Melbourne's Commonwealth Games party is over, but it seems that the $13 million cultural component - a huge program of free events which was enthusiastically embraced by Melburnians, including me - is being used as a big stick to bash the arts, or at least the Melbourne International Festival of the Arts.

I was not alone in thinking last year's MIFA was the most exciting for years. But as so often in Australia, it seems that artistic achievement pales before the bottom line. Think of the controversial termination in 2003 of Simone Young's contract with the Australian Opera, or Meryl Tankard's acrimonious departure from the Australian Dance Theatre in 1999. Or of any number of festival directors who have created critically acclaimed arts festivals, only to be shoved out the door once it's discovered that European-class arts festivals actually cost money.

In a recent article in The Age, it was claimed that the success of the Games' cultural festival has given rise to an idea that it ought to be an annual fixture, with possible implications for MIFA. And, perhaps not inconsequentially, Robin Usher reports an attack on MIFA artistic director Kristy Edmunds by the Victorian Arts Centre administration:

The free Festival Melbourne 2006, costing $13 million out of the overall Games' budget, attracted about 1 million people from across the state, including 700,000 in Melbourne. The event's director, Andrew Bleby, says politicians including the Premier, Steve Bracks, all observed the throngs milling around the circus tent and other events along the Yarra and at Federation Square. This is why he believes there will be an addition to March's cultural calendar.

But the question now is whether any new event might impact on MIAF, which reported a box-office return of only $1.64 million after receiving a grant of $5.5 million from the Victorian Government - the largest of any festival except Adelaide's biennial event.

MIAF's programming by the first-time director, Kristy Edmunds, has come in for behind-the-scenes criticism, with several senior arts figures and administrators arguing that the 2005 event concentrated on an "unremitting narrow band" of performance.

Arts insiders also point to poor return for events at the Arts Centre, where the box office was only $650,000.

A furious Arts Centre administration is reported to have complained to the Government about the programming, which put poorly attended shows such as Green by the Japanese choreographer Saburo Teshigawara and Rite of Spring by the New York-based Shen Wei dance company, in the vast State Theatre.

The Commonwealth Games festival was massively well funded, with a budget almost three times that of MIFA; all events were free and so posted no box office return at all. MIFA, on the other hand, has to sell tickets. Why compare the two events? Moreover, is the State Government really going to spend $13 million every year on another arts festival? I find that one hard to swallow.

I am curious to know the details of the MIFA box office figures, since they don't necessarily reflect poor attendance. Certainly, I did not see a single event at MIFA that wasn't packed out - demand for Theatre de Soleil, for example, was so great they had to schedule extra shows. I may have picked my shows with exquisite taste, of course, and seen only the festival successes.

But I am very wary of the agenda being pushed here.

Art Centre chief executive (not, I note, artistic director) Tim Jacobs claims that government investment in arts festivals "ultimately depends on popular involvement". And there is concern expressed by unnamed "others" that the festival is "open to the charge that it is catering too much to elite tastes".

The key word here is "elite". I have personally never understood why no one questions the huge amounts of money thrown at elite sports - the Commonwealth Games reportedly cost more than $1 billion, most of which will be picked up by the State Government - while the comparatively modest amounts spent on the arts rouse such ire. Survey after survey shows that, contrary to popular belief, Australians like their arts. All that the Games festival proved was that they like them even more if they're free.

Culture, like sport, costs money. If we want, as we claim, the kudos of a "world class" culture, why cavil at what what "world class" culture actually is? Last year we had some of the world's most exciting companies in Melbourne, including a rich component of local work. It was, artistically speaking, a huge success: and I saw crowds everywhere. I deeply hope this article isn't a straw in the wind, and that the vitality we glimpsed then isn't crushed by a bureaucratic demand for bread and circuses.

Surely it's the first time a theatre stoush has inspired a song - in any case, British singer Billy Bragg has written a song protesting the NYTW cancellation of My Name Is Rachel Corrie. The Lonesome Death of Rachel Corrie is downloadable here at The Guardian.

Those who believe Bragg is passe, by the way, might reflect on the fact that he is currently the hip songster of choice among Melbourne's young music fans. The times they are a-changing...

Playwright and critic Walter A. Davis has a brilliant and thought-provoking essay just up at MCW News which takes apart the tired old left/right binaries which infect discussions of political theatre. It's a must-read for anyone interested in (or depressed about) the possibilities of theatrical art. And it's absolutely applicable to ideologies at work in Australian theatre.

Jumping off the My Name Is Rachel Corrie controversy, which is virally spreading through the US media, Davis inspects the actual play, which he predicts will be clutched to the bosoms of all those wishing to tattoo "progressive" on their ideological foreheads, and isolates the conservative gene which resides fatally inside all documentary theatre - its refusal, finally, of aesthetic and political imagination. Davis' argument reflects Howard Barker's stentorian criticisms of what he calls "the theatre of journalism":

On those rare occasions when a play succeeds in preserving the conditions of genuine art, it offers its community a challenge that goes far deeper than controversial comments on a given political topic.  For such works cleanse the doors of perception, thereby transforming our relationship to ourselves and the world.  We feel and experience everything in new ways, ways fraught with anxiety but also with the pulse of transgressive discovery.  Ideology no longer retains its habitual and automatic control over our minds. It is in this sense that Hamlet and Marat/Sade and Three Sisters are political in a way far more radical than The Permanent Way to Victoria Britain or Guantanamo or, to strike closer to home, the confused Messianic (and non Benjaminian) aesthetic of Angels in America or the self-congratulatory sexual posturing of The Vagina Monologues.

In transforming the very terms of our experience radical works of art exposes their audience to the pervasive ways in which we are prisoners of ideologies that severely limit our possibilities of thinking and feeling.  Plays that perform such a function need never directly address a political topic in order to be political in the deepest sense by making it impossible for us to experience the world the way we previously did.   The popular concept and practice of political theatre, in contrast, severely truncates this possibility.  It offers us no more than a quick ideological fix on some current issue.  As a result we are more the slave of ideology—be it liberal or conservative, religious or secular, or whatever—than we were before.  All such dramas do is incite the faithful so that we’ll fall into line the next time we’re polled on some issue or asked to contribute cash to some politician campaign.

Thanks to Superfluities for the heads up.

East: Elegy for the East End and its Energetic Waste by Steven Berkoff, directed by John Bolton, lighting by Toby Bolton. With Andre Jewson, Simon Morrison-Baldwin, Sarah-Jane St Clair, James Re and James Ballarin. La Mama at the Carlton Courthouse until April 1.

This marvellous production of East reminds you how powerful language can be in the theatre. In his first, and to my mind his best play, Steven Berkoff forged an outrageous poetry from the collision of Shakespearean rhythms and cockney slang, creating a heightened theatrical vernacular that is at once obscene, audacious, dark and beautiful.

East premiered just over 30 years ago, but Berkoff's brash originality shines as freshly as ever. Its language is reminiscent of Anthony Burgess' s A Clockwork Orange, in the film of which Berkoff acted shortly before he wrote East: there is the same extreme metaphoric pressure and kinetic energy, the same ecstatic violence. But unlike A Clockwork Orange, East is a celebration of the "energetic waste" of youth, an exuberant aria of damage and desire.

Set in London's East End in the late 1960s, the London of Berkoff's own adolescence, the play is, as he says, "a scream or a shout of pain. It is revolt. ...East could be the east side of any city where the unveneered blast off at each other in their own compounded argot as if the ordinary language of polite communication was as dead as the people who uttered it... The acting has to be loose and smacking of danger ... it must smart and whip out like a fairy's wicked lash..."

What's most striking about this language is its unabashed carnality: it is arousing, in every sense of that word, demanding the immediacy of physical response. Like his contemporaries Maria Irene Fornes and Richard Foreman, Berkoff is an auteur director, who wrote and directed his own plays with the London Theatre Group. He situates his theatre in a variety of performing traditions and techniques, including vaudeville, Brecht, Artaud and Le Coq, but the emphasis is always on the text and the actors.

The tension between writerly and performative excess and an ascetic simplicity of design makes a theatre that is at once elegant and rawly affective. Berkoff's production of Salome, which toured here many years ago, featured highly stylised and expressive performances of Oscar Wilde's heightened language. In a way, it's the obvious thing to do with such naked theatrical poetry: but the obvious is not necessarily easy. It's a question of holding one's nerve, of following the gesture through, blasting past the fear of creating mere parody or shallow pastiche towards an Artaudian possibility of revelation.

VCA head of acting John Bolton has directed a copybook production that fully exploits the talents of his young ensemble, and it's as enjoyable a production of East as you'll see. The Courthouse space is draped on three sides by black curtains, which fortuitously go a long way to solving many of the acoustic problems of this space and permit very precise, black theatre lighting. The set consists of five chairs, a piano and a table set for a meal. Toby Bolton's lighting is at once subtle and bold, creating maximum effect with a sparely chosen pallet that caresses the bodies of the actors as they emerge from or vanish into darkness.

What centrally matters in any production of Berkoff's work is the performances. In East, the play depends on a sense of explosive youthful anarchy married to a high level of actorly skill: it's essential that you can hear every word of Berkoff's thick, viscous language, that every gesture is precise and measured. The length and complexity of the monologues means that sustaining energy and focus is an almost athletic challenge. These performances are remarkably detailed, reflecting months of work (the luxury of a student production): every phrase is lovingly incarnated and articulated through the bodies of the actors, and performed with an infectious relish.

East is at once a celebration and critique of the performance of masculinity. Les (James Re) and Mike (James Ballarin), the two young thugs perpetually on the hunt for a fight or a fuck, play their parts with a swaggering machismo that is so excessive it turns into a hilarious parody of itself. Arrogant and amoral, they live for the spilling of bodily fluids, blood or sperm: the moment of ecstatic release that permits them to transcend the banality and poverty of their lives. But beneath this extremity is a corrosive isolation: "I was lonely...' says Les, "basically I think, like one is born that way, I always felt lonely as if it was something like a habit..."

Their racist, misognyist Dad (Andre Jewson) simmers in a constant brew of suppressed rage, laced with a poisonous nostalgia. The high point of Dad's life, and in Jewson's frenetic performance a high point of the night, is his memory of a march with the Fascists of Oswald Mosley, beating up the "Kikes". But it is a memory of failure - the marchers were beaten back, England was not saved for the English - and Dad's only recourse is to bully his children and his wife. Jewson is 30 years too young for the part, but makes up for that by bringing a quality of grotesque caricature to the role that emphasises the play's theatricality, its play of masks.

Against this aggressive masculinity the two women, Mum (Simon Morrison-Baldwin) and Sylv (Sarah-Jane St Clair) launch a bruised but vitally resistant femaleness. The relationship between the sexes is agonistic all the way. Sylv's potent sexuality is a weapon to goad and mock the men: "So thou, bitch," says Mike, "seeks to distress my Johnny tool with psychological war, humiliating it into surrender shrink". But for Sylv, and for Mum, it's a battle that cannot end in victory: Sylv is clear-sighted enough to understand the conventions that imprison her, even if she can't do more than rebel against them.

Mum has retreated into numbness; she no longer reacts to anything except the fantasies in her head, fed by the cliches of popular culture. Morrison-Baldwin plays her, in contrast to the heightened energies of the other performances, as a centre of unnatural calmness, stilled perhaps by Valium, no longer even reacting to her husband's unpredictable rages.

Berkoff isn't going to allow the audience the luxury of easy empathy with any of these characters: even Mum doesn't coalesce into a figure of pity, but reveals her own surprising resistances. Neither does he suggest any way out of the dilemmas the characters reveal. East is joyously amoral, leaving the audience to wrestle with its contradictory empathies and revulsions.

This production gets these emotional and aesthetic complexities just about spot on. It's an exuberant and sexy rendering of what is, in the end, a paean to life, venereal warts and all. It's rarely done here, so don't miss it.

Poet and translator Pierre Joris today posts an illuminating comment on his Nomadics blog that illustrates some of the ugliness of debate around the Rachel Corrie issue. (In particular, some of the ugliness that occurred when I posted information on the controversy to the American poetry discussion list, Buffalo Poetics.)

He goes on to point to a well-researched London Review of Books article by John Mearscheimer, Professor of Political Science at Chicago, and Stephen Walt, Professor of International Affairs at Harvard, which traces the deleterious influence of the "Israel lobby" on US foreign policy. A must read for anyone who wants to understand the larger pressures which touch on this issue.

Closer to home, playwright Ben Ellis points to Freedom of Expression, an excellent blog which updates news on the amendments to the Sedition Laws rushed through Parliament here in December. The Australian Law Reform Commission is currently conducting a review of these disgraceful, repressive and unnecessary laws.

The Sedition Laws are of grave concern to artists and media organisations: as they stand, under the vagueness of the criminal definition of "recklessness" and the wobbly defence of "good faith" (which reverses the onus of proof: the accused has to prove his or her innocence) you could be sent to prison for seven years if you invented a fictional character who advocated the overthrow of the government, or reported the statements of an organisation considered to be an enemy by the State. Government statements that "of course" the laws wouldn't be used in that way are, oddly, not very reassuring. Interestingly, of the 294 Senate submissions on the legislation, only two were in favour of the amendments - the Attorney General's Department and the Australian Federal Police. Go figure...

The Nero Conspiracy by Enzo Condello, directed by Beng Oh. Designed by Kat Chishkovsky, lighting by Nick Merrylees, sound by Robert Harewood. With Ian Rooney, Giovanni Bartuccio, Leon Durr, Tani Lentini, Simon Kearney, Steven Cabral, Christopher Broadstock, Josie Scott, Steven Dawson and Lauren Clare. Old Council Chambers, Trades Hall, Carlton, until April 2.

I'm not sure whether The Nero Conspiracy isn't one of the most naive plays I have ever seen. It's as if Enzo Condello simply decided that he wanted to write a Shakespearean tragedy and then went ahead and did it - blank verse, ornate language and all - blithely unaware of all the reasons why such a project might be impossible in the early 21st century.

I don't mean "naive" in any pejorative sense; indeed, a certain naivety, even stupidity, has always seemed to me an important ingredient of art, although it must be balanced by a concomitant sophistication. As Heiner Muller said: "Stupidity is a prerequisite for poets. I am a good example of this... Maybe I have too little fear."

And in fact, one thing that is striking about both this play and its production is its fearlessness. Director Beng Oh, whose work is new to me, meets the challenges of Condello's text head on, and in the process creates a powerful contemporary example of tragic theatre. It may be raw; it may even be, on reflection, something that oughtn't to work at all: but it seems to me that The Nero Conspiracy misses being a triumph by only the narrowest of margins.

The play retells Tacitus's history of a plot by members of Rome's aristocracy to assassinate the corrupt and tryannical Roman emperor Nero. Condello - drawing on Seneca's bloody tragedies, which influenced the Jacobeans as well as Shakespeare - creates a fast-moving and gripping drama. It has to be said that when Condello reaches for Shakespearean metaphorical complexities his language most often falters, falling into mere pastiche: he lacks the linguistic and dramatic finesse of his models. But for the most part, the play is written in muscular, plain blank verse, and it's surprisingly effective and economical.

What makes the play is, I think, Condello's solid sense of dramatic structure, which permits the inexorable unfolding of events to exert its own fatal fascination. Certainly, despite a feeling that the text was sometimes overwritten - especially at the end, where the powerful climax and denouement are muffled by the inclusion of three or four minutes of unnecessary dialogue - I was never bored.

Beng Oh's production is exemplary, attaining moments of authentic grandeur and horrible beauty. His sense of orchestration occasionally falters - it is a fine line he is treading here - but for the most part his direction is sure and compelling. He uses the simplest of resources to create a visual language drenched in the dark sensual splendour of Renaissance painting, highlighted by the operatic music which largely constitutes the sound. The wonderful opening scene, in which each character enters one by one and sits at a table draped with a white cloth, is for example clearly based on Da Vinci's The Last Supper.

But the major visual inspiration for the design is the dramatic painting of human form by Caravaggio, and here the lighting and design are crucial. The most important element is a plain red curtain that can be drawn across the middle of the stage, and many scenes are played against its vivid folds. The set is very simple: props are ordinary household objects, costumes neutrally contemporary, suggesting rather than illustrating the milieu of Ancient Rome. Nick Merrylees' expressive lighting enacts a lush chiaroscuro across the human forms on stage and makes the most of Kat Chishkovsky's design, which exploits the classic Victorian architecture of the Old Council Chamber space to its full.

But this would be mere framing if it were not for the high quality of the performances, which almost without exception meet the complex emotional and technical demands of this play. The scenes enacting human brutality are among the most effective I have seen in a theatre. This is, after all, a theatre of cruelty: Seneca's tragedies gave birth to Shakespeare's sadistic tragedy Titus Andronicus and the blood-drenched extremities of Jacobean drama, and Beng Oh picks up this tradition with an almost ascetic directness: it is the restraint which makes these scenes so potent.

The rape of the slave woman Epicharus (Tania Lentini) by Nero (Giovanni Bartuccio) early in the play is only surpassed by her torture, which is almost unwatchable. Violence of this extremity is very difficult to do well on stage: it is too easy for it to slip into the grotesquely comic. Here it is unambiguously horrifying, as if you were watching the real thing. This effect is not due to any particular gore on stage: it results from the ingenious manipulation of an audience's imaginative capacity, and some totally committed acting.

But tragedy is of course about pity as much as terror, and there is plenty of that as the characters in this tragedy struggle with events which they are powerless to resist or control as Rome's political climate darkens into slaughter. The final scenes between Seneca (Ian Rooney) and his wife Paulina (Josie Scott) manage to reach an extremity of pathos which is genuinely moving. And Seneca's suicide, the climax of the play, is at once sombre, grand and desolate.

Theatre of this imaginative ambition is rare anywhere, and it's worth seeing The Nero Conspiracy for that alone. I can't help feeling that this is at once one of the most peculiar and most arresting plays I will see this year. And I will watch Beng Oh's future development with enormous interest.

Bookings: Trades Hall, 9513 9363

In the beginning was the Word. Give something a name and lo! it exists...

The theatrical blogosphere is alive with discussion of something that's already called "the new lyricism" (thanks, Zay Amsbury). That means poetry in the theatre, folks, and that means I like it. George Hunka has a handy round up of the relevant reflections and discussions here. And it's fascinating.

And the NYTW furore has hit the bigtime - The Nation runs it as its lead story, with a useful backgrounding on all the issues surrounding the controversy and - for once - a proper acknowledgement of the part the blogosphere has played in this issue. For more on the press reactions, on new responses from people like Tony Kushner and others, and on continuing actions against the NYTW decision, check out The Playgoer, who has meticulously followed up every nuance of this affair, and Superfluities.

Robert Fisk - one of the few journalists whom I wholeheartedly respect - weighs in on the Rachel Corrie issue in The Independent, with an article called The Erosion of Free Speech:

You've got to fight. It's the only conclusion I can draw as I see the renewed erosion of our freedom to discuss the Middle East. The most recent example - and the most shameful - is the cowardly decision of the New York Theatre Workshop to cancel the Royal Court's splendid production of My Name Is Rachel Corrie.

It's the story - in her own words and emails - of the brave young American woman who travelled to Gaza to protect innocent Palestinians and who stood in front of an Israeli bulldozer in an attempt to prevent the driver from destroying a Palestinian home. The bulldozer drove over her and then reversed and crushed her a second time. "My back is broken," she said before she died.

An American heroine, Rachel earned no brownie points from the Bush administration which bangs on about courage and freedom from oppression every few minutes. Rachel's was the wrong sort of courage and she was defending the freedom of the wrong people. But when I read that James Nicola, the New York Theatre Workshop's "artistic director" - his title really should be in quotation marks - had decided to "postpone" the play "indefinitely" because (reader, hold your breath) "in our pre-production planning and our talking around and listening in our communities (sic) in New York, what we heard was that after Ariel Sharon's illness and the election of Hamas. ...we had a very edgy situation", I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

Fisk contextualises the NYTW decision with some other examples of attempted censorship of debate about Israel and Palestine - including, shamefully, a local Australian campaign against Jewish academic and journalist Anthony Loewenstein's forthcoming book on the Israel/Palestine conflict, due out later this year from Melbourne University Press.

For his journalistic mission of "monitoring the centres of power", as he puts it in his recent book The Great War for Civilisation, Fisk has been often smeared and reviled himself. But he is an intellectual in that rather 19th century and honourable sense: "one who will say the truth, no matter what the price". I'm all for old-fashioned values like that.

Maybe for me he exemplifies qualities which you also see in the great journalism of George Orwell or Ryszard Kapuscinski: an excoriating honesty which does not spare himself; a commitment to compassion and justice; a tough and resilient sense of humour; a resolute fairness towards even those with whom he disagrees; an attention always to the mundane yet significant details that make up our lives; a continual sense of outrage at how casually and brutally these fragile human realities can be utterly smashed by those with power.

It adds up to what Orwell called "decency".

_____________

Latest: Via Playgoer, a letter from British playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker defending the play is published in the New York Times plus a letter from the president of the NYTW Board defending the theatre from "shrill" criticism - Isaac Butler at Parabasis has the letter in full and a robust response.

Superfluities picks up Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter's comments that the NYTW's decision is a "a clear case of self-censorship". The full transcript of his Turin conversation with Guardian theatre critic Michael Billington is here, and worth reading for many reasons, but the pertinent quote is: "[My Name is Rachel Corrie] has now been withdrawn by the producing theatre in New York and that is, I think, typical of what is happening more and more in Britain and America: suppression of dissent and the truth."

The blog has been getting a little messy lately, and it's hard to find and access old reviews, so Theatre Notes got out the broom today and tidied up. Now I'm absolutely luminous with virtue. The most important new addition is that there is now a complete listing of links to every review and essay that has appeared on this site since June 2004. As I discovered, it all adds up...

The peripatetic Chris Boyd is posting some lively reviews of the Adelaide festival over at The Morning After, with mucho lush pictures. Wish I was there...and check out his interview too with David Freeman, director of the Opera Factory, where he speaks about Dionysian desires in theatre. The energy of Freeman's work lies in a very Australian and wholly admirable theatrical vulgarity, but sometimes I fear it is merely vulgar. Or maybe I've just never been able to get Madonna.

News from France is of a culture fighting for its life. The right-wing Chirac government's recent devolution of cultural funding from national to regional bodies has resulted in widespread and ongoing funding cuts. There are stories everywhere of theatre companies unable to produce planned programs of work because of unexpected budget cuts, in some cases approaching 20 per cent. The full extent of these cuts is still unknown. Perhaps Chirac's plan is to emulate the Australian model...

And words continue to spill over the Rachel Corrie controversy in New York. John Heilpern, the fine critic for the New York Observer, has an excellent opinion piece which backgrounds what he calls this "craven" decision a little more. We look to [Jim Nicola's] theater—and all great theaters—to be our forum, pulpit, truth-teller and witness to a world that has lost its reason, writes Mr Heilpern. Plays written in blood are not meant to be “acceptable” or “reach consensus.” That is for weaselly politicians. Give us plays of consequence, for heaven’s sake—not caution, compliance and fear.

Hear, hear. Wish I could read that in The Age...

Meanwhile in London, the new Practicum Theatre is accepting play submissions that "reflect the thoughts behind the recent ban of My Name is Rachel Corrie from the New York Theatre Workshop ... The plays should be 10 minutes or less and 8 - 12 pieces will be chosen for a central London showcase in May. Possible themes include: censorship, America, protest, racism, freedom of speech, democracy, Rachel Corrie, Israel and Palestine, propaganda, media control, invasion of privacy or fear. They say New York said nothing. Let's say something in London."

More information at www.practicumtheatre.com.

Well, some people in New York are saying quite a lot. But judging by the uncomfortable silence that this issue elicited last night in NY from a distinguished panel gathered to opine on - yes - the importance of political theatre (an inarticulacy surely up there with the amnesiac politicians so beloved of Australian Government inquiries), some kinds of politics are still off-limits.