This week has been unexpectedly busy (in a non-theatrical manner), as the final copy edit for Black Spring arrived, marked "urgent", and has taken all of my time. And I also had to review Kate Lilley's fascinating book of poems, Ladylike (review now uploaded at Overland Journal). So I've been deleting commas and pondering Freud instead of writing about Roland Schimmelpfennig's The Golden Dragon, which opened last week at the Melbourne Theatre Company's Lawler Studio. It's on the to-do list, but while I recover my sanity, get thee a ticket.

As a slightly irrelevant PS, I have a poem in today's Australian. I can't link, as poetry is too oldfashioned to be on the internets.

First, an apology and an explanation. Your humble blogger is heroically attempting to get out less, but Melbourne, you make it hard. I seem to be presently measuring the worth of Melbourne performance by the quality and number of invitations I am forced to turn down. I feel a twinge every time I refuse an event that ticks my boxes of potential interest, and there have been a lot of twinges lately. Extrabloggish activities - talks and panels, literary reviewing and countless other sundries - are certainly gobbling much of my time. But the major distraction is making a living, which for me means novels.

Finucane & Smith's Glory Box

Looking back at the halfway mark of 2012, I realise this year has been pretty busy. My British publishers, Walker Books, have this month re-released my Pellinor quartet, in schmick new editions, with new translatory introductions (and a light edit). My Gothic novel Black Spring will be out in Australia at the end of this year with Walker Australia (early 2013 in the US and the UK). Last month I finished a new novel, Simbala's Book, another stand-alone speculative fiction work, which is now with my agent. And I am presently about a quarter of the way through a Pellinor prequel, which I haven't titled yet - titles are a constant bother for me - but which I hope will be finished to first draft status by September. Somewhere in between all the writing and editing, I also wrote a libretto for composer Gerardo Dirié, head of music studies at Queensland Conservatorium, for an opera project called Flood.

It adds up to a lot of words being pounded out on this old keyboard. I am very loath to stop seeing theatre, which gets me out of the house and which - most crucially - is not about my own work. Writers spend a lot of time in their own heads, and a large part of the value of theatre for me is that it gets me out of mine. A selfish motivation, I agree, but it probably explains why the blog is still alive after all these years. All the same, it's fair to say that at the moment I am feeling the pressure. I am considering shutting the blog down soon for a few weeks to enable me to get some serious pages under my belt, and to catch my breath.

In Macbeth, the ruling metaphor is darkness. Macbeth's "black and deep desires", pricked into life by the prophecies of the witches, overthrow the deepest oaths of feudal manliness: loyalty to king and tribe and, perhaps the strongest tabu of all, to a guest under his own roof. As bloody ambition seizes Macbeth's mind, the clear boundaries of daylight vanish in the murky shadow. The solid earth is not what it seems: it "hath bubbles, even as the water has", and quakes with portent. Even the sun is hidden: "By th' clock 'tis day," says Ross. "And yet dark night strangles the traveling lamp."

Macbeth (Dan Spielman) and the witch (Lizzie Schebesta) in Macbeth

This brooding sense of infecting darkness makes Macbeth the most claustrophobic of Shakespeare's plays. It's also one of the shortest, tracing a swift trajectory of temptation, corruption and fall. For all its feudal morality, it remains a compelling and intimate study of the paranoia of tyranny, which sews its downfall into its very fabric. Macbeth's initial murder of King Duncan to gain his crown ensures the crimes that follow, which in turn spark the rebellion that destroys him. But more germanely, as is compellingly clear in Peter Evans's lucid production for Bell Shakespeare, Macbeth's murder of Duncan is equally a violence to himself. "To know my deed 'twere best not know myself," he says, contemplating his bloody hands. It's that zombie conscience, as ruthlessly put down as the rebellious thanes but never quite dead, that drives him to madness.

In Evans's production, Macbeth becomes the hallucinations of a tormented mind. Anna Cordingley's strikingly elegant design summons mediaeval Scotland with a bare stage of rank grass. It's roofed by an angled mirror that reflects obscurely what happens beneath it, just as in the play the heavens reflect the dark acts of men. The night is made visible by a lot of haze and Damien Cooper's moody lighting, which shifts between brutal exposure and enscarfing shadow.

There is no attempt, except in a poetic sense, to make a realistic world: contemporary costumes cut against the Elizabethan language to place it in no-time, a troubled dream of the present. The stylised Meyerholdian movement of the performances is studded with images of stark realism: Banquo's half-naked corpse, for example, boltered with blood, mouth grotesquely gasping, as he sits at Macbeth's table. The effect is, startlingly, to foregound the language: Shakespeare isn't naturalised, but made strange, and so brought into thrilling focus.

Over the past couple of years, Chamber Made Opera, under the direction of David Young, has been investigating domestic space as a means for creating contemporary opera, quite literally producing operas in people's houses. The results have often been stunning: Daniel Schlusser's Ophelia Doesn't Live Here Any More, or Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey's beautifully situated Dwelling Structure. I missed Another Lament on its first outing, when it was performed in a house in Malvern, but fortunately for me, Malthouse Theatre remounted it.

Another Lament at Malthouse Theatre

Another Lament is a collaboration with Rawcus, a company which works with performers with disabilities, that draws on the songs of Purcell. Emily Barrie's set recreates in astonishing detail a wood-panelled Malvern house, complete with all its chilly Edwardian formality: there's sliding doors that open on a huge hallway, a piano, a huge chocolate cake on a occasional table surrounded by china cups and saucers.  There are even sofas in the auditorium, to reinforce the illusion of being in a house.

Director Kate Sulan uses physical performance and the crafty articulations of Jethro Woodward's sound design to create a series of tableaux that manifest something like the repressed subconscious memories and desires of the house. The performance centres on the singer and double bass player Ida Duelund Hansen, who is riveting from the moment she opens her mouth. Baroque music has often been used as a means of illuminating the quotidian - I'm thinking here of Ranters' devastatingly elegant Holiday, or even Pina Bausch's Café Müller. The purity of its lyricism works every time to generate a poignancy that seems to flower from the very centre of the mundane, rather than as decoration.

Over the past few years, I've lost count of the number of columns I've read which lament the Youth of Today. Pundit after pundit has informed me that young people, Generation Whatever, are spoilt, self-obsessed, materialistic and non-political. This always makes me think of the poet Kenneth Rexroth, who as a fascinated elder statesman was one of the first people to chronicle the youthful counter-culture of the 1960s. Back then, as Rexroth reported with constant surprise, newspaper columnists also regularly lambasted the apathetic, non-political, self-obsessed youth of the day. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose...

Publicity shot for Atlanta Eke's Monster Body

Like Rexroth, I think that underneath the surface, something interesting is stirring in Generation Youth. Of course, as in the 1960s, the majority of the population observes the status quo: what matters is the critical mass of those who don't. It doesn't take an especially sharp observer to see the symptoms of a new political urgency occurring everywhere: the raw protest of the Occupy movement through 2011, the resurgence of feminism and Marxism, the resistances against increasingly repressive regimes worldwide in Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, the responses to increasing environmental crisis. As with the apocalyptism of the Cold War, coming out of the birth of the nuclear bomb and the disaster of the Vietnam War, there is a sense of global crisis driving politics now. And, as it was back in the 1960s, you'll only find the surface reflected in the news.

Given the tumultuous events of the past couple of years, it's unsurprising that much of the work in the Next Wave festival harks back to the art of the 1970s. The difference between what's going on now and what happened then is that this is a generation that knows what has already happened: it's perhaps the most historically self-aware generation we've had, with more access to more information than at any point in human history. At its most shallow, this results in the pomo irony of the hipster. But, as performance art works like Atlanta Eke's Monster Body or Justin Shoulder's The River Eats demonstrate, this awareness of the past can lead to something altogether more interesting.

As you probably know, Ms TN has been trying to get out less. I am writing a novel which I'd like to finish before September, or at least in the next decade, and then there are all the numberless sundries that presently seem to be the texture of my life. I'm not complaining, you understand; for one thing, it's all my own fault, and for another, I love everything I do. But most of the time I feel like a mini-avalanche waiting for a jolly mountaineer to let loose a careless yodel. And then along comes something like Next Wave, trampling the heights with trumpets and elephants, and down comes the full disaster.

No Show's Shotgun Wedding

In practical terms, the past fortnight's shenanigans means that TN is about eight reviews behind. In the diary, this weekend is marked: "Catch up on Next Wave". Let's see how Alison runs, eh? If I'm a little breathless, you'll know why.

Last Saturday I saw No Show's Shotgun Wedding. Co-creators Bridget Balodis and Mark Pritchard have had an idea for a brilliant new social institution: how about we invent this thing called "marriage", right, a life-long union between "a man" and "a woman"? Let's randomly pick one of each from the people milling about on the pavement outside St Peter's in East Melbourne, and "marry" them. Let's divide the crowd in two, with half belonging to the "bride" and half to the "groom", and let's get going. Right? Right.

The art of light writing, as playwrights like Oscar Wilde demonstrate, is a serious business. Writing a light play about serious business is even more serious. The danger is that "light" - which is not, by any means, a synonym for "slight" - can so easily become banal or substanceless or, worst of all, indigestibly soggy in the middle. It requires a quicksilver theatrical wit, faith in the intelligence of the audience, a lot of writerly tact and, perhaps most of all, the ability to keep contradictory impulses in dynamic suspension. You can see all these qualities at work in Robert Reid's On the Production of Monsters, now playing in the Lawler Studio at the Melbourne Theatre Company.

Virginia Gay and James Saunders. Photo: Jodie Hutchinson

Set in the cafes and offices of inner-city Melbourne, On the Production of Monsters exploits hipster urban chic even as it pokes fun at its absurdities. The elegant conceit is that each scene is a dialogue between different characters, all of them played by the same two actors, Virginia Gay and James Saunders. The plot revolves around the young couple Shari and Ben, uber-cool Melburnites who, following the unwritten laws of hipsterdom, recognise the hip in everyone but themselves. They are sweeter than they realise, basically well-intentioned and harmless. Reid is interested in how these two are transformed, through an innocent mistake, into the favourite monster of the tabloids: child pornographers.

The play opens with Ben and Shari breakfasting in a cafe, tallying up points for hipster-spotting while they sip their coffees. Ben works in a call centre for the local water authority, where he embarrassedly fends off awkward advances from his supervisor. Shari, a keen environmentalist and aspiring artist, is seeking funding for a project which will see children from local schools clearing rubbish from the banks of the Merri Creek. When she is interviewed by an ambitious young reporter from the local newspaper, she forwards him an email leaked by Ben, which has the minutes of a meeting from the water authority. Unfortunately, Ben has also forwarded a photo of a naked and possibly underage girl which his boss has sent to him as a coarse attempt at seduction.

Part of the problem in responding to the Next Wave Festival 2012 is knowing where to start. After much dithering, I'm going to begin by talking about the festival itself: I'll be posting about the individual performances I saw over the next couple of days. Perhaps the most important aspect of a festival is the least tangible: a good festival is much more than the sum of its parts. It necessarily consists of programmed events but, if the magic happens, those events will become part of a dynamic phenomenon that generates its own energy. It's the kind of second order process that happens with a neural network, in which the material synaptic connections create that miracle called consciousness. 

Art in the city: The Stream / The Boat / The Shore / The Bridge

For Next Wave, artistic director Emily Sexton has radically rethought the question of what a festival is. The result was an extraordinarily seductive event that generated an almost irresistible gravity. I saw six performances, and altogether attended nine events, a small percentage of the work on offer. Keeping my attendance down only to those (which was personally necessary) required an active exertion of will: as soon as the festival started, I wanted to get to everything. Even on the outskirts of the vortex, the pull was palpable: attending one event made you want to see three more.  I met two people at a table at one of the daily Breakfast Club talks - "ordinary punters", if you like - who were there because they had attended the previous day, and enjoyed it so much that they came again. Strangers felt moved to discuss what they had experienced. Everybody was swapping notes on what they had seen and what they wanted to see.

The last time I felt this sense of excitement in Melbourne was during Kristy Edmunds's Melbourne International Arts Festivals. Those were events on quite a different scale, and with different ambitions: but they also plugged into Melburnians' endless appetite for debate. (I also felt it at a visual arts festival directed by Ivan Durrant in Benalla back in 1995 - it needn't be a city thing). The sales pitch for MIAF one year was "Be Curious": I was fascinated how generously GP audiences responded. Events were packed out, even some that you didn't expect to appeal beyond a niche audience. And everybody, whether they liked what was happening or not, was talking. Likewise with Next Wave, a much smaller - but no less ambitious - festival geared towards those interested in new artists. Such a focus will attract a particular audience: but the invitation was open and, as far as I could see, was taken up with gusto. Be curious. What do you think?

A pointer to my latest review on Overland, which looks at Melbourne poet Philip Salom's recent heteronymic collections The Keeper of Fish and Keeping Carter, out from Puncher and Wattman Poetry.

It may sound banal, but the most important thing, both in film and in the theatre, is the human being - the study of human beings. What you want above all, whether you are doing film or theatre, is to make the audience experience the result as something absolutely alive. The most important thing of all is to create a reflection of reality - to capture a heightened intensity, a distillation of life - and to guide the audience through that magical process.

Of Winners and Losers, interview with Ingmar Bergman

What I have written seems more like the melody line of a piece of music, which I hope with the help of my colleagues to be able to orchestrate during production. On many points I am uncertain... I therefore invite the imagination of the reader or spectator to dispose freely of the material that I have made available.

Preface to the script of Persona, Ingmar Bergman

Persona is one of Ingmar Bergman's most enigmatic films. The idea is notionally very simple: an actress, Elizabeth Vogler, falls silent in the middle of a performance of Elektra. She resumes the performance, but the following day refuses to speak at all. Doctors can find nothing wrong with her, physically or mentally: it seems that she has simply chosen to be mute. Her doctor decides that she should spend the summer at an isolated house with a nurse, Sister Alma. Elizabeth never speaks. Alma never stops speaking. The result is a film that investigates profoundly, and often cruelly, the nature of performance as an existential state of being human.

Meredith Penman (L) and Karen Sibbing in Persona. Photo: Pia Johnson

To attempt to remake Persona as a work of theatre is surely the definition of risk: certainly, director Adena Jacobs and the Fraught Outfit team can't be faulted on their ambition. Such an adventure could so easily end up being a bad imitation, with the haunting performances of Liv Ullman and Bibi Andersson inviting invidious comparison. Yet, miraculously, Fraught Outfit has taken up Bergman's invitation to "dispose freely" of his material, translating it into another form, and, crucially, into an autonomous work.