The talk in the foyers of late has been that of scarred veterans swapping notes from the front-lines of culture. Never, say hardened theatrenauts (as they whittle their programs into speaking likenesses of Ibsen) has Melbourne seen such a season as this. A few years ago, you could count on the theatres going dark in November, leaving summer free for extra-curricular frolicking in front of the Wii. Not this year, they add blackly (expectorating into handy spittoons). This year, the culture has gone feral.


Some, their spirits broken, point silently to harpoons. Others lean mutely against walls, a thousand-yard stare betraying their inner turmoil. If only, they mutter into their beards, most of it wasn't so good. If only we could all stay home and watch Australia get demolished in the Ashes, secure in the knowledge that the local stages are bereft of interest...

Like some of my colleagues, Ms TN ran out of gas a month ago. Personally, I don't see a lot of point in TN if all it offers is straight up-and-down reviews; but sometimes, straight up-and-down reviews is all a gal can manage. So here goes...

Peer Gynt

Like Goethe's famously unstageable Faust, Henrik Ibsen's verse drama Peer Gynt is something of a gift to theatremakers. A phantasmogoric parable of a man's struggle with himself, it's one of the more bonkers plays in the repertoire, leaping with its anti-hero from the mountains of Norway to the deserts of Egypt, from rural wedding scenes to lunatic asylums. It is not a play for literal minds: the only level on which it makes sense is that of metaphor. And there it makes a great deal of sense indeed, foreshadowing Freud's own grubbing about with the monsters of the subconscious.

It's easy to see its attraction for a young, ambitious company like Four Larks. This company has in fact attempted this play before, in 2008. I can't compare their stagings; despite a bunch of good intentions - and we all know where they lead - I hadn't seen their work before last week. This young, unfunded collective has been making waves for a couple of years now, and finally last Wednesday I got to its production of Peer Gynt, staged in a barn-like space off a back lane in Northcote, to see what all the fuss is about.

The fuss is certainly warranted. Although the theatre they produce is vastly different, the aura around the event reminds me strongly of the early days of the Keene/Taylor Theatre Project, which - similarly unfunded - staged several seasons of short plays in the Brotherhood of St Laurence warehouse in Fitzroy. There's the same sense of an audience excited by discovery, the same raw faith in theatre, the same feeling of welcome.

This adaptation of Peer Gynt, co-adapted and directed by Sebastian Peters-Lazaro, Jesse Rasmussen and Mat Diafos Sweeney, hovers just on the theatre side of music theatre. The text is heavily cut, and many transitions or episodes replaced by narrative or lyric songs that channel the independent folk scene - think Joanna Newsom, the Decembrists, José González, Sufjan Stevens. The six-strong band, lined up on bales of pea-straw on the left of the stage, includes a harp, double bass, violins and banjo, and the vocals feature some sublime harmonising.

But maybe the strongest aspect of this company's theatre is its design. It stretches through the building's environment - charcoal drawings of Norwegian mountains adorn the walls as you enter the theatre, and a drawing on the barn door to the left of the set, which Peer Gynt himself is extending as the audience enters, is of a man with antlers, recalling the English folk figure Herne the Hunter, but is more pertinently an echo of the deer shamans of the Sami, who would adorn themselves with reindeer antlers during their mystic ceremonies.

Reaching back into pagan folk tales, just as Ibsen did for his play, gives the text and the music a powerful resonance, a sense that this is a contemporary enactment of a story that reaches back far beyond the 19th century. And the constantly inventive staging, often using re-purposed objects like feather dusters or bits of rope, reinforces this feeling: the ordinary is here made strange. It makes for a heart-lifting investigation of theatrical storytelling, with an unabashed intention towards beauty. There are glorious moments - Solveig (Tilly Perry), for example, appearing lamplit in a high window, singing to Peer Gynt (Ray Chong Nee), or the rambunctiously disrespectful trolls.

My only reservations are at the level of performance. Especially in the first half, its style veers, sometimes uncertainly, sometimes with unsettling sureness, from a Pythonesque grotesquerie to moments of clear naturalism. This was most successful in Ibsen's most surreal act, where Gynt becomes serially a rampant capitalist, a prophet and a scholar. The actors are clearly a talented bunch - each has a chance to show his or her strengths - and there's no questioning their commitment. This is mainly a technical quibble about voice - a complex text like Peer Gynt needs to sound clearly, and sometimes I was simply struggling to hear the lines. It almost seems churlish to mention it, since the theatre making here is otherwise so exciting. But there it is.

Elektra

(Spoiler warning).

I wondered how the very talented young director Adena Jacobs would stage the ancient tragedy Elektra in a theatre as tiny as The Dog in Footscray. The answer is: with absolute simplicity. Eugyeene Teh's design surrounds the playing area in transluscent plastic curtains, and the walls vanish: we are suddenly in a space without edges. Actors can be so close we could almost touch them, and yet, by merely stepping behind the curtain, are suddenly cloaked in an illusory distance, or loom behind the unobscured characters like uneasy ghosts.

In the centre of the stage is a single object, a bed covered with old bloodstains that invokes the crimes of sex and murder that shape the action of this play. This production also makes a virtue of the venue's intimacy. The lights are up on the audience for much of the play, and when the actors speak to each other, they turn and meet our eyes as well, so we are not merely witnesses, but accomplices in the unfolding action.

Elektra is the second act of the trilogy of the Oresteia. The story begins with the murder of Agamemnon as he returns from Troy by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus, as revenge for the sacrifice of her daughter Iphigenia. In Elektra, Agamemnon's daughter camps on the threshold of Clytemnestra's house, neither inside nor outside, awaiting the return of her brother Orestes. By the code of vendetta, Orestes must avenge his father's death: however, if he does so, he will commit another unforgivable crime, that of matricide.

Anne Carson's fine translation of Elektra is clean and contemporary, drenching the action in an unforgiving lucidity. Here it is - very effectively - cut: most notably, Aegisthus's return in the final scene is deleted. In the mouths of this most accomplished cast, around a stunning central performance by Zahra Newman as Elektra, it plays with a compelling muscularity; sometimes the language is bitten off with a contemporary, almost slangy curtness, and at other moments the keenings of the original Greek are left untranslated. These cries are spine-tingling, Elektra's purest expression of what Carson calls her "torrent of self". For she talks all the time, all through the play, veering between obsessive madness and a bitter rationality. All she can do is talk.

Two things are immediately striking about this production. The first is the obvious fact that this is a play primarily about women. When Clytemnestra (Jane Montgomery Griffiths) speaks of the pain of birth giving, or of her grief for her murdered daughter Iphigenia, or when Elektra savagely claims that she is the shape her mother has made her, or in the arguments with her meeker sister Chrysothemis (Luisa Hastings Edge), the play summons darkly feminine turbulences that drive it towards its grim climax.

These women writhe under their subordination to male power. Unable to act as men do, they can only take refuge in speech, plotting their actions through the bodies of their men: in this case, Orestes (Gary Abraham) and his guardian Pedegogus (Josh Price). The actions of men become in this play functions of the women's frustrated desires. Elektra's inability either to act or not to act make her vengefulness a different thing in kind to that of Orestes: her lack of control alarms and frightens him. What is for Orestes a question of male honour becomes, through Elektra's voicing, a darker and more visceral thing, inchoate hatred and love driven from the gut, rather than Apollonian justice.

The second aspect is the claustrophobic awareness of the human body. From the beginning, when Elektra squats on the bed, or strips naked, or when the Chorus (Karen Sibbing) slowly eats a cake that is a grave offering, finding inside it a bone, the sense of opaque fleshliness, of the weight of muscle and bone, is foregrounded. On the skin, all light: on the inside, all obscurity.

This culminates in an extraordinary final scene. After the off-stage murder of Clytemnestra, Orestes carries her body onto the stage and attempts to lay it on the bed. The body passively flops to the ground instead, a dead weight. For the next minute or so, Orestes tries to lift the body up, thwarted constantly by its limp lifelessness. He pauses and fixes a frustrated eye on Elektra, but she will not help him. At last, after an excruciating struggle, he succeeds in lifting the corpse onto the bed. Elektra, without looking at him, seats herself on the floor next to her mother, cupping her dead hand to her cheek. Orestes sits on the bed and stares into space.

It's in these anti-climactic moments that we feel the weight of the crime that has just been committed. It is the realisation that the murder solves nothing: rather, it has orphaned them entirely, and left them mired deeper in shame and grief. They can't even take comfort in each other. Neither sibling can look the other in the eye.

Creditors

August Strindberg is one of my favourite misogynists. As with Friedrich Nietzsche, his perception of how men have shaped the femininity of Woman mitigates - to some extent, at least - his mingled loathing and attraction towards actual women. He comes close to the top of the list of Men To Avoid, especially in matrimony. His second wife, Frida, described her marriage as "a death ride over crackling ice and bottomless depths", and there's no evidence that his first and third wives would have disagreed.

A paradoxical side effect of Strindberg's obsessive loathing (all women, even his wives, were "whores") is his perceptiveness in analysing the war of the sexes. He could speak as an insider, a man who practised what he preached - a treatise that translates roughly as, treat 'em mean, or they'll have your balls. Yet his pitiless intelligence doesn't permit him to gloss his own behaviour. For a scathing portrayal of the wounds patriarchy inflicts on both sexes, it's hard to go past Strindberg.

His three-hander play Creditors is a classic example. Adolph (Brett Cousins) is a gullible and highly suggestible young artist who is the second husband of the novelist Tekla (Kat Stewart). Tekla is a thoroughly modern woman, the dominant partner in the relationship. As the play begins, she has left her husband at home for a few days while she goes out gallivanting. Enter Gustav (played with Mephistophelean oiliness by Dion Mills), a stranger who perceives the young man's weaknesses, manipulating him into a state of jealous hysteria.

Gustav is, of course, Tekla's first husband. Unable to forgive the blow to his masculinity caused by Tekla's departure, he has coldly determined to destroy their marriage. Having sown the seeds of insecurity and paranoia in Adolph, he seeks to seduce Tekla into betraying her husband while Adolph listens behind a door. Adolph has a fit and dies, Tekla is distraught with grief, and Gustav finds, to his enormous surprise, that his ex-wife loved her husband, after all.

Within this melodramatic plot lurks a surprisingly complex argument about men and women. Strindberg exposes a series of archetypes - the dominated man, the dominant man, and the Woman. All are ruthlessly articulate about their desires and feelings, and all expose their weaknesses as well as their strengths, generating a darkly fascinating narrative of argument and counter-argument that builds up into a devastating tragicomic satire about marriage. Strindberg dismisses from the outset the possibility of an equal relationship in a marriage; one partner must always be dominant, and - in his view at least - it must always be the man. What's provoking is how contemporary so much of this sounds. Not a lot has changed in the past century.

David Bell's production at Red Stitch is an excellent and lucid reading of the play. It focuses, quite rightly, on the actors. Using a muscular new translation by David Grieg, the three give powerful and detailed performances, opening out the complexities of their characters. The melodrama gets its due, as it ought, and it doesn't flinch back from comedy; but what sticks in the mind afterwards is the darkly visceral emotions that Strindberg transcribed with such troubling accuracy. My only complaint is a decorative pillar in the middle of the set that kept obscuring the performers. Why was it there? A querulous quibble perhaps; but not being able to see an actor's face for no good reason drives me crazy.

Picture: Four Lark's Peer Gynt.

Peer Gynt, by Henrik Ibsen, adapted and directed by Sebastian Peters-Lazaro Jesse Rasmussen and Mat Diafos Sweeney. Four Larks, The Little Bakery, Northcote, until December 11. Details and bookings here.

Elektra by Sophokles, translated by Anne Carson, directed by Adena Jacobs. The Dog Theatre, Footscray, until December 18. Details and bookings here.

Creditors by August Stringberg, in a new version by David Grieg, directed by David Bell. Red Stitch Theatre, Prahran, until December 18. Details and bookings here.

I saw three astonishing works of theatre last week, all created from texts not originally intended for the stage. One, A Woman in Berlin, is based on a personal memoir of the Russian occupation of Berlin at the end of World War 2. Another was Fragment 31's Irony is Not Enough: Essay on my Life as Catherine Deneuve, a poem by Canadian poet and scholar Anne Carson. The poem wasn't so much adapted - the collaborators performed the work as written - but "translated" into a fascinating work of theatre. The third was Barrie Kosky's terrifyingly beautiful The Tell-Tale Heart, an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's gothic story about a murderer's self-betrayal.

Unsurprisingly given the source material, each work is markedly different from the others. All the same, they each have something profound in common: none assumes that either language or theatre is transparent. And in transforming a written work into performance, they reveal something profound about writing itself.


All writing is a dance around absence. A text notates something that isn't present, and perhaps was never present; it enacts the magic of revelation, of making visible what is invisible. Writing is memory, imagination, thought, made manifest: it gives what is otherwise unseen and intangible an illusory solidity. It is a record of an act - the act of writing - that generates its meaning once the act is finished, once the text is written and can be read.

What is most crucially absent from the written word is the body itself. A body makes a text, a body reads it, a body imagines and responds; but the text itself is bodiless. Without flesh and nerves or organs, boneless and hairless, a text is merely marks on a page or a screen or a wall: it's a trace of something, not any thing itself. The fetish of book design, focusing on the book as object, conceals the evanescence of text with an appearance of permanence: yet the object remains obdurately silent, its meanings dormant, until the immediate moment in which it is read.

When a text enters the theatre, the body is pushed into its foreground: both performer and audience are present. The performer's body is mediated: it's a body shaped by language, that now in turn interrogates and transforms the text. Sensitive adaptations or translations understand this recouped embodiment as the primary gift of theatre: the performer is the presence through which meaning is animated. And this meaning, whatever it is, in turn becomes memory, a potential text carried in the bodies of the audience. Sometimes it seems that the whole of human communication exists in this constant transformation from one state to another and back again: from revelation to hiddenness, from object to subject, from the intangible to the palpable. One reason I find theatre so fascinating is that it makes these transformations impossible to ignore.

The three works I saw all place the body in the centre of performance, exposing it as a site of trauma. Here language fragments under the pressure of its enactment. The performer's body - ambiguous, carnal, paradoxically private - is the focus of attention as the bodily absence hidden in the writing spills into an excess of presence. In performance, these texts are thickened and made opaque by what language is unable, finally, to express: the tactility of pain and desire, the incorrigibility of physical experience.

The performer is a complex presence that cannot easily claim its own authenticity. He or she offers a re-presencing, an enacted present of an imagined past. Yet this representation can't dissolve either into sheer abstraction. It is immanent with its own authenticating physicality: the actor's sweat, the actor's voice vibrating in the same air the audience is breathing, the sense of bodily duration. In all truthful theatre, the performer's enactment carries a double knowledge: the body both represents and is; the actor is both herself and someone else. The mask is real.

*

To claim that A Woman in Berlin is a confronting text is to state the obvious. To begin with, it's a personal memoir, a vexed form that often sparks fierce battles about its authenticity. A diary of two months of the Russian occupation of Berlin in 1945, it gives a detailed first-hand account of the experiences of a young, "well brought up" woman attempting to survive in the city in the final days of World War 2. It is, above all, a dispassionate account of survival - pages are devoted to the urgent task of finding enough food and fuel to sustain life. But the most sensational - and deeply contested - aspect of the book is its account of rape by the Russian troops.

Historians give differing estimates of how many women were raped during the occupation - some say at least 100,000, others say up to two million. The troops that arrived were bent on revenge. Hitler's invasion of Russia is generally agreed to be the bloodiest war in history; by the end of World War 2, 30 million people had been killed on the Eastern Front. The orgy of destruction that took place in Berlin was one of the final atrocities of the war.

The anonymous author was named in 2003 by literary critic Jens Bisky as Marta Hillers, an educated and well-travelled journalist who had written some small-time propaganda for the Nazis, but was probably not a member of the party herself. She was in her early 30s when the Russian stormed Berlin. The book was initially released in 1954, when there was little interest in Germany (or elsewhere) in examining the suffering of Germans, the aggressors in history's most ruinous war; and the author herself refused to republish it. But in the early years of this decade, there was renewed interest: publications such as W.G. Sebald's A Natural History of Destruction, or Anthony Beevor's The Fall of Berlin, began to expose a history that had been hidden by shame or trauma.

Unsurprisingly, rape is the centre of the book's controversy. Anonymous's account - especially her semi-romantic, almost tender relationship with a Russian major, with its hints of treacherous collaboration with the enemy - was considered to have smirched the honour of German women, and the truthfulness or otherwise of the book has been fiercely contested. It's a text with literary qualities by a clearly literate woman; the original writings were retyped and expanded for publication. Paradoxically, the more literary it appeared, the less reliable it was assumed to be. The poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who republished it in 2000, demanded that it be seen as a strictly documentary source, a work of absolute historical truth, and historian Anthony Beevor validates its historical authenticity.

For all that, perhaps the most illuminating analysis is of the book as a literary work, because that is how it represents itself, complete with a epigraph from A Winter's Tale. Above all, the diary recounts the struggle to survive as an entire world is destroyed: a city breaks down under war, cutting off food supplies, electricity, all public services; and with it comes the collapse of all moral and social certainty. The most graphic symptom of that collapse is the transformation of the women in the book into into casual sexual prey.

The book is in part not just about rape, but its representation. "What does it mean—rape?," Anonymous asks herself. "When I said the word for the first time aloud ... it sent shivers down my spine. Now I can think it and write it with an untrembling hand, say it out loud to get used to hearing it said. It sounds like the absolute worst, the end of everything—but it’s not." The women in the book, and even the soldiers who rape them, whose relatives had been raped by Germans, oscillate between an understanding of rape as "worse than death" and a brutalised jokiness that is perhaps more confronting than any other aspect of the book. Anonymous's dispassionate observations make the line between victim and aggressor extremely unstable: at one point she even claims that Berlin's ordeal "balanced an account", extracting from the Germans some of the suffering they had dealt others.

Given these complexities, it would be misleading and reductive to present this text as a simple story of victimhood. It would be even more perilous to assume an immediate empathy with this young woman and the atrocities she suffered and witnessed; that would risk a kind of emotional pornography, an exploitative sensationalism. Instead, just as the diary is a literary imagining of real events, director Janice Muller and performer Meredith Penman frame A Woman in Berlin consciously as a work of art. Penman's performance permits us to witness an act of imaginative identification that shifts from the present to an evocation of the past.

The set appears to be an exhibition about the conquest of Berlin, with text and mementos on the white walls and a gallery bench in the centre. A young contemporary woman enters, wandering casually from item to item. She idly presses a button and listens to an audio in German. She earnestly contemplates a picture. She is any of us, peering from the outside into an atrocity we can barely understand. Then she drops her leather jacket, and her dress is subtly changed: she is no longer of the 21st century. She begins to speak extracts from the diary.

This is an extraordinarily powerful performance. Much of its power emerges from its intelligent restraint: it is only when it finishes that its trauma really registers. Penman presents a woman brutalised by her experience, not only of rape, but of the bare struggle to survive; the self she once knew - cultured, middle class, safe - splinters under the deprivations of war. She witnesses and reports, not only on what she sees, but on her own feelings: her observing, writing self is the single coherent element of a world reduced to madness.

In the end, all that matters is that she lives. Her survival is not triumphant, but a bitter, self-knowing will that recognises the shame of "naked life", as all the markers of civilisation are stripped away to a bare play of power: an animal instinct that overpowers every other consideration. We know that knowledge is now imprinted on her body and will never be undone: it is now part of who she is.

Then, just as the audience does, Penman transforms back into the young contemporary woman, picks up her jacket and walks out of the gallery.

***

"Irony is a mask," says Anne Carson in her poem Irony is Not Enough: Essay On My Life As Catherine Deneuve. "The problem is that we become the mask". It's an understanding of the paradox of performance that perhaps explains why Carson's work, intentionally or not, so often enters the theatre: in 2003, this particular poem also formed part of the basis for a dance/theatre work by William Forsythe, Kammer/Kammer.

Fragment 31's production is a brilliant collaboration between some of our most interesting theatre artists: performers Luke Mullins and Leisa Shelton, designer Anna Cordingley, composer Jethro Woodward and lighting designer Jenny Hector. In their rendition, the poem is presented unchanged: as they explain in the program, "to edit, re-write or change in any way the writing of Anne Carson is to defeat the purpose of choosing this writer and her work as the source material".

This signals what could potentially be an inhibiting reverence for the text. But this profoundly intelligent collaboration avoids fetishising the text, instead opening up its complexities into a parallel essay about fetish, the irrational displacement of desire. The poem's fragmented narrative is refracted through an equally fragmented performance, in which the component parts of theatre - design, sound, staging, performance and text - become fluid constructions that are made and unmade before our eyes.

When we enter the theatre, we seem to be entering a workshop: there are tables covered with technical equipment, and parts of set are still being dressed. The designer is kneeling on the floor, working on a design detail with tape and a box-cutter; the performers are leafing through files of script, checking the pages are all there, the sound designer is testing levels. There is an air of industry and preparatory concentration. Once the audience is seated, Leisa Shelton sits down with a businesslike air at a desk at the very front, only feet away from the audience. Darkness pulls in around her, a single light on her face. She says the first words of the poem: "Je commence". And so it does.

Most of the poem is spoken by Luke Mullins, with interruptions of pre-recorded text and dialogic lines spoken by Shelton. The writerly self, which seems a binding unity in the text despite its fragmentations, is immediately split and mediated. Carson's exact language is full of raw spaces, caesurae which electrically shift the speaker's realities. She is a classics lecturer suddenly pierced with desire for one of her students ("Knife of boy. Knife of girl.") Burned by this impossible desire, she imagines herself as Catherine Deneuve. She speaks of herself in the third person in one sentence, in the first in the next. She enacts the repetitions of traumatic desire in a cityscape chilly with snow.

Desire is traumatic, as Carson says, because it is felt as a disintegration of the known self. It can only be experienced as fragmentation. In response, Fragment 31 takes apart the supposed coherence of theatre: they present a series of contingent unities, theatrical images that collapse back upon themselves. Shelton dons a blonde wig and becomes Catherine Deneuve behind a table of telephones in a miniature set that mimics a bourgeois Parisian apartment: she does not answer the insistently ringing phone, but it is answered nevertheless. The designers focus a light on her, rearrange her clothes. They hold an empty black frame in front of her hand or her foot, so we might examine the parts of her body, adorned by a bracelet, a shoe, as if they are a close-up in a film. They hand Mullins a microphone, and he speaks into it.

The tableau collapses. The stage returns to a raw state of preparedness, and then is remade as something else. These pauses begin to generate a particular electricity: we are continually reminded that this is a performance, that it is an artifice. A poem, said Marianne Moore, is "an imaginary garden with real toads in it": what is real here is the articulation of feeling. Once or twice we seem to see the performers stripped of any mask at all. They stand in front of the audience at a momentary loss, and the entire pretence briefly dissolves into a larger understanding of our own implication in this anxiety, this painfulness and loss. All this occurs with an delicate and precise attention to rhythm - not merely the rhythms of Carson's language, but the breath of the stage, how it contracts and expands in the light, how the performers inhabit or leave a space.

And then, quite suddenly, we are at the end of the poem, and the work is finished. Blackout.

***


I had forgotten the sheer brilliance of Barrie Kosky's The Tell-Tale Heart. This was my second viewing: I saw it in 2007, when it was staged in the Malthouse workshop as part of the Melbourne Festival. Here Kosky's production is remounted by Michael Kantor in the Merlyn Theatre, with Michael Kieran Harvey taking Kosky's place on the piano.

Edgar Allan Poe's story is a famous parable of the self-betrayal of guilt. Its nameless narrator suffers from a disease that has resulted in a morbid over-sensitivity, which drives him to murder an old man, perhaps his father, with whom he lives. The murder, he explains, is necessary, even though he felt no animus towards his victim. Rather, the reverse - "I loved the old man. He had never wronged me... I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! He had the eye of a vulture - a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees - very gradually - I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever."

The murder might be an act of madness, but it is not irrational - as the narrator points out, he is extremely logical, and plans his crime meticulously. Poe's anti-hero is perhaps an extreme case of hyper-rationality, of a logic devoid of the wider considerations of felt reason: the perception of the whole is obliterated by a single anguished act of cognition, from which all else follows. He never explains why the old man's eye is so dreadful to him: it is enough that it is predatory and veiled, an inhuman organ. What he doesn't say is that the eye looks back at him. Perhaps what is most unbearable to the murderer is what it sees, or what he thinks it sees.

In this performance, The Tell-Tale Heart is a single act of theatre, as cleanly achieved as a knife: there is absolutely nothing extraneous, nothing that is not needful. It begins as the auditorium lights gradually fade on the sumptuous red curtain that veils the stage. We sit for what seems like a long time in total darkness and silence: there is the faint sound of the curtains opening, but otherwise nothing.

Then, so suddenly that it made me jump, there blares out a jazz era song which is, in its bright brashness, an assault, and a single spotlight illuminates a tiny object in the vast blackness. At first it seems as if might be a trick of the eye, but gradually you see that it is a face, or half a face: a mask. The spotlight shifts like a voyeur, exposing first one side of the face and then another, until at last there is the whole head, suspended in the darkness. It looks like the face of a corpse, or a ghost: tonight we will listen to the dead.

Martin Niedermair speaks thickly, as if his lips are decaying, as if the words must be imagined and created before he can utter them. He stops and starts unpredictably, distorting the shapes of sentences; at one point the struggle to speak reduces him to mere slavering. It's an extraordinary performance, in which the human body becomes itself a thing of shadow, opaque, mysterious and sinister. Even the boundaries of his body are questionable: by shaking his head rapidly from right to left, Niedemair blurs our vision and briefly becomes a living sculpture by Francis Bacon, a two-headed, anguished monster.

Paul Jackson's lighting is miraculous: he doesn't so much design light as sculpt the darkness. As the lights widen around Niedermair, they reveal the single feature of Anna Tregloan's set: a vertiginous staircase, bereft of banisters, floats in the darkness, stretching right up to the roof of the theatre. It's so steep that it's impossible not to fear that Niedermair might fall off: it's a tension that screws up with the narrative, until he is revealed lying impossibly upside down, as if he has indeed fallen, singing of his yearning for a love that he has himself murdered.

In the controlled environs of the Merlyn, this production has a feeling of absolute precision. Harvey's exquisite renditions of Bach and Purcell bring a new and aching loveliness to the performance, drawing out the palpable tensions between beauty and repulsion that drive this production. But there are more pragmatic reasons too: the blackouts occur, for example, without the distraction of ushers holding up boards to conceal the exit signs. It is, quite simply, one of the best works of theatre I have ever seen.

Pictures: Top: Meredith Penman in A Woman in Berlin. Photo: Andy Baker. Bottom: Martin Niedemair in The Tell-Tale Heart. Photo: Jeff Busby

A Woman in Berlin, by Anonymous, adapted by Jancie Muller and Meredith Penman, directed by Janice Muller. Set and costume design by Gabrille Logan, lighting by Matt Cox, sound design by Russell Goldsmith. Performed by Meredith Penman. Tower Theatre, the Malthouse, until November 28.

Irony Is Not Enough: Essay On My Life As Catherine Deneuve, by Anne Carson. Created by Anna Cordingley, Jenny Hector, Luke Mullins, Leisa Shelton and Jethro Woodward. North Melbourne Arts House. Closed.

The Tell-Tale Heart, after Edgar Allan Poe, directed by Barrie Kosky. Return season directed by Michael Kantor. Design adaptation: Anna Tregloan (set and costumes) and Paul Jackson (lighting). Performed by Martin Niedermair. Merlyn Theatre, Malthouse, until December 2.