Peter Handke is in the headlines again, this time after he was stripped of the prestigious Heinrich Heiner Prize by the city of Dusseldorf. Handke was awarded the prize, which is worth 50,000 euros, but it was revoked after heated public criticism of the decision.

I am frankly horrified that Handke's literary achievements can be utterly erased by political opinions he is alleged to hold. I have my own reservations, as have others, about what can be discerned of Handke's political stance, but I hold no brief for misrepresentation and misquotation. There seems to be an industry of moral outrage that obscures any possibility of nuanced discrimination: for one thing, Handke himself is not a war criminal, but a writer.

So much for art. So much for freedom.

Those who claim that the revocation of a major literary prize in these circumstances is not a form of repression should ponder Wiglaf Droste's observation in Die Tageszeitung:

Of course it's possible that Peter Handke has got a screw loose. If you go on a search for the truth, you can also get lost along the way. But anyone that believes they automatically have truth on their side just because they belong to the overwhelming majority should not be listened to in the first place. A writer has every right to his own view of the world. Telling him to be more media-friendly is tantamount to seeking to abolish the writing profession.

Thanks to Pierre Joris at Nomadics for the headsup. Playgoer has some more details.

Footnote, via Sign and Sight:

Handke himself answers today in a short article entitled "What I did not say" in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: "I have never denied or played down, not to speak of sanctioned, any of the massacres in Yugoslavia from 1991 – 1995." Handke continues that although he is often criticised for having one of the characters in his play "Die Fahrt im Einbaum" (the voyage in the dugout) defend the Serbs, "the truth is that in the play (page 65), one figure says: 'You know it was we who protected you from the Asian hordes for centuries. And without us you'd still be eating with your fingers. Who was it that introduced the knife and fork to the Western world?' But: is it necessary to point out that this is a parody? or that this minor character's name is 'Irrer' (Madman)?"

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Eagle-eyed readers will notice that I have given Theatre Notes a swish new look. Unless they're squinting at it through Internet Explorer 5 for Mac, which seems to scramble it entirely. Apologies for this glitch: I am investigating solutions. In the meantime, I suggest Explorer surfers try another browser, such as Firefox or Safari, which puts all the text and graphics and sidebars and gewgaws in the right places. Many apologies to anyone going cross-eyed trying to read this...

The image in the top bar is Robert Fludd's 1619 drawing of the Globe theatre, the Theatre of Memory, from "Ars memoriae".

Update: I've given up; the software problems on IE5/Mac seem insoluble, and are certainly beyond my primitive coding. Since IE6 for PC seems to work fine, I can only urge Mac users to trash IE5, which is no longer supported by Microsoft anyway, and use Safari (or to download a more useable browser, like Firefox). Boo hiss (yet again) to Bill Gates: his software has wasted many of my precious hours over the years....

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Headlock, text by David Denborough, directed by Kate Denborough. Set and lighting, Ben Cobham, Music by Byron Scullin. With Luke Hockley, Bryon Perry and Gerard von Dyck. Kage Physical Theatre @ The Malthouse, until June 3. The Clean House by Sarah Ruhl, directed by Kate Cherry. Designed by Christina Smith, lighting by Jon Buswell. With Julia Blake, Daniela Farinacci, Wendy Hughes, Pip Miller and Deidre Rubenstein. Melbourne Theatre Company, Fairfax Studio, Victorian Arts Centre until July 8.

Last week I had a good week of theatre. This was a fine thing because, gentle reader, your blogger has been under the gun lately: sometimes I am simply wearing too many hats, and no head, however swollen, can keep track of all of them. I keep rediscovering that each day has only 24 hours, and I have only one body with which to while those hours away...

And so, do forgive me for the brevity of these reports. But I must tell you about these shows. Firstly, on Thursday night I went to see Headlock.



Headlock was a surprise for me. I hadn't encountered Kage Physical Theatre's work, although I had heard Good Things: but the prospect of a show exploring masculinity and set in a boxing ring does rather call up a possibility of cliche: the aggressive male body at the wrong end of another aggressive male body in yet another incarnation of Raging Bull, yada yada yada...

It turned out to be much more interesting than that. It is in fact a work that explores male friendship in a way that seems honest, neither sentimental nor prurient. And finally it evokes an image of masculinity that is not so far from that of Giuseppe Ungaretti's First World War poem, Brothers:

What regiment are you
brothers?

Speech trembling
in the night

Leaf just born

In the tortured air
the helpless revulsion
of man so close to
frailty

Brothers

The impressionistic narrative follows the memories of a young man in prison, whose loneliness and vulnerability in the institutional desert is punctuated by his memories of his two best friends. The story is told through movement which segues effortlessly into pure dance, and a brilliant soundscape of music and ambient sound. There is very little text spoken, and much of it is inaudible; among other things, this is a journey through the inarticulate.

Perhaps what principally impressed me about the scenes enacted here is that, apart from the opening sequence, a car chase evoked by sound in the darkness, they are all utterly banal. The costumes are authentic Werribee, the games the young men play - arm wrestling, daring each other by a train line - not very far from childhood. The prisoner rings his mother or has a shower; he remembers eating fish and chips with his friends by the foreshore or going to a concert. There is no desire to sensationalise; rather an attempt to explore the significances of apparently trivial moments of living.

A tangible sense of the fragility of the male body grows through the performance. There are moments of sheer exuberance - the scene at the concert, for example, where a dancer jumps off the stage and unexpectedly bounces back up into the light from a hidden trampoline. But there is also a brooding sense of a world full of hard edges, in which one of the few refuges is the unspoken love between these men - not the love that dare not speak its name, but a perhaps even less speakable fraternal love - that can find its expression only in a dream.

Ben Cobham's design exploits the Merlyn Theatre about as well as any I have seen. The main action takes place in a boxing ring, around which seats are arranged intimately in a horse shoe, leaving at least half of the theatre empty. This permits vignettes to occur in the distance, on the actual stage, vanishing like ephemeral visions into blackness. It's visually thrilling, and the performances are at once athletic and expressive, forming a stylised language of movement from the ordinary gestures of young men.

I thought Headlock very beautiful. The crowd of VCE students who filled the theatre the night I was there stopped talking about ten minutes in, when they started watching it intently, and burst into whoops and cheers when it finished. Which I think says something too.

The following night, nursing an incipient cold, I went to see The Clean House at the MTC, and again had my expectations disrupted. Another American play, the misanthropic TN grumbled to herself; well, at least it has a good cast...

Actually, it's a great cast (Wendy Hughes, Julia Blake and Deidre Rubenstein on stage together? Come on!) and worth seeing for that alone. But the play too was unexpectedly charming: light comedy at its best. It concerns a career-driven doctor, Lane (Wendy Hughes) who employs a Brazilian maid to clean her house. Matilde (Daniela Farinacci) is recovering from a tragedy: she is mourning her parents, both great joke tellers. Her mother died laughing at one of her father's jokes, and her father died shortly afterwards.

Now she has come to North America to earn her living and to find the best joke in the world. She doesn't like housework; it makes her sad. So Lane's sister Virginia (Deidre Rubenstein), the image of the repressed housewife itching to tidy up the world, offers to clean up for the maid. Meanwhile, Lane's husband, also a doctor, leaves her: he falls passionately in love with Ana (Julia Blake), an older woman whose breast he has just removed in surgery.

Predictably enough, the sterile white set with which the show opens doesn't remain sterile for long, as life and death flood the house and the lives of these women with their anarchies. As in a good farce, Sarah Ruhl's play follows its own impeccable logic, which is a parallel logic to that of the "real world": a logic, one might say, of the heart rather than the mind. There's a subtext of grief and love leavened with a black humour that staves off mawkishness. I wouldn't call it magic realism, a phrase which my fellow critics have fallen on with cries of relief; I'd call it theatre.

In the capable hands of the cast, The Clean House plays delightfully: all of them are wonderful comic actors and deftly make the most of their roles. The production is also notable for Christina Smith's stunningly elegant design, which, like the writing, playfully transcends the naturalistic conventions of this theatre. It's the best design I have seen in the Fairfax Studio, which is an awkward space at the best of times. Not too demanding, but not brainless entertainment either. As they say, a good night out.

Photo: Headlock at the Malthouse. Picture: Jeff Busby.

Ungaretti translation by Daniel Keene.

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Launching with a bang on this momentous Monday, with posts already on the imminent demise of the novel, the situation in East Timor, an obituary on the French philosopher Roger Saint-Douche, and more - much more - any minute now - is Australia's own group litblog, Sarsaparilla.

Get thee hence, culture vultures, and check it out. It's sure to be a most interesting addition to our indigenous literary conversation. And, yes, among the 14 contributors is one Alison Croggon. I didn't quite make the starting gate, but I will get there, and am delighted to find myself in such good company...invisible on the contributor's list, but also apparently on board, is our very own Chris Boyd, so theatre will be well represented in this new parliament of letters. The gorgeous design is by Laura Carroll, who conceived the idea and then cajoled us all into joining up.

I didn't get to blog because I was busy at the Malthouse, being forced to read the "I am an animal" speech from Marat/Sade in the company of Robert Menzies and Lindy Davies. Now, that's the definition of intimidating. I think I passed the audition, and the reading (aside from my speech) was excellent, reminding me, anyway, how powerful language can be in the mouths of great performers.

On a less cheerful note, George Hunka has announced that he is hanging up his board over at Superfluities. One of you New Yorkers take that man for a drink and convince him of the error of his ways. Always thoughtful and literate, sometimes inspiring, Superfluities sets a standard for theatre blogging that will be sorely missed if he sticks to his resolution to leave the cyberworld behind. So I'm crossing my fingers and hoping he changes his mind.

And finally, I expect those who scour every inch of this blog will notice that I have a new email address - alisoncroggon at aapt dot net dot au. I have been having an interesting time lately with technology, and in the process have exhausted the resources of at least four tech help people at Apple, not to mention Aapt. But I will desist from boring you further. Normal transmission - and for those who have mentioned to me that they miss my missives, normal email updates - will resume very soon.

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Wondering what to do this Sunday? Of course you are. So head on down to the Malthouse, where your faithful blogger is hosting the next Things on Sunday session.



The theme is "theatres of violence", and it will be a treat to hear the distinguished actors Robert Menzies and Lindy Davies reading excerpts from the work of four exciting playwrights: to wit, Peter Weiss, Jasmine Chan, Sarah Kane and Daniel Keene.

Sunday May 28, 2.30pm, running for approximately one hour.
Venue: CUB Malthouse
Cost: $10, free for Malthouse Theatre subscribers
Bookings highly recommended: Box Office (03) 9685 5111

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The rebarbative Gilles d'Aymery gives his opinions on l'affaire Handke some vigorous exercise (for background, just scroll down) and provides a useful summary of the issues in the webzine Swans. Worth reading. Courtesy Playgoer.

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I am not reviewing Romeo and Juliet, The Bell Shakespeare Company's first touring production for this year, for two reasons. One is that I didn't see all of it; by interval I had had quite enough. The second is that I have known Chloe Armstrong, who plays Juliet, for many years, and feel unable to review a show in which one of the few compensations for an excruciating hour in the darkness is the startling talent of a good friend.

I haven't seen every Bell Shakespeare production, but I have seen a number over the years. Again and again (here's an exception - significantly, directed not by John Bell, but by David Freeman) the productions are superficially conceived, unevenly acted, confusedly designed and directed with an almost triumphalist mediocrity. Bell can have his pick of talent but, as in Romeo and Juliet, the good actors - those three or four investing the language with a feeling and intelligence beyond the fallback dum-de-dum rhythm - are dimmed by the complacencies that frame them. In the face of productions like these, it's very hard to argue with those young Turks who think Shakespeare ought to be banned from contemporary stages.

How does John Bell get away with it? Review after review lauds John Bell as the great Australian interpreter of Shakespeare. The company boasts a string of prestigious corporate sponsors, a large educational program, and a touring circuit that this year includes 47 theatres around Australia. In fact, as is noted on its slick website, Bell Shakespeare is "Australia's national touring theatre company" and "tours every state and territory with creativity and audacity".

I guess it's a kind of audacity to mount a production which lazily recaps Baz Lurhmann's sparkling gang warfare take on Verona, Romeo + Juliet, only without the flair, or to jam a model of Mafia corporatism over Antony and Cleopatra (watch out for those Sicilian asps). But the audacity referred to here is, I think, the company's supposed irreverence towards Shakespeare, a nationalistic expression of our very Australian egalitarianism, which lends the language a new, contemporary vitality. Or something. Certainly, according to Katherine Brisbane, in his early days at the Nimrod Theatre, John Bell patented "larrikin" productions of Shakespeare notable for their "energy, colour and a certain felicitous vulgarity".

That energising vulgarity has now, I fear, decayed into intellectual crassness, playing a corporate audience for easy laughs. Bell's patronising takes on youth culture might please the suits, but media-savvy young urbanites see straight through it and yawn, wondering as an aside why anybody should bother with anything as naff as theatre. Under its glossy PR, Bell Shakespeare is giving us the very definition of deadly theatre: it's Shakespeare-lite, stripped of everything that makes the Bard a significant and popular playwright.

Is this really the best that Australians can do with Shakespeare? I don't believe it for a moment. There is a truth in the core of Bell's cliched "larrikinism": the Australian vernacular can bring a tough vitality to Shakespeare's blank verse, and prick it fully alive. See my reviews of A Poor Theatre's production of Hamlet or The Old Van's Macbeth for some other possibilities. As for anyone actually interested in seeing Shakespeare on stage, my advice is to assiduously avoid our national company.

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Worth reading, for those intrigued by the conundrum of Peter Handke's attitudes to Serbian nationalism and by the nexus between language and war, is a brief essay, written in 2000, by the English poet J.H. Prynne.

"Whatever the context may have been for the comment attributed to Peter Handke, who in a recent protest against the NATO air-raids over Bosnia is reported to have observed that the first victim of war is language," writes Prynne, "it is hard not to wince at what seems extreme naivety and self-righteousness."

The charitable explanation for Handke's public presence at Milosevic's funeral is, indeed, naivety, and his subsequent statements are hardly free of self-righteousness. But more significantly, A Quick Riposte to Handke’s Dictum about War and Language illuminates the hiatus in Handke's work that leads from a notion of a "pure" poetic language to a troubling nationalism. Prynne elegantly dismantles the notion of a language uncontaminated by complicity with the machinations of power, and also points out that writers have historically played a crucial role in constructing the nationalist identities that are so important in the rush to war:

It may be resisted that true poets are patriots only to an ideal kingdom, of pure language and equally pure humanity; but enquiry shews this contention to be mostly false, because such purity is itself chimerical, often substituted for less admissible alternatives. The bread and butter that a man or woman eats (or even a poet) does not materialise like manna out of thin air. The emergence of nineteenth-century European nationalism, in the period of state-formation that composed the map for the start of the twentieth, was propelled by the intense development of national schools of culture and literature, by the locking up of international possibilities into the closed citadels of a national language, and by the poets who endorsed its ultimate separateness from the other languages all around its frontiers. No other art will do this so well, because music and painting are able to be more transparent to trans-national modalities; but writers proclaim the essence of their patriotic kingdom, and their work is most frequently enrolled into ideas of national identity by which one kingdom rallies its purposes against another.... If writers and poets think that language can somehow resist this involvement with the worst, while claiming natural affinity with the best, then they are guilty of a naive idealism that ought least of all to attract those who know how language works and what it can do.

The whole essay is available in Keston Sutherland's excellent magazine Quid, Issue 6. Many thanks to Edmund Hardy of Intercapillary Space for the pointer in my comments.

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Ah Melbourne, Melbourne, Melbourne: would it be home without the weather? It's a Melburnian obsession: every conversation, on buses, on trains, in supermarkets and offices, hovels and palaces, hovers anxiously about the weather. What do I wear today? Will that fur-lined overcoat become uncomfortably sweaty five minutes after leaving home, when the merciless gales razoring off Antarctica suddenly transform into balmy breezes, and a wholly unexpected flood of sunshine pumps the temperature up 10 degrees in five minutes?

Yes, being "under the weather" is an occupational hazard in this vile climate, and I am fallen beneath its baleful influence. But so is everybody else I know, so I don't feel so bad. All by way of excuse for my absence the past few days. However, as consolation, permit me to direct you to a fascinating on-line forum, Critical Edge, on the challenges facing contemporary arts journalism, a discussion that ended up circling obsessively around blogs, just as Melburnians get stuck on the weather. Well worth reading all the way through, as MSM'ers (mainstream media journalists) and bloggers and assorted hybrids engage in a frank and free and sometimes energetic exchange of ideas...

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Mrs Petrov's Shoe by Noelle Janaczewska, directed by Chris Bendall. Video Kirrilly Brentnall, design Kelle Frith, lighting Nick Merrylees, music and sound Kelly Ryall. With Jude Beaumont, Mike Bishop, Katie-Jean Harding, Toby Newton and Carole Patullo. Theatre@Risk at 45 Downstairs until May 21.

From the moment Ania bounces on stage in blonde pigtails and Polish national dress, fulsomely accepting a major literary award for her autobiographical novel about her immigrant background, the image of Helen Demidenko is impossible to shake.



The Demidenko affair was colourful even by the high standards of Australian literary scandals. In 1995, Helen Darville, daughter of Grace and Harry Darville of Scunthorpe, England, scooped a bag of literary prizes (including Australia's most prestigious, the Miles Franklin) with The Hand that Signed the Paper, a novel purporting to be by Helen Demidenko, the daughter of an illiterate Ukrainian taxi driver from Cairns, and trading heavily on its autobiographical authenticity.

Ms Demidenko - a camera-friendly young woman with startlingly blonde, waist-length hair - appeared on television in Ukrainian national dress and even performed Ukrainian dances, and spoke movingly of how "my father who can read and write neither English nor Ukrainian flew to Brisbane to see me after I won a prize for writing-words. So my mother who left school at twelve to work as a domestic, read her first book..." The media loved it. They loved it even more when her persona was exposed as a sham.

The Demidenko affair was one of the most bitter and tabloid-friendly scandals in Australian literary history. The Hand that Signed the Paper was controversial even before it won the Miles Franklin, accused of anti-Semitism and a tenuous grasp of historical fact. It was also attacked for plagiarising a variety of sources, including Toni Morrison.

But more complexly, the affair raised all sorts of bitterly contested questions, especially about minority literature and the performance of ethnic identity. "I kept it going for the cameras and they kept wanting to come and participate in it," Darville told Channel Nine's Sunday program. "I mean, this is this whole - part of this whole false celebrity that's attached to writers. If they want to make a false celebrity, I gave them a false celebrity. And it's - it's all false. It's - it's bogus."

Which brings us to the question of "authenticity", and fiction's relationship to reality. Demidenko's persona, consciously poised in its first edition by an author's introduction vouching for the historical authenticity of the novel, filled out what was missing in the prose. And if her Demidenko alter-ego enchanted the press with those Ukrainian dances, who is to blame her for giving them the simple ethnicities that Anglo-Celt Australia wanted to see?

It's been a decade since I read Darville's book, but I agree with Les Carlyon's observation that it takes a particular gift to make the Holocaust boring. I remember the novel as being coarsely imagined and poorly written, its stereotypical portrayals of Ukrainians, Jews and Germans doing nothing to mitigate the crudity of its didactic prose. It was, after all, a first novel by a precocious young writer who decided to tackle themes - genocide, racism - that require the power and subtlety of a Dostoevsky.

This wouldn't have mattered, had the novel not won so many prestigious awards, most of which cited the author's bravery in tackling such difficult and unspeakable themes. Helen Darville, as she pointed out with some justice, didn't award herself all those prizes. In other words, it wasn't the book that mattered, so much as the performance of identity around it. The ensuing fuss split Australia's literary community down the middle. Ten years later, it's telling that, unlike that other notorious Australian fiction Ern Malley, Helen Demidenko is remembered merely as a curiosity, and her novel, now out of print, is vanishing into the shadows of literary history.

This by way of a long preamble to Noelle Janaczewska's play Mrs Petrov's Shoe, which bases itself on the Demidenko hoax in order to investigate how ethnicity is perceived in Australia, at once marginalised and envied for its exoticism. Janaczewska has invented a somewhat less toxic Demidenko, Anna, a compulsive fantasist who wins a major literary prize for her moving novel about her childhood in Tasmania as the precociously imaginative daughter of Polish immigrants. For more than half the play, the scenario switches between Ann's victory speech and enacting the novel, which follows Anna's fascination with the story of the Russian defector Petrov and her conviction that her mother is spying for the Soviets.

Beyond the child Anna's feverish imaginings of spies, however, exists an uncomfortable and frightening world of adult complexities that Anna comically misreads. Her mother (Carole Patullo) is not spying for the Soviets; her furtive behaviour is in fact about helping a neighbour, who is hiding because he is an illegal immigrant. Moreover, her father's (Mike Bishop) frequent absences are due to illness, not nefarious activities. Anna is reminded again and again that life is more complicated than she knows. Unlike The Hand that Signed the Paper, this is a charming coming-of-age tale about a child learning to understand adult sadness.

Once the novel is enacted - which takes long enough for me to start wondering if I had got the Demidenko link wrong - the hoax is revealed. It turns out that Ania is in fact Ann, daughter of English immigrants from Scarborough who live a life of stifling ordinariness. There follow a few somewhat earnest summaries, via video and the actors, of the arguments that surrounded the Demidenko affair: defences of her right to invent herself as she likes; accusations of appropriation; observations that Anna's fraud compromises the perceptions of genuine minority literature; revelations of Ann's long-term fantasy life, which dates back to her schooldays. Ann is exposed as a fraud, but despite the public humiliation her compulsive imagination takes off again, reinventing herself...

It's impossible to talk about Mrs Petrov's Shoe without talking about Darville/Demidenko, and I think this is part of its problem. It remains too close to the Demidenko affair to really take off as a fiction of its own, and yet it is not, either, a theatrical retelling of Darville's fantasising. The play leaves to one side the less comfortable aspects of Darville's fake history - its anti-Semitism and incipient fascism - which in reality sparked bitter devisions between the Ukrainian and Jewish communities in Australia, and raised questions about mainstream Australia's comfortable fetishisation of the "simplicity" of the ethnic.

What we are left with is the marginalisation of minorities (expressed as a fashionable fetishisation of the exotic), the alienation of suburbia, and the question of whether a writer has the right to imagine realities that do not "belong" to her. Janaczewska's fake novel, with its layered complexities of realities, is in fact a more complex creation than Darville's; but the play remains imprisoned in the Demidenko narrative. This is, as I fear this review rather reflects, a play that is ultimately about issues, illustrative rather than inherently theatrical. Its theatrical lack is underlined by a lumpen structure, and Theatre@risk's production can't overcome that basic problem.

As a result, despite some fine and even moving performances, particularly from Mike Bishop and Carole Patullo, and Chris Bendall's inventive and fast-moving direction, it feels like a long evening. Everyone on stage is working their butts off, to little effect. And in the end, despite Jude Beaumont's energetic performance as the alienated Anna, the person you end up thinking about is Helen Demidenko/Darville, who these days is Helen Dale, and who is no longer a writer.

Picture: Jude Beaumont and Michael Bishop in Mrs Petrov's Shoe

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