Those curious to hear my dulcet tones can listen to me speaking about Joanna Murray-Smith's The Female of the Species on ABC Radio's The Deep End. I fear my vocabulary went into a nosedive - this interview was done second thing in the morning, after I had already done another review for The Book Show (pre-scripted, fortunately, and coming up soon) and after a night's insomnia induced by cortisone. That's my excuse, anyway. I will review The Female of the Species here soon, and I swear not to say the word" fun" once...

Last night I had the pleasant task of helping to give away some money to a young artist. It was the announcement of the winner of the George Fairfax Memorial Award, which is given every two years to a VCA School of Drama alumni to permit them to develop their professional and artistic ambitions.

This year's winner is Luke Mullins, one of the members of the very talented group Stuck Pigs Squealing. (The 2004 winner is, interestingly, Stuck Pigs director Chris Kohn...) Mullins will use the money to collaborate on a theatre piece with Canadian poet Anne Carson and to work with the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre in New York. Luke's new show, based on Anne Carson's novel An Autobiography of Red opens, in fact, at the Malthouse on September 12, so get down there to see what the fuss is about.

As one of the judges of this prize, with Lindy Davies and Richard Murphet, I can attest that it was an inspiringly difficult decision. There was a depth to the field of entries that made awarding only one prize seem a little unfair, and the breadth of vision on offer was a tribute to the profound impact that the VCA School of Drama is having on Melbourne theatre. If a theatre renaissance is quietly bubbling here, as some claim, the passionate, skilled and thoughtful theatre artists turned out by this school is one of the reasons.

And meanwhile, back at the ranch - I am in conversation tomorrow with the very charming poet George Szirtes at the Melbourne Writers Festival. Last year George won the prestigious TS Eliot Award for his collection Reel. As the screed runs, "This morning, this major figure in British letters and acclaimed translator of poetry and prose from the Hungarian, reads from his works and speaks to Alison Croggan. 31 August 11:45 am"

Should be fascinating, so come if you can. (And a whinge- shouldn't the Writers Festival get my name right? Croggon, guys: Croggon...)

ABC Radio National program Airplay is broadcasting my radio play Specula either today or yesterday (they say August 26, I was told 3pm on Sunday 27). However, it will be unambiguously repeated at 9pm next Friday September 1 Melbourne time. And for those who miss the broadcasts, the recording will be online for a few weeks here after the program is repeated on Friday.

Specula is a collaboration between myself and composer Sam Mallet. Institutional restrictions at the ABC meant it wasn't quite the intense collaboration we envisaged (though good on them for being interested), so we're both perhaps a little disappointed: but you can still hear Sam's music and my words. The radio play is part 3 of a private project of mine to do with an obsession with mediaeval woman mystics: those curious can find an interview here about part 1, a series of poems, and part 2, an essay, here.

And yes, those mystic bits are all my own work: the only actual quotations are from Malleus Maleficarum. Perhaps I missed my vocation?

Feel free to comment: I'd be most interested to hear any responses.

A few days ago I mentioned that I had to cut back on my workaholic tendencies before I either collapsed or began to write bilge.

A writer would, of course, always prefer to collapse before the bilge, rather than afterwards; so I hope, for the sake of my pride, that it all happened in the correct order. Your indefatigable crrritic proved not so indefatigable after all, and was, to the alarm of herself and of everyone around her, carted off in an ambulance early on Thursday and put very firmly into hospital. And they wouldn't let me out again until today, which was, to say to the least, tedious. Though to be honest for a day or two I was far too sick even to be bored.

I fear that I am in some ways very thick; certainly, it didn't really hit home until Thursday morning that it is possible to die from being unable to breathe. Anyway, I have made my acquaintance with many innovative and cutting-edge drugs, and am now, regretlessly and without any kind of struggle, an ex-smoker. Who needs to be that sick? Not me.

Things here will obviously be a little slower until I get up to speed again. But I feel very committed to this blog (perhaps I ought to be committed) and am not planning to give it up. I just have to organise my priorities - slowly and carefully - so I can survive them all. But I'm back, I'm fine and I'm planning to be finer still. Just not in any manic hurry.

Construction of the Human Heart by Ross Mueller, directed by Brett Adam. Lighting by Rob Irwin, sound by Casey Bennetto. With Fiona Macleod and Todd MacDonald. The Tower @ the Malthouse until September 3

Physical pain, says Elaine Scarry in her groundbreaking study The Body in Pain, destroys human language. The problem is that, as Scarry puts it, "the act of verbally expressing pain is a necessary prelude to the collective task of diminishing pain".

Behind this is an assumption that we have a ready vocabulary for emotional suffering. And certainly, you can wave a hand at millenia of literary expressions of grief, loss and despair, or even at the stumblingly moving In Memoriam poems in the daily newspaper. But for all their expressiveness, can these millions of words really mitigate an iota of anguish?



For my part, my private nadirs have always exposed language - otherwise the DNA of my conscious being - as utterly useless. I have no doubt that the ability to articulate emotional pain is better than being unable to do so, and yet I have never quite felt either that therapeutic faith which underlies so many of our assumptions about human expression. A facility with language may even be counter-productive: language can be something to hide in, a means of denial as much as of admission.

This is the emotional and intellectual territory of Construction of the Human Heart, which is my first acquaintance with the writing of Ross Mueller. Where have I been? Mueller is surely one of the most intelligent, formally adventurous and emotionally brave playwrights now writing in this country.

On the face of it, a play that is about a play - worse, a play about two writers and a play - sounds like a sure recipe for unbridled narcissism. In Mueller's hands, it becomes a desolately moving meditation on human helplessness in the face of overwhelming grief.

Construction of the Human Heart is about a couple, Him and Her, who are haunted by two deaths. Her returns obsessively to the death of her mother, a relationship scored by unbridgeable absences and alienations. The other death is that of the couple's son. We never find out why he died, or even how old he was; but his death has triggered mechanisms of blame, denial and anger that really only conceal the utter devastation of his loss.

The play sets up a disarmingly simple conceit which, almost by the bye, also interrogates the formal conventions of theatre and writing. The stage in the Tower Theatre is simply a raised platform, the acting area delineated by white paint. On the stage are two chairs, each with a bottle of water placed beside them. We are, it seems, about to attend an informal public reading of a work in progress.

The actors, Fiona Macleod and Todd MacDonald, enter through the side door when the house lights are still up. They clear their throats, fiddle with their scripts, smile nervously at the audience and settle down on the chairs. They begin to read the first scene.

So far, so conventional. Then Him drops his script, the two start bickering and you begin to understand that Him and Her are partners and that they are reading Her script, which is written out of their personal lives. At this point I realised that the house lights had gone down. They had dimmed so gradually that, although I was expecting them to go dark, I hadn't noticed when it had happened. The transition from a public reading, where the audience is visible to the actors and to each other, to a formal piece of theatre, where we sit in the dark witnessing the action on stage, is cunningly imperceptible.

The effect is a potent sense of complicity between the audience and the actors: they have seen us as much as we have seen them. And this reinforces a sense of voyeurism as the actors move in and out of differing imaginative realities - the relationship they are enacting before us, and the script they are reading. A third layer is added by Casey Benneto's pre-recorded voiceovers, which boom increasingly baroque stage directions. They describe powerful visual and sonic elements that never eventuate on the bare stage, becoming at once cues for the audience's imagination and sly satires on theatrical convention.

The dynamic between the read script and the "real" play becomes increasingly more complex and more fraught. Is Her, as Him claims, really the one in control, the one who can articulate what happened and deal with her grief? Or is she as lost as Him, floundering in her grief as she uses her imaginative life to deny that her son is dead?

What becomes clear is how little these two people can help each other. As writers they both have a privileged relationship to expression, but even this doesn't help them communicate or even to understand the actuality of their own pain. Even their love is not enough. "The land of tears," as St Expury says in The Little Prince, "is so mysterious".

In Brett Adam's hands, this complex script is given its full emotional and intellectual range. The stripped-down design and Rob Irwin's unobstrusive but effective lighting frame two extraordinarily generous performances. Neither Macleod nor MacDonald miss a beat: on them rests the human weight of the play, the painful silences behind the words, and they meet the challenge with performances that articulate its subtleties and emotional power.

It makes superb, thoughtful theatre, which manages to be at once astringently intelligent and heartbreaking. And this stylishly minimal production, imported into the Malthouse after a successful season at the Store Room, is as polished as any I've seen.

Picture: Fiona Macleod and Todd MacDonald. Photo: Deryk Alpin

For which this blog is not intended, so I promise I will get back to controlled egocentricity very soon.

However, I feel that I need to explain that over the next six months I will have to be restricted in my reviewing, as I need to focus on my novel. I will certainly not be abandoning the blog, which in some ways keeps me sane while I prosaically labour away at my desk, but I am definitely limiting my playgoing to one show (at a stretch two) a week. Even I, blithe idiot that I am, realise that if I do more I will (a) collapse and/or (b) start writing tripe. So apologies in advance to the people whose invitations I will have to decline (and please don't stop sending them!)

Secondly, Theatre Notes has had a couple of nice mentions in the press this weekend, thanks to her inclusion in Creme de la Phlegm, a newly-released MUP anthology of notable critical hatchet jobs edited by SMH arts writer Angela Bennie. Worth reading in full is James Bradley's review in the Age this weekend, which among other things intelligently (and positively) discusses the arts blogosphere, and has some hard words for mainstream reviewing:

The democracy of the net is often closer to licensed demagoguery. But simultaneously it offers access to voices that struggle to find space in the traditional media. And the online forum's flame wars notwithstanding, these voices are flourishing, meaning much of the best writing about Australian art and culture is now to be found online.

[Bennie] is also correct in her assertion that we now inhabit a society where serious thinking about art and culture - indeed, serious thinking of any kind - is routinely derided. But simultaneously her desire to preserve the cultural status of the critic hampers her attempt to map out the factors that have driven that decline.

They are, of course, many and complex. The impatience with ambiguity and difficulty that has grown up hand in hand with consumer capitalism's culture of instant gratification, the increasingly blurry line between marketing and editorial, the ongoing erosion of educational standards; all play a part.

The status of criticism, as Bennie, like West before her, sees all too clearly, is only one victim of these forces. The same culture of impatience with serious thought pervades almost every aspect of our culture, from politics down. And almost invariably it is the interests of the powerful that are served by the lack of engagement and serious debate.... One of the symptoms of this malaise is the endless, underinformed rush to judgement we see every day in our media, the constant asinine commentary about what's wrong with our art and our artists.

Over at Sarsaparilla, Kerryn alerts me to two deaths. Playwright Alex Buzo, one of the pioneers of the New Wave Australian drama, died after a battle with cancer at only 62. And James Hall, former literary editor of the Australian and variously arts editor and editor of the Bulletin, died suddenly the day before. Jim was in fact responsible for my becoming a critic: he gave me the job of Melbourne theatre critic when he was arts editor at the Bulletin and I was a young tyro. I respected him tremendously and am very saddened to hear of his death.

I ought to read Andrew Bolt's blog more often. I'm not sure whether I should be flattered - it seems that I'm a "much talked about poet" who has made it to his list of pinko enemies (as a result of my defence of Kristy Edmunds and MIAF). Perhaps it's a little petty to respond, but I do feel compelled to make a couple of points to, as it were, defend my honour.

First, Bolt uses John Slavin's review of Diamanda Galas to "prove" that my response to Galas' performance is, um, invalid. Well, I wrote about the inadequate critical response to Galas, including Slavin's very fuzzy review, at length last year. It's more than an aesthetic difference: Slavin clearly didn't know what he was talking about.

That aside, in my Age piece I was pointing out that, despite the canard that no one was interested, last year's MIAF was enjoyed by crowds of Melburnians, and that an awful lot of shows were actually sold out. (I won't re-enter the tired old argument that commercial viability equals artistic excellence. Tell that to Milton, who struggled to sell 3000 copies of Paradise Lost in his lifetime.) But Bolt claims, at a more personal level, that I wouldn't have a hope of knowing what's popular anyway, being an elitist poet and all. I am apparently all bristles because I've had too many Australia Council grants and don't have enough readers.

Bolt naturally neglects to mention that I do actually write popular literature. As well as the elitist stuff. Hey, just this week I made it to a best seller list for the first time, with my latest YA release The Crow (NB: I'm not sure how long this link will remain current). According to this week's UK Publishing News charts, in the Bertram's Children's lists The Crow is at Number 6 in the UK. That's above JK Rowling, folks, who clocks in at Number 9. I'm quite chuffed, really. Plus book number two, The Riddle, this week scored a starred review (for exceptional merit) in the US trade mag Kirkus on its release in the States this month (again, this link will go out of date....) Not bad for an old anti-populist.

To clinch his argument that I am an undeserving recipient of public money, Bolt even quotes a poem of mine. Well, half of it, anyway. He could have had the grace to mock the whole thing. (Note to Andrew: if you're going to clock me for being obscure, do it honestly.) As regular readers of Bolt's writings will know, leaving out the important parts of an argument is a key part of his rhetoric. I'm not going to defend my poetry: it's never going to please everyone, and people of more integrity than Bolt give it enough recognition to be going on with. But I thought that I'd post the whole thing, just for the record (minus indentations that I can't do on this blog). It's called Bread.

Whatever drags downward, the heart hampers:
hands softer than dough
may leaven massy weights, o delicate
knucklings of love,

those confusing perfumes, wafers taken
out of the fragrant ovens
to be laid on muteness, on whatever starves
in crowds of noise

or between walls neither silent nor friendly
where restless shadows
take refuge from themselves, wherever
no rains fall,

there may the tongue flood and flower:
harsh the stone that cracks
the seed, harsh the fire, harsher still the heart’s
voiceless need.

Thanks so much to everyone who posted nice comments on the essay I dragged out of the archives. Theatre Notes feels loved and cherished... This is perhaps not good for a crrritic, who rightly ought to be dipping her nib in venomous wit prior to skewering her next hapless victim (phew, I just remembered that I'm reviewing Leonard Radic's new book for ABC Radio National, so balance is restored).

The responses highlight how obsessed we theatre types are with the question of theatre criticism. There are a number of reasons for this, mainly to do with theatre's status as a temporal art. Companies depend on reviews as a means of getting the word out on a show and drawing an audience. And (one of my bugbears) once the show is closed and gone, reviews are often the major documentary evidence that a work existed at all. Inadequate reviewing can mean that entire swathes of theatre history vanish altogether.

Anyway, for further discussions on criticism in London and New York, where concerns are interestingly congruent, check out Encore Theatre Magazine's stimulating discussion on responding to critics and Superfluities' own dip into the archives, this thoughtful essay here.

And a PS: I just caught up with Ben Ellis' review of Cameron Woodhead's demolition of David Grieg's The American Pilot, recently mounted by Red Stitch. Not having seen this show, I have no opinion of the production or play: but I'm wholly with Ben on his opinion of Woodhead's "toxicity". I think it's a serious problem that a reviewer who so transparently knows so little about theatre and whose main vocation seems to be that of a walking sneer should be the new senior reviewer at the Age. In comparison, the daze of Radic seem almost halcyon. And that's saying something...

Festen, dramatised by David Eldridge, based on the dogme film and play by Thomas Vinterberg, Mogens Rukov and Bo Hr. Hansen, directed by Simon Phillips. Designed by Shaun Gurton, lighting by Matt Scott. With Nicholas Bell, Julia Blake, Melinda Butel, Ditch Davey, Jason Donovan, Julie Eckersley, Kim Gyngell, Bob Hornery, Chris Kirby, Alex Menglet, John Stanton, Kat Stewart and Greg Ulfan. Melbourne Theatre Company at the Fairfax Studio, Victorian Arts Centre, until September 23

I have to begin this review with an abject confession. Yes, gentle reader, in things cinematic, Theatre Notes is a dolt. Not only have I not seen Thomas Vinterberg's film Festen, on which this play is based: I have never even seen a Dogme film.

As everyone else knows, Dogme was a Danish collective of avant garde film makers started by Lars Von Trier in 1995. Dogme was defined by a manifesto which excoriated the decadence of contemporary cinema and called for a new, democratic purity. Directors were exhorted to put aside the bourgeois individualism of the auteur, refuse artifice and devote themselves to revealing reality. To this end, they were expected to adhere to a Vow of Chastity.

Festen (Celebration) was in fact the first Dogme film. Given the austerity of the Dogme vow - which prohibits any kind of illusion, including props, sets, lighting or even bringing extraneous items into a location - it seemed to me an unpromising basis for that child of metaphor and illusion, the theatre. And in any case, I am inclined to be suspicious of theatre that chases the illusory glamour of film.

I am, of course, always glad to be proved wrong, and Eldridge's adaptation turns out to be brilliantly theatrical. Although I found its conclusion mystifying (which may have been a function of the production), I was compelled by a script that was at once tough, subtle and muscularly gestic.

The celebration of the title is the 60th birthday of a wealthy hotelier, Helge Klingelfeldt (John Stanton), held shortly after the suicide of one of his daughters. When his oldest son Christian (Jason Donovan) rises to give the toast, he reveals a shocking family secret. This prompts a succession of increasingly violent reactions as the household - the extended family and servants as well as the parents and children - struggles through denial and is finally forced to confront the truth.

It's not quite as direly therapeutic as it sounds in this bald summary. It is saved from the Oprah Winfrey genre by the complexity and subtlety of its characterisation, which allows for a truly human contradictoriness to emerge in its portrayals, and by how the drama opens up metaphorically to become an indictment of bourgeois mores. Its exposure of the sadism, hypocrisy, racism and exploitation running underneath the skin of capitalist society made me think (uncharacterically) of a film that also opens with a family celebration - Visconti's masterly exploration of the roots of Nazism, The Damned.

Moreover, there is a genuine fascination in its close observation of the rhythms of social convention, how human beings protect themselves from painful realities through rituals of habit. This is reinforced by staging meals in real time - tables are set, people are seated and real food is eaten - which gives the action a compelling frame of veracity. And there are moments of theatrical magic - one scene weaves three separate dialogues from three bedrooms seamlessly together, replacing simultaneity of time with simultaneity of space. In a beautiful piece of choreography, all six characters end up on the same bed. Awesome theatre.

The Dogme anti-aesthetic aims to focus attention entirely on the story and performances. It is possible to do something similar in the theatre: there's a parallel aesthetic in the early Keene/Taylor Theatre Project productions, which were presented in a working Brotherhood of St Lawrence warehouse using only the objects found there as props.

The necessary artifice of the stage presents its own obvious challenges. The English production of Festen, directed by Rufus Norris, solved this problem with a design of formidable austerity that sculpted a play of light and shadow on a mostly empty stage. Simon Phillips gives us a much softer interpretation. Shaun Gurton's set - a semicircular framing of hauntingly-lit birch trees - avoids the literal, but it is a tad pretty and lyrical. And it is overdressed, a frequent flaw in MTC designs, with gratuitous touches such as a chandelier descending from the flies that distract not only the eye, but the mind.

This slightly fudged air continues through the production, which leaves you feeling as if you just missed something: it's as if the emotion of the play is a melody half-heard in the distance. Phillips has some excellent actors at his disposal, and elicits some fine performances - in particular, John Stanton as Helge and Julia Blake as his wife, Else, who give controlled, understatedly powerful performances. Julie Eckersley and Ditch Davey as Christian's dysfunctional brother Michael and his put-upon wife create an authentic energy of violent, damaged sexuality. Bob Hornery, Alex Menglet and Kim Gyngell as the comic mechanicals provide some requisite black humour; but few of the other performances quite hit the mark.

Jason Donovan in the central role of Christian is an emptiness in the middle of the production. There is, of course, a sense in which he is meant to be a kind of black hole, exerting a traumatic gravity into which he draws the rest of the family; but for all his exertions - and there is no doubt he is working his arse off - Donovan seems strangely absent as an actor. He mistakes mere blankness for the emotional numbness of trauma, and confuses emoting for the material of real feeling.

A sense of actorly self-consciousness flaws Kat Stewart's performance of Christian sister Helene as well. For all its toughness, Festen is a delicate play that depends crucially on a sense of authenticity in performance, and in this production emotional nuance is terminally blurred. Hence, I think, the puzzling ending, in which the writer has either lost his nerve or something has been crucially misunderstood.

The final scene is a family breakfast which appears to tie off the traumas of the previous night's action in a neat bow: catharsis is attained, everyone is healed and the repentant malefactor is punished. It all feels rather too pat. Here I really am hampered by not having seen the film: does it really finish with such simplistic psychologising? I had the feeling that something else was happening subtextually that just wasn't apparent in this production: a certain menace, perhaps a certain manipulative reassertion of patriarchal power. But here I am only guessing.

Despite this, Festen has moments of real potency, and Phillips' flair for stage choreography is well in evidence, especially in its early scenes. It's an opportunity teasingly missed by a very small margin. Unfortunately with a play like this, the small things really matter.

Picture: Jason Donovan as Christian. Photo: Jeff Busby