Fringe Festival: Into The Fire: Wallpaper by Lucy Stewart & Interrogation by Ben Noble, St Martins Youth Theatre; Spatial Theory, created and performed by Bill Shannon, music by DJ Richie Tempo, lighting David Szlasa, North Melbourne Town Hall.

First, a mea culpa: a lethal combination of the school holidays and severe laryngitis meant that my fingers slid nervelessly off the pulse of Melbourne theatre, right in the middle of one of its busiest times. And so, belatedly coming to, I realise I've missed out on a few things I would have dearly liked to see: the Theatre of Decay's latest version of intimate theatre, viewed from the back seat of a car, for example, or a production of a play by France's most eminent playwright, Michel Vinaver. And you can't exactly rent out the dvd if you miss the show: the beauty and terror of theatre is, alas, its ruthless temporality.

However, I collected myself in time to catch a couple of interesting shows. At St Martins Youth Theatre I saw Into The Fire, a double bill of two young Melbourne playwrights, Lucy Stewart and Ben Noble. They are part of a new generation of Melbourne theatre artists which looks restlessly beyond parochial influences, and these two demonstrate that contemporary British writing is beginning to make itself felt in new writing here.

Although very different from each other, both these works eschew conventional ideas of character and narrative in favour of splintered, disconnected realities. Stewart's play Wallpaper is a theatrical exteriorisation of disturbed subjectivities, with sharp, unheralded shifts between differing levels of actual, imagined, remembered or deranged states of being. It's a technique Sarah Kane exploited spectacularly, but Stewart uses it here to different ends.

At the opening of the play the central character, Nigel (Chris Jefferson), is celebrating his twenty third birthday. He is undergoing a kind of early-life crisis, with his marriage falling apart and his work in an introduction agency echoing hollowly the lack of love in his personal life. As his sense of self disintegrates into a chorus of mocking voices, he begins a relationship with a girl (Miriam Glaser) who emerges from the grey walls of his house. The people around him - his wife Kiki (Naomi Francis), her sister Jeannie (Hope Hayward Rowling) and his employer Malcolm (Kristian Sartori) increasingly become less real to him than the strange young girl who sinisterly demands his love.

This kind of writing is much more challenging than conventional plot-driven drama, and Stewart doesn't always manage to achieve her ambition. The dramatic dynamic falls on emotional contrast and metaphoric connections rather than narrative suspense, and such complexities require a concomitant clarity in the writing. While it was never difficult to work out what was going on, I felt that Stewart often flinched from the more difficult implications of what she was writing about, relying on a fey lyricism or absurd humour to get her through. This feeling was reinforced by James Adler's rather fuzzy and fussy direction. The play's virtues are its freshness and ambition, and I look forward to Stewart's future work, especially if she finds a drivenness and focus her work presently lacks.

Ben Noble's Interrogation is a much darker play, directed with a sure and spare hand by Julie Waddington to make compelling theatre. Noble is clearly a startling and intelligent talent: he is the only actor on stage, and has given himself the material for a virtusoso performance. The play also features filmed scenes acted by Alison Boyce, Shaun Brown, Sylvie de Crespigny, Daniel Frederksen, Fiona MacLeod and Peter Roberts. The videos are naturalistic grabs of story or conversation, captured voyeuristically (we are always aware of the camera), which are interspersed with quotes from the Bible and an obscure text called The Encridion, which I can find nothing about and so suspect may be fictional. The monologues performed by Noble are all characters whom we also see on the screen, which creates a number of gaps between the differing representations. These gaps grow perversely more dislocating as the stories become clearer.

The links between the narratives are the murders of three young women. The masculinist equation of eroticism and death is well-trodden ground, but Noble makes an interesting fist of it here, only stepping falsely when he makes the dead woman speak of her longing to be watched or even stalked. Even if it is a projection of the imaginings of the men, this is a moment which comes uncomfortably close to the notion that women desire the violence to which they are subjected.

Interrogation is vaguely reminiscent of Martin Crimp's tour de force Attempts on Her Life, but instead of a named woman whose identity and story shifts and fractures from scene to scene, there are three nameless victims and three potential murderers. The final opening out of the play into the literal realities of the writer and the audience/reader did seem, perhaps, a little pat: given the power of Noble's performance and the intelligence of the writing, I think I wanted something that more disturbingly revealed that a fiction is also a reality.

I also saw Spatial Theory, New York street performer Bill Shannon's attempt on theatre made, he says with contagious insouciance, because you make more money in theatre than in the street (a fact that, frankly, I find hard to believe).

Bill Shannon is a beguiling entertainer, his improvisatory repartee honed in the harsh market of the street where a moment's boredom means your audience will wander off, and he is dynamically supported by the amazing sound work of deejay Richie Tempo, a mixture of jazz, hiphop and percussive funk. The show is a bastard cross between dance, a lecture (complete with videos) and stand-up comedy, with all the joins showing. While each section is slick, the movement from one to the other is often awkward, and a director might have excised a few repetitive longueurs. However, this show is conscious and ambiguous enough to make a fetish of its own awkwardness, and to make discussing the whole idea of success an uneasy prospect.

Shannon was diagnosed at the age of five with Legg-Calve-Perthe disease, a kind of arthritis which means that he is dependent on crutches. He hasn't let that stop him, and Spatial Theory demonstrates that he is not called "The Crutchmaster" for nothing. With his especially designed dance crutches and a skateboard, he creates moments of breathtaking lyricism and grace out of an uncompromising street aesthetic. The crutches are extensions of his body and become elements of his fluid expressiveness - a cross, a cage, wings - both the badge of his limitations, and the means of his freedom. Perhaps the most interesting moment was a dance in which he performed more and more difficult tricks until he fell over, flat on his back, the music stopping instantly. The gasp from the audience was instantly turned back on us, the audience's willing him on to "success" gently satirised by his own dislike of being patronised, of help that is more about the helper excercising their own notions of themselves as humane people than anything the other person might actually need.

Underneath the comedy and strange beauty, Spatial Theory is mining some uncomfortable areas, exploiting the ambiguity and uncertainty the abled feel towards the disabled, and what it means to be a disabled person in a public place. He fearlessly launches himself into the pathos and comedy of failure, in the process both creating an aesthetic of heroicism and redefining that word "ability". How can a person of such abilities actually be "disabled"? And what was I watching? An artist making a show, or a disabled person transcending their disabilities? As Shannon says, turning the question back on us, "Is it a dance, or is it a trick? Is it a trick, or is it a dance?" The answer is, I suspect, that it is both of these things, or neither of them. The truth is, I still don't know.

The Last Days of Mankind, by Karl Kraus, with Justus Neumann. Music performed by Julius Schwing. Original direction by Hanspeter Horner, additional direction Daniel Schlusser. La Mama Theatre until September 26.

Think of a real work of art: have you never had the feeling that something about it is reminiscent of the smell of burning metal you get from a knife you're whetting on a grindstone? It's a cosmic, meteoric, lightning-and-thunder smell, something divinely uncanny!

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

Every now and then, it is necessary to be reminded of the true resources and possibilities of art. Sometimes it seems that dullness is all, that we merely consume, like lobotomised laboratory rats, the enforced idiocies of mass culture. A real work of art calls up without shame the seriousness of being, the mind's restlessness, its functions as critique and rebuke, inspiration and provocation. All fiery discontent, artists are indeed of the devil's party; but, like Milton, they must sing as if they were angels.

Karl Kraus was such a malcontent. He was one of an extraordinary generation of Austrian artists who emerged after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the catastrophe of World War One, a period which included geniuses like Robert Musil and Joseph Roth, and the chilling visions of painters like Otto Dix and Oskar Kokoschka. Perhaps it is that time's unique sense of apocalyptic transformation which makes these artists seem so relevant now, and gives their writings such a bitter air of prophecy.



Kraus, considered one of the great satirists of last century, was arguably the most sophisticated media commentator of his day. He saw before almost anyone else the baleful influence of press-driven propaganda on public life. Ironically, he used the transient forms of journalism to articulate his critique, most notably in his famous journal Die Fackel. The Last Days of Mankind, a sprawling 800-page epic which is still not fully translated into English, is generally acknowledged to be Kraus' masterpiece.

The play is reportedly a melange of quotes from sources such as Goethe and Shakespeare and the Bible, a mixture of historical and fictional characters, songs, cinematic elements, polyphonic crowd scenes and scenic fragments. Justus Neumann opens with a quote from Kraus' prologue, in which he says: "The events shown in this play, no matter how unlikely, actually took place; the words spoken in this play, no matter how unlikely, are true quotations." In a play which features God Himself, this is hardly an appeal to documentary ideas of verity. But there is no doubt that it is an account which is bitterly, blackly true, in the way that only art can be true. And it is deadly funny.

A performance which lasts for just over an hour clearly offers a radically edited version of Kraus' epic, and I am in no position to judge either the quality of the translation (made for this performance by Neumann and Matthew Lilias) or how the redacted version compares to the original. However, I can say that Neumann's adaptation makes stunning theatre.

Neumann, an Austrian actor whom I last saw perform almost 20 years ago in a virtuosic one-man piece called Kill Hamlet, is an actor's actor, a performer of consummate skill who has the strange glamour of invisibility that only the best actors attain. Your attention is so focused on the narrative, the character, the performance, that the actor himself is paradoxically effaced. From the first moment Neumann shows himself, half-lit halfway down La Mama's stairs, and reads in that bewitching voice from Kraus' prologue, you know you are in the hands of a master.

The set is self-consciously a stage: a raised dais draped with a black cloth, and a table with a chair, on which lies a book. At the other end of the stage is Julius Schwing - as I found out afterwards, Neumann's 17-year-old son - who tickles acoustic melodies from an electric guitar, as Neumann walks slowly to the small stage and begins what is effectively a dramatised reading of the play. But what a reading...

To call it a reading, although that it what it is, threatens to undersell its subtleties and power. The Last Days of Mankind is theatre at its simplest, a matter of unadorned words, music, and performance, but the production is, within the rigors of its stern palette, astoundingly full of colour and variousness. Aside from Neumann's ability to play a cast of at least dozens (he contains multitudes), this is due to the beautiful and precise shifts of Niklas Pajanti's lighting states, the suggestive placings of Neumann's body, certain stillnesses and gestures. His performance is counterpointed with the responsive and passionate live music, which varies from gentle arpeggios to the anguished electric scream of Hendrix or Deep Purple, summoning in the tiny space of La Mama the technological apocalypse of modern warfare.

If it is true, as Heiner Müller says, that the major political function of art today is to mobilise the imagination, then this production of The Last Days of Mankind performance is profoundly political. Without spectacular sets or casts of thousands, the atrocity and scale of world war is made palpable. The play's scope ranges from intimacies - a scene, for example, where children play "world war" - to public utterances of all kinds: a teacher to his pupils, a disillusioned God to His creation. The most frightening, perhaps, are where Kraus strips back the rhetoric of war's glory and exposes its homicidal insanity.

In this most nuanced of writers, no linguistic manipulation is left unexamined: Kraus is alert to all the political dimensions of language, from the most private to the most public. He shows how abuse of language directly creates the realities which permit the human tragedy, the grief and piteousness, of war.

Kraus considered the press one of the driving forces towards war - a major reason his work resonates so uncomfortably in the age of Fox News. The play opens, tellingly, with the news being shouted in Vienna of the assassination of the Prince Franz Josef in Sarajevo. Neumann plays "The Crowd", recreating the whirlpool of nationalism, racism, bellicose excitement, stupidity and bloodthirstiness which accompany a public lust for war. And one of his characters is an actual journalist, Alice Schalek, whose prurient interviews with soldiers and officers reveal an excitement bordering on the obscene.

"Satisfied?" she asks rhetorically, in raptures over being on a battlefield. "Satisfied is not the word for it! Patriotism, you idealists may call it. Hatred of the enemy, you nationalists. Call it sport, you moderns. Adventure, you romantics. You who know the souls of men call it the joyous thrill of power. I call it humanity liberated!"

It made me go cold, to hear that familiar glorification of mass murder in the name of human freedom. Those words were written almost a century ago, but for all our dazzling technological innovations, for all our trumpetings of progress, how much have things actually changed? We seem to have learned nothing. And as a response - an intelligent, undeceived, conscious response - to a world of increasing fascistic paranoia and irrational passions, it puts most contemporary works to shame. Don't miss it.

La Mama Theatre

Julia 3 by Michael Gurr. Directed by Bruce Myles, with Kate Fitzpatrick, Peter Curtin, Todd MacDonald and Greg Stone. Designed by Christina Smith, lighting design by Glenn Hughes, sound design Andrew Pendlebury. Playbox at the Malthouse Theatre, until September 25.

In the past, Michael Gurr's plays have left me either bored out of my skull or shaking with rage. Or both. Given my extreme reactions, I have sometimes wondered if Gurr represents everything I fear in myself about being a middle class writer with a humanitarian conscience.

Julia 3 gave me a chance to look again in this dark mirror. In this play, directed with a stylish minimalism by Bruce Myles, Kate Fitzpatrick plays a wealthy philanthropist who invites her three lovers - recipients of the favours of her foundation, as well as her bed - to her husband's funeral. Her husband represents, I suppose, Global Capitalism (he has "no character", but he has lots of money, a predatory sexual attraction towards third world children and a karmic cancer). The three lovers represent Science (Greg Stone), Culture (Peter Curtin) and Literature (Todd MacDonald). Julia herself, if we are to follow the allegory - if, indeed, it is an allegory - is the desperately compromised human conscience, haunted by the world's evils and attempting to change what she can.



Gentle reader, I confess; I was mainly bored. But I must be growing up, for I didn't walk out spitting with anger. Instead, Julia 3 left me worrying at a bunch of questions. For instance: is this play really as vacuous as it appears to be, or is Gurr being ironic? Has he in fact written an attack on the covert corruption of the liberal humanist, pointing out the complacency of the cultural imperialism which writes the whole world in the West's image? Or, instead, is he serious when he seems to be saying that nice rich people can change the world, by arranging the murders of the nasty rich people who cause all the suffering?

If he's serious on that last point, which is possible, the play begs a lot of questions. For instance - global capitalism is surely not a phenomenon driven, like a nineteenth century steel mill, by a top-hatted Captain of Industry, but a staggeringly complicated, gargantuan network of financial forces and institutions. Gurr is certainly not advocating structural change - the money can stay where it is, it seems, as long as it behaves decently to those less fortunate than itself. Or is it that the assassinations are supposed to be ironic, the ultimate corruption: capitalism turning on itself, like a senile mother cat eating her kittens?

But then again, if Gurr is being ironic, why all the conscience tweaking, the endless descriptions of third world suffering, those poor Others who live in appalling circumstances because of Us? And (more insidiously) why is Charlie the writer, a young man with pretensions worthy of the pen of Stella Gibbons, the only representative of Western culture who gets away with a shred of moral probity? (More troubling still, he is writing a book of ponderous ineffability, about Love...)

So it is that I can't get any purchase on this work; my mind glides off it. Watching it, I found myself gloomily remembering Harold Pinter's 1996 play Ashes to Ashes, which inhabits similar territory to Julia 3. But unlike Gurr, Pinter can take the minutae and superficialities of middle class life and reveal its hidden profundities, its beauty and and its atrocity.

Ashes to Ashes is a dialogue between a man and a woman in a drawing room, a conversation which keeps circling around an infidelity. Pinter ritualises the dialogue, which is allusive, evasive and, indefinably, more and more threatening, until he is able to make a real imaginative connection between the atrocities of Nazi Germany and this drawing room conversation. He builds towards a profoundly intimate sense of shock, which illuminates Hannah Arendt's argument about the banality of evil with a new emotional understanding.

Like Mountain Language, another of Pinter's later political works, Ashes to Ashes is a poetic play which deals with questions of moral complicity. But Pinter takes Emily Dickinson's advice, and tells the truth slant. His moral and political subtleties highlight what is fuzzy or badly thought through in Gurr's work; and most importantly, as a dramatist Pinter generates a charge of feeling which is seriously lacking in Julia 3.

It troubled me also that Gurr does not question the actual representation of atrocity. It is enough, he suggests, to describe it, to imagine it, to be aware of the "soft avalanche of disasters" which fill the morning newspapers. Yet the representation of atrocity as we know it becomes a kind of voyeurism, yet another form of exploitation; even, perhaps, a subtle form of colonisation, in which the victim as abject Other is enfolded into a wholly Western subjectivity. This is never questioned in this play. And the constant iteration of suffering in Julia's monologues has, like its equivalent on the news, an anaesthetic effect.

Gurr has written a poetic play, the kind of drama which depends on metaphorical connections and a dynamic of feeling, rather than more conventional dramatic machineries. My problem with it is that it contains scarcely any poetry. Aside from a little time travel between the present of the funeral and six months before, Julia 3 seldom pushes its realities beyond the literal. What does stay with me from the play is a dreamlike monologue in which Julia describes buying a hairbrush from a woman in a department store whose name tag has "apostrophes in it".

She began to brush her hair to show me how soft and delightful it was. And as she brushed, the blood began to come. First in drops, then in clusters and streams.... She wanted me to have the best. And by the time I left the blood was in her eyes and she had to blink it out, that black-red blood spreading from her scalp to her neck, but she never stopped smiling and she never stopped brushing.

This speech conjures a more complex subjective reality than is otherwise offered, and for me signalled a point where the writing began to become alive, to truly imagine itself, and the horror Gurr had been attempting to describe in monologue after desensitising monologue at last became visceral and disturbing.

(A serendipitous aside: while thinking about this, I stumbled across an interview with the performance artist Marina Abramovic. She describes her work Art must be beautiful, Artist must be beautiful thus: "I brush my hair with a metal brush held in my right hand and simultaneously comb my hair with a metal comb held in my left hand. While so doing, I continuously repeat: 'Art must be beautiful. Artist must be beautiful', until I have destroyed my hair and face".)

I realise it's unfair to worry the play to the exclusion of the production, especially as it has a fine design and a committed cast. Kate Fitzpatrick is so well cast the part might have been written for her, and she is ably supported by her "gentlemen", despite the thinness of the characters they must play. Peter Curtin gives a complex and humane performance as Leon, the art curator who is making his own compromises, and Greg Stone is all aggression and testosterone as the oncologist Joe. Todd MacDonald does his best as the young writer Charlie, and I really don't think he is responsible for the fact that his character annoys me beyond measure.

In Christina Smith's design, the stage of the Beckett is at first shrouded by a black theatre curtain. But instead of the curtain rising when the play begins, it is lit from behind, so it becomes a funereary veil, an image which beautifully introduces the notion that the whole of this reality exists within Julia's mind. And there was one moment of extraordinary stage magic - a newspaper on a table, its pages turning by themselves, as if it were being read by a ghost.

Kate Fitzpatrick and Greg Stone in Julia 3. Picture: Ponch Hawkes

Playbox Theatre Company

In which the PLAYWRIGHT (Abe Pogos) and the CRITIC (Alison Croggon) come to fisticuffs. Er, actually, no - in which two writers attempt to have a discussion about what matters to each of them about drama, following the criticism by one of the other's work. This is an edited version of a private email exchange, which Abe has very kindly permitted me to post here. This kind of dialogue will, I hope, be an irregular feature on the blog.

- AC

Dear Alison

Sorry I've taken so long to get back to you about your review.

I've decided not to post a response on your web site. I had a number of gos at a detailed analysis but I couldn't come up with anything I was happy with. When I tried to be funny I sounded bitchy, when I tried to be serious I sounded boring. Inevitably I found myself writing a review of my own play and I just felt embarrassed.

I gave up on trying to write an essay (I also gave up on trying to respond with a film script, an opera and an epic poem) and I've just included some general responses.

I felt that to some extent you reviewed the play according to expectations that were raised by the blurb on the Currency edition and that one of the play's failures was that it didn't live up to those expectations. I think the blurb (which I didn't write) unduly influenced you into placing emphasis on what I think are secondary concerns in the play. As a thesis on racism and genocide the play may be limited. While those issues are part of the fabric of the play I don't think they're the most important aspect. I wished you'd engaged more directly with the narrative and the drama of the piece which seemed to me to focus more on other things. The clue to what those things might be is somewhere in the following territory:

When Joan enters in the play's opening scene, the four characters on stage are the same ones who appear at the very end. In that first scene Joan discovers Toby being beaten by Christie under the authority of Duke. In the final seconds of the play Joan is weeping over the body of Christie who has been murdered by Toby while Duke is offering Toby Christie's badge. Joan is weeping over Christie oblivious to the fact that he has killed her first lover, Duke is offering Toby the badge oblivious to the fact that he's murdered Christie and Toby is on the ground whimpering in despair in spite of the fact he's been offered the two things he asked for at the beginning of the play (to be held and to be a sheriff).

I'm not sure what the moral of all that is, but the meaning of the play and its themes are contained in the sweep of the story and its ending, and the issue of racism is one part of it. You said the play has some "terrific bits...but where's the whole?" It begins in scene one and includes all the steps that take us to a climax where all the characters' and their relationships to one another have drastically changed. Directly or indirectly every scene leads to that climax and in that sense the play is organic and logical. That doesn't automatically make the play entertaining or compelling (and if you're right and the characters are unbelievable then the play fails anyway) but I'd argue there is a fundamental sense of design that you didn't see. It seemed like you decided or assumed what the play's themes ought to be or were trying to be, then got discombobulated because the narrative didn't stack up . Again I think it's because your emphasis on its themes and intentions was misplaced (I blame the blurb).

You make an attempt to state what my intentions were:

PLAYWRIGHT: I wanted to show how easy it is for people to become - other. For people to be made afraid of anyone different, and then to become cruel and murderous.

I'd argue the emphasis is the other way around. My starting point was to see what might happen if an outsider tried to gain acceptance by embracing the bigotry that marginalised him in the first place. You may argue that the Blood Libel story that Duke tells is evidence that I was attempting to analyse and deconstruct genocidal beliefs, but when I interpret the action of the scene (act 1, scene 10) I think it has a different dramatic focus.

In the scene Duke tells Toby about a child murder blamed on Gypsies some years earlier. What's most important to me is not the detail of the history lesson, but the fact that Duke is giving Toby a history lesson at all. Why? He despises Toby. It's because Duke has experienced a succession of humiliations to his dignity and his authority. He has been stripped of power and status. He can't sack Christie, he's afraid of Garth and young boys bare their arses at him. In fact his whole journey through the play is about loss of power and identity and his attempts to regain it (one reason why the scapegoating of Gypsies becomes crucial to him). He wants to be "a beacon for others" but they ignore him, so he is reduced to giving a drunken history lesson to someone on the lowest rung of the food chain and the only person who takes him seriously. The scene is not primarily about what Duke is saying, but what Duke is doing, or more importantly being; a teacher, a mentor, a father figure, an officer of the law, all the things that give him identity and status.

At the end of your review you say:

CRITIC: I thought and thought. Racism isn't about hallucinations and madness.

Again, I disagree with your emphasis. Duke's racism is a given which is there at the beginning of the play and he has no problem with it. It's what happens to him through the course of the play that sends him spiralling downward. I don't think the play is saying that racism is about madness (though I think Duke's Blood Libel story does demonstrate both "skewed realities" and "a certain kind of emotional logic"), but it might be saying that Duke's madness is a consequence of loss of power and status. (Incidentally, that's also what I think his Alien hallucination is about. Duke, having just been stripped of his badge, begins to doubt himself and God. He hallucinates another kind of divine entity that will end his torment, but even that leads to further humiliation.)

The following passage is from one of my failed attempts to write a detailed analysis of your review.

CRITIC: Suddenly it's not about these people arguing, instead they're talking about the Law. Suddenly a whole lot of imponderables and abstracts enter the conversation. Suddenly the life goes out of it.

The discussion of the law is on page one of the script. It spans about three sentences and it's not really about the law. Christie is using the law as an excuse for disengaging himself from the fool he's in the process of robbing. There's nothing imponderable or abstract about it. Also, it's an inextricable part of their argument, not something that takes place instead of their argument. When Duke enters the tension that began the play continues. If the life goes out of it, it's not because imponderables or abstracts enter the conversation. Whatever they're discussing, their actions and objectives remain constant throughout; Toby seeking acceptance, the sheriffs rejecting him. The scene is organic and logical. It doesn't begin as one thing and derail to become something else. If it fails it's for other reasons. You then suggest one of these reasons:

CRITIC: ... if you're dealing in imponderables and abstractions, (I don't think I was but anyway) if the characters are telling us all the time what they're thinking instead of, well, just thinking it - or even not just thinking it, but being it, at a level below consciousness - then it all becomes a bit too self conscious.

Trying to prove the play isn't self conscious is too abstract and imponderable for me. And if self consciousness is a fault in Toby that isn't the inevitable consequence of filling the play with characters that are "telling us all the time what they re thinking". The characters in Toby tell us what they think far less than in masterpieces like Macbeth or Long Day's Journey Into Night. It also doesn't inevitably follow that characters who constantly tell us what they think are incapable of "being...at a level below consciousness". In any decent play characters should be more than what they tell us. What you're suggesting is that my characters are only what they tell us and this makes it impossible for the actors to live inside the characters or behave in character, that my dialogue forces actors to describe, explain or illustrate the character they're playing so they can t really be the character:

CRITIC: It all ends up being like the shape of things, rather than the things themselves.

I believe all my characters allow actors to achieve a state of "being...at a level below consciousness" but there's nothing definitive in the text that I can show you to prove the point. In fact it's almost a contradiction if I could show you. How can they be at a level below consciousness if the text makes it explicit?

Anyway, my characters are not telling us all the time what they're thinking. Most of the characters lie and deceive at crisis points throughout the play and Christie, the second most prominent character in the play, lies and deceives in almost every scene he's in. Again that doesn't mean it's a good play but I question the way you've characterised its flaws.

CRITIC: And seeing as it's set in a (The CRITIC checks the back of the book) nineteenth century European village - don't you think it could have been a little more - specific? More like a nineteenth century European village?...It didn't seem like a nineteenth century European village at all.

Your complaint about the European village makes my head hurt. Maybe we can chat about it over a coffee one day.

You said there were only a couple of times when you believed the characters. I'll respond to the one character you dissect in any detail, Joan.

CRITIC: But I just don't understand why that girl Joan - played by Tess Butler - had to be so Pollyanna. She seemed the most symbolic of the characters, she might as well have had "WOMAN" tattooed on her forehead, how the men all owned her, how obedient she was, how her sexuality was her only means of power. I didn't believe her for a second. What can a performer do with that?

If Joanne is a Pollyanna at the beginning she isn't by the end. She s not a Pollyanna anyway and she isn't particularly obedient and her sexuality isn't her only means of power. She uses ridicule and shame and eventually lies and deceives. The fact that the men try and own her doesn't mean they actually do. They defer to her constantly and when her lover, Garth, says "she's mine", he can only say it out of earshot because he's in the process of a deception that he knows she won't tolerate. Lots of people didn't like Joan because they thought she was conceited, manipulative and ultimately opportunistic and duplicitous, not because they thought she wasn't real. She's not the greatest female role in theatre history but her actions are clear, she drives the scenes she's in, and she goes on a journey that means she's in a different emotional space by the end of the play. A performer can do a lot with that.

Abe


Hi Abe

Cor!

I’m not sure that what is basically a light review can stand or in fact deserves such close analysis; some of your objections are to comments that are basically jokes, since much of the review is a satire on the whole process of criticising in the first place. The only really serious bits are at the end, when I talk about Woyzeck and grapple with the problem of moralising that happens in spite of itself (this is actually an attempt to think about a question which I think is really about form, and how possible it is to subvert it).

No, I wasn’t influenced by the blurb. I don’t take blurbs seriously, can’t write them myself since they always seem like pure corn to me – I always get other people to write them for my own books - but some critics do. That comment is in fact a satirical aside on critics who do that (or take their lead from press releases, a bugbear of mine).

As for your other points: I’m not sure I’m going to be able to articulate what I mean. My main real criticisms of Toby were firstly its metaphorical problems, because the metaphor of the play, and its internal metaphors (the alien &c) were I felt extremely confused; and secondly its dramatic language, which fell too often out of the gestic and into these abstractions - in fact, in your defences of it, I felt that those abstractions loomed large - speaking for instance of "objectives" in a scene is already a step away from a character's actual being, and into psychology (I think psychologising is one of the enormous problems, nay falsities, of much contemporary drama, and one of THE great abstractions).

Say - the aim of wanting objectives to remain "constant" through a scene is, in my mind, a real problem, since all interesting drama is about derailment in one way or another. Which is to say, the interest of drama or characterisation is not in the constants, which may or may not be there, but in the dislocations - obvious in Strindberg or Barker or Shakespeare say, not so obvious in Ibsen or Chekhov, but I would still absolutely argue it. Toby was the best character in the play, and the only one who didn't seem to have some kind of ultimately didactic role in which their behaviour meant something and was designed to achieve something beyond themselves (what does Beckett say about "we're not beginning to mean something?", Hamm, or was it Clov?); everyone else seemed to be symbolising something, fulfilling some role inside the plot, and didn't have a life beyond that. Now you would say that Macbeth is being symbolic beyond himself, and I would agree, but not primarily: he is all sorts of things, abstractly speaking, which represent all sorts of things about human beings, if you care to make him so: but first of all, he is Macbeth - a fictional, imagined character - and these other things are incidental next to that fact.

Not sure if this is clear, but I suspect that within this conversation is a real difference about what we both consider drama to be. Which is always an interesting point to begin. I want it to be poetic, and by that I mean a whole raft of stuff which I really can't write down here. The things you want from it are maybe more prosaic (I'm not attaching value judgements to either of these descriptions, btw, I write a lot of prose...)

I still think it would be interesting to have this conversation on the blog, with all its difficulties and reservations of presentation and expression.

A


Dear Alison,

I did wonder if you were doing an impression of a bad critic but I wasn't game to say it. The fact that you indicate that you had serious critical points to make at the end of the review muddies the satire.

I won't go into what you've written here in too much detail for now (I've already spent five hours on the earlier correspondence). I do think a discussion of what we mean by drama is worth considering and I was thinking of asking you to look at extracts from Toby that embody your reservations, and compare them to extracts from any other play of your choice that embody your values. Obviously Toby won't compare to Shakespeare or any work of genius, but my issue is not about it's relative quality, but about the way the dramatic impulse functions. I guess I want to see if you can show me examples to demonstrate your argument.

I'm not sure what you mean by abstractions. I also don't understand what you mean when you say "speaking for instance of "objectives" in a scene is already a step away from a character's actual being, and into psychology. "(I think psychologising is one of the enormous problems, nay falsities, of much contemporary drama, and one of THE great abstractions). Say - the aim of wanting objectives to remain "constant" through a scene is, in my mind, a real problem, since all interesting drama is about derailment in one way or another."

I don't see how you can divorce someone's objectives from "their actual being" and I wonder if there is a confusion of what we mean by our terms. I even wonder what you mean by "derailment" because I'd have thought there was quite a bit of it in Toby. (I should have a read of Woyzeck.)

Abe


Hi Abe

I've been thinking in a troubled fashion about what we've been saying.

I am shocked you haven't read Woyzeck. I mean, it's not like it's a minor or unimportant play or something; it's the beginning of modern drama. There's a film by Werner Herzog with Klaus Kinski which isn't bad, but you should read it, and a good translation; I've got about five different versions, and some are much better than others. The thing is that Buchner didn't finish it before he died, and so nobody knows what order the scenes should be in. But I digress.

This business about having objectives and thwartedness being the essence of the dramatic seems incredibly reductive to me. Yes, of course, you can look at most plays and figure out objectives for each character, but if the play is any good, you won't be revealing anything interesting about what's going on by doing so, because you'll have to ignore about 90 per cent of what is actually happening in a scene. Conflict is about so much more than that, and drama is about so much more than conflict. Shakespeare is about the most un-psychological writer there is, but even Ibsen doesn't do that (people forget that his first plays were verse dramas, and that his naturalism is inherently poetic).

What about the formal attributes of writing? Of language? Do you think that the dramatic impulse has nothing to do with these things?

And a question: this emanates from my experience of writing character-based novels as much as any reading or watching plays. Do you ever not know what a character is doing, or why they're doing it?

A

I haven't yet dealt with stuff about poetics and language. Anyway...

I don't know if the idea of "having objectives and thwartedness" is "the essence of the dramatic" but it's a good place to start.

"Let's go/We can't/Why not?/We're waiting for Godot."

The idea of struggle is at the heart of most drama. Characters striving for more than they have - or at least keeping what they've got - and the possibility of failure or loss is what engages audiences because these things resonate in our lives.

The issue about having objectives is a practical one. How do actors bring a text to life without having objectives? A text may embody many layers of meaning, be full of ambiguities, mystery, poetry and may be open to many possibilities as to how it may be performed, but actors can't play them all. They have to be selective and find an impulse to bring the thing to life. Having objectives (what do I want?) is a fundamental animating impulse of drama, and it's the actions (what am I doing?) a character plays to achieve their objective that defines character.

Defining an objective doesn't have to be "reductive" or mean you have to "ignore about 90 per cent of what is actually happening in a scene". If the text has mystery or ambiguity actors can convey that without actually playing it (in fact I don't think you can play mystery or ambiguity). Defining an objective can also be a key to revealing layers of meaning that may not be apparent on reading a text. I'll use the example of the Cheek By Jowl production of Othello which I described to you recently.

"Emilia in this production was presented as a woman who truly loved Iago and their relationship had once been loving and passionate. Her objective was to somehow rekindle their love and the scene when she gives Iago Desdemona's hanky was playful and sexy. We then saw Iago cruelly extricating himself from Emilia's advances once he gets the hanky. It conveyed the sense of Emilia's bewilderment at a breach in their relationship which Iago has never spoken about. Like Desdemona, Emilia is in the dark as to what's gone wrong. At the end when Emilia discovers how Iago has used the hanky, her sense of betrayal and loss is palpable on many levels. The tragic heart of the play in this production is not with Othello, it is with Emilia."

Assuming my interpretation is in the right ballpark, Emilia's objective of trying to win back Iago added a layer of meaning and texture that seemed to resonate throughout the play. For one thing, it drew a parallel between Emilia's journey and Desdemona's - something that had never occurred to me before.

In response to the question "Do you ever not know what a character is doing, or why they're doing it?"

In that moment when I imagine what the characters are saying or doing to one another I usually know why. I may not know everything about that moment and with time and reflection I'll come to understand that there are more dimensions to what that moment means then I realised at the time, but in that moment I can usually articulate what a character's actions are about. That may sound reductive but at some point I'm going to be in a rehearsal room and an actor or director will come up to me because that moment is not working and they'll ask, why is the character doing or saying that? To me it's a cop out to say I don't know. I read an interview with a playwright/director who said that if a writer was in a rehearsal room and couldn't get up and demonstrate how a line or scene works, then they had noright to expect an actor to solve the problem for them. I wouldn't go that far (I can't act for one thing) but if I'm expecting an actor to invest their time, craft and humanity in realising my work in performance, I should be able to impart some clue to help them if they don't understand me. if I can't help them then I should consider re-writing.

I'd be curious to know what your experience has been in regard to this question (in the writing process and in the rehearsal room).

More importantly, did you ever do something without knowing what you were doing or why you were doing it? (Anything you might have done under the influence of substances doesn't count.)

Another question.

What you think of notions of identification? A fundamental of any script is having someone we identify with. If we don't identify at some level, why should we care?

Abe


Hi Abe

I think we have to make a distinction between what actors might (think they) want from a text and the processes and experiences of writing. Actors always ask questions of a text, this almost goes without saying. And often what they say is very interesting and illuminating. But that does not mean that their questions ought to be answered all the time: and I think it is perfectly possible, even desirable, to write a credible character who says or does something that you don't fully understand; and if that happens, the only honest answer is that you don't know. It might be far better to let an actor or a director make certain specific decisions about a text, following his or her own creative intuitions, than to permit the actor to think that someone else has the ultimate answers. That is, after all, the actor's work. The writer's work is to make a text which permits the occasion of the actor's work: that is a writer's full and actually total obligation. (You can't ask any questions if the author is dead.) If the words on the page do not provide enough for the actor to work with, then no amount of explanation by the author is going to make up the deficit.

Now, this is not to deny that writers and actors can both very often be stupid about each other's, and very often their own, work. I am trying to imagine the best possible circumstances, rather than the worst. We both know how easy it is to fail in the theatre, and how very difficult it is to make all these elements work. Let's take that as a given.

The fact is that the actor, in having to create a character on stage night after night, is the person with the ultimate answer in any particular production of a play. And one actor will find one definitive answer in a particular production, and another actor another equally definitive - but perhaps startlingly contradictory - answer in another one. Both answers will be equally derived from the text, equally "true", which suggests that the text can encompass both contradictory readings. And this suggests that a text might have something that particular actors don't want or need, some kind of surplus, and actors might have something that is beyond the text. So these questions about actorly and writerly characterisation, while being superficially related, might actually be about very different aspects of a text.

Also, if an actor asks a writer a question about a character, it is with the assumption that the writer knows better than the actor, and has a final authority in declaiming on his/her text. I would seriously question that authority.

I think a writer ought to know everything possible about the aesthetic/formal decisions he or she has made. He/she should know everything he/she brings to making a work: its antecedents, its influences, its devices, its structure/architecture, the usages of syntax, the etymologies of words, the allusions, and so on. The better a writer is, the more conscious he/she is of all the gross and minute formal aspects of any particular piece of writing. I think Shakespeare is like this. (I'm sick of this he/she thing, I'll just use one or the other from now on) But there are things that a writer does not and should not know, although she might guess or hope. These things are, I believe, to do with the emotional life and affect of a text. This is the stuff that you can't be wholly conscious about, but which is absolutely vital to the ultimate coherency of even the most fragmentary text (eg Muller). You can't be wholly conscious about it, because, if brought into consciousness, these aspects immediately go absolutely dead and lose their potency. They have to exercise some kind of kinetic, potential charge below the surface level of the text (as you suggest). To go back to the question of the actor, this emotional affect is what an actor will respond to - most actors, in my experience, and certainly most of the best actors I have talked to, are quite inarticulate about their process: they seem to work primarily physically and intuitively, exploring some sense of "rightness". When the actor's inarticulacy meets and expresses a writer's inarticulacy, all those things that can't be said but are inherent somehow within the words, something happens.

I don't want to be mystical. Nevertheless, I think what one doesn't know, what one can't pin down, what is unpredictable, is extremely important in any creative process. You would probably say this is a cop-out. But I would suggest the opposite: that to embrace and accept what you don't know is to accept the full responsibility of your vocation, to "dance over the abyss", as Nietzsche says. To know what your work is doing all the time is a desire to possess meaning, to pin it down, and the fact is that meaning is not a possessible quality. Meaning is evanescent and contingent: if theatre has taught me anything, it is the importance of context and temporality. Also, the feeling of any text (prose, poem, play) is for me a vastly important aspect of its meaning, as are its formal qualities. These things - formal qualities and feeling - are not vehicles in which "meaning" is conveyed from writer to actor to audience. One simply cannot possess all the meanings of a text, even - or even especially - if one has written it (check out Blanchot on the question of the impossibility of authors reading their own work - I think he's right).

So, to answer your question: have I ever done anything without knowing what I was doing? The answer is, sadly, yes, even without substance abuse (in real life, I do not necessarily think this is a good thing; in fact, it is not the same question). In the realm of writing, it is most certainly "yes". I have finished stories and plays in order to find out what happened at the end. I never know what a poem is going to be before I write it, and I wrote a whole 450 page narrative novel with no idea what was going to happen next, or what my characters were going to say or do. Even when a narrative is planned, there is still an enormous indeterminacy in the writing of it. Writing for me is almost wholly a process of discovery, otherwise I couldn't imagine why the hell I would do it. When the process works, and sometimes it does, it looks as if you meant it all along. But you didn't.

Saying a play or a character is about an objective is reductive, without question, if you think it is the only or primary thing that matters in the texture and the meaning of the play. Any moment of any person's life is very complicated: at the moment, I am thinking about this, while Ben is nagging me to go to the park, and so part of me is thinking about that; the temperature has just dropped in the past five minutes; I must finish off the washing for school tomorrow; and I ought to turn the light on, as the room is getting dark. And so on... It is very seldom that only one thing happens in anybody's mind, and a good text gives the illusion - and it is an illusion - of that kind of complexity. There may be an overriding objective which drives the text, but it operates on a gross level: what makes a play interesting is all the things happening underneath that informing arc, and perhaps most of all, their contradictions. To take a crass example: Iago's objective is to destroy Othello: why is it, then, that you're sure that he loves him?

- Also, and this is a big problem I have with the Objective School, it ignores the whole question of metaphor. And I think metaphor is so crucial to theatre and theatre writing that I don't know how theatre can be talked about without it. And yet almost nobody does. As soon as an actor is on a stage, without opening his mouth, it is a metaphor. It is at once itself - the banal fact of a human being on a stage - and something else - The Theatre! Another reality, which is inherently unreal and poetic and exists in the dimensions of imagination.

As for notions of identification: it really depends on what you're writing. In my young adult novels, I write characters who are absolutely to be identified with: when fans write me "I am Maerad", I am well pleased. Maerad is an attractive character, and she embodies all sorts of terrible problems about the self that young people can passionately see in themselves. This is partly because I am writing something that I want to be popular literature, and because of the kind of book it is. It is by no means the only thing that is going on in these texts, but it is a means by which I am able to manage a number of other things which interest me.

But I don't think this question of identification matters as a universal law: I disagree that it is a "fundamental of any script". What about a play like Offending the Audience? Barker's work? (Who do identify with in The Europeans or Victory?) Heiner Muller? Brecht? &c &c, there are hundreds of examples. There are many reasons to be interested in a script, and identifying with a character is only one of them. Brecht would perhaps say that this question of identification is absolutely about pandering to an audience, about making a text "safe". This is when the question of identification becomes, as it most often does, a question of "liking" a character. It's a common criticism that characters in a piece are unlikeable, and nothing makes film producers more nervous than unlikeable characters. And this functions as a huge leverage of censorship, of reality as much as of representation. The fact is that it is possible to wholly dislike a character and yet find them fascinating - Heathcliff, say, in Wuthering Heights, is one of the most compelling characters in literature. Yet have a look at Bunuel's film, the only one which really gets Bronte's savagery, and see how cruel he is, how deeply unlikeable.

That's a really complicated question, and I have probably written enough. And now I really have to go and do the washing!

A

Take Me Out by Richard Greenberg, directed by Kate Cherry, designed by Richard Roberts. With Paul Bishop, Kenneth Ransom and Jeremy Lindsey Taylor. Melbourne Theatre Company at the Arts Centre Playhouse, until October 2.

As cricket is to the English, so is baseball to the Americans: a pastoral dream of green fields peopled by shining gods. And being, like cricket, a "metaphor for life", it's inspired some pretty silly remarks. Among the sillier, Richard Greenberg's grandiose declamation that "baseball achieves the tragic vision that democracy evades" can hang with honour. (Unlike democracy, it seems, baseball has losers). Or, even better: "Baseball is a perfect metaphor for hope in a democratic society". Is the real problem in Baghdad that they don't play baseball?

Despite the undeniable comedy of Take Me Out, there's no getting away from the earnestness that underlies it. This is a play about identity; more specifically, it's a play about American identity, a particularly anguished question at the moment. And against the interior blankness of two of the central characters - the charismatic player who comes out of the locker, unexpectedly announcing during a press conference that he is gay, and the white trash pitcher who objects to "showering with a faggot" - is set the nostalgic romance of The Game.

Darren Lemming (Kenneth Ransom) is the star hitter of the Empires, a team rather like the New York Yankees, and his blankness is characterised by an unironic narcissism, an unchallenged sense of self-importance and centrality which segues gradually to a corrosive loneliness. "I don't have a secret," he says. "I am a secret." His polar opposite is the pitcher Shane Mungitt (Jeremy Lindsey Taylor), the ultimate untermensch, whose inarticulacy is matched by his lack of self awareness. The product of a childhood as nightmarish as underclass America can dish up, he is the acme of down south bigotry, complaining about "spics" and "niggers". But as becomes clear, the differences between these two players - one adored, one reviled - are eclipsed by what they have in common, which is their inner emptiness and violence. They are, Greenberg seems to be saying, the two faces of contemporary America, and each is tacitly and hostilely dependent on the other.

Greenberg is most at home in the earlier part of the play, when he is writing what is really a kind of camp Seinfeld: Lemming's dealings with his thicko compadres after his coming out are all urbane New York wit, with a light but pointed hilarity poking fun at political correctness or victim culture. When the play becomes more portentous, it is less successful; despite a couple of very powerfully-written scenes, the energy sighs out of it. Not uncoincidentally, that's when the big-picture metaphors about baseball really start flying around.

Kate Cherry's production is slick and fast moving, supported by a strong cast, and overcomes the problem of overblown rhetoric by camping it up (it seems in New York that the baseball epiphanies were said in all seriousness: that would definitely not have worked in Australia). This undercutting irony works very well in the first half of the evening, but after interval the play requires a shift of strategy which is not forthcoming, and the production and the performances lose conviction.

Although I think the production could have dealt differently with the second half, I wondered how much this slackening of energy had to do with the play's structure. (Or maybe it's just that the American Dream has been Dreamed to Death). This play's bloodlines are impeccably American - out of Arthur Miller by Malamud's The Natural - but it is written as if theatre stopped evolving after A View from a Bridge. It even has a couple of narrators - Kippy Sunderstrom, adeptly played by Paul Bishop, a similar figure to Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, and Greenberg's self-confessed mouthpiece Mason Marzac, an appealingly crumpled performance by Simon Burke, who is baseball's naive enthusiast and its real heart. Together they orchestrate a classic three-act structure which seems, like the pastoral echo of baseball itself, almost quaintly old fashioned. As the action gets more serious, the narration become more intrusive: in the end, it's hard to see why it is there, except as a means of neatly tying up the stories.

And, perhaps, the narrative deflects some of the play's emotional bleakness: that is, it shields the audience from the implications of the play, as perhaps baseball (I am almost sure that Greenberg does not mean this, though I find it an irresistible conclusion) shields the soul of America from its inner emptiness. In which case, Take Me Out very neatly fits Brecht's description of bourgeois theatre, affirming rather than challenging its audience. Essentially it's an extended sitcom, and it can't bear the weight of tragedy without becoming overblown and self important. It aims for the grandeur and sweep of Angels in America, another gay fantasia on the American soul, but without Kushner's political savagery or fatal beauty, it settles finally for the winsome. I suspect America deserves worse.

Melbourne Theatre Company

Terrorism by the Presnyakov Brothers. Directed by Victor Bizzotto, designed by Douglas Iain-Smith, with Adam May, Romy Lor, Sophie Kelly, Paul Denny, Julie Eckersley, Paul Reichenstein, Lyndal Hall and Luke Elliot. Theatre@risk, Fortyfive Downstairs until September 12.

Writing plays is a delicately negotiated compromise between the subtleties of literary ambition and the pragmatic limitations of the stage. On the evidence of Terrorism, the Presnyakov Brothers negotiate with style. It has a brutal elegance, the kind of brilliantly nuanced crudity which heralds notable theatre.

The play opens with a bomb scare at an airport that sparks a banal discussion between three passengers on the nature of terrorism. Terrorism, we are told, gains its power by its reasonlessness: anyone might be its target, and being an innocent civilian is no protection. Its only aim is fear, by which we are manipulated and controlled...

This was one of a few occasions where I sniffed didacticism, feeling that I was being patronised by the writers. But on reflection, I suspect that this is a problem with the production rather than the text. The dialogue reflects the media-driven discourse around the word "terrorism" that the play is seeking to subvert, and I think is meant to function ironically, being the kind of anxious gossip that attempts to deflect or control fear. In this production, perhaps by default, it comes across as a frame through which the audience is directed to interpret the play. But as it unfolds, it becomes clear that Terrorism is by no means straightforward: by the end, it is not even clear if any of the events have actually happened, or if they have merely occurred inside the traumatised mind of one of the characters.

The play consists of six connected but autonomous scenes, through which the panic instilled by the bomb scare ripples and amplifies into something truly deadly. There are the adulterous lovers whose sexual games cross the line from play to real danger; the two grandmothers discussing murder; the boss who bullies his underlings to suicide; the brutal hazing of a soldier. In each of these scenes the Presnyakov Brothers peel back the veneer of normal social behaviours to reveal their potential murderousness. These scenes are where the real power of the play exists and, at their core, they are shockingly cruel. It is not so easy to sort out victim from criminal, the innocent from the guilty: everybody is implicated and no one, not even a child, is blameless. Terrorism is presented as a tyranny of fear which corrupts and brutalises even the most minute and everyday aspects of our lives.

The play is specifically Russian in many ways: its black absurdity, for instance, draws from a literary tradition as old as Gogol. The Presnyakov Brothers know that comedy is inherently cruel and voyeuristic, that the man slipping on a banana skin isn't as far from souvenir atrocity photos as we would like to think, and they fully exploit this knowledge in their writing. But the play's clear-eyed dissections of brutality strike uncomfortable resonances, and touch some of our deepest contemporary fears.

It ought to be both frightening and hilarious, but theatre@risk gives it a rather prophylactic production. Apart from the problems of a largely young and under-rehearsed cast, Victor Bizzotto's direction has a fussy, drama-school feel about it, with over-choreographed scene changes which diffuse the energy of the writing. There is also a strange sense of kitsch, an edge of camp: I suspect this is an attempt to grapple with the comedic aspects of the writing which substitutes for dealing with its confrontational brutality. As a result, performances waver in and out of focus, giving occasional glimpses of what the play might be; only Julie Eckersley consistently achieves the unsentimental accuracy which can release the text's comedy and pathos.

These problems are amplified by Douglas Iain Smith's set, which consists of a number of pastel-coloured canvases neatly hung around the white gallery space. The setting muffles rather than illuminates the play, containing its confrontations within a context of consumable cultural display. The seating is arranged lengthwise, perhaps the least felicitious arrangement for this space since, unless you are in the front row, there are almost no good sightlines. It also means that getting actors on and off stage includes a long walk, which slows down further the orchestration of the action.

The first thing I noticed when I got into the theatre was that the program was printed on high quality glossy paper. Not, to quote Seinfeld, that there's anything wrong with that; if the gloss had heralded a deeper lustre, this might not have lodged in my mind. A small but telling detail was the absence of any credit for the English translator, whom I assume is Sasha Dugdale, the translator for last year's production at the Royal Court in London. Lack of resources is a constant dilemma for independent companies, and it's understandable that they might aspire to a mainstream PR slickness. But given that the production of this very interesting play was so drastically undercooked, I wondered if this company's resources might not better be directed to the substance of its art.

theatre@risk
Fortyfive Downstairs

Dinner by Moira Buffini, directed by Julian Meyrick, designed by Ralph Myers, lighting by Paul Jackson. With Pamela Rabe, Neil Pigot, Alison Whyte, Brian Lipson, Stephen Curry, Robert Jordan and Ming-Zhu Hii. Melbourne Theatre Company at the Fairfax Studio, Victorian Arts Centre, until October 2.

Dinner left me at odds with myself. On the one hand, I was neither bored nor pained, and, in a general way, enjoyed myself. On the other, it scarce ruffled the surface of thought; if I hadn't had to write this, I should have almost totally forgotten about it by now. Back to the first hand, why should I object to something so totally harmless? And on the other, how can I not object to theatre so totally harmless?

And again - watching Pamela Rabe being febrile, feline, sexy, desolate, acidly witty and despairing all at once is a treat. Rabe is an Actress with a capital "A", and in a long black evening frock with diamantes she generates the sort of presence that makes strong persons swallow hard and lesser mortals involuntarily bow. The play is a perfect star vehicle, and Rabe adorns it with a predatory glitter among a high quality cast who, if they seldom challenge Rabe's centrality, each shine in their own way. I couldn't help wishing all this talent was lavished on a more worthy object, but I seemed alone in my reservations (I often am). The full-house audience loved it.

You see my difficulty: it's not as if I don't enjoy fluff, or even pap, especially if it's presented with style. It's just that I would prefer it to have a little substance.

As its title promises, the play follows a dinner thrown for her husband Lars (Neil Pigot) by society hostess Paige (Pamela Rabe) to celebrate the success of his sub-Nietzschean self-help book, Beyond Belief. She (or Buffini) has invited some carefully chosen representatives of Britain's intellectual elite for what is, I suppose, a kind of existential dinner party, in that its culinary meaninglessness reflects the pointlessness of life. The lucky guests include a dippy visual artist Wynne (Alison Whyte), who also happens to be Lars' mistress. Wynne's politician lover is invited but absent, as their relationship has just broken up because Wynne exhibited a painting of his genitals. The electronic media is represented by bimbo newsreader Sian (Ming-Zhu Hii), and the sciences by her new husband microbiologist Hal, an old friend of Paige and Lars who left his ex-wife suicidal when he abandoned her for younger flesh.

As a necessary sociological contrast, working-class van driver Mike (Stephen Curry) crashes in the fog and, after he comes to the house to ask for help, is installed as a guest in the place of the absent Member for Camberwell Green (he of the unwillingly publicised penis). Finally, a sinisterly efficient and silent waiter (Robert Jordan), hired through a mysterious web page whose motto is "Let me hold your coat and snicker", completes the set up. As the motto is meant to suggest, he is Eliot's "eternal Footman", an avatar of death.

Naturally, as the play progresses we understand the hypocrisies of these characters, how unpleasant, weak, selfish and vulnerable they are, blah blah (at this point I found my attention wandering, like it does, in fact, at the sorts of dinner parties where competitive wit substitutes for actual conversation). Wynne claims to be an artist of eroticism, but unsurprisingly is distinctly prudish; Lars' pseudo-Nietzschean philosophy turns out to be really a front for his mean-minded egocentricity; the bimbo news reader is in fact the brightest and bravest of all the guests, and the working class van driver - who has possibly burgled the house next door - the most honest.

So far, so BBC situation comedy. Dinner is dressed up with lashings of literary allusion, but that doesn't lift it into the realm of the literary. The literary allusion might in fact be part of the problem - kind of like what faux Stoppard would be if Stoppard were not faux in the first place. The effect is as if Buffini had rummaged through the attics of Western culture, emerging with a text that's nostalgically encrusted with decorative trinkets from a time when high culture really mattered. But in fact, its aesthetic heart is firmly with The Good Life.

In Julian Meyrick's stylish production the play fizzes from witticism to witticism, lurching through Paige's surreal and disgusting courses (Primodial Soup, Apocalypse of Lobster and, for dessert, Frozen Waste, each as nasty as they sound) towards what you know will be a black conclusion. Meyrick and designer Ralph Myers boldly set the play in the round, on an unadorned parquet revolve. Although this mucks up Buffini's "Last Supper" metaphor - the play is clearly written to be performed on a proscenium arch stage, with Da Vinci's painting as a visual reference - it permits some pretty flash scene changes, with neurotic violin music by Tim Dargaville highlighting a choreographic satire of social manners.

I am no nationalist, and abhor nationalistic arguments about art. But Dinner reminded me that we are a colony: we still bow to the Queen of England, although our interest is now lodged in the US Reserve Bank. Even if it did live up to its pretensions as social satire (the jury's out on that one), Dinner is so specifically English that it's hard to see the point of producing it here.

After all, what has Cool Britannia, Tony Blair's amoral and materialistic Brave New World, got to do with us? Our local brand of moral bankruptcy is of an entirely different breed: lacking the strange arrogance of having lost an empire, our crassnesses are underlaid by insecurity - what Donald Horne once famously dubbed the "cultural cringe". One of the cringe's symptoms is, not unincidentally, the way that insubstantial West End hits are picked up for our main stages. Dinner is as determinedly superficial as its characters or the social milieu it purports to criticise, and while it aims for the profundities of tragedy, can only attain the brief frisson of shock or surprise. Its pretensions towards absurdist drama can't excuse the emotional falsity of some its dramatic surprises, and it's this lack of emotional torque which makes it so forgettable.

If Dinner were a more profound play, it wouldn't matter where it was set. Unlike the work of Chekhov, or Orton, or Wilde, Buffini's play doesn't transcend its specific origins to enter the generous amplitudes of art. An afternoon's diversion, for sure; but one that painlessly drains out of your psyche, changing nothing.

Melbourne Theatre Company

Sweet Staccato Rising by Robert Reid. Directed by Lauren Taylor, with Hamish Michael and Lauren Urquhart. Theatre of Decay at The Store Room, until August 22.

Talking about my g-g-generation: nothing is calculated to make me feel more like J. Alfred Prufrock than some bouncy young artist insisting on his or her youth. It is unarguable that 40 is older than 20, and I guess quoting Eliot says it all: how last century can a creaking old ague-ridden carcass get?

But I can't help it, the ague or the age. So here one stands, rolling up the bottoms of one's trousers, checking out the crows' feet around one's eyes and that lascivious softening of the flesh that occurs around one's middle, if one pays too little attention to lifestyle clubs and botox. It is indisputable that I am over 38 (eew, old! they say with disgust of 38 in Sweet Staccato Rising) and wear my age gracelessly, if only to point out that disaffected youth didn't spring new-minted from the ground in 1984. And if Robert Reid's play Sweet Staccato Rising makes me feel my age - so what? Was it worth the discomfort? Or - perhaps more pertinently - was it in fact as discomforting as it sought to be?

Sweet Staccato Rising covers familiar territory. It tracks the alienated young lovers Gunner (Hamish Michael) and Slitfish (Lauren Urquhart) as they implode in mutual self-destruction. It's that old romance of sex and death, Bonnie and Clyde or Sid and Nancy for a new generation. I've never really bought into the generational concept, which seems to me a device invented by market researchers, but, for the record, Reid claims to speak for those born in the mid-80s "between two Gulf Wars", articulating a familiar nihilism which is nevertheless aggressively particular to contemporary Melbourne.

The play's parochial focus gave me pause, for a number of reasons. One danger is that its brand of suburban angst runs the risk of seeming little more than self-indulgent, a cry of rebellion which turns out to be no more than "nobody loves me". (But is there anything more, after all, to the young Brando's iconic sneer?) And admittedly, the endless eastern suburbs of Melbourne, especially when seen from a train window, are bleakness itself: the heartland that spawns Neighbours and Kath & Kim is mile after mile of identical suburbia, sterile and heart-shrinking, the only sign of vitality the graffiti which blazes garishly along kilometres of fencing. It's not surprising that, in this landscape, youth suicide statistics are among the highest in the world.

Still, it was the stifling petit bourgeois respectability of Charleville which engendered the incandescent talent of Arthur Rimbaud, probably the first and still arguably the greatest of adolescent rebel angels. It is poverties of spirit that are germane here, not material poverty, despite the statistics about youth poverty flashed, a la Brecht, onto the theatre wall. Gunner and Slitfish are from the disenfranchised white middle class, not the underclass who inhabit towerblocks and caravan parks; they are not migrant workers or asylum seekers or disenfranchised indigenous people or, to begin with, homeless. Gunner might burn down his house, but he has a house to burn down in the first place: and it's a house with a lawn. Slitfish can afford a ticket to New Zealand, even if she is raped there. There are claims made for disenfranchisement which sit rather nervously over what is revealed in the play; I would have felt less bothered if there had been no claims, if I had been permitted simply to watch the story of these two abusive and abused young people. But this is theatre which seldom escapes a didactic edge.

Reid has written a series of dialogues which outline the limited arena of Gunner's and Slitfish's lives. They are given a high-octane delivery by Hamish Michael and Lauren Urquhart in two very interesting performances. Both are in clownish white-face make-up and lit only by white light in a black box theatre, and their physicality is jerky and artificial, as if they are marionettes or anarchic dolls. It's a risky strategy: these alienations only work sometimes, most effectively in the final scene, when the artifice of the direction and performance pays off in a true heightening of feeling. There is little attention to nuance in Lauren Taylor's direction, and although I admired the full-on, relentless assault of the energies of the performers and the play, the shock of dialogue delivered in a monotonal shout is one of diminishing returns. The effect is more often numbing than awakening.

The major problems with the production seemed to me to be in the writing itself. Sweet Staccato Rising aims for a tragic arc which drives towards a cathartic climax, but Reid has an uncertain grasp of the dramatic mechanics which make this possible, and the energies of the play are consequently largely dissipated in meandering dialogues. Despite a surface appearance of action, very little in fact happens until the final scene, where at last a real conflict occurs between the characters and the dialogue becomes forceful and dynamic and, dare I say it, moving.

The challenge in work like this is to create a mimesis of pointless and meandering lives without making the work itself meandering and pointless: it's a hard ask, and Reid only partially succeeds. I admire the ambition, which is the first ingredient of achievement, but I suspect this work is not ambitious enough. If it were, it might reach past its own naivetie, a nagging sense of narcissism which ultimately compromises its politics.

The Store Room

Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare, directed by David Freeman, designed by Dan Potra, lighting by Nigel Levings. Bell Shakespeare Company at the Arts Centre Playhouse to 21 August, Canberra Theatre Centre 25 August to 11 September, Illawarra Performing Arts Centre Wollongong 15 to 18 September, Sydney Opera House 23 September to 6 November, Orange Civic Theatre 10 to 13 November.

Twelfth Night is a confection supposedly written for Queen Elizabeth I and performed on Twelfth Night, the last day of Yule, which was traditionally celebrated with plays and mumming. Shakespeare whipped up a syllabub of gender-bending, drunken foolery and loutish mockery, punctuated by some exquisite speeches and haunting songs. It's a charming froth to sweeten the end of the midwinter season, and while it doesn't make a lot of sense, it does make a lot of theatre.

David Freeman, directing his first Australian production since he left these shores for Europe more than 30 years ago, is not shy of its sheer theatricality. Instead of forcing a leaden metaphor onto the hapless play, "updating" it by making it "relevant", Freeman permits Twelfth Night to play in a purely theatrical space which exists only in the imaginations of the actors and the audience. Any pandering to the literal is off the menu, and the comedy, released into the absurd, takes wings. And it's gloriously, bracingly vulgar: my inner groundling was tickled into irresponsible happiness. If there had been orange pips to spit my pleasure, I would have spat them.

However, Twelfth Night is not just a play of bawdy jokes and pratfalls: like all Shakespeare's comedies, it has its own brand of enchantment. The famous opening lines in which Orsino declares his love for Olivia, surely some of the loveliest in Shakespeare's lexicon, set the tone:

If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more:
'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.

Signalling his intentions early, Freeman changes Shakespeare's beginning. Instead, focusing on the twins Viola and Sebastian, Freeman swaps the first and second scenes, and opens with Viola (Caroline Craig) washed up on the shores of Illyria and vowing to dress as a man and serve the man she loves, Orsino (Julian Garner), in order to win his heart. This permits a spectacular curtain raiser, with a storm and real rain - and it also makes a neat rhyme with the fool's closing song ("the rain it raineth every day"), when the rain machine is again called into action. Orsino's famous speech comes second, and is undercut by a joke - Orsino is hooked up to an i-pod. It gets a good laugh, but I still missed the poetry.

There's no doubting the success of the comedy. This is character clowning as good as it gets; Sir Toby Belch (John Batchelor, in a suit that gives the irresistable impression that it must have grease on the collar), his brainless sidekick, Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Philip Dodd, replendent in black leather jacket and stove-pipe jeans) and Jonathan Hardy's Feste (in various states of tank-top-and-shorts undress) are the avatars of low humour, ably helped in ridiculousness by Billie Browne as Malvolio. The highlight of the night is the scene where Malvolio reads the forged letter which purportedly exposes Olivia's love for him, overheard by three conspirators unconvincingly posing as bushes. Here Freeman takes the unreality of the theatrical aside and pushes it to an extreme of absurdity, with Malvolio lounging against the very foliage that eavesdrops on him.

I couldn't help wondering whether the hilarity really had to be at the expense of the play's poetry: enchantment is as germane to this play as is laughter, and one of Shakespeare's masteries is that he saw neither quality as cancelling out the other. And it seems to me that there is a prurience in denying beauty as much as in the editing out of obscenity. Outrageous bum-flashing is, after all, always going to appeal to the hoi polloi, including me: and the introduction of a gratuitously Strine song after the interval, to underline the Australian-ness of this production, our necessity to recognise "ourselves" in it, made me suspect that the obscenity was pandering to the audience, rather than disrupting its expectations into delight. It's a fine line, after all.

For this is a Twelfth Night in which the poetry is strictly sidelined. I ought to explain that by "poetry" I do not mean a reverential rendering of the Bard's language: far from it. It is merely to remember that Twelfth Night is a romance as much as it is a farce, and that part of its power is in how, however lightly, it touches the heart. The despair of exile and alienation, the erotic obsessions of romantic love, the grief of loss, are all made minor themes, occasions only for the joke of the play. And consequently, the play's meanings are muddied: the romantic scenes have an air of confusion, unlike the comedy, in which every action is absolutely clear. For all the production's strengths as popular theatre, and even Caroline Craig's appeal as a lively and charming Viola, this is a considerable diminishment of the play's enchantment.

The way into this enchantment is, as Orsino's opening speech indicates, through music. Much has been made of James Reyne, of Australian Crawl fame, composing the songs for this production, and so it is a little disappointing to report that the music mostly amounts to fairly indifferent balladeering. Freeman has gone for a cracked instrument, malodorous rather than melodious, which is an idea not without potential. But in practise the songs are, like the loveliness and feeling of the poetry, again undercut. It's not until the finale, sung off-key by Jonathan Hardy, that this decision pays off: its plain rendering exposes the bones of the poetry, its sour-sweet melancholy filling the theatre with a true poignancy.

The costumes are eclectically contemporary, and Dan Potra's design is an intriguing and practical cross between a farce and the traditional Shakepearean stage. To reinforce the artifice of the action, the stage is dominated by a huge picture frame, which is itself a stage within the stage, with doors right and left that can be forced open and slammed shut with proper comic effect. I've seen more elegant designs by Potra, but this serves the production most efficiently. For all my reservations, it's by far the best Bell Shakespeare production I've seen, and delivers Shakespeare defiantly and greedily alive.

Bell Shakespeare

Caresses, by Sergi Belbel. Directed by Scott Gooding, with Simon Kearney, Danica Balara, Merrin Canning, Dawn Klingberg, Barry Friedlander, Tim Kelly, Kirk Westwood, Chloe Armstrong, Gareth Ellis and Penelope Bartlau. Vicious Fish Theatre, at Theatreworks. Until August 22.

Caresses marks my first acquaintance with the work of the Catalan playwright Sergi Belbel, for which I dips me lid to Vicious Fish. I am certainly richer for the introduction. This is tough, muscular writing, at once lyrical and obscene, humane and cruel, hilarious and tragic. Caresses represents the first part of an on-going commitment by Vicious Fish Theatre to Belbel's works, and I am looking forward to the next three productions of the Belbel Project with lively interest.

Sergi Belbel is part of a generation of playwrights which emerged in the 1990s. The international success of Catalan companies such as Els Comediants and others created a field where new writing could flourish, and this led to the development of a new generation of Spanish theatre writers, including Sanches Sinisterra, Angel Guimera, Benet i Jornet and Rodolf Sirera. Belbel is one of the most popular of these playwrights - Caresses has been performed all around the world and it was also adapted into a film by the Barcelona director Ventura Pons by 1998.

Its structure is taken from Arthur Schnitzler's 1896 play La Ronde, which scandalised fin de siecle audiences by tracking a series of sexual encounters through ten dialogues, in which one character from each scene moves into the next. It completes the circle of the title by coming back to the beginning, with the final scene including a character from the opening dialogue. It is an elegantly satisfying form, a dramatic equivalent of terza rima, which democratically gives each character two scenes each. It also has the virtue, like all interesting aesthetic decisions, of being a metaphor in itself.

Belbel's play has one more scene than Schnitzler's, and what binds the action here is not just sexual desire, but a complex dynamic of emotional dysfunction that often erupts into a blackly funny comedy of human absurdity. About five minutes into the play, I realised that the title of the piece is ironic. It opens with a dialogue which is apparently a conventional exposition of domestic violence, but this quickly mutates into a black satire on heterosexual domesticity. In the next scene, the woman from the first encounter is visiting her mother, who reads her an extravagantly poetic peroration on the night before the dialogue segues into a bitter conversation about their relationship, and the mother's decision to move into a home for the elderly. The following dialogue is set in the old people's home, and is between the mother and an old woman who was formerly her lover; but the old woman no longer remembers her. And so it swings from scene to scene, the disconnections as disconcerting as the connections.

Every scene enacts some moment of emotional extremity in which the characters are confronted by their inability to articulate their desires and react instead with violence and cruelty, the lees of love. Each dialogue is an attempt at love: between lovers, parents and children, siblings, or even the vagrant and fleeting love that is possible between strangers. But by the end of the play, I no longer thought the title ironic: the blows the characters inflict on each other are caresses, the stricken means by which they express their love, rather than love's lack. And the poignant final scene is tranformative and hopeful in a way which belies the apparent darkness of the play's vision.

This suggests a work of considerable complexity that operates at a number of emotional and metaphorical registers. Director Scott Gooding brings it to the stage with creditable style, although his cast doesn't always meet the mutiple resonances of the text, sometimes overstraining for effect, at others perhaps a little mono-dimensional. To fully explore the subtleties of this dialogue would require a longer rehearsal period than most Australian companies are funded for. Even so, there was no point where the energy flagged or I found my attention wandering: the inventiveness of the situations and the writing's theatricality are compelling, and there are standout performances by Barry Friedlander, Dawn Klingberg and Chloe Armstrong.

Kathryn Sproul's design fills the Theatreworks space with secondhand furniture: mattresses are stacked up against the walls, and the stage is full of old beds and bedsteads, tables, chairs, sideboards, wardrobes and battered suitcases. On walking into the theatre, it was impossible not to flash back to the earliest productions of the Keene/Taylor Theatre Project, mounted in 1997 at the Brotherhood of St Laurence's Fitzroy warehouse. The furniture donated there for those in need had a brief life as sets for a series of short plays by Daniel Keene, which were themselves concerned with the marginalised and emotionally dispossessed.

The KTTP connection is reinforced by Alison Halit's choreography. In the same way that Ariette Taylor used extras in many KTTP shows, Halit employs the actors not immediately involved in scenes to inhabit the space and amplify the action, creating the movement of a city around these isolated dialogues. To drive the connection further, Belbel's work is very reminiscent of Keene's. From this play at least, it seems that Belbel is stylistically less spare than Keene, more given to sonorities of repetition; but they share an ability to generate cruel humour while retaining a compassionate vision, and an unsentimental preoccupation with an urban geography of despair and alienation. Their connections betray a common lineage of European theatrical writing, of which Schnitzler is only the most obvious.

Gooding uses an English translation by John London, and I was slightly puzzled why he didn't change the specifically English references to more local ones; it would have been the work of a moment to convert pounds and pence to dollars and cents, and no middle class Australian woman refers to "Mummy" and "Daddy". It's a small quibble, but the poetic tightness of the writing does focus detail, and these slight hiccups in the lexicon seemed unncecessary.

Melbourne audiences can see Belbel's work thanks to Theatreworks' new policy of supporting innovative independent companies. So far, so very good: last month it hosted The Old Van's extraordinary production of Macbeth, and this play is a worthy successor. It reinforces my growing conviction that Melbourne's independent theatre scene is where it's all happening.

Theatreworks