La beauté, “Beauty is difficult, Yeats” said Aubrey Beardsley
when Yeats asked why he drew horrors
or at least not Burne-Jones
and Beardsley knew he was dying and had to
make his hit quickly

Hence no more B-J in his product.

So very difficult, Yeats, beauty so difficult.

- Ezra Pound, Cantos

I left Whiteley's Incredible Blue last night with Pound's verse circling around my head. Barry Dickins's new play, subtitled "an hallucination", is almost an essay on the proposition of the difficulty and necessity of beauty, through the medium of the enfant terrible of Australian art, Brett Whiteley.


Whiteley is a compelling figure: part artist, part charlatan, myth-maker extraordinaire, he died of a heroin overdose in 1992, aged only 53, in a country motel. So much of his work is trashy product for the cannibalistic art market that at once made and destroyed him, and yet his sublime gift for colour and line gave us some of us our most iconic paintings. Dickins, however, isn't interested in moralising, nor in biography. What he has created instead is a poetic riff that recreates Whiteley's restless imaginative excesses, a theatrical meditation on art, beauty and self-destruction.

The title not only recalls Whiteley's fondness for the colour ultramarine blue, but colloquially suggests Whiteley's argument ("blue") with life itself. It's probably Dickins's best play, and certainly a play only he could have written: here his Dylan Thomas-esque ear for rhythm and colour is given full rein, looping and relooping in an avalanche of imagery. These flights are grounded by an earthy self-awareness, a deprecating humour that pricks the impulse towards romanticising the artist, seeking instead to make luminous the sensual passion that informed his paintings. The blur of the sentimental is always a danger in a work like this, and this play never goes there.

The conceit is simple. Brett Whiteley's soul is in purgatory, trapped in the squalid motel room in which he died. He is played with a startling verisimilitude by Neil Pigot, who with the addition of a curly wig looks almost exactly like him, but it's clear from the opening moments that this isn't intended to be a realistic representation. Pigot plays him as a clumsy dancer, half child, half cynic, regretful and regretless, looking back at the failures of a passionate life from the dispassion of death, a collision of quicksilver and human flesh borne down by the gravity of mortality. It's a bravura performance, exact and compelling, which drills into the observation that might be Whiteley's epitaph: "I'm not good. I'm a good artist."

Julian Meyrick's production is carefully designed to frame and amplify the text. The set is simple: a wide stage, featuring only a messy double bed that recalls Tracy Ermin's squalid autobiographical My Bed, a side table loaded with pills, a radio on the floor. To one side is the band (Pietro Fine, Robert George and Robert Calvert). The art is suggested visually by the barest of cues - a mobile of birds in flight to the right of the stage and a few projected graphics. The paintings are principally invoked through music, Whiteley's line echoed in the soaring notes of a saxophone.

Hallucinatory stage directions are read in voice-over by Richard Bligh, Keonie Dodd and Daniela Farinacci, sometimes overlapping each other, punctuating the various movements of the monologue with vivid, oneiric mise en scenes. This is a reality created almost entirely through Dickins's words.

I wished that the acoustics at Fortyfive Downstairs were less muddy, as the music sometimes overwhelms the text. And occasionally Meyrick's directorial eye slackens: Pigot's physicalisations - playful dance, jumping on the bed - can tip over into the merely silly. When Pigot's gestures, however odd they are, unite with the extremities of the text, it creates a potent expressiveness, but this is not unfaltering. It made me think of the sort of precise physicalisations Anita Hegh created in Peter Evans's production of The Yellow Wallpaper: the performance language here is not as sharp. But these are quibbles. This is a sound production of a challenging and complex text, from a writer who should not be forgotten.



It felt serendipitous that I should see Foley on the same day as Whiteley's Incredible Blue: it was a day for Australian icons. Gary Foley, Aboriginal activist, uncompromising anarchist and unrepentant larrikin, is a living repository of a fascinating and shamefully little-known aspect of Australian history: the battle for self-determination and land rights for Aboriginal people. Rachel Maza Long's production is basically a lecture tarted up with a cardboard set that recalls a television talk show, with four screens showing various media - photographs, graphics, television footage. It's plain, unpretentious theatre, and absolutely riveting.

As with Ilbijerri's Jack Charles Versus The Crown, this is an exercise in autobiographical theatre. Gary Foley presents himself in his "native habitat" as an Aboriginal historian, which is a room scattered with archive boxes. Late in life, he tells us, he became a creature he despised, an academic (spit), graduating with honours in history from Melbourne University (spit), and now can be observed in his rooms at Victoria University. From here, he tells us the story of his life, which - as Foley was part of some of its most important events - is also an introduction to the wider history of black struggle in Australia.

It's a warts and all presentation, and often hilarious. It opens with a video of the young Foley on the lawns of Parliament House, being buttonholed by a disapproving matron in a twinset. At first he attempts to explain the aims of the protest, but soon he loses patience and roundly abuses her. When Foley himself, sans beard and long hair, 61 years old, steps onto the stage, he tells us that this angry young man is dead. "Now I'm a grumpy old man," he says.

Foley's often controversial life is full of colourful anecdote. He was one of the founders of the Aboriginal Embassy on the lawn of Parliament House in Canberra, a member of Black Power, which started the first free legal and medical services for Aboriginals (or anyone) in Australia, and even co-designed the Aboriginal flag. Importantly, he is also an actor. Indigenous theatre has been from its beginning a political theatre, the most consciously political we have; it's here that the very European notion of theatre as social revolution exists as a living thing.

Foley was a member of Sydney's Black Theatre, founded under Bob Maza at the Nimrod, and was in the cast of the ground-breaking 1972 political revue Basically Black. This is a legendary production, and one of the highlights of Foley is a short showing of some of the sketches filmed by the ABC for a pilot. The series was never made, presumably because it was considered "too political". On the evidence of those few minutes, Basically Black is the funniest tv show that was never made. You can only sigh for what could have been.

He outlines the history of Aboriginal activism against the background of the notorious White Australia policy and the wider international Civil Rights movement. This history reaches back to Federation, and forward as Foley traces his own involvement in the protests of the 1970s and the various governmental betrayals of the Aboriginal quest for Land Rights (it finishes by making the point that Native Title is an entirely different question to Land Rights).

Foley highlighted the shameful fact that I know much more about the US Civil Rights movement than I do about the history of Indigenous activism here. Even so, I had no idea that the early 20th century boxer Jack Johnson - in his time the most famous black person on the planet - was a prominent activist, or of his far-reaching influence on Indigenous politics here. This history is not only necessary; it's fascinating. If nothing else, that these stories remain largely untold demonstrates how colonial Australian culture remains.

And you'll seldom be taught history as entertainingly as in this show. Invigoratingly irreverent, driven by an unflinching lifelong passion for justice, it makes absorbing theatre. As the Age said of Foley himself: "If his ego is epic, as his opponents allege, so is his story." Foley's the one to tell it, and you'd be mad to miss it.

Pictures: Top: Neil Pigot as Brett Whiteley. Photo: Jeff Busby. Bottom, Gary Foley as Gary Foley.

Whiteley's Incredible Blue by Barry Dickins, directed by Julian Meyrick. Designed by Meredith Rogers, lighting by Kerry Saxby. Performed by Neil Pigot, with musicians Robert Calvert, Robert George, Pietro Fine. Melbourne Festival, fortyfivedownstairs, until October 23.

Foley, written, performed and co-devised by Gary Foley, directed by Rachael Maza Long. Co-devised by Jon Hawkes, co-written by Tony Birch. Audio and lighting by Danny Pettingill, costume and design by Emily Barrie. Ilbijerri Theatre, Melbourne Festival. Fairfax Studio, Victorian Arts Centre, until October 15.

When Hofesh Shechter debuted here during Brett Sheehy's first Melbourne Festival, I was in the UK and missed it. So it's fair to say that I had no idea what to expect last night when I sat down to watch Political Mother - aside, that is, from the kind of generalised anticipation prompted by a bunch of people saying things like "!!!" when his name was mentioned. 70 minutes later I staggered out of the Playhouse Theatre, not so much enlightened as endarkened. I didn't even know what I thought, and the truth is that it will take a few days before I do. However, I'm seeing four shows in the next two days, and needs must, etc. Herewith some notes.


Shechter is an Israeli choreographer and musician based in London, a former member of the Tel Aviv dance company Batsheva. That influence remains in the clarity of his choregraphy and in the disturbing images of militarisation that inform Political Mother. But where Batsheva's Ohad Naharin retains an almost classical quality, Shechter drags dance into a universe of theatrical assault. From its opening moments, when a soldier clad in the ceramic armour of the ancient Middle East appears out of darkness, plunges a sword through his body and writhes in agony as he dies, it's relentless.

Political Mother is a - I want to say "meditation", but this seems almost precisely the wrong word - an analogue in performance of political violence, especially the violence of nationalism. Its visions emerge out of a thick darkness and then vanish, almost like ghosts across the inner eye, to an amplified score. The music throbs through your body, making the experience visceral and immediate - its various music is mostly a driving contemporary beat, threaded through with the half tones of Middle Eastern folk music, but includes the sound of the wind in a desert, Verdi and Bach, and some blinding death metal. The three drums and four electric guitars are performed live, as a singer/charismatic dictator, sun-glassed like a glamorous Gaddafi, screams into a microphone between them.

The choreography mostly weaves out of folk dance - a staple of nationalistic identity since it was first created in the 19th century - here extended to extreme states of ecstasy and abjection, defiance and oppression. Shechter's command of dynamic relationship is masterly: groups of dancers collect and disintegrate, creating a rising tension between the individual and the group. There are glimpses of pastoral idyll or communal ideal that collapse and distort under the avalanche of sound and fury; moments of human connection, even love, that splinter and corrupt under the tyrannical obliteration of political domination. The dancers are astonishing, performing this challengingly complex movement at a pace which seems physically unfeasible.

I experienced a lot of this performance like a dream, often a horrible dream: there are glimpses of obscure nightmare - necrophiliac coupling on a battlefield, concentration camps, a chorus of marching zombies - which suddenly clear to moments of realistic representation - a couple imprisoned, threatened with a gun, who are then released and, in a rare moment of lyricism, embrace. This nightmare-like quality is reinforced by the design: the musicians are back stage, on different levels above the dancers, and flash in and out of darkness. The drummers first appear half-lit in military uniforms, so all you can see is the gleaming buttons on their torsos, avatars of war.

Shechter's brutal shifting of theatrical focus makes it impossible to read the dance outside its own terms of reference: you are forced to experience it. A brief interlude, in which we are staring at an empty stage to the sound of baroque strings, comes as an emotional relief. The final minutes rewind the opening sequence, until we are back at the opening image, with the unknown soldier brought back to life, drawing the sword out of his body. Perhaps we should go back, Shechter seems to be saying, and undo the act of primal violence to the self that inaugurates the nationalistic state. Unmissable.

*


Impempe Yomlingo's production of Mozart's The Magic Flute is equally dreamlike, but rather less traumatic. It seems impossible that this most charming of operas should be scored almost entirely for marimbas - I confess, not my most favourite of instruments - but here it is. Rather than diminishing the music, it exposes its wit and enchantment.

The connection is a traditional Tsonga folktale that is so close to Mozart's absurd fairytale that it makes you wonder if he knew it. Taking this cue, director Mark Dornford-May has translated the opera into the vocabulary of African townships, rescoring its orchestrations for marimba, voice and - in the famous Papageno/Papagena duet - with bottles of water struck by the chorus. The cast performs barefoot on a raked stage of scaffolding and humble wooden boards, with the marimba orchestra performing on either side. The witty costumes combine fantastic contemporary conceits with African motifs. The various characters and events are transformed into African equivalents, with a libretto performed in English and Xhosa.

The result is exhilarating. It's performed by an impeccable cast which seamlessly combines operatic bravura with African traditions of song and dance. There are many stand-out performances: Mhlekazi "Wha Wha" Mosiea makes an enchanting Tamino; Nobulumko Mngxekeza is a superb Pamina; Zamile Gantana, decked out in military camouflage, is a charismatically comic Papageno, and Pauline Malefane (also one of the musical directors) as the Queen of the Night - in a costume of feathers, studded black leather and gravity-defying hair - is hugely impressive.

Part of its pleasure is in the sheer ingenuity of the adaptation: but the rest is in the infectious joyousness of the performances. I doubt that Mozart would ever have thought that his opera might have been reinterpreted as a fable from a South African township, but I can imagine his ghost laughing with delight.

Pictures: Top: Political Mother by Hofesh Shechter Company. Photo: Sean Fennessy; bottom, Pauline Malefane as Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute.

Political Mother, choreography and music by Hofesh Shechter. Musical collaborators Nell Catchpole and Yaron Engler, lighting design by Lee Curran, costumes by Merle Hensel. Performed by Hofesh Shechter Company. Melbourne Festival, Playhouse Theatre, Victorian Arts Centre, until October 15.

The Magic Flute, by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, adapted and directed by Mark Dornford-May. Words and music by Masnidi Dyantyis, Msali Kgosidintsi, Pauline Malefane and Nolufefe Mtshabe. Choreography by Lungelo Ngamlana, lighting design by Mannie Manim, costumes by Leigh Bishop. Performed by Impempe Yomlingo. Melbourne Festival at the State Theatre, until October 16.

A pointer to my review of New York Theatre Workshop's Aftermath, which I saw at the Perth Festival earlier this year, and which opened in Melbourne at the Malthouse Theatre last night.

Much has been said about The Manganiyar Seduction, a stunning theatrical presentation of Rajasthani music, and no doubt I will simply add another bunch of superlatives. Indian director Roysten Abel has created a work that had the Melbourne Festival audience standing up, cheering and stamping its feet. Like everyone else, I was seduced: by the musicianship, by the passion of the music, by the production itself.


The Manganiyars are a caste of musicians, an unknown concept in western culture. The performers in The Manganiyar Seduction are mostly Muslim, although there is one Hindu, and mostly, intriguingly, have the surname "Khan". Their work combines both classical and folk traditions, creating a music of winding complexities: driving rhythms that get under your skin and make you want to dance contrast with solo voices that seem to express all human longing, edged with raw feeling and yet astonishingly skilled in their flexibility.

At first we're presented with four tiers of booths curtained in red velvet, each surrounded by light globes. The progression of the show is through revelation: one by one, two by two, three by three, the curtains open and reveal singers and musicians, until there are 37 musicians all playing together. It was like an Advent calendar, and I found myself pleasurably looking forward to finding out what I would see next. The other simple conceit is that the globes around the booths light up when individual musicians are playing, and darken when they stop. This creates a constantly changing geometry, and permits the conductor/percussionist/dancer (Deu Khan) who performs before the set to act as a conductor of the visuals as well as the music.

The performance itself consists of three songs, which fluidly connect in a text-book example of theatrical orchestration. The primary song is a Sufi work by the poet Bulleshah, Alfat Un Bin In Bin, which explores the love of God and the Sufi journey of gnostic self revelation. Two other songs are woven into the first: Halariya, a traditional welcome for newborn children that describes the birth of Lord Krishna, and Neendarli, a comic song about a wife attempting to seduce her husband.

I wished I could understand the words: not that the music wasn't enough in itself, because it was, but because the directness of its emotional effect made me want to know what they were singing. However, I didn't need to read the program afterwards to know that all these songs were about love. That was absolutely palpable. This show made me want to cry with happiness.

*



I walked out of Rhinoceros in Love shaking my head. One of the Melbourne Festival's headline acts, it's a production from the National Theatre of China, billed as China's "most popular contemporary drama". It was first produced in 1999, and was the National Theatre's resident playwright Liao Yimei's first play. We're seeing the fourth production, directed by Meng Jinghui, who has, among other things, specialised in bringing productions of the European modernists - Dario Fo, Samuel Beckett - to the Chinese stage.

This production is a bizarre collision of Chinese and European traditions. And yet... for all its faults - and these are legion - it generates a seductive energy that I found impossible to resist. Within this work is a feeling that I think western theatre has largely lost: it manifests an expressive liberty which reminded me strongly of the modernists of the early 20th century, a sense of almost defiant arbitrariness. All the dramaturgical care, all the polish and experience that can be brought to the best western theatre, can have a constipating effect, creating a feeling of aesthetic politeness and, in the worst cases, a "by the rules" stolidity. There's something refreshing in the total lack of attention to our unwritten laws of aesthetic production here, and in its best moments it creates an electric sense of the unexpected.

The play itself is the tale of Ma Lu's (Zhang Nianhua) hopeless passion for Mingming (Qi Xi), who is herself in love with an abusive man who won't love her back. Ma Lu is a zookeeper, and his only confidant is a lone rhinoceros, to whom he addresses his confessional monologues. This dodgy love story is punctuated by satirical clowning scenes, in which the reckless individualism represented by Ma Lu and Mingming is counterpointed by the conventions of the state or market. There is, for example, a series of "Love Tutorials", in which young people are taught the proper expressions for love through Hollywood cliches and pop songs.

Ma Lu's obsession reaches stalker territory - he declares that he will keep loving Mingming until she loves him back, no matter what she says, and that she will never be allowed to escape. There's no irony in this: he is presented as the heroic individual who persists in his beliefs against all odds. Perhaps it's not surprising that there should be a rape joke in there. Again, and this time not in a good way, it made me think of the early 20th century.

It's quite clear where the expertise lies in this production: in the performances, which are highly skilled, especially in the impeccable chorus work, and, for all its problems, in the text. I don't know enough about Chinese culture to be able to read this clearly against tradition, but even through the uncertain surtitles it seemed to me that Liao Yimei's text spirals out of a long tradition of Chinese poetry. The play's lyricism and obsession with the natural world recalls Li Po and Du Fu, who famously celebrated the romantic figure of the poet as an exile from society, and also contemporary poets such as Yang Lian, one of the figures who unites Chinese traditions with European modernist influences.

The design is probably its worst aspect. The set features suspended metal rectangles and reflective panelling at the back, and is very approximately lit: the lighting design has some good ideas, but is indifferently executed. The whole looks like a bricolage of modern effects, but doesn't appear to mean anything. Likewise, the show opens with a flourish of percussion which is never seen again, and which seems to bear absolutely no relationship to anything else. This, and a lot of the clowning, made me think of the acrobatics which were interpolated into Shakespeare's productions: these elements seem designed to catch the attention of the groundlings in the pit.

To one side of the stage is something like a billiard table that turns out to be a treadmill. This is the locus of one the production's hilariously kitsch moments: a Chinese pop song rises and the two lovers are running together, in an analogue of making love. It made me feel as if I had strayed into a bad anime. Towards the end of the play, the stage is flooded with water, forcing the cast, rather charmingly, to don green gumboots. In the climax, Zhang Nianhua ends up standing on a table being drenched with a private rainstorm, passionately declaiming his stalker ambitions. I still don't know why he had to be so wet.

Pictures: Top: The Manganiyar Seduction; bottom, Zhang Nianhua in Rhinoceros in Love.

The Manganiyar Seduction, conceived, arranged and directed by Roysten Abel, conducted by Deu Khan. Sound engineer, S Manoharan, set and lighting design by Roysten Abel. Melbourne Festival. Closed.

Rhinoceros in Love, by Liao Yimei, directed by Meng Jinghui. Design by Zhang Wu, lighting by Zhang Jian, sound design by Yan Guihe. With Zhang Nianhua, Qi Xi, Zhao Hongwei, Zhang Ziqi, Kou Zhiguo, Lui Chang, Wang Xiaoshen and Feng Qilong. National Theatre of China and the Melbourne Festival. Closed.

One of the strongest aspects of this year's Melbourne Festival program is the local performance. I can remember a time when under-developed local shows too often made an embarrassing contrast with the production-polished international work: not so in 2011. It demonstrates the depth of achievement that has been nurtured in this city over the past decade, and festival director Brett Sheehy's good fortune in being able to draw from such a rich field.


This cultural depth has come about through the patient investment of many institutions and people. Companies like Back to Back or Chunky Move or BalletLab don't spring up overnight: they emerge from initial risks taken on raw and untested talent, years of often unrewarding work, and, crucially, the faith that gives this work stages and audiences beyond the "fringe". For example, Back to Back's Small Metal Objects premiered at Kristy Edmunds's 2005 festival. That exposure led to an international tour which established their European reputation and to their subsequent 2008 Melbourne Festival premiere, Food Court. This leads directly to the confidence and experience that can mount a show as ambitious and finely worked as Ganesh Versus the Third Reich.

Chunky Move, one of the driving forces behind Melbourne's thriving dance culture, is another. Founded in 1995 by Gideon Obarzanek, this company has constantly surprised its audiences with work that restlessly explores the possibilities of dance performance. It actively nurtures new talent (Byron Perry, whose work Double Think is also in this year's program, is a Chunky Move protege). Obarzanek himself has choreographed everything from extravagant multimedia spectacle to a minimalist one-man show. In Assembly, his last work as artistic director of Chunky Move, he has shifted the goal posts once again, joining forces with Victorian Opera and its director Richard Gill to give us a meditation on the discrete self and communal identity, and the conflicting human longings for belonging, connection and individuality.

Assembly focuses entirely on the bodies of its 62 barefoot performers. They provide the entire score - breathing, yelling, hissing, drumming their feet, or drenching us with the harmonies of plainsong or sacred Renaissance choral works. Obarzanek and Chris Mercer's design is a plain wooden construction of bleachers or stairs, which sits beautifully inside the panelling of the Melbourne Recital Centre. This apparent simplicity belies the sophistication of the design: costumes which appear to be the casual outfits of the performers reveal themselves to be a carefully designed palette of reds and blues (Harriet Oxley), and Nick Schlieper's lighting is a masterly demonstration of the power of subtlety.

Eight dancers, six principal singers and 48 choir members in itself makes a considerable impact on a stage, and Obarzanek's choreography takes full advantage. The movement is bound by a notion of pneuma, the Greek word for "breath" which also means spirit, or creative energy. Even the stage seems to be breathing: at one moment it's crowded with people, and in the next, seemingly by magic, it's empty. People flood over the top of the steps, or stream in from either side, and as quickly vanish. Assembly demonstrates Obarnzanek's control of the dynamics of space: he exploits every plane of the set, vertical, horizontal and diagonal, to full advantage. The work's various moods transform the space from a public area - stairs in a public square, for example, or a football crowd - to stylised abstraction that brings us back to the public act of dance, to an interior evocation of private loss, an expression of the human longing for connection in an alienating world.

Assembly balances its austere structure with a surprising richness and variousness, and creates moments of unexpected beauty. Obarzanek constantly disrupts focus: at one moment we are studying the mechanisms of flocking behaviour, with gestures rippling through a crowd, and in the next are aware of the performers as disunited individuals. He divides his cast into a hostile halves, hissing and shouting at each other, before uniting them in a joyous celebration of a goal, and then immediately shifts us to a different notion of communal harmony with the choral music. The eight dancers emerge from the crowd, spilling down the stairs in gestures of defiance, or abjection, or longing, or expressions of humanity as machine, with pneumatic sounds (breath again) emphasising mechanical movements, and as suddenly dissolve into the collective.

The first half provides some of the most overwhelming moments of the show. The sheer beauty of the choral music emerging from the apparently "ordinary" crowd lends its emotion a strong utopian focus: a choir is a powerful image of community. Here, the work strikes chords with the collective behaviour that is presently re-entering the public sphere, with demonstrations from the Arab Spring to the Occupy Wall Street movement in the US, and feels like a forceful expression of the zeitgeist.

The dance shifts in the second half towards an exploration of coupling, of the individual within relationship: the crowd becomes an expression of the conventions which surround, extend and confine the anarchic possibilities of sexual desire and love. Here the dance becomes more obviously formal: Obarzanek creates a texture of symmetries, with couples mirroring each other's gestures, or weaving images out of their limbs that are reminsiscent of Hollywood dance movies. He certainly isn't afraid of kitsch: at one point the dancers even shape a heart with their arms.

These displays of romantic convention play against a subtext of conflict, desire, confinement and loss, including a fragmentary spoken text that suggests a man inarticulately defending himself against accusation. The final image is of solitude and longing: Alisdair Macindoe, isolated mid-stage, makes stylised gestures of weeping that seem to come from the vocabulary of Asian theatre, as Paul Capsis appears out of nowhere (he is not in the previous dance) and sings an a cappella love song. It feels surprising how far this work has evolved from its opening image of a loudly chattering crowd: by this time, we've had a chance to see all these people as individuals, and to contemplate them (and us) as both social and solitary beings. It's a fascinating and moving multi-faceted work, and a fitting finale to Obarzanek's achievement with Chunky Move.

Picture: Assembly. Photo: Jeff Busby

Assembly, directed and choreographed by Gideon Obarzanek, musical direction by Richard Gill. Lighting design by Nick Schlieper, costume design by Harriet Oxley, set design by Gideon Obarzanek and Chris Mercer. Dancers: Sara Black, Nathan Dubber, Benjamin Hancock, Alisdair Macindoe, Lily Paskas, Harriet Ritchie, James Shannon and Frankie Snowdon. Principal singers: Casselle Bonollo, Olivia Cranwell, Frederica Cunningham, Tobias Glaser, Jeremy Kleeman and Matthew Thomas. With Paul Capsis and the Victorian Opera Youth Opera. Chunky Move, Victorian Opera and Melbourne Festival. Melbourne Recital Centre. Closed.

I've been dithering over this post for days, trying to find a way in to writing about this extraordinary show. As with Back to Back's Food Court, which remains one of the most compelling experiences I've had in a theatre, Ganesh Versus The Third Reich takes an idea which initially appears to be very simple, and then, with cumulative force, systematically unpicks every expectation that you might have formed, until the psyche finds itself at such a point of vulnerability that you are suddenly confronted with - what? The Human Condition? Your own existential solitude? The naked soul as Foucault imagined it, criss-crossed and scarred by the traces of power and authority?


One of the problems in discussing Back to Back, the little theatre company from Geelong that could, is that it creates experiences that defeat description. Outlining a production's shape gives an idea of its characteristics, its morphology, if you like; but this morphology doesn't explain the vitality that inhabits the work. I feel, even more than usual, as if I were attempting to invoke an entire life, with all its incidence, richness, mundanity, conflict and beauty, by dissecting a corpse.

Bruce Gladwin and his collaborators make a work that can only happen in a theatre. It can't be translated into another medium, because it exists so fiercely in its transient present, in the particular moments in which it's witnessed by the particular people who happen to attend. Its transformations are a kind of alchemy, a human magic that ignites in the shifting relationships between the performers and the audience. It's at once transparently simple and profoundly complex.

As those who have followed the mild controversy that greeted its publicity will know, Ganesh Versus The Third Reich is, in part, a fable about how Ganesh, the elephant-headed Hindu god, travels to Nazi Germany to wrest back the swastika from Hitler. A major god in the Hindu pantheon, Ganesh is the deity of obstacles: he not only removes them, but will place them in situations that need to be checked. One of his lesser aspects is as lord of letters and learning, an avatar of stories (which is why I have two small brass effigies of Ganesh on my desk).

Ganesh's aspect as remover of obstacles must have special significance for a company in which most members are disabled. And Back to Back's decision to interrogate Hitler reminds us that, well before their plans to eradicate Jews, homosexuals, Roma and Slavic people, Nazi Germany targeted its disabled population. In 1939, the state systematically began to murder people with mental and physical disabilities, labelling them "unworthy of life", with estimates of deaths varying from 200,000 to 250,000. These murders were the experimental laboratory for what later became the death camps: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka.

Given such a dark subtext, not to mention the questions of cultural appropriation in employing the figure of Ganesh, it's unsurprising that the company discarded their initial idea for Ganesh Versus The Third Reich. "We knew our narrative was morally fraught," says Bruce Gladwin in his program note. "Over time our thinking shifted. Our self-imposed censorship - our reasoning that we should not create the work - became the rationale for bringing it to life."

What is presented instead is a double reality. We see the actors - Mark Deans, Simon Laherty, Scott Price and Brian Tilley - and director David Woods creating their Holocaust fairytale. When we walk in, the stage is a working studio littered with tables, ladders and other miscellaneous mess, with a row of huge curtains tied up at the side of the stage. As the performers argue in a desultory fashion, the director comes in and takes charge.

These glimpses of rehearsal are punctuated by scenes of theatrical spectacle, in which the semi-transparent plastic curtains, painted with silhouetted outlines of trees, houses and other illusions, are drawn across the stage. They are backlit, so performers can be seen in silhouette as well, or are used as a screen for shadow puppetry. The shifts from mundane reality to fairytale are swift, signalled by sound and lighting, and completely transform the stage, so that you are plunged wholly into mythic realities and just as suddenly, almost with a sense of bereftness, dragged out of them.

What is hard to explain is how this rhythm of contrast intensifies into a shattering potency during the show. As in Food Court, the work is an ambush: gestures and relationships which seem of merely mundane importance, or which begin as comic confrontations, inexorably gather emotional force. Subtly and incrementally, connections begin to accrete between the two storylines; for example, David plays Mengele, the Nazi doctor who conducted horrific experiments on, among others, disabled children, and David's very correct treatment of his actors begins to collect sinister undertones.

Perhaps part of this sense of ambush is in how lightly these connections are drawn. The rehearsal scenes are leavened by absurd comedy: Simon, for instance, complaining about his part as one of Mengele's experimental subjects: "It's hard being a Jew." They argue, passionately, about the issue of appropriation. There are sudden and confronting gestures towards the audience: David flinging his hand towards us, as if he is addressing a bank of empty seats, claiming that the audience is just coming to watch "freak porn". As the arguments between the performers intensify, his contempt becomes double-edged, and you begin to wonder if the person most interested in "freak porn" is David himself.

When these arguments explode into violence, the effect is devastating and shocking: the disparate elements and themes of the production suddenly fuse in a wholly unexpected way. The final image is unforgettable. David, tired of his job, tired of these freaks, is left with Mark, who has been the silent focus of many of the cast's arguments. Mark's mother will pick him up later. David, using all his professional skills in people management, deals with the annoyance of Mark by suggesting that they play hide and seek.

Mark hides under the table; David, pretending to look for him, picks up his things, and leaves the room. As the light closes in on him, Mark remains crouched under the table, wriggling with delight at the game, waiting to be found. Even thinking of this moment shakes my heart. It's not simply that this disabled man has been carelessly abandoned by someone who should know better. It's how this apparently trivial gesture becomes, in the deepest and most vulnerable echo chambers of the consciousness, a metaphor for the betrayal of all human hope.

This shows the power and ambiguity, also, of what Back to Back do to the notion of performance. David Woods is the only actor without disability, and his is, in the conventional sense, a brilliant performance. There is no question, at any time, that the rest of the cast isn't making a performance: this is the company's counter-argument to the bitter notion of their being "freak porn". But these actors bring another edge, a sense of perilous exposure that is intensified under Gladwin's impeccably sure direction. I can't think of another company which so foregrounds the knowledge that this work is being made, in each moment, before our eyes: it is a great part of why the audiences becomes so deeply involved.

Back to Back have never had any truck with "special" treatment: their work has a harsh honesty that makes it impossible to patronise. But they also specialise in moments of breath-taking beauty that assert the sheer power of their skills. There are images I won't forget: the impossible poignancy and strangeness, for example, of Ganesh, dressed in a business suit, standing before Hitler, who is played by Simon in a ridiculous knitted Hitler costume. Or an evocation of Indra's net, when a back curtain of stars was lifted to reveal a blazing light, like a sunrise. I've never seen anything like this show, because only Back to Back could make it. They are, simply, our most important independent theatre company.

Picture: David Woods and Brian Tilley in Ganesh Versus The Third Reich. Photo: Jeff Busby

Ganesh Versus The Third Reich, directed, designed and devised by Bruce Gladwin. Lighting design by Andrew Livingston, Bluebottle; design and set construction by Mark Cuthbertson, design and animation Rhian Hinkley, composer Jóhann Jóhannsson. Performed by Mark Deans, Simon Laherty, Scott Price, Brian Tilley and David Woods. Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne Festival and Back to Back Theatre. Merlyn Theatre, Malthouse, until October 9.

Your faithful blogger has been shanghaied by the day job lately, dealing with an editing deadline for my forthcoming novel. (Forthcoming Christmas 2012, that is - lead times are long in the publishing world). And I find, lifting my weary head from the coalface of the imagination, that I've fallen rather behind in my reviews, and this despite steadfastly missing nearly the entire Melbourne Fringe. I'll apologise here to those who invited me personally to their shows - I tried to reply to everyone, but believe me when I say that my inbox exploded. And I know I missed some worthy events. Perhaps my biggest regret is Nicola Gunn's At The Sans Hotel, at La Mama, which I meant to see last Sunday. That plan was derailed by a migraine, another regular pothole in the Croggon road to enlightenment. The spirit is willing, etc...


Despite my most cunning attempts at theatre evasion, I was still lured to three shows. Clybourne Park at the Melbourne Theatre Company opened two weeks ago, which demonstrates how tardy I am. The other two are the first harbingers of the Melbourne Festival, which officially opens tomorrow. (Expect TN's usual blanket Melbourne Festival coverage; I've cleared my desk and will be focusing on being a critic for the next three weeks.) The Malthouse got in early last week with The Border Project's Half-Real and Back to Back's Ganesh Versus The Third Reich. Back to Back's show is an exceptional work, which confirms this company's place as one of the most significant we have; more on that tomorrow later. Half-Real is mostly striking as a missed opportunity. But, first, to Clybourne Park.

Bruce Norris's Pulitzer Prize winner springs from Lorraine Hansberry's groundbreaking 1959 play, A Raisin in the Sun. Hansberry's play is based on the hostile racism (culminating in a lawsuit) that she experienced during her childhood when her family moved to a white neighbourhood in Chicago. It follows the fortunes of the Youngers family as they attempt to move into the middle class, along the way exposing the mechanics of North American racism, especially as expressed through the housing market. In A Raisin in the Sun, the family buys a house in a suburb called Clybourne Park: and this is where Bruce Norris picks up the story.

The first act of Clybourne Park, also set in 1959, is almost Ayckbournian in how it fills in the "other" side of Hansberry's play, although Australian audiences, unlike American theatre goers, will miss most of the cross-textual references. It begins as Russ (Greg Stone) and Bev (Alison Whyte), haunted by the suicide of their war veteran son, are selling their house in Clybourne Park.

When it becomes known that it has been bought by a black family, all hell breaks loose: their neighbours, who claim to be all very tolerant of black people in their place, are horrified by the thought of their being next door. Community leader Karl (Patrick Brammall), a take on A Raisin in the Sun's character Karl Lindner, even offers the family money to buy elsewhere. The second act is set in the same house fifty years later. Clybourne Park has in the meantime become a black neighbourhood, and now the new white gentry are moving back in, thoughtlessly obliterating a complex history.

This juxtaposition permits Norris to make mordant fun of liberal hypocrisies, exploring how little has changed in American social relations. Aside from race, its major question is the place of memory and history in a world defined by the marketplace. It's a conventional realist play, with nods to the expressionist theatre of Arthur Miller as well as situation comedy and farce. And it's strikingly well written: while it never reaches the heights, say, of Death of a Salesman, it's rare to see a play this well crafted, and that goes a long way to dispel the inevitable mustiness of its form.

The production is as well-crafted as the play itself: it's beautifully lit by Matt Scott, with a simple and effective set design from Christina Smith and an unobtrusive but evocative sound design from Jethro Woodward. Director Peter Evans brings together an exceptional cast, who ably negotiate the various levels at play in the text. The tone shifts with blinding swiftness from farce to robust comedy to tragedy, and the actors step nimbly and exactly from one to the other, with such skill that you barely notice the artifice.

It's truly an ensemble effort, but to pick out some highlights: Greg Stone as the depressive Russ handles the role's miserable aggression with wit and force and, in the end, moving humanity. We've long known that Bert Labonté (Albert/Kevin) is one of our best stage comedians, but I had no idea Zahra Newman (Francine/Lena) could be so funny. Given that I've seen her playing the title role in Elektra, and more recently in Debbie Tucker-Green's stunning one-woman play Random, this woman is blazing a trail as one of our most complete actors. And Patrick Brammall's Karl is a comic jewel. I often come out of these kinds of plays badly needing some artificial stimulants, but I really enjoyed this.


The main question bouncing around after the premiere of The Border Project's Melbourne Festival offering Half-Real was: why? Anyone wanting to prove the popular thesis that video games and art are an incompatible mix will find their prejudices amply affirmed by this show. Its successes - mainly in Geoff Cobham, Michael Marner and Chris More's fascinating digital design - only highlight how badly Sam Haren's production misses the mark.

The premise is that a woman has been murdered. Audience members, furnished with a Wii-like controller (minus buttons), are invited to investigate aspects of the crime by voting to choose which aspects of character or event they would like to witness, thereby "solving" (or not - my audience certainly didn't) the murder. While it was kind of fun waving the controller and seeing if your choice got up, it's fair to say that the novelty palls.

Half-Real's basic choose-your-own-adventure format is the first problem: as productions like LA Noire or Heavy Rain demonstrate, videogames outgrew simplistic narrative structures years ago. They offer far more sophisticated experiences, with morally complex stories and deeply designed environments. But even the most basic shoot'em up offers player choice and participation in ways that theatre is challenged to match: within a guided structure the player controls every action, not simply, as here, which chunk of story they wish to witness. And games are not confined by theatrical limitations of time.

Immersive theatre has been the buzz phrase over the past few years, with companies such as the UK's Punchdrunk leading the way. And there's continuing discussion about the formal possibilities interactive digital technologies offer for theatre. For my part, it's easy to see why writers might be excited about exploring the narrative structures pioneered by games. It's not a big step from the complex interactivity of games to, say, the aleatory playfulness of John Cage or even (as is teasingly hinted in Duncan Graham's text) the kinds of oblique narratives imagined by a writer like Roberto Bolaño.

Half-Real, however, only demonstrates the limitations of a by-the-numbers story. There's little evidence that the concept was thought through beyond the superficial details of structure: what such an approach could mean for theatre itself is barely examined. As a consequence, we get neither the best of theatre nor the best of gaming: instead of an imaginative collision of different forms, we get a reduced vision of both of them.

The impressive aspect is the design, in which projections transform an angled set into different environments. Digital characters are represented as shadows which are voiced by actors standing off-stage, and interact seamlessly with the actors. It's ingenious and sometimes beautiful. This is let down by DJ TRIP's sound design, which is almost a parody of bad videogame music. But even an actor as good as Amber McMahon can't rescue the banality of the story or, more profoundly, of the concept.

Pictures: top: (L-R) Patrick Brammall, Laura Gordon, Bert Labonté and Zahra Newman in Clybourne Park, photo Jeff Busby; bottom, David Heinrich in Half-Real. Photo: Steve Tilling

Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris, directed by Peter Evans. Set and costumes by Christina Smith, lighting design by Matt Scott, composition by Jethro Woodward. With Greg Stone, Alison Whyte, Zahra Newman, Luke Ryan, Bert Labonté, Patrick Brammall and Laura Gordon. Melbourne Theatre Company @ the Sumner Theatre, until October 26.

Half-Real, by Duncan Graham, directed by Sam Haren. Design consultant Geoff Cobham, lighting design by Chris Petridis, video art by Chris More, video system design by Michael Marner, composition by DJ TRIP (Tyson Hopprich). With David Heinrich, Alirio Zavarce and Amber McMahon. The Tower, Malthouse Theatre, until October 15.

Bangarra Dance Theatre's Belong demonstrates, once again, why Bangarra is one of our leading dance companies (and why it has such a huge international reputation). It consists of two dances: About, by Torres Strait Islander Elma Kris, and ID by artistic director Stephen Page. Both of them add up to "stunning".

The opening work enacts myths about the wind from Kris's Islander culture, opening out traditional movements into contemporary dance, and features an astounding set design by Jacob Nash that recalls the abstract beauties of bark paintings. Each of the four sequences takes a different aspect of the wind - the south wind Zey, the storm wind Kuki, the gentle north wind Naygay and the gusty south easterly Sager - and translates their stories and, crucially, the sensations of each wind into breath-taking dance, combining physical excitement with lyrical grace.

ID comes out of the world of tradition and nature into a bleaker present. Here Stephen Page confronts the question of Indigenous identity, in all its complexities. Page's theatrical imagination and sureness of touch make this a riveting work: by turns devastating, comic, poignant and intimate.

It opens with a tour de force of multimedia, in which a black and white projected film of a family, dominated by the dignified figure of an Aboriginal grandmother, is projected on a back stage screen. A changing cast of figures move in and out of view, looking curiously towards the camera. In turn, different dancers approach the camera until their faces loom in close-up and disappear. The same dancer then appears on stage, rolling out from behind the projection, so it seems that he or she literally emerges into three dimensions from the image.

ID segues into different sequences that are constantly surprising - a satirical take on skin-colour, for example, in which the dancers, dressed as school children, squabble on bleachers before smearing their faces with vegemite to create a startlingly cheeky take on blackface; a devastating death in custody scene, in which an Aboriginal is beaten by uniformed guards and his dead body, transformed subtly into a tree, is dragged away on a tarpaulin. In its portrayal of powerlessness in the face of brutal authority, this last is as potent as the brutal beating sequence in Castellucci's Tragedia Endogonidia. ID finishes with a powerful evocation of tradition being woven into contemporary identity.

Emotionally powerful, gorgeously realised and danced with impeccable virtuosity, Belong demonstrates the richness that Indigenous traditions of performance bring to the contemporary stage. Absolutely not to be missed.

Pictures: Bangarra, About (middle) and ID (bottom). Photos: Jeff Busby

Belong: About, choregraphed by Elma Kris, and ID, choreographed by Stephen Page. Design byJacob Nash, coustmes by Emma Howell, composers David Page and Steve Francis. With Bangarra Dance Theatre dancers. Playhouse, Victorian Arts Centre, until September 24.

In the past few years, adaptations of classic plays have become more the norm than otherwise in Australian innovative theatre. Two directors in particular wrenched opened the Pandora's box. Barrie Kosky led the way from the 1990s with refigured classics, such as Lear or the baroque opera Poppea, while Benedict Andrews's explored an austere theatricality in shows such as The War of the Roses. And there's Simon Stone's adaptations, from Hayloft's visually luscious Chekhov Recut: Platonov to the controversial Malthouse/STC production Baal to his sensitive reworking of Ibsen's The Wild Duck.

All these directors demonstrate the far-reaching influence of European auteur theatre on Australian work. Kosky and Andrews work as much in Europe as they do in Australia (Kosky, now the director of Berlin's Komische Oper, seems to have vanished from the local scene almost completely). Then there's Daniel Schlusser, who has been working rather more under the radar and whose work has been leading him in a strikingly different direction. Over the past few years he's been conducting a fascinating exploration of theatricality, mainly in the institutional shelter of the VCA, that has produced some of the most exciting work that Melbourne has seen in the past few years.

I wouldn't say Schlusser adapts classics so much as blows them up: this work is much more than rewriting. Using a practice he calls "hyper-realism", he makes theatre out of classic texts that is not so much a textual exploration as a haunting, a demonstration of how these works live in our collective unconscious. With his collaborators, he creates an alternative theatrical reality that is at once located firmly in the present and the past. The first I saw of these works was A Dollhouse, an investigation of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House at the VCA. The Dollhouse at Fortyfive Downstairs is a revisiting of this production with a (mostly) new cast, and it demonstrates how polished Schlusser's practice has become.

Watching it, I was forcibly reminded of a show I saw in Britain back in 2008: Chris Goode's brilliant ...Sisters, a deconstruction of Chekhov's Three Sisters by way of John Cage. The reason is the profound focus in both directors on the theatrical present. No matter how we imaginatively enter the realities on stage, we are always reminded that this is a work of theatre, an artifice. This is a characteristic of most work in this vein, but Goode and Schlusser in their different ways explore further the implications of what this means for performance. Crucially, both have an unerring, even poetic, sense of theatrical rhythm that makes their investment in the minutiae of human experience deeply riveting.

As with ...Sisters, the audience enters to find the actors already on stage, in pre-performance mode, getting dressed, flirting, having barely audible conversations, fiddling with props. The play itself is introduced by Schlusser (who plays Krogstad) reading Ibsen's stage directions through a microphone, but its action evolves organically from the the idle conversations and games of the actors. The delicacy of this transition is hard to overstate: the actors remain the actors, while slipping almost subliminally into their assigned roles. These performances remain unstable, since the actors might at any point slip back to being "the actors" (roles which are, for all their apparent unstudiedness, as much a performance as the roles in the play).

Complex as this might be to describe, in performance it is very lucid. And we get Ibsen's play, although this time much more radically translated than in the 2007 show. What's followed is the action, not the text. Nora (a transcendentally good Nikki Shiels) is a sexy young thing addicted to shopping, living in the gilded cage provided by Torvald (Kade Greenland), who works for the Macquarie Bank. Nora's friend Kristine (Edwina Wren) is an unemployed economist from Tasmania, and is, aside from the faithful Dr Rank (played with poignancy by Josh Price), her only confidant.

She is as imprisoned in deceit as Ibsen's Nora, but Torvald's tyranny is more subtle, a question of invisible strings. It plays out in the sexual manipulations she uses to attract Torvald's and attention and favour, her willingness to be a sex toy, her terror that Torvald will discover that she has fraudulently borrowed money from Krogstad (Daniel Schlusser). When Nora's lies catch up with her and her world collapses, we get as powerful an image of abjection as I've seen on stage: Nora, stuffing her mouth with marshmallows so they spill out half chewed, her face smeared with tear-smudged make-up, clutching her groin like a little girl who wants to wee, but here with a horrifying sense of sexual injury.

The action plays across a narrow metallic set designed by Jeminah Reidy. It's a house of expensive toys - Torvald's Playstation, litterings of Lego and brightly wrapped Christmas presents - that summons the empty materialism of Torvald and Nora's marriage, the objects and rituals that replace actual relationship. Although Schlusser has kept the rewritten ending, as he did in the first production, he gives us a much tougher interpretation: the actions of these people are more ambiguous and lost, Nora's sexuality more scarred and frightened, the subtext beneath seemingly inconsequential interactions more desolate.

This feels like a work in which every moment has been thought through, creating theatre of admirable emotional and intellectual rigor. Mandatory for anyone interested in the possibilities of the contemporary stage. It's on until Sunday, as part of the Melbourne Fringe.

Picture: Nikki Shiels in The Dollhouse. Photo: Marg Horwell.

The Dollhouse, adapted from the play by Henrik Ibsen, directed by Daniel Schlusser. Set design by Jeminah Reidy, costumes by Tiffany Abbott, lighting by Kimberly Kwa, sound by Martin Kay. With Nikki Shiels, Kade Greenland, Edwina Wren, Josh Price, Daniel Schlusser and Cate Bastian/Gabrielle Abbott. Fortfive Downstairs until September 25.

I will be seeing very little of the Fringe Festival this year. This is because Life is getting in the way. To wit: the edits for my novel Black Spring (coming out late next year, but the lead times are astonishing in book publishing) have arrived and must be dealt with asap, and preferably before the Melbourne Festival opens, and I have a couple of music theatre workshops coming up in early November that require some pre-attention. And then there's Stuff, such as eating, sleeping and handing my wallet to my children.

I will, however, be talking on a Fringe panel, Your Show Is Fifteen Minutes Too Long: Arts Reviewing and Criticism in the Digital Age, with colleagues John Bailey, Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris and Josh Wright. It's a forum for "bold, inspiring and ambitious arguments", apparently, which gives us something to live up to.

However, other bloggers are blogging. For reviews, try the excellent Andrew Furhmann, who is presently reviewing for Time Out, and still occasionally blogging at Primitive Surveys, and Cameron Woodhead, who logs his Age reviews at Behind The Critical Curtain. Anne Marie Peard is both previewing and reviewing, with a bunch of artist profiles at Sometimes Melbourne. Richard Watts, usually a heroic blogger of the Fringe, might blog at Man About Town, but I see he has been slack lately. Perhaps because he's busy at ArtsHub. Thats how I'll be tracking what I'm missing, anyway.