Almost a decade ago, when I first began exploring the net, theatre seemed like the last bastion: so deeply rooted in real time and physical space, perhaps, it's been slow to catch up with the prose and conniptions of cyberdiscussion. Poets, being unwanted anywhere else (I joke! I joke!), moved there wholesale; poetry zines, blogs, forums, listserves, author pages and so on are out there in (literally) their millions. But no more: it's standard for theatre companies now to run websites and theatre zines and forums are flowering like Paterson's Curse - recent new Melbourne additions, both responses to a lively independent scene, are Theatre Alive and Melbourne Stage Online, which I'm told will soon introduce a discussion forum. And, of course, blogs are spreading like an ever more insidious virus. As some of the mainstream press indulges an ever more flippant philistinism (check out this belief-beggaring piece, only the latest of a series, by Age arts editor Raymond Gill) real discussion - enlivened by the possibility of interaction across continents - moves ever more steadily onto the net.

So permit me to point out some recent items of interest, the mere tip of an iceberg. George Hunka of Superfluities is dragging us further into the 21st century with his first Podcast, a review of Odchodzi (Passing Away), a show by a Polish company based on the poetry of Tadeusz Rozewicz, now on at La Mama in New York. Check out as a matter of priority Chris Boyd's fascinating interview with Athol Fugard on Camus, truth, reconciliation and freedom at his blog The Morning After, and while you're at it read his review of Mummenschanz's 3x11, now on in Melbourne. As usual, debate has been running hot on Scott Walters' blog Theatre Ideas - Arcticactor has a good summary of a blogosphere discussion on theatre criticism at his BLOG!.

Slightly aside from theatre, playwright Jasmine Chan and her partner Miles are keeping fascinating (and awesomely well-written) travel journals at their respective blogs, Endpapers and A Confrontation with Falling. After a colourful time in South America, they're now in London. Ben Ellis, another Melbourne Playwright at Large, is currently hiding out at the Cites des Artes in Montparnasse and blogging on Parachute of a Playwright. And lastly, a note which has nothing to do with theatre at all, I was chuffed today to see my translation of Rilke's Eighth Duino Elegy quoted on a very classy blog, Wood s Lot. Must get those translations into a book one day...

So get clicking!

Can't Leave Tomorrow Alone by Vanessa Rowell, directed by Emma Valente. Design by Kate Davis, lighting by Rebecca Etchell. With Ma-an Adriano, Jasper Bagg, Alexis Beebe, Athony Cleave and Nicola Gunn. Hoist Theatre @ Theatreworks, until February 25. One Way Street by David Grieg, directed by Chris Bendall. Design by Kirrilly Brentnall and Isla Shaw, lighting Nick Merryless. With Simon Kingsley Hall. Theatre@Risk at 45 Downstairs

The revenge tragedy, as exemplified in the Jacobean plays of John Webster or John Ford, is a place of fabulous excess. These works excavate sexual passions and political intrigue from the darkest corners of the human psyche, and play them out remorselessly in a dystopian reality that permits no redemption. In the world of the revenge tragedy, there is no such thing as innocence: everyone is implicated in the carnal realities of this fallen world, and the price for the ecstatic revulsion that its base materiality evokes is always blood.



It is a theatre of extremity and, crucially, a poetic theatre: a forerunner of Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty and Howard Barker's Theatre of Catastrophe, or of plays like Peter Weiss' Marat/Sade or Sarah Kane's Blasted. Which is to say that Vanessa Rowell's Can't Leave Tomorrow Alone can't be faulted on its ambition. A contemporary inflection on revenge tragedy, it brings to its portrayal of middle-class suburbia the erotic darkness of sexual cruelty and exploitation.

The set-up - which swiftly reveals that Jason (Jasper Bagg) is having a passionately obsessive affair with his adopted Asian daughter Chantel (Ma-an Adriano) - made me wonder fleetingly if this was an "issue" play about sex slavery. Then, when the sado-masochistic nature of Jason's relationship with his wife Abigail (Alexis Beebe) unfolds, and Chantel runs off and is imprisoned by an inscrutably asexual lover, there is the issue of male violence. But thankfully, the play never pretends to portray documentary realities: the language is heightened and poetic, unafraid of attempting almost Elizabethan flourishes or of pushing beyond the tragic to a black, ironic vision of absurdity.

Whether Chantel, the spoilt adopted daughter, is any less of a sex slave than the women illegally imported into Western countries and forced brutally into prostitution, is a question that runs underneath the skin of the action, as does the issue of domestic violence. But it becomes clear is that everyone in this play is violent, including Chantel herself, brutalised by a brutal world in which the only possible beauty is transient. And even the perception of that possible beauty is, ultimately, isolating: it solves nothing. However, for all the bleakness of its vision, it is not a bleak experience of theatre.

The main problem with the play is not inherent in the language itself, which is impressive: Rowell writes tough, poetic dialogue and has a good ear for both the sublime and ridiculous. It's that she has little control of the architecture of the drama, a quality that is crucial to tragedy, even in its postmodern incarnations in playwrights like Howard Barker or Sarah Kane. The structure, even if it is fragmented, needs to move like a pitiless machine towards its apotheoses of pathos or horror or fear; but here it seems to collapse or meander, muffling the force of individual scenes.

Emma Valente directs with a spare hand, invoking from her actors the extremities the script demands: such artifice requires, paradoxically, a great deal of emotional honesty. None of the actors fails to meet the challenge, though there are times when manneredness substitutes for nakedness, loudness for passion. The stand-out revelation of the production is Ma-an Adriano, in her first acting role: she combines an electrifying physical presence with emotional fearlessness, tempering the whole with a fine irony that makes an exact sense of her role.

Kate Davis' set, like the direction, is spare: the cavernous space of Theatreworks is halved by a coarse hessian curtain, dimly lit from behind to permit glimpses of shadowy figures. The Elizabethan tenor of the play is highlighted by the neck ruffs and subtly archaic style of the costumes. The forestage area is divided by asymmetrically diagonal poles of scaffolding, which abstractly define playing spaces. The lighting - which includes effective use of footlights - focuses the solidity of the real objects that stand in isolated pools of light: the rowing boat which represents the marital bed, the lush colours of vegetables in a basket, the bodies of the actors themselves. The effect is at once sensuous and dislocating.

Scottish playwright David Grieg's One Way Street is, in contrast, by a writer in full control of his material. It's a monologue narrated by one John Flannery (Simon Kingsley Hall), an escapee from Lancashire who is hiding out from his repressively English family in Berlin while attempting, somewhat fecklessly, to live the bohemian life of a writer.

The play is structured on a simple premise: Flannery has been given a paying job and has been asked to write write up ten walks for a tour guide to Berlin. So there are ten monologues which meander imaginatively through various districts of Berlin, visiting the Jewish Cemetery, hanging out in cafes in Prenzlauer Berg or visiting the red light district. The walks become the occasion for Flannery to view a retrospective of his life.

And a fairly mediocre life it has been, he realises: he has neither money nor self respect. His family fills him with horror: he refers to it as a "black hole" and, in his panicked resistance to its collective gravitational pull, he has succeeded in blighting his own life, fleeing emotional challenge or commitment for an empty illusion of freedom. He is presently spending his time drinking too much in cheap bars, having abandoned his pregnant German girlfriend Greta (or driven her crazy, which perhaps amounts to the same thing). The play charts his his movement through self-contempt towards a sense of self-knowledge, a tentative understanding that the emotional poverties of his family need not determine the shapes of his subsequent relationships; but this is clearly fragile, a beginning of hope rather than a sense of happily ever after.

With sardonic asides on writing, relationships, the history of Berlin and political tyranny, it's a witty text which wears its seriousness lightly. And it is a gift for an actor, demanding he exercise all aspects of his art: his ability to switch instantly from one role to another in a series of dialogues, to move back and forth in time, to invoke both comic deftness and pathos. Simon Kingsley Hall is most certainly up to it.

Chris Bendall's direction is deft, moving the play quickly and seamlessly through its variations. The design uses street signs, tables, a patch of grass or a railing to signal specific locations, and is augmented by projected images, which may be unnecessary - I'm not sure how much they really add to the production - but which unobstrusively counterpoint the text. For all its comedy and undoubted energy, it's curiously meditative theatre: the stage as a machine for both memory and imagination.

Picture: Jasper Bagg as Jason and Ma'an Adriano as Chantel in Can't Leave Tomorrow Alone. Photograph: Erin Davis

Further to some recent discussion here on commercial shows mounted by subsidised theatre companies: the Sydney Morning Herald runs a story today which says that the STC is posting its first deficit for a decade. And it is not alone: several other mainstream companies are struggling.

They are collectively calling for a 25 per cent increase in their funding. As the SMH reports:

The STC is among five major performing arts companies struggling to make ends meet that are expecting a combined loss of up to $1.5 million for last year, despite boosting sponsorship by 98 per cent and box-office takings by 60 per cent since 1998.

Other companies facing a loss are Company B, the Queensland Theatre Company, Circus Oz and Bell Shakespeare.

A survey by the Australian Major Performing Arts Group found has found the percentage of government funding has decreased, while reliance on box-office revenue has risen. This has forced companies to produce less adventurous work, according to the companies. Most say they have had to program more conservative repertoire, including light comedies or Broadway hits, to ensure their ticket sales remain strong.

The article reports that the STC's subsidy is a footling 7.5 per cent, compared to subsidies in Britain of 40 to 50 per cent (don't even think about Europe, where funding can be 80 per cent). Furthermore, the Herald Sun this morning reports that although MTC box office takings have gone up 66 per cent since 1998, from $21 million to $33.2 million, average show production costs have been cut by 9 per cent. And because large cast shows are getting more and more difficult to mount, acting jobs in the major companies are down by 15 per cent.

I guess these figures speak for themselves. And these, remember, are the "rich" companies.

Virgins: a musical threesome by Mathew Frank and Dean Bryant, directed by Dean Bryant. Musical director Luke Byrne, design by Adam Gardnir. With Esther Hannaford, Rosemarie Harris, Verity Hunt-Ballard, Amanda Levy and Kellie Rode. The Tower Theatre @ the Malthouse until February 11

I am becoming rather thoughtful about musicals; there's a lot of them about these days. And I wonder...

The richest Australian prize for music theatre, the Pratt Prize, is slanted toward developing one particular genre of music theatre, the Broadway musical; founder and philanthropist Jeanne Pratt said when the prize was launched that she "was more or less trying to find an Australian Irving Berlin". To the end of promoting this artform, the Pratt Foundation (which of course has every right to encourage whatever it likes) has a company, The Production Company, which last year ran a season of performances of Oklahoma!, Kiss Me Kate and Andrew Lloyd Webber's Sunset Boulevard.

No one is going to sneeze at a $80,000 prize; and the sheer fact of it must be exercising a magnetic pull on Australian music theatre. The argument is that the Australian musical (which has had a fairly disastrous history, from the famous debacle of Manning Clark's History of Australia to the enthusiastic kitsch of Eureka! a couple of years ago) needs all the help it can get. This may well be true. But music theatre is a broad church, inhabited by many more forms than the traditional Broadway musical, or its contemporary off-Broadway offshoots such as Urinetown. Although, of course, it behoves me to remember indigenous shows like The Sapphires, or the cabaret of Eddie Perfect or Paul Capsis, I find myself worrying about ecological diversity.

Don't get me wrong; it's not like I think the musical should not exist. But if that broad church "music theatre" tends, particularly in its fringe manifestations, primarily to the poles of Broadway and the West End, I believe that it's a problem. I'm thinking rather wistfully of the energy and inventiveness of Australian music theatre in the 70s and 80s - John Romeril's rude and crude The Golden Holden Show, produced in 1975, or Daniel Keene's Cho Cho San, Madame Butterfly reimagined with banraku puppetry and a score that mixed jazz, rock and opera, which was the theatre hit of the 80s.

It's a question even in New York: critic George Hunka, surveying the New York Fringe Festival, comments sardonically that for all its pop and verve, the program is populated by "knowing, sly" musical comedies, all vying for a slot on Broadway, or at least off-Broadway. The writers of Virgins, Mathew Frank and Dean Bryant, have, in fact, already had a musical produced in New York, and the gravity of the American Dream looms large in the three pieces presented here. I guess that Melbourne is about as off-Broadway as it gets.

The show is really three mini-musicals, of which only the first, The Virgin Wars, is overtly American. It's an amusing skit which exposes the conflicting messages given to young contemporary women who must, in a culture saturated with images of sexuality, preserve their chastity. Five young women are touring American high schools, using their cheerleader sassiness to promote the excitement of preserving oneself for marriage. Meanwhile, their bump'n'grind routines convey entirely another message - and it seems that some of the girls are not as pure as they make out. As it were.

The next two pieces directly address media representations. Girl on the Screen concerns a woman journalist assigned to investigate soft porn websites run by women. Are they, she asks, empowered by what they do, or are they merely exploited by a world shaped only by male desire? The straightlaced journalist finds that the truth is more complicated than she imagined - and worse, that her employment by a multinational media company is a more profound form of prostitution.

The final show, Jumpin' the Q, invents the ultimate bad taste reality show: singing asylum seekers from a variety of countries (Russia, Columbia, Iran and Zimbabwe) compete for a visa, a recording contract and a new life in Australia. The exploitative voyeurism of of reality tv is here lifted to new heights, although it's actually not that hard to imagine such a show being seriously mooted: some things in our modern world are beyond parody.

Each of these shows is inventively directed by Dean Bryant, with a minimal but effective design that permits the Tower seating to be rearranged twice in the course of the evening. And performances are without exception full-blooded and fun: there's a lot of talent on show here. The five-piece band grinds out an entertaining marriage of rock and musical numbers, and if there are dramatic longueurs, especially in the final piece, they are largely compensated for by some spirited singing and dancing.

The Virgin Wars is the most successful of these three, perhaps because the ideas it addresses are the most apt to its form. In the other two I found myself contemplating an uncertain marriage of form and content: the attempt at serious social commentary collides heavily with the entertainment aesthetic of the musical. In the middle is, perhaps inevitably, a soft centre.

Are the asylum seekers amusing caricatures of different nationalities (notwithstanding that the Zimbabwean is a white refugee), or people whose histories and personalities should rouse empathy and understanding? The production oscillates uncomfortably between these questions, never quite resolving them. Jumpin' the Q has enough intelligence to avoid the worst traps that lie waiting for it in tackling this subject but, perhaps out of an admirable respect for the issues it addresses, it fails to be bold enough to pull off its own conceit. Part of me wished that it was much crueller, that it dared to follow to the end the logic of its own bad taste.

Perhaps being under the rubric of "entertainment" means that one cannot create too much offence: and certainly it is difficult to pull the emotional gems of real drama out of the froth of musicals. Which isn't, of course, to say that it can't be done. But that's another argument.

Chris Boyd's review at The Morning After

The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, music and lyrics by William Finn, book by Rachel Sheinkin, conception Rebecca Feldman. Directed by Simon Phillips. designed by Dale Ferguson. With Marina Prior, Tyler Coppin, Bert Labonte, David Campbell, Christen O'Leary, Tim Wright, Magda Szubanski, Natalie Mendoza and Natalie O'Donnell. Playhouse @ the Victorian Arts Centre, until February 25.

The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee has been a phenomenon on Broadway, and it's easy to see why: it's a bright, appealing show in the best traditions of American musicals, with enough satirical bite to avoid the saccharine. Think Little Shop of Horrors, with its light comic digs at American materialism and off-beat love story, replace the gothic elements with a parody of contemporary small town America, and you have the tenor about right.

It takes that most American of inventions, the competitive spelling bee, and wrings surprising dramatic mileage from this simple idea. The spelling bee is, of course, already a performance, where a hapless child stands in front of an audience and tries to spell increasingly obscure words. When they get a word wrong, they're eliminated from competition, and the winner is the last one standing. It is, in many ways, a precursor of the Big Brother/American Idol "reality" shows, and with the same ruthless subtext of predatory competitiveness.

And, as The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee or, indeed, Big Brother, demonstrates, any situation in which contestants are placed under pressure opens rich possibilities for emotional revelation. The successive rounds of the spelling bee include dramatisations of the children's inner thoughts as they stand in front of the microphone, groping for some clue on how to spell a word like "xanthosis" or "appoggiatura". These vignettes reveal the complexities of their lives, and in the process offer up a breezy portrait of the neuroticisms of middle class America.

Logainne Schwarzandgrubeniere (Christen O'Leary), for instance, has to be a poster girl for her two gay fathers, who are anxious to show what a successful child they have raised. Leaf Coneybeare (Tim Wright) is from a large home-schooled family, and feels outshone by his bright siblings. Marcy Park (Natalie Mendoza) is a prodigy who longs for the liberation of failing, and Olive Ostrovsky (Natalie O'Donnell) misses her mother, who has gone to an ashram in India for nine months. And then there's William Barfee (Magda Szubanski), obnoxious, arrogant, clever, asocial and lonely, and the former spelling bee champion Chip Tolentino (David Campbell), who is tormented by the travails of adolescent lust.

The spelling bee itself is run by Ms Peretti (Marina Prior), a former champ herself who scatters seductive charm over any male within smiling distance, and Vice Principle Panch (Tyler Coppin), who is as asocial as some of his pupils. And the whole is watched over by the ironic eye of the streetwise Mitch Mahoney (Bert Labonte), who is doing community service for unknown transgressions as the "comfort counsellor". His job is to console the losers although, as he says, he'd like to see what would happen if they had to cope with something really bad.

To be a loser is almost synonymous with sin in a society where Donald Trump is the model for ultimate success. The irony is, of course, that the children who win are the misfits and the socially inept, "losers" in almost every other sense.

Simon Phillips has put together a classy production with an excellent cast, and it bounces along entertainingly from the first number, neither insulting your intelligence nor boring you. The set is a basketball court-cum-school hall, with a curtained stage at the back, behind which sits the band. The stage is used inventively and flexibly: the playing space includes the auditorium, for of course we are the fictional audience of the spelling bee as much as the actual audience of the musical. This complicity is underlined by a bit of audience participation: four contestants are drawn from spectators. They compete and are eliminated (in one case, with a particularly good speller, with some difficulty), comforted and sent back "home".

The band is tight, the music catchy, the singing (especially from Marina Prior) glorious. And the performances are essays in comic deftness: just this side of caricature, with enough depth to generate moments of real feeling. In short, this is a show with bags of charm, and an undoubted winner for the MTC.

Is it churlish of me to cavil at this point? No doubt...but let me be a churl anyway. It's my job. What is the MTC - the largest subsidised theatre company in the southern hemisphere - doing putting on what is, by any other name, a commercial musical? Surely this is the kind of decision that has actual commercial producers gnashing their teeth? The fact that I know a lot of the answers - looming large among them the parlous funding for even the large state companies - doesn't mean that the questions go away. Primary among them is, why have subsidised theatre at all, if it is only to produce commercial shows?

I've added a few new blogs to my theatre blogroll - scroll down the sidebar and check them out!

The True Amazon Adventures of Roger Casement by Andrew Shaw, directed by Robert Reid. With Mike McEvoy, Elliot Summers, Robert Lloyd, Michael F. Cahill, Tobias Manderson-Galvin, Johannes Scherpenhuizen, Liz McColl, Simon Morrison-Baldwin and Alicia Benn Lawler. La Mama until February 18.

The so-called Black Diaries of Roger Casement are a kind of Turin Shroud of modern history. Sir Roger Casement was a distinguished Victorian human rights advocate whose reports on colonial atrocities in the Belgian Congo and rubber plantations in Peru earned him a knighthood.

But Casement, an Anglo-Irishman, was also a believer in Irish Independence. In 1916 he arranged for a German ship to sail for Ireland with "several machine-guns, 20,000 rifles and a million rounds of ammunition" for the Irish Volunteers. But his plans were exposed, and Casement was arrested and imprisoned in London for three months awaiting trial. He was hanged by the British for treason on August 3, 1916, for his part in the Easter Rising.

While Casement was in prison, the diaries - supposedly seized in a raid on his house - were used to destroy his credibility and character. The diaries contained explicit details that revealed Casement to be a promiscuous homosexual with a taste for rough trade. Selected extracts were shown to public figures and known sympathisers, who consequently shrank back from appealing for clemency for a "degenerate". The Black Diaries effectively hanged him.

Predictably, perhaps, given the underhand way in which the British authorities used the diaries, and their subsequent keeping in conditions of extraordinary secrecy (the first independent examination of the documents only happened three years ago), their provenance has always been surrounded by controversy. Particularly in Ireland, there has been a widely held belief that the diaries were forgeries, partly out of a disbelief that a hero and martyr could possibly be gay: as de Valera said, he was "too noble to be a degenerate".

The unequivocal 2002 judgment of handwriting expert Dr Audrey Giles that the diaries "were genuine throughout and in each instance" has done nothing, however, to end the controversy. Many experts argue that her examination was incomplete, and failed to take into account inconsistencies in the text and other issues which, at the very least, throw doubt on their authenticity.

In our times, Casement is in danger of becoming a martyr for gay pride as much as for the Irish Nationalists. Poor ghost. Playwright Andrew Shaw has no doubt: "we can accept the diaries as real, why shouldn't they be?" he says, dismissing the arguments for their inauthenticity as "a claim designed to safeguard an Irish martyr against the perversion of homosexuality".

I'm not so sure; in this age, the counter-arguments may have nothing to do with homophobia, and everything to do with concern about the lengths to which the British authorities could go in order to hang a troublesome dissident. However, Andrew Shaw has created an intelligent and witty play out of the hallucinatory realities that circle around this case.

In the opening scenes a young civil servant Thomson (Mike McEvoy) is blackmailed by two Foreign Office officials (Robert Lloyd and Michael F Cahill); the police have certain information on his private life, and he will be prosecuted for homosexuality - unless, that is, he reads the private diaries of Roger Casement and uses them to create a forgery which fits in with the known details, but which proves Casement to be a degenerate.

Thomson likes to think he is a humanitarian - he admires Casement's work in the Congo and the Amazon - and is something of a naive romantic. But he takes the job to save his own skin, knowing that he will help to hang a man whom he admires. He hopes to salve his conscience by showing that, even though Casement is queer, he is also a human being capable of love; and the project also appeals to a certain literary vanity. The irony is that when the actual diaries turn up and Thomson's forgeries are no longer needed, Casement's adventures are not the romantic idylls of Thomson's imaginings, but something altogether more ambiguous and disturbing.

Shaw interleaves scenes between the civil servants and others between Thomson and his lover with dramatisations of events from Casement's diaries, which relate a somewhat brutal narrative of what we would now call sex tourism as well as the corruptions and brutalities of plantation life. He artfully illustrates not only the hypocrisies of Victorian society - at least one of Thomson's superiors is himself homosexual - but also its mechanics: the levers of class and money and exploitation that constitute a colonial empire. Sharp and subtly inflected performances from these three actors (I especially enjoyed the panicked vulnerability of Thomson, too intelligent to hide from himself the implications of what he is doing) intensify the ironies of these scenes.

In the middle of this machinery is the hapless character of Casement (Elliot Summers) himself, who is a cipher - on the one hand condemning the exploitation of "natives", while on the other exploiting them sexually. But instead of creating a truly complex contradiction, Casement comes across merely as a hypocritical prig, weakly shoring up his own authority at the expense of the man he claims to love but, in fact, exploits and betrays. It's a factor of Summers' rather blank performance, I think, as much as a question not quite resolved in the script. While Shaw's Casement is certainly flawed, it is difficult to see how such a moral quisling could be fired by the desire for justice that motivated his reports of human rights abuses or the support for an independent Ireland which finally ended his life.

Robert Reid's direction is arresting, if perhaps a little ambitious for the intimate stage of La Mama: the artifice of this production might work better with the distance of a proscenium. The actors are in white face, and half masks are used to indicate the masks of colonial rule, effectively theatricalising the roles and selves of colonial rule. The English servant and the plantation slave, both at the bottom of the class hierarchy, are represented by a bunraku puppet. Sometimes the staging is very effective indeed: a scene where Casement's assistant is whipped is startlingly violent and unbearable, especially from a distance of less than a metre - hard to do in a small theatre. It's a production that doesn't quite achieve its own ambition, but is well worth a look.

Dumb Show by Joe Penhall, directed by Peter Evans. With Aaron Blabey, Anita Hegh and Richard Piper. Designed by Christina Smith, lighting design Matt Scott, music by Darrin Verhagen. Melbourne Theatre Company @ the Fairfax, Victorian Arts Centre, until February 18.

Joe Penhall is that very British phenomenon, the straight-talking celeb. Asked what he thought the problems of British theatre were, he responded: "Too much mediocrity in the West End. It's like watching BBC1. They're just milking the tits of a giant, wobbling, quivering fucking middle-brow cash cow if you ask me."

Ironically enough, without the profanity (I am a courteous and restrained individual) that was more or less my sentiment at the end of Penhall's Dumb Show, a play about the mutual parasitic relationship between celebrity and tabloid journalism. It's a classic issue-based play, setting up a confrontation with enough moral ambivalence to keep the audience teetering to and fro in their sympathies, without reaching so far into the heart of things that it confronts anything too visceral. Middle-brow indeed.

My first, not very interesting, thought about Dumb Show was to wonder why a story about the grubby hypocrisy of British tabloid newspaper journalists would be of interest to Melbourne theatre goers. Australian tabloids have got nothing on the excesses of Fleet Street, nor can we match the trashy glitz of British celebrity; and the issues as presented here have little to do with us. But then, I will follow with breathless interest stories about decaying 19th century Russian bourgeoisie or 12th century English kings, without the question of irrelevance entering my head. The real question is, I think, one of sentimentality.

In Dumb Show, Richard Piper plays Barry, a vain and insecure tv celebrity. He becomes the target for entrapment by a pair of unscrupulous tabloid journalists, Greg (Aaron Blabey) and Liz (Anita Hegh), who disguise themselves as bankers and dangle the bait of a huge fee for a dinner talk. Of course, behind the moral outrage of the journalists lies the grubby business of the scoop, the voyeuristic and predatory amorality that feeds on the pain and humiliation of its former favourites. But, as the play reveals, it is a symbiotic relationship: the celebrity needs the press as much as it needs him, to feed his fame and his egotism.

And that, really, is as far as it goes.

I have heard sentimentality described as "unearned feeling", and it's a description that fits this play to a tee. I have seldom seen a work so brazenly manipulative, shamelessly raising the emotional stakes to wring the hearts of the audience, without anywhere risking real feeling. And of course it's full of jokes, defusing moral or emotional discomfort with those crackling one-liners. Yes, I laughed at one or two of the jokes, but less and less as the show went on.

In this, I fear, I was a little solitary: the MTC audience lapped it up, practically booing the villains and cheering the main guy as if it was a Victorian melodrama. I sat, as Michael Billington once memorably said, in "mutinous isolation". I don't like having my feelings pushed around, as if my mind is nothing but a series of buttons to be pressed by this or that turn of the plot: if I want that, I can always watch Neighbours.

It's a shame to see such a talented cast and director spending their efforts on work so unrewarding. Anita Hegh, in particular, was unable to access her considerable powers in the character of Liz, who is, like her colleague Greg, thinly drawn; neither of the journalists are much more than empty representations of the moral and emotional bankruptcy of their profession. Richard Piper as Barry, predictably, makes a meal of his role, which gives him plenty of scope: his character is pathetic, greedy, morally dubious, vacuous: but also raffishly charming and funny. His performance, like all the others, has that painful sense of actors mugging their roles, going for crude surface in the absence of any other ideas. But, given the script, it's hard to see what else they could have done.

Peter Evans' direction is competent, ensuring the show runs smooth and fast. At the beginning, he has the two journalists enacting their roles-within-roles as heightened, almost grotesque caricature, dropping this style when they reveal their "real" selves. It's an interesting idea that doesn't come off, partly because then it's difficult to see how Barry could possibly have been taken in by them.

In short, another play that slips out the memory as soon as you slip out of the theatre: slight in every respect, vaguely insulting in its manipulativeness, curiously untouching. The kind of thing, the MTC would argue - with some justification - that it is forced to do in order to keep the box office ticking over: as one might say, "milking the tits of a middle-brow cash cow". But that's another argument.

It's all happening in the theatre blogosphere. First of all, my estimable colleague Chris Boyd has kicked off his own theatre review blog, The Morning After: Performing Arts in Australia, with a couple of reviews of Cheek by Jowl and Robert Lepage at the Sydney Festival, so do check it out.

And the question of the theatre audience is the topic du jour in the US, where the blogsters are all arguing hammer and tongs. It was indirectly sparked by my posting the Foreman quote, which led to George Hunka over at Superfluities posting a quote from my essay on Howard Barker. In response to Scott Walters at Theatre Ideas agreeing with Barker, but with a caveat, George posted this passionate response, where he says in part:

Some audience members see ... difficult work as an attack, as perhaps they should, since it tells them that their conception of the world isn't theirs but a reflection of something manufactured for them to keep them asleep. Nobody, especially those who are confident in their self-indulgent belief that they know how the world works, wants to hear that. Others, seeing the same show, won't see it as an attack at all, but will be open-minded enough to see it as an invitation to a new vision: their own. Neither Foreman nor Barker wants the audience to think like them, to feel like them, but wants them to think and feel for themselves, individually, to find liberation in confronting their own darkest depths. The dramatist is a metaphor in his or her own work, a metaphor for individual perception, as the lyric voice serves in his or her own poetry. It is an invitation to profound, wrenching, transformative, painful change. As somebody once said about omelets and eggs, you can't make an epiphany without shattering a world.

Scott Walters responds here with a long and interesting post, and Matt Freeman on his Theatre and Politics blog here. And some lively discussion continues in the comments... all in all, it makes for a fascinating conversation.

A Richard Foreman quote to stir up the New Year, which comes courtesy of New York blogger/playwright George Hunka:

I BELIEVE THAT NOW IS THE TIME FOR A CELEBRATION OF ELITIST ART!

Let's dare proclaim that in the face of a society increasingly crying for a media-driven, market-oriented, popular art, reaching out to everyone at once – while 'deep thoughts' are officially allowed in such art, they must only come in a form that is easily communicable to all.

BUT I MAINTAIN
that to feed the individual human spirit, the true art of these times must be a kind of demanding gymnasium where sensibilities get rigorous exercise – so that those sensibilities then become more refined, able to pick up on and appreciate the patterned intricacies of a world which is usually, in art, simplified into recognizable social and psychological clichés or knock-out effect. Such normal strategies lie about the world because they talk about what we already know (which is always wrong) in languages with which we are already familiar (and therefore put our more delicate mental mechanisms to sleep) – all this, instead of waking us up with the uncharted energies that throb behind the facade of the shared world of communicable convention.

Theatre Notes is limbering up - back next week.