A prison is a place where people are watched, and know that they are watched. In these spaces, behaviour shapes itself beneath the pressure of the assumed gaze. Human action becomes, in a disturbing sense, pure performance. As the Abu Ghraib photos brought home brutally by implicating all who looked on them in the act of torture, there can be an uncomfortable element of sadism in the act of looking.


It's an irony of history that the man who first theorised total surveillance, the Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, was an influential progressive. The panopticon - the institution in which an inmate is watched all the time - has become the symbol of the repressive surveillance state; and yet Bentham opposed slavery, campaigned for the decriminalisation of homosexuality and advocated rights for women. For all his humanitarian views, the chilly intellection in the idea of the panopticon makes mere brutalisation seem almost friendly.

Plays set in prison enact this discomforting element in the relationship between actor and audience. They derive their unsettling power from a meta-theatrical consciousness of the parallels between theatre and prison, heightening the awareness of the mutual confinement of the watchers and the watched, and dramatising the predatory gaze of the audience. This is true of plays as formally various as Athol Fugard's The Island, Jean Genet's Deathwatch or Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade. And Angus Cerini's Wretch is yet another.

Wretch is, in many ways, a wholly uncomfortable experience. Marg Howell's confronting design transforms La Mama, almost placing the audience inside the white box of the set. The friendly stairs are hidden completely, which radically changes the nature of the space: all that is visible is a floor and overarching ceiling of institutional white tiles, illuminated harshly by fluorescent lights.

The two performers are already seated on stage when the audience enters. When we sit down, we know we are as visible to the actors on the stage as they are to us, and their exposure is a reflection of our own: we cannot conceal from ourselves that our watching is active. As witnesses, guards, silent bystanders, we are implicated in this act of theatre and, by extension, in its social meaning.

The fictional conceit of the script - the co-winner of the 2007 Patrick White Playwrights' Award - is that it is visiting hour in prison, where a mother (Susie Dee, who co-directs this piece with Cerini) is visiting her criminal son (Angus Cerini). At first, as the banal conversation unfolds into an argument about cigarettes, Wretch appears to be a naturalistic piece enacted in real time, but this soon shifts into another, much more heightened register. Cerini's densely poetic text attacks language at its most brutalised and grotesque, and wrings out of it a starkly lyric beauty. The play itself sculpts experience into a single, unbearable present, where the past erupts in sudden psychotic shifts, beautifully signalled by Kelly Ryall's sound design and Richard Vabre's lighting.

The young criminal in Wretch bears striking similarities to the 15-year-old boy in Cerini's extraordinary 2007 show, Detest. Although they clearly ring fictional variations on each other, they are not the same man: the story in common with both is that of a young man who beats to death the killer and rapist of an old woman. Here the abjection of Cerini's brutalised character is, if possible, even more exposed: but this time it's seen in relationship to his mother, a former street prostitute who is suffering from breast cancer. She has had one mastectomy, and is facing another; but we know as well as she does that she is dying.

Possibly only Susie Dee - whom I last saw on stage 15 years ago - could match Cerini's style of extreme grotesquerie, which marries outrageous, even Hogarthian, caricature to a pitiable yet complex humanity. Slouched on stage, their bodies somehow deformed and twisted under the lights, Dee and Cerini are two tragic clowns, creatures whose abjection is so extreme, so humiliating, that our witnessing is painful. And yet they are stubborn, they make us laugh, and there are telling moments when the slyness of their understanding, their subversive humour, slide in and slash away any possibility of patronising pity.

This doomed pair confront each other, accuse each other, hate each other, humiliate each other. They reveal their brutalising histories, and we understand that both of them have always, from the moment of their births, been imprisoned: by lack, by cultural deprivation, by the inability to articulate their desires.

We know there is no redemption for either of them, just as there is no escape from our gaze. And yet, just as clearly, we see how much they love each other. There is no moral to this story (for which, more than anything, I thank Cerini); just the fact of their love, in the midst of so much ugliness. And the difficult act of looking.

Wretch by Angus Cerini, directed and performed by Angus Cerini and Susie Dee. Design by Marg Horwell, sound design Kelly Ryall, lighting design by Richard Vabre. La Mama Theatre until March 8. Bookings: 9347 6142.

Holiday by Raimondo Cortese, directed by Adriano Cortese. Design by Anna Tregloan, sound design by David Franzke, lighting design by Niklas Pajanti. With Paul Lum and Patrick Moffat. Ranters Theatre @ Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall. Bookings: 9639 0096

Chapters from the Pandemic, written, directed and performed by Angus Cerini. Design by Marg Howell, music composition and sound design by Kelly Ryall, lighting by Rachel Burke, video design by Michael Carmody. Doubletap @ fortyfivedownstairs. Bookings: 9662 9966

These two shows demonstrate the depth, range and quality of independent theatre bubbling beneath the skin of Melbourne. They represent a startling contrast in style: Chapters from the Pandemic is a full-on expressionist dance theatre work, devised and performed by the human tempest Angus Cerini, while Holiday is exquisite minimalist theatre that focuses on the apparently inconsequential minutae of human communication.


All the same, they do have some common ground. For one thing, they are part of a significant shift in the magnetic field of Australian culture. Over the past decade, many of the most interesting theatre-makers have been aligning themselves with Europe and Asia, rather than with the traditionally Anglocentric centres of London or New York.

Many significant artists in the Australian performing arts – Barrie Kosky, Benedict Andrews, Gideon Obarzanek, David Berthold or Daniel Keene, to name just a few – work between Europe and Australia, often developing significant careers overseas. We don’t have expatriates any more, we have a culture of nomads. Ranters Theatre and Doubletap are no exception; in recent years, they’ve both toured Europe, garnering plaudits along the way. And it's easy to see why they attract attention.

From writing to performance to design, Holiday is a devastatingly elegant show. Using black curtains, designer Anna Tregloan has enclosed an intimate auditorium within the vasty heights of the North Melbourne Town Hall. Once you find your way through the slightly disorientating darkness, you see before you a small stage that is effectively a white box. In the centre is a blue paddling pool, on which float two huge, brightly coloured beach balls. To one side is an absurd velvet chaise lounge, and on the other are a couple of stools.

The actors, Paul Lum and Patrick Moffat, sit either side of the stage. They are wearing shorts and bathers, and they are apparently relaxing: sighing, rolling their shoulders and stretching, smiling at each other with the slight apology of strangers sharing an intimate space. It’s clear that they’re indulging in that strange Western ritual, the holiday.

Before long, the silence stretches into anxiety. Somebody has to speak. And somebody does. What follows is utterly enchanting: absurd, gentle and profound. It’s a series of apparently artless, inconsequential dialogues, interspersed with a capella performances of baroque love songs by Schubert, Bononcini or Gluck that excavate the unspoken desires that run beneath the skin of idle conversation.

Raimondo Cortese's dialogues have an airy sense of improvisation, seemingly leading nowhere, but they are written with acutely honed skill. They create a sparkling surface that unobstrusively hints at depth: underneath we sense sadness, loneliness, vulnerability. Some have an air of comic confession (one man compulsively lies about himself; the other, a lapsed Catholic, regularly attends confession to relieve his mind of childhood betrayals). And others circle around performance, exploring the different selves we present to the world and to ourselves, the idea that we are always, in one way or another, acting.

At one point, one man departs the stage (to buy, as we discover, a chocolate bar and a soft drink), leaving the other in solitude. The lights come down: it is evening, and a sense of peace fills the theatre. We watch, with the lone man, a ship pass over the horizon (a video inspired by Simryn Gill’s work Vessel) and for once, the awkward question of self is left behind, absorbed in contemplation.

The production is superb, backed by a subtly nuanced sound design by David Franzke, and beautiful lighting by Niklas Pajanti. But what matters in this show is the text and the performances, and Adriano Cortese has orchestrated these with delicacy and attention. Lum and Moffat are stunning performers, achieving the extremely difficult task of doing nothing on stage with apparent effortlessness. You can’t take your eyes off them.

In its artful artlessness, Holiday reminded me of the anti-spectacle of Jérôme Bel’s beautiful Pichet Klunchun and Myself, which was one of the highlights of last year’s Melbourne Festival. Like Bel, Ranters Theatre achieves a profound and joyous lightness.

Angus Cerini’s one man show, a post-apocalyptic dance piece, couldn’t be more different: here there is minimal text, and Cerini and his collaborators create a rich stage environment that includes video projections, dramatic lighting (strobes, spotlights) and a huge set that evokes a world of human ruins. Chapters from the Pandemic, a project that emerges from Chunky Move’s Maximised program, imagines a world in which all living creatures have been killed by humankind.

Cerini's vision isn't a million miles from Konstantin’s ill-fated playlet in Chekhov’s The Seagull:

Men, lions, eagles, and partridges, horned deer, geese, spiders, silent fish that dwell in the deep, starfish, and creatures invisible to the eye – these, and all living things, all, all living things, having completed their sad cycle, are no more…The bodies of all living creatures have turned to dust, eternal matter has turned them into stones, water, clouds, and all their souls have merged into one. That great world soul – is I…

Like Konstantin's "world soul", Cerini's human is the last living creature in the world, the final locus of memory within a dead landscape. When you enter the theatre, a naked man is displayed on what looks like a laboratory table. And I mean naked: he is, from head to toe, completely hairless. At first he seems to be a statue, utterly still, even breathless, but he draws in a shuddering breath, and then another. He is alive.

What we witness over the next 50 minutes is a man, but a man reduced to a state of new infancy. He is without speech, and he must relearn his body: how to walk, how to hold things, how pushing breath through his larynx permits him to make a noise. Slowly he begins to explore a frightening and mysterious world, a world of jarring edges and objects whose use he does not understand, while confused memory plays in his head in a jumble of sound and light.

Kelly Ryall’s score shifts from lyrically plucked guitar to ambient animal noises (bird song, the lowing of cows) to loud, abstract bangs and howls, and fills the space as dramatically as Michael Carmody’s video projections, which assault the stage, playing over Cerini’s body so that its vestiges of humanity are almost dissolved in a chaos of light and shadow.

Cerini’s performance – grotesque, touching, vulnerable, utterly concentrated – is astoundingly brave. His nakedness is the least part of it: he tests our patience and attention, taking exactly as much time as he needs to shift between one state and another. The movement oscillates between moments of lyrical stillness and extreme anarchy, when the body, its head engulfed in a gas mask, flings itself in ecstatic abandon. And at last, with neither sadness nor regret, the human body dissolves into the natural world.

Sometimes you feel that Cerini's vocabulary of gesture could be expanded, and that perhaps the space could be better exploited (the left hand of the stage, for example, is never visited). But these are quibbles: Chapters from the Pandemic is riveting, a strange elegy for a dead world that is somehow, to quote the poem in the program, a celebration of "human magic".

Detest (This Thousand Years I Shall Not Weep) created by Angus Cerini, with music by Kelly Ryall, Courthouse @ La Mama until February 17.

Chocolate Monkey, written and performed by John-Paul Hussey, directed by Lucien Savron. Original music and sound design by Kelly Ryall, photography and visual design by Natalie Lowery, lighting design by Remo Vallance, Mark Benson and Luke Hails. The Amazing Business, presented by the Store Room Theatre Workshop at Full Tilt, the Victorian Arts Centre, until February 18.

Rage Boy by Declan Greene, directed by Susie Dee. Set and costume design by Emily Barrie, lighting design by Katie Sfetkidis, video design by Nicholas Verso. Midsumma Festival at the Beckett, Malthouse Theatre, until February 10.

It's been a dislocating week. Not for any traceable reason, but still, discombobulating enough to scatter my neurones over a wide field. Permit me some bloggish indulgence as I attempt to gather these oddments into some semblance of coherency, in the hope that a random skitter through last week might get those neurones firing, or at least talking to their Team Leader. This will be long, so arm yourself with your liquid drug of choice, and then listen and attend, O my beloved, as I relate to you the banal marvels of ordinary life.

So: last week I managed to deliver my youngest boy to his first week at high school, complete with uniform, lace-up shoes, bus ticket and mobile phone. I agreed, after deep contemplation of the word "no", which does exist in my vocabulary somewhere, to be on a panel of the Green Room Awards. I read Robert Musil's Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One and George Bataille's Story of the Eye. I finished a review for the Book Show of Dorothy Reynolds' gigantic book on Dante and sat in a studio trying to imitate Simon Schama as I read it into a microphone ("It is common to compare Dante Aligheri’s epic poem the Divine Comedy to a cathedral: VAST, SOARING, sublime...") I considered the many reasons why I have never had the slightest impulse to be an actor. I worried about the reviews I wasn't writing.

I didn't go (although I put it in my diary) to David Williamson's John Sumner Lecture, which I idly thought to attend last Thursday. I just wanted to stay home with my new best friend, a box of Anti-Viral Facial Tissues that apparently "kills 99% of Cold & Flu Viruses, in the tissue". (Virucidal tissues seem to me a piquant symptom of the paranoia of contemporary middle class life.) I bored several people to catatonia talking about my Novel. (Formal apologies to all thus buttonholed, You Know Who You Are).

In the midst of all this, I saw three pieces of theatre, all by men and all, in various ways, exploring the dilemmas of masculinity. Two of them were monologues - Chocolate Monkey and Detest - and one, Rage Boy, had 10 cast members. Somehow all these works added to my general subjective scatteredness. It is as if I've been trying to listen to a conversation that is running at the back of my mind, a kind of shadowscape of thought which flickers past and refuses to coalesce into anything as concrete as mere words. So, as reviews often are, this will be an attempt to recuperate some fugitive impressions, to pin the butterfly to the wheel and see if it sings. Only more so than usual.

The above excess of confessional detail is, I suppose, prompted by the monologues. The performers so embed themselves - or perhaps more accurately, fictions of themselves - in their work that they call up similar self-reflection in response. So, if you're still reading, blame Angus Cerini and John-Paul Hussey (and, no doubt, their mutual musical collaborator, Kelly Ryall). Detest and Chocolate Monkey are, in very different ways, intensely personal works: they directly tangle with the vexed question of the self in art, foregrounding the performer's body to confront the audience with the discomforting, confronting fact of an actor's ontological existence.

In both of these shows, the audience is unable to be merely a spectator of an object called an actor, who plays for us roles hermetically sealed off from his or her life outside the theatre. Rather, we are drawn into direct relationship with a self that presents itself as autobiographical, with a performer who brazenly announces that he exists outside the four walls of the theatre, and who rudely intrudes his life on us, and himself, and art. This is dangerous territory but, using vastly differing strategies, both performers escape the trap of narcissism.

The two shows have even more in common. Both are parts of larger works - Cerini's is a further development of earlier works Puppy Love and This Thousand Years I Shall not Weep, while Hussey's is the first instalment of a trilogy. And both of these pieces arrive well-polished by performance, as they have been touring (Chocolate Monkey is a return season, and was a hit on its first showing). Even more intriguingly, they both have circular structures, finishing at their beginning. Perhaps it is the archetypal voyage of Odysseus: it is, after all, the journey that matters in both these works, and they both begin from a place of abjection, one of mockery, one of despair. As Cavafy says in the poem Ithaca, at the end of the journey, the beginning is still a place of poverty, with "nothing more to give". But "Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage".

Detest (this thousand years I shall not weep) made me think of Robert Musil's mischievous reflections on art and kitsch, which I was reading (see above) on the way to the play. "Is not art," asks Musil, "a tool we employ to peel the kitsch off life?...Can it be that the farther it is removed from life, the clearer art becomes?" In a series of absurd logical steps, Musil comes up with two syllogisms: that art peels kitsch off life, and that kitsch peels life off language. This leads to some even more absurd algebra ("life equals three times kistch") which in the end only proves that these syllogisms do not resolve.

Inside Musil's games are some serious questions: what is life? What is art? What is kitsch? He defines kitsch as a "firm, clearcut and immutable relationship between feeling and words". It seems to me that Cerini plays between these categories, art, life and kitsch, in very interesting ways.

If Detest is not quite kitsch, it plays with kitsch's cousin, sentiment, calling on understood codes of language to elicit specific responses. Cerini's language, generated from conversations in a juvenile prison, switches between vernacular obscenity and flights of lyrical yearning. Its narrative is simple: it tells the story of a 15 year old boy sent to prison for shaking his baby brother to death, and his visceral loathing of a boy found guilty of raping and murdering an old woman.

The writing itself ranges from very fine to very crude, but this strikes me as unimportant. What is important is how his text reveals the close relationship between the coded kitsch of sentiment and the aesthetic of fascism. Both are impoverishments of linguistic possibility, and thus of the possibilities of conscious experience. Cerini does not give us an articulate tongue, but rather a mouth that screams against its inabilities; life is horrifyingly in excess of language, and yet is constantly truncated by its limitations.

Words are poor things to hold up against the extreme realities of sexual desire or violence, or the banality of suffering. The gaps between simplistic language and complex reality cause the mind, unable to understand its own experience, to collapse inward under its emotional pressures. In Detest this pressure becomes intolerable, finally expressing itself in dreams of righteous retribution against the granny rapist. With chilling verisimilitude these dreams enact the obscene language of concentration camps, in a violent outspilling of self-loathing that becomes a fantasy of total annihilation.

It is impossible to separate Cerini's text from his body's expressiveness or from Kelly Ryall's soundscape and composition: all three elements are intimately woven to create an aria of grotesque anguish. In the cavernous spaces of the Courthouse, Cerini's body is a lonely thing, a poor bare forked animal, both exposed and concealed by the carefully minimal lighting design.

Make no mistake, Cerini's performance is exhilarating. Although it is very polished, this is peformance at its most raw, in that state Duchamp describes as "finally unfinished". After a prologue, partly in German, which self-consciously, even precociously, lays out for us the works we are about to witness, Cerini performs what is perhaps best described as a dance. His movement ranges from joyous to parodic, grotesque to bathetic: what is always foregrounded is his electric physical presence. He finally arrives at a stasis, endlessly jumping on the same spot, neither at rest nor in motion, as arresting an image of desolate entrapment as I have seen.

The commitment and intensity of his performance, its particular style of fearlessness, reminds me of Tom Waits, and like Waits it forces you to recategorise your judgements. Don't miss this one.

If Detest uses elements of a rock concert to make theatre, Chocolate Monkey employs the tropes of stand up comedy. John-Paul Hussey bills this show as "extreme storytelling", and its surreal verbal riffs remind me of nothing so much as Dylan Moran. (Perhaps it's the Irish accent, too, and the violent reaction against the easy kitsch of Oirishness).

It's easy to see why it was such a hit. Hussey is very funny indeed, with an ability to sketch vivid satirical portraits, at once mocking and fond, a raconteur's talent for accents and an appealing self-mockery; and under Lucien Savron's direction the show is slickly lit and designed. It's presented at the Arts Centre's Black Box under the aegis of the Store Room Theatre Workshop.

It's hard to say what Chocolate Monkey is about; its narratives splinter and dissolve, although in the mediaeval imagery projected on the stage and in the text itself there are many hints of a complex subtext. As Genet says of metaphor in the theatre, it ought to be like the rigging on a ship - visible from a distance. Here Hussey contents himself with subtleties that more properly belong to prose, and pushes the show through with the sheer vim of performance.

Among its several narratives, Chocolate Monkey traces the end of a relationship (described, in a striking image of mutual narcissism, as conjoined twins in a constrictingly narrow house) and Hussey's job as a auditor of the Melbourne rail system, which involved him trundling a measuring device over every inch of it, a physical purgatory that becomes a metaphor for redemption. But its central tale is of the disastrous production of an earlier show, Burnt Monkey, which through a series of comic misadventures never saw the light of day.

Hussey's fanatical eye for the eccentricities of inner thought and the extreme details of everyday experience - and his ability to communicate them - gives this piece its peculiar illumination. In a sense that is not dishonourable, it seems curiously pointless: he takes the risk of permitting the piece to be, like life itself, unclear, complex, full of loose ends and, in the end, resistant to interpretation. I am still unsure whether the risk is entirely successful, but I can say, unequivocally, that I enjoyed the ride. And I'm very curious to see what happens next.

The disappointment of the week was Declan Greene's play Rage Boy, which had a short return season as part of the Midsumma Festival after a production last year at Melbourne University's Student Union Theatre. It is narrated by Toby Milk (Aaron Orzech), a young man disabled by polio. His family is violently and colourfully dysfunctional: his father Daddy Rice (Marc Testart) is a wannabe revolutionary folksinger with a swastika tattooed on his forehead, his grandfather Grampy Milk (Adam Wieczorek) a demented and bitter old man still in love with his Nazi twin brother, the household hobby watching porn on television, and so on. Toby has a couple of similarly dysfunctional friends.

Perhaps it's unsurprising that Toby, the archetypal innocent-at-large, falls in love with the rich lunacy of the Talent family, who are Jehovah's Witnesses who believe that the world will end in a fortnight. He decides to get baptised and to wait for the end of the world, which might be more interesting than the world as it is.

About ten minutes in, following the week's tradition of being reminded of other artforms, I began to think of Napoleon Dynamite. The problem was that then I couldn't stop thinking about it. It's not just that this play exploits the same po-faced quirkiness (with, it must be said, rather less success at humanising its eccentric cast of misfits). It's also that its conventions are more those of film than theatre; indeed, large parts of it are filmed, projected on the back of the stage to the accompaniment of a voiceover from Toby.

Here Musil's discussion of kitsch and art might come in handy again. As Musil comments, "the more abstract kitsch becomes, the more it becomes kitsch". Greene's script demonstrates that his reputation as a promising young playwright is not unearned, but that he is as yet unable to transcend the constrictions of his own conventions. In its grotesque alienations, his satire is in fact more kitsch than its models, and its supposed taboo-breaking is, in fact, very tame. Perhaps what surprised me most of all, given its title, was that there is very little anger in this show at all. If anything, it leans towards the sentimental.

It's given an elegant production by Susie Dee which, using the device of seating actors around the edge of the stage when they are not in a scene, moves with admirable despatch. There was certainly no point where I was actually bored. But, despite an appealing central performance from Aaron Orzech, I can't say it captured my imagination. Rage Boy is curiously affectless; certainly, compared to the other two shows, it is - paradoxically enough - the one that strikes me as self-indulgent. In art, I guess, the putative subject matter is usually what matters least.

And that, O my beloved, has been my week. If you have read this far, I thank you for your attention. And now I must attend to my washing.