Ms TN is not normally in the business of doling out writing tips, of which there is a sufficient plenitude online: but here's one. If ever you want to get some work done, book yourself into a hotel in a strange city for a week. The lack of procrastinatory devices such as washing dishes, polishing the bathroom taps, answering the telephone or castigating children has a startling effect. Everyone says that the internet is the problem, but I find that the internet runs out fast when there is nothing else to leaven it with.

Aside from seeing theatre, since I arrived in Perth last weekend I've done almost nothing but write, as I have a couple of pressing deadlines which I brought across the continent with me. This meant that yesterday - which was scheduled for writing reviews - I hit that mysterious but frustrating wall which forbids the construction of a single thought, let alone a paragraph. On such days it is best to bow to the gods, and hope for better things. Meanwhile, the shows are piling up. So before I discuss my midweek adventures, let me highly recommend Trust, a collaboration between playwright/director Falk Richter and choreographer Anouk van Dijk from the Schaubühne Berlin that opened last night. It's a must-see for anyone interested in the possibilities of dance theatre.


On Tuesday night I saw David Milroy's music theatre work Waltzing the Wilarra, which is given a luscious production by Wesley Enoch for Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company. Drawing on Australian traditions of cabaret and vaudeville, it's a swift-moving evening of knockabout melodrama with a political message. Its easy slippages from highly poetic language to vulgar comedy and its heightened theatricality recalls no one so much as the Wheatbelt poet and playwright Dorothy Hewett (whose play The Man from Mukinupin Enoch directed in a superb 2009 revival for Belvoir St and the MTC).

The play opens and closes with a scene of stunning theatrical lyricism - Old Charlie (Trevor Jamieson), softly lit in the darkness, recalls a transcendent moment of initiation during his boyhood. He walks into a pool until he is up to his chest in water on a night that "was so still, the stars floated on the water...I couldn't tell where the night sky ended and the pool began". This moment of union and innocence sets the keynote for a possibility that is lost and betrayed in the action of the play.

The chief theme here is reconciliation: whether it's possible and, more searchingly, what it might be. The action is set in a post-war dance club in Perth run by black MC Mr Mack (Kelton Pell) where white and black can socialise, despite repressive laws that ban Aborigines from entering Perth and threaten immediate arrest if they are found drinking alcohol. What's important in this play is that there are intricate (if troubled) familial relationships between all the characters, white and black.

The local star is the singer Elsa (Ursula Yovich). She is married to a white ex-soldier, Jack (Tim Solly), who is suffering a severe form of what is now called PTSD. It has transformed him into a sick and violent man, who in his clearer moments knows that he will eventually kill his wife. Elsa is a stolen child, brought up in a mission; her mother, Mrs Cray (Irma Woods) is "nanny" to the white girl Fay (Alexandra Jones), whom Elsa resentfully feels has taken her place in her mother's heart, while Mrs Cray is the Australian equivalent of a household slave. Jack's adopted brother is Charlie (Trevor Jamieson), who is also in love with Elsa, while Fay has a consuming, hopeless and predatory crush on Charlie. The ensuing melodrama of jealous passion is played out in song and scenes of naturalistic drama, all of which is framed with vaudevillean patter from Old Toss (Ernie Dingo) and his offsider Young Harry (Jessica Clarke).

In the second act, the action is brought forward to a degraded present, with the former dance hall now condemned. Here the well-meaning activist Athena (Jessica Clarke) organises a reunion of the estranged group, prompting unquiet ghosts to rise out of the past. This is much weaker than the first act: with the removal of Jack, we are left with white characters who are little more than wooden stereotypes, parodies of white attitudes towards blacks. One might argue some payback in this for centuries of offensive black caricatures, but the fact remains that, just as with black stereotypes, it doesn't help the drama: what is there to reconcile when the white characters are so one-dimensionally stupid?

This highlights a major problem with the text, which otherwise is rich with both wit and feeling (especially in the fantastically punning speeches that Dingo as Old Toss delivers with such superb showmanship). When the script drifts into didacticism its energy flags, and this happens frequently in the second act: there are moments when you quite literally see actors step out of character and become declarative mouth-pieces. It's a shame, because this is otherwise powerful theatre, and Milroy's songs, which range from classic blues to growling contemporary Nick-Cave-esque ballads, are showstopping examples of the art.

Enoch gives the play a seamlessly slick production, capitalising on its vaudevillean energy and Jacob Nash's cosily intimate design, and it's performed with energy and commitment by a first class cast. It seems unfair to pick out particular performances, because each cast member has his or her moment, but Yovich's Elsa is a winner, both as singer and performer, her power and allure riven by vulnerability and bitterness, and Tim Solly as Jack has a couple of devastating solo moments in a difficult part that often threatens to dwindle into cliche. Dingo is in his element as jester, and has many of the best lines: and it's in these moments that Milroy's satirical message finds its real teeth.


My Bicycle Loves You is another Australian production, this time from physical theatre company Legs On The Wall, which was recently revamped under the direction of Patrick Nolan. To my shame, this is the first Legs On The Wall production I've seen; but it is a good introduction. My Bicycle Loves You is a knockabout theatrical ride through some of the crazier excesses of The Corrick Collection, 135 films produced by the Corrick family in the early 20th century that are now preserved in the National Film and Sound Archive.

The conceit is that the action follows "a day in the life of seven characters, all of whom live in the same apartment block". We see them first as if we were voyeurs from the street, peering in through the windows: then, gradually, they emerge, as if stepping out of a screen, and begin to play. Nolan exploits the remarkable and often bizarre Corrick archive as counterpoint and inspiration to the action on stage. A series of antics exploiting various stunts - hat tricks, balancing acts, slapstick fights, aerial acts - come into theatrical play with the projected images.

The stage (in a flexible and deceptively simple concept by Anna Tregloan) is a space of constantly changing planes and perspectives: the eye is drawn from the present to the past, from filmed image to live performer, until each becomes inextricably tangled with the other. There are moments of fabulous comic ingenuity: at one point Laasko the hat designer is looking for his wife, whom we see standing in the distance: he takes a drawer out of his desk and looks at it lovingly, turning it to the audience, and her projected image appears in the drawer, then on his chest, then serially on the desk as he turns it over looking for her, until at last the performer herself is revealed on top of the desk.

My Bicycle Loves You is a confection of image and sound (from an excellent band playing live in front of the stage) that at its best is enchanting. The program claims that it's an exercise in story-telling, which seems to me a bit of a misnomer. The only stories that were really clear on stage were those on film: an astonishing reel from the Corricks, for example, in which a magician in what seems to be mediaeval Venice is burgled by two thieves who steal his invisibility potion, with slapstick results. For the most part, it's a series of episodic acts, loosely linked by image and character rather than any pretence at narrative, which doesn't sustain the length of the show. Perhaps part of the problem here is that an expectation of story-telling is set up, without being delivered.

Sometimes the acts lack the virtuosity that makes impossible feats seem effortless, generating an anxiety for the performer, although this roughness can in fact be a virtue, part of a shambolic and peculiarly Australian charm. However, little on stage rivals the sheer craziness of some of those films. There is a recurring comedy in which a man grows enormous horns and runs about the town attempting to gore innocent bystanders: when this is translated to physical theatre, it somehow loses its surreality. I have always sworn that theatre is more poetic medium than film, but maybe I have to rethink that prejudice. All in all, well worth a look.

Pictures: Top: Waltzing the Wilarra; bottom, a still from the Corrick archive that inspired My Bicycle Loves You.

* Alison Croggon travelled to Perth as a guest of the Perth International Arts Festival.

Waltzing the Wilarra, by David Milroy, directed by Wesley Enoch. Music director Wayne Freer, set design by Jacob Nash, costumes by Isaac Lummis, lighting design by Trent Suidgeest, sound design by Kingsley Reeve, choreography by Claudia Alessi. With Ernie Dingo, Jessica Clarke, Kelton Pell, Irma Woods, Ursula Yovich, Trevor Jamieson, Tim Solly and Alexandra Jones. Musicians: Ric Eastman, Wayne Freer, David Milroy, Lucky Oceans and Bob Patient. Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company, Subiaco Arts Centre, until March 6.

My Bicycle Loves You, devised by Beatrix Christian, Patrick Nolan, Anna Tregloan and company. Directed by Patrick Nolan, composer Ben Walsh, designer Anna Tregloan, video artist Mic Gruchy, lighting Damien Cooper. With Alicia Battestini, Tom Flanagan, Alexandra Harrison, Aimee Horne, Kate Sherman, Matt Wilson and Emil Wolk. Musicians: Eden Ottingen, Matt Ottingen, Daniel Pilner and Mich Stuart. Legs on the Wall, Regal Theatre, until February 26.

On Sunday afternoon, I saw les ballets C de la B's performance of Out Of Context - For Pina at the stunning new Heath Ledger Theatre, a venue that combines the virtues of modern theatre architecture with the embracing intimacy of an old-fashioned theatre. I had planned to stay for the artist talk that was scheduled afterwards, but when the show finished, I realised that the last thing I wanted was the immediate imprisonment of what I had just seen and felt in a lot of words. I walked out into the warm Perth evening and let the dance's penumbra work its chemistry, like the slow developing of a black and white photograph.

This was a work that had a considerable emotional impact on me, at levels of wordlessness that are difficult to translate. One of the great challenges - and, it must be said, pleasures - of writing about contemporary performance is how absolutely the attempt demonstrates the limits of words. Many choreographers press against spoken or written language, hovering on the threshold of speech: at its most successful, as in some works of Lucy Guerin's, this preoccupation reveals language to be as opaque and textured as the body itself.


This reflects a deep concern in a lot of contemporary dance: the problem of communication. So much of it reaches towards an almost utopian idea of unmediated contact: clearly an impossible ideal which can, all the same, attain a fragile reality in the fluid space of performance. Maybe this explains the uninhibited audiences dance can generate, as it did during les ballets C de la B's performance. When they weren't being as quiet as mice during the silences (no outbreaks of anxious coughing, which means they were paying close attention) the audience at the State Theatre Centre was laughing and whooping, even applauding individual performers during the dance. The last time I saw an audience respond so spontaneously to contemporary dance was at a performance of Jérôme Bel's The Show Must Go On at the Victorian Arts Centre.

There is certainly a connection between Out of Context and The Show Must Go On, although Platel's multiple layerings of sound and complex choreographies differ wildly from Bel's almost indescribably bare aesthetic. Bel and Platel both comprehend the whole auditorium in their idea of the stage, offering an invitation to a mutual adventure which the audience feels surprisingly free to accept. In both cases, this turns on what it might mean to be a human being, a social animal imprisoned in an opaque body: their dancers are individuals, rather than generic bodies exploring abstract form. And both use popular culture as artists once used religious iconography, as a touch point of emotional recognition.

Out Of Context begins with a simple conceit. The lights lift to reveal a bare stage. At the back is a pile of orange blankets, the same colour as the saffron robes of monks or, more disturbingly, the uniforms of prisoners. Otherwise there are only two microphones. We stare for a while, and then a man (Emile Josse) walks up on stage from the auditorium and begins to undress to his underpants, unhurriedly folding his clothes. He picks up one of the blankets and drapes it about his shoulders. About half way through his undressing, I saw a woman stand up in front of me and work her way through the row: until she began to walk towards the stage, I thought, with surprise, that she must be a disaffected audience member, leaving already. She too begins to undress. And gradually, all nine dancers gather on stage, emerging out of the audience. This is the first trick, and it is very effective: any barrier between stage and audience is immediately removed.

The recorded sound track here is mostly silent, aside from the occasional moo of a cow and percussive sounds from knocking the microphone against the floor or the dancers' bodies. Dancers mill about like herd animals or a flock of birds; they encounter each other in pairs and, in choreography reminiscent of illustrations from a Konrad Lorenz textbook, make ritualistic movements of greeting and curiosity. Through the first forty five minutes, the choreography expands and intensifies from animal-based behaviour to Platel's signature interest in spasmodic, involuntary movement: these are constrasted with classical representations of the body, especially from ancient Greek statuary - one image almost casually formed back stage briefly showed us three muses, one classically posed Venus, half naked and armless, the other two headless torsoes. There are others drawn from classical representations of wrestling or battle.


An insistent techno beat starts up, and the next section is a parody of contemporary mating rituals, with the dancers sardonically speaking various pop lyrics into the mic: here the choreography is drawn from dance clubs and pornography. A male dancer even steps out into the audience, stepping from seat to seat to writhe above a patron who was very determinedly staring straight ahead. Here are all the codes of mating, all the triggers of contemporary representations of sexuality, but the cliches are riven by the interventions of the body, its insistent presence, its involuntary, unaestheticised life.

We then return to a reprise of the first section, but here the body is more nakedly exposed, and, for all its expressed desire, more nakedly alone. This is where Out Of Context began to bite for me: I'm not sure that I've seen the erotic body, in all its absurdity and longing, expressed so frankly and delicately on a stage.

Its final gesture is almost histrionic: dancer Romeo Runa, who has been a kind of master of ceremonies, asks everyone in the theatre to raise their right hand. They do. "Who wants to dance with me?" he asks, and the forest of hands magically vanishes. The barrier between stage and auditorium hasn't been erased to that extent... until a man shyly appears out of the audience and they dance, to Jimmy Scott's version of Prince's Nothing Compares To You. Shamelessly manipulative, yes; but something else as well, more humble, more difficult. This seems to me to be a work that's sophisticated enough to be naive. And then the dancers simply put their clothes back on and return to their seats among the audience.

None of this emotional power would be possible without the virtuosity of these dancers: the movements are sometimes impossibly demanding and their control is astounding. The trust between them is palpable. You can't see everything that's happening on stage: it is always active all the time, with all nine dancers constantly making and remaking images, but Platel's rhythmic control is such that this seems a thickening of texture, rather than a means of frustration. What's important is that we are watching nine individuals, whose identities become more clear through the dance until the audience feels they know them, which is I think the real point of Platel's contact to Pina Bausch, to whom this work is dedicated. A beautiful work, which touches that fragile transparency which makes live performance truly memorable.

The following night I went to see Martha Wainwright perform at Beck's Music Box on The Esplanade. It was stiflingly hot, with a brilliant gibbous moon hanging in the luminous sky, and the city lights had that phosphorescent halo they seem to attain on hot evenings. I was glad to find that this is an outdoor venue, most civilisedly set up so no matter where you sit, you are never far from the stage.

Wainwright's performance was another exercise in destroying barriers between audience and stage, but in an entirely different way: while the conventions that separate performer and audience were carefully observed, Wainwright offered herself on a slab for two hours of powerful performance in which stunning virtuosity is cut with raw feeling. It's clear that for Wainwright, who of course hails from a famous musical dynasty, there is no division between her music and her life.

The show opened and closed with spine-tingling performances of a selection of songs made famous by Edith Piaf, another chanteuse who sang on pure nerve. Wainwright gave us a good selection of Piaf's stirringly theatrical ballads, songs such as Marie Trottoir, Le Brun et le Blond or Les Grognards (from which she took the title for her Piaf album, Sans Fusils, Ni Souliers, à Paris) which, in the greatest tribute that one artist can make to another, she took and made her own.

In between Wainwright sang her own songs, including a couple of scorching new works and, in a moving tribute, several by her mother, legendary singer/songwriter Kate McGarrigle, who died early last year. "Last year was tough," Wainwright tells us. "I lost my mother, my son was born five weeks early... it was hard." And then she sings her anguish, striking her guitar as if it is a percussive instrument, and that voice goes right through you. Of course it is a performance, but the feelings are real. And as with all great singers, the grief and anger and longing and ordinary ecstasy touches us and and becomes our own.

Pictures: Out of Context - For Pina. Photos: Chris Van der Burght

* Alison Croggon flew to Perth as a guest of the Perth International Arts Festival

Out Of Context - For Pina, directed and choreographed by Alain Platel. Danced and created by Ellie Tass, Emile Josse, Hyo Seung Ye, Kaori Ito, Mathieu Desseigne Ravel, Melanie Lomoff, Romeu Runa, Rosalba Torres Guerrero and Ross McCormack. les ballets C de la b, Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre, Perth. Closes tonight.

Martha Wainwright, Beck's Music Box, Perth. Closes tonight.

Sometimes there's an unexpected serendipity to picking festival shows. So it was on Saturday, when your humble correspondent landed in Perth. My first day here included some of the final performances of two shows from the earlier weeks of the festival - Donka: A Letter to Chekhov, by Swiss company Teatro Sunil, and The Red Shoes, an adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson's remarkably cruel story by Cornish company Kneehigh Theatre. The rhymes between the shows ranged from clowns to rose petals: but in the end, it was the differences that intrigued me.


Donka: A Letter to Chekhov is precisely what it claims to be: a theatrical letter to Anton Chekhov. (Reflecting Chekhov's passion for fishing, "donka" is the Russian word for a small bell attached to a fishing rod, which rings when there is a bite.) Writer/director Daniele Finzi Pasca glances off almost all of Chekhov's writing, including his sojourn to the penal colony of Sakhalin, where he took the first census of the convict population and campaigned for education for the many children born there, but the key here is lightness.

The Chekhov summoned here is more the letter writer than the tragedian. Donka leaps from the playfulness and surreality that shines in some of his earlier, lesser known short stories, or the love of absurdity and wicked sense of humour of his letters, which must be among the most enjoyable authorial correspondence ever published, and which reveal a man who is a far cry from the melancholic Russian depressive his name commonly summons. Chekhov the sensualist was, for a long time, edited out of the biographies: but a sensualist he was.

He was a man of the theatre, with passionate relationships with actors and directors (among many others, the avant garde director Vsevolod Meyerhold and Chekhov were regular correspondents). And he also shared the love of his peers for circus, which in early 20th century Russia entered the theatre as an art form. The poet Vladimir Mayakovsky remains, at least to my knowledge, the only person to have written literary works for circus. It's this tradition of circus which is summoned in this show.

Rolando Tarquini, in a white summer suit based on a famous photograph of Chekhov, represents the writer, although he doesn't, as it were, play Chekhov: Donka is an exercise in metatheatrics as much as anything else. Rather, he and his fellow clowns present a show in which various images are introduced - skating, fishing, hospital beds - that become symbolic of different aspects of Chekhov's life. These in turn become occasions for some sublimely lyrical circus acts. Using standard circus tropes - aerial acts, juggling, the wheel, shadow play - the company creates visual fantasias that quicken into an imaginative life that is purely their own.

The performers are as skilled as any I've seen, but what is most breath-taking is how the choreography and design lifts circus into poetic performance. There are moments of joyous wit, as when two acrobats lying on the ground are projected onto a curtain front-stage, so we see their vertical images as they move on the horizontal plane. The vertical image shows an apparent chair act, in which the performers appear to be - quite literally - defying gravity. At the same time, the performers on the ground are perfectly visible. We are in on the joke, and enjoy its ingenuity: at the same, we catch that childlike astonishment - look, she is walking on his fingertips! - that is something like wonder. Then there are others, as in a set piece where an ice chandelier descends on the stage and is smashed to pieces by the cast, which aside from their compellingly strange beauty, foreground the sense of transience that is the emotional timbre of the show.

Maybe the key phrase is a quote from The Seagull: "Life should be represented, not as it is, not as it should be, but as it appears in a dream": this is a performer's dream of Chekhov. Underlying its lightness is a preoccupation with death, a search for what vanishes (where is the soul?) and what remains behind. A recurring image is Chekhov's death bed, and close to the end is an absurd representation of a duel, where the duellists spray endless bottles of sparkling stage blood all over the stage. As the show unfolded, I began to find it almost unbearably moving: as each act succeeded the other, its images created and dismantled before my eyes, Donka's transparency, ingenuity and beauty began cumulatively to reveal something about the fragility of the act of making theatre.

Donka strikes me very much as a recognition of and tribute to Chekhov's delight in the serious play and illusion of theatre. To represent death on stage is an absurdity: Donka allows us recognise this, and then, by exposing its artifice, reminds how it is theatre itself that is mortal, a gesture drawn on the air that shines for a moment and then vanishes forever, to exist only in the memories of those who saw it. Chekhov understood this as well as Beckett did. Yes, it's a show about pleasure, and is a crowd-pleasing, sensuous riot notable for the beauty of its design and lighting. But it reminded me how profound pleasure can be.

The Red Shoes, which was first performed in 2000, also relies heavily on clowning, this time by a cast who seem to be channelling every popular comedian in Britain. Hans Christian Anderson's story concerns an orphaned girl whose vanity leads her to buy a pair of red shoes, deceiving her blind guardian. She is horribly punished when she finds she can't take the shoes off, and is forced to keep dancing past the point of utter exhaustion. At last her feet are chopped off and she repents her vanity, walking around on stumps until she is accepted into heaven. The sadism of the story is compelling, and perhaps accounts for its multiple adaptations, particularly in film.

Adapted and directed by Emma Rice in 2000, the story is retold in rhyming couplets, building its theatre from the ground up. The design has a junkshop aesthetic, with the improvisatory air of having been thrown together from available materials. The whole is overseen by a witchy pantomime dame, Lady Lydia (Giles King), who acts as a master of revels, appointing roles to the performers and narrating the story, and the music is performed live by Stu Barker and Ian Ross. The five performers who enact the story are stripped to their essential clown: their heads are shaved and they are dressed in ill-fitting white underpants and vests, so they become, like Anderson's anti-heroine, objects of humiliation and ridicule. As they are appointed to different roles, they put on the appropriate costume, so we literally see the theatre made in front of our eyes.

There's much to like in these ingredients: the Kneehigh company give performances of infectious energy, and their clowning was received rapturously by the audience. But I found myself falling into longueurs: there was a paucity of invention in the conventions it set up (at once point, I thought that if I saw another suitcase, I would scream) and I felt patronised by the text, which is uncomfortably pitched between child and adult sensibilities, without quite being able to decide where to exist. It's often forgotten that Anderson was regarded in his own time as a writer for adults, counting among his many admirers Henrik Ibsen, which might explain the difficulty here.

For me, the troubling misogyny of Anderson's story, in which a young girl is mutilated for her nascent sexuality (for what else do those red shoes represent, really?) is somehow reinforced rather than questioned: the taint of public shame that infects Anderson's fable is consciously woven into the experience of its theatre, but is rendered oddly innocuous by its comedy. In this version, the Girl (Patrycja Kujawska) refuses Anderson's redemption, in which her "heart breaks" and she enters heaven, where no one asks her about her red shoes; instead she runs away from the forgiving Christ into the audience, presumably defiant even in death. I don't know whether, if the story had been followed to its puritan finale, the effect might have been more troubling, and thus more conducive to thought. As it was, it left me feeling strangely empty.

Yes, I know; but sometimes a gel has to do what a gel has to do. Today Ms TN has a piece on the ABC's website The Drum about David Williamson. It's a response to a last week's piece by political writer Annabel Crabb, which claimed, among other things, that "implacable hatred of [David Williamson] seems of late to have become an article of faith for the serious theatre-goer". My penny's worth is online here.

Ms TN is up at this ungodly hour on a Saturday morning because she is imminently flying to the other end of the continent. I'll be there for a week as a guest of the Perth Festival, absorbing as much of the rich program as is humanly possible. I'll be blogging everything, and if you're super keen on the butterfly peregrinations of this too too sullied flesh, you can follow me on Twitter as well at twitter.com/alisoncroggon.

It's unsurprising that the 20th century saw a renewal of interest in the Jacobean tragedies. Aside from their unapologetic theatricality, which generates its realism from extreme emotional truths, their dark machineries reflected a godless world in which human passion flamed out and extinguished itself in a materialistic, cynical and bloodily hierarchical society. Morality in this universe walks uneasily. It's easy to see why the playwright Howard Barker, whose fierce polemics created the Theatre of Catastrophe, wrote a contemporary version of Middleton's Women Beware Women.


Women - their role, their power, their destruction in the crushing sexual morals of their time - are at the centre of these tragedies, and John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore is no exception. When the Jacobean tragedies were written, political and public life was dominated by men. There were, however, notable exceptions, just as there are now: women such as Elizabeth I and Lucrezia Borgia subverted the expectations and limitations of the social roles expected of their sex, and the conflicts raised by their presences are reflected in the plays.

'Tis Pity She's A Whore goes further, baldly introducing incestuous love between a brother and sister - a brooding subtext in plays like The Duchess of Malfi. In a moral twist which for centuries made the play especially scandalous, Ford transforms his doomed siblings into tragic embodiments of romantic love. This sexual transgression occurs in a society in which honour killings are the norm: it exposes a nakedly misogynistic society in which women flail against social restrictions that are ultimately murderous. Interestingly, this aspect is seldom remarked upon, perhaps because honour killings are most commonly thought of as an oriental disease; but in the Malthouse's hugely ambitious production the question of male honour is opened out into contemporary sexual violence.

As this is Marion Potts's first production for the Malthouse as new artistic director, it's been hotly anticipated; and with such a weight of expectation, perhaps it's not surprising that one of the responses is a nagging disappointment. Potts delivers on many levels: this is a a richly sensuous show, visually and sonically layered to generate an operatic pitch of feeling. In its best moments, it promises a great deal; but it never quite delivers. At the heart of its problems is the dramaturgy, which is, in a singular feat, at once crude and obscure.

'Tis Pity follows the story of Annabella (Elizabeth Nabben) and Giovanni (Benedict Samuel), the children of the wealthy Florio (Richard Piper), who fall in love and, with the connivance of Annabella's nurse Putana (Laura Lattuada), consummate their passion. There are various subplots, of which the most important concerns Hippolita (Alison Whyte), the betrayed and vengeful lover of one of Annabella's suitors, Soranzo (John Adam). When Annabella falls pregnant, she is urged to marry Soranzo to cover her disgrace; when he discovers her pregnancy, Soranzo's servant Vasque (Anthony Brandon Wong) seeks out the name of the lover whom she will not reveal to her husband, and helps Soranzo to plot revenge. Cue a lot of knives and a welter of blood.

Anna Cordingley's design dramatically fills the Merlyn stage with three playing levels constructed out of huge shipping containers. At ground level are two containers, their exteriors scrawled with grafitti, which create room-like tunnels. They support the central playing area, a long trucking container lined with tarpaulins that is painted with Tiepolo-style murals and littered with strangely cartoonish versions of Renaissance furniture. In Paul Jackson's heavily shadowed lighting design, this space is flooded with golden light, so that it plays like a fantasy inside the industrial decor of the set. Finally, on top of this container is an eyrie with a harpsichord, where there is a gorgeously costumed singer (Julia County).


The sound design - a mixture of Elizabethan arias composed by Andrée Greenwell and a densely textured electronic score performed live by Jethro Woodward - takes on a lot of the work of the heavily cut text, in particular heightening the emotional pitch. Some dialogue is sung, and otherwise the wordless voice weaves through the speeches. At the best moments, this creates a thrilling uplift. Significantly, it echoes a long tradition of wordless expression among women in misogynistic societies, in which cries and tears, such as the extravagant public sobbings of the 15th century mystic Margery of Kempe or the keening of widows in early 20th century Cretan funerals, become potent expressions of subversion. (There is a strand of criticism which ascribes the same impetus to Lady Gaga). For me, this is a powerful trope within the production.

However, I think the production relies too much on the music to generate its emotional power. The original play is cut to the bone - the original 16 characters are cut to nine (Woodward is given a character name, but never does anything more than the music), excising many marginal characters such as Hippolita's husband or Annabella's various suitors. Perhaps what it most crucially loses in this cutting is any sense of transgression: for example, removing Friar Bonaventura, who in the original is Giovanni's confessor, means there is no sense of a societal morality against which to measure the sins of the children. Instead, somewhat surprisingly, when the incest is first revealed we just get the nurse saying more or less that Giovanni is hot, and that she can't blame Annabella for wanting to get into bed with him.

We are left with the twin poles of male violence and sexual betrayal, with little sense of the social constraints in which they vibrate and intensify. An important thread is the introduction of B (Chris Ryan), presumably a version of the comic relief Bergetto, who opens the play with a superb performance of a contemporary would-be stud. Aside from its irresistible echoes of Hayloft's Thyestes, Ryan's character is unclearly linked to the action on the stage above him: at first he is a contemporary counterpoint, but later, somewhat confusingly, he enters the action itself as a narrator and a masked figure of death.

This lack of clarity extends to the structure of the adaptation, where important actions are often shorn of motivation and leap up out of nowhere. It's not at all clear, for example, why Giovanni kills Annabella. Richard Piper's character Florio is reduced to a few lines, a kind of patriarchal scarecrow, which means that his death, however well performed (it was about all Piper had to do onstage) has very little dramatic payoff. Vasques is similarly a Iago-like cipher of evil. And sometimes I just was lost.

Some of this confusion could have been also because some of the cast members couldn't get around Ford's language, and there were times when I couldn't hear important dialogue. The shining exception is Alison Whyte, whose performance is riveting, and undoubtedly will be one of the performances of this year: she unwaveringly enters the extremities of Hippolita and carries us with her in a physically and vocally astounding performance.

For all my reservations, it's well worth a look: I'd far rather see this kind of flawed ambition than any number of smug successes, and there are moments of real power. More generally, it signals a Malthouse that intends to continue to challenge and explore. And that is an encouraging thought.

Picture: top, Chris Ryan; bottom, cast of 'Tis Pity She a Whore. Photos: Jeff Busby

'Tis Pity She's a Whore, by John Ford, directed by Marion Potts. Original music by Andrée Greenwell, set and costumes by Anna Cordingley, lighting design by Paul Jackson, sound design by Jethro Woodward, dramaturgy by Maryanne Lynch. With John Adam, Julia County, Laura Lattuada, Elizabeth Nabben, Richard Piper, Chris Ryan, Benedict Samuel, Alison Whyte, Anthony Brandon Wong and Jethro Woodward. Malthouse Theatre @ the Merlyn, until March 5.

First, an apology of sorts: Ms TN is wearing another couple of hats at present, and has only so much forehead where they can fit. Worse, one of the hats is generating a bunch of psychic static that gets in the way of everything else. The reason I have no time for the argument that claims that criticism is just the same as making art is that, in my experience anyway, art demands everything that criticism does, and then eats your soul as well. Which means that these responses will be brief.

Secondly, a pointer to the 2010 Green Room Awards nominations, which were announced yesterday, prompting a flurry of tweets. Reading through the nominations reminded me how rich 2010 was for Melbourne theatre: so many shows were outstanding. Go thither and form your own thoughts: the winners will be announced on March 21.


Now to the two shows I saw last week. A Behanding in Spokane is Martin McDonagh's first new play for 15 years: as is well known, the six plays that made his name were drafted in a frenzied nine month period in 1994. Here McDonagh has moved his particular brand of Grand Guignol from a fantasy Ireland to a fantasy mid-West: the action is set in a seedy hotel somewhere in America, and revolves around the pathological state of a one-handed man, Carmichael (Colin Moody). His hand was severed by hillbillies 27 year earlier, and ever since, after exacting revenge on his tormentors, he has been searching for his missing appendage. Two young opportunists, Toby (Bert LaBonté) and Marilyn (Nicole da Silva) hear of his quest and attempt to sell him a hand to make a quick buck - but it is, of course, the wrong hand.

The play is basically about Toby and Marilyn's subsequent attempts to escape from the hotel room after the deal goes pear-shaped, with occasional interruptions from the bellhop Mervyn (Tyler Coppin), a man who has turned disappointment and indifference into an art form. It's swift, funny and black-humoured: a neatly structured four-hander which turns its theatrical tricks with style. It's a shiny version of Sam Shepard's early plays, with the sharper edges of Shepard's dark excavations of the American Dream rounded off: less memorable and strange, and concomitantly less interesting. But there's no doubt it's fun.

What's of note here is Peter Evans's production. From Christina Smith's angled stage-within-a-stage, lavishly draped with red curtains that reveal a hotel room of staggering squalor, to the pitch-perfect performances to Ben Grant's ominous sound design, it's a winner. It takes the absurd premise of the play and turns it into high comedy, stylishly meta-theatrical, holding the balance of belief in a sure hand. On the one hand, we know these characters are fantasies: on the other, in the magic box of the theatre, they generate their own compelling realism.

The performances are, without exception, first class. Colin Moody as Carmichael gives a bravura performance of psychotic obsession, baffled threat in his every footstep, nicely leavened with an undercutting petulance and credulity (some of the funniest dialogue is a phone conversation with his mother). Tyler Coppin equally explores the grotesque with his melancholy "reception guy", who is, like Carmichael, arrested in a permanent state of distorted adolescent fantasy. Both characters are much more childish than the two young people, whose comparative rationality and ordinariness plays against the grotesquerie of Mervyn and Carmichael: LaBonté and da Silva play their characters more or less straight, with just enough exaggerated edge.

The play was accused of racism in its US outing, and it's easy to see why: Carmichael is a white supremacist and the word "nigger" flies around freely. Mostly it was criticised for its stereotypical portrayal of black maleness. In this reading at least, the play seems more a piss-take on racism: LaBonté's characterisation certainly lifts Toby past crude caricature. If anything, it could be accused of sexism, since the least interesting role is the woman's: Marilyn exists mostly as a foil to the other characters, although Da Silva makes the most of the little she has. Each character is in fact a graphically sketched cartoon, but this production finds the life in them.

Richard Pettifer's No-Show (sadly, closed after a short season at La Mama) is at the other end of the theatrical spectrum. As Pettifer explains in his program, it came about because he "had a show fall over a few weeks ago" and made this show to replace it. The no show was a play called Smudged by Megan Twycross, which made a brief appearance at the Brisbane Festival before foundering on the rocks of theatrical difference.

Out of this catastrophe, Pettifer makes a poignant work of anti-theatre. As with all anti-theatre, the focus is on the immediate presence of the performer and the audience as the bedrock of theatrical experience. He is, as it were, surrounded by the rags of the absent show: the set is four chairs labelled with the names of the absent performers, and during the course of the 50 minutes he dons one costume after another, explaining what each character was meant to do. It's irresistibly reminiscent of Forced Entertainment's Spectacular, which I saw in 2009, but with this difference: where Spectacular left me with an empty sense that I'd been had, this show takes off the aesthetic protection and exposes something real and human about the risk that is theatre.

I'm going to cheat now and refer you to The Blogger Formerly Known As Neandellus, Andrew Furhman, who discusses this show with more thoughtfulness and intelligence than I can presently summon. Essential reading about theatre, failure and the avoidance of failure in two posts, here and here, at Primitive Surveys.

Picture: Colin Moody in A Behanding at Spokane. Photo: Jeff Busby

A Behanding at Spokane by Martin McDonagh, directed by Peter Evans. designed by Christina Smith, lighting by Matt Scott, sound design by Ben Grant. With Tyler Coppin, Nicole da Silva, Bert LaBonté and Colin Moody. Sumner Theatre, Melbourne Theatre Company, until March 19.

No-Show, by Richard Pettifer, with excerpts by Megan Twycross. Lighting non-design by Tilly Lunken, sound non-design by Alister Mew. La Mama Theatre. Closed.

Yes, there is life after David Williamson. It must be said that lately the man has been hard to ignore: even John Bailey found himself adding, with an air of bewilderment, to the pile of words surrounding his latest play. "I can't think of another local play, great or rubbish," says Bailey, that has "provoked so many words from commentators, or [has been] given so much space in the public sphere". No, neither can I. And resisting that mind-numbing vortex proved impossible, even for stern-minded aesthetes such as myself.


If anything proves the marginalisation of theatre in Australia, it's that Williamson - presumably the only recognisable name outside the theatre culture - still so dominates the general discourse. Why is it so, when there's so much more interesting stuff to see or talk about? Take Ruben Guthrie, for instance, presently enjoying a season directed by the playwright, Brendan Cowell, at Red Stitch.

This play has everything Williamson's lacks - wit, energy, emotion, complexity. And it's a play, goddamit. It doesn't even faintly resemble the "non naturalistic" theatre that Williamson, despite all the evidence to the contrary, claims is driving his work off Australian stages. It has characters and plot. It has a beginning, middle and end. If it were on a main stage, not even the most conservative theatre nerd could argue that it wasn't mainstream.

The most immediate difference between Ruben Guthrie and Don Parties On is that Cowell's play is a lot more fun. The second is that its exploration of its chosen theme, the nature of addiction, is a lot more thoughtful. It seems to come from a living mind: from the opening moment, when alcoholic advertising whizz and relationship disaster Ruben Guthrie (Daniel Frederiksen) arrogantly addresses his first AA meeting, the energy is pitched high, and it never slackens for the two hour duration of the show.

The story follows Ruben Guthrie's attempt to sober up. His professional success has been all about excess: it has rewarded him with a top creative job with a mega salary, supermodel girlfriend Zoya (Anna Samson) and harbour views. We meet him at a moment of crisis: his girlfriend, sick of his narcissistic self-destructiveness, leaves him, and he has broken his arm jumping off a roof in a moment of alcohol-fuelled abandon. He goes cold turkey, and immediately discovers that his entire life - work and play - is predicated on alcohol. His boss Ray (David Whitely) isn't interested in the new sober Ruben; his best friend Damian (Simon Maiden) can't bear his not drinking, and even his irritably separated parents (Dennis Coard and Andrea Swifte) think he's a wowser for going teetotal.

Desperately seeking to replace the world he is rejecting, Guthrie meets Virginia (Erin Dewar), former speed addict, and enters the 12-step plan with a vengeance. It's soon clear that he is replacing one addiction with another. Both are evasions of the real issues that drive his catastrophic instincts: the emotional poverties of his life as a high-flying creative are neatly complemented by the empty jargonistic platitudes of his new sobriety. It's not much of a choice: each of the options open to him is a kind of death. What hovers teasingly beyond this stark binary is the never-realised possibility of a engaged life, but only Zoya - beating her own demons - is able to pick this up. She is, in a sardonic note, the character who leaves Australia.

Since it premiered in 2008 this play has had two hit seasons at Belvoir St, and the polish of previous incarnations is amply evident in this production. The script is sharp and supple, achieving a nice balance between comedy, satire and genuine pathos. Cowell's slick production picks it up and goes for it. Peter Mumford's elegant set - designer shelves stacked with designer liquor - permits the action to move swiftly and legibly from one scene to another.

The evening is inevitably dominated by Frederiksen's turbo-charged portrayal of Guthrie, but this is in fact an ensemble production: there's not a weak performance in it. And there are memorable theatrical moments: my favourite is the image of Ruben Guthrie and his father Peter in hospital robes with saline drips, smuggling a flask of liquor under their robes. For a moment, the stage is almost Beckett.

Definitely a don't miss. Life would be a lot more exciting if more of the mainstream looked like this.

Over at Fortyfive Downstairs, there's an interesting production of Skin Tight, by New Zealand playwright Gary Henderson. There's no doubting the energy of this one, which begins with an erotic all-in wrestle between performers Holly Shanahan and Michael Whalley, and continues with a highly stylised physical production that traces the history of a marriage, from its early pre-war years to the ill-health and death of the aging couple.

The striking design places the action in traverse. Lush red curtains open to a narrow angled stage strewn with clothes. The play's time and place - country New Zealand from early to middle last century - is suggested by phonograph music and minimal props. An iron wash tub is filled with water and apples: the water acts as a metaphor for sensuality, the apples for appetite. And there's a pathos in the idea of an old man bathing his ill wife but seeing his young lover, a la Pierre Bonnard, that, even if it doesn't quite emerge, is beautiful.

My major problem is the soft-focus lyricism of the play itself, which never escapes a pervasive sentimentality. I couldn't shake the feeling that I'd seen this play several times before, (although I can't think where); it's full of familiar tropes, and you know from almost the very beginning exactly what is going to happen in the end. This needn't be a problem, but here it is.

The production set up an increasingly bizarre disconnect between the language and performance: although the performance seems to be about articulating the play's subtextual passion, I never felt the passion in the text. Rather than excavating a truthfulness from its play, I felt that most of the time the production was flailing around looking for it. Awkward touches, such as the introduction of an older actor (Karl Peschek) in the play's final moments, add to its lack of focus.

All the same, in the moments where performances strikes truthfully - mainly moments of physical play - the show achieves a genuine power. Both Shanahan and Whalley are actors to watch, and their full-on sensual intensity means this show is worth a look.

Picture: From left: Erin Dewar, Daniel Frederiksen and Anna Samson, from Ruben Guthrie.

Ruben Guthrie, written and directed by Brendan Cowell. Design by Peter Mumford, lighting by Stelios Karagiannis, sound by Marlene Samosn and Jonathan Shaw. With Daniel Frederiksen, Anna Samson, David Whiteley, Dennis Coard, Erin Dewar, Andrea Swifte and Simon Maiden. Red Stitch until March 5.

Skin Tight, by Gary Henderson, directed by Justin Martin. Lighting design by Marco Resondeck, sound design by Jared Lewis, choreography by Tom Hodgson. With Holly Shanahan, Michael Whalley and Karl Peschek. SaySIX Theatre and The Groundswell Division, @ Fortyfive Downstairs until February 11.

On a mild summer evening in the ivy-clad courtyard of The Eleventh Hour's headquarters in Fitzroy, it's not difficult to think that you have suddenly been transported to a different era. The lawn is studded with marquees; a door behind the temporary bar opens teasingly to a private house with shuttered upstairs windows, which you can't help but imagine must look like something painted by Bonnard or Vuillard. Even your host, artistic director William Henderson, could have stepped out of a daguerreotype.

Maybe it's Europe circa 1912, before world war and revolution wracked the planet, when a disparate bunch of radical artists were creating something that would be called "modernism". Only it's Melbourne 2011: a different place, a different era. Given the present sense of social urgency, perhaps it's not surprising that so many artists are looking to the modernism that flowered as the anxieties of its times thickened and convulsed, picking up the threads of experiment and discovery and attempting to make something new of them. Certainly, this investigation is a crucial part of The Eleventh Hour's eclectic, intelligent theatre, and why they're one of Melbourne's must see companies.


This time, instead of reworking classic texts, The Eleventh Hour presents a new play by David Tredinnick, who is better known as an accomplished actor. Song of the Bleeding Throat is described as a "burlesque", meaning its older sense of comic parody rather than strip-tease. And it's a fascinating beast indeed. Tredinnick is parodying ideas, in particular some of the formative 19th century notions behind contemporary Britain and America. His burlesque features such notables as the historian and social commentator Thomas Carlyle; his wife, Jane Welch (and their dog Nero), Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, Lincoln's assassin John Wilkes Booth and the Statue of Liberty.

The text is foremost a torrent of words. Tredinnick has created a bizarrely Beckettian collage out of quotations and almost-quotations from public figures ranging from PT Barnum to Marx: statements about empire and revolution jostle with domestic intrigues, fancies, poems and obscene malapropism. The language of high oratory or Romantic poetry is continually exploded by the decay and weakness of the body: Carlyle (Richard Bligh) is tormented by his bowels, Welch (Anne Browning) is a drug addict, Nero the dog (James Saunders) is beaten within an inch of his life, Lincoln (Neil Pigot) is dying (or dead). The only personage who seems above all this bodily flux is Whitman.

Each phrase is buffed to a dark lustre. Everyone speaks as if they all wrote out their thoughts in a goose-quill before uttering them. It's about as far as it is possible to get from the conventions of contemporary theatre: this is a text that has little truck with ideas of character or narrative. Its characters are symbols, mouthpieces, carefully constructed puppets - parodies, as Tredinnick claims. But parodies of what? There are all the obvious answers - they parody the vanity of intellectual achievement in the face of death; the selective consciousness of heart-stirring cries for liberty and revolution that ignores, say, those who happen to possess black skin; the tragic gap between ideal and reality (the play itself is prefaced by a quote from the greatest pragmatist of them all, Josef Stalin).

But most of all it seems to me that it parodies language itself. Language, which promises so much, here collapses inward on itself, revealing a pile of rubble that stinks of death, or is anerotically absorbed in the cultural body. The production often forbids us easy access to listening: Nero stutters, the Carlyles speak in Scots accents. Even its visionary clarities decay: Whitman's magnificent "I sing the body electric" becomes a narcissistic anthem in the musical Fame. The only recourse at the end is the solitary voice, Whitman's "song of the bleeding throat", which is cut off in mid-sentence.

This density of meaning and linguistic relations means that if you don't pay close attention, you will soon be quite lost. Even if you do, it's easy to feel that, as Lincoln says at one point, "I’m trying to blaze a way through this swamp". The weight of this orotund 19th century language, almost completely unleavened by contemporary brevity, often lies heavy. The danger of employing this diction is that it attenuates the work's political clout: what do all these words have to do with Now?

If it's anything, Song the Bleeding Throat is an overtly political work, at once exploring and mocking the formative nationalism of our time, US patriotism. Through the figure of Carlyle, a major Romantic essayist and thinker, it picks up European revolution and imperialism, connecting these ideals to the hopes and betrayals of the brash democratic exercise in America. Yet this is an oblique tracing, more a kind of animating of ghosts which still colour the assumptions behind so much public speech.

I find myself oscillating between feeling on the one hand that the text rings its changes very successfully, and on the other thinking that all this luxuriant excess of language ends up obscuring itself, that there is, in short, too much of it. (Certainly, coming from a school that prefers poetry of the theatre to poetry in the theatre, I think there's a little too much poetry). Its ideas are in fact often presented with an unsettling clarity, but the whole seems too much jostle. I suspect that there is a myopia of focus, an obsessive close-up attention that forgets the larger architecture of the play's argument and diffuses its point. It's common to claim that less is more, and it's not always true; but in this case, I think it might have been.

Perhaps the only director in Melbourne who could tackle a text like this is Brian Lipson, whose theatrical imagination is as baroque and elliptical as the playwright's. The production is as finely polished as the text itself: it features astonishingly disciplined and, frankly, riveting performances from its cast, although Neil Pigot as Abe Lincoln is the stand-out. The alienations in the text are realised in the theatre with a playful theatricality: in the first half, the three characters are formally placed as in a portrait (the staging is in fact based on a famous portrait of the Carlyles at home), with Nero - an English shepherd dog in the painting - becoming a working class lad in a cloth cap. In the second half, in a stunning coup de theatre, the entire space is reversed, and the audience finds itself looking up at the death bed of Lincoln.

There is no moment that doesn't feel utterly worked, down to the least gesture: even the twilight shading to darkness through the windows outside. And it glints with a dark humour that segues to sheer playfulness: when Carlyle decides to light a spill from the fire, for instance, and irritably summons the dogsbody/author to crouch behind the empty mantelpiece with a lighter. There are theatrical moments which are as good as anything you'll see, seriously, but somehow it meanders, creating palpable longueurs. I kept thinking of a necklace, a string of marvellous pearls with no string. And yet, again, this isn't wholly true.

It's often very funny, but underneath the whole is a vein of pure seriousness that harks back to those 20th century modernists, in particular the formalist experiments of Piscator and Meyerhold. Maybe my reservations exist in its timeliness. It was odd to watch this play last week, as the popular revolution in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East lit a more violent flame beneath the pieties that Song of the Bleeding Throat explores. Suddenly these ideas - democracy, revolution and their betrayals - seem invested with more urgent feeling and moment than seems adequate to burlesque. But then again, the song of the bleeding throat is precisely what is consciously elided in the play: its concern is with everything that silences that song. In any case, this is certainly an intriguing work, uncompromising and painstakingly realised, and worth seeing for that alone. Definitely not for those who like their theatre on a plate.

Picture: Neil Pigot as Lincoln in Song of the Bleeding Throat.

Song of the Bleeding Throat, by David Tredinnick, directed by Brian Lipson. Design by Brian Lipson and Alexis George, costumes by Alexis George, lighting by Niklas Pajanti and Nicola Andrews. With Richard Blight, Anne Browning, James Saunders and Neil Pigot. The Eleventh Hour, 170 Leicester St, Fitzroy, until February 12.

Every time David Williamson writes a new play, the Australian theatre world launches into one of its favourite games. It goes like this.

There's a flurry of pre-publicity in which we hear, again, that Williamson is our best-selling playwright, a "national myth-maker" who takes the pulse of our times and touches the receptive hearts of the masses. We hear that "the critics" are unkind and out of touch with ordinary folk, and that the only reason people dislike his plays is because he's too popular. We hear that the theatre world is continually chanting that "you can't have naturalism on stage". Preferably, somewhere in the middle of this, someone mentions Barrie Kosky.


Then a good chunk of the theatre community gets dressed up to the nines and heads off to the premiere. The play occurs. Some people laugh. Some people leave at interval. A sizeable proportion of the audience applauds rapturously. Another sizeable proportion emerges in various states of crankiness and flees for a debriefing session over a stiff drink.

Then the fun begins. Some critic, bristling with righteous fury, writes a slashing review of the Williamson phenomenon. Said critic is in turn accused of general nastiness, humourlessness and elitism. Williamson fans point once again to the box office. Various right wing pundits weigh in to opine about Williamson's leftiness. Various left wing pundits complain about his lack of leftiness. Someone (often it's me) says something plaintive about art. And everyone, his or her expectations satisfyingly met, has a marvellous time.

Lather, rinse and repeat.

So it is with Don Parties On, the sequel to Williamson's 1970s mega-hit Don's Party, which opened at the Melbourne Theatre Company last Thursday. And here's my contribution to this particular circle of Hell.

In Don's Party: The Sequel we meet the central characters from the first play 40 years on, as they gather around Kerry O'Brien for the ABC telecast of the 2010 election. As Williamson says in his program note, he's doing a Seven Up on his fictional characters. Baby Richard (Darren Gilshenan) is now a Generation X advertising executive with marital problems. Don (Garry McDonald) is still married to Kath (Tracy Mann), who brings up a decades-old infidelity every two minutes or so. We hear that Don finally did write his novel, which sank like a stone after offending all his friends, and is the cue for some self-referential jokes about commercial writing not being proper art.

Don's mentor Mal (Robert Grubb) and his sharp-tongued wife Jenny (Sue Jones) have divorced, and Jenny has subsequently built a political career. Cooley (Frankie J. Holden), as lascivious as ever, has turned into an obscenely rich right wing lawyer with emphysema, and is married to a patient woman with a social conscience, Helen (Diane Craig). There's a sententious grand daughter, Belle (Georgia Flood), who watches Twilight DVDs and calls herself a Greenie, and Richard's lover Roberta (Nikki Shiels), a redhead whose histrionics are apparently explained by her Italian genes.

At the beginning of the play, Don and Kath are, once again, preparing tidbits for an election night party. Mal turns up early and asks Jenny along, to Don and Kath's dismay, as they haven't spoken for decades after a disagreement about Twisties. Meanwhile there is much rhubarb about Richard, who has left his wife for Another Woman. Richard's daughter Belle is displeased. Richard's wife makes a suicide attempt and ends up in hospital, and is promptly forgotten until the end of the play. Cooley turns up with an oxygen bottle and mask and his wife Helen, and lusts after the grand daughter until he has to put on his oxygen mask.

The actors watch 30 seconds of Kerry O'Brien and then mute the tv for some expository dialogue about the good old/bad old days. There are in-jokey references to Play No. 1. Richard turns up and makes the entire audience wonder how a whiny, hysterical boy-man could possibly be holding down a mega-buck job in advertising. There are revelations, a couple of heart-unwrenching confessions and some reheated scandal. Belle overhears it all and is displeased. Richard's lover turns up in high heels and low-cut dress and has conniptions. Belle is displeased again. And so on. And on.

Well, I practically went to sleep writing that. Williamson's great gift is that he is incapable of surprise. He is at once so popular and so reviled because he knows exactly how to meet the expectations of his audiences. It creates a dilemma for me, because I hate repeating myself; so forgive me for pointing to some earlier essays. In 2004, when Williamson announced his retirement, I wrote an essay on the Williamson phenomenon which basically sums up my responses to his work. You might also be interested in my review of Peter Evans's sparky production of Don's Party for the MTC in 2007, which incidentally features the same designers and the same set - for this production, Dale Ferguson's hyper-real evocation of a 1970s Lower Plenty house is updated to 2010.

In the 2004 piece, I discussed how troubling it is that state theatre companies, forced to make commercial decisions by their financial bottom lines, are so anxious to bruit Williamson as not only a best-selling playwright - which he undoubtedly is - but as a great playwright - which he emphatically is not. Harry Kippax did Australian theatre no favours at all when he compared Williamson to Chekhov. And this claim to artistic quality is my beef about Williamson, although the beef is smaller these days.

One of the things that seems clear in this round of the Williamson Game is that the theatrical conversation has shifted markedly. For instance, it seems (even more) ridiculous to claim that naturalism isn't allowed, when so many young companies are exploring it themselves. And I can't get too exercised about state companies making commercial decisions, given the paucity of their subsidies; although it could be I'm just tired of the argument. And really, who cares? Nobody said that people will be shot if they like going to Williamson plays. Some people merely objected when Williamson was promoted as the ne plus ultra of Australian theatre.

Recently, some defenders of the Williamson oeuvre have begun to say that Williamson is not a naturalistic playwright, a la Chekhov or Ibsen, but more a playwright of heightened social satire, a crafter of comedies of manners. This is in fact a much more accurate placing of his work, but it means that one has to assess him in the company of Sheridan or Feydeau or his contemporary Alan Ayckbourn, all masters of stage business. One of the things that has puzzled me for years about Williamson's reputation is that he is such an inept theatrical technician. Popular, as these other playwrights demonstrate, doesn't have to mean bad; but in the Dan Brown-Charles Dickens continuum, Williamson is definitely thumping the tan.

In Don Parties On, all his writerly clumsiness is writ large - the dire expository dialogue, the stereotypical characters, the almost neurotic repetitiveness, the constant machinations of getting people on and off stage. Much of the dialogue - the pronouncements on baby boomers, greenies, Australian politics and so on - in fact sounds as if it's been cribbed from some of Australia's more active political blogs. The people-moving is about as clunkily done as I've seen - characters are constantly announcing that now they must go into the garden to show each other photographs of their children, or to the bedroom to check on someone hysterical, or to the study to watch a DVD, so that two or three people can be left on stage to reminisce or reveal something shocking. Alternatively, you get rows of frozen actors standing on stage watching as two or three others do their dialogue.

Robyn Nevin's direction makes as decent a fist as is possible of this stylistic rubble - I left feeling that it could have been a lot worse. The actors fail to make the characters credible, but it's hard to blame them given that they are all written as walking cliches; although Sue Jones gives some feisty life to the character of Jenny. But for me, there was no escaping the creeping numbness as the evening wore on.

Naturalism this certainly isn't. Considered as a comedy of manners, it lacks the grace, wit and formal mastery that gives the form its champagne fizz. A direct comparison with Don's Party starkly demonstrates how stale Williamson has become: the lively colloquialism of the original, its chief virtue, has long leached out. This really is zombie theatre, devouring the brains, not only of its audience, but of its own playwright.

Yes, some people love it. The guy next to me, for instance, was having a super time: he kept up a running commentary and walked out happily humming the Credence Clearwater Revival song that is the subject of one of the running gags. As always with Williamson plays, it will continue to please those who like his work and annoy everybody else. He's still making the box office go ka-ching, and as long as people keep buying tickets, companies will keep programming his work. And there it is.

Picture: Don Parties On. Top row, l-r: Frankie J. Holden, Garry McDonald. Bottom row: Sue Jones, Diane Criag and Tracy Mann. Photo: Jeff Busby

Don Parties On, by David Williamson, directed by Robyn Nevin. Set by Dale Ferguson, lighting by Matt Scott, sound by Russell Goldsmith, costumes by Jennifer Irwin. With Diane Craig, Georgia Flood, Darren Gilshenan, Robert Grubb, Frankie J. Holden, Sue Jones, Garry McDonald, Tracy Mann and Nikki Shiels. Melbourne Theatre Company, Arts Centre Playhouse, until March 8.