This might surprise some of you, but I never really meant to be a Critic. I began with an irresistible loquacity, a desire to talk about the art stuff I see, which is married to the desire for interested interlocutors. The transformation into a Critic, which subtly ossifies this essentially private and fluid desire into a fixed public role, an authority, is perhaps an inevitable evolution. But it feels false. And not only because something which started with an ambition to be a kind of belles lettres, a leisurely and civilised way of keeping myself mentally stimulated while I pursue my own work, now means that I spend most of my time either writing reviews or worrying about not writing them. As if, a little voice behind my shoulder keeps whispering, it really matters what I think.

Similarly, I thought I'd left journalism 20 years ago. And yet it's crept up on me again, and here I am, despite my heroic efforts at career sabotage, being a journalist. Neither role, critic or journalist, is necessarily a bad thing. I remember when I resigned from the Melbourne Herald in order to write poetry, my decision prompted the wrath of a senior journalist, Bill Hitchens. He told me off in no uncertain terms: he thought that in turning my back on the possibility of a mass audience, I was being criminally irresponsible. He was, of course, quite right. But I also knew I had other responsibilities, even if they looked like irresponsibility to him. And I still do.

Perhaps it's because it's August, and all of Melbourne is entering that bleak phase when you're really tired of grey skies and rain and woollen underwear, and longing for sunshine and balmy evenings and the swish of chiffon. Maybe it's because everyone I know seems to be drowning in mucus, and I can feel my annual bout of bronchitis coming on. But all this is weighing heavy on me at the moment. I think it's not so much overwork (though no doubt that is part of it) as a tangle of ambitions that presently are tripping each other up. Whatever, Ms TN is doing that rather human thing of wondering how she ended up here, where she never quite intended to be.

Anyway, bear with me while I negotiate the perverse byways of my psyche. I saw three shows last week, and will indeed write about them - a fascinating production of The Lower Depths at Theatre Works, Peter Houghton's The Colours at the MTC and Yumi Umiumare's astounding En Trance at the Malthouse, which I wholeheartedly recommend. I'm off to find my mojo.

Picture: Honoré Daumier, The Art Critic

My paean to the women on our stages is in today's Australian. And yes, it was a hard list to make.

Artaud, the language of pain. Writing from the experience that the masterworks are the accomplices of power. Thinking at the end of the Enlightenment, thinking that began with the death of God. Enlightenment is the coffin He was buried in, and it is putrefying with His corpse. Life imprisoned in this coffin. ... The lightning that split Artaud's consciousness was Nietzsche's experience that thinking might be the last joy of mankind. Artaud is the terminal case. He wrested literature from the hands of the police, the theatre from the hands of medicine. His texts blossom under the sun of torture that is shining with equal force on all continents of this planet. Read on the ruins of Europe, his texts will be classics.

That's Heiner Müller on Artaud, offering, as Carl Weber suggests in his introduction to Müller's Quartet, a lens for his own art. One of the most undeceived observers of 20th century Europe, Müller's work always has a post-Apocalyptic edge; Müller walks, like his Hamlet, with "the ruins of Europe behind me".

Quartet, based on Choderos de Laclos's epistolary novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses (also the source of a celebrated adaptation by Christopher Hampton) is a case in point. The opening stage directions bookend the birth and death of Enlightenment Europe: Timespace: Drawing Room before the French Revolution. Air raid shelter after World War III. The protagonists, Merteuil and Valmont, are both decadent libertines, seeking oblivion in sexual excess; but that fleeting corporeal bliss has, like all drugs, lost its potency with repetition. Müller presents us with a picture of hell, in which souls are tormented by their own decaying bodies. "Your breath tastes of solitude," says Merteuil, in her opening monologue to an absent Valmont. "Let's rub our hides together..."

All that is left to titillate these jaded appetites is the destruction of innocence. The two conspire to seduce Merteuil's virginal niece, Volange, and the virtuous wife Madame de Tourvel, breaking and abusing them for their amusement. In Müller's play these sadistic seductions are played out by the two protagonists in a grotesque endgame in which both sides know the only winner is death. Shot through with Müller's pitiless intelligence, Quartet generates a perverse beauty. It's essentially a play of long monologues which highlight the existential isolation of each character, layered with literary allusions that create a darkly scintillating surface. But here civilisation and culture are simply baubles that adorn decaying flesh: Müller's lapidary style is thick with corporeality, the obscenity of the body.

The independent company A is for Atlas signals its ambition with its production of this challenging text, which is performed in tandem with The Razor, a new music work by Annie Hseih written for violin and cello. As you enter the space, the first thing you notice is Grant Cooper's breath-taking and ingenious design: the audience sits in a single row looking down into what is effectively a pit, where Merteuil (Felicity Steel) stands on the floor on the stage. It's a kind of grunge take on an ancien régime drawing room, with alcoves in which are set television screens (which take live feeds of the actors) or mirrors. The music is performed by Larissa Weller and Jonathan Tasio, who are seated level with the audience.

It opens with the first movement of The Razor, as Merteuile moves out of stillness into what is effectively a kind of dance. Her movements signal the rhythmic style of the play: like the delivery of the text, they are are languorous, slow and highly controlled. Eroticism here is signalled by distance (and, interestingly, in the spectacularly beautiful costuming). Merteuile's first dialogue with Valmont is still all but a monologue: Valmont (Andrew Gray) crouches in an alcove in the wall, eating strawberries. The effect is hieratic and stylised, and perhaps a little over-aestheticised, although Hseih's nervy take on Haydn gives a welcome barbed edge to the performance.

Merteuile and Valmont play out their fatal games, tearing each other to pieces with their language but seldom broaching the formal stylisation of performance. After a while, the unvarying rhythms begin to damp down the language. This style of poetic delivery is a hard ask for actors: I think that the only time I've seen it successfully achieved is in Steve Berkoff's National Theatre production of Salome, when performers would move front stage to speak Wilde's poetic perorations to the moon in a thrilling theatrical sprachgesung. When the conceit does work here, it's marvellous, but a lot of the time it doesn't quite hit the mark, and over the course of the play its major effect is to flatten out the theatricality of Müller's language. It was sometimes difficult, for example, to track the shifts in the character's roles: there's a lot of play in the language that is left unplayed.

The main thing missing in Xan Coleman's direction is the stench of death: and it's death that rules here. Through the deaths of his characters, Müller is tracking the death of God, the death of love, the death of the whole Enlightenment project, in which reason was supposed to save humankind from itself. Here he savagely takes apart that folly by dramatising the torment of reason in the rotting chains of the body's lust.

Paradoxically, I felt the text was respected too much, as if the company is seduced by the beauty of Müller's language: on the one hand, the formality of the production imprisoned the actors, just as the characters are imprisoned in their bodies: but on the other, the text is so full of rot, excrement, blood, mucus and so on, that the tension between the aesthetic cleanliness of the production and the physical savagery of the language simply broke apart. One felt that Merteuile should have spat on Valmont's corpse, rather than strewing it with rose petals. In the end, it just was too pretty.

The only other time I've seen Quartet was in an eye-popping production directed by Ariette Taylor in the early 90s. It was performed in the foyer of the Playbox on a tiny, bare stage, with Robert Morgan and Melita Jurisic (whom I saw a couple of weeks ago in Kosky's scorching meditation on love and death, Poppea) at their savage best. That sets the benchmark high indeed. But for all my reservations, this is an eye-catchingly impressive production, which firmly places A is for Atlas in the ranks of companies to watch.

Quartet by Heiner Müller after Laclos, translated by Carl Weber, and The Razor by Annie Hsieh, after Haydn. Directed by Xan Coleman, designed by Grant Cooper, costumes by Julie Renton and lighting by Suze Smith. With Andrew Gray and Felicity Steel. Musicians Larissa Weller and Jonathan Tosio. A is for Atlas, @ J-Studios, 100 Barkly St, North Fitzroy.

Gobsmacked to read in the Age this morning that every single former Victorian Arts Minister, Labor and Liberal, has written to University of Melbourne Vice-Chancellor Glyn Davis to protest the changes at the VCA, and asking for a meeting to express their concerns. The only ones who didn't were dead. That's a stunning and unprecedented show of bipartisanship.

As Mr Kennett said: "'You can't have a modern city without a thriving creative life at its centre. If the State Government saw fit to spend $65 million to get the World Swimming Championships for a one-off event for Melbourne then surely it could give the VCA a secure life for the future.'' Well, yes. The meeting will occur, according to the report, later this week.

* I forgot yesterday to mention James Waites's continuing meditations on the Bacchanalian qualities in Barrie Kosky's work, including the recent production of Poppea. In the course of which he reveals that Kosky is unlikely to be working in Australia in the future, as his job with Berlin's Komische Oper looms closer. Which is sad news for us.

* The Malthouse production of Optimism finished its sell-out season at the Edinburgh Festival last week, garnering a swag of glowing reviews on the way. Mark Fisher (of Mark Fisher's Scottish Theatre Blog fame) described it as "the feelgood hit of the summer", while others, such as the Guardian's Lyn Gardner, suggested that it was too much fun to be serious. Ian Shuttleworth in the Financial Times, enjoyed the irreverence: "A decorous evening of high culture this wasn’t, but what the hell: surely we can take one night off from guarding the citadel." The Malthouse is crowing after Frank Woodley, who plays the terminally naive Candide, won a Herald Angel award for his performance in the show. Prost! Sydneysiders will get to Optimism at the Sydney Festival next year.


* Among the usual bloggish navel-gazing about whether critics are allowed to say what they think about a show or whether, especially in a recession, they ought just to be nice, George Hunka over at Superfluities has written a stimulating overview calling for a larger view of criticism in Theatre, Criticism and the Public Intellectual. Well worth a leisurely read.

* Another film festival, another censorship debate. Richard Wolstencroft, director of the Melbourne Underground Film Festival, is furious that the OFLC has banned MUFF's screening of Jennifer Lyon Bell’s Matinée, which was part of their Mini Muffs short season. In demanding that the OFLC repeal its decision, he says the ruling is "hypocritical, suppressive, and worryingly anti-women".

At issue is the depiction of real sex. Matinée is made by Blue Artichoke, a company which specialises in making female-centred erotica. Wolstencroft says the OFLC's decision negates the film's artistic merits: "Matinée is a picture which embodies many of the qualities which should be sought after in high quality artistic filmmaking", he says. It creates "a highly stylized, enigmatic and atmospheric world, the likes of which is often attempted in independent cinema but rarely so deftly achieved." Worse, he claims that an office which passes Lars Von Triers' controversial Antichrist, which featured high levels of sexual violence and mutilation, but bans a film that features frank sexuality but no violence, is displaying a worrying ease with misogyny. "Banning Matinée reveals a tendency in the OFLC to suppress films which strengthen female sexuality on screen and to allow films which encourage a view that female sexuality is damaged, fractured or violent."

He's also pointing to precedents where films depicting actual sex in complex situations (Shortbus, 9 Songs) have been passed for screening. Sounds like a case to me.

Even gale-force winds couldn't stop the theatrical event of the week: to wit, the Save VCA protests, which culminated in a 1000-strong march this morning to Parliament House, where the troops were rousingly addressed by Geoffrey Rush and Julia Zemiro. (Ms TN, alas, could only be there in spirit). As Crikey's Ben Eltham reports:

The University seems to have badly under-estimated the strength of feeling about the proposed changes to VCA. The protests are now starting to garner broader media attention, owing to strong feelings in Melbourne’s tight-knit artistic community and the high profile of Rush and Zemiro. Now three prominent members of the VCA Advisory Board have quit in what looks suspiciously like a protest.

The situation has been exacerbated by the University’s ham-fisted attempts to spin the issue. The embattled new Dean, Sharman Pretty, who has become the lightning rod for student and staff discontent, was initially held back from all but hand-picked media appearances, until this strategy started to look like arrogance. When she finally fronted up to be interviewed by the ABC 774’s Jon Faine this Wednesday, it was deer-in-the-headlights stuff as Faine took her apart on air.

The strength and feeling of student, staff and community protest about the VCA course changes appear to have surprised senior executives at the University, who perhaps thought the VCA could be successfully integrated without too much fuss.

Instead, it seems to be turning into something of a PR disaster for the University of Melbourne and Vice Chancellor Glyn Davis. And certainly for Dean Pretty, whose evisceration by Jon Faine can be heard here. Save VCA is calling for the Federal Government to fund the VCA as a national training institution, as it does NIDA and other institutions.

Photo: courtesy of Twitter

In lieu of a post: a pointer to the discussion on TN about the reforms at VCA.

Or something like it. I have 470 unread messages in my gmail inbox, 299 unread messages on my Facebook account, and I don't know how many read but unanswered messages on my other two email accounts. I have a play to finish in a week, a magazine feature to finish by tomorrow, two unwritten reviews, and two books to finish reading by next week, when I appear at the Melbourne Writer's Festival as Robert Dessaix's interlocutor. And that's only the immediate demands. It's beginning to trickle through, even to me, that this is unsustainable.

I know I swore I would never, ever again complain on this blog (mainly because I then get embarrassed when people ask me if I'm feeling better). This is more by way of a generalised apology to those people - you know who you are - to whom I owe letters, rsvps, and probably apologies of various kinds. My mantra "I can't get to everything" is at present in danger of turning into "I can't get to anything". (OK, I saw three shows last week. I have only written a review of the one I had to do for the Australian - Joanna Murray-Smith's Rockabye, which I enjoyed. I'd like to write about Hoy Polloy's Purgatorio, about which I have a few reservations, but I don't think I'll find the time. And I wouldn't write about Slava's Snow Show in any case, because I was sitting in the gods and only saw the tops of people's heads.)

There are several shows I would, if I were in any sensible state, like to see, and given my present state, probably won't. I realise this generally means that I am mainly seeing mainstream shows, and I'm not very happy about that. Also I seem to have been, despite myself, hijacked by journalism. At the same time, I'm not sure what to do about it. Anyway, if you see a small exploding critic in Williamstown, try to be kind. I'll get over it.

Update: more info on VCA action - tent cities! flash mobs! sing outs! - and links to more info at Twitter and Facebook.

This week, SaveVCA is organising a last-ditch round of protests against the changes to the college, culminating in a march to Parliament House on Friday August 21.

For the past few years, along with most Melbourne arts observers, I have been glumly following the continuing story of Melbourne University's predatory absorption of the Victorian College of the Arts (now known as VCAM). It's a complex story - detailed at length, with useful media links, on the informative Save VCA website - which boils down to a battle about the philosophy of arts education, between a generalised, more academic approach, as promoted by the new regime under VCA Dean Sharman Pretty, or the extraordinarily successful practice-based teaching that the VCA has refined over the past three decades.

Although the battle seems all but won, with the winning hand being the one with all the money, a number of alumni, students and interested arts affiliates are leading a growing protest against the changes. All power to their arms, I say: it's difficult to see how the proposed changes, which include savage redundancies, reduced teaching hours and axing of courses (so far, in Puppetry, Music Theatre, Music Repertoire and Music Composition) will benefit students or the wider culture.

Friday's protest march begins at 10am at the St Kilda Rd entrance, VCA Campus, 234 St Kilda Rd, Southbank. It will feature prominent industry speakers, MC'd by Julia Zemiro. And there will also be "after-event details revealed on the day".

George Orwell once remarked that if a writer says he can't write, he can't write. It's not laziness or malingering or disorganisation: it's mysterious, crippling incapacity. When allied to the desire to write, he listed it as one of the major frustrations of a writer's life; if a writer isn't writing, he enters an existential no man's land in which it's difficult to see his reason for being on the planet. (This is assuming that a writer's self is entirely defined by writing which is, fortunately, not entirely true).

So it is that Ms TN has been thinking about Barrie Kosky's Poppea for more than a week, yet has been curiously unable to write a word. Last Saturday I stole a precious 24 hours, flew up to Sydney, relaxed enough to realise how near to burnout I actually am, and then trotted off to the Sydney Opera House to see the opera. From the overture, during which the lights slowly faded in the auditorium and the curtain rose, revealing Amor with her back to us, one garishly braceleted hand gracefully extended in silhouette, my breath seemed to stop. I left the theatre exhilarated, moved and shaken.


I thought Poppea was an outstanding and fearless work of theatre, which is perhaps what has inhibited my writing about it. It seemed to me to be a work about love that was for grown ups, a work that enacted the darkness and beauty and amorality of eroticism with a rare honesty. It showed at once the preposterousness of lust and the dignity of love, the ruthlessness and tenderness of desire, its ludicrous obsessiveness, its corruption and its purity, the murderous seduction of power. Its ironies are savage, and yet it pierced my soul, that wounded and scratched prison of my body, with profound sorrow.

Kosky has taken Monteverdi's last opera, L'incoronazione di Poppea, and given it a very 21st century treatment. The opera is cut to the bone: all the secondary characters and all the gods save Amor, the goddess of love, are gone. He has also translated the original libretto, by Giovanni Francesco Busenello, into German, and he's interwoven Monteverdi's music with songs by Cole Porter, which illuminates both of them. I'll certainly never hear Porter's songs in the same way again; this production brings out their themes of obsession and passion, their world-weary cynicism, the black polish of their urban wit, and their contrast with the baroque intensities of Monteverdi's music is as exciting as their thematic collisions. It's a bold, dramaturgically elegant attack on the original work that brings its blood to the surface of the skin.

The opera tells the sordid story of Poppea's accession to power as Empress of Rome. Originally Ottone's (Martin Niedermair) lover, she attracts the attentions of Nero (Kyrre Kvam). With the blessing of Amor (Barbara Spitz, played as a world-weary madam), she schemes to marry him: Nero has to divorce his wife Ottavio (Barbara Frey), and in order to do that, he has to get rid of Seneca (Florian Carove), Nero's former tutor and an influential moral voice in the Senate. Meanwhile, Ottavia hatches a plot to murder Poppea, blackmailing Ottone into doing the dirty deed despite his continuing love for Poppea. Ottavia is backed by Ottone's lover Drusilla (Ruth Brauer-Kvam), who was thrown over for Poppea and still seethes with jealousy. Seneca commits suicide on Nero's orders, Ottone and Drusilla are exposed, punished and banished, Ottavia is exiled, and Poppea and Nero emerge triumphant, celebrating their marriage with an achingly beautiful duet.

There are ironies here that are mostly lost on a modern audience. Busenello's libretto was based on Tacitus's account of the Emperor Nero's reign of Rome, which is by any measure a racy read. Monteverdi's audience would have been aware that Poppea came to a bad end: most Roman historians agree that Nero murdered her by kicking her in the stomach when she was pregnant with her second child. Some even say he jumped on her. (Modern historians note that Seutonius, Tacitus and others were very biased against Nero, no doubt for good reason, and that she may have simply died from complications in childbirth or a miscarriage). Moreover, Ottone, Poppea's rejected lover, became Emperor in the end anyway.

Shorn of this context, Monteverdi's triumphant ending is disconcerting, even obscene, a blackly realist view of the effectiveness of ruthless power. Kosky exploits this ambiguity to the full, reserving easy judgment for a more sternly Platonic morality: that virtue is its own reward, and vice its own punishment, which I've often thought is one of the bleakest observations ever made.

The couple's first crime is the death of Seneca, which in the opera comes about through Poppea's urging. (It is certainly true that Nero ordered Seneca to commit suicide, but in fact it was after the Pisonian Conspiracy, a plot to kill Nero, in which the Emperor believed Seneca was involved, although it's unlikely that he was - but hey, Monteverdi was no more interested in historical accuracy than Kosky is).

Seneca cuts his wrists in a hot bath, the favoured Roman method of self-slaughter, and so here he rises up, naked in a bath tub, from the floor of the stage. He is mute, as Nero has already cut out his tongue, and his arias are sung by another actor or, in an extraordinary scene, acted out in sign language. The scenes that show his death are the most powerful in the opera. Nero climbs into the bath with him and smears himself, with gestures like those of a lover, with Seneca's blood, before the corpse slumps heavily out of the bath in an image which is one of the most shockingly abject representations of death I've seen on stage.

Nero's spurned wife Ottavio, who first appears as a figure of grotesque comedy, writhing with jealousy and spite, comports herself in her final song as a figure of intensely moving dignity, proudly accepting her exile and proclaiming her innocence. She shows up the lack of dignity of Poppea and Nero, who prowl the stage like the grotesque, bestial creatures their power has made them into.

Likewise, the love story between Drusilla and Ottone emerges as a contrast to the self-satisfied self interest of Nero and Poppea. For this couple, their murderous adventures and their punishment lead to a sacrificial declaration of love, with Drusilla pledging to go into exile with Ottone at the height of their humiliation - both are raped by Nero, although he stops short of ordering them off to the torture chamber for a lingering and painful death. And this prompts an impassioned solo from Ottone in which he declares his happiness: a happiness, it is quite clear, that Poppea and Nero have foresworn, and which Poppea, stalking the stage like a crazed monster behind them, murderously envies.

None of this, however, takes away from the ravishing beauty of Poppea and Nero's final declaration of love. They can be monstrous and amoral and still truly love each other; after all, their victims gain their dignity through losing the power game and, aside from Seneca, are no less morally questionable than the Imperial couple. Amor, the goddess of love, is not concerned with the morality of passion: her drive is towards the orgasmic moment of excess, the primitive, unbridled nightmare of passion.

The production is realised with a simplicity of staging that mercilessly exposes the action. The set is an office-like box, white walls with doors, that throws the emphasis onto the bodies of the performers. The revealing costumes make the actors seem more naked than they would be if they were actually unclothed: here everything is revealed by what is hidden, which is the secret behind the erotics of almost everything, and especially art. Poppea works off contrast, turning in a trice from cabaret grotesquerie to sublime operatic beauty, from comedy to tragedy. And the cast, without exception, rises fearlessly to Kosky's demands; every performance here fully inhabits the contrasting extremities of the roles.

One effect is that it abolishes duration; you wake up at the end as if from a dream, aware only then of what has been stirred out of the dark reaches of the psyche. For me, it was mainly sorrow, which is perhaps what beauty inevitably does; it breaks open my awareness of mortality by briefly lifting me, with its gorgeous, fleeting illusion, out of time. If opera is indeed a song of love and death, then Poppea is, for all its impurities, pure opera.

Picture: Melita Jurisic and Kyrre Kvam in the coronation scene from Poppea.

Poppea, after Monteverdi, by Barrie Kosky, directed by Barrie Kosky. With Barbara Spitz, Martin Niedermair, Melita Jurisic, Kyrre Kvam, Beatrice Frey, Florian Carove and Ruth Nauer-Kvam. Musicians: Aisha Buka, Linde Gansch, Jorge Ulrich Krah and Barrie Kosky. Vienna Schauspielhaus, Sydney Opera House.