According to Guy Rundle, theatre isn't just dying, it's dead. In a piece in today's Crikey in relation to e-books, he claims in an aside that radio and movies killed theatre, leaving "existing theatre as a mix of largely subsidised, state and philanthropic funded events, non-commercial avant-gardes and occasional large spectacles".

This got me thinking, mostly because I don't see a lot of signs of rigor mortis: although maybe I'm seeing theatre through less jaundiced glasses than Rundle. What was theatre before the invention of the mass market? Surely it too was a mixture of the popular vulgate (music hall, melodrama, the huge spectacles of Victorian times), "largely subsidised, state and philanthropic funded events" like the court theatres (Shakespeare and Moliere) and avant garde or "non-commercial" ventures such as Artaud's theatre or the communal mystery plays. Which is to say, was it so different to what it is now? Does this mean it was always dead? Or is it always, despite everything, stubbornly, recalcitrantly alive?

The difference from the 19th century is the mass market, made possible by the invention of reproducible art in film, photography and now digitisation. Theatre was never going to be a mass market phenomenon, aside from the franchise model of a Cameron Mackintosh or Cirque du Soleil: it's at its best in intimate spaces. And intimate spaces co-exist quite happily alongside the mass market, because people seek different things from both of them. As with the e-book argument, people can walk and chew gum at the same time: the rise of one doesn't mean the end of the other.

Anyway, just wanted to wave at all you corpses out there...

Your correspondent was most pleased today to receive her copies of international theatre journal Theatre Forum, a fab magazine focusing on innovative theatre that is published out of University California San Diego. My interest is particular - I was invited to write an introduction to a play of Daniel Keene's. It's nice to be in glossy print, and there will be more - I'm working on a longer piece on direction for the next issue.

Keene's The Architect's Walk is one of two scripts published in the magazine. It's printed with some gorgeous photos of Tim Maddock's premiere at the 1998 Adelaide Festival, and of the French premiere, which was directed by Renaud Cojo at the Cloître des Célestins for the 2002 Avignon Festival.

The other published script is US Latina playwright Caridad Svich with her adaptation of Allende's The House of the Spirits, which premiered last year at the Repertorio Espanol in New York and in English at Houston's Main Street Theatre.

On the critical front, there are meditations on Jan Fabre, the Catalan group El Joglar, the Auckland troupe Playground and Romeo Castellucci's recent Dante extravaganza, as well as a comparative study of Japanese playwright Ota Shogo and Wang Chong. In other words, like the other issues I've got, it's a feast for the theatre gourmet.

You can subscribe through the web page here. Well, what are you waiting for?

Happy Invasion Day 2010 from Fear of a Brown Planet on Vimeo.

It's Australia Day today. As our national day of celebration, it acts as a post for all sorts of flags. Once, in more innocent times - or at least, in the days when White Australia was a harmless nationalistic masthead that merely signified cutting off the pigtails of Chinese goldminers - it meant the Land of the Long Weekend was nearing the end of its summer hols. The Australian Worker returned to his factory in the worker's paradise, there to cock his snook in a suitably larrikin fashion at the Boss, while stealing his copper piping.


Then our Indigenous people were given the vote, and we found that a sizeable slice of the Australian population thought that Captain Arthur Phillip's arrival at Botany Bay marked a day of calamity. In response to this and other kinds of thoughtfulness, Australia Day has become an occasion for bashing Indian students, dubious dress-sense and general boganoogery, which itself prompts a wave of horror from the anti-thug brigade in the national press.

I'm not sure that Australia is more racist than it has been. A certain zombie element is certainly expressing its racism in worse taste and with more confidence, and - seizing the commercial opportunity - supermarkets, insurance salesmen and furniture barns are cashing in on the patriotic ka-ching. Luckily, that's not all of Australia. It's certainly not the Australia I know. As a proud, card-carrying "arts extremist" and, well, ordinary urban citizen, I can testify to the tolerance, intelligence, ingenuity, passionate thoughtfulness and, yes, decency (George Orwell valued decency highly, and so do I) of the Australia I inhabit.

Phew. Just had to get that off my chest. Now from the editorial to the reviews: which will, I fear, be brief. Today is somewhat crowded. and I am working against other deadlines at present which limit my time.

The splashy opening of last week was, of course, the Melbourne Theatre Company's production of the Broadway hit The Drowsy Chaperone. If anything expresses Australian colonialism, it's a willingness to take the cultural lead from the traditional Anglo centres of culture, Britain and the US; in theatre's case, Broadway and the West End. However, the paradox of colonialism - as cricket and soccer demonstrate so well - is that the damn colonials end up doing the mother country's culture better than the mother country itself: and Simon Phillips's production here is a case in point.

The Drowsy Chaperone might usher in a subtext of nostalgia for the days when we - meaning white, middle class audiences - could comfortably laugh at wops and dagoes with funny accents. And it unashamedly claims that theatre is about entertainment and escapism, and nothing else. (It's actually the "nothing else" clause that I object to - I know very few extremist arts elitists who aren't up for popcorn). But its ironic self-commentary means that it has its cake and eats it too.

Disliking The Drowsy Chaperone would be like disliking kittens: pointless and somehow inhuman. This is a preposterous cocktail of a show, delivered with just enough lemon to cut against the syrup, and Phillips has given it a superb production. It plays homage to the golden age of musicals, when life was grand (if you were rich enough): it evokes 1920s Broadway, when Dorothy Parker was sharpening her pen at the Algonquin Round Table, Gershwin and Cole Porter were shaping the tunes and the Great White Way was paved with rhinestones and sequins.

What makes it more than merely an exercise in nostalgia is its simple but ingenious framing. When the lights go down at the start, they stay down: we sit in the anxious darkness that precedes every show, and Geoffrey Rush’s voice, refracted through a New York accent, floats across the auditorium. "I hate theatre," he says. "Well, it's so disappointing, isn't it?" And he tells us the prayer he delivers before every show: that it will be fun, that it will be short, that the actors will strictly observe the fourth wall and stay out of the audience, and that it will deliver an escape from the mundane travails of ordinary life.

The light lifts on a small, unimpressive apartment to reveal Rush, whose character doesn’t even have a name – he is simply the Man in the Chair. He is a musical theatre geek – for him, Elton John is a decadent shadow of Gershwin, and Cameron Mackintosh’s spectaculars are an unspeakable vulgarity. The Man has the blues, or at least an ill-defined anxiety he calls the blues, and to combat his melancholy, he proposes to share one of his favourite albums – a 1928 cast recording of a chestnut called The Drowsy Chaperone. He fussily puts it on the turntable and the overture begins.

And suddenly the blinds lift on his windows to reveal a real band playing outside. The walls ascend to reveal another, more glamorous world, the characters enter one by one, and the musical comes to life in his apartment. The musical itself is a ludicrous parody, performed by an outstanding cast with a brio that lifts it beyond its undistinguished score. It’s wittily annotated throughout by the lugubrious Man in the Chair, with occasional unwelcome interruptions from the “real” life he wishes so desperately to escape.

As well as theatrical stars like Rush, Richard Piper and Robyn Nevin (whose technical control is, in case we've forgotten, superb), Phillips has cast from experienced music theatre stagers, with a lineup that includes Adam Murphy, Shane Jacobsen, Rhonda Burchmore. And it's the cast - which has depth as well as breadth - that makes this show. Choroegrapher Andrew Hallsworth has put together some ripping dance routines - I'd forgotten, for example, how sheerly pleasurable it can be to watch a great tap duet. It all generates pure comic showbiz, with a sparkle heightened by Dale Ferguson’s ingenious set and spectacular costumes. A sure-fire crowd pleaser.

At the other end of the scale is Gary Abraham's Acts of Deceit (Between Strangers in a Room). At La Mama's Courthouse Theatre as part of the Midsumma Festival, this shows Melbourne's indie scene at its considerable best. It's loosely based on James Baldwin's second novel, Giovanni’s Room, which explored the alienation of a young, gay American man in 1950s Paris, his inability to reconcile his homosexuality with his ideals of manhood, and the catastrophic consequences. It is, in fact, the kind of thing that in lesser hands could be teeth-achingly pretentious. When delivered with the skill and passion you get here, what occurs is gut-wrenching, compelling theatre.

David (Jay Bowen) is waiting in Paris for his would-be fiancee Hella (Joanne Trentini), who is travelling Spain as she decides whether to marry him. While she's away, he meets a young West African barman, Ku-Jean (Terry Yeboah), and begins a passionate affair. His deceptions of his lover, his fiancee, his gay friend Jacques (Dion Mills) and a young woman whom he sexually exploits (Zoe Ellerton-Ashley) begins, of course, with his self-deception.

The major change in Abrahams' sensitive adaptation of Baldwin's novel is to transform the race of David's lover from Italian to West African. It's appropriate: as a black, gay man, Baldwin was himself one of the most insightful commentators on race relations in post-war literature; it also introduces a subtext about illegal immigrants that gives the text a contemporary spin. Also impressive is how the text wears its intelligence lightly, echoing Baldwin's literary sophistication without weighing down the play's dramatic force.

Perhaps what I most admired about this show - besides the passionate and, above all, accurate performances, which are truly extraordinary - is the delicacy and honesty with which the production explores a complex emotional and moral situation, eschewing judgment for insight. The design team - lighting, sound and set - use simple strokes to effectively evoke the glamorous squalor of jazz-era Paris. But don't take my word for it. Go see it for yourself.

Picture: The Australia I adore: Melbourne cafes.

Shorter versions of these reviews appear in the Australian.

The Drowsy Chaperone, music and lyrics by Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison, book by Bob Martin and Don McKellar, directed by Simon Phillips. Melbourne Theatre Company. Playhouse Theatre, Victorian Arts Centre. January 21. Until February 27. Tickets: $115. Bookings: 1300 723 038.

Acts of Deceit (Between Strangers in a Room), directed and written by Gary Abrahams, from a novel by James Baldwin. Sets and costumes by Kat Chan, lighting design by Katie Sfetkidis, sound design by Jim Westlake, music composition by Lachlan Tan and Geoff Chan. With Jay Bowen, Terry Yeboah, Dion Mills and Zoe Ellerton-Ashley. Dirty Theatre and La Mama Theatre, 2010 Midsumma Festival. Courthouse Theatre. January 22. Until February 7. Bookings: (03) 9347 6142. Tickets: $25.

Daniel Kitson - a shy, rather literary man with a stutter and a protective beard - is the most unlikely of stand-up comics. It isn't surprising that his work has evolved into a niche all its own, somewhere between theatre, story-telling and comedy, that is probably closest to the work of Spalding Gray. Nor is it surprising that over the years his work has attracted a loyal following.

The secret behind Kitson's self-deprecating allure is his unabashed embrace of the mundane and quotidian. He dares to risk sentiment and cliche in a search for the passions that burn inside the most ordinary realities. Cliches are cliches, after all, because they express commonly held truths. Kitson's gift is to pick up shopworn phrases and commonplace observations and to polish them lovingly, so that the tarnish of their constant usage acquires the lustre and depth of real feeling.


The sparkle of novelty holds no attraction for Kitson: he celebrates instead the beauty of imperfection. He lives in open rebellion against today’s consumerist, disposable, youth-oriented society: he values, passionately, the patina and wrinkles of age, the fingerprints of memory, the chips and cracks of use and experience, which for him define the human capacity for love.

The title of his new show, 66A Church Road: A Lament Made of Memories and Kept in Suitcases, is fairly self-explanatory: here, through his detailed recollections of a much-loved flat, he explores with his trademark wit and poignancy the meanings of memory and home.

Nostalgia, he explains in the recorded voice-over at the beginning, isn't simply muddy sentiment for time past. It derives from the Greek words nostos, meaning to return home, and algos, meaning pain. It expresses the bittersweet longing for home - that yearning for a place that is our own which is at the centre of what makes us human.

A home is much more than a house or a financial investment: it is thousands of minute sensory details - the angle of a floor, the precise alignment of shadows at particular times of the day, irregularities in a wall, a cracked window, a certain smell - that are the habitations of memory. And it is memory, as Kitson says, that makes what we call a self.

In this ninety minute show, Kitson evokes his six-year love affair (the longest relationship, he tell us, in his life) with a rented flat in the London suburb of Crystal Palace. The show is a long, demanding and often very funny monologue: he recounts finding the flat, its virtues and its inconveniences, his vexed relationship with his landlord, his dream of buying the building and opening a record shop with a miniature cinema in the basement. Punctuating his chronological account of discovery and, ultimately, loss, are recorded fragments which tell of a parallel relationship with a lover, the story of which is bound with the flat but which remains, nevertheless, deeply private.

In fact, one of the paradoxes of 66a Church Road is that it is deeply, exposingly personal while at the same remaining profoundly private. I think that's largely a function of how it's written. Kitson's disarming orotundities and bizarrely-stretched comic metaphors translate personal experience into a public language, so that the more he reveals, the more something essential is hidden, even if we feel its presence pulsing beneath the surface of the language.

The personal becomes a mask: the mask in this case is language and performance itself. We know that there's a gap between the performer and the private individual before us, even if they are also the same person. It's this gap that permits the comedy and, perhaps more crucially, the feeling to emerge within the show.

It's an irresistibly Proustian exercise, in which Kitson attempts to recapture in words the multiplicities of memoried experience; and yet, as he explains at the end, immediate experience is precisely what always, in the final accounting, evades language. The act of translating experience into words inevitably reduces memory, fixing it in the past: details are lost or fudged, and feeling is emptied out in the tasks of remembering and saying. And this is why, he tells us, he has kept the most important memories for himself.

Kitson performs on a set which consists of a host of battered suitcases placed on an old Persian carpet. The suitcases are themselves boxes of memory: he opens them during the performance to reveal beautiful little models of his flat. He gives a generous, energised performance that demands and keeps your attention (and which makes me wonder how he can possibly do a late show in the Black Box afterwards). It's a show of great charm, in its original sense: an incantation of a magic spell, in which things that are irrevocably lost shimmer in our minds, briefly alive again in the parallel world of imagination.

66A Church Road: A Lament Made of Memories and Kept in Suitcases, by Daniel Kitson. Victorian Arts Centre. Fairfax Studio. January 15. Until January 31. Brisbane Powerhouse Centre for the Arts, February 2-7; Subiaco Arts Centre, Perth Festival, February 17-28.

My feature on what arts festivals mean in our culture is in today's Australian. It gave me a chance to do some happy reminiscing:

These shows changed how I saw the world and how I think about it. And as a result, they changed the way I act. I can see the influence of these artists in countless tiny ways in the theatre that I encounter in Melbourne.

Multiply those individual experiences by millions of festivalgoers over several decades, and that's a big cumulative effect. It's also untraceable: a stimulus might bear fruit decades later, in ways that no one can foresee or quantify.

Yeah, ok, that's how I think art works in general.

Meanwhile, the year is beginning to stretch and turn its scary head me-wards, and the blog will be swinging into slow (but undeniably graceful) action very soon. From now on I'm going to use Twitter to post interesting links, brainless chatter, personal confessions and witty observations on issues of import. This is because it stems my natural loquacity, thus permitting me to direct it in more financially rewarding directions. You can find my Twits at twitter.com/alisoncroggon.

Spam posted to this blog will be removed immediately.

Yep, it's been a big twelve months for Ms Geraldine Pascall Crrritic of the Year. And it behoves me, before I hang up the sash and hand over the crown, to tug my forelock at Yuletide crrritical tradition: viz. write my magisterial overview of the year. But first, a confession.


Because 2010 is round the corner, the media is bristling with Best of Decade lists: best music, best books, best video games, best movies, best literary feuds, best comics ... well, you get the picture. And really, who gives a rat's arse? (It must be admitted nevertheless that some of the "worst of" teardowns can be quite a lot of fun.)

Although I'm always prepared to spit in the face of futility, Ms TN can't do a best of decade list, and not only because - as all pedants know - it isn't the end of the decade until December 31, 2010. The fact is that TN has only been around for five years, and while in web-time that's approaching Methuselah status, it's still only half of ten. So I'll stick to the 2009 highlights reel, with the caveat that there was also a lot that I didn't see, and let everyone else argue.

While Hugh Grant and others have been complaining about how only five per cent of plays are worth the eye-time, Ms TN - always the half-glass-full type - has been doing her own mathematics. This year, I saw 66 shows, and deep meditation with a pencil has revealed that of those, around seven made me want to shoot myself. Which works out to 10.60606 per cent.

Of those 66, 20 (30.30303 per cent - how I love the symmetry of numbers) sent me out of the theatre humming with happiness; or, if not precisely with happiness, with faith rewarded, the spirit nourished, the intellect bracingly buffed and the heart called to its truthful home. The remaining 54.54545 per cent were the shows where, to varying degrees, the interesting and the less interesting marbled into deeply discussable experiences. Of these, surprisingly few were merely mediocre.

Which means that 84.3934 per cent of the time, I've had a much better time in the theatre than Hugh Grant. Is it me? Of course it is. But it is also Australian theatre. I love you, Australian theatre. You're beautiful, smart, curious, truthful, brash, skilful, intelligent, funny, passionate and unafraid. And you have a very charming seriousness.

For the listmaniacs among you, here, in strictly alphabetical order, are my Top Five Shows of 2009, complete with handy links to the original reviews:

Glasoon, Black Lung: Thomas Henning and the Black Lung gang reached a reductio ad absurdum in this show which, from their earlier work, ought to have been impossible.

Happy Days, Malthouse Theatre: Michael Kantor's best work to date, featuring a definitive performance of Winnie from Julie Forsyth.

Peer Gynt, VCA School of Drama: Daniel Schlusser showed how blowing up the classics can bring them to life. Exemplary, stunning work.

Poppea, Sydney Opera House: Barrie Kosky's sublime mating of Cole Porter and Monteverdi. A great director at his best.

The War of the Roses, STC Actor's Company: Benedict Andrews' astounding reworking of Shakespeare's History Plays: theatre of a rare and desolating beauty.

That's the best of the best. I'll put my extended best list at the bottom, for those who get that far.

As for the shows that made me lose faith and gave me colds (they do, bad art really does make you ill): the MTC features more than it should. The razzamatazz of the gorgeous new theatres hasn't been matched by many of the productions. The whole was still an improvement on previous years, with the Lawler Studio giving the company a little wiggle-room in what is really subscriber-bullied programming. Low points for me were the MTC's productions of Grace (theatre reduced to a school lesson), Andrew Bovell's teeth-achingly saccharine When the Rain Stops Falling and Guy Rundle and Max Gillies' flat satire Godzone.

The Malthouse gets a guernsey with an ill-considered production of David Harrower's sublime play Knives in Hens, which was an expense of talent in a waste of shame. The visiting avant garde didn't do too well either: Forced Entertainment's Spectacular brought theatre to stunning new levels of patronising tedium. On the other hand, it was several hours shorter than the much-lauded and hugely pretentious Gatz, which came from the New York company Elevator Repair Service to the Sydney Opera House with a thin idea and even thinner performances.

Aside from those in the productions already listed, there were some notable performances. Simon Phillips' excellent MTC production of August: Osage County featured two of them. The play itself failed to fire me with enthusiasm, but Robyn Nevin and Jane Menelaus showed how good acting can be. Pauline Whyman shone in an indifferent (and controversial) production of Pinter's The Birthday Party. And it's hard to hold a candle to the entire cast of Hayloft's equally controversial production 3xSisters which, for all its lively division of audience response, had everyone united in their admiration of the actors.

Uschi Felix and Dion Mills both gave exemplary, disciplined performances in André Bastian's fine production of five short Beckett plays at La Mama. And I'm prepared to be strung up for it: but it would be wrong of me not to mention Jan Friedl and Bruce Myles' gut-wrenching performances in The Cove, a season of Daniel Keene's plays that were directed at the Dog Theatre by Matt Scholten.

And I haven't even mentioned dance. It's been a rich part of my year: perhaps my favourite in a very distinguished bunch was Splintergroup's Lawn, which was at the Malthouse as part of Dance Massive early this year. I also loved Meryl Tankard's The Oracle (I fear I ran out of gas and didn't write about this, despite the magnificence of Paul White's solo performance), BalletLab's Miracle, Michelle Heaven's Disagreeable Object, and Lucy Guerin's remarkable piece on the West Gate Bridge disaster, Structure and Sadness.

What else? I missed the Melbourne Festival and so have no magisterial opinion to opinionate, because to my surprise (and, it seems, to everyone else's) I won the Australian Poetry Centre's poetry tour prize, and was touring the British Isles with my lovely colleague, Robert Gray. I doubt this will happen next year, so I'll get to see AD Brett Sheehy settling into his stride at MIAF. Reports reached me nevertheless: and it has to be said there was a palpable sense that the excitement that has sparked the past few years under Kristy Edmunds' aegis was somewhat dimmer. Aside from the program, which seemed to strike more as a series of events than an integrated festival, people missed the Spiegeltent and, even more crucially, the delightfully democratic (anyone could go) and cheaply-priced artists bar.

Melburnians, after all, love to talk.

As for me, I got my share of brickbats. In the midst of what has undoubtably been the Issue of the Year - the lack of women in key creative positions - I got outed as a hairy-legged feminist. (I admit it, it's true, especially when my razor is blunt and the boys have hidden theirs.) Earlier this year, Julian Meyrick got cross with me for being an aphasic racist, which was fun rather than otherwise; and then Neil Pigot attacked me with a blunt knife. This last depressed me so much - what's the point of writing all these words if your critics don't bother to read them? - that I thought of giving up the blog. But then, after a month of being rained on in England, I unthought it. The blog is too much fun, and I would miss the theatre terribly.

All the same, I am going to be a writer first and blogger second next year. Firstly because writing is how I make my living, and I need to live; and secondly, because that part of me that likes making things up has lain fallow long enough, and is getting bored with itself. That means that I'll probably see less theatre, and won't write about everything I see. Or at least, that's the resolution. Such is my track record with resolutions that this remains to be seen: but I'll definitely be putting my primary energy into novels next year.

As a postscript, you can don your quizzing glasses at the end of January to witness me in my guise as hapless reality tv poet. Some of you might remember I shot an episode of the series Bush Slam in March, going head-to-head with my dear friend John Kinsella. And yes, it's finally making it to prime-time ABC-TV (in the silly season, of course). I doubt I'll be watching, but I'll make a brave face on any mockery. None could be crueller than that of my children.

All that remains is to thank you, my readers, for coming here. I owe thanks too to the theatres who have provided tickets, to the artists who bear with my opining, and to the countless people (You Know Who You Are) who have encouraged and supported me this year. I wish you all a happy Christmas and, despite the worst efforts of the world's politicians, a healthy and enjoyable 2010.

The shows I loved in 2009

3xSisters, The Hayloft Project
Africa, My Darling Patricia, Malthouse Theatre
Beckett's Shorts, La Mama
Care Instructions, Aphids/Malthouse Theatre
Disagreeable Object, Chunky Move Studio
Glasoon, Black Lung Theatre and Whaling Firm
Happy Days, Malthouse Theatre
Lawn, Splintergroup/Malthouse Theatre
Life is a Dream, Store Room
Miracle, BalletLab
Peer Gynt, VCA Drama School
Poppea, Sydney Opera House
The Apocalypse Bear Trilogy, Arena/MTC
The Man from Mukinupin, MTC/Belvoir St
Structure and Sadness, Lucy Guerin Inc/Malthouse
The Cove, Dog Theatre (no review)
The Oracle, Sydney Opera House/Malthouse Theatre (no review)
The War of the Roses, Sydney Theatre Company
Tom Fool, Hoy Polloy
Wretch, La Mama
Yuri Wells, The Hayloft Project

Picture: a touching domestic scene from the Croggon-Keene household, posted instead of production photos already published on the blog. The duck says Happy New Year.

Ms TN is slipping away incognito for a week's actual holiday. She'll be lounging in a secret location on the Bellarine Peninsula, reading and checking out the local botany and squabbling comfortably with her family. Bliss. Please continue debating if you wish, but play nice.

At what point does politics move beyond parody? Maybe when you have a Prime Minister who looks as if he belongs in a Lego set, and who ought to be reported to the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to English.

Kevin Rudd can shift mid-sentence from warning of "incremental bifurcation" in the Asia-Pacific region (while, of course, needing to "work within the extant political vocabulary with China's national discourse") to his notorious manglings of outdated Australian slang ("fair shake of the sauce bottle").


Weld these together with cliches ("working families", "decisive action", "at the end of the day"), acronyms and buzz words ("synergies", "outcomes", "reverse engineering") and mixed metaphors ("preglacial position"), and you have a Teflon-coated PR machine that evades satire by overtaking it.

Its effectiveness can be seen in Godzone, Guy Rundle and Max Gillies's political satire now playing at the Melbourne Theatre Company. "Let's go for gold!" says Gillies's Rudd. "Let's optimise programmativity!" And it sounds just as boring and incomprehensible as Rudd himself.

It's a measure of the hyperreality of contemporary politics that satire in the noughties moved to featuring the politicians themselves. American comedians Steve Colbert and Jon Stewart invite politicians to be interviewed on their shows. The Chasers were regulars at Canberra press conferences.

The show that most successfully captures the white noise of the political machine - the brilliant ABC series The Hollow Men - doesn't feature politicians at all.

It's a dilemma for a satirist who, like Gillies, has made his name by impersonating politicians. The humour of his mimicry of Bob Hawke, Andrew Peacock and John Howard depended on both the startle of recognition and a recognisable gap between the reality and the portrayal.

The absurd exaggerations reflected back on their originals, prompting us to see them in a different light. But when impersonation can't prompt this frisson, it loses its bite.

It's why The 7.30 Report satirists John Clarke and Bryan Dawe, who don't rely at all on mimicry, still hit their targets: there's a cognitive dissonance at play that spikes their wit with the necessary unreality.

Godzone, on the other hand, seems like an 1980s television skit expanded to the stage. It is as if theatre is where television goes to die.

The set-up is a feel-good public conference, rather like Rudd's 2020 Summit but with added religiosity, where the PM introduces a brace of contemporary political figures to address the audience.

In between perorations from the lectern from Rudd, Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott and various commentators such as Andrew Bolt and Christopher Hitchens, Gillies rushes offstage to apply a new false nose and funny wig. We are then treated to a series of video sketches, "live" interviews with Malcolm Turnbull or Noel Pearson, or ads from the "sponsors".

The best of these was a vision of hell, or Liberal Party HQ, complete with shadowy Ku Klux Klan figures and swinging light bulbs. There was a YouTube aesthetic here - perhaps stemming from budgetry limitations - that rather undermined the effectiveness of others. Corporate PR gloss doesn't come cheap.

The blandness of the New Left - impregnably smug, impeccably coiffed and upholstered in incomprehensible jargon - creates a smooth, all-reflecting surface that simply doesn't give the purchase for this kind of satire. It's telling that the most successful sketches - Barnaby Joyce as a used car salesman, Gerard Henderson arguing with his local video store - are of the rough-hewn conservatives.

Gillies's impersonations don't always hit the mark either. Rudd is reduced to a pout, Abbott to a pair of Billy McMahon ears, and Julia Gillard - the least successful of all - is a spinsterish school teacher with "man hands" brazening out her secondary role as Rudd's henchwoman.

The portrayal of Bolt made me reflect that parody always includes a modicum of homage. Rundle's script made Bolt seem the most intelligent of the lot: its scathing caricature of left-wing inner-city suburbanites possessed a wit Bolt's columns signally lack.

The most mystifying - nay, bizarre - was Hitchens, who tells a meandering Boys Own story of meeting Osama Bin Laden in the Hindu Kush (didn't I read something like that in Robert Fisk's book The Great War for Civilisation?) and finishes with an account of being raped by Arabs. Which is why, he declaims, it was right to invade Iraq.

Hitchens as Lawrence of Arabia? Well, maybe - at a stretch - there's something in that, but here it's just a cheap punchline. And those allusions - if that's what they are - have no force at all in the format of sketch satire.

None of this is helped by Aidan Fennessy's static direction. Rundle and Gillies's last collaboration, The Big Con, featured Eddie Perfect crooning a series of cabaret numbers ("Don't be so damn September 10!") and was a lot more dynamic. Here the switching from lectern to screen gets monotonous and most of the set is simply flashy decor.

For those who have enjoyed the Gillies-Rundle combo before, this is a disappointing outing. It's a bad sign when the program is funnier than the show.

This review is in today's Australian.

Godzone, by Guy Rundle, directed by Aidan Fennessy. Set and costumes Shaun Gurton, lighting design by Matt Scott, sound design by Darrin Verhagen. With Max Gillies, Melbourne Theatre Company @ the Sumner Theatre, MTC Theatre, until January 17.