Briefly: a kerfuffle has emerged in Sydney over Belvoir St's decision to hand the Philip Parson's Memorial Lecture over to a panel who will discuss the contentious absence of women in key creative roles in our mainstream companies. As has always been the case, the lecture is delivered at the same event as the Philip Parson's Young Playwright's Award; and, as Joanna Erskine reports on her blog, one of the shortlisted playwrights, Caleb Lewis, has withdrawn his entry in protest against the "politicisation" of the award. More from Augusta Supple here.

Meanwhile, your faithful blogger hasn't been idle, despite the lack of activity here; I've been going to the theatre. November is usually quiet as the program winds down for summer, but I've returned from the UK to find there's de facto mini-festival of some of the best indie theatre and dance companies in town, all happening at once, and all in short seasons ... bugger the jet lag, it's theatre lag now. Reports will, I promise, follow.

The most contemporary thing about contemporary art is its crisis...

The Accident of Art, Paul Virilio

It's always interesting to revisit a show, and doubly interesting when it's as fascinating as Daniel Schlusser's production Life is a Dream, an enactment of the 17th century Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca's famous philosophical play about the nature of reality. Theatre in its purest forms is flux made visible and plastic, a constant interrogation of the present through the conditionings of the past. (I mean this quite literally. Weeks or months of rehearsal, countless orchestrations of bodies, objects, sound, spatial arrangements, make every action a deliberate and conscious choice that, if it is to possess any life, must manifest in the now as if it were newly discovered: a paradox theatre can never resolve so much as embody).


Heraclitus, whose ambiguities and musical language make him a poet among philosophers, argued that: "On those stepping into rivers the same, other and other waters flow" (for the Greek scholars among you, "Potamoisi toisin autoisin embainousin, hetera kai hetera hudata epirrei"). Not so much that one can't step into the same river twice, which is Plato's interpretation, but that in returning to the same river, one will encounter other waters: the river remains what it is only through the constancy of its change.

Likewise with revisiting a work of theatre: the work's structure and identity remain constant, but the experience will be, in countless subtle ways, a different meeting, buffeted by variable currents. This change is, crucially, the condition of its vitality. In the case of Life is a Dream, focus inevitably shifts on a second viewing, and becomes more layered: what I said about its first season last year, with Company 08 at what was then the Victorian College of the Arts, remains true. (And since I hate repeating myself, that review contains a discussion of the original play and its relation to the performance which I'll not explore here).

Yet, wholly unsurprisingly, this incarnation is more conscious, more practised, and more immediately legible. As much as any evolution in the work itself, this is also because I was sitting close enough to the performers to hear their private dialogue, which was mostly inaudible the first time. Although in both cases the emerging power relationships between the performers was very clear, there was a quality to this inaudibility that I missed, a heightened sense of voyeurism that underlaid some of the work's strange unease.

Schlusser uses very little of the original play; it exists as shining moments of pure dramatic poetry that bubble out of the riveting banality of the performance on stage. He weaves fragments of Beatrix Christian's translation through what he calls "poorer" speech: a casual domestic conversation that establishes its own routine - boiling a kettle, tea making, instructions to comfort or to attack another performer. The conceit is that the performers are, like Segismundo himself, damaged adults abandoned by parental authority; they are caught in a traumatic repetition that attempts to restore order, clear lines of authority and power, where none existed in the first place.

This initial reality is established patiently and without any concession to dramatic artifice: there is no attempt to persuade an audience to empathy, no overt manipulation. The action on stage flirts constantly with the edges of boredom, but its apparent artlessness is belied by its careful orchestration. The stage dynamic escalates insensibly from a mundane if degraded domesticity to excesses of cruelty and desire with an action like breathing: it eddies in and out of crisis, gradually generating a concentration of energy until the poetry of Calderón's play becomes possible.

The power of this production depends crucially on the nine performers who, with the exception of Johnny Carr who plays the imprisoned Segismondo, are unable to escape our gaze. They inhabit the reality of the stage with unwavering concentration, hooking and keeping an involuntary attention with the depth and detail of their performances. When they shift seamlessly from casual spoken language to the startlingly beautiful poetry of Christian's text, it has both the shock of contrast and an underlying continuity.

The show's sense of unity stems from the central metaphor that is filleted out of the play and extended in performance - the figure of the abandoned and mistreated child. Here the fairytale mother is dead in childbirth, the father an absent tyrant; the child is betrayed by those who should have most cared for him. When Segismundo is brought out of his prison in chains, his legs and elbows agonisingly chafed and blistered, he is the embodiment of abjection. His suffering, according to the king, is the condition of the kingdom's security: he is the scapegoat for the king's fears and, as a result of his mistreatment, also embodies them.

Life is a Dream plays out the aftermath of damage: it's clear in the neurotic repetitions, the infantilisms of mutual dependency and the relentless scapegoating, as much as in the complex denials that are encapsulated by mundane routine. In particular, it illuminates how traumatic shifts of power are domesticated and normalised, just as after revolution the king - Napoleon, Stalin - restores the lines of authority that have been blown violently apart. Freedom glimpsed through the lens of revolution is, after all, terrifying, and perhaps there is something in the human psyche that craves the security of tyranny.

This production is in some ways deeply pessimistic: trapped in the damage of childhood, it suggests, we can never embrace either freedom or responsibility. Against this is posited a fragile hope in a possible ethics, Segismundo's statement that the good we do matters, whether it occurs in a dream or in reality. It offers no resolution: the production is simply a playing out of crisis. It's a crisis of art as much as it is of conscience, poising us, just as the performances do, on the razor-edge of contingency, between the ghosts of the past and the trash of the present.

*

THIS week I also caught Andrew Bovell's When The Rain Stops Falling, which finishes its MTC season today after a national tour. This production has been bouncing from festival to festival, with plaudits showering down like the torrents mentioned ad nauseam in the play itself. And I'm frankly baffled by the fuss.

The structure is an uncomfortable conceit that stretches Arthur Miller-style realism towards surreal ends. The writing is like a lot of the Australian brand of so-called magical realism, which employs an enervating faux lyricism to dress up what are essentially banal conclusions with some pretty imagery (in this case, fish and rain). The anxiously detailed plot (paedophilia, suicide, child murder, child abandonment, love affairs, fatal car accidents, all swimming in the thematic broth of climate change) is strung together by a bunch of increasingly unlikely coincidences, ranging across four generations of two families to trace the genealogy and resolution of psychic damage.

Yet for all this frenetic ambition, it nowhere strikes a true emotional note: all through the play, statement ("I'm going mad!") substitutes for the emergence of feeling. It's amazing how agonisingly boring this becomes: the falsity mounts to an almost hysteric over-compensation, which is perhaps most noticeable in the copious tears shed by various actors. And it's not helped by the leaden pace of the production, which delivers its holy truths with an earnestness worthy of George Lucas retelling the Christian myth in the Star Wars prequel. Repetitions are archly (and frequently) deployed to demonstrate the fatal connections across generations, but they function chiefly as a plot contrivance, rather than as a deepening of metaphor.

The design is stylishly imagined by Hossein Valamanesh, but in the end amounts to a parade of pretty tableaux unveiled to a neo-Glass soundtrack, which is at least played live. The performances, perhaps worn down after several seasons, varied wildly the night I saw them; Neil Pigot's bizarre decision to play both his roles as if he were an old man whose boots were full of water was intensely distracting, as were some very poorly rendered British accents. For the record, Yalin Ozucelik got his accent pitch-perfect, and Paul Blackwell's understated performance was a pleasure to watch, which provided some compensation for all the mugging.

Even more than its intellectual fuzziness - the issue of climate change, for example, is basically a kind of aesthetic wallpaper - its main lack is emotional precision, which would seem crucial in a work that is essentially about the life of feeling. Ironically, given its obsession with rain, it made me think of some lines of Ezra Pound's: "dry casques of departed locusts / speaking a shell of speech... / Words like locust-shells, moved by no inner being..." It gives the whole a strange air of being an imitation of something else.

Life is a Dream, adapted from Pedro Calderón de la Barca, translated by Beatrix Christian, directed by Daniel Schlusser. Designed by Marg Horwell, lighting by Kimberly Kwa, special make-up effects by Dominique Noelle Mathisen, composed by Darrin Verhagen, stage management by Pippa Wright, produced by Sarah Ernst. With George Banders, Brendan Barnett, Johnny Carr, Andrew Dunn, Julia Grace, Sophie Mathisen, Vanessa Moltzen, Sarah Ogden and Josh Price. The Store Room until November 29.

When the Rain Stops Falling by Andrew Bovell, directed by Chris Drummond. Desined by Hossein Valamanesh, composer Quentin Grant, lighting design by Niklas Pajanti. With Paul Blackwell, Michaela Cantwell, Carmel Johnson, Kris McQuade, Yalin Olucelik, Anna Lise Phillips and Neil Pigot. Brink Productions, presented by the Melbourne Theatre Company and Melbourne International Arts Festival, Sumner Theatre untl November 22.

I’ve often pondered the astounding ability of puppets to generate intense emotional responses. How is it possible that we can identify so fiercely with an overtly unrealistic object made of sticks and paper?

The power of animation plumbs our imaginative humanity. It's a simple and crude device that every child exploits in play, but it enacts a totemic magic, an ancient ability to invest an object with human or supernatural qualities. In the theatre or on the screen in, say, the exquisite art of Hayao Miyazaki, it removes the possibility of realistic representation and with it our tendency to moral judgment. What is delineated with a poignant clarity is pure action, pure gesture. Consequently it creeps beneath your emotional guard. You’re not aware until it’s too late that you’ve opened what otherwise are fiercely protected regions of the psyche.


Puppets are key to the impact of Africa, the latest work of Sydney company My Darling Patricia, presently making their Malthouse debut as the resident company in the Tower Theatre. Like last year’s Black Lung residency, Africa demonstrates the value of giving talented young companies the resources and time to fully realise their visions. It’s a stunning piece of theatre that weaves together the mundane and the marvellous to create a rawly affecting work about childhood.

The germs of Africa were news stories: one of two small German children who ran away from home intending to elope, and were caught on their way to Africa, and several accounts of child abuse. However, My Darling Patricia has leapt away from these sources to forge its own story. It’s a simple narrative about the imaginative world of three small children, who are represented by bunraku-style puppets which are manipulated in full sight of the audience.

The children live in a chaotic house, strewn with washing and toys. The two girl are the daughters of a woman who is a traditional “bad mother”, a single woman in the throes of an abusive relationship. She clearly loves her children and is the source of their security, but she is also neglectful and chaotic, and we witness her downward spiral as she struggles with her circumstances. The little boy is the girls' best friend, an abused child who takes refuge in their home.

The three puppets become real very quickly, a function of the accuracy of the gestures their manipulators achieve, and of the collective's unsentimental observations of childish behaviour. The show opens, for example, with the little boy putting a doll's head in a microwave, an absurd and macabre image that sharply expresses the cheerful amorality of young children, and which also foreshadows the cruelty that he suffers.

The two adults, the mother and her lover, are played by actors (Jodie le Vesconte and Matt Prest) who mostly perform on the top tier of a multi-level stage, seen from the waist down from a child’s-eye perspective. Their torsos are visible as silhouettes through a frosted glass window. The adults' sexuality and violence occur literally above the heads of the children, who play obliviously beneath them, as if, like the sky, the adults in their lives are natural elements.

Africa plays across the two realities, adult and child, with an impressive ingenuity and playfulness. The children might be deprived in many ways, but they don’t consider themselves deprived: like all small children, they accept their circumstances as the totality of their universe. When they watch a nature documentary on Africa, which is comically rendered through the lens of their childish desires, another possibility opens up: Africa becomes the focus of their inarticulate yearnings, the place where they can be the marvellous beings they feel nascently within themselves.

Yet this imaginative freedom doesn’t protect them from harsh realities. The double world of Africa - its simultaneous evocation of the domestic and the epic - permits My Darling Patricia to tell a story of startling bleakness that paradoxically seduces us with its light playfulness. Even in the face of its brutal truths, the show expresses a curious optimism. One of the chief achievements of Africa is its emotional honesty: how it at once expresses human resilience – the ability to generate beauty from the “rag and bone shop of the heart” – and the incorrigibility of damage and loss.

Realised with an admirable skilfulness and attention to detail, it’s funny, beautiful and heartbreaking. It's selling out fast, but beg, borrow or steal a ticket - you don't want to miss it.

Picture: My Darling Patricia's Africa. Photo: Jeff Busby

A brutally edited version of this review is in today's Australian.

Africa, conceived, designed and created by My Darling Patricia. Concept by Sam Routledge, written and directed by Halcyon Macleod. Designed by Clare Britton and Bridget Dolan, performed by Jodie Le Vesconte and Matt Prest, puppeteers Calre Britton, Alice Osborne and Sam Routledge, composition and sound design by Declan Kelly, lighting by Lucy Birkinshaw. Malthouse Theatre @ The Tower until November 29.

Keen theatrenauts will have no problem calling to mind the on-going debate over the place of women in Australian theatre. Sparked by a season launch at Company B Belvoir St that overshadowed Neil Armfield's farewell season by fielding one woman among a brace of male directors, the debate has widened to a discussion about gender equity in the key creative roles in all Australia's main stage theatres.

The furore has prompted some patronising from the UK, which, as an irresistible aside, feels a bit rich when you consider the National Theatre's current seasons. The October-January season running presently has, out of a total of 30 writers and directors, only five women; January-March has a total of 27, and again only five women. Looks like exactly the same problem to me.

The latest move here is a request from Melbourne University that the MTC appoint an Equal Opportunity Officer who will address the lack of opportunities for women directors. As John Bailey comments, it's a little odd for the UoM to demand the creation of positions while it is so merrily decimating its own departments, but that's another question.

Meanwhile, Belvoir St in Sydney is taking the bull by the horns and opening the question to public debate. The Philip Parsons Memorial Lecture for 2009 will be given over to a panel to debate this very question as it pertains to directors: Where Are The Women? The debate will be introduced and backgrounded by Rachel Healy, director performing arts at the Sydney Opera House, who will then join the discussion. Fielded by journalist Monica Attard, the panel will also include myself; emerging director Shannon Murphy; Marion Potts, associate artistic director at Bell Shakespeare; and Gil Appleton, who will provide a historical overview. Then the floor will be opened for debate. I expect a lively, fascinating and - I hope - illuminating discussion.

The debate, which will be followed by the presentation of the Philip Parsons Young Playwright's Award, is on Sunday December 6 at 2pm, and tickets are $10. Bookings 02 9699 3444.

Yes, faithful readers: your truant blogger has returned from the fleshpots of the northern hemisphere, having bounced around England and Ireland and Scotland like a crazed blowfly in a bottle. I had a marvellous time, I met a lot of charming people and I read poetry at many of them. And I saw a lot of rain, with water falling promiscuously off mountains and chuckling in brooks and rivers and lying about in fields as if it had nothing better to do. It's nice to know it still exists somewhere.

And despite some good intentions (we all know what they lead to), I didn't blog at all. That was a very pleasant thing not to do for a month, and I'm all the better for it. I even managed, mostly, to stay away from the theatre, although I confess that I did pop into the Donmar Warehouse to see a version of Calderon's Life is a Dream (starring Dominic West, who might be known to some of you as McNulty from The Wire, as Sigismundo). It featured an impressively elegant adaptation by Helen Edmundson and some of that brilliantly precise and skilled British acting, but was much less comfortable with its physical theatre aspects; and the Ruritania cossies (the actors seemed constantly in danger of tripping over their swords) and its undeveloped sound design did make me long rather for Australian design culture.

Now I'm back at my desk, feeling that my body is still somewhere in Central Asia and punishing me for leaving it behind, and studying a large pile of mail with deep suspicion, in case it bites me. And I'm straight back into it: theatre dates are already filling my diary, and I'm catching up on what I missed.

For those interested, I guess I reached some sort of decision while I was away. I'm unlikely to stop blogging altogether, and always intended to see out this year. However, I will wind TN back next year in order to focus on my work, rather than everybody else's. I wrote out a list of unfinished and upcoming projects - novels, theatre works, epic poems - and it added up to nine works in progress. Yes, that's crazy, but I want to finish at least some of them; and that means that I will keep the blog for fewer and longer meditations, and stop attempting to blog everything I see. And we'll see what happens.

Thanks for the good wishes expressed, public and private. In answer to one correspondent here: no, I won't open this blog to others, except in the small dialogic instances already established. This blog has always been just me, and that's why it's worked; it's one of the conditions of bloggishness. My waters (see above) tell me that the internet is changing again; I've never wanted to tweet, which for my purposes only strikes me as useful for haiku, but perhaps the halcyon days of extensive blogs are drawing to an end. Who knows? I will be watching with as much interest as anyone else. Meantime, it's great to be back in Melbourne. I hope you all know what a brilliant city this is.

Tickets, check. Passport, check. Itinerary, check. iPhone A-Z, check. Ms TN is a traveler who likes to know where her towel is, and most particularly wants maps, even if she has a record of holding them upside down and striding optimistically in exactly the wrong direction. (I'm hoping the GPS thing on the iPhone will make this less likely.) But at last I'm feeling more or less prepared.

As some of you will know, earlier this year I won the Australian Poetry Centre's International Poetry Tour ("international" meaning England, Scotland and Ireland), which is an initiative funded by the Australia Council and launched for the first time this year. Practically every poet in Australia applied for this one, and to say I was surprised to get it is an understatement. From next week, I and my fellow winner, Sydney poet Robert Gray, will be spreading the word on Australian poetry to a variety of northern hemisphere persons; but I am looking forward most of all to a week's "writing time" in the Lake District at Dove Cottage, which was Wordsworth's house in Grasmere. (Or, to be exact, I'll be in picturesque lodgings 50 metres from Dove Cottage, as well as doing a reading and a chat about Australian poetry with its present resident, Emma Jones). A list of my appearances is on the Salt blog, and there's a poetical biography on my website for those who like some background. If any of you are anywhere nearby any of my readings, it would be brilliant to see you there.

On the down side, it means that I am missing the Melbourne Festival. So this weekend I am doing a bit of hobnobbing: last night, the festival's opening night, I saw Lally Katz's The Apocalypse Bear Trilogy at the MTC's Lawler Studio (don't miss it) and tonight I'm booked for Sascha Waltz's Medea, an opera/dance piece based on Heiner Müller's Medeamaterial. Aside from any other things I can fit in, like Peter Greenaway's multimedia piece on Leonardo's Last Supper, that will be it. I'm sorry to be missing the buzz, although I admit there's certainly a lining to the cloud.

I'll also be taking the time to do some reflecting. Over the past few months, it's become very clear to me that TN is unsustainable. I love doing this, but it eats me up; and I can't delude myself any more that it isn't at the expense of my own work. I haven't finished a single project now for more than 18 months, and that is beginning to weigh heavy. I'll be considering a number of options, but I might as well warn you that one of them is ceasing blogging (if not theatre going) altogether next year. Reading Roberto Bolaño's extraordinary 2666 recently reminded me again how much I love the form of the novel; and it pricked my conscience, yet again, about my own unfinished folly, The Gilded Man (extracted here), which has been languishing since 2001. Not to mention a number of other stalled projects, at last count four, which I dearly want to complete.

I might blog while I'm away, but I may not. I'll certainly be uploading responses to the two Melbourne Festival shows I'm able to see. In the meantime, au revoir. I'll be back in mid-November.

In the interests of organisation, Ms TN has been tidying her desk. This bland, anodyne phrase cannot begin to comprehend the dimensions of the task. It's like the fifth labour of Hercules (Augean Stables, Cleaning Of), only instead of incontinent cows, I have constant incoming drifts of press releases, programs, drafts, invoices, notebooks, permission requests, bills, receipts, postcards, lists, chocolate wrappers, magazines and books, books, books - phalanxes of them diving in like migratory flocks of starlings, and taking up disordered residence anywhere there's a spare centimetre.

I have often thought my desk is a reflection of my state of mind, and this tells you more than you, gentle reader, need to know. But having reached the point where annihilation by domestic avalanche was more probable than not, I girded my loins, sinews, teeth and anything else that needed girding, and now my study appears to be the habitation of a marginally sane and reasonably organised woman. Appearances may deceive, certainly, but it's nice to have the surface at least, even if it's undermined by a faintly hysterical loquacity.


And now at last I can begin to speak, if briefly, of last week's fringedwelling, which has been sidelined not only by the Labour of the Desk but by my upcoming departure from these sea-girt shores next Monday. I saw three shows last week, making five in all out of a possible menu of around 400 acts, which is pretty wimpy compared to some others. On the upside, I enjoyed all of them. And if the Fringe is conceived as a showcase for the energies throbbing beneath Melbourne's sedate skin, I reckon it's filling its brief nicely. Perhaps what I found most interesting about these shows is that there are all, crucially, works of imagination. It's about time imagination came back.

A Black Joy is one of two Declan Greene plays on at the Fringe. The other, Home Economics, is running at the Store Room until Saturday, so if you missed the first, I recommend the second, sight unseen. I wasn't especially enamoured of Greene's Rage Boy, which I saw in 2007 in a production directed, like this one, by Susie Dee; but two years is a long time in an artist's life, and Greene's been working hard. Now his quality is clear and unambiguous. He's a dark, explosive talent, a playwright who channels the anxieties of 21st century living into a tunnel of comedic nightmare that is as grotesque and pitiless as Bosch.

The conceit of this play is that the characters are all celebrities - John Candy (Tom Considine), Diane Keaton (Anne Browning), Bette Davis (Carole Patullo), Joseph Cotten (Chris Bunsworth), Dakota Fanning (Miriam Glaser), Corey Haim (Ash Flanders) and Megan Twycross playing a character who looks suspiciously like Paris Hilton. They are addressed, all through the play, by their full names, which is a device that gets weirder through repetition. As the author says in the program, the play emerged from a documentary about the fetish called "Feeding", where one partner overfeeds the morbidly obese other in a perverse co-depedency. The centre of A Black Joy's action is John Candy lying beneath his enormous stomach, being fed baked beans by Bette Davis.

This morbid dysfunction sets the cue for the action in the play - the plot, as such, includes Diane Keaton neurotically pumping iron so she won't be raped by her lesbian house cleaner; Keaton's husband Senator Joseph Cotten imprisoning Paris Hilton and feeding her the liver of her murdered daughter, Dakota Fanning; and Corey Haim's romance with Dakota Fanning and the Neo-Nazis. It could be simply a schlock-fest, but Greene's frankly beautiful writing - which ranges from spikily hilarious dialogue to extraordinarily lyric monologues - and Dee's focused and unafraid production makes it something else altogether.

Each time I've contemplated this play, I find myself thinking about mediaeval or Renaissance art - yes, Bosch, because it's enacting a kind of hell; but the celebrity "characters" also recall the stock characters of Commedia dell'arte or even Punch and Judy, obscene and grotesquely exaggerated types who refract our human foibles. It's maybe not so odd - Bosch and the vulgar theatre emerged from another age haunted by apocalyptic fantasy, a world as unstable and strange as ours. It's a comedy for a contemporary apocalypse, underpinned by millennial fears - climate change, mass species extinction - in which the idea of the self is emptied out by celebrity-fuelled consumerism, in which appetite devours itself.

The production is done in the round, with Candy's prone body - swollen under a huge sheet with horrifically rotting feet poking out the end - the centrepiece around which the action revolves. The performances tackle the extremity of the text with relish, excavating at once the cruel comedy and strange pathos of the text. They're all good, but I particularly enjoyed Carole Patullo's Bette Davis, Tom Considine's John Candy and Anne Browning's hyper-neurotic Diane Keaton. Really something.

From the large to the small: Yuri Wells is a one-man show (with added musician) written and performed by Benedict Hardie, and co-devised and directed by Anne-Louise Sarks. It's a change of direction for Hayloft, whom we last saw creating mayhem among the commentariat with their huge and ambitious production 3XSisters, for which Hardie directed a third of Chekhov's play. Maybe it's not so much a change of direction as of scale: in its conception it's as ambitious as anything this company has done.

Yuri Wells is a beautiful piece of theatre, created with deeply thought artfulness and craft. It begins as the audience enters the small, curtained space, with Hardie and musician Stuart Bowden doing a kind of pre-show warm-up, greeting audience members, playing the odd song and passing a toy xylophone around for people to cautiously plink. It's all very relaxed, and with lots of meta-theatrical friendliness. Once it's time to begin, Hardie tells us he's starting the show. So far, so avant garde familiar. Then Bowden sits down among the audience, and Hardie removes all the props from the stage, leaving it totally bare. (The props all gain their significance in the subsequent monologue, but by then we must imagine them).

Hardie tells us that he is playing Yuri Wells, an aged care nurse who, it is rapidly clear, has problems relating to women. And then comes a miraculous and unexpected transition, from an actor playing an actor, with the expected nods to the audience, to an actor becoming Yuri Wells, lonely and possibly homicidal human being. The power of this transition is in the words as much in Hardie's strangely unsettling performance: he takes techniques more at home in contemporary lyric poetry and applies them to theatre, creating an allusive, rich language that is subtle and full of ambiguity, while still remaining emotionally lucid. The writing is theatrical in the best way, and turns on a dime. Yuri Wells is, in the end, a portrayal of human loneliness; but its power comes from its being a portrait of a particular person's loneliness, and all the more desolate and complex for that.

The show is unsettling, disturbing and surprisingly gentle, all at once. But perhaps its greatest invitation - and reinvention - is into the world of imagination, ours and the actor's. I thought this show utterly enchanting, in the proper sense of the word: "to subject to a magical influence, to bewitch", "to delight". Remembering of course that spells have their darker side.

Finally, I saw In the Absence of Sunlight, a one-on-one show that began at the Town Hall pub in Erroll St, North Melbourne, as an assignation in a bar with a stranger. I confess that, given its set-up, I was expecting something like the controversial hit of the Edinburgh Fringe, Ontoerend Goed's Internal: something that turned the intimacy of theatre into a disturbing collision between fantasy and reality. It turned out not to be that at all. Or if it turned out to be something like that, it was not in the way I expected.

When you arrive at the right table, there is a card under the "reserved" sign that says: I need to ask you something. The performer, Tamara Searle, turns up and there's a stilted conversation, the kind that happens between strangers who are meeting for a reason only one of them understands. She talks about where she lives, about John the barman, her room upstairs. She talks about how she has seen me in the street (and I almost say, but I never hang out around here, but don't). Then I'm invited upstairs, to a room that opens out on a balcony. She pours some elderflower cordial, she tells me she has been ill, she takes me out on the balcony and we blow bubbles.

By this time it's clear that the invitation of this show is to be part of the fiction. I am the woman that she has observed obsessively during her illness, unknowingly seen in all my intimate moments. And I guess how you might respond to this show would depend on how you feel about entering a fictional self. It's something I do all the time, one way or another, so once I understood this, I found myself playing this woman. After all, I might have lived on my own across the road from the pub. I might have been observed in my solitude. I might have something to forgive a woman I have never seen in my life.

I thought it a delicate and brave performance, only half shielded by its fiction. Oddly, the more I became my fictional character, the less chatty I became: the more prepared to be silent, to watch Tamara to see what she would do or say next. It was strangely liberating, just as sitting in the dark of the theatre is liberating. Perhaps one of the fascinations of art is the chance not to be yourself, or to escape the carapace of imposed selves into other aspects of who you are. I don't know how useful it is to know that this theatre piece is an adaptation, or perhaps more strictly speaking a kind of coda, to Marjorie Barnard's lyrical short story about illness and recovery, The Persimmon Tree. It gives it an added depth, I guess; but I'm not sure that it matters.

Picture: Benedict Hardie in Yuri Wells. Photo: Lachlan Woods

A Black Joy by Declan Greene, directed by Susie Dee. Design by Emily Barrie, lighting by Katie Sfetkidis, audiovisual by Nicholas Verso, sound design by Ben Bourke. With Anne Browning, Chris Bunsworth, Tom Considine, Ash Flanders, Miriam Glaser, Carole Patullo, Megan Twycross and Alastair Watts on cello. Fortyfive Downstairs, Melbourne Fringe Festival, until October 4, closed.

Yuri Wells, written, co-devised and performed by Benedict Hardie, co-devised and directed by Anne-Louise Sarks, music and performance by Stuart Bowden. The Hayloft Project, Melbourne Fringe Festival, North Melbourne Town Hall, until October 10.

In the Absence of Sunlight, devised by Katerina Kokkinos-Kennedy, Dayna Morrissey, Danny Pettingill, Ivanka Sokol, Xan Colman, performed by Tamara Searle. A is for Atlas, Melbourne Fringe Festival, until October 11. Bookings here.

Attract/Repel is an intriguing work of theatre at the Store Room which meets, head-on, the question of racism. One of the best things about it is how it does so without fuss or apology, yet instead of visiting the expected arguments of victimisation or entitlement it manages - delicately and with humour - to excavate something of the complexities of human social relationships, to explore the fluidity of the categories of "us" and "them".

A devised work directed by Ming-Zhu Hii, and generated in collaboration with the performers (Jing-Xuan Chan, Fanny Hanusin, Georgina Naidu and Terry Yeboah), Attract/Repel it has a pleasing transparency about its motives and aesthetic which focuses on the particularities of experience to illuminate general truths, rather than the other way around. The most important aspect of this approach is that contradiction is embraced rather than glossed.


As it begins, the four cast members enter the space one by one, each carrying a suitcase. Each is regarded with suspicion by those already occupying the territory of the stage, until they find their own space. It's an elegant introduction, and is almost a theatrical illustration of an image used by the poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger. In an essay on migration, he describes how one passenger in a train carriage will immediately occupy it. When another enters, he is regarded with mistrust, even veiled hostility; but once he has settled in, he too occupies the carriage. When a third passenger enters, both will regard the new occupant with the same mistrust, until she too has settled in. Enzensberger uses this metaphor to describe the tensions between successive waves of immigrants, pointing out that migration has been the essential history of human beings for millennia. Difference always generates hostility until it is absorbed into the fabric of a society, at which point it becomes part of the "us" that makes a "them".

Once all four performers are on stage, they introduce themselves by asking each other their full names. Because they are from different cultures - Chinese/Australian, Chinese/Indonesian, Indian/Celtic, Ghanaian - they each have names that immediately signal their differences: none has a standard western christian and surname, although their names have all been "translated" into western formats. They ask each other how many languages they speak (an average of about three each, as I recall). They ask each other to say "I love you" in their native language. Georgina's native language is English.

And so begins an intriguing exploration of the mechanics of making human beings "other". The achievement of Attract/Repel is that it at once enters the realm of personal experience and frames it in a series of wider questions: what is racism? Who is racist? Is racism only a question for white privilege? How, in a supposedly multicultural society, does it actually function? What does it feel like to encounter racism? And through these apparently simple questions, which immediately subvert themselves in ways that are comic, unexpected and moving, a picture emerges of something that is not simple at all: a social texture that is full of ambiguity and contradiction, and which is reinforced by the most apparently trivial of gestures as much as by its coarser manifestations.

Ming-Zhu Hii has learned a lot from Jérôme Bel, notably from the apparently straightforward simplicity of his approach in Pichet Klunchun and Myself. However, she has framed this work in a sculptural installation of neon lights designed by Damien McLean, originally inspired by a Dan Flavin installation. This framing makes it more self-consciously theatrical and less joyously transparent than Bel's work, but has its own attractions. The cast use chalk to write on blackboard walls, giving the work a pedagogical frame that is undermined by the playfulness of the performance. There is some stylised movement which doesn't always throw off the smell of studio improvisation, but on the whole the conceit is startlingly successful. The stern simplicity of the work liberates a sense of play, which in turn releases a very human complexity that evades the traps of earnestness or simple moralising.

What makes this work is ultimately the generosity and skill of the performers; they slip with grace and subtlety between raw expressiveness and artifice, keeping both qualities constantly in play. We are never quite permitted to forget that this is a performance, that these performers are playing characters, even if those characters are themselves. At the same time they bring to this consciously theatrical construction a disturbing ability to generate authentically naked emotion. It's intelligent and deeply felt theatre, alert to all its possible pitfalls and evading most of them. Ming-Zhu Hii and her collaborators have created a work that seems to be all light surfaces but which resonates in some deep places.

The Ridiculusmus Readings were, as the name suggests, a series of play-readings of works in progress by Ridiculusmus, the British comic duo, David Woods and Jon Haynes, who brought us an unforgettable The Importance of Being Earnest a few years ago. Over four nights, they read differing combinations of three plays, one of which involved a volunteer cast of around 50 people.

I'm not quite sure how to describe the reading I saw, which included the play with the cast of 50 (a hyper-theatrical and possibly awful play about Princess Diana called Goodbye Princess). For one thing, in the tiny La Mama space, the cast outnumbered the actual audience, although maybe it's truer to say that in many ways the cast and the audience were the same. Which made it a peculiarly immersive experience.

Both plays were reflections on contemporary Britain. Total Football is a two-hander about a PR campaign to jazz up enthusiasm for British Identity by finding golden moments in British public history (including Winston Churchill's declaration of war on Germany and a winning goal by David Beckham). It was a sly and hilarious pisstake on nationalism as a brand, performed with faultless comic timing by Haynes and Woods. Goodbye Princess was read by practically everyone. I guess it had the same concerns as the first play, with added metatheatrics and idiot royals. But what made it totally enjoyable was being in the middle of this anarchic communal reading, complete with misreadings, missing characters and lots of coarse acting. Totally irresistible fun.

Picture: Attract/Repel at the Store Room Theatre.

Attract/Repel, conceived and directed by Ming-Zhu Hii. Lighting design and dinstallation by Damien MacLean, with Rachel Burke, music by Yusuke Akai. With Jing -Xuan Chan, Fanny Hanusin, Georgina Naidu and Terry Yeboah. The Melbourne Town Players @ The Store Room, Melbourne Fringe Festival, until October 10.

Ridiculusmus Readings by David Woods and John Haynes. La Mama Theatre, Melbourne Fringe Festival. Closed.

Fringe shows are now piling up, but not the wherewithal to write about them. Ms TN's got a headache, not of the hangover variety but of the Jane Austen sick-headake kind. I need a shadowed bechamber and some lavender water. But some pointers, all the same, and not only because it's easier to point than to think. If you want reviews now as opposed to later, click through at once to "John Bailey's" excellent new review blog, Capital Idea. It is, as the man says, "a very important blog and should be read frequently". Quite. He's better known to bloggers as Born Dancin', and to others as a Sunday Age reviewer of rare (if condensed) acuity.

Meanwhile, the big talk is women in theatre. After the Belvoir PR disaster, and Neil Armfield's patently inadequate defence, Melanie Beddie has moved the debate south by complaining to the MTC about their lack of the XX chromosone. Blogs and commentaries are catching fire up and down this wide brown land.

What do I think? A lot of things, actually. I have never stepped back from calling myself a feminist, but I hate that thinking feminist ends up imprisoning me in my gender. And I think it's quite right to regard the fact that women are so poorly represented in powerful mainstream artistic positions as a scandal. And I'm also thinking about the essentialist problem (women, being communicative mammals, make a certain kind of collaborative theatre, that is itself marginalised) and the quota problem (it is a step forward for women to be counted on the mainstream stages, even if in aesthetic/ideological terms they do as much for women in general as Margaret Thatcher did for miners).

I'm thinking the question is complicated because of the whole baggage of being a woman, which means millions of signals from babyhood, reinforced if necessary by psychic or physical violence, to stay quiet, to be helpful and selfless and small, to not put oneself forward, to never, ever, ever say how good you are, to speak low and soft lest one be called shrill and monstrous and not-a-proper-woman, to self-efface, to stay away from boring women's business, to hide your intelligence lest a man feel his balls shrink, to remember that to point out that it's a man's world makes you a man-hater, that an outspoken woman will get twice as much shit as an outspoken man, and will have to be twice as smart even to be heard, and that every woman knows underneath, in the reptilian bits of her brain, that the threat of physical and sexual violence is always there to keep her down if all else fails. And so on and so forth in all its infinite variety. And it's not simply about what all this does in the externals of making a career, but what it does to the inside: to what you choose, what your ambitions are, where you flinch, where you don't. And that it's the internals that really count when you're an artist.

And I'm pondering the fact that every woman will experience these things differently, but negotiating them is something every woman has to do. Maybe if a man is gay or black or brown or disabled or lower class, he might have some insight into the insidious effects of this conditioning. But not always. And I think that maybe sometimes, like Frederick Douglass, you have to use the vocabulary of power in order to have a chance of changing things, not the vocabulary of entitled victimhood, and I'm thinking that that is complicated too. And that it takes a long time to change the world, and sometimes those changes aren't as big as they're claimed to be.

Like I said, it's complex.

And while we're on the topic, we might as well give Bell Shakespeare a huge gong, since its 20th anniversary mainstage season - Lear and Twelfth Night - is 100 per cent directed by women. But maybe that's just smart, hip programming.

The National Times - aka Fairfax's op-ed pages - yesterday hosted a Peter Craven polemic which purported to analyse "the trouble with Australian theatre". I feel I ought to point to it (and to the anger which it has provoked): but is it possible to argue with a critic who, although he writes with an air of impenetrable entitlement, clearly knows so little about theatre?

It's the old wrestling matches - "naturalism" vs "non-naturalism", "writers" vs "directors" - a divide which, it seems, must be preserved at all costs, even if it illuminates nothing about the contemporary scene. In the "Naturalism" corner are Hannie Rayson and David Williamson, playwrights who in fact write television for the stage and have as much to do with naturalism as McDonalds has with haute cuisine. But this is not surprising in an intellectual world in which Robert Wilson makes "mime-oriented experimentalism"; in which a "naturalistic and muted" production of a Tennessee Williams play is a good idea (try reading the playwright himself on what he thought his work should be); in which the desolating Barrie Kosky adaptation of Euripides' The Women of Troy is simply about "standing a play on its head until its teeth rattle to see if it's alive" or the most notable features of the revelatory STC production of The Season at Sarsaparilla were "Peter Carroll in drag and a Big Brother-style camera".

In short, this is Australian theatre criticism as we know and loathe it: ignorant, incurious, self-satisfied and parochial. It's an intellectual world defended by empty rhetoric rather than reasoned argument, claiming to be defending "emotional truth" when in reality such truth is the last thing it's interested in, making spurious claims towards theatrical "cutting edge" and "tradition" while calling for a theatre that has neither. Its sole interest is the boulevard stages of the middle brow.

It's a world with carefully policed borders that stop at the Australian coastline, where we all stand and wave, with a proper deference, at the West End and Broadway. These borders have to be policed because otherwise the absurd implicit claim that Williamson and Rayson could "take their place with Pirandello and the Greeks" would fall apart in the two seconds it takes to write it. They have to be policed because otherwise one would be ashamed to write such insupportable tosh about Robert Wilson or Tennessee Williams. They have to be policed because the only thing that permits such claims to be sustained is a total incuriosity about the arts and traditions of theatre. Can you argue with that? No. In fact, you can't.