Drink Pepsi, Bitch performed and written by Eddie Perfect, co-written by Tom Wright. Directed by Tom Healey. Music performed by Ben Hendry, Dustin McLean, Vincenzo Ruberto. Beckett @ The Malthouse Theatre until October 2. Bremen, directed by Michael Cammilleri, North Melbourne Festival Hub, Lithuanian Club Main Theatre until October 1.

Apologies for my lateness this week. Balancing this blog with everything else I do sometimes proves a tightrope act I can't quite manage, especially when I am bitten by yet another novel. I warn all budding writers: novels are a serious drug. You might begin with harmless poems and little playlets, thinking that you can stop any time you like, but before you know it you're trapped in the tentacles of addiction, sacrificing your life to feed your corrosive habit...

Currently, I am writing four novels. Even I think that is excessive. But despite being manacled to the computer, I managed to get out to a couple of Melbourne Fringe shows this week. (Eddie Perfect's show is certainly listed as part of the Fringe, even though, as he said himself, the lighting is too good.)

Drink Pepsi, Bitch! is fun with razor blades. Here is our multi-mediated corporatised world in all its inglorious unreality, from alienated cybersex to call centres to commodified celebrity. It's the universe of Michael Jackson, Britney Spears, Oprah Winfrey and celebrity disaster journalism, where our unfulfilled consumerist desires flash and crackle like sick hallucinations above a black abyss of fear.

Eddie Perfect's take on this is rude, crude and witty. After an Austin Powers-type voice-over intro, where some mega-corporate boss summarily liquidates his top celebrities (Michael Jackson, Britney Spears and some other person I forget), Eddie Perfect, faux-rebel, is introduced as the perfect weapon - commodity culture incarnate, set to destroy from within, a kind of lightning rod to safely earth any subversive desires.

It's a sardonic comment on how even rebellion has become a brand name (Che Guavera is, after all, mainly seen on t-shirts these days). And on Eddie bounces, in his suit and Australian Idol hair, to sing the glories of brand culture. His band is dressed (apparently to their displeasure) in cutsie waistcoats and caps, like McDonalds employees.

Drink Pepsi, Bitch! is a show which is basically a mix of cabaret singing and stand up comedy. Perfect likes "strong language" to put a bit of tabasco into his acerbic wit. So this, folks, is not the kind of show you'd take your grandmother to, unless she drinks Bundy and drives a motorbike.

Perfect is at his best when he is most pitiless, although there is one good moment where he reads a letter from the Oprah Winfrey website which is so appallingly sad that it silences the audience: it exposes, beneath the mockery, the human cost of our contemporary delusions.

I found the structure and direction of the show was sometimes clunky and contrived; it's hard not to compare it to Boulevard Delirium, a wholly successful importation of cabaret to the theatre. Where Barrie Kosky's direction slickly and unobtrusively focuses the stage on the talents of Paul Capsis, Tom Healey's here merely attempts to set up a semi-narrative frame. It also lacks a certain variety of texture, so Perfect's show doesn't quite escape a feeling, at times, of sameness, a kind of monotonality.

I also felt that the balance between savage satire and a more explanatory mode of social conscience was a little uneasy and unresolved. Though I liked very much the way Perfect lulls his audience with comedy, only to sock it to them with some biting observation about our own responsibilities for how the world is. No one is let off the hook.

What drives Drink Pepsi, Bitch! is, in the end, the courage and energy of the performer, and Perfect has these in abundance. The show culminates with a wonderful number, "Don't Be So Damn September 10", from his previous Malthouse show with Max Gillies, The Big Con. Here it is given a harsher and rockier edge which excoriates anyone who thinks that compassion is still an option in the New World Order after 9/11.

The following night, pepped up by Perfect, I went along to see Bremen, expecting magical puppets and rock and roll. I had forgotten something important about the Fringe: the right to fail. The fact is, I don't get out enough.

It was in the Lithuanian Club in Erroll Street, North Melbourne. This is an intriguing building, a centre for the Lithuanian community. Courtesy of the collaged photographs on the walls, I learned that "It Is Exciting To Be Lithuanian!" Like I said, I should get out more.

Bremen, loosely based around the Brothers Grimm fairytale, is, at 90 minutes, half an hour too long. It could easily get rid of that half hour by quickening its transitions from scene to scene, and making some of its performers speak their lines at normal conversational speed. To be fair, it may have been a disastrously slow night: aside from the delayed beginning, which came from the previous show running overtime, the lights went up and down a few times before anything actually happened on stage, suggesting a few technical unfamiliarities.

When anything did happen, it happened at a glacial pace. I had plenty of time to reflect on something a director told me a long time ago: that the art of direction is getting people on and off stage.

Despite this, some of the writing was lyrically lovely in a genuinely theatrical way, even through a rather earnest attempt to marry the fairytale with some commentary on asylum seekers.

And there were in fact wonderful moments - when, for example, the Sweet Sassafras Choir appeared, suddenly filling the stage with people, or the first glimpse of Death, who was genuinely, mediaevally impressive - and also some good singing. But the momentary pulse-quickening of these moments was almost immediately dissipated by the glumly slow rhythms of the show.

Melbourne Fringe Festival

Yes, your favourite blogger is doing the dreaded critics' panel thing again, in which we crrrritics Socratically examine our chosen vocation in a public-spirited attempt to find a reason for living. This one looks potentially interesting. It's part of the Sunday Soapbox series at the Victorian Arts Centre, convened by the inimitable Peter Clarke. I believe the discussion will include questions from the audience.

Event details are:

TITLE: "A Question of Quality: Critics and Reviewers Take a Look at Themselves"

PANEL: Chris Boyd, Lee Christophis, Alison Croggon, Fiona Scott-Norman, John Slavin, Helen Thomson

DATE: Sunday 2 October 2005

TIME: 2.00 - 3.30 pm forum

LOCATION: Foyer, Fairfax Studio, Victorian Arts Centre

You can find out more about Peter Clarke and the Sunday Soapbox events here.

All welcome, especially friends of Theatre Notes... Hopefully none of my colleagues will bite me, especially if I promise to be nice. Which, as those who know and love me will confirm, I always am.

Telefunken written and performed by Stuart Orr, directed by Barry Laing. Table 9 Productions @ the Tower Theatre, Malthouse, until September 25.

"Art, like suicide," says Ralph Manheim Mann blackly during the course of this fascinating show, "is very, very personal."

It's an illuminating analogy. Suicide is at once the ultimate assertion of self - the conscious decision to override even the deepest survival instinct, a blasphemous refusal of life - and the self's ultimate erasure. And if art, as Freud argued, is the sublimation of certain instincts towards death and sex, it is not a sublimation which yields gratification but is peculiarly circular. It is, in fact, a masochistic sublimation, erasing rather than aggrandising the self.



Stuart Orr's anti-Fascist aria Telefunken is art of this kind. Orr's electrifying physical presence is at the centre of the show, but all our attention is splintered and diverted from Orr himself by his very expressiveness. Personal this show may be, but it is the antithesis of confessional.

It's a bit of a challenge to describe its complexities. Telefunken works on several levels, and in reflecting on it, all of them seem to metastasise uncontrollably, creating dense clusters of allusion and metaphor which themselves collect more allusions, more metaphors...and it is no accident that one of the presiding gods in this piece is Loki, the trickster. I fear that one viewing is not nearly enough to absorb all of its implications.

It is, first of all, a riveting one-man show, a tour de force of performative and directorial skill, combining projected images and performance in continually inventive ways, so the eye and ear never know what to expect. It's deeply intelligent, in the anarchic fashion peculiar to art, which is disrespectful to everything except imagination, revealing truths through shiftings veils of deception and illusion.

As one reviewer said, less than euphoniously, Orr has a lot of accents. He does them all faultlessly, at least to my ear; I spent half the show convinced he really was German. He moves with the precision and speed of a dancer, and performs with a charismatic, even Mephistophelean, self-mockery. And often he is very, very funny, if in a rather apocalyptic fashion.

Telefunken is narrated by a character called Ralph Mannheim Mann, a propagandist for the Nazi regime, who is welcoming some American soldiers into the bunker as muffled explosions outside signal the fall of Berlin. Hitler's suicide is, he tells us, an hour away. In this time, he will reveal to us his unmade and clearly autobiographical masterpiece, a film called Cry of the Wolf, which follows the story of Erasmus, propagandist and werwolf, from bullied child to Fascist television producer, the major source of political influence in our contemporary world.

The thesis behind this show is somewhat unhistorical: Ralph Mann claims that television was a military invention used by the Nazis crucially to assist the rise of Fascism in Germany. While Telefunken advertised televisions for sale in 1936, it's a dubious proposition in itself; what is indisputable is that with films like Triumph of the Will, later called the most successful propaganda film ever made, the Nazi film maker Leni Riefenstahl was one of the seminal figures of modern propaganda.

Ralph Mann is her equivalent in the world of television; but again, he is trans-historical: he can, by putting on an instrument like the phylactery that pious Jews wear at prayer, channel all of Western television culture. And he foresees the monstrousness and power of television as a medium, how it projects its hypnotic images into the domestic space of every home. Orr's argument parallels the televisual culture of FOX and CNN with Nazi film propaganda, as is clear from the opening montage, which juxtaposes images of the Third Reich, George W. Bush speaking of weapons of mass destruction and Oprah Winfrey. However, as should already be clear, this is no simplistic parallel, but rather a darkly funny and dizzying exploration of the irrationalities inherent in Fascist power. Ralph Mann is the unacknowledged ghost in the machine, the personification of the incipient Fascism of the image.

The stage is like an extension of Ralph Mann's mind. The floor is littered with paper, the pages of his film script. In front is an old television set, topped by a gramophone and a set of wires, some connected to a ghastly looking machine which looks like something out of Frankenstein, the phylactery/headset which locks Mann in agonised torment to the demons of television. It's an idea which irresistibly recalls the Heathcote Williams of AC/DC, without the revolutionary optimism. Strapped to the side of the tv are sticks of dynamite, and on top is a plunger. Mann's suicidal trajectory is clear from the start.

On one side of the stage is an old fashioned pump organ, and at the back a scrim which can be lit from behind and which functions as a screen for projections of various kinds - drawings, extracts from films. This is topped by some old books. The images of books, of literary culture, recur obsessively through this show: books are what is destroyed in the translation to a culture of image, just as the tv propagandist Ralph Mannheim Mann and his werwolf creation Erasmus are the translation of that towering figure of German literary culture, Thomas Mann.

Some clues to Orr's complex system of metaphor and allusion can in fact be untangled from Mann's name. Ralph Mannheim is the name of Thomas Mann's most prominent English translator. The novelist Thomas Mann, writer of Death in Venice and - (here most pertinently) the masterpiece Dr Faustus - was the most famous patriarch of a famous artistic family, most of whom fled Germany in the 1930s as Hitler tightened his strangleghold on German society. (As Mann points out, before the Jews were persecuted, the Nazis came for the avant gardists and the socialists; what he doesn't say is that many of these people were Jewish, and that avant garde culture was denounced by the Nazis as Jewish decadence.)

Thomas Mann's son Klaus Mann wrote Mephisto, a novel about an actor called Hendrik Höfgen who colluded with the Nazi powers, betraying his left-wing friends and rising with the regime. This novel is based on Klaus' brother-in-law, Gustaf Gründgens, who became the director of Berlin State Theatre in 1934.

The character of Ralph Mannheim Mann (if he can indeed be called a character - he is not that in any conventional sense, but more a kind of occasion for performance) bears more than a little resemblance to Gustaf Gründgens. He speaks of staying in Nazi Germany while other artists fled, and clearly has reached a position of huge cultural influence, as chief propagandist for the Nazis, a lesser Leni Riefenstahl. He even travels to Paris to make tv shows with French actors, prompting some scathing cabaret parodies.

In both Mann's Dr Faustus and Mephisto, the legend of Faust - the consummate man of culture who is tempted by the devil and sells his soul - is an informing metaphor. In Telefunken, by contrast, Orr invokes the demons within the self, the transformative werwolf which emerges, like madness, with the full moon. The Mephisto figure might be television itself, which demonically possesses Ralph Mann every time he put on his phylactery/headset.

But it is of course perilous to take these allusions too literally. Orr works by bringing together constellations of association - and a wide ranging set they are, from South Park to Courbet's L'Origine du Monde, from the Norse myth of the trickster Loki to Michael Caine, from Bob Brown to Sesame Street - and imploding them in performance. It's blackly pessimistic - the Fascist propagandist's inevitable suicide releases on the world the demon of television, a new and monstrous culture of social manipulation, which Orr makes clear reaches its apotheosis in contemporary America.

The great achievement of Telefunken is that the centre holds, despite the incredible centrifugal force brought to bear upon it by Orr's imagination. This must be a tribute to Barry Laing's direction as much as to Orr's talent. It's a show of considerable class, rich with ideas and the immediate pleasures of performance, which means it repays both watching and later reflection. And that it is probably worth seeing twice.

I'm not the only person who thinks that serious arts commentary is moving wholesale to the internet. Blogging is go! It's even happening in theatreland (poets migrated to the web years ago, being a minority even among minorities). I've (finally) blogrolled some interesting theatre blogs that I've stumbled across in my cyberwanderings; all American so far, bar the English Encore Magazine. The links are in the sidebar: be sure to check them out.

The Crucible by Arthur Miller. Directed by Anne Thompson and William Henderson. Designed by Bruce Gladwin, lighting design Niklas Pajanti. With Nicole Nabout, Shona Innes, David Trendinnick, Fiona Todd, Peter Houghton, Evelyn Krape and Christopher Brown. The Eleventh Hour, 170 Leicester St, Fitzroy, until October 1.

It was not only the rise of McCarthyism that moved me, but something which seemed much more weird and mysterious. It was the fact that a political, objective, knowledgeable campaign from the far Right was capable of creating not only a terror, but a new subjective reality, a veritable mystique which was gradually assuming even a holy resonance...the astonishment was produced by my knowledge, which I could not give up, that the terror in these people was being knowingly planned and consciously engineered, and yet that all they knew was terror. That so interior and subjective an emotion could have been so manifestly created from without was a marvel to me. It underlies every word in The Crucible.

Arthur Miller

Miller could be writing about contemporary America: a consciously engineered terror which attains a "holy" mystique, where dissent against the ruling powers attains the status of blasphemy. The Crucible premiered in the US in 1953, but its political insight strikes fresh sparks in the age of the Global War on Terror (or GSAVE - the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism - for those who missed the changing of the acronyms). If ever there were a play for our times, The Crucible is it.

It also happens to be a personal favourite of mine. With Death of a Salesman and A View from a Bridge, The Crucible shows Miller at the height of his dramatic powers, in fruitful agonistic struggle with theatrical aesthetic and form. He was not yet America's Great Playwright, and the urge to didacticism - always strong in Miller - had not yet gained the upper hand. Here is passion tempered by formal intelligence, ideological critique informed by intuitions of human contradiction and frailty. These plays exemplify the very best of the American liberal tradition.

The timeliness of The Eleventh Hour's decision to stage Miller's masterpiece (for it may be fairly called that, especially if, following Randall Jarrell, one thinks of a masterpiece as a work of art with "something wrong with it") is therefore praiseworthy. But it must be said that the company's treatment of the text is utterly baffling.

The focus of the production is deliberately shifted from complex political critique to Miller's private life ("the affair that led to the destruction of his first marriage"). To this apparent end, the directors - Anne Thompson and William Henderson - have eviscerated the text. The Crucible runs for something like half its original length, and many of its secondary characters have been cut out completely. Its formal structure looks something like Fallujah after the Americans finished with it, with the odd graceful wall poking out of the ruins to show what had been there.

The company's stated objective in the program is to "wrest this classic from its traditional performance framework" in order to "create a performance landscape that allows the force of Miller's extraordinary language and the passions fuelling it to live in a new way." To be honest, I am not at all sure what this means; but I do know that a work of art is inseparable from its form. There is no purer "content" which might be ripped out of a frame: in a radical sense, the frame is the content. In other words, you fiddle with a work as artfully made as The Crucible at your peril.

I should say at this juncture that I am no friend of the museum treatment of "classics". A good play should be able to withstand - in fact, requires - intense interrogation and disrespectful, even violent treatment, if it is to live in performance. True, texts can be cut and sometimes to their advantage, Hamlet being only the most obvious example. And one thinks of the power of the Wooster Group's treatment of The Hairy Ape, performed as extreme physical theatre, as if it were a boxing match, its vocal assault electronically amplified... but the Wooster Group performed O'Neill's play, however they attacked the text. The Eleventh Hour, on the other hand, put The Crucible through some process of "composition": that is, they rewrote it. The big question is, why?

Partly, perhaps, to focus an emotional experience on some perceived essential quality of language? The play is performed as stylised physical theatre: certainly the cast is choreographed with a beautiful precision, and lushly lit in the dark cavernous spaces of the theatre to create tableaux which sometimes possess an arresting and disturbing beauty. And, except in the later scenes (which are also the least grievously cut) where, perhaps, the passion of the writing begins to inhabit the performances, the language is declaimed with deliberate artifice, each word enunciated as if it exists on its own. I don't understand this decision, as it wrecks Miller's rhythms; in plays, as in poems, rhythm is the heart of linguistic vitality.

Clearly the directors wish to take The Crucible beyond its naturalistic conventions - which, in Miller's hands, have more than an edge of the poetic - to a more heightened experience. I suspect that in doing so, they mistake the artifice of Miller's naturalism.

Miller wrote a play in four acts, each in a different setting, through which the action evolves seamlessly and dynamically. The more you study the play, the more you admire its economy, how artfully he integrates emotional and political worlds, suggesting the complexity of a small community by a deft phrase here, a throw-away line there. Miller invokes the remorseless machinery of tragedy: The Crucible is, if you like, an instrument tuned finely in all its parts to create the final cathartic scene, where John Proctor grasps his "goodness" at last in the face of his own wilfully chosen death.

The Eleventh Hour's "composition" of Miller cuts these fluid, intricately worked acts into a series of truncated scenes separated by blackouts. This transforms the action into a series of tableaux, and the sense of stasis is reinforced by hymns sung by the cast at each blackout. These refinements have some fairly profound effects on the play's political texture. More devastatingly, I think, they fatally corrode the emotional force of the play: though the final meeting between Elizabeth (Fiona Todd) and John Proctor (Peter Houghton) still holds some of its original power, basically because most of it is still there, it is deprived of much of its poignancy because we have not seen the simple domestic scene that introduces Elizabeth, in which the bones of their marriage are laid bare through their painful, tentative conversation.

By assuming that Miller's political impulses evade the personal, the company also mistakes him. His politics were never simple - he refused the claim that he wrote "political plays" - and never eschewed the personal. "I can't write plays that don't sum up where I am," he wrote. "I'm in all of them. I don't know how else to go about writing." Miller's plays place themselves, optimistically, in the tradition of liberal individualism. John Proctor's choice not to betray his friends and to redeem himself is the archetypal gesture of the individual asserting his (in Miller's case, it was nearly always "his") identity in the face of social repression. For Miller, this was an anguished and continuous conflict between imperatives of inner and outer selves which could end only with death.

But he was more than an observer of the human conscience. The idea of property, of who owns what, is meticulously noted in The Crucible; Miller is extremely conscious of the economic relationships in the small Puritan community of Salem. Removing altogether characters like Giles Corey, the cantankerous landowner who will neither plead guilty or not guilty so his sons can inherit his property after he dies, removes a crucial subtext from the play: the Protestant equation of ownership with virtue. It's the poor and dispossessed who face the hangman first, and conflict over property fuels many of the accusations of witchcraft. Miller is too acute to portray the accusers simply as venal hypocrites; what he shows is how public hysteria can all too easily meld with private self interest.

One aspect this production highlighted for me, and which might have been a fruitful area of further exploration, was a brooding sense, as pervasive as the Puritanical sexual repression, of unacknowledged violence. Proctor's threat to whip his servant, Mary Warren (Evelyn Krape), is viscerally disconcerting. Tituba (also Evelyn Krape) is a slave, taken by force from Barbados, and before that, from Africa. Abigail's (Nicole Nabout) recollection of her parents' violent deaths at the hands of Indians reminds that the disputed properties of Salem have a prior claim, that of the native Americans who first lived there, and whose lands were taken by force. Behind the hysteria of the witch hunt lies also the guilty conscience of the coloniser, the sense of a primal crime.

There are lines in The Crucible which strike with renewed force, because they have, again, found their time. The polarised vision of Good and Evil that informs the present White House and, unfortunately, the discourse of our own government - "you're either with us or against us" - is unsettlingly echoed in Danforth's declaration that "a person is either with this court or he must be counted against it". The seduction of the absolute and the destructiveness of certainty have particular resonance now, and have implications for both the private life of conscience and that of public action. It wasn't that Miller thought anything as banal as "the personal is political", which I rather fear informed the interpretation here; but he was an acute observer of the relationships between these different spheres of being.

I liked the simple and effective design - trestle tables which were manipulated to create several performance levels. And despite my serious reservations about the production, I enjoyed individual performances, especially those of David Trendennick as Parris and Danforth, and Christopher Brown as the tormented Man of God, Reverend Hale. It makes you sigh for a missed opportunity: if, as the director's note says, one impulse behind this experiment was "to try to understand the relationship between private emotion and political action", it would have been far more illuminating to perform the play Miller actually wrote.

Ivanov by Anton Chekhov, translated by Natalia Axenova. Directed by Ariette Taylor, deisgned by Adrienne Chisholm, lighting by Philip Lethlean. With Paul English, Helen Morse, Alex Menglet, Malcolm Robertson, Margaret Mills, Chloe Armstrong, Dan Spielman, Jane Nolan, Bob Hornery, Stewart Morrit, Monica Maughan, Laurie Bishop, Jonathan Taylor. At Fortyfivedownstairs, Flinders Lane, City, until August 31.

Ivanov's famously disastrous premiere, in which the drunken actors forgot many of their lines, seems to have set its reputation as a minor Chekhov play. It's seldom staged, and is generally seen as merely a sketch of the genius better realised in masterpieces like The Seagull or The Cherry Orchard.

Watching this wonderful production, I couldn't help pondering the justice of this judgment: Ivanov seems rather more than a sidenote. It displays Chekhov's dispassionate accuracy of observation, a comedic eye for social detail as surgical as Jane Austen at her most caustic; and equally his instinct for the drama of human contradiction, if perhaps less nuanced than in his later plays. And beneath his art is already his fiercely moral refusal to judge weakness and folly, his sceptical idealism, his intense awareness of human possibility and finitude.

Chekhov himself said, in one of his many moments of irritation with the theatre: "In Ivanov it seems that I did not write what I wished. Remove it from the boards. I do not want to preach heresy on the stage. If the audience will leave the theatre with the conviction that Ivanovs are scoundrels and that Doctors Lvov are great men, then I’ll have to give up and fling my pen to the devil." But his frustration is as much with the limitations of theatre culture itself, as with his own abilities: " If the public does not understand 'iron in the blood'," he said, "then to the devil with it, i.e., with the blood in which there is no iron."

When Chekhov's plays were premiered, his refusal to play to expectations obscured the perception of his work - Ivanov was called "brashly cynical, immoral trash" by a Moscow critic, who no doubt was looking for some clear moral judgment - a clearly "good" and "evil" axis in the play's human universe. This was something Chekhov explicitly refused to supply.

He was in the invidious position of someone attacking the very orthodoxies that obscured the perception of his own work, the conventional perceptions that made his achievement, literally, almost impossible to see. If a theatre is understood only in terms of generalised conventions, then what Chekhov creates can only be puzzling. Is it comedy? But the events are tragic... - But how can it be a tragedy, if parts of it are broadly hilarious? Where can the audience place its moral sympathy, if there is no clear moral? And so on...

In a theatrical culture dominated by melodrama, when complex characters like Chekhov's were virtually unprecedented on the stage, these responses might be predictable. They seem more difficult to understand now: but the fact remains that Chekhov is one of the most consistently misunderstood of modern playwrights. He is generally regarded as either the warm-hearted creator of absurdly loveable, stoic characters, or as a gloomily depressive Russian. He is much more interesting, of course, than either of these reductive caricatures. It is difficult, for example, to imagine Beckett without Chekhov to precede him.

The bafflements of Ivanov continue with its contradictory formalities: its shifts to melodrama or burlesque comedy are commonly perceived as flaws that compromise its serious intentions and disrupt its dramatic unity. Ariette Taylor's direction has the singular virtue of having ignored these "problems", simply presenting Ivanov as beautifully as possible, in all its variation of texture. And the production demonstrates that these are not flaws at all: as Peter Brook said, the central mechanism of theatre is contrast, and Chekhov grasped this principle surely and subversively.

Ivanov does lack the subtle nuance and flow of the later plays, though it certainly plays well enough. The company has resisted the temptation to cut the play to make it more palatable for contemporary audiences, and the dialogue has a robust colloquial vitality. However, it does remove a literary dimension that points to one of the romantic stereotypes that Chekhov sought to attack in his almost clinical depiction of Ivanov's depression: most of the references are gone that place Chekhov's portrayal of Ivanov as "superfluous man" in a tradition that includes Hamlet and Byron's Manfred - the misunderstood intellectual paralysed by melancholia.

And if the play also fails to reach the masterful, anguished poetry of key moments in Uncle Vanya or The Seagull, it has intriguing foreshadowings of the moral complexities that exist within them. Think of Nina's monologue in The Seagull : "I know now, I understand. - In what we do... the most important thing isn't fame or glory or anything I used to dream about - but the ability to endure. To know how to bear your cross and have faith. I have faith...and when I think of my vocation, I am not afraid of life..."

Unlike Nina or Sonya in Uncle Vanya, and like Treplyov, the writer who shoots himself in The Seagull, Ivanov is a man unable to endure. He cannot achieve the heroically existential faith which, in Chekhov's world, is the other side of despair. Ivanov is a idealistic aristocrat, a man who has married unconventionally, who has "tilted at windmills", rebelled against the banality and injustice that surrounds him. But now he is broken, caught in an inanition he is powerless to dissipate and cannot understand.

As played by Paul English, Ivanov is not only a man in the grip of spiritual exhaustion and depression, destroyed by the thousand cuts of the small-minded society in which he lives: he is also a victim of his own corrosive honesty. He is unable to deceive himself about either his condition or his feelings, and his inability even to manage the small deceptions that would comfort his dying wife Ana (Helen Morse) plunges him into a abyss of sick self-contempt.

His direct reflection is Lvov (Dan Spielman, looking unsettlingly like the young Chekhov), the young doctor whose honesty is a parade of certainties. To Lvov, good and evil are measurable and perceptible qualities. "How easy and straightforward," Ivanov protests towards the end of the play, as Lvov condemns him as a dishonest, evil hypocrite: "Man is such a simple and uncomplicated machine. No doctor... I don't understand you, you don't understand me, and we don't understand ourselves..."

This human opacity is what Lvov - and, by extension, Chekhov's imperceptive audiences - cannot admit. More explicitly than any other Chekhov play, Ivanov concerns itself with the idea that human certainty is the straightest road to blindness and folly; a telling stage direction in this particular dialogue is Lvov's refusal to listen. He knows, so he does not need to listen; to listen, indeed, might open him to unsettling possibilities about his own motivations (a subterranean desire, perhaps, for Ana) or make him see the vanity and destructiveness of his self-bruited "honesty".

But no one in this play is free from blindness: Ivanov is admirable only because he is the character with most self awareness, although it is no help to him. The complexities of the many characters are revealed in this production by a sheaf of intelligent and felt performances, both major and minor. There are a couple of electric scenes between Paul English and Helen Morse as Ana which made the hair stand up on my neck: what becomes palpable is the love that still exists between them, despite Ivanov's depression and guilt, despite the sudden gulf of despair which opens beneath Ana's poignantly self-controlled dignity. In another wrenching scene, Lebedov (Malcolm Robinson), Ivanov's debtor and friend, attempts to help him, fumbling past his futility and weakness to a raw expression of love.

Sascha, the young woman who deludes herself that she can save Ivanov by loving him, is played with a steely wit by Chloe Armstrong, surely one of the most under-estimated young actors in Melbourne. She saves the character from what otherwise might become a cloying sentimentality by investing the role with a sharp, ironic passion. It becomes clear that Ivanov's rejection of Sascha's love is clear-sighted: she does not love Ivanov himself, but what he represents to her, in the stifling and sexist society in which she lives: a chance to use her intelligence and vitality to some good end, not so far, perhaps, from Ivanov's desire to help the peasants. Dan Spielman as Lvov has possibly the most difficult part; it is challenging to play a prig and make him interesting, and Lvov's explosions of loathing are the only clue to his hidden inner life. For all the kinetic passion of his performance, I'm not sure that Spielman has yet quite grasped the character's full dimensionality; he seems curiously constrained, oscillating between the polar opposites of loathing and self-important righteousness. Perhaps as the season unfolds, more subtleties will emerge.

These intensities are leavened by some high comedy, provided in particular by the expansive energy of Alex Menglet as Shabelsky, Ivanov's uncle, an intriguing (and in Menglet's hands, very Russian) mixture of melancholia and extroversion; and by Stuart Morritt's irrepressible Borkin, the charmingly fraudulent manager of Ivanov's estate. These are huge performances which ignite the stage with an irresistible physical energy.

The smaller roles of Zinaida, Lebedev's miserly wife (Margaret Mills), Babakina, the wealthy widow (Jane Nolan), the old busybody Avadotia (Monica Maughan) and Kosich, an indefagitable cardplayer (Bob Hornery) people the production with polished comic performances. They devastatingly portray the venal, petty materialism which destroys Ivanov's idealistic attempts to change the world: yet in their individual particularities, their absurdities are also almost touchingly transparent. A nice touch, further enriching the dynamic texture of the production, is the presence of mute performers: in particular, the dancers Laurie Bishop and Jonathan Taylor, who play the ever-present but - to the characters - invisible servants, enacting their own trivial comic dramas.

Taylor choreographs her cast with a satisfying attention to both perspective and intimacy. The design is minimal and elegant: a drawing room, for example, is evoked by a single chandelier, or a garden by a pattern of leafy shadow. The actors are dressed in period costumes in a lush palette of autumnal colours, and the objects used on stage - decanters, antique tables and chairs, lace cloths - are focused by their contrast with the cool white walls of the space. At times the action is brought right up next to the audience: you might almost be sitting at the same dinner table as the characters, craning around someone's back to see the person opposite. In other scenes, chilly distances open between the characters, and between them and the audience.

The sheer energy on stage, the varying intensities of each moment, mean that the three hours of Ivanov fly past. It's a joy to see theatre like this. This production has many virtues, but perhaps its greatest is the sheer depth of its cast: the kind of insight an ensemble of this quality can collectively bring to a text can be revelatory.

Link
Ariette Taylor - Ivanov

Disclosure: Alison Croggon was a board member of the Keene/Taylor Theatre Project, co-directed by Ariette Taylor and Daniel Keene, for the duration of its existence.

The Black Swan of Trespass by Lally Katz and Chris Kohn. Directed by Chris Kohn, with Jacklyn Bassanelli, Christopher Brown, Gavan O'Leary, Katie Keady and Chris Kohn (musician). Stuck Pigs Squealing at The Tower Theatre, Malthouse, until August 7. Stalking Matilda by Tee O'Neill. Directed by Chris Bendall, with Jude Beaumont, Irene Dios, Odette Joannidis, Ron Jordan, Toby Newton and Jeremy Stanford, Theatre@Risk at Theatreworks, St Kilda, until August 21.

People speak easily about the poetry of theatre, as if it were self evident, as if it were merely an ornament available to those who might choose to employ it. But poetry is not an easy thing. It is the pith and passion of plays, the molten spine of them; it is the profundity that is summoned by the carnality of language, the mystery of the corporeal and the mortal: this particular body in this specific time, speaking what cannot be repeated.

The Black Swan of Trespass and Stalking Matilda are very different plays; but both have been described as "poetic". It must be said that the poetry of theatre differs, markedly and importantly, from poems: but it is also related, in ways which are not necessarily obvious but which remain profound. Predictably I suppose, given my own predelictions, what struck me in both productions was a conviction that theatre practitioners would benefit from a better understanding of poetry.




The Black Swan of Trespass concerns itself with one of the most celebrated hoaxes in Australian literary history. In 1943 Harold Stewart and James McAuley, two poets with a particular animus towards the modernist work of writers like Dylan Thomas and Henry Treece, cooked up a fictional poet called Ern Malley. They created his life's work (sixteen poems called The Darkening Ecliptic) in an afternoon's hijinks of creative collage using, among other things, a Complete Works of Shakespeare and an army training manual on mosquitos. They concocted a letter from Ern's sister Ethel that described his life as a garage mechanic and his tragic early death from Graves disease, and sent the lot to Max Harris, then the young, iconoclastic editor of the modernist journal Angry Penguins.

As is well known, Harris enthusiastically published the poems, proclaiming Malley a genius. When Stewart and McAuley exposed the hoax, he stuck to his guns; whether or not they had intended it, he said, the poems were still extraordinary. But the story took another twist when Harris was prosecuted for obscenity in a courtcase which has shades of Pythonesque black comedy. The ultimate irony is that the poems have passages of undeniable beauty, and are now probably the most famous pieces of writing either Stewart or McAuley published. Malley generated a compelling reality: there is even a celebrated portrait of him by Sidney Nolan.

In The Black Swan of Trespass, writer Lally Katz and director Chris Kohn conjure some charming theatre from the ghostly figure of the imaginary poet. Ern Malley is summoned by Stewart and McAuley, who are represented by comically grotesque puppets - a chicken and a cat - on either side of the stage, and Ern himself (Christopher Brown) stands before us, tall, rangy, surreally Australian, all his suburban pathos framed in the velvet curtains of a puppet theatre.

The irony of Malley's situation as a poet who does not exist is not lost on him. As a theatrical creation, he is uneasily aware, as in fact any conscious writer must be, that his language is at best only partly his own and may be, in fact, writing him, that his writerly self is a fiction that trespasses hesitantly on the "alien waters" of reality. As the poet says in Dürer: Innsbruck, 1495, the work from which the show takes its title and which is to my mind the loveliest of the Malley poems:

"I had read in books that art is not easy
But no one warned that the mind repeats
In its ignorance the vision of others. I am still
The black swan of trespass on alien waters."

The theatrical realisation of these complexities is often enchanting. Chris Kohn employs music, stylised performance and projected text as well as an ingeniously surreal design to create a show that works on multiple levels, and which seeks to express the pathos and irony of both Malley's unstable existence and his writings. Characters which are imaginary even in Ern's reality - Anopholes (Gavan O'Leary), a kind of mosquito-muse/narrator, and Princess (Jacklyn Bassanelli), his Keatsian love object - thicken the texture further. There are moments in this show - most often when Malley says his own poems - when all these complexities fold together into a shimmering, vital present.

One such scene is when Ethel (Katie Keadie) and Ern venture out into the real world, and speak about the people hurrying home - a description reminiscent of John Brack's painting Collins St, 5pm. Here the force of their yearning to be like other people, to be real, attains a potent and fragile poignancy. But too often this delicacy and poise is blurred in Lally Katz's script, which cannot but suffer by comparison to the complexity of the Malley poems: sometimes merely simplistic in its responses to them, it often veers dangerously close to sentimentalisation.

In the final scene, where Ern speaks his Petit Testament, I writhed at the bad judgement of punctuating each verse with lyrics from a sentimental love song. It was as if the dislocations of the poem, the contradictions of the poet and the poetry itself, could be resolved through a comfortingly simple narrative of unattainable and tragic love. No, it's not that simple.

Tee O'Neill's Stalking Matilda, directed by Chris Bendall for Theatre@Risk, addresses a more familiar theatrical poetic, that of the chorus. But this chorus is not a formal Greek convocation of witnesses, but something more like Brecht's idea of epic theatre in his essay The Street Scene, in which members of the cast enact the events they are describing, fluidly moving in and out of character.

Stalking Matilda was originally commissioned in Ireland, and has apparently been rewritten to reflect "an Australian setting and spirit". Perhaps its first problem is that, despite its concern with the plight of asylum seekers, common to both countries, it does not easily make the transition from Ireland to Australia. Local conditions, I couldn't help reflecting as I watched, do count; the English/Irish "hoodies" are not the same as Australian gangs; we have not had a celebrated racist murder like the Stephen Lawrence case in England (obliquely referred to in the play); and racism here is, if equally ugly, different in its ugliness.

The major difference between Ireland and Australia is perhaps that Australian history since settlement has been characterised by successive waves of immigrants and so is, whether we admit it or not, deeply multicultural, whereas Ireland is a racially homogenous society marked more by emigration than immigration, in which the sudden intrusion of "aliens" registers as a shock. The notion of "aliens" - central to the metaphor of the play - is somewhat muffled here by the immigrant status of so many of us. This uneasiness of locale undermines the play's potency; it might have been better to present it in its full Irishness.

Despite this, there is much to like in O'Neill's writing, in particular her robust embrace of human complexity and her refusal of easy moralising. The dilemmas faced by asylum seekers are sketched briskly and without sentiment. O'Neill portrays the injustices they face, desperately fleeing their own countries only to become persecuted non-citizens in a country that does not want them, but she also reveals the resilience and comic subversiveness of the oppressed, the small but vital ways in which human beings can help each other survive.

Central to the play is the figure of Matilda (Jude Beaumont), a charismatic, beautiful woman whose decision to walk into the sea and disappear is the mystery that sparks the action. The chorus - Irene Dios, Odette Joannidis, Ron Jordan, Toby Newton and Jeremy Stanford - discover her mobile phone on the beach and read a series of text messages, which reveal complexities, hypocrisies, strange elisions. The play is structured around a gradual enactment - not necessarily in chronological order - of the events that led to those cryptic notes.

Matilda is in many ways a symbol of European liberal ambivalence and its inevitable complicity with power. On the one hand, she is devoted to helping her asylum seeker friends, getting them false documents, spending hours with them in the bureaucratic maze of applying for citizenship, celebrating with them their small triumphs, even marrying Suleyman (Rob Jordan), a refugee from an unnamed African country. (Although ethnicities - Eastern European, African - are broadly suggested, countries are referred to by number - "First World", "Sixteenth World" - which is an economical and effective distancing device).

On the other, Matilda has a perverse affair with the General (Jeremy Stanford), a shadowy and sinister military commander who puts money into her bank account after every sexual encounter. And she may be also responsible for the death of Suleyman, who appears to be the victim of a brutal race hate crime, and for the burning down of the boarding house where her immigrant friends live.

The chorus sets off to discover the truth of these contradictory signs, but the murder mystery impulse isn't enough to sustain the energy of the play, despite a gallery of skilfully drawn characters and some interesting scenes. On the night I saw it, the action flagged considerably in its second half; it was a bit of a race to see whether the play would end before I lost interest entirely in why Matilda had walked into the sea. Jude Beaumont turning in anguish to the waves became, in truth, a rather over-used image during the course of the show. Though, in mitigation, I note that the given running time is 90 minutes, and the show I saw went for two hours. It could have been an exceptionally slow night that exaggerated the longeuers and repetitions in the production.

But there were other problems that were not to do with pacing. Especially towards the end, the chorus was often written with a self-conscious, literal clumsiness that slowed down the play. The physical-theatre aspect of the performances, together with the day-glo circus set, at times reminded me of those breathlessly earnest Theatre In Education shows English teachers used to inflict on unwitting adolescents in the name of culture. At its best, the production transcended these associations, but not often enough to lift the show out of its problems.

There is a poetic of a promising muscularity at work in this play, but it stumbles. Poetry exists in the silences between words, in what is not said, at least as much as it does in the words spoken; and sometimes in Stalking Matilda there were just too many notes.

Picture: Christopher Brown as Ern Malley in The Black Swan of Trespass. Photo: Heidrun Lohr

Links

Malthouse Theatre
Ern Malley: The Complete Poems
Theatre@Risk
Theatreworks

This is a brief good bye - I'm off on a six week tour of England and Ireland, where I'll be reading poetry to those foolish enough to invite me. If you happen to be in that part of the Northern Hemisphere, you can check out my reading dates here.

After a tedious succession of colds and viruses, I'm more than happy to be missing the bulk of the Melbourne winter. But I'm not so happy to miss out on the first production of King Lear (MTC) I can remember in my home town, or Pamela Rabe at the Malthouse in Woman-Bomb. There's some seriously interesting theatre on while I'm away... But hey, them's the breaks.

Meanwhile, my thanks to the readers of this blog. There are more of you every week, and your comments, public and private, keep me going and make me believe that what I'm doing is worthwhile. And thanks also to the theatre companies for their support. I'll be back at the end of July, refreshed and reinvigorated. See you then!

Boulevard Delirium with Paul Capsis, directed by Barrie Kosky. From Schauspielhaus Wien, @ the Malthouse Theatre, June 1 until June 26.

Now I've been to Boulevard Delirium, I see what all the fuss is about. Paul Capsis is something else. But how do you begin to describe a talent like this?



About half way through the show - and this is a show - I began to wonder if there was anything that Capsis couldn't do with his voice. By the end, I was pretty well convinced that he can sing anything. I might be wrong, but I wouldn't bet money on it. Capsis must be one of the great theatrical voices of this century.

But that incredible voice - so flexible it can gravel up for Janis Joplin, tenderise for Nina Simone, scream, bark or howl in the middle of an impassioned pop aria - is only half of it. Capsis is a performer of rare quality: he's on, full throttle, from the first moment he appears on stage in top hat and tails, his eyelids gleaming with sequins, lasciviously inviting his audience into the gritty, sensual, passionate delirium of his world.

Boulevard Delirium eschews, immediately, the misogyny that sometimes creeps into drag shows. Capsis opens with an obscenely hilarious monologue about lust. ("I'm horny!") What I found interesting was how Capsis' expression of desire for a man was at once that of a man and a woman. He doesn't merely impersonate women; but neither does he wholly become them. He enacts a series of transformations that are all, ultimately, aspects of himself. By the end of the evening, the masks drop to reveal Paul Capsis - whoever he is - singing on stage in a black tank top.

This is a magic which doesn't depend on gowns and diamente; it's a lot more subtle and radical than that. And its multifacedtedness is rather hard to describe, and as much reflected in the musical arrangements as the performance.

It's unsettling, for example, how the bewitchment of this performer can make you believe (as when he is being Judy Garland) that you are watching a beautiful woman; unlike the aesthetic of drag, you completely lose sight of any sense of artifice. But this illusion will be harshly dispelled almost at once, making you totally aware of his masculinity. And in the next moment he is neither, an androgynous trickster and parodist giving us a grotesquely exploding Marlene Dietrich.

I suspect it's a sorcery that is ultimately powered by emotional, rather than sexual, identification. Behind the energy of these songs are implicit stories of tragedy and courage. Beyond all his talent, the secret to Capsis' coruscating presence is his bravery as a performer. He holds nothing back.

His performance of Billie Holiday's Don't Explain was something like channelling. He adopted some classic props, dressing backstage with his back turned to the audience, and slowly coming into the light. In silhoette, the effect was spooky: it might have been Lady there, swaying to the music. And then, if you shut your eyes, you would swear it was Holiday singing. The whole audience seemed to be holding its breath. I thought of Frank O'Hara's great poem, The Day Lady Died:

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

I can find no greater compliment. The same goes for his heartbreaking rendition of Nina Simone's Little Girl Blue ("Sit there, count your little fingers / Unhappy little girl blue") which had the audience pin-drop silent. This is homage in its truest sense: the interpretation of the work of one great artist by another.

Barrie Kosky's direction takes cabaret conventions and gives them a 21st century twist: abrasive, confronting, exhilarating and moving, it does to cabaret what Capsis does to female impersonation. It draws lovingly on conventions from vaudeville and cabaret and marries them with the aesthetic of a rock concert and a contemporary theatrical intelligence: it's theatre dressed as cabaret, rather than cabaret itself.

The stage is straight cabaret: huge red curtains which draw back to reveal a proscenium edged with lights like a dressing table. The band is arranged in a semi-circle around the back, and Capsis moves between the band members and a thrust forestage that juts out into a row of candle-lit tables where some audience members have close-up views. The rest is created by Michael Zerz's inventive lighting design.

The band - Chris Bekker, Tom Fryer, Roman Gottwald, Niko Schauble and Geri Shuller - is hot, hot, hot, and Roman Gottwald's musical direction unfalteringly bold, with astounding arrangements of some classics. The musical references range from contemporary funk to Kate Bush to blues to gospel. You might get 30 seconds perfectly-phrased and performed Sex Pistols in the middle of another song. At no point, as an audience member, can you stop and say, oh, it's that kind of music. It's as live as you can get.

Don't miss this one: you'll regret it if you do.

Malthouse Theatre

Wars of the Roses by Williams Shakespeare, directed by John Bell, designed by Stephen Curtis. With Joe Manning, John Batchelor, Robert Alexander, Christopher Stollery, Greg Stone, Timothy Walter, Matthew Moore, Richard Piper, Peter Lamb, Darren Gilshenan, Georgia Adamson, Julian Garner, David Davies, John Turnbull and Julia Davis. Bell Shakespeare at the Arts Centre Playhouse until June 4.

Shakespeare's early history plays have preoccupied many an ambitious director. The eight plays make an extraordinary epic drama covering five generations of brutal power struggles. The second tetralogy, Henry VI parts I, II and III and Richard III, dramatises the ruinous civil wars between the houses of Lancaster and York that tore England apart before the ascension of the Tudor dynasty to the throne.

John Bell follows luminaries like Peter Hall, Michael Bogdanov and Adrian Noble in tackling the second tetralogy. And like Hall (Wars of the Roses) and Noble (The Plantagenets), he has elected to adapt the four works into a single play. To be more precise, he has worked the Henry VI trilogy into a play, and then appended as an epilogue the shortest version ever of Richard III, whose Machiavellian ascension to power over a pile of corpses takes the length of a song.

This is a self-consciously irreverent Australian adaptation of works which are, to the marrow of their bone, about Englishness. Why, then, should we be interested in them? Shakespeare's analysis of the tragic, inexorable cycle of power suggests one answer. But rather than delving into the harsh morality of Shakespeare's complex political world, Bell sidesteps the question and plumps for cheap populism.

Perhaps the most obvious symptom of this is the Monty Python accents affected by the French, who are presented as a bunch of fops. At any moment you expect them to start hurling dung at the Eengleesh. Worse, it makes it hard to believe that the French are capable of mounting any defence against the English, let alone winning any battles. Worst of all, when Joan of Arc (Georgia Adamson, mercifully free of the foppishness) is captured, Bell makes an allusion to the Abu Ghraib torture scandal by having her brought on in a shopping trolley, her head in a black bag, and pushed around while soldiers take photos of the abuse.

This snatch at contemporary events is gratuitously shallow: are we now supposed to equate France with occupied Iraq? And if so, why are we caricaturing the enemy? Or is the whole issue of torture merely the occasion (as I fear) for a jokey aside? The same kind of metaphorical confusion happens when Jack Cade (Christopher Stollery) quotes a line by George W. Bush ("Watch this drive!") So the most powerful leader in the Western world, the scion of a wealthy oil dynasty, is actually like a rebellious and powerless peasant?

Aside from a scene showing Joan's dealings with demons and witchcraft (absent from this version), Shakespeare is fairly even-handed in his portrayals of the French and the English, with both armies demonising each other. Dehumanising the enemy is one of the time-honoured (or dishonoured) staples of warfare, and Shakespeare clearly demonstrates its mechanisms. By eliciting easy laughs at the expense of the French, Bell neatly fillets out this moral equivalence, and with it a great deal of tragic power.

These merry quips are among aspects of the production that are supposed to appeal to the young. They certainly got laughs from the not-very-young audience, making me reflect on Howard Barker's now disavowed dictum that laughter in the theatre is a kind of death. But mainly I wondered whether obscuring Shakespeare's seriousness and emotional potency wasn't, in fact, cheating young people of a potentially astounding experience.

Certainly the teenagers I took, media sophisticates that they are, were rolling their eyes at the contemporary references ("what's with the Bush thing?") They also knew it didn't make sense. And such panderings dilute any moments of genuine audacity - Darren Gilshenan, for example, singing the famous opening lines to Richard III as a sardonically dark rock song.

Richard Curtis' design sets the play in a sports stadium, with echoes of the Colosseum, and many of the soldierly costumes are versions of athletic body armour. The motley costumes strike a balance between being brashly contemporary and theatrically timeless, and the harsh, flat lighting accentuates the unrelenting brutality of the action. For the most part the battle scenes, staged as aggressive dance or with elements from Asian fight films, are exciting and theatrical.

The most powerful moments revolve around the performances of Richard Piper as Warwick and Greg Stone as the Duke of York. They imbue their roles with a masculinity that wavers between swagger and amoral ruthlessness, complicated by epiphanies of real, tragic feeling: half gangsters, half noblemen. Piper plays Warwick, the Duke of York's chief henchman, as a bluff mercenary, pragmatic and pitiless in pursuit of his goals, but also unwaveringly loyal to York and touchy about his honour.

Stone's performance is remarkable: the scene on the molehill when the captured Duke of York is mocked by Margaret of Anjou, who throws him a handkerchief stained with the blood of his dead son, is one of the few times when the play truly reaches Shakespearean heights. York's railing against Margaret, and the unbearable poignancy of his grief, is a heart rending evocation of the tragedy and bloodiness of war.

They are surrounded by generally strong performances, notably from John Batchelor, Christopher Stollery, Georgia Adamson and Peter Lamb, but at times the characterisations seemed a little one dimensional. The pious, unworldly Henry IV is an ambiguous figure, at once pitiable, morally admirable and contemptibly irresponsible. He is played somewhat wanly by Joe Manning, who mostly succeeds in seeming bewildered. There are more subtleties and strengths to this role than pathos; an inescapable bitterness at his destiny, for example, and the irony that knows the true worth of the crown for which so many others are prepared to murder.

Margaret of Anjou is played by Blazey Best as a manipulative sex bomb, an interpretation that, like her outrageous accent, obscures her warrior ruthlessness. Darren Gilshenan plays Richard of Gloucester, York's hunchbacked son (soon to be Richard III) as a pastiche of Laurence Olivier and Anthony Sher's spidery performances. It works - kind of - but as caricature rather than characterisation.

These interpretations strike me as failures of direction rather than performance, a marred understanding of the plays which often mistakes novelty for originality and crassness for crude vitality. It's a shame, because in its best moments, Wars of the Roses has the lineaments of a tantalisingly excellent production.

Bell Shakespeare