It was bound to happen. Our Germaine has delivered a couple of fast left hooks at Joanna Murray-Smith, whose play based (or not based) on La Greer, The Female of the Species, opens in the West End this week. She says Murray-Smith is an "insane reactionary" and claims that, far from being a comedy, "what actually happened was a tragedy. What are they doing putting this play on in the West End of all places? Auckland in New Zealand, maybe..." Snort. Germaine, don't be a hemispheric snob, the world ain't so centrist any more. Murray-Smith claims in response that she is a feminist, although, according to Greer, she boasts of never having read a single feminist text. Well, it all makes about as much sense as the play...

Footnote: The Blogger on the Cast Iron Balcony proposes another play not based on any person living or dead. Sort of.

Or, How Little Alison Learned to Love the Bomb Again

Onstage, I am a real person, not a "persona." The people for whom I play are just that: individuals, not a faceless or generic "audience." We bring to our experience together preferences, histories, and expectations, and this is a volatile combination. This kind of immediate, intimate encounter is as far as one gets from an abstract cultural construct. And personal encounters, as everyone knows, are the riskiest kind.

Pianist Marilyn Nonken, from an interview in Superfluities

Language, so the wisdom runs, is what separates us from beasts. Unlike the average amoeba or domestic cat, we possess a glittering consciousness that is a microcosm of the galaxy itself, and of which the most noble excresence is the ability to communicate in abstractions. This raises us above other living things, and – like our expulsion from Eden, which was an expulsion into consciousness and the primordial moment of our alienation from other living things - justifies our exploitation of the planet, which is given to us, God’s chosen higher beings, to do with as we will.

This has been the basic contract of human authority since around the Renaissance, though it started long before. Our humanity is measured against the non-humanity of animals, and if we wish to deprive others of their humanity, we merely need to categorise them as less than human, as animals themselves. George W Bush is only the most crass example of what happens when such linguistic manifest destiny is put into practice.

At the other end of language are writers who are concerned with at once smashing and exploiting the hidden legislations of language, worrying the loosening tendons of syntax and grammar into the animalities of sound and redelivering language to the body, bewildered and unknown to itself. They make a various and implosive language, corrupted and broken and enlivened by post capitalist consumerism, conscious and angry, shamanistic, ecstatic, beautiful, polluted, impure: but most of all, it’s language that articulates consciously, through soft tissue palate and breath and skin and bone, the impossible abstractions of thought. It’s language that traces the oscillations between the tangible and the intangible, here and there, the said and the thought, the mediations of technology and self. Poetry.

If language is so deeply embedded in our idea of our humanity, then tinkering with its DNA, as poetry does, is a deeply political and significant activity. At the same time, it’s an activity which has to negotiate its own lack of significance, its continuing marginalisation, which it does with varying degrees of defensiveness or belligerence or grace. At its best and most bracing, it’s an art about which, even more than most, it’s impossible to generalise: it is stubbornly particular in the multiplicities of its insistences on now, here, this. Poets have to be spoken about one by one. And a week ago in Cork at the SoundEye Festival of the Arts of the Word, about 30 poets proceeded to prove that truism.

This was my third visit to SoundEye, a 12-year-old poetry festival run by Irish poet Trevor Joyce with cohorts Fergal Gaynor, Matthew Geden and Jimmy Cummins. It is one of the more nourishing poetry events I know of. It’s hard to describe the mixture of chaos and organisation that seems peculiar to SoundEye: at one moment it seems impossible that anything might occur, and then, without any sense of real transition, you are suddenly watching something extraordinary. And it’s even harder, even impossible, to describe the electric clash of poetries that in Soundeye 2008 made it such an energised and vital event. But I’ll give it a go.

The programming was marked most deeply by diversity: from the anti-aesthetic noise poetics of Justin Katko and the multiple unselvings of Jow Lindsay, to the shamanistic disarticulations of language and exquisite visual poems of Maggie O’Sullivan; from the “uncreative” media collages of Ubu Web founder Kenny Goldsmith, to the bone-tough lyrical constructions of Trevor Joyce, or the splintered urban demolitions of London poet Sean Bonney, or the baroquely observed minutae of poet Peter Manson (whose forthcoming translations of Mallarmé will be a significant event). There was even an epic romance, of sorts, from Cathy Wagner.

However, all the poets present – hailing from Ireland, England, Scotland, the US and Australia – were, in one way or another, heirs of modernism, in all its diversity of definitions. A hint of this provenance – and of its historic depth – was given during the cabaret night, which opened with a violin de gamba trio under Marja Tuhkanen playing Renaissance and baroque music, which was punctuated by readings from Sir Philip Sidney by Keston Sutherland and Samuel Beckett’s novel Watt by Fergal Gaynor, and from there plunged into successive anarchies.

SoundEye reflects the fact that contemporary innovative poetry is a bewildering variety of poetics, an uncountable collection of micro-communities scattered throughout the world, tracking their own aesthetic traditions and rebellions and deeply involved in each other’s work. These splintered communities are often deeply at odds with each other, or at least peer sniffily over each other’s fences to throw snails. What’s called, with varying degrees of impatience, the “poetry scene” can be a disheartening place, one I often find myself contemplating with depression or irritation. I suppose the general tendency of the world in general to despise poets internalises itself in a propensity for poets to despise each other, and the divisions that can ensue, as the so-called Australian “poetry wars” during the 70s and 80s demonstrated, can generate a lot of heat and shadow.

Which is to say that for some time the idea of poetry, outside an idiosyncratic network of relationships and my own private practice, has not much interested me. For me, poetry has always been driven by an inarticulate internal necessity; it is a mysterious if dominant force in my life which seems to imperiously demand certain questions, certain explorations, certain attentions. And it has not always been clear to me – it isn’t clear to me even now – how what I do fits into any particular poetic community. I am, for better or worse, a lyric poet, and “lyric poet” is in certain vocabularies a synonym for “twat”. But the truth is that most poets, whatever their provenance and chosen traditions, feel unhomed and isolated.

Poets assume, quite rightly for the most part, that their primary audience will be their peers. Within a multitude of tiny economies flourishes an infinity of small presses publishing beautifully made chapbooks and collections and online journals and blogs, holding readings and conferences, attracting those with the specialised literacies such work demands. Thus it ever was - Milton and Wordsworth published in much the same way - but there are times when one tires of the resultant inwardness. It's seldom that you will hear poets thinking with such depth or complexity about a relationship to a general audience as you will see in UK poet Chris Goode's latest (especially mammoth) post on Thompson's Bank of Communicable Desire. (That's because Chris also works in the theatre). There are good things about this as well as less good things: but sometimes, in the hurlyburly, it's hard to remember them.

Well, I seem to have wandered off the point. Or maybe the point is that I didn’t think any of these thoughts at SoundEye, even though I was elbow to elbow with so many and so different poets. For five days I was intrigued, fascinated, excited and stimulated. Sometimes I was bored, but the longueurs were relatively rare. And instead of a bunch of defensive egos, I was for the most part among that rare collective noun, a generosity of poets. I remembered how poetry works at the edges, inventing new languages out of what lies prosaically around us in the contemporary world or imagining vivid alternative realities. It is all life – hatred, snails, love, curiosity, passion, sex, jokes, cities, arcane intellectual obsessions, insects, war, television, home. It is paying attention.

And what I carry away mostly is how the many readings I saw confirmed poetry in the body and in the present. Keston Sutherland’s reading of a poem in which his body was at war with itself, a fleshy dismembered microcosm of wider political violence, was among the more startling of these assertions, but no less memorable than Maurice Scully’s quiet, seated reading of his wickedly turned articulations. There was poetry made for that day only and poems that will be read in books for decades to come, and it was all alive and dynamic and grabbed your ears and showed you how many ways there are to listen. Listening is a choice not often given in our cultures of endless consumerist distraction: the open ear is a necessary balance to the incipient fascism of the eye. The parties were great too. I am glad I was there.

Note: The poems and readings linked to here were not performed at SoundEye 2008. However, the event was recorded on video and readings will (eventually) be uploaded to Meshworks and, it is threatened, YouTube.

It was good to see Bill Henson speaking publicly for the first time after the recent fracas and negotiating the inevitable media glare with dignity and grace. On Friday he opened the Picture Paradise exhibition at the National Art Gallery in Canberra and, to the disappointment of the press, merely made "a pointed intellectual defence of the role of his art and that of others in Australia", during which he made no direct references to the recent media hysteria surrounding his work.

Art, said Henson, "redeems us from a world of moralism and opinionation and claptrap. It stops us in our tracks as we are formulating the truths we think we believe in. It stops us and makes us wonder."

Indeed. Meanwhile, Art Monthly has exhumed the scandal with its cover image of what is, let's be honest, an inoffensive but unremarkable photograph of a naked girl, taken by her mother in circumstances which the child herself says vocally were not abusive. This unleashed an almost identical media replay of the Henson controversy, but this time with press conferences from the girl model and her family, including her father, art critic Robert Nelson, proving the truism that history enacts first as tragedy, then as farce.

This seems merely opportunistic, but check out Larvatus Prodeo before, like everyone else, rushing to judgment. And consider further Arts Minister Peter Garrett's comment that the issue was "needlessly provocative". Is our very own minister claiming that the arts must put their heads down now and work hard not to provoke anybody? And is the "arts community" agreeing with this?

Consider too this deeply ominous comment from PM Rudd: "Mr Rudd said he had ordered the Australia Council, which funds the magazine, to develop new protocols about using images of children, and any recipient that did not abide by them would have its funding axed." Even Howard didn't go (quite) that far. And are young people going to be banished from any kind of representation, out of the panicked fear that society is completely constituted of paedophiles? Why are we criminalising our children?

Welcome to the brave new world of soft censorship, peoples, which looks just like the old fashioned kind. I fear we are entering a deeply creepy time. At least under Howard the oppositional faultlines were clear...this time the social conservatives are marching under the banner of protecting the exploited. Oh, right, it's not that unfamiliar...

PS: I'm waiting for the outcry over Sigur Rós's video of their new single Gobbledigook, made in collaboration with New York photographer Ryan McGinley, which includes many disturbing portrayals of child porn. Or, alternatively, Edenic representations of youthful desire and freedom, which are probably, on reflection, even more disturbing to those who would prefer that such things did not exist.

PPS: ...and check out Corrie Perkin's excellent piece, The Rise of the Art Police, in today's Australian.

My publisher tells me that my new collection of poems, Theatre, is at last in book form (it took a little longer than expected, and I just missed getting my hot little hands on it in England - apologies too to those who tried to buy it and found it wasn't printed yet). Those who missed the full TN advertisement, complete with flattering endorsements, can contemplate it here, and then, flushed with enthusiasm, order it directly from Salt Publishing. Or you can just wander down to Readings in a few weeks and buy it there, as copies are winging south as we speak.

This might displease Diana Simmonds, who thinks that it's outrageous that I speak about my husband's work (hey Diana, last I looked, journalists with conflicts of interests are not prevented from writing in those areas: they are required to declare them, so as not to mislead people about their provenance. And even my harshest critics have to admit that I couldn't have declared my interests more, well, openly). And here I am, being Keene's most "passionately biased", one-eyed and presumably lonely supporter - all those mainstage European productions and critical raves count for nothing, apparently - mentioning his work again! Hsssss!

Anyway, a reading of one of this Keene lad's comic plays, Three Men in a Bottle, is on this Sunday at the CUB Malthouse, as part of the Things on Sunday series. It's a cast to die for - Robert Menzies, Kym Gyngell, Julie Forsyth, Monica Maughan, Chloe Armstrong and Mark Constable, under the direction of Kate Davis, rising young directorial star of The Rabble. Should be a hoot. 2.30 pm this Sunday, July 13, bookings (03) 9685 5111. Tickets $10.

Your faithful blogger is back is town, with a baroque case of laryngitis incubated on the long-haul flight and an even more spectacular dose of jetlag. Yet for all such minor discomforts, I feel refreshed and revitalised. I had a fantastic time, which reminded me of some important stuff that is all too easily eroded in the hurlyburly chaos loosely known as my life.

I spent the final few days of my visit at the SoundEye Festival of the Arts of the Word in Cork, a completely brilliant and unique event which showcases, if showcase is the word, some of the most exciting things happening under the radar in contemporary poetry in Ireland, the UK and the US. There simply isn't an event in Australia like it (I'm not sure there's an event anywhere like it). It's one of the most intense, exciting and fun engagements with the possibilities of language that I've experienced. I plan to blog Soundeye a little more fully, to see if I can give you any sense of what it was, so watch this space theatrenauts, especially if you're interested in performance and language together. (And no, I'm not talking about performance poetry, but poetry as performance, which, I earnestly assure you, is quite different).

Some thoughts sparked by the festival are gleaming through the fog of jetlag, colliding with further thoughts emerging from the conversation under my review of Chris Goode's ...Sisters, which seems to have melded with attacks on Dan Spielman and Max Lyandvert's Manna, (on this week at the STC). And these thoughts then wandered on further and bumped into other thoughts which have been circling for some months now about the literary and intellectual culture in this country, and how unfruitfully it meshes with our theatre.

I have long suspected that our writing is the weakest part of our theatre, and it strikes me that the reasons for this go much deeper than a simple analysis of institutional structures and practice can reveal. Although I'd claim proudly that many elements of our theatre - performance, visual and sound design, technical skills and so on - stand with world's best practice, writing is too often like a poor, rather dim cousin on the fringes. And this has deep and worrying implications for everything else.

I'm not alone in my concerns about Australian theatre writing, although my thoughts are of a different timbre to most. On my desk when I came home was this month's Platform Paper by Chris Mead, artistic director of PlayWriting Australia, from Currency House: What Is An Australian Play: Have we failed our ethnic writers? I've glanced through it, and will give it a proper read in the next week - I hope - (on my floor is a huge boxful of scripts that I have to read this week as part of a panel for the RE Ross Trust Playwrights' Awards). But superficially, Mead is addressing the Anglocentric focus of Australian theatre culture, and how it marginalises minority writing. It looks interesting, and certainly deserves close attention.

But I suspect my own concerns go deeper than Mead's. It seems to me that any writing that steps outside a lamentably narrow paradigm is marginalised here, at a cost which is felt most deeply in our mainstream, but which reverberates all the way through the ecology of literature and theatre. The marginalisation of ethnic writers is only one of the symptoms. This is because the writing that kicks a culture alive is always the work that is rigorously doing something different, that questions basic assumptions, that won't fit - whether or not it exploits recognisable formal attributes - with what has gone before it.

We (excuse the rhetorical "we" - blame the jetlag, but I'm going to get stentorian now and shout in generalities) think in cliches, and this is where we betray most seriously our colonial mindset and stamp out most enthusiastically all signs of cultural diversity. Because literary thought (and I mean literary thought) in its broadest senses is marginalised in our culture, we lack an intellectual context in which new writing of any kind might be recognised. We are frightened (or simply ignorant) of the possibilities of language. And without a rigorous intellectual context, we will be stuck with half-baked experimentation or half-baked realisations of conventions, because any writing, conventional or not, that passionately addresses the possibilities of theatre will be greeted with hostility or, which is worse, total indifference. And this applies to Henrik Ibsen as much as to Sarah Kane, who is yet to have a mainstream production of her work in this country.

Can we find that context in Australian literary culture? I greatly fear that we can't. Theatre's where much of the most exciting Australian art is happening, and the more interesting reaches of our own contemporary writing are basically invisible, drowned in the sludge that here passes for literary culture. We're hamstrung in so many ways by what the German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger tapes as the inevitable link between "mediocrities and delusions". That why we can't distinguish genuine experimentation from sheer wankery, or even recognise a good play, and turn to tired Anglocentric modes of writerly practice with timid squeaks of relief. If we want our theatre to matter, we have to be smarter. That means a lot of things. But maybe the first thing is to address our own incuriosities and illiteracies.

…Sisters, adapted and directed by Chris Goode from Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov. Designed by Naomi Dawson, lighting design by Anna Watson. With Gemma Brockis, Catherine Dyson, Julia Innocenti, Helen Kirkpatrick, Tom Lyall and Melanie Wilson. Headlong Theatre @ The Gate, Notting Hill Gate, London, until July 5.

When last we spoke I was in a state of high irritation after seeing Anthony Neilson’s Relocated at the Royal Court. But a theatregoer’s unkillable optimism led me on Saturday to the wilds of London, or at least to Notting Hill Gate, where I climbed yet more stairs to see, this time, a matinee performance of …Sisters, a version of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters adapted and directed by Chris Goode. And I gave thanks, for the karmic gods saw to it that there was balance. This production stands with one of the best Chekhov experiences I’ve had.

First, a confession: I’m a bit of a Chekhov fangirl. When I get to that big dinner table in the sky, I hope they seat me next to Anton for at least a few of those eternal moments. His letters reveal him to be a man of great personal charm: he was funny and lively and, which is perhaps most rare, he possessed a coolly humane social conscience, a wholly rational and sceptical compassion that, for example, informed his report on health conditions on the penal island of Sakhalin, and is one of the defining qualities of his work.

It’s this quality, I think, that makes Chekhov one of the more poorly understood playwrights of the modern age: the realisation of his texts demands a special kind of wisdom. The mantel of reverence – or, alternatively, the machismo of anti-reverence – often obscures the intense fragility that animates the strength of his drama. Worse, a grey miasma of contemporary naturalism tends to rise about his work, snuffing out the poetic vitality at its heart.

Goode’s version of Three Sisters has been billed as a “deconstruction”, but this seems like a cold word for what strikes me more as an organic reanimation, an attempt to recover (or perhaps, more accurately, to create) a Chekhov who is continually invested in the raw presence of the moment. At first glance, this appears a quixotic approach to a classic four act naturalistic play, but in fact it is an ambition peculiarly apt to Chekhov’s work. What has always moved me most about Chekhov’s plays is their tragic consciousness of the present, a profound sorrow and comedy that stems equally from the moment’s unbearably beautiful transience, or its crushing boredom, or its pain. For this reason among others, I have often thought that Beckett owes a great deal to Chekhov.

Writing about this production, as is true of all the best theatre experiences, is very difficult. To write it down is inevitably a kind of falsification, as it shifts something that exists almost entirely in the present into the past tense. And memory has its own filters and connectivities, selecting and fictionalising and shaping as it rewrites the experience. All that remains of this production now is what exists in the memory of those who were there.

This acute awareness of mortality (“Each thing once. Only once.”) is the informing feeling of …Sisters, and the reason why it’s so intensely moving. Because of the chance elements Goode and his actors have introduced, each performance is different: no one knows at the beginning who is going to play what parts, or even which lines will be said. However, these variations are played over a deeply thought structure: not only the play (which still preserves its four acts and its language) but in the shape of the production itself. It’s a show that teaches you how to watch it as you watch, profoundly intelligent but also, crucially, profoundly felt. When a character asks: Do we exist? the question resonates intimately in the auditorium: suddenly I felt as fictional – or, conversely, as real - as the characters on the stage. And who’s to say I am not?

Goode has adapted the play into contemporary English and gathered an exceptional cast (it clearly had to be exceptional) of six actors, all of whom learnt the entire text. Then he asked them, as he says in the program, to “dance”. And dance they do. One of the things that took my breath away about this production is its beautiful and subtle choreography, its creation of a continually dynamic space.

…Sisters maintains an exquisite tension between the scripted play and the anarchies of chance. From the moment we enter the space – designed as a comfortably cluttered green room with 19th century touches, complete with electric kettle, walls covered with post-it notes and framed collections of dead butterflies - we see the actors, half costumed, leafing through scripts or wandering idly about the stage, preparing for the show. The emphasis is from the beginning on performance in all its meanings, an awareness which implicates the audience. We are always conscious – we are never permitted to forget – that we are watching a work of theatre.

Goode uses a number of Cagean techniques: the actors choose straws, play spin-the-bottle and pick up at random envelopes containing instructions that drop from the ceiling. Anyone could play any character, and at any point might become someone else. Despite this, it’s a production very strong on clarity: clues are given from the beginning – in costuming and dialogue – to show who is who, although these clues are instantly destabilised. For this reason, it demands close attention. But although my memory of Three Sisters was very vague (I resisted the impulse to reread the play, and merely reacquainted myself with the character list), there was no point where I found myself utterly lost. Perhaps those who don't know the play might be lost, but I suspect what is fruitfully destroyed here is a certain kind of dramatic expectation.

The four acts are very distinct. Act I establishes the play, and sticks most closely to the text as written. Act II stretches the conventions: at one point, for example, there are three Mashas. The love scene between Masha and Vershinin gains a skin-prickling poignancy by being performed in a kind of chorus, the dialogue shifting from one couple to another with no attention to gender. Act III, the dramatic climax, is the closest thing I’ve ever seen to play-as-opera, and is the point where the play's emotional subtext surges rawly to the surface of the performance.

Act IV is a return to stasis, with performers seated staring out at the audience, but now the play is in pieces, literally scattered over the floor for one of the actors, continually circling the others, to pick up and read at random. In a rather Castellucci-ish touch, two rabbits hop onto the stage and lollop around, behaving, as animals and babies do, with a hypnotic lack of self consciousness. I thought it a tribute to the actors that I found myself watching them as closely as I watched the rabbits, which ended up, bored, fast asleep under a desk at the end of the scene. But for all the random elements, the performance begins and ends where the play begins and ends: it still, rather miraculously, attends to Chekhov's dramatic and emotional arc.

I don’t know whether, if he had seen this production, Chekhov would have advised his friends (as he so often did) to “shoot him in the head” if he ever thought about writing another play. But I like to think he might have been pleased: for all its robust approach, ...Sisters seemed to me to be deeply true to him. Certainly, in its peculiar and evanescent transparency, it's a work of exemplary integrity. No wonder people here think Chris Goode is God.

Relocated, written and directed by Anthony Neilson. Designed by Miriam Buether, lighting by Chahine Yavroyan, sound design by Nick Powell. With Frances Grey, Phil McKee, Staurt McQuarrie, Katie Novak, Jan Pearson and Nicola Walker. Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, Royal Court, Sloane Square, London, until July 5.

Despite my stern resolutions to do other things while in London - like, oh, I don't know, photographing Beefeaters or climbing the Tower of London - Ms TN gave in and decided to go to the theatre after all. After reading various responses to Anthony Neilson’s Relocated, from Michael Billington’s notorious one star review to our Euro-trotting Jana’s indignant defence, curiosity overwhelmed me. And so, on Friday night, I found myself at the Royal Court Upstairs.

When they say Upstairs, they mean Upstairs. I think I made my way up five flights and then, after I'd climbed all that way, I entered a space that felt like an underground bunker. Miriam Buether’s impressive design is not for claustrophobes: it features a black, low-roofed stage furnished with chairs and other objects painted black, and lit by dingy naked lightbulbs.


The stage is separated from the audience by a coarse scrim, so you are effectively peering into a box, creating that sense of voyeurism which seems to be a bit of a staple of contemporary theatre. In a neat touch that increases the voyeuristic frisson, the angle of the stage means that you can watch through the scrim as the rest of the audience enters the space. And then came what turned out to be my uneasiest moment of the night: the ushers shut the doors. I suddenly thought, what if there’s a fire? How do we get out?

It's not a thought that usually occurs to me in the theatre, and is no doubt a tribute to the oppressive effect of Buether’s design and Chahine Yavroyan’s parsimonious lighting, which is more a play of shadows on darkness than of light on shadow. The production they shape is certainly effective, well performed by a good cast and, for the most part, stylishly done. Yet on the way home I was overwhelmed by waves of irritation. I wasn’t offended, I wasn’t mystified, I wasn’t even angry. I was annoyed.

I've spent the whole day attempting to unpack this irritation. And I found that the more I thought about the production, the less there seemed to be think about. On the surface, Relocated is a Lynch-esque nightmare about identity, a peek under the skin of suburbia to its murderous neuroses and alienations, a fantasia of contemporary anxieties. That's certainly how it's dressed. But in the end, it doesn't really offer much more than a solidly visceral sensation of sitting in the dark.

It opens with a woman who is vacuuming and listening to the BBC news when she suddenly collapses. What follows is a series of nightmarish scenes, perhaps occurring in the moment of her death, since the show also ends with the image of the fallen woman. The play is a splintered narrative that splices Josef Fritzl, the incestuous imprisoner of his own daughter, with Connie/Marjorie/Kelly, a woman who, like Maxine Carr, is an unwitting accomplice to the murder of two 12 year old girls by her partner, and who is continually moved around the country under different identities for her protection.

Unlike others who have seen Relocated, I wasn’t disturbed by the ethics of the direct references to current events, although perhaps I should have been. The jarring effect of employing and distorting recognisable news stories wasn’t (for me, anyway) a question of “going too far”; but I did think it was exploitative. What bothered me was how the references literalised the play: they give the mind a handle of explanation which is then, despite variants and wandering storylines, impossible to ignore. The show is hamstrung by the kind of tabloid sensationalist banality which (perhaps) it seeks to critique.

The most effective moments are when the production is most restrained. There is a domestic scene, for instance, when one partner talks about children "upstairs" needing a bath, while the other, shocked, denies that they have any children at all. This moment, and a few others like it, begin to generate a genuine unease, a sense of dislocated, amnesiac identity; but this is hijacked almost immediately by the sudden flagging of contemporary news stories: a topicality, if you like, that erases relevance. It left me on the surface of things grappling with “issues”, rather than underneath the skin, grubbing about in the subconscious.

I suppose I might have liked to see something like the poise in Henry James's brilliant horror story The Turn of the Screw, which is a text so finely balanced that it is impossible to know whether it is a ghost story or an account by a sexually neurotic and destructive woman. Neilson might claim that he is challenging such elegance: certainly Relocated is full of loose ends. But for my money, rather than challenging the idea of narrative causality, these end up merely drifting, creating neither a dramatic narrative nor an oneiric anti-narrative, but rather something with a bet each way.

That sense of scrappiness no doubt emerges from Neilson's process, which is to devise texts during rehearsals. There's nothing in principle wrong with this, but in this production it's hard to see what the advantage is: effectively you have a play that works in the same ways other plays do, but without the benefit of reflective writing time. There are lyrical moments - for example, Connie's recorded assertion of her identity towards the end - that certainly reach towards very writerly ambitions.

And perhaps, too, I had been told too often that it was frightening. I avoid horror films, being rather too vulnerable to suspenseful sound effects and sudden leaps on the protagonist out of shadowy doorways, and I was prepared to have to steady my nerves with a stiff drink afterwards. And, rather to my disappointment, it didn't frighten me at all. The lighting design uses the effect of total blackout a few times too often. While at first it exerts its disorientating power, leaving you with that curious sense that your body's boundaries are now amorphous, by the fourth or fifth blackout it was, for all the inventiveness of Nick Powell’s soundscape of children’s cries and atmospheric electronic noises, just sitting in the dark, waiting for the next scene.

Neilson’s direction, imaginative and precise though it is, suffers from a sense of repetitiveness: not the repetition of scenes as variations, an aspect I found interesting, but from a rather unvarying directorial rhythm. (Reveal, hide, reveal, hide, more darkness…) I suspect this was a major reason I found myself checking my watch, which is a bad sign in a 90 minute show. But I think what primarily prompted my post-show irritation was a feeling of emptiness: for all the physical sensorium it provided, the production never connected into any deeper poetic recognition. I didn't feel anything.

Before the show, I bought the script of Marius von Mayenberg's The Ugly One - presently on in a return season downstairs at the Royal Court - and I read it on the way home. It makes a striking contrast to Relocated, because Mayenberg understands the value and strictness of theatrical metaphor. The Ugly One is, oddly enough, another essay on identity, a wickedly funny and painful exploration of the meaning of the face. I suppose there is a value in being annoyed - it doesn't in truth happen very often - but I couldn't help wishing I had seen Mayenberg's play instead.

Picture: Jan Pearson in Relocated at the Royal Court. Photo: Johan Persson

Comus by John Milton, composed by Henry Lawes, directed by Annilese Miskimmon. Designed by Lachlan Goudie, musical direction by Richard Bates, costumes by Beth Sims, choregraphy by Kyra Cornwall. With David F. Walton, Mary-Ellen Lynell, Jenni Mackenzie, Ed Rowett, Ned Stuart-Smith, Olivia Marshall, Rachel Thomas, Charlotte Verrill, Maria Pritchard, Shu-Pin Oei, Emma Rhule and Helen Ivory. Christ’s College Amateur Dramatic Society.

Comus: A Reply by John Kinsella, directed by Simon Godwin. Designed by Lucy Minyo, music composed by Simon Gethin Thomas, choreography by Vikki Le May, lighting by Benjamin Sehovic. With David Brown, Amanda Plain, Helen Duff, Sam Pallis, Lowri Amies, Alashiya Gordes, Abigail Rokison, Iona Blair and Arthur Asseraf. The Marlowe Society. Double bill @ Christ’s College Hall, Cambridge University.

Last weekend, I had the rare opportunity to watch a masque in performance – or more accurately, two masques, Milton’s Comus and a 21st century “reply” by Australian poet John Kinsella – in the atmospheric environs of Christ’s College, Cambridge. How atmospheric it was might be judged by the fact that it was performed in the hall where, four centuries ago, a 19-year-old Milton presided as Lord of Misrule, and on the wall was a portrait that is, at least in tradition, a picture of Milton by Lely (and which for the occasion was garnished with laurels).


Yet, for all the 17th century decor, what struck me most forcibly was how modern the form still seems. Much of the most interesting contemporary theatre plays up its artifice, finding emotional authenticity in performance and language rather in any pretence at realism. Masque reminds me of nothing so much as the Asian theatre that so inspired figures like Brecht and Artaud: it’s theatre that focuses on art, music, dance and physically stylized performance, and depends crucially for its intellectual sophistication and much of its beauty on poetic language.

A form of theatre that evolved from ancient traditions of mummery, it reached its apotheosis with Ben Jonson, who created extravagant spectacles that employed the arts of literature, music, singing, dancing and design to enchant the senses of Jacobean courtiers. Milton’s “Mask, presented at Ludlow Castle” (later named Comus) extended the tradition to pastoral poetry, but it was also a play on the genre that confounded the expectations of his audience, who were used to a narrative in which disruptive disorder was finally conquered by the forces of virtue (usually represented by the King and Queen).

Milton reclaimed the masque from its courtly excesses, recasting it as morality tale that defends chastity against the chaos of sensual riot. The plot is simple: a young woman (the Lady) becomes lost in a forest, the home of a wicked magician who, with his half-animal revelers, lives a life of sexual and sensual excess. But with the help of her two brothers, her innate virtue and the intervention of an earth goddess, Sabrina the Nymph, she fights of his seductions.

However, it’s more complex than it first appears. True to the ambiguity noted by Blake when he said Milton was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it”, Milton permits the Bacchanalian Comus to run away to fight another day, still clutching his magic wand.

Kinsella’s version, which was commissioned by the Marlowe Society, sticks closely to Milton’s structure and even, intriguingly, his language, and brings the sexual perversity that is subtextual in Milton rampantly to the surface. Certainly, in its radical message it’s very much in the tradition of Milton. The contemporary version of Comus is an out-of-control genetic scientist who swallows handfuls of Viagra and amphetamines, and after her adventures in the forest, the Lady becomes an eco-warrior. But again, all is not quite what it seems: the ultimate triumph of Virtue is merely another form of corruption, in which the wilds of England are preserved at the expense of the wildernesses of the developing world.

The productions were presented in traverse, in a hall which is intimate rather than grand, with double doors and a gallery at one end. Both productions took advantage of this intimacy, and were both, for different reasons, entirely engrossing. If Milton’s Comus featured some rather charmingly enthusiastic overacting, it also had some gorgeous voices – Mary-Ellen Lynall as the Lady, Jenni Mackenzie as the Attendant Spirit and Olivia Marshall as Sabrina – to deliver Henry Lawes’s sublime baroque settings of Milton’s lyrics. The songs were show-stoppers: for a moment, it was like stepping outside time, and we really were in the 17th century.

Annilese Miskimmon’s direction was functional rather than imaginative, and tended at times to the static; but it mostly filled the space and took proper advantage of the gallery. Beth Sims’s costumes were contemporary, with the Attendant Spirit in a costume that was a kind of cross between a beekeeper's costume and a space suit, the Lady in a tennis dress and her brothers in cricket whites. The most spectacular dress was for Comus and his dancers, in particular some stunning half-masks that demonstrated their Circean bestial provenance: one had a spectacular coronal of peacock feathers.

Simon Godwin’s direction of Kinsella’s Reply was more muscular, heightened by some fun animalistic choreography drawing on pole-dancing and dance clubs, which together generated an urgent energy. The costumes were simple and eye-catching: Comus’s dancers were decked out in bright, skintight lycra draped with complete fox furs, a gruesome touch which makes you wonder why such things were ever considered fashionable, while the Lady’s rather clueless brothers (Sam Pallis and Lowrie Amies) were in public school uniforms. The speaking performances were on the whole weaker than in the previous play, but the production was grounded by an utterly sure and very impressive performance from David Brown as Comus.

Whatever the quibbles, the whole was more than the sum of its parts. The original Comus was performed by amateurs - including the children of Lord Bridgewater, for whom the masque was commissioned - and its hieratic form is forgiving of the declamatory. All the same, I couldn’t help speculating what it would be like to see the masques directed, say, by Michael Kantor, designed by Anna Tregloan, with Geoffrey Rush as Comus and Melissa Madden-Grey as the Lady… but I was in Cambridge, not Melbourne. These were, after all, more than creditable productions. And the location and sense of event gave the evening an irresistible and unique frisson.

And the language was glorious. These masques might easily be a form of superior agitprop: what saves them is the poetry, complex and intellectually graceful, which plays richly against the simplicities of their theatrical form. Perhaps masque, or forms like it, is where poetry can really sing in contemporary theatre.

Picture: Christ's College Hall.

A shorter version of this review was published on the Guardian's theatre blog.

Ms TN is going to come over all bloggish and type an actual diary entry, since I'm sure you are all bereft since TN hefted herself into the northern hemisphere. Or perhaps, more realistically, some of you are mildly curious about what I'm doing. But first, a confession: I am typing this because the remote controls attached to British televisions are, like the First Sefiroth, wholly beyond comprehension. I unwarily pressed a button marked "P" and found myself in a labyrinth of commands which, after much cursing and frantic button pushing, finally led me to a television picture of grey snow. All this technology to take me back to the tv coverage of the 1950s, only without the comfort of warming valves. I miss the kind of remote that is still prevalent in the primitive antipodes, which merely goes to Channel 2 when you press "2".

But, I hear you cry in horror, what's this? Did Ms TN travel through a dozen time zones merely to watch television? Well, not really; but I was planning a night in with John McEnroe and the latest from Wimbledon, which is the kind of sports coverage that would make Channel Seven blush with shame, were the programming chiefs not actually giant lizards in the process of taking over the world, and so immune to human delicacies and shame. Yes, there are compensations for Britain's watery sunshine. Wimbledon and Dr Who (which is as huge on the wow factor as rumour rumours) are two of them. 

But I haven't only been glued to the BBC. I have been out imbibing some of that history the English are so keen on erasing with carparks. A weekend in Cambridge is enough to make you thoughtful on this point: on the one hand, exquisite 17th century colleges, their perfect lawns cut with nail scissors by armies of specially trained topiarists, and on the other, blocks of concrete dropped in from the sky. (This is, admittedly, rather unkind to Churchill College, which hasn't aged as gracelessly as most 70s architecture, though someone said that was because of its beautiful gardens).

On Friday and Saturday I stayed at the Moeller Centre at Churchill, a cutting-edge example of 70s Danish design with an alien hexagon dropped into its middle for reasons that are not very clear, but which creates a roof terrace that looks like a set for a movie in which sophisticated 20-somethings drape themselves carelessly over S-bend furniture and drop their false eyelashes into their martinis. It is clearly designed for MBAs in conference mode, no doubt with facilitators, and so boasts televisions, internet connections, classy shampoos and body wash and even white flannel dressing gowns. Which was, for me at least, quite unexpected.

On Sunday night I moved into a room at the rather less well appointed but undeniably more atmospheric Pembroke College, looking over the Library Lawn, which is just past the building you see on the right in the picture below. (The building that looks like a church is actually the Library, and the building on the right is the very beautiful neoclassical Pembroke Chapel, which is Christopher Wren's first building). And then I went to see the double bill of the masque Comus - John Milton's version and John Kinsella's eco-warrior "reply" - at Christ's College down the road, of which more In Due Course.


All this excessive history and expensively cut grass is probably why the Cambridge dons get all stern and modern. In fact, most people who live in Cambridge are dismissive of its gorgeousness.  One Cambridge don (I think he was a don) told me last night, as I was admiring the rooftops of Christ's College silhoetted against the miraculously luminous summer night sky: "The problem is that nothing has changed since the 17th century". A few things have changed: they let women in, for instance. But I suppose that carefully groomed privilege gets stifling, not to mention the peasants muttering as they rake the leaves. And I have to remember that this is a country where I can pick up the major left wing daily and read a columnist objecting to rude language (a) because it comes from the "lower ranks" and (b) because it is "inherently discourteous to women". (Max, what if it's the women swearing, eh? Are they being inherently discourteous to men?)

Still, as I had an hour to kill on Sunday, such considerations didn't stop me getting in a punt and floating down the Cam, watching the ducks nipping each other at close quarters. And there's no getting away from it: Cambridge is incredibly beautiful.

Now I'm back in London, less beautiful but more vital, planning some leisurely socialising and maybe even a trip to the theatre. After that deeply interesting week at UEA in Norwich (when I took copious notes, none of which I feel like writing up) and my Cambridge weekend, I've finished masquerading as a university person and am uncloseting as a tourist. It's quite restful, after 10 days which have mainly been concerned, one way and another, with talking about climate change and corporate depredation. 

Completing the brainmelt, I managed to get the television working by using another remote, although I'm quite sure it's using the wrong buttons, and my absent hosts will have to untangle whatever unholy mess I've made of the remote control programming. And I watched a BBC documentary which explained something I've noticed over the past few days: why English dress shops are full of cheap, gaudy tat. They are made, wholly unsurprisingly, by Indian children working in sweat shops: and the much-vaunted "ethical policies" of the chain stores are deeply dubious. It strikes me there are worse things in Britain than indecent language.