Welcome back to the world!

(Or: yes, there is life after MIAF...)

The Masque of the Red Death, adapted from a story by Edgar Allan Poe, directed by John Bolton. Music by Jo Laing, set design by Jeminah Reidy, costumes by Jane Noonan, lighting design by Kimberly Kwa, sound design by Timothy Bright. Victoria College of the Arts Company 2008 Graduating Performance, Space 28, Dodds St, Southbank, until November 7.

Yibiyung by Dallas Winmar, directed by Wesley Enoch, dramaturgy by Lourise Gough. Set design by Jacob Nash, costumes design by Bruce McKinven, lighting design by Niklas Pajanti, composer and sound design by Steve Francis. With Jada Alberts, Jimi Bani, Sibylla Budd, Annie Byron, Russell Dykstra, Roxanne McDonald, David Page, Melodie Reynolds and Miranda Tapsell. Malthouse Theatre and Company B @ CUB Malthouse until November 16.

After too many years listening to respectable poets talk about their "craft", I have conceived a violent - if admittedly perhaps eccentric - prejudice against the word when it is yoked to "art". Craft is important if one is, for example, demanding shoes that don't let in rainwater or tables with the correct number of legs. Craft is essential and wholly admirable in the creation of any functional object. I spent many childhood hours watching a master blacksmith at his forge making lovely and useful things in ways that are now largely forgotten, and can personally attest to the deep magic of artisanship.

In the less directly functional realm of art, "craft" is a quality that makes me think of boxes that are cunningly joined together to admit no air. I'm not sure that I think that craft has anything much to do with art at all, perhaps primarily because I suspect that art isn't about function. I much prefer the terms "skill" or "technique" and can get as highminded as you like about the necessity of these: although even there I align with the poet Paul Celan, who said that technique is like hygiene: simply the least that one should expect.


And perhaps, for all its evident skilfulness, John Bolton's VCA production of The Masque of the Red Death would fail every measure on the dramaturgical craft meter. It doesn't make a lot of narrative sense or develop recognisable psychological portraits of its characters or follow any obvious laws of dramatic development, aside from having a definable beginning and end. A middle, I suppose, hangs between these things, but more as duration than development.

And although the performers quote most of Poe's original story, the show doesn't, for most of its length, have a lot to do with it (except that it is certainly a "gay and magnificent revel"). The story provides a structure, rather than a plot. Poe's gothic description of aristocrats holding a magnificent entertainment while plague rages in the outside world is rather the occasion for a string of theatrical sketches.

It is an evening of extreme cabaret, delivered with a black Artaudian edge, inventively directed and designed and performed with enthusiasm and (yes) skill. The comedy often has more to do with The Mighty Boosh or Derek and Clive or (in one obscene satire of Madame Butterfly) Austen Powers than with Poe, but there are moments of purely theatrical image-making that are beautiful and grotesquely unsettling. It has a hectic edge of doom-laden hysteria that seems especially apt for our media-hyped times.

Almost incidentally, it also explores various ways to relate to audiences, so you are always in a state of perceptual disruption. After watching the opening from conventional seats, the audience is invited into a tent that is constructed around them by the cast, seated in a circle and treated to some gyspy fortune telling. After that we were divided into smaller groups who were each taken into tiny rooms and entertained with a story (in our case, about Nelly, the "well-intentioned flea" who spreads the plague).

There are recitations of Poe's poems, sometimes in rude parody. There's a macabre tap dance, some ridiculously transparent magic tricks, a lot of gorgeous singing, many cruel jokes, lots and lots of mise en scene and more double entendres than you could poke a phallus at. It's all in highly questionable taste and no doubt most of the scatalogical humour is juvenile. But two hours went by on winged feet.

Yibiyung is, on the other hand, a well-crafted play. It's the story of Dallas Winmar's grandmother, who was taken from her family at the age of eight because she was a "half caste" and sent to a mission. From there she was hired out as a domestic servant to various white employers, until she ran away and rejoined her own people.

It's a story that, since the report on the Stolen Generations revealed a shameful litany of destroyed lives to a wider public, is now very familiar. And as director Wesley Enoch points out in the program, "in a post-apology world, the need to tell these stories has not evaporated". Given the continuing paternalism of Federal Indigenous policies, that's hard to argue with.

And in a way it's difficult to argue with this work, in that it is all honestly done and impeccably fulfils its own stated ambitions. It's beautifully directed, performed with energy and passion, well designed and lit. This coming of age story reveals the bureaucratic totalitarianism that ruled the lives of Indigenous people in Australia for most of the 20th century, and enslaved them in all but name.


In other words, this is Worthiness with a capital "W". Unlike Enoch's irresistible production of The Sapphires, it seldom escapes its didactic impulses. This worthiness is leavened by some inventive direction and appealing performances - notably from Miranda Tapsell as Yibiyung, with compelling support from David Page and Jimi Bani - but it's always there.

It's not like it's bad or that time hangs especially heavy. Yibiyung is an unusually well-realised example of a certain very recognisable kind of Australian theatre: it has an emphasis on researched authenticity, with a central character surrounded by multiply-cast cameos, which are mostly played with an exaggerated theatricality I'm beginning to think of as a Sydney style. It employs a lot of stage tricks to generate effective and clear story-telling, it has a moral (usually triumphalist) at the end, and it features much careful dramaturgy.

You can in fact see dramaturgical fingerprints all over it, even without noting that Louise Gough gets top billing on the program, underneath the playwright. Yibiyung tells its story clearly, it bounces along with vigour, it gets its meaning across without any fear of ambiguity, it even gets in some necessary complexity in its portrayal of White power over Black lives. You can almost hear the conversations that informed the play.

And that, really, is the problem. This is theatre that asks for an affirmative nod at the end, and which leaves you with the warm compensation of touching your own compassion. Its function - to record the untold stories of Indigenous Australia - is paramount, and its craft painstakingly fulfils its aim. It's hard to condemn, and equally hard to get excited about. I much preferred the tragic extremes of Enoch's Black Medea, which to my mind communicated with far more devastating force and complexity the dilemmas of Black Australia. But that one was a realisation of art rather than craft.

Pictures: (top) Josh Price in The Masque of the Red Death; (bottom) Miranda Tapsell and Jimi Bani in Yibiyung. Photo: Heidrun Lohr

Brett Dean, artistic director of the Australian National Academy of Music, passionately defends the academy in today's Age against the funding cuts that presently mean it will cease operations forthwith. He's backed by Richard Tognetti, head of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, who today condemned the cuts and called for Arts Minister and Chief Axe Peter Garrett to rethink the decision (Garrett says, in his usual decisive way, that "talks are continuing").

The ANAM receives $2.5 million a year, which trains 55 elite musicians on a model derived from the Australian Institute of Sport (and with, Dean notes with subdued irony, one fifteenth the AIS budget). According to Dean, this training stems the otherwise inevitable flow of ambitious Australian talent to the US and Europe. It's peanuts in the larger scheme - especially when you think of Scotch College's government grant of $4.3 million, which helped it to post a profit of $12.7 million last year. If only the ANAM owned a cricket pitch that a freeway authority needed to buy...

Meanwhile, let me point you to a fascinating post by Guardian critic Lyn Gardner, which discusses theatre created with young people - among other works, Tim Etchell's That Night Follows Day (seen here last week). It's prompted some deeply interesting responses from the theatre makers themselves that are well worth reading.

The Malthouse Theatre launched its first 2009 season last night, with a bunch of kilted bagpipers doing the full skirl. The pipers cued enough mysterious references to Scotland for a conference on Macbeth, but nary an explanation passed the tight lips of Michael Kantor (or his henchmen or women). However, there's a hint in Robin Usher's Age preview today that these vague allusions might have had something to do with the Edinburgh Festival and a possible interest in the big show of the season, Optimism, an adaptation by Tom Wright of Voltaire's Candide, to be directed by Kantor.

Whatever the case, we got to admire the Highlanders' kilts and spectacular socks. And sporrans, of course. But on with the season, which looks good even through the fog of hangover.

First cab off the rank is Georg Buchner's Woyzeck, a play often cited as the beginning of modern theatre, in an Icelandic adaptation that premiered at the Barbican Centre. This version features songs by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, which for this production will be performed by Tim Rogers. There's a new collaboration from Lally Katz and Chris Kohn, a step back to Melbourne's vaudeville history called Goodbye Vaudeville Charlie Mudd, which stars Julia Zemiro, and a new play, A Commercial Farce, from Peter Houghton (who can be presently seen in The Eleventh Hour's brilliant festival production of Endgame).

Acclaimed British actor Kathryn Hunter is performing Kafka's Monkey, her adaptation of Kafka's short story, A Report to An Academy. And the Malthouse is also remounting the Fringe hit, Adam Cass's I Love You, Bro, which is a show I missed but which prompted a lot of enthusiastic emails to the TN inbox.

In case people think the Malthouse is getting all logocentric, there's also a showcase of our lively contemporary dance scene, Dance Massive, which is an exciting initiative that formalises the company's continuing connection to dance. It kicks off with Chunky Move's Mortal Engine, which follows on from the exquisite Glow to explore the choreographic possibilities of responsive technology, and Brisbane-based Splintergroup's Lawn. And Rogue, a season in the Tower theatre, showcases the work of some of our most promising new dance talent.

Changing the subject, sort of, I was wondering whether to respond to Peter Craven's odd attack (or was it?) in yesterday's Age on the Melbourne Festival and all things Avant Garde. Under the headline "Avant Garde is all very well, but what about the rest of us?", he reprises his tired argument about how "post-Edmunds" Melbourne ought to get all mainstream. Edmunds, he says, ignored the great writers. Aside from Shakespeare, of course. And they should have stars, like Patti Smith. Oh, they did have Patti Smith. And the Romeo and Juliet was pretty good, actually. Where were the Young Turks? (Aren't Young Turks by definition Avant Garde? - Ed) Or Jack Hibberd or Hannie Rayson? But still, mumble mumble mumble... Actually I couldn't make head or tail of it. Which makes it hard to take issue with.

www.malthousetheatre.com.au

The Melbourne Festival this year had a surreal edge. As capitalism crashed about our ears amid headlines of financial doom, it had the air of a dance at the edge of the abyss. I kept feeling that we were standing in the etched light of an oncoming storm, with long shadows streaming behind us. A little voice kept saying to me, This won’t happen again.

As we all know, it’s the last of Kristy Edmunds’ festivals, and boy, has she given us a party for the past four years. From 2005, her first festival and still one of the best this city has seen, she’s changed the main stage aspirations of this city. People started going to events with intense curiosity and emerging to have fierce arguments (I still remember the couple having a stand-up fight over asylum seekers after Ariane Mnouchkine’s Le Dernier Caravansérail). They were festivals of passion, excitement, artistic depth and, often, controversy. Her programming attracted some of the most vicious and sustained media attacks I’ve seen on an artistic director - first for being too “elitist” and then – when it was clear people were going – for being too “populist”.

Despite the attacks, she steadily continued to follow her nose, attracting a younger demographic with programming that reached into both popular culture and high art, and which unobstrusively demonstrated the humane and complex politics of art. Most importantly of all, she brought us great work, from Peter Brook to Jérôme Bel, from Romeo Castellucci to Diamanda Galas. This year has been no different: looking over what I’ve seen, the quality has been just as high. Possibly higher: festivals can be cut in an infinity of ways, but I’ve had a brilliant time. As in previous years, there have been some disappointments. But what would a festival be without something to argue about?

Over the 17 days of the festival, I got to 21 events. I’ve seen a lot of international work of outstanding quality this year – the Schönberg Ensemble, OKT/Vilnius City Theatre, Tim Etchells & Victoria and both Patti Smith performances were all five star events. And for the first time, Australian works stood substantially beside them – Chunky Move, Lucy Guerin Inc, Back to Back, The Eleventh Hour and the Black Arm Band – without inviting invidious comparison.

Doing the stats, that adds up to half my festival experience being pure gold: a high proportion by any standards. And I missed some of the buzz-making stuff – Wendy Houston, Deborah Hay, Ben Cobham and Helen Herbertson, Goran Bregovic – which by all accounts would have added to my tally.

Around these events was a lot of high-quality work that was fascinating or moving without grabbing my whole heart – Tim Crouch’s ENGLAND, for instance, or DJ Spooky’s Antarctic symphony, or Batsheva – or was just plain enjoyable, like the Interpreti Veneziani Baroque Ensemble (as an aside, I read Clive O’Connell’s dry, indifferent Age review of this inspiriting concert and decided that I don’t want to be a music critic). There were a couple of disappointments – Barrie Kosky and Liza Lim's The Navigator was one of those, and the markedly unremarkable Glass/Cohen collaboration The Book of Longing. And then there were a couple of dismaying failures, both Australian – Jenny Kemp’s Kitten and, notoriously, KAGE’s Appetite. Of which more in a moment.

That seems like a pretty successful festival to me, and certainly no less successful, aesthetically speaking, than in previous years. At the closing night party, Edmunds revealed her “theme”: the fragility and strength of human beings. The theme I kept tripping over was poetry, which perhaps might add up to the same thing. Certainly, this was a festival that kept reminding me, with exquisite poignancy, of my own mortality, of the complexity and pain and joy of existence.

But I constantly encountered people who expressed disappointment. There wasn’t, they said, that one inspiring event; or there wasn’t enough edge; or they had just been to see Appetite (which generated an extraordinary level of hostility).

Given what I was experiencing, I kept wondering why. I looked through my reviews of previous years, and couldn’t see how what was on offer was any less substantial or interesting than previous years. This could of course be my own incapacity. But it made me think.

I suspect two things changed this year. Firstly, Edmunds has been hoist on the petard of her own success: her last three festivals have lifted the bar out of sight. She generated such enormous expectations that it was perhaps impossible for people not to be disappointed with something. And the other was what I thought one of the strongest aspects of this festival, its Australian content. This was a brave move on Edmunds’ part, a long-term expression of faith in our local talent. In terms of overall work, we saw some extraordinary things; but I think it also backfired.

Instead of the unexpected, we got the familiar: Chunky Move or Back to Back didn’t erupt as new discoveries, but as work we can see in our own backyard. And perhaps we primarily expect the festival to bring us amazing discoveries from elsewhere, rather than to show us ourselves.

Also, programming local work changed the politics: it was easier then to question what was not chosen, and for a certain schadenfreude to emerge when the annointed didn’t deliver. I suspect that’s part of what happened with Appetite.

In a way, this year’s MIAF showcased both what is best and worst about our culture. My god, we can do extraordinary work. Most of what was there deserved to be there, to stand beside the best work that came from the rest of the world. And the work that collapsed dramatically in the face of comparative pressure – Kitten and Appetite - seemed to epitomise the failures of our theatre: shocking writing, fuzzy conceptualisation, narcissistic self-involvement, a tendency towards shallow moralising. Which is perhaps why they felt so scarring.

If my speculations are correct, it’s rather depressing: no matter what our achievements, value still lies elsewhere, rather than here. However, we can be almost certain it won’t happen again. The incoming artistic director, Brett Sheehy, is not notable for the same kind of programming depth that Edmunds has brought to Melbourne over the past four years.

Moreover, my instinct is that the arts are heading into rough times under the dubious rudder (pun intended) of our Arts Minister, Peter Garrett, who has not demonstrated, at any point since his appointment, an iota of moral courage. Nor much interest in the arts. His first act was to cut the staff at the Australia Council – a decision that didn’t create much protest, because who cares about bureaucrats? But I thought it an ominous straw in the wind.

And now it seems he's the smiling man with the axe. Last week, the Australian National Academy of Music received a peremptory fax from Garrett telling them that their funding was to be summarily cut: a decision that artistic director Brett Dean (composer extraordinaire and internationally famous viola player) says he refuses to accept. Today the Australia Council – buckling under an inflexible budget that has been straining at the edges for years – announced that 11 companies, including Queensland’s La Boite, have had their funding cut. This despite the new artistic directorship of David Berthold, who suddenly finds himself not at the helm, but out of a job. (Update: David Berthold assures me in the comments that he most certainly is still in a job, and that La Boite - unlike ANAM - will be going strong next year, albeit on a smaller scale than originally planned).

This is in a climate in which the arts are on the back foot in many ways. There is the dwindling quality of mainstream arts coverage. The brutalising idiocy of so-called cultural commentators like Helen Razer or Age arts editor Raymond Gill doesn’t help. And this in part accounts for the hostility towards the arts community expressed in the Henson brouhaha earlier this year, which itself is heralding a new form of puritan repressiveness, best summed up by the campaign to cut funding to companies that depict smoking.

But it seems wrong to end on a note of doom after such a brilliant time. I want to thank the 13,500 readers who accompanied me on this 17-day wild wild ride. And, as I thought after the inspiring Black Arm Band concert, it’s gutless to despair. As the man said, climbing the mountain in Longfellow's bizarre poem: Excelsior!

Festival Diary #12: Friday

That Night Follows Day by Tim Etchells. Tim Etchells & Victoria. Merlyn Theatre, CUB Malthouse. October 24.

Some theatre refines its form to such a degree of purity that it seems almost indescribable. It simply won’t translate into language that effectively communicates its experience.

This struck me forcibly when I attempted to describe That Night Follows Day to a friend. This exquisite show is a collaboration between British innovator Tim Etchells and the Belgian company Victoria, which features 16 children between the ages of nine and 15.


“They were lined up in chorus on what looked like a school basketball court,” I said. “And they listed all these ways that adults shape the reality of children. Things like ‘You cut our hair and our fingernails,’ or ‘You take the coins from our money boxes and promise to pay it all back later’.”

“And…?” said my friend.

“Well, that’s all it was,” I said.

“For an hour? In Flemish?”

"Well," said I defensively. "They had surtitles on a blackboard above the set..."

Clearly this was inadequate.

That Night Follows Day is in fact a quietly revolutionary work which, with immaculate artfulness, strips theatre back to the barest essentials. Performance is the simplest utterance, and the text – a beautifully modulated series of variations on a theme – is a sequence of statements.

With the clarity and poise of a poem, these statements accumulate to become a complex portrait of the relationships between adults and children.

It is wholly recognisable without ever becoming cliched, delicately exploring the truths and untruths with which parents condition their children, and revealing the complex mutual dynamics – love, play and betrayal, dependence and rebellion – that underlie these relationships.

As the recitation evolves, the military ranking begins to dissolve: children wander to the back wall, where they hang upside down, or sprawl on plastic chairs. At one point they break into playground mayhem.

The chorus speech is counterpoised with solos and duos and trios and undermines any tendency towards cuteness by giving the smaller children some of the more confronting lines.

Etchells directs his impressive young performers with an austerely profound understanding of the stage. The children move with a precision that itself comes under question during the performance, as one more instance of how adults control children. But, like everything else in this show, this is done with a light touch.

That Night Follows Day demonstrates how few elements are required to make compelling and moving theatre – words, a stage, performers. And, perhaps most importantly of all, unsparing intelligence and honesty.

Picture: That Night Follows Day. Photo: Phile Deprez

This review appears in today's Australian. Ms TN isn't up to an extended review today.

And I'm still standing! Quelle amazing! I can't match The Boyd's 30 shows - I have very definite limits before everything begins to break down - but I saw a fair proportion of MIAF 2008 all the same, and blogged my fingers raw. The last of my reviews (the exquisite That Night Follows Day) will go up tomorrow, when it appears in the Australian. And I'll do a wrap-up in a couple of days, when the dust has settled. I've had many interesting conversations over the past fortnight that have sparked a fair bit of sober thought, and I feel compelled to share it with you all.

I finished my festival on a blast with last night's performance of The Black Arm Band's Hidden Republic - a brilliant concert from beginning to end, with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra powering up incredible performances from some of our most spine-tingling Indigenous singers, from Ruby Hunter and Lou Bennett to Archie Roach and Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, in a joyously literal celebration of racial harmony.

It was more than just a concert. It was, as a friend said afterwards, a ritual: a summoning of hope and possibility, a mourning and expiation, a gift of huge spiritual generosity, a Damn Good Time. The evening was punctuated with readings from Oodgeroo Noonuccal's poem Song of Hope. Kutcha Edwards got up and listed his 17 dead relatives, each a stone he kissed and threw with a clang into a bin, and then sang: Is it only a dream? Tell me it's not just a dream... Let's make it more than a dream. For those two hours, it was more than a dream. And this morning, it seems frankly gutless not to hope.

Festival diary #11: Thursday

Appetite by Ross Mueller, directed by Kate Denborough. Set design by Kennedy Nolan Architects, lighting design by Niklas Pajanti, costumes by Paula Levis, composer New Buffalo (Sally Seltmann). Kage @ Fairfax Studio, Victorian Arts Centre, until today.

As we barrelled down St Kilda Road in search of post-show consolation, my outraged son told me that Appetite had bruised his soul. I guess he takes his theatre very personally. But then, how else is one to take it?

And I was right with him. Appetite was one of those dismaying experiences which make you flee the theatre in search of strong alcohol, so disheartened that targeted destruction of the relevant memory cells seems like a top priority.


I'm sure I sat through most of it with my mouth open in disbelief. Kage is, after all, the same company which made Headlock, and Headlock was, in stark contrast to this show, a visually thrilling piece of physical theatre that was an intensely moving and honest exploration of masculinity. (It also, signally, didn't have any words in it). Appetite, on the other hand, was a very bad play punctuated by some ordinary songs and uninspired dance.

I wanted to stand up like John McEnroe and shout, You can't be serious! Being a well-behaved little crrritic, I didn't. Alcohol was the only option. (This is why theatre can be so bad for you.) But onto the post mortem.

The text of Appetite seems, in fact, like a bad imitation of Moira Buffini's West End hit Dinner, which was produced by the MTC back in 2004. Dinner is the story of a woman who throws a celebratory dinner party for a representative bunch of friends, during which their hypocrisies and moral emptiness become manifest and the emptiness of their lives is exposed. I am almost going to sleep describing it, although to be fair it wasn't a bad couple of hours in the theatre. For all its superficiality, it was sharp and funny.

Take out Buffini's mordant, literate wit and throw in a good dose of moral sentiment, and you have the premise of Appetite. Catherine McClements plays a woman who is turning 39 and, in celebration, throws a dinner party with 39 courses - one for each year - for some badly chosen friends. As they consume various courses and drink excessively, they degenerate into an orgy of drug-taking and sex.

At about course 124, over the suckling pig, McClements begins to see the emptiness of her careless, middle class life and rediscovers her love for her husband. It ends with a cosy uxorial chat over the wrecked dinner table in which the happy couple croon truisms to each other about living each day as if you are falling in love, instead of doing the proper thing and shooting each other.

In between the excruciating dialogue, there were sequences of dance or almost dance that failed almost completely to exploit the accomplished dancers in the cast. The only interest I managed to get out of the evening were moments in which something in the movement began to come to life, but these were shortlived. Certainly, New Buffalo's trite songs (originally intended to be played live, but delivered as a recorded score due to the artist's illness) did little to enliven proceedings.

It was nicely lit and quite pretty. But seldom has decadence been so dull.

It's only fair to say that this show cued a lot of enthusiastic applause from the capacity audience. (My inner McEnroe stood up and shouted again). OK, I'm cantankerous, but my feeling of utter discouragement was quite real. There was not one point where the self-involvement of the characters on stage cracked open, not one point of imaginative contact where the script - and I blame Ross Mueller's text for this debacle - opened up into actual complexity. As an audient, I was expected to run along the rails of this moral fable to its banal revelation, when the playwright offered up the Meaning of Life as a reward for obediently making my way through the rat maze of Art. The only other possibility was total revolt.

So, gentle reader, I went out and was revolting. And then I wrote this purgative review.

Picture: Catherine McClements and Michelle Heaven in Appetite. Photo: Jeff Busby.

Festival diary #10: Wednesday

Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare, directed by Oskaras Koršunovas. Designed by Jurate Paulekaite, costumes by Jolanta Rimkute, lighting design by Eugenijus Sabaliauskas, choreography Vesta Grabštaite, music composed by Antanas Jasenka. OKT/Vilnius City Theatre @ the Playhouse until October 25.

Freud would have a field day with this remarkable production of Romeo and Juliet. Oskaras Koršunovas, director of Lithuania’s OKT/Vilnius City Theatre, never permits a cigar just to be a cigar. A dizzying range of objects – a length of dough, a ladle, a knife, a tie - become ribald symbols of masculine power. Or, as the case might be, impotence.

However, this cheerful obscenity is far from gratuitous. Here Romeo and Juliet is a satirical and ultimately deadly critique of male violence. A theme that begins as a joke transforms inexorably into a savage attack on the macho culture of vendetta.


This is, of course, a prominent theme in Shakespeare’s play, but seldom drawn out with such theatrical power. Koršunovas’s rambunctious production is not concerned merely with telling the story of star-crossed lovers. Rather, the child lovers are stark symbols of a possible freedom that is murdered by the harsh exigencies of their warring society. It's a theme which has considerable contemporary poignancy.

The play is set in the kitchens of rival pizzerias, with a design cluttered with objects that reminded me of nothing so much as the surreal illustrations of Maurice Sendak. The stage becomes a setting for extreme theatrical and emotional transformations.

It begins with the cast looking blankly out into the audience, as if posing for a photograph. This pose is held so long one cast member falls asleep against another, stirring laughter at its audacity, until at a signal the stage is instantly alive with activity. The play ends with another still pose, only now this is the stillness of death, not life.

So much happens in between that it’s difficult to encompass in a review. This is a production of enormous detail that plays with extremes. The comedy does not relieve the tragedy so much as clash electrically against it, the pathos or passion or sheer uncanny beauty of some scenes heightened by the parodic clowning of others. The dramaturgy is driven by emotional shifts that turn on a knife edge: in a split second, the stage transforms from absolute stillness to frenetic movement, low comedy to high tragedy.

The first two acts are grotesquely playful satire that scrapes against the shy passion of the childish protagonists (one thing we never forget in this production is how young Romeo and Juliet are). There are gorgeously choreographed street scenes that are reminiscent of parts of The Godfather, leavened with a good deal of that lewd comedy. A sense of what is to come occurs during Mercutio's speech to Romeo before his fateful meeting with Juliet: a dramatic shift of lighting transforms the stage into a dreamlike moonscape, hinting of the inhuman workings of fate.

After interval the mood changes irrevocably: the stage becomes a memento mori adorned with skeletons and coffins. The final three acts are stunning, a danse macabre in which Romeo and Juliet’s doomed marriage is played out as nightmare. The comedy becomes a blackly sardonic note against which is played some startling stage images: when Romeo hears of Juliet's death, for example, it comes from a bestial spirit, a boar, in a scene that genuinely touches the uncanny. And the violence is disturbingly real, as in a brutal scene where Juliet's father - heretofore a mildly comic patriarch - demands that she marry Paris, in which the physical force that underlines his familial authority is revealed in an ugly enactment of domestic violence.

Koršunovas's employment of objects is dizzyingly imaginative, richly detailed and constantly surprising. In the first half there is much use of dough, a symbol of life. In the second, the performers use flour, most notably masking their faces white in a spookily effective image of death. When the mourning families gather on stage for the final scene, they sift flour onto the floor, like a constant fall of tears or rain. The final image of the dead young lovers slumping into the huge dough basin - an object which itself has been many things in the course of the play - is one of those indelible theatrical images that sear themselves into memory. It had the chilling finality of corpses being thrown into a pit.

The performances are fantastic, meeting the demanding extremities of the production. The only bother was the sound design, which was frankly naff, and only saved by its abrupt switches from one state to another: at no point did the sound seem integrated with the production, serving rather as sonic wallpaper. Compared to the rest of the production, it seemed surprisingly naive. The other minor irritation was the sometimes puzzlingly ill-spelt surtitles (a feature, as someone remarked last night, of many festival shows). But it's more than worth these glitches to experience Koršunovas’s depth of imagination and masterly command of theatrical image.

A shorter version of this review is in today's Australian.

Talk among yourselves while Ms TN sits at her desk in strenuous attitudes of thought, wondering how to write about Oskaras Koršunovas's remarkable production of Romeo and Juliet, seen at the Arts Centre Playhouse last night, in 400 words. (TN review tomorrow, when my pithy note comes out in the Australian). See this if you can - it's more than worth the eye-watering struggle with surtitles, and this despite a very cheesy soundscape. (Appropriate, I guess, for a play set in a pizzeria.)

Three days from the end, Ms TN isn't holding up badly on her MIAF marathon, though I confess the daily treadmill of see-and-write has been rather (no, extremely) demanding. One has, after all, and despite all evidence to the contrary, a life as well. In my case, several lives, though I put the others on hold for the duration. I see other crrrritics around town with their eyes falling out of their heads. Thank god for spackle make-up, I say. Even the bloggers are flagging (where are you, Chris Boyd?) although Born Dancin' is still present and correct and well worth a visit, and Jana and I are having some friendly skirmishes at Mono no aware.

Meanwhile, in the Australian this morning I see that the Arts Centre is living up to its reputation for hard-hitting, cutting edge, courageous work by dropping a play about the Henson case from the upcoming Short & Sweet season, apparently on legal advice. I'm assuming it probably wouldn't be Henson who would want to sue. (Me, possibly? Luckily I have taken an oath never to speak to lawyers).