I'm slightly surprised, given the heat the issue has generated, that there's been no response within our sea-girt shores to my ALR piece on the NSW Premier's Literary Award and its subsequent hooha. Or, to be more accurate, not any that I've seen. (If any lynx-eyed commenters care to set me straight on this, fire away). Instead, commentary has been left to our Anglo cousins in London and New York. The Guardian's Stage Blog has run a couple of blogs on the question, most recently Chris Wilkinson's wrap up of the debate, and George Hunka, modernist warrior, goes into bat in the Guardian comments and on his smart new blogsite at Superfluities Redux.

Meanwhile, the current issue of that excellent international theatre journal Theatre Forum arrived in the post yesterday with my essay Benedict Andrews and Barrie Kosky: Two Innovative Theatre Directors. And, I was pleased to see, a photo of Kosky's Poppea on the cover. The web page is not updated yet, but it's a great issue: other essays include discussions of Britain's Punchdrunk, new French writing at the Avignon Festival, New Paradise Laboratorie's Fatebook, Ivo Van Hove's Roman Tragedies, and Young Jean Lee's production of Lear. Plus theatre texts by Deborah Stein and Chiori Miyagawa.

One ambition of my essay, which looks at five recent Australian productions, was to discuss Andrews and Kosky as two quite distinct and different directors. They are often conflated as a kind of two-headed beast - some critics, like Peter Craven, lazily characterise them as a single monster which symbolises What's Wrong With Contemporary Theatre. Sadly, unless you all rush out and buy the issue - which I wholly recommend - it won't get much circulation here. So I thought I would quote the beginning of it, just to give you a taste:

ONE of the great attractions of writing about the performing arts is its impossibility. The greater the impact of a work, the more difficult it is to convey accurately what that experience was. The experience is translated from the immediate present where it lives and exists, into a past tense, which makes it what it never was: a complete and finite object, now preserved in the distorting aspic of memory. Theatre is not a recordable experience: its repetition is, even in its crudest forms, not a reproduction so much as an imitation of its earlier performances. Even filming a performance is unsatisfactory: however artfully done, the most essential aspect of the performance, its elusive present-ness, its quality of being created in the moment before an audience, is irretrievably lost.

Every artform expresses this tension between the present moment and past memory, between now and then, the unfixed and the fixed, the open and the closed. I suspect that one of the reasons why theatre remains fascinating is because it’s an artform that by its very nature baldly articulates these contradictions. Its various disciplines unite into something which is at once a product and more than a product: it’s a commodity that eludes possession, that can’t be confined, that escapes our best efforts at definition. In writing about theatre, every attempt only reveals, as Eliot said of poetry, a different kind of failure.

As a temporal artform, theatre enacts a condition central to the experience of living itself. Raw experience is continuously mediated and shaped in ways of which, most of the time, we are hardly aware – by language, by memory, by consciousness itself. In its more interesting forms, theatre brings this mediation to the foreground; and ideally, by doing so, it makes its audience more aware of the things that shape them and their lives.

The pursuit of this kind of awareness is an abiding obsession of innovative theatre, from Brecht’s theory of Verfremdungseffekt to the disorienting stage images of Romeo Castellucci. Much exploratory theatre plays with ideas of aesthetic alienation, a foregrounding of artifice, that at once refuses an easy articulation of feeling and, paradoxically, intensifies its experience. This has been the case with much of the innovative theatre made in Australia over the past decade, and is particularly clear in the work of two of the most influential auteur directors, Barrie Kosky and Benedict Andrews.

Both bring to Australian theatre a distinctly European awareness, which hybridises with local practice to generate oeuvres of particular interest. They work regularly in Germany as well as in Australia: Andrews is an associate with Berlin’s Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, where he developed a relationship with Marius von Mayenburg that resulted in notable Australian productions, and Kosky was the director of the Schauspielhaus in Vienna and, from 2012, will be chief director of the Komische Oper in Berlin. Their cross-cultural careers are not unusual in Australia, where the smallness and undeniable provincialism of much of the culture has paradoxically sparked a wave of artists who situate themselves aggressively as local artists participating in a global culture. The poet John Kinsella, who works as an academic and poet between England, the US and Australia, coined the phrase “international regionalism” to describe this kind of locally-centred art that, while celebrating its particular locale and tradition, refuses to confine itself in nationalist borders.

Kosky and Andrews are both very different directors, but their work is irrevocably linked. It is seen to epitomise – for better or worse – Australian auteur theatre. They have many collaborators in common – both were often produced at the Sydney Theatre Company under the artistic directorship of Robyn Nevin, who ran the company before it was taken over in 2010 by Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton. Both have also had significant collaborations with the writer Tom Wright, who scripted both Kosky’s spectacular adaptation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, The Lost Echo, and The Women of Troy, and for Andrews dramaturged the adaptation of Shakespeare’s history plays that became The War of the Roses. Wright has also collaborated extensively with Michael Kantor, the artistic director of the Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne which has commissioned and presented work from Andrews and Kosky, and which has been a critical institutional supporter of this work.

...

The major difference between these directors is perhaps their orientation: while Kosky’s first and informing theatrical love is music, which leads him to an almost mystic exploration of the possibilities of ecstasy in the theatre, Andrews is a text-centred director who works are notable for their intelligent formality. They have identifiable and individual styles, but the work of each encompasses a wide variety of approaches and modes.

...And so on, onto discussions of particular productions. I've only dipped into the rest of the mag, but it's up to Theatre Forum's usual standard, and the whole is a brilliant way of keeping up with international theatre. So subscribe, peeps. You know you want to.

For various reasons, I ended up seeing only three shows in Next Wave - the marvellous Hole in the Wall and the two I briefly discuss below. I missed what several people have told me was the highlight of the festival, And Then Something Fell On My Head, which John Bailey describes in a wrap-up on Capital Idea. Meanwhile on Crikey, Jana Perkovic from Guerilla Semiotics has created something of a storm by questioning the curating claims of the Next Wave Festival as risk-taking art, saying the majority of work she saw consisted of half-baked and under-developed ideas.


Risk means risk, I guess. Most people who saw more than one or two shows freely admit that not all of the work was of the first water. The questions raised are whether Next Wave is about new artists or new forms (or both); whether the good works justify a festival which largely consists of emerging artists, and whether early public exposure is counter-productive. If some, or even most, art fails of its promise, is that a problem, or part of the festival's remit? Should young artists just be kept in boxes until they know how to make a grown up work of art?

I saw none of the shows that have caused such doubts. Instead, I am wondering about the "right to fail", that phrase famously coined by the Royal Court's George Devine. The right to fail doesn't include the right not to try, which is perhaps the definition of cynicism in the arts. To seriously attempt and to fail demands respect, whatever the outcome. For my part, I think that works that trim their sails and chart courses into shallow waters to pander to the lower expectations of a perceived audience are those which fail most spectacularly, whatever superficial success they might achieve.

I've often wondered whether one of the reasons we have such a problematic culture is our unforgiving attitude towards failure. There seems an inability to perceive individual works as more than cultural products designed merely to be consumed. Artworks are, as well as individual pieces, part of a continuum, an on-going process of individual and collective development, that might in its entirety be called a culture. Understanding this is not about glossing failure, however it's defined and perceived: I don't believe in the kind of "supportive" criticism that consists of dishonest praise, in the mistaken belief that this is good for artists. But it is about seeing failure as a necessary part of growth. Not a moral flaw, perhaps, so much as a moral necessity. Fail again. Fail better.

Whatever the verdict on the wider festival, the works I saw in Next Wave were their own justification. Alisdair Macindoe's Bromance, a dance piece on brotherly relationships between young men, was commissioned and mentored by Lucy Guerin, and shows her influence in how it explores and extends the vocabulary of quotidian gesture into the pure abstractions of dance. I was very taken by this work: perhaps what most appealed to me was its legibility, which never became merely simplistic.

The dance, which took full advantage of the wide space of the Meat Market, is divided into several parts, each separated by a moment of darkness. It begins with two dancers mirroring each other's gestures, a symmetric stylising of masculine physicalisations which are all wholly recognisable, and often comic. A short blackout, and suddenly there are four dancers, thickening the physical language, developing it into more abstract patterns. The lighting was the cue for a dialogue between interior and exterior representations: through half a dozen sequences, the dance moved between highly codified social gestures performed in exposing light, and a subterranean darkness, which explored the violence, love, desire, pain, nostalgia and delicacies which underlie these social surfaces.

What's most moving is how lucidly Bromance dramatises the inarticulate love of young men for each other, which is truncated and diverted into cramped expression by the social restrictions of homophobia. It explored how young heterosexual men fear expressing their love, in case it is misunderstood: affection can only be deeply coded, with the performance of masculinity always the overt message; passion can only be expressed through mutual violence, barracking at the football, brawling while drinking, or, as in one delightfully funny sequence, the secret mate's handshake.

It made an interesting diptych with The Folding Wife, which I saw on the same evening. In comparison to the disciplined movement of Bromance, this could seem a naive work: here we had the actor performing, literally dressing up to play her roles. The Folding Wife examines the cultural displacement of immigration through three generations of Filipino women, all played by Valerie Berry, who performs on a bare stage crowded with baskets of props. Its theatre is literally created before us.

Berry is presented to us in the beginning as a passive brown body, a tabula rasa on which is written all sorts of narratives: she is the obedient wife, the exotic beauty, the whore, the terrorist, in a dizzying array of Orientalist projections that are at once comic and horrible. The multimedia artists Datu Arellano and Teta Tulay dress and pose Berry in her various roles, and she obediently takes the shapes she is given: she grips the flower between her teeth, grabs the gun, or thrust her pelvis seductively forward.

Then Berry moves out of silence and tells her various stories. The poetic text, by Paschal Daantos Berry, is divided into several chapters which move between the middle class matriarch Clara, bitterly resenting the revolutions and occupations of 20th century Phillipines that have cost her family social status and wealth, to Dolores, a single mother looking to improve her life by marrying a rich Australian, to Grace, the migrant child who exists between two worlds, not quite at home in each of them. The text and performance are complemented and enriched by ingenious multimedia that uses sand drawings, fluid projections and shadow play with ordinary objects like glassware or lace.

The Folding Wife is a playful celebration of complexity: its charm is in its many textures, how speech, visual imagery and performance weave together to create a portrait of several lives. I liked especially how it refrains from judgment, and how it never seeks easy empathy: the women are simply presented, in all their contradictions. In other words, for all the humility of its materials and presentation, this was a sophisticated piece of work.

Picture: Bromance. Photo: Heidrun Lohr

Bromance, directed Alisdair Macindoe, choregraphed by Alisdair Macindoe and Adam Synnott. Performed by Alisdair Macindoe, Lee Serle, Jay Robinson and Adam Synnott. Next Wave Festival @ Arts House Meat Market (closed); Performance Space, Carriageworks, Sydney, until June 5.

The Folding Wife, by Paschal Daantos Berry, directed by Deborah Pollard. Multimedia by Datu Arellano and Teta Tulat (Anino Shadowplay Collective); lighting design by Neil Simpson. Performed by Valeri Berry. Arts House North Melbourne Town Hall. Closed.

The Australian Literary Review (published in today's Australian) today runs my piece on the controversy about whether plays are literature. Basically it's an overview of the recent debate that was sparked by the missing play at the NSW Premier's Literary Awards. Speaking of which, the debate has reached the UK, where my charming colleague (and he is - he bought me dinner so I know) David Jays ponders the same question on the Guardian's Stage blog.

While you're at it, check out Andrew Haydon's post on Postcards from the Gods where he talks about the implications of casting - racially, class-wise, aesthetically. It's a huge topic that sparks a concomitantly long reflection, and is well worth the read.

And don't miss either 2010 Pascall Prize winner Mark Mordue's meditation on contemporary criticism on his blog The Basement Tapes (which I thoroughly recommend). "Great criticism is about love more than hate, construction more than destruction... in many ways what a good critic does is nearer to the task of a translator who has found a way of channeling one form of language into another... I’d be so bold as to claim a great critic can, and should be a responsive poet, balancing judgment and empathy in an art of evocation." Well, I'm bound to say amen to that...

If one is an actor, a bare stage must be the most perilous place in the world: it leaves nowhere to hide. In last year's STC production of The War of the Roses, Benedict Andrews showed how this most naked of spaces can act as a burning glass, amplifying language and performance to a charring intensity. But exposure can equally reveal poverty: and sadly, this is mostly what happens in Bell Shakespeare's King Lear.


It's never comfortable reviewing a company when you suspect it is not at its best. After 75 performances around the country, Bell's Lear limped into town last week minus one of its key actors, Leah Purcell, who was forced to pull out two days before the Melbourne premiere. Instead, the part of Regan was played by Rachel Gordon, flown in the day before. Reading from the script, Gordon gave a most creditable performance, but the disruption must have had an impact. I got the feeling I was watching a tired production.

It's easy to see the ambition of Marion Potts' concept. This Lear is almost depopulated: isolated figures play across Dale Ferguson's starkly minimal stage, which features a small revolve in its centre, with a silver backdrop that looks like a screen of mist. Courtly pomp is represented by a suspended marquee above the revolve, a stylised crown that lifts out of sight as Lear divests himself of his kingly power. The simplicity is highlighted by the presence of Bree van Reyk playing her percussive score live on stage.

It's a cold stage, emphasised by Nick Schlieper's pitilessly revealing lighting and the furs which drape each character. At times it functions almost like a screen: there are hints here of painting and film, with visual references from Brueghel and Bergman. The frame is all there: what's missing is not so much the play itself - we hear every word - as the passions which inhabit its freezing void. Shakespeare's Lear is a terrifying portrait of human beings at the mercy of bestial forces in an indifferent and godless universe, and here we're missing at least half of the equation.

The furs and chill can't but recall Peter Brook's film of Lear, which stars Paul Scofield in a bleak, snowy landscape that evokes the existential desolation of Beckett. And the comparison unkindly shows what this production lacks: where Scofield's masterly performance maps the clashing forces - the pride and brokenness, the fierce will and the anarchic madness - of a king who is only, after all, a man, Bell gives us a journeyman's sketch of the soul.

Physically Bell looks the part, and there's nothing wrong with his bodily presence on stage: the problem is all in the language. Shakespeare's text is merely delivered, with a repetitive cadence that encloses the verse rather than opening it into the universe of human feeling. It seems astounding, but not one of Lear's harrowing speeches evoked a single responsive emotion: not the storm scene, nor the heart-rending reunion with his daughter, nor any of his tormented abjurations against madness; most notably not his anguished recognition of his own blindness, in which at last he sees humanity in its naked state.

With no Lear at the centre, the production inevitably splinters. It's left to Peter Carroll as the Fool to show what might have been. The Fool is Lear's other self, his conscience and his confidant; it's no accident that he disappears after the storm scene, when Lear is finally reunited, through his suffering, with himself. Carroll's performance is the most lucid I have seen of this opaque and tragic character: he is at once frail and fearless, comic and heart-breakingly poignant. Most of all, he brings multiple levels of light and shade to his performance, creating a rippling depth that fills the stage's cold emptiness. The show's worth seeing for Carroll alone.

The rest of the cast sits mainly between these extremes, with solid performances from Yalin Ozucelik as Oswald, Bruce Myles as Gloucester, Paul English as the Duke of Albany, Jane Montogomery Griffiths as Goneril and John McConville as Edgar. But for all their efforts, the production is ultimately no more than a competent reading of the play: not a harrowing of the soul, so much as a polite introduction to the idea that a soul might be harrowed.

Picture: Peter Carroll (left) and John Bell in King Lear.

King Lear by William Shakespeare, directed by Marion Potts. Designed by Dale Ferguson, lighting design by Nick Schlieper, sound design by Stefan Gregory, composition by Bree van Reyk. With John Bell, Jane Montgomery-Griffiths, Rachel Gordon, Susan Prior, Peter Kowitz, Peter Carroll, Josh McConville, Tim Walter, Paul English, Anthony Phelan, Yalin Ozucelik, Keith Agius and Justin Stewart Cotta. Bell Shakespeare @ the Playhouse, Victorian Arts Centre, until June 12. Her Majesty's Theatre, Perth, June 18-26.

My, it's June already. Like around 30 per cent of the Melburnian population, I've had a cold for more than three weeks. And Ms TN is again three reviews in the red: this time for two Arts House shows, The Folding Wife and Bromance, and Bell Shakespeare's King Lear, which opened on Friday night.

Meanwhile, the outpouring of oil into the Gulf of Mexico continues unabated. The Israeli government is busy spinning its latest assault on international law by casting itself as victims of an innocent commando night raid during which the unarmed protesters defended themselves. And this weekend Louise Bourgeois and Randolph Stow - surely one of the most brilliant writers Australia has produced - both died.

And what has this to do with theatre reviews? Everything and nothing. Like everyone else on this planet, I live on this planet, and "no man is an island, entire of itself". This weekend, I kept thinking of a conversation overheard many years ago on the train: "Do you think the human race is worth saving?" (Pause.) "Naah..." Or Hamlet: "Man delights not me".

Yes, people - even great artists - die all the time. The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is small beer besides the three-decade environmental catastrophe in Nigeria, where equivalent oil-spills occur every year. Not to mention the depradations that are the price of our global wealth: the illegal forest clearing in South-East Asia, the disastrous overfishing of our oceans, the suicidal consumerism that drives so much global injustice, the mass species extinction that is every bit as catastrophic as climate change. The Israeli state is no more dishonest than any state which decides that habeas corpus is an unnecessary legal detail.

Shall we continue fiddling as Rome burns? Or are we doing something else?

I write this blog because I think one of the few saving graces of the human race is that we make art. I also write it because it keeps me truthful, and it exercises my faculties when I'm not writing other things (and, quite often, when I am). But at the moment a shark is swimming about in my subconscious, gobbling all the thought that would normally be directed to writing criticism. The shark has always been there, and it's never dormant, but for some time it's been down in the trenches, lurking below the visible light. Over the past six months or so, it's been surfacing. It's a question, a demand, a fury. Some time soon, I'm going to have to do something about it. It's not as if there's a choice.

I'm not stupid or vain enough to think art can save the world. But those who denigrate art are even more stupid than those who proclaim its vanities: it is imagination that has created our entire human reality. If PR and the media are thought to be so powerful, it's bizarre to say art is impotent. The problem is that art's power exists only in its truthfulness, and truthfulness is not the lingua franca of power. Art's potency exists in the abdication of power that is also human love. Imagination is the necessary condition of art, yes, but also, more crucially, of love. And without love, each of us is nothing.

I don't mean, being loved. I mean our inner capacity to love, to see our realities in all their grievous beauty. "Love never stopped a bullet / Or stayed the raping hand / Of a damaged world. / But it is the only way / To remain undefeated."

The shark is asking: how serious are you?

So, to quote Les Murray, now I've said my beliefs. I'll do the reviews, probably later this week. And I'll go prepare myself to deal with the shark. That's a long-term project. But if there's some thrashing about on the surface of the waves, you'll know why.

Update: Or, in other words... Maladjusted on philosophy (and art, and love): "Time to fight. ... Time to refuse any reality principle that can only locate reality in the relentless, nihilistic pursuit of profit."

A couple of weeks ago I interviewed Ewen Leslie, currently the driving force of the MTC's production of Richard III, for the Weekend Australian. The profile runs in today's paper and is online here.

1. Ex-Melbourne and Red Stitch director Sam Strong has been appointed the new artistic director of Sydney's Griffin Theatre. Joanne Erskine has the goods at Cluster.

2. Critic Mark Mordue has won this year's Geraldine Pascall Critic of the Year Prize. (Those of you with long memories will recall I was last year's winner; this year I was on the judging panel and can say he was the unanimous choice.) More on Mark's work from James Bradley at City of Tongues. Another blogger/freelance critic: it suggests that the common perception that blogs are the death of criticism might be getting a few critical hits.

3. George Hunka at Superfluities Redux posts details of Howard Barker in conversation on, well, all sorts of things. Go hence.

4. The Guardian flatters me outrageously by listing me as one of five must-read critics, alongside Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Peter Campbell and James Wood. Excuse me while I lie down and recover.

As readers will know, last week Ms TN suffered a knock-out blow in her long-running war with the Dreaded Lurgy, putting her on the benches. There she has been grinding her teeth and annoying her neighbours, like the nameless anti-hero of Notes From Underground. In the interests of social amity, it's probably time I got my personae under control and started work again. So here, on tottering feet, we go.

If another person writes another op-ed complaining that Australian theatre is dying, beset by aesthetic crises and apathetic audiences, I will simply point them to Melbourne, May 2010, and have done with it. I can't remember a time when our theatre culture conspired so successfully to demonstrate that it's well and truly alive: and it's been happening at every level. At the MTC, Richard III is packing them out and The Ugly One has scheduled late performances; you can't get a ticket to Moth at the Malthouse for love nor money and The Threepenny Opera, in previews later this week, is officially sold out. Beyond the main stages, indie companies are posting "full" signs all over town.


What's going on? A lot of very interesting theatre, for one thing, boosted by the Next Wave Festival, which continues until the end of the month. And also a lot of word of mouth. Many shows are selling out without the benefit of a single review. So much for the much-vaunted power of crrrritics! What counts for much more is the excited report of a friend or acquaintance: that is, the impact of the work itself. This also demonstrates very clearly the idiocy of the idea that the success of one aspect of the theatre culture comes at the expense of others. It suggests something altogether more interesting: that vitality breeds vitality, and that theatre companies ignore their interdependence with the rest of the culture at their own peril.

Out of all this richness, reports of which have reached even my subterranean ears, I've been able to see very little. What I did see gives some indication of the quality of work that is not only expected but is delivered in this city. Following are some notes on what I've seen:

Moth

At a distressingly young age, Declan Greene has carved out a reputation in Melbourne’s independent scene with a series of plays demonstrating a black wit, iron nerve and a considerable lyrical gift. What's notable is the restlessness of his work: he's a playwright whose work is distinctive but never predictable. And he's learning fast. Moth represents yet another startling evolution: it was not at all what his previous work led me to expect, and yet is an absolutely logical progression.

It’s a powerful examination of mental illness, especially in relation to young people. Greene's two 15-year-old protagonists are Claryssa (Sarah Ogden), a wiccan emo, and Sebastian (Dylan Young), all-round oddball, who are both rejects in the merciless pecking order of high school. They are compelling portrayals of adolescents - self-centred, mocking, vulnerable and funny - who are traumatically alienated from the social lives around them. A horrific, if horribly familiar, instance of bullying unlatches Sebastian's already uncertain sense of reality, and his sense of self splinters into delusion. He has an apocalyptic vision of St Sebastian, embodied as a moth he keeps in a jar, and sets off on a mission to find the saved. Meanwhile Claryssa, as traumatised by Sebastian by the bullying episode, sinks into paralysing depression and is unable to help her friend.

Perhaps the strongest aspect of this script is how unsentimentally and accurately it represents not only the speech and attitudes of teen subculture (I had a 15-year-old with me who affirmed its authenticity) but the subjective experience of mental breakdown. The story is told through enactments by Ogden and Young, shifting between times and different subjective states in ways which recall the narrative of the cult film Donnie Darko, and Greene exploits to the full his capacity to soar from vernacular speech into pure poetry.

Chris Kohn directs Moth on a stage bare of everything except what looks like three lengths of underfelt, cascading from backstage to the floor, that define three different theatrical areas. Kohn's direction is absolutely simple and absolutely lucid, directing so good it's almost invisible. Jonathan Oxlade's design, Rachel Burke's lighting and Jethro Woodward's music conspire to focus the action on stage to diamond precision. Ogden and Young are remarkable, giving passionate, minutely disciplined performances that wind up to a shattering climax. What begins as a comic picture of two teen misfits ends up as a piece of theatre with the catastrophic power of tragedy. The long, devastated silence that preceded the applause was its proper tribute.

The Ugly One

Marius von Mayenburg, long-term dramaturg with Thomas Ostermeier at Berlin’s Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, debuted in Melbourne at the Malthouse in 2006 with the brilliant Benedict Andrews production of Eldorado, a scorching parable on the human capacity for self-destruction, and returned in 2008 with a production of a fascinating collaboration, again with Andrews, called Moving Target. The Ugly One, written between these two productions, is a play on a smaller scale, but demonstrating to the full Mayenburg's imaginative control of theatrical form.



As an exercise in theatrical elegance, it's an exemplary text. The Ugly One is a painfully hilarious and disturbing satire on the contemporary obsession with appearance, in which Mayenburg cunningly exploits a simple theatrical idea – identically named characters played by the same actors – to explore the place of individuality in an increasingly homogenised society, and how our uniqueness plays into our idea of self.

Lette (Patrick Brammall) is the inventor of a new kind of plug, but finds that when it’s time to present it to the world, his boss Scheffler (Kim Gyngell) thinks he is too ugly to sell it, and instead intends to send his assistant, Karlmann (Luke Ryan). When he asks his wife Fanny (Alison Bell), she confirms, to his astonishment, that he is as ugly as everyone says. In despair, he undergoes plastic surgery. Lette emerges looking exactly the same, but finds that his world has changed. Women lust after him, and he becomes a corporate success. But now everybody wants to look like him.

Using this simple premise, Mayenburg pulls to the surface all sorts of contemporary anxieties. The face is both more and less than a marker of individuality: it is, in the corporate world, the equivalent of a brand, through which perceptions of success and failure are filtered independently of the reality of achievement or quality. Lette's "transformation" - he is the only actor, incidentally, who doesn't play multiple roles - gives him the competitive edge in both the sexual and corporate worlds. But all too soon technology catches up and reproduces him, creating a hall of mirrors, a nightmare vision of Lettes that flood the market like generic drugs. In such a world, no human being can be anything but a product, a commodity valued by his or her exchange value. In the process, Lette's personal identity - whatever uniqueness he originally possessed - is completely lost.

Peter Evans gives this play the elegant production it deserves, directing it in the round with minimal props. The razor-sharp shifts in the text are handled with finesse and spareness, and some ingenious staging: among other effective touches, the amplified crunching of an apple excruciatingly evokes the sounds of surgery. All four performers rise to the challenge, giving nuanced and witty performances that bring out the play's comedy, and permit the darker themes simply to rise to the surface as a profound rippling of disturbance. This is definitely a highlight of the MTC's 2010 season, and not to be missed.

Hole in the Wall

Hole in the Wall is the only show I've been able to catch from the Next Wave Festival. This 45-minute show knocked my socks off, and made me even more sorry about what I've been missing. It's a fascinating multi-disciplinary theatre work that explores the experience of domestic, surburban space as lived by a twenty-something couple. Sounds mundane? As Hole in the Wall manages to demonstrate, the mundane is only dull if you're not looking.

The text, written by My Darling Patricia member Halcyon Mcleod, has a simple premise: it articulates the thoughts, fears and desires of a young couple (Matt Prest and Clare Britton) during the course of a single night. They would like a better house; they wonder what they are doing with their lives; they take out their frustrations on each other in bitter and violent arguments; they are afraid of dying; they are lonely. All these recognisable vignettes play out with a dream logic that ignores chronology, giving us snatches of their domestic lives.

It creates the premise for an extraordinary piece of experiential theatre. The audience is divided into four, and then put in four separate boxes that are simulacra of the average weatherboard rental house, with wallpaper up to the picture railing, a paned window (which is closed), and a painted white door with a brass handle.

Once you are enclosed with your fellow audients, the box begins to move, forcing you to walk along with it. It is difficult to describe how disorienting this is: it quite literally made me dizzy. Part of the dizziness was the necessity to reorient my sense of place. While in fact the floor is quite still, and it's the box that's moving, from the point of view of those enclosed, it's the walls that are stationary. There was a similarly disconcerting exhibit of a swaying room in the Guggenheim exhibition at the NGV recently (I'm afraid I can't remember the artist) - this was much more displacing, because it was more claustrophobic.

Once the box stopped moving, the lights went out, leaving us in complete darkness, and the first monologue - about the way a bed is like a grave - boomed out over us, accompanied by a rising growl of sound. And then one wall was thrown open, revealing the the rest of the audience in the three other boxes, all ingeniously linked together to make one room, in the centre of which was a bed.

The performances played out in these intimate spaces, which were continually reconfigured in constantly surprising ways by unseen manipulators. Sometimes the boxes became a long hallway, through which the performers entered and left, in which we became guests at a party, or ghostly witnesses of private grief. Sometimes we looked out through a window at Preston walking outside in his pyjamas. Once all the walls opened and we watched a projected animation of puppets who played out the story of a happy suburban couple.

The effects were haunting, poignant, moving; sometimes (as in the terrible quarrel between the couple) confronting. Aside from the compelling performances, perhaps the most powerful aspect of Hole in a Wall was how the initial disorientation made us all complicit in the show. Social barriers immediately dropped in our initial surprise and puzzlement, and when we were watching the performances, we were all aware not only that we were watching together, but that we were in the same intimate space as the performers, and that we were, in our witnessing, part of the show. An absolutely fascinating and beautiful experience.

Pictures: top: Sarah Ogden and Dylan Young in Moth. Photo: Jeff Busby Bottom: Patrick Brammall, Alison Bell and Luke Ryan in The Ugly One. Photo: Jeff Busby

Moth, by Declan Greene, directed by Chris Kohn. Set and costume design by Jonathan Oxlade, lighting design by Rachel Burke, composer Jethro Woodward. With Sarah Ogden and Dylan Young. Malthouse Theatre and Arena Theatre Company, Tower Theatre, Malthouse, until May 30.

The Ugly One, by Marius von Mayenburg, translated by Maja Zade, directed by Peter Evans. Lighting design by Matt Scott. With Alison Bell, Patrick Brammall, Kim Gyngell and Luke Ryan. Lawler Studio, MTC Theatre, until June 12.

Hole in the Wall, text by Halcyon Mcleod, directed by Hallie Shellam. Concept by Clare Britton, Matt Prest, Hallie Shellam and Danny Egger. Set design by Clare Britton, Matt Prest and Danny Egger. Lighting design by Mirabelle Wouters. Original music, sound design and animation by James Brown. Performed by Matt Prest and Clare Britton. Next Wave Festival @ The Meat Market. Closed. Carriageworks, Sydney, May 26-29.

I seem to be suffering from something very like flu, which is putting the kybosh on both seeing and writing about the theatre. And at such a time! This town is presently lousy with great performance. To cheer my shivering hours, I thought perhaps you could tell me (and everyone else) what you're seeing and liking (or, perhaps, not liking). Some already have: Richard Watts said this enchanting notion, Sunset Over Cardboard Mountains (sadly closed) was to kill for, and Yumi Umiamare's Trans-Mute at the Guild Theatre is another smart recommendation - her brand of cabaret/butoh/dance is really something. What else?

Ms TN just realised that she has driven herself nose-first into a large furrow in the ground. In practical terms, this means that writing anything sensible is presently way beyond my capacity. So: a holding note. If you want to see some theatre, get out to the Next Wave Festival, which is causing all sorts of exclamations around the traps. For my part, last night I went to see Hole in the Wall at the North Melbourne Arts House, which is an astounding experiential interrogation of domestic space. It closes this Saturday, so be quick. I hear that Moth at the Malthouse is sold out, and the only way to get a ticket is to hang out at the box office and beg. (I'd say it's worth the chance.) And I believe The Ugly One is also selling fast, and the MTC has scheduled extra performance. All are most certainly worth your time. And mine in writing about them, which I swear I will.

I might add that the recent proliferation of sold-out performances in the smaller venues around town speaks volumes.