A couple of weeks ago I interviewed Ewen Leslie, currently the driving force of the MTC's production of Richard III, for the Weekend Australian. The profile runs in today's paper and is online here.

1. Ex-Melbourne and Red Stitch director Sam Strong has been appointed the new artistic director of Sydney's Griffin Theatre. Joanne Erskine has the goods at Cluster.

2. Critic Mark Mordue has won this year's Geraldine Pascall Critic of the Year Prize. (Those of you with long memories will recall I was last year's winner; this year I was on the judging panel and can say he was the unanimous choice.) More on Mark's work from James Bradley at City of Tongues. Another blogger/freelance critic: it suggests that the common perception that blogs are the death of criticism might be getting a few critical hits.

3. George Hunka at Superfluities Redux posts details of Howard Barker in conversation on, well, all sorts of things. Go hence.

4. The Guardian flatters me outrageously by listing me as one of five must-read critics, alongside Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Peter Campbell and James Wood. Excuse me while I lie down and recover.

As readers will know, last week Ms TN suffered a knock-out blow in her long-running war with the Dreaded Lurgy, putting her on the benches. There she has been grinding her teeth and annoying her neighbours, like the nameless anti-hero of Notes From Underground. In the interests of social amity, it's probably time I got my personae under control and started work again. So here, on tottering feet, we go.

If another person writes another op-ed complaining that Australian theatre is dying, beset by aesthetic crises and apathetic audiences, I will simply point them to Melbourne, May 2010, and have done with it. I can't remember a time when our theatre culture conspired so successfully to demonstrate that it's well and truly alive: and it's been happening at every level. At the MTC, Richard III is packing them out and The Ugly One has scheduled late performances; you can't get a ticket to Moth at the Malthouse for love nor money and The Threepenny Opera, in previews later this week, is officially sold out. Beyond the main stages, indie companies are posting "full" signs all over town.


What's going on? A lot of very interesting theatre, for one thing, boosted by the Next Wave Festival, which continues until the end of the month. And also a lot of word of mouth. Many shows are selling out without the benefit of a single review. So much for the much-vaunted power of crrrritics! What counts for much more is the excited report of a friend or acquaintance: that is, the impact of the work itself. This also demonstrates very clearly the idiocy of the idea that the success of one aspect of the theatre culture comes at the expense of others. It suggests something altogether more interesting: that vitality breeds vitality, and that theatre companies ignore their interdependence with the rest of the culture at their own peril.

Out of all this richness, reports of which have reached even my subterranean ears, I've been able to see very little. What I did see gives some indication of the quality of work that is not only expected but is delivered in this city. Following are some notes on what I've seen:

Moth

At a distressingly young age, Declan Greene has carved out a reputation in Melbourne’s independent scene with a series of plays demonstrating a black wit, iron nerve and a considerable lyrical gift. What's notable is the restlessness of his work: he's a playwright whose work is distinctive but never predictable. And he's learning fast. Moth represents yet another startling evolution: it was not at all what his previous work led me to expect, and yet is an absolutely logical progression.

It’s a powerful examination of mental illness, especially in relation to young people. Greene's two 15-year-old protagonists are Claryssa (Sarah Ogden), a wiccan emo, and Sebastian (Dylan Young), all-round oddball, who are both rejects in the merciless pecking order of high school. They are compelling portrayals of adolescents - self-centred, mocking, vulnerable and funny - who are traumatically alienated from the social lives around them. A horrific, if horribly familiar, instance of bullying unlatches Sebastian's already uncertain sense of reality, and his sense of self splinters into delusion. He has an apocalyptic vision of St Sebastian, embodied as a moth he keeps in a jar, and sets off on a mission to find the saved. Meanwhile Claryssa, as traumatised by Sebastian by the bullying episode, sinks into paralysing depression and is unable to help her friend.

Perhaps the strongest aspect of this script is how unsentimentally and accurately it represents not only the speech and attitudes of teen subculture (I had a 15-year-old with me who affirmed its authenticity) but the subjective experience of mental breakdown. The story is told through enactments by Ogden and Young, shifting between times and different subjective states in ways which recall the narrative of the cult film Donnie Darko, and Greene exploits to the full his capacity to soar from vernacular speech into pure poetry.

Chris Kohn directs Moth on a stage bare of everything except what looks like three lengths of underfelt, cascading from backstage to the floor, that define three different theatrical areas. Kohn's direction is absolutely simple and absolutely lucid, directing so good it's almost invisible. Jonathan Oxlade's design, Rachel Burke's lighting and Jethro Woodward's music conspire to focus the action on stage to diamond precision. Ogden and Young are remarkable, giving passionate, minutely disciplined performances that wind up to a shattering climax. What begins as a comic picture of two teen misfits ends up as a piece of theatre with the catastrophic power of tragedy. The long, devastated silence that preceded the applause was its proper tribute.

The Ugly One

Marius von Mayenburg, long-term dramaturg with Thomas Ostermeier at Berlin’s Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, debuted in Melbourne at the Malthouse in 2006 with the brilliant Benedict Andrews production of Eldorado, a scorching parable on the human capacity for self-destruction, and returned in 2008 with a production of a fascinating collaboration, again with Andrews, called Moving Target. The Ugly One, written between these two productions, is a play on a smaller scale, but demonstrating to the full Mayenburg's imaginative control of theatrical form.



As an exercise in theatrical elegance, it's an exemplary text. The Ugly One is a painfully hilarious and disturbing satire on the contemporary obsession with appearance, in which Mayenburg cunningly exploits a simple theatrical idea – identically named characters played by the same actors – to explore the place of individuality in an increasingly homogenised society, and how our uniqueness plays into our idea of self.

Lette (Patrick Brammall) is the inventor of a new kind of plug, but finds that when it’s time to present it to the world, his boss Scheffler (Kim Gyngell) thinks he is too ugly to sell it, and instead intends to send his assistant, Karlmann (Luke Ryan). When he asks his wife Fanny (Alison Bell), she confirms, to his astonishment, that he is as ugly as everyone says. In despair, he undergoes plastic surgery. Lette emerges looking exactly the same, but finds that his world has changed. Women lust after him, and he becomes a corporate success. But now everybody wants to look like him.

Using this simple premise, Mayenburg pulls to the surface all sorts of contemporary anxieties. The face is both more and less than a marker of individuality: it is, in the corporate world, the equivalent of a brand, through which perceptions of success and failure are filtered independently of the reality of achievement or quality. Lette's "transformation" - he is the only actor, incidentally, who doesn't play multiple roles - gives him the competitive edge in both the sexual and corporate worlds. But all too soon technology catches up and reproduces him, creating a hall of mirrors, a nightmare vision of Lettes that flood the market like generic drugs. In such a world, no human being can be anything but a product, a commodity valued by his or her exchange value. In the process, Lette's personal identity - whatever uniqueness he originally possessed - is completely lost.

Peter Evans gives this play the elegant production it deserves, directing it in the round with minimal props. The razor-sharp shifts in the text are handled with finesse and spareness, and some ingenious staging: among other effective touches, the amplified crunching of an apple excruciatingly evokes the sounds of surgery. All four performers rise to the challenge, giving nuanced and witty performances that bring out the play's comedy, and permit the darker themes simply to rise to the surface as a profound rippling of disturbance. This is definitely a highlight of the MTC's 2010 season, and not to be missed.

Hole in the Wall

Hole in the Wall is the only show I've been able to catch from the Next Wave Festival. This 45-minute show knocked my socks off, and made me even more sorry about what I've been missing. It's a fascinating multi-disciplinary theatre work that explores the experience of domestic, surburban space as lived by a twenty-something couple. Sounds mundane? As Hole in the Wall manages to demonstrate, the mundane is only dull if you're not looking.

The text, written by My Darling Patricia member Halcyon Mcleod, has a simple premise: it articulates the thoughts, fears and desires of a young couple (Matt Prest and Clare Britton) during the course of a single night. They would like a better house; they wonder what they are doing with their lives; they take out their frustrations on each other in bitter and violent arguments; they are afraid of dying; they are lonely. All these recognisable vignettes play out with a dream logic that ignores chronology, giving us snatches of their domestic lives.

It creates the premise for an extraordinary piece of experiential theatre. The audience is divided into four, and then put in four separate boxes that are simulacra of the average weatherboard rental house, with wallpaper up to the picture railing, a paned window (which is closed), and a painted white door with a brass handle.

Once you are enclosed with your fellow audients, the box begins to move, forcing you to walk along with it. It is difficult to describe how disorienting this is: it quite literally made me dizzy. Part of the dizziness was the necessity to reorient my sense of place. While in fact the floor is quite still, and it's the box that's moving, from the point of view of those enclosed, it's the walls that are stationary. There was a similarly disconcerting exhibit of a swaying room in the Guggenheim exhibition at the NGV recently (I'm afraid I can't remember the artist) - this was much more displacing, because it was more claustrophobic.

Once the box stopped moving, the lights went out, leaving us in complete darkness, and the first monologue - about the way a bed is like a grave - boomed out over us, accompanied by a rising growl of sound. And then one wall was thrown open, revealing the the rest of the audience in the three other boxes, all ingeniously linked together to make one room, in the centre of which was a bed.

The performances played out in these intimate spaces, which were continually reconfigured in constantly surprising ways by unseen manipulators. Sometimes the boxes became a long hallway, through which the performers entered and left, in which we became guests at a party, or ghostly witnesses of private grief. Sometimes we looked out through a window at Preston walking outside in his pyjamas. Once all the walls opened and we watched a projected animation of puppets who played out the story of a happy suburban couple.

The effects were haunting, poignant, moving; sometimes (as in the terrible quarrel between the couple) confronting. Aside from the compelling performances, perhaps the most powerful aspect of Hole in a Wall was how the initial disorientation made us all complicit in the show. Social barriers immediately dropped in our initial surprise and puzzlement, and when we were watching the performances, we were all aware not only that we were watching together, but that we were in the same intimate space as the performers, and that we were, in our witnessing, part of the show. An absolutely fascinating and beautiful experience.

Pictures: top: Sarah Ogden and Dylan Young in Moth. Photo: Jeff Busby Bottom: Patrick Brammall, Alison Bell and Luke Ryan in The Ugly One. Photo: Jeff Busby

Moth, by Declan Greene, directed by Chris Kohn. Set and costume design by Jonathan Oxlade, lighting design by Rachel Burke, composer Jethro Woodward. With Sarah Ogden and Dylan Young. Malthouse Theatre and Arena Theatre Company, Tower Theatre, Malthouse, until May 30.

The Ugly One, by Marius von Mayenburg, translated by Maja Zade, directed by Peter Evans. Lighting design by Matt Scott. With Alison Bell, Patrick Brammall, Kim Gyngell and Luke Ryan. Lawler Studio, MTC Theatre, until June 12.

Hole in the Wall, text by Halcyon Mcleod, directed by Hallie Shellam. Concept by Clare Britton, Matt Prest, Hallie Shellam and Danny Egger. Set design by Clare Britton, Matt Prest and Danny Egger. Lighting design by Mirabelle Wouters. Original music, sound design and animation by James Brown. Performed by Matt Prest and Clare Britton. Next Wave Festival @ The Meat Market. Closed. Carriageworks, Sydney, May 26-29.

I seem to be suffering from something very like flu, which is putting the kybosh on both seeing and writing about the theatre. And at such a time! This town is presently lousy with great performance. To cheer my shivering hours, I thought perhaps you could tell me (and everyone else) what you're seeing and liking (or, perhaps, not liking). Some already have: Richard Watts said this enchanting notion, Sunset Over Cardboard Mountains (sadly closed) was to kill for, and Yumi Umiamare's Trans-Mute at the Guild Theatre is another smart recommendation - her brand of cabaret/butoh/dance is really something. What else?

Ms TN just realised that she has driven herself nose-first into a large furrow in the ground. In practical terms, this means that writing anything sensible is presently way beyond my capacity. So: a holding note. If you want to see some theatre, get out to the Next Wave Festival, which is causing all sorts of exclamations around the traps. For my part, last night I went to see Hole in the Wall at the North Melbourne Arts House, which is an astounding experiential interrogation of domestic space. It closes this Saturday, so be quick. I hear that Moth at the Malthouse is sold out, and the only way to get a ticket is to hang out at the box office and beg. (I'd say it's worth the chance.) And I believe The Ugly One is also selling fast, and the MTC has scheduled extra performance. All are most certainly worth your time. And mine in writing about them, which I swear I will.

I might add that the recent proliferation of sold-out performances in the smaller venues around town speaks volumes.

Despite a certain personal discombobulation - finishing a novel will do that to a woman - Ms TN has been having a fine time at the theatre in the past week. And hearing of much more that I'm not seeing, what with the Next Wave Festival flinging open its doors to what many people are saying is a very high quality program that is practically compulsory for theatre nerds. Crazy times, guys.

Last week the MTC and the Malthouse both opened hotly anticipated studio shows - Marius von Mayenburg's The Ugly One at the Lawler Studio and Declan Greene's Moth at the Tower. Both are stunning productions - my very brief Australian review is here, but I hope to get more considered responses up on the blog in the next few days.

Meantime, our Australian representative in Paris, Daniel Keene, has been making waves. The season of his play Scissors, Paper, Rock, which opened at the major Paris theatre La Colline on May 5, has completely sold out, and a couple of days ago it received a rave review in Le Monde. (The link is to a Google translation, which has its own peculiar grammatical pleasures.) Reading through the translatese, critic Fabienne Darge speaks of a "masterly simplicity" created by the "minimalist music" of "this amazing Australian author". Am I a proud spouse? Indeed I am!

And an update: Direct your browsers this instant to George Hunka's fascinating review of David Mamet's new book of essays, on Superfluities Redux.

Polly Stenham's That Face - famously written when she was 19 - is most often compared to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - not least because the anti-heroine in both plays is called Martha. Both Marthas are badly behaved, addictive older women, and both have an incestuous passion for their sons, even if in Albee's version the son is imaginary. But it strikes me that a more pertinent comparison is with Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire. Stenham's Martha is more like Blanche DuBois: a fragile, damaged creature teetering wildly on the edge of a catastrophe curve.

The play reads very much as a precociously talented first work; it has an undeniable dramatic force that is dampened by some crudities in its structure and characterisation. For all that, it swept the British theatre awards when it premiered at the Royal Court in 2007, and productions around the world have quickly followed. It's easy to see why it attracted such attention: a palpable sense of urgent truthfulness drives the play past its flaws into a genuinely cathartic climax.


In That Face, Martha (Sarah Sutherland) is the inexorable gravity at the centre of the action. She is alone after a bitter divorce from her husband Hugh (Dion Mills), a wealthy suit who lives in Hong Kong with his new wife and child. Her son Henry (Tim Potter), a budding artist, has devoted his life since he was 13 to caring for her, convincing himself that if he can only keep her out of hospital, she will recover. His sister, Mia (Lauren Henderson), is regarded by her mother as an unwelcome rival for Henry's affections.

The play opens with a scene where Mia and her prep school friend Izzy (Lucy Honigman) are hazing a younger student, in an initiation ritual that goes badly wrong when Izzy Mia drastically overdoses the student on valium, stolen in the first place from Mia's mother. Mia's threatened expulsion prompts Hugh to fly back from Hong Kong, and Henry, boiling with resentment at his father's betrayal of his old family, panics that Hugh will "fix everything up" and have Martha involuntarily committed, thus making his failing efforts of the previous five years utterly meaningless.

What That Face lacks in complexity - Hugh, for example, is little more than a cipher in a suit - it makes up for in its precise observations of a family locked in the crisis of mental illness. (Anyone who thinks the actions here are exaggerated histrionics hasn't seen psychosis in action). But this play is more than a study of the effects of mental illness, and the common predicament of children caring for dysfunctional parents. It's also a scathing indictment of British middle class brutalisation, with the clear implication that the extreme emotional alienation Stenham articulates in all her characters is not only pathological, but endemic.

The fact that the opening scene is in a boarding school - central to the mythos of the British class system - is crucial. Not one of Stenham's characters - from the supposedly "normal" father Hugh, who seems emotionally cauterised, to the schoolfriend Izzy - knows how to relate to other people. The only characters who might be said to feel genuine love for each other, Henry and Martha, exist in a haze of destructive, incestuous mutual dependency. The only character who acts with any dignity is the one with the acknowledged mental illness, Martha, when she makes her Blanche DuBois exit for the mental hospital.

There's an unspoken history here that is still playing out in Britain. In his unfond memoir of his prep school St Cyprians, George Orwell described the brutalities of his middle class boarding school as a training ground for the front troops of Empire, fostering the lack of empathy and Darwinian competitiveness necessary for ordering around, and possibly shooting, the brown people who lived in the pink bits of the map. Another association, more telling perhaps in its poignancy, is from Michael Apted's 7-Up series: the unhappy middle class teenager Suzy, devastated by her parents' divorce, introvertedly twirling her hair as her pet dog chases and kills a rabbit in the background.

This resonance simply doesn't translate to Australia: yes, we have class in our society, but it's quite a different deal here. We might even have colonial imitations of the British class system, but they don't function in the same ways or with the same codes. Consequently director Sarah Giles's decision to stage That Face with Australian accents effectively reduces it to an enclosed family psychodrama. It still works, but you have to listen hard through the unfocusing that results: and aside from the ramifications of class, the diction remains too specifically English to sit easily with Australian accents.

This lack of clarity extends to the design, a bare curve of beige carpet sweeping up the back of the stage, with Henry and Martha's bed a sunken pit to the side of the stage. Instead of making the play more lucid, as is probably the intention, it makes it less so, muddying the transitions between scenes. But most crucially, I often felt the performances lacked an understanding of the pathologies the play explores. Tim Potter as Henry gives us a bravura performance, and after an initial uncertainty Sarah Sutherland creates a convincing portrayal of Martha. Dion Mills does his best with the thankless task of humanising Hugh, but neither Lauren Henderson nor Lucy Honigman manage to convey the pathological alienation of their characters.

Still and all, it's a creditable production of an interesting play. Stenham appears to be that rarest of beasts, a natural dramatist. If her subsequent plays bear out the promise of this one, she will be well worth looking out for.

Picture: Tim Potter and Sarah Sutherland in That Face. Photo: Jodie Hutchinson

That Face by Polly Stenham, directed by Sarah Giles. Design by Claude Marcos, costumes design by Yunuen Perez Martinez, lighting design by Danny Pettingill, sound design by Caitlin Porter. With Tim Potter, Sarah Sutherland, Dion Mills, Lauren Henderson, Lucy Honigman and Fantine Banulski/Persia Hethorn-Faulkner. Red Stitch until May 29.

As TN readers will know, the judges of this year's NSW Premier's Literary Awards declined to shortlist any plays, sparking a debate on whether plays are proper literature. So, when the glitterati gather on May 17 to hear the Premier announce this year's literary winners, playwrights will be absent from the tables. Instead, a group of Sydney playwrights and their theatrical peers are arranging their own Salon des Refusés, "to celebrate Australian playwriting and to assert its place in Australia’s theatrical and literary landscape".

I know where I'd rather be; but then, award functions have always rather reminded me of Dorothy Parker's remarks on "Literary Rotarians".

Speakers for the evening include Executive Director of Currency House and co-founder of Currency Press, Katharine Brisbane, and my Australian critical colleague John McCallum, who is a past NSW Literary Award judge, senior lecturer in theatre and performance at the University of NSW and author of Belonging: Australian Playwriting in the 20th Century.

An open invitation is extended to anyone who wishes to attend. You can RSVP and find out more details at Cluster.

Today's Australian review of the touring production of Theatre Royal Haymarket's Waiting for Godot is now online. With apologies for some odd grammar, not all of which is mine. (Of course evening arrives before nightfall...)

To the lovely readers who have kindly (and discreetly) emailed me to correct the typos in my last couple of reviews. Richard III set a typo record! I fear that general time poverty meant doing them all in one day, which has resulted in a little fraying about the edges. But all fixed now. I think.