information about the publishing industry available now to make decent decisions. This also does my head in.
If this report is ratified by the government, it will have one immediate effect on me, and the majority of other Australian authors who are able to do so: I will think very hard before publishing in Australia from now on. I will be far better off publishing in the UK or the US, where I will have the benefits and royalty protection of territorial copyright. Which makes me a bit sad.
And I would hate to be a new Australian writer now.
A busily theatrical weekend is looming in the Keene/Croggon household. To begin with, those who bemoan that Daniel Keene's work is never done in Melbourne have a chance for a bit of catch-up: the Dog Theatre in Footscray, under the direction of the dauntless Matt Scholten, are putting on The Cove, a season of eight short works, over the next four weeks. Keene is of course one of Australia's most awarded playwrights and almost certainly its most produced, if not here; he has had around 80 productions in Europe since 2000, on some of its main stages. Next year he has productions coming up at the National Theatre of Brussels, the Théâtre National de Toulouse and the Théâtre national de la Colline, the biggest subsidised theatre in Paris.
The Cove is an interesting selection of four premieres and four revivals, with one of each performed in repertory each week (details here). The cast includes Majid Shokor, Bruce Myles, Jan Friedl, Danielle Carter, Matthew Molony and Harli Ammes; myself, I can't wait to see Shokor, one of my favourite actors, perform the two monologues that open and close the season.
The revivals were all first performed in the KTTP days and have since gone on to glory elsewhere. Most notably, To Whom It May Concern was a hit for the Théâtre de la Commune in 2005, prompting an excitable critic to claim that it was the most significant event in Paris theatre since Waiting for Godot opened in 1953. If you want to see the plays in tandem, your chance is this weekend: all the premieres will be performed on Saturday and all the revivals on Sunday. Bookings are strongly advised: Easytix online or 9639 0096.
I won't be there on Sunday, alas, because I am presiding over the next Things on Sunday event at the Malthouse. This should be a fun one: we've selected some texts that influenced Samuel Beckett, which include writings by Dante, John Keats, Anton Chekhov and James Joyce. It's really an excuse to hear some wonderful writing read by a couple of great voices, Greg Stone and Rachael Maza Long. The session starts at 2.30pm sharp in the Merlyn. Tickets $10 or free for Malthouse subscribers.
My reviews of Happy Days and Care Instructions, which both opened last week at the Malthouse, are respectively in Friday's and today's Australian. More to follow here later this week. I hope.
Read More.....I briefly reviewed Julian Meyrick's MTC production of The Birthday Party just over two weeks ago and have been meaning to write about it at more leisure ever since. That I haven't yet done so is symptomatic of (a) the time of year - it's flu season here in Williamstown, and various microbes have been doing a serial dance through the family home - and (b) the difficulty I'm having balancing the conflicting demands of my increasingly chaotic life. So this is a brief cathartic visit to some thoughts that have been irritating the delicate membranes of my synapses over the past fortnight.
Another reason for the delay was that I wanted to watch the 1968 William Friedkin film of The Birthday Party. Thanks to the magic of Amazon, it arrived last week. The screenplay was adapted by Pinter himself, and it features a great cast, with Robert Shaw in the central role of Stanley, Patrick Magee and Sydney Tafler as the mysterious strangers McCann and Goldberg, Dandy Nichols as the naive landlady Meg and Moultriie Kelsall as her husband, Petey. It's very much a film of its time - some of its special effects are worthy of YouTube - and it's obviously made with a budget of around $2. But it remains an astounding film.
It's not, by any means, comfortable family viewing. You watch it all the way through with your stomach in a knot, unease growing with the slow inevitability of nightmare as the play's banal but obscurely threatening situations unfold. What these performances do so beautifully is to demonstrate the startling dislocations of Pinter's dialogue, how he violently wrenches language from its emotional subtext. The story of the film is not in what is said, but what is going on in the actors' faces: the fear in Nichols' face as Shaw suddenly turns on her, asking if she knows who he is; Shaw's seemingly irrational terror when the two men appear in the miserable boarding house where he has been living for the past year; Magee's hesitation and fear in the face of Tafler's smoothly civilised violence.
It's not the notorious Pinteresque Pause that matters here; it's what going on underneath the language, which may indeed flower into silence, but equally occurs in the estrangement of the dialogue. The fact that Pinter's name is practically synonymous with the Pause has always faintly baffled me: other playwrights (and not only Beckett) have used pauses, which act as the writerly equivalent of musical notation, an indicator of linguistic and emotional rhythm. So why should Pinter's be so controversial? But those who wish to belittle his achievement for whatever reason - political disagreement, artistic hostility - always refer to the Pause, which is I guess a way of eliding the fact that he actually wrote a lot of words in between his silences.
It strikes me that this discomfort with Pinter's pauses reflects a wider cultural response to silence. We don't know what to do with it: we have to fill it up with noise, as if silence is a yawning abyss that threatens to devour our souls. I've noticed this especially when watching anime: the master of the medium, Hayoa Miyazake, uses silence beautifully in his carefully constructed soundtracks. But if in error I put on the dubbed versions instead of the subtitled Japanese soundtrack, suddenly all that fertile, evocative silence disappears under a welter of music and dialogue.
And it also reflects a cultural discomfort with, well, discomfort itself. Have we such a terrible fear of ourselves, of what might emerge if we are forced to contemplate the realities that underlie the camouflaging gabble of language, that we literally can't face it?
Which brings me to Julian Meyrick's production, now running at the Fairfax Studio in the Arts Centre. I think this is a perfectly respectable and intelligent production of the play, which in many ways brings a contemporary vitality to The Birthday Party. Meyrick has cast it mainly with Indigenous actors, in a rare and welcome example of main stage cross-racial casting. Smartly, he has avoided obvious racial power relationships: power and disempowerment reside in every character. The single white actor is Marshall Napier, a man of slippery identity, who is the locus of hidden but palpable violence. Goldberg's Irish sidekick McCann is played by Glenn Shea, his Irish song replaced by an Aboriginal chant. (This subtly draws an interesting parallel between the colonisation of Ireland and Australia). And I was particularly taken by Pauline Whyman's beautiful portrayal of Meg, the naif whose fantasy world almost completely protects her from the sharp edges of reality.
But - and for me it is a large but - there was something missing in the middle of the play. It was characterised by Isaac Drandic's performance of Stanley, which I am guessing, having never seen Drandic in action before, was a directorial decision. And perhaps - not having seen it again, I don't know - this performance has evolved from opening night. On the night I saw it, Drandic was a blank: he responded catatonically, with none of the repressed violence so characteristic of Shaw's performance in the film. This gives the performance nowhere to go, since in the final scene he really is catatonic; because he has been emotionally blank from the beginning, his inability to speak is much less devastating. And it neutralises many of the exchanges in the play, as Stanley is always a passive victim.
This sense of soft-focus permeates the tone of the whole production: the squalor of the boarding house, physically palpable in the details of Friedkin's film, is here rendered with a respectable cleanliness. There are moments of sudden brutality, moments of discomfort, but instead of winding slowly up to a kind of stomach-twisting panic, they dissipate in comic relief. It's too easy in this production to read The Birthday Party as a kind of surreal comedy about "those" kinds of people - lower middle class, Not Like Us - because its real power, its merciless exposure of the dark animal impulses in human behaviour, is muffled. The sense of interior nightmare never takes hold where it counts, in the primitive caverns of the subconscious.
The performances and direction bring out the absurd comedy of Pinter's language, which is in itself no bad thing. Like Beckett, Pinter is full of comedy: also like Beckett, he is also deadly serious, and laughter is only sometimes on the menu. Discovering that a playwright is funny shouldn't, as regularly happens with Chekhov, elide the tragedy that drives the drama. As I watched it, I thought of Howard Barker's stern comments about laughter in the theatre. "Laughter appears to be a manifestation of solidarity," he says, "but it is now more often the sign of subordination. It is pain that an audience needs to experience, and not contempt. We have a theatre of contempt masquerading as comedy".
I think Australian theatre is not arrogant enough to generate the contempt Barker speaks of. Rather, the impulse towards comedy reflects a different kind of subordination. It seems to me to be a fear of the audience, a fear that they will not get it, a fear that if they do, they won't like it anyway. Who, after all, wants pain? And in this fear we lose the larger possibilities of art, its paradoxical exhilaration and joy.
There is, alas, good reason for these fears, as the conversation after my review of The Man from Mukinupin - probably the MTC production I've enjoyed most this year - demonstrates all too clearly. And certainly, the production of The Birthday Party has been warmly received; indeed, it's been welcomed almost with relief, as if a visit to the dentist defied expectations by serving up chocolates instead. But I can't help pondering the value of presenting Pinter in a prophylactic, with all the danger at a comfortable remove. On the one hand, yes, there's more chance of attracting an audience to the work of a playwright generally considered "difficult". But on the other, what is the point, really?
Note: for more discussion of the play, you can find an earlier TN review of a production of The Birthday Party here.
Picture: (from left) Jada Alberts, Marshall Napier and Isaac Drandic in the MTC's production of The Birthday Party.
The nominations for the Helpmann Awards, our national awards for the performing arts (yes, I know it's problematic), were announced earlier this week. I read them with lively interest: I was part of this year's theatre panel, and the secret ballot meant that I had as little idea as anyone what the results would be. And they're quite interesting.
In the theatre category, Benedict Andrews' brilliant production of War of the Roses for the STC Actors Company is the dominant note, with a swag of 10 nominations in practically every category. And it's good to see that Food Court by Geelong company Back to Back, which was probably my highlight of last year's Melbourne Festival, has gained some well-deserved notice, with three nominations in the Industry category. Barrie Kosky's production of The Women of Troy, an STC production seen here at the Malthouse, also won three nominations in the theatre category. And - to my surprise and delight - so did Peter Evans's production of David Harrower's Blackbird for the MTC. I'm pleased to see this subtle, modest and passionate production, low on spectacle but high on sheer class, put next to the more obviously significant works.
The full list of nominations can be trawled here. The winners will be announced in Sydney on July 27.
Well, I'm dug back into my burrow after a fortnight out of the office. I've been doing some in-depth theatrical investigation of a story by one of my favourite pin-up boys, Anton Chekhov. It's been a chance, rare in my life, to concentrate on one thing for a whole two weeks. Well, almost one thing: I did see a few shows, and still want to think a little further on the MTC's production of Pinter's The Birthday Party.
But stepping aside from the quotidian pressure for a little while has been a much-needed opportunity to touch base, and to reflect on the things I value, in life as much as in art. They're the same things I've always valued, but to articulate them is difficult; perhaps this constant unfolding and evolution, this desire to express what it is that delights and hurts us, is the entire practice of a life. Anyway, while I've been pondering the meaning of existence, work has been piling up on my desk: piles of envelopes and a few hundred emails in my inbox, reminding me of a bunch of things that have gone under the TN radar lately. I'm slowly catching up, which seems to be the refrain of my days.
Among several interesting events and shows, I missed the launch of the Store Room Theatre's 2009 season. Relaunching after a hiatus of public performance, artistic director Todd MacDonald has put together an ambitious program that looks rich, various and deeply interesting. It's a staggeringly diverse program that includes new work by Ming Zhu-Hii, Ross Mueller, Tommy Murphy, Cerise de Gelder and Lee Blessing. One work, designer Anna Tregloan's The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, is part of the Melbourne Festival program. (Tregloan's last piece at the Malthouse, an installation/theatre piece called Black, was a fascinating immersive experience.) Which reminds me that we're coming up to the Melbourne Festival's official launch next week, and I'm working on a thorough preview of Brett Sheehy's first program. Watch this space.
I see the chairman of News Ltd, John Hartigan, has some harsh words for bloggers. In an address to the National Press Club yesterday, he claimed that "amateur journalism trivialises and corrupts serious debate", and that only well-trained professional journalists wrote reliable news. (This, I am sure, has nothing whatsoever to do with News Ltd's launch of its blog-style commentary website The Punch, "Australia's best conversation"). As he is further reported in the Age:
"In return for [bloggers'] free content, we pretty much get what we've paid for - something of such limited intellectual value as to be barely discernible from massive ignorance," he said. "Like (Paul) Keating's famous 'all tip and no iceberg', it could be said that the blogosphere is all eyeballs and no insight." He said blogs often gave a platform for "radical sweeping statements unsubstantiated with evidence".
Mr Hartigan has a point, but as always in these debates, he's comparing the worst of blogging with the best of journalism. If you reverse the comparison, and compare the worst of journalism with the best of blogging, you can come up with a completely different picture. For example: if professional reporters are such glowing avatars of responsible fact-checked journalism, how come the hoax story of Jeff Goldblum's death got flashed around Australia on Monday, hmmm? I read it on the Age's website...
And everyone who has been interviewed for the mass media knows the perils of misquotation. I was once interviewed by a print journalist with no visible notebook, who then drew a series of wholly moronic quotations from her less-than-vivid imagination. I mean, I'm happy to stand by my own stupidities, but it tries your patience to be made to look more idiotic than you actually are.
As in so many parts of my life, I have a foot in both camps. I'm a blogger who got an old-fashioned and thorough training in print journalism back when dinosaurs roamed Flinders St. In those days, the line between journalism and fiction was sometimes very thin indeed: I once, with these very eyes, watched a weather-beaten hardened cynic of a journalist completely make up a rattling story for the front page of a (now defunct) newspaper, after an afternoon of fruitless phone calls turned up no confirmation whatsoever of a headline-grabbing rumour. But even that seems preferable to the routine processing of press releases that constitutes so much contemporary reporting these days.
So, sure. If traditional newspapers produce fine journalism, I'm all for them. Sometimes they do. But you can be sure that very often the very structures of news gathering mitigate against such things. I'm totally with Mr Hartigan when he says that "amateur journalism" trivialises and corrupts serious debate: but his argument would have more strength if it didn't so often grace the mainstream media. Maybe a case of taking the beam out of his own eye first?
