This Is Good Advice: This Is A Chair by Caryl Churchill, Advice to Iraqi Women by Martin Crimp, directed by Lauren Barnes. Sound design by Rueben Stanton, set design by Rhys Auteri and Vlad Mijic, set illustrations by Vlad Mijic and Harriet O'Donnell. Welcome Stranger @ Trades Hall, Carlton, until February 10.

Sometimes the concept of "British Political Theatre" seems synonymous with David Hare, whom the SMH describes this week as "Britain's most committed left-wing playwright". I'm not sure how one measures such things, but in a field that includes barnacled warriors like Edward Bond or Harold Pinter, this seems, to say the least, highly arguable. Hare takes the prize - in the mass media, at least - because he writes about issues that everybody recognises as politics, from Israel to Iraq, in ways that are utterly familiar to anyone who has watched television. Hare's finger, it seems, is ever sensitively pressed to the pulse of current affairs.

But Britain has produced deeply committed political playwrights whose artistic achievements far overshadow the narrow oeuvre of David Hare. Caryl Churchill is among the first rank of these. Since the early 1960s, she has steadily written plays that express her commitment to socialist and feminist ideals and, later, a disturbingly prescient vision of a natural world being destroyed by the relentless progress of global capitalism. She is also one of the most exciting formalists now writing in the theatre.

This Is A Chair is a case in point. This short and elegant play, premiered by the Royal Court in 1997, is a sardonic evolution of Bertolt Brecht's Fear And Misery of the Third Reich, a series of fragmentary and realistic sketches of the impact of Nazism on the ordinary lives of Germans. Brecht's examination of the nexus between politics and social behaviour is at once oblique and direct, focusing on the apparently inconsequential to illustrate the rapid erosion of rights and freedoms under Hitler's regime.

Churchill has shaved this form to the bone; at first sight, her sketches of mundane social interaction have nothing to do with their purported titles - War in Bosnia, The Northern Ireland Peace Process, Genetic Engineering. They are at once domestic and strangely iconic: a young woman stands up a man with whom she has a date, a couple order their child to "eat up", two old women watch television while discussing a medical procedure. The only overt sign that something else is going on - in the text, at least - is in the scene titles, which, in classic Brechtian fashion, are to be displayed or announced before each scene.

The cognitive dissociation that vibrates between the labelling of significant public events of the mid-90s and the brief sketches that supposedly illustrate them has an effect that becomes progressively more and more uneasy. One hunts for the connections, and finds more usually a disconnection. What comes closer and closer to the surface is the carelessness people display towards each other in their ordinary lives, an ethical callousness that might appear minor and unimportant, but which, in the magnification of the theatre, demonstrates how little people actually perceive each other's pain.

The amplification from the micro to the macro is not a simple question of metaphor, of these domestic mise en scenes illustrating in miniature the larger public events. Rather, Churchill is sketching out an ecology of human affairs, creating a sense of how these small events accumulate into a social ethos. Just as climate change is created by billions of individually insignificant choices, so a callous public ethos is linked to countless smaller events, such as a doctor persuading an old woman not to use anaesthetic during a procedure in order to save money. In each case, the capacity of empathetic responsibility - one of the better human traits - is imperceptibly worn away.

More, Churchill is playing with the nature of knowledge and its relation to reality. The statement "This is a chair" is a common philosophical cue for investigating knowledge: how we know things, whether they exist apart from our knowing of them, what the nature of this knowing is, what role language plays in constituting human realities, and so on. These are the kinds of questions at play, as the program points out, in Magritte's famous painting Ceci n'est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe). All the same, I can't escape a nagging suspicion that Churchill is also employing a playwright's direct literalism in her titling: an insistence that, indeed, things are as they are seen, which is not at all the same as how they are said to be.

It's a subtle thesis which is largely trampled by Lauren Barnes' production for Welcome Stranger, although she makes a creditable attempt at what is an extremely challenging play. Only a writer of Churchill's calibre and precision could even attempt such a stylistic coup, and the demands of this kind of spare text are unforgiving to even the most experienced actors. The actors employ blackboards, emphasising an pedagogic element that might exist in Brecht's play, but which in Churchill's remains ambiguous: it is not a lesson play, a Lehrstücke, so much as an attempt to destabilise the simple categorisations that make it easy for us, in our media-driven age, to ignore the actualities of our actions.

So what is written as a simple interaction is labelled for us: the opening scene, for example, has blackboards behind each actor: He is Bosnia, She is Britain. (I confess, I was at first confused: I thought they had just got their grammar mixed up, not that they were different nations). The effect is to simplify its complexities, to read the play in a directed way that removes much of its jangling affect. In order to play with a proper metaphorical potency, a text of this kind requires an intensity of realism in the performance which is here side-stepped by the approach: the subtext is, as it were, written out for us, and I'm not certain that it's the correct subtext.

All the same, there is enough ingenuity in this simple staging and enough energy in the performances to keep it interesting. It's not surprising that the lesser play - Martin Crimp's 10 minute Advice to Iraqi Women - is by far the more successful piece. Here the actors are working well within their limitations, and Crimp's piece, which depends - albeit in a far less nuanced way - on an ironic dissonance between its text and its content, finds the comedy and depth that eludes the earlier piece.

Advice to Iraqi Women is a litany of the advice routinely given out to mothers to ensure the safety of their children - always supervise children near water, lock away poisons, give them good food. It has long irritated me that such advice is couched in terms that feed parental paranoia, thus no doubt ensuring that we are the most protective parents in history. (Yes, I am all for sensible safety standards...) Crimp picks up on this rhetoric to create what becomes a blackly ironic comment on the hypocrisy of the British Government's slogan "Every Child Matters" while it was simultaneously bombing children in Iraq.

It's performed by three actors seated in a row on three chairs. Beneath them is a stretch of sand, scattered with lit tealight candles that suggest a memorial to the dead. They glance anxiously at each other before blurting out the standard exhortations. "Your kitchen," they intone, "is a warzone." Your garden is a minefield. Death awaits your children around every corner. Beware! Beautifully judged performances, taking their cue from the tone of earnest social welfare and magazine television, highlight the comic unreality of the rhetoric in the face of those who live in actual warzones. It's simple and powerful and very effective.

For all my reservations, This Is Good Advice is a chance to see a couple of plays by two of Britain's major playwrights that otherwise wouldn't get an airing here, performed by an interesting young company. Well worth a look.

Reviewed for The Book Show, ABC Radio National - you can listen to me here or read on...

Contemporary Australian Drama by Leonard Radic. Brandl and Schlesinger 2006.

You shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but in the case of Leonard Radic's new book on Australian drama it's irresistible. The book is grey. Tombstone grey. It gives you fair warning of the quality of the prose inside.

The cover's greyness is marginally relieved by a black and white photograph of the first production of Ray Lawler's Summer of the Seventeenth Doll in 1955. Yes, that's 51 years ago. And this is a book entitled 'Contemporary Australian Drama'? Those of us who believe theatre is one of the most exciting artforms around and wonder at its fusty, old-fashioned image need look for explanation no further than this volume.

Leonard Radic was the theatre reviewer for the Age for two decades and, in the tradition of reviewers such as James Agate, Kenneth Tynan or Michael Billington, now seeks the more permanent legacy of a book to immortalise his critical insights. Or, as the case may be, insight. Radic seems to have had one idea in his entire critical life, and he hangs onto it with the tenacity of a slightly dim bull terrier.

Contemporary Australian Drama follows his equally dull 1991 survey of Australian theatre, The State of Play. The narrative in both books is basically the same: Australian theatre was a colonial franchise until, in the late 60s and early 70s, a bunch of young turks – including David Williamson, John Romeril, Jack Hibberd, Alex Buzo and Dorothy Hewett – began to articulate a new, uniquely Australian perspective.

This thesis is fine as far as it goes. In Radic's hands, that's not very far at all. There's no doubt that the founding of the Nimrod, Pram Factory and La Mama theatres, the formation of the Australian Performing Group, and the tremendous surge of political and artistic energy this released, was a crucial period in our theatre history. Radic's special genius is to make this colourful history more boring than cutting your own toenails.

As I plodded through this book, I saved myself from the insanity of tedium by rereading One Night Stands, Michael Billington's collected theatre reviews for the Guardian. Radic is, in some ways, the Australian equivalent of Billington. They are roughly contemporaneous, both young reviewers of the theatre that expressed the social and political upheavals of the 1970s. Billington, like Radic, was in particular an advocate for a theatre of social and political commitment – a theatre epitomised in Britain by writers like David Hare or Howard Brenton, or directors like Max Stafford-Clarke.

Billington has his limitations: his subscription to a notion of theatre as a branch of sociology meant, for instance, that he initally missed the significance of radical talents like Sarah Kane (although he was man enough to admit it later). But a read through his collected reviews will give you a fair idea of the ferment of ideas that ran through British theatre in the 70s and 80s – the variety of its aesthetic, its political concerns – filtered through a fascinated, mobile intellect. More importantly, it leaves you with the feeling that the theatre is an exciting, vital place to be. 'He loves the theatre,' Peter Hall said of Billington. 'So I always want to read him.'

This sense of excitement is palpably missing from Radic's book. In part, it's a function of his style: where Billington is witty, literate and engaged, Radic is earnest and pedestrian. He has the unstoppable, unvarying stolidity of a cyberman, and about as much intellectual suppleness. The book's single virtue is as an archive: it records the titles, plots and premiere productions of many significant Australian plays, and there is a useful chapter on the beginnings of a national theatre. Considered as a critical history, however, it has crippling shortcomings.

Radic is very clear that his book is about the writers of the theatre and not the directors, designers, actors and other artists who create it. This is, of course, a perfectly legitimate and worthy exercise. His aim, as he explains in the introduction, inspired by the only decent piece of prose in the book – a quote from David Hare – is to track the social history of Australia through the writings of our playwrights over the past 40 years.

This is Radic's Grand Idea, and he grimly sets about applying it to every playwright in sight. It fits neatly over David Williamson and his heirs like Hannie Rayson, those who devote themselves to a formally conventional theatre inspired by 'issues', but less easily categorised writers like Patrick White or Dorothy Hewett, let alone avant garde artists like Jenny Kemp, have to be violently jemmied into his thesis. To this end, the hapless reader is taken through the plot of each play, treated to a series of homilies on its success or failure, and then moved on to the next illustration of Australia's social history.

The champion of this story is David Williamson, who according to Radic 'remains unchallenged as Australia's leading playwright'. Why? Radic says, as if it trumps all argument, 'the box office figures are there on the board for all to see'. This equation between commercial viability and quality is, as Michael Billington observes in other circumstances, 'deeply Thatcherite', and points towards the basic philistinism underlying this book.

While any critic has the right to her individual viewpoint, Radic's Melbourne-centrism seriously compromises his claim to comprehensiveness. To take one example: a chapter is devoted to the oeuvre of Daniel Keene. Anybody familiar with Keene's work will notice that Radic only discusses the plays that have been produced in Melbourne. There is no mention at all, for instance, of Keene's long and fruitful collaboration with Tim Maddock, director of the Red Shed Company in Adelaide. Yet this company commissioned five of Keene's most important plays, all of which have subsequently had major productions in Europe.

Radic also studiously avoids any discussion of the arguments against his nationalistic narrative, such as Julian Meyrick's controversial essay Trapped by the Past, a swingeing attack on the so-called new wave theatre and its suppression of younger artists through the 1990s. And although he discusses plays produced as recently as 2005, Radic fails to engage with of any of the new theatre writers who have emerged since 2000. Despite an epilogue that attempts to sketch out the challenges facing Australian theatre now, this is a book which looks resolutely backwards.

Here is little sense of a critical mind distilling his wide experience into a useful intellectual map, or even researching very far past his personal experience. Compare it to something like David Bradby's excellent Mise en Scene: French Theatre Now, a crisp, intelligent overview of the the major movements in the development of modern French theatre, and its inadequacies become very clear.

The shame is that this is such a missed opportunity. Sure, theatre's failures can make you squirm like nothing else can. But when the art takes flight, when that indefinable magic occurs and the stage is transformed into an arena for our released imaginations, nothing is more exhilarating. It's something that happens now, here, in the same space where you are breathing, and it will never happen again. As Malcolm Muggeridge said of journalism, its glory is its transience. If any art is to inspire lively writing, it surely ought to be the theatre.

Phaedra's Love by Sarah Kane, directed by Julie Waddington, design Julie Waddington and Luke Hails, sound by Nicholas Albanis. With Ben Noble, Georgina Capper, Fabienne Parr, Peter Roberts, Nick Austin, Pablo Calero, Alison Boyce, Jacinta Perry and Keira Lyons. Abstract Chaos with Instorage at the Store Room, until November 21.

Sarah Kane is the most exciting British playwright to emerge in the past decade. Her work was long overshadowed by the tabloid frenzy sparked by the 1995 production of her first play, Blasted, notoriously greeted as the product of a "sick" mind by a succession of rabidly foaming reviewers. The Daily Mail's Jack Tinker memorably labelled it a "disgusting feast of filth".

In common with many English-language writers treated without honour in their own countries (Samuel Beckett, Edward Bond, Howard Barker), European theatre was quick to recognise Kane's significance and welcomed Blasted as one of the most important plays of the 1990s. Critical opinion in Britain began to turn in 1998 with the premiere of Crave, but her suicide the following year made her the poete maudite of her generation. After her suicide, Kane's plays - like Sylvia Plath's poetry, and to their equal detriment - were mostly read as autobiographical expressions which foreshadowed her untimely death. As much as the claim that she wrote to shock for shock's sake, this romanticised notion obscured her uncompromising theatrical innovation.

In Australia, despite her steadily growing international reputation, Kane's work is still the province of the "fringe". She has been staged by theatres like Brisbane's La Boite and Sydney's New Theatre or the Stables, or by small independent theatre companies in Melbourne. I mean no disrespect to independent companies when I say that it's a shameful reflection on Australian theatre that one of the most important contemporary playwrights in the English language is unable to get a gig on a major stage.

Kane was one of a post-Thatcher generation of playwrights which emerged in the 1990s and challenged the pedagogic "theatre of journalism" exemplified most notably by David Hare. Many of them looked to playwrights like Caryl Churchill and Martin Crimp, or to Howard Barker's "theatre of catastrophe", as animating inspirations. As Kane's work evolved, her plays successively attacked the notion of theatrical naturalism in a distinctively visceral way. The revulsion and shock her plays invoke is never gratuitous, but is intended to provoke a re-evaluation of reality.

Although these playwrights were called the Nihilists or the New Brutalists, Kane's vision is far from nihilistic. It exposes a moral universe in which, as Hamlet says, "there is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so", and searches uncompromisingly for an ethics which can survive the violence of our contemporary world. But even 4:48 Psychosis, her final, excoriatingly beautiful masterpiece, finishes with a fragmentary but stubborn hope that should not be dimmed by her subsequent suicide.

Abstract Chaos' production of Kane's second play, Phaedra's Love, is an uncertain rendering of Kane's work, but worth seeing nevertheless. The night begins promisingly, but by the end has fallen off the unforgiving tightrope that Kane sets up with such deceptively simple assurance. It exemplifies the kind of difficulties - lack of resources, lack of time - faced by independent theatre productions. I should add that some of its problems may resolve as the season progresses.

Phaedra's Love is Kane's take on Seneca's and Euripides' tragedies Hippolytus, which tell the legend of Phaedra, the wife of Theseus. She is cursed by Aphrodite and falls desperately in love with her stepson, the beautiful and chaste youth Hippolytus, with catastrophic results. It is most famously adapted by Racine in his play Phaedre, which is written in what are allegedly (I have to take George Steiner's word for it) sublimely beautiful alexandrines.

Kane's take couldn't be more iconoclastic, although it still has traces of the naturalism which she afterwards abandoned altogether. Phaedra's Love is the most darkly funny of her plays and is also the first which explores the nature of love, a theme that became the major obsession of the later work. Here she perverts Phaedra's tragedy to create what is at once a chilling vision of the nature of obsessive love, and a strange liberation from despair.

In Phaedra's Love, Hippolytus (Ben Noble) is very far from being the chaste and beautiful youth of the original story. He is physically and emotionally repugnant, seen in the opening scene watching tv while wanking into a sock. (He checks that he hasn't blown his nose in it first). Phaedra's (Georgina Capper) fatal passion for him is therefore inscrutable and terrifying; when she declares her love, in a scene of skin-crawling humiliation, she performs oral sex on him while he watches television and snacks indifferently from a bag of lollies.

Yet in his monstrous boredom, his disgust with the falsity of everything that surrounds him, Hippolytus is also a curiously attractive character. Behind his joylessness and refusal of any human contact lies a desire for absolute honesty, a ruthless integrity which will have no truck with a world that disgusts him. The only time he shows anything like wonder is after he hears of Phaedra's suicide: "She really did love me... Bless her." And it becomes clear that Phaedra's accusation of rape against him is not the act of revenge that it appears to be, but a gift: the orgy of violence which follows is, at last, a real moment, in which there is no trace of human deceit. Hence his final words: "If there could have been more moments like this."

Phaedra's suicide is the logical result of the fire which has so consumed her, her abnegation the utter loss of self which is, as Kane perceived, tragically attracted to its opposite, the self that will compromise nothing. The gravity exerted by these extremes detroys everything around them - Phaedra's daughter Strophe (Fabianne Parr) is raped and murdered by Theseus (Peter Roberts) in the final carnage. But Kane's humour here is wicked: the murders of the Royal family are represented as a barbecue, with Hippolytus' genitals becoming a gruesome sausage.

Kane's grand guignol violence contains a serious critique, of classical theatre as much as of the nature of human love and the dilemma of the self. It's in eight tautly written scenes, which move rapidly to its horrifying and obscenely funny conclusion. Unfortunately, Julie Waddington's direction seldom matches the icy clarity of the text, so nothing is ever quite in focus.

Stylised acting at the pitch this play demands requires a depth of polish that the standard four weeks' rehearsal simply cannot achieve with any certainty. Georgina Capper's performance as Phaedra is the most successful in negotiating the challenges of the play's stylistic formality, and has some genuinely thrilling moments. Ben Noble's Hippolytus achieves his character's grossness, but falters at the extremity of his despair and so cannot reveal his perverse nobility. I had the feeling that often the other performances were hesitant or even, at times, without conviction. This means that the final scene has all the faults of stage violence when it doesn't work: despite the liberal application of tomato sauce it merely looks fake, and the audience laughs for the wrong reasons.

I thought the set design a major problem in this production. Admittedly, Kane wrote with a fine disregard for the difficulties of designers: at one point Phaedra's body is meant to be set on fire, which defeated the ingenuity of this production team. At times, however, the set literally gets in the way of seeing the action, and the pace is hindered by cumbersome moveable blocks which are rearranged between scenes. The set changes impede the flow of the tragedy, stilting its emotional movement so it achieves neither apotheoses of horror nor comedy. Despite these reservations, it's a rare chance to see - if through a glass darkly - a fascinating work by a major contemporary dramatist.

Links
The Store Room
Sarah Kane

Melbourne International Arts Festival: Via Dolorosa, written and performed by David Hare, directed by Stephen Daldry, Athenaeum Theatre.

I had a number of difficulties with David Hare's Via Dolorosa, but a principle problem was that I became bored. About half an hour before Sir David ended his whistle-stop tour of Israel and Palestine, I was obsessively longing for a coffee. With renewed alertness, I noted that he had reached his last interview; perhaps that was it. No, he had to get on the plane. And off the plane. And catch the train from Gatwick to Victoria. And then a Black Cab. A couple of flashback quotes... And then turn right, and right again... His dog, of course. The front door. A final, telling reflection...

Well, that coffee was pretty damn good by the time I got to it. I wondered if my coffee compulsion was a kind of Pavlovian response: I like caffeine with my Sunday newspaper. What I was listening to was the kind of thing that is published on weekends in quality English broadsheets (Via Dolorosa was, in fact, excerpted in The Guardian): erudite, intelligent, self aware, sceptical, leavened with an ironic if empathetic eye and a deprecating wit. Quintessentially English liberal bourgeois. Bourgeois that knows it's bourgeois, dammit; hence the deprecation.

Via Dolorosa recounts a visit to Israel that Hare made in 1997, when his play, Amy's View, was presented in Tel Aviv. His visit was also prompted by deeper reasons: as he says, "It is only now... that I realise, almost without noticing, that for some time my subject as a playwright has been faith. My subject is belief. And so it comes to seem appropriate - no, more than that, it comes to seem urgent - that the 50-year-old British playwright should finally visit the 50-year-old state."

What follows is a series of encounters with Palestinians and Israelis, mostly prominent people: religious Jewish settlers in Gaza; the respected head of the Palestinian Red Crescent, Haider Abdel Shafi; Menachem Begin's right wing son, Benni Begin; the Palestinian historian Albert Aghazerin; the theatre director George Ibrahim and poet Hussein Barghouti. These conversations are noted with painstaking even-handedness, and recounted with the deft lightness of a practised raconteur. And they are interesting in their own right, revealing some of the intractable, tangled contradictions that underly the Israeli occupation of Palestine. The sort of thing, as I said, which one might read with interest and attention in a broadsheet newspaper, and argue about afterwards.

A big problem with a play like this is that it dates quickly: I suspect it has lost a lot of punch by its inevitable assumption of the glaze of history. It was first performed in 1998, and the situation in the Middle East since then has grown immeasurably worse. What Hare describes seems, in comparison, almost a kind of idyll: this was when Ramallah had a "cheerful air", before it was bulldozed by the IDF.

Wisely, Hare does not attempt to act; he merely stands and speaks, assisted only by a couple of minimal lighting changes and one bizarrely kitsch moment when his visit to the Temple Mount summons a luminous gold model of the Mount to float in the dark space at the back of the stage. These things seem mere gestures towards theatre, a kind of dressing to assure us that this is, indeed, a play. I am not usually given to categorical assertions, but I was not convinced that it was a play at all.

I don't mean to limit what theatre can be to the spectacle, and personally I have a fatal attraction to the kind of show which features a spotlight, a performer and a harrowing script. Walking into the Athenaeum and seeing the naked stage bathed in a bluish light, a table with a glass of water set forestage, I thought I might be in for my sort of night. Instead, I came out with a feeling that I had just witnessed something that was tantamount to a kind of artistic death.

What David Hare presented was not anti-theatre: the Temple Mount moment exploded any sense of such a stern aesthetic. It was more a kind of un-theatre. I was more troubled by it than I expected, and not for any of the obvious reasons. It seems to me that Hare's insistence on "witness" and "reportage" is symptomatic of a wider contemporary crisis in art; ironically, given Hare's stated subject, of a loss of faith in art itself.

According to Hare, Via Dolorosa is primarily a vehicle for "enlightenment": "In fact, what I'm doing with Via Dolorosa is trying to pull theatre back to a fact-based theatre where the audience knows more when they leave than when they went in," he explains in an interview. This jostles uneasily with his disclaimer elsewhere that "theatre doesn’t work like journalism, and the suggestion that it is a form of journalism is untrue". It is hard to see that Via Dolorosa is anything but journalism, although that need not be a sneer - journalism, after all, includes writers like Martha Gellhorn and Ryszard Kapuschinski. But Hare's stated intention does beg the question: if I want some understanding of the Middle East, why am I not better off reading the reports of Robert Fisk or Juan Cole's analysis? Why would I want to go to a play?

Hare has not always been averse to making things up, although he comes out of the left wing British theatre of the 1970s and he was one of the pioneers of documentary theatre in his work with Joint Stock. His brand of politically committed work, rooted in actuality, has continued to be massively influential. Documentary theatre is currently the dominant vehicle for political dissent in British theatre; Hare's most recent play about the Iraq war, Stuff Happens, is now on in London.

Like his contemporaries Howard Brenton and Trevor Griffiths, Hare stands squarely in a broad tradition of British left wing activism which goes all the way back to before the Fabians. It's a tradition often fatally marked by the earnest belief that, with enough work, enough commitment, enough care, enough education, enough Reason, Progress will prevail. "But what is the way forward?" Hare kept asking his interviewees, with increasing plaintiveness. With the benefit of hindsight - this play was first performed in 1998 - it is clear that there has been no way forward, just an intractable locking in of conflict and bloodshed between two sides which are themselves riven by deep divisions. Hare's own Via Dolorosa is, of course, his discovery of the inadequacy of secular reason in the face of the apocalyptically irrational.

One of the ironies of Via Dolorosa is that, for all Hare's stated objectives of presenting "facts" and removing his mediating presence as author to permit his interviewees to speak for themselves, it is, in the end, a work about David Hare. But it is a Hare so conscious of his desire to be even-handed and of his status as an outsider that he speaks in chains, leaping in alarm when he dares to entertain a thought. I agree with Hare on the unimportance of opinion, but the aesthetic and morality of any artwork is much more than mere opinion. One wonders, tangentially, at what point fair-mindedness becomes moral vacillation.

Hare is scrupulously factual, working from his belief that his job is primarily to inform his audience of things they should know, in order to form a rounded moral view of the world. "Give us the facts, just the facts," he says, of a visit to the Holocaust Museum in Via Dolorosa, remarking that the art works there strike falsely in relation to the actual evidence of atrocity. It is a watered down version of Adorno's famous statement that, after Auschwitz, it is no longer possible to write lyric poetry. But unlike Adorno, who, with Hare, is speaking of the impossibility of representation in the face of atrocity, Hare's argument is full of sly libels against imagination itself.

In an interview on Via Dolorosa, Hare says: "Well, let's say it's the Jewish tradition that knowledge is as important as imagination. And so in some way I think its true that Jews traditionally distrust fiction. In other words, why make up stories when the world is already incredibly various and interesting?" Aside from the leap Hare makes from knowledge being as important as imagination to its being markedly less important, his sweeping statement about the Jewish distrust of fiction seems a little tough on writers like Franz Kafka, Saul Bellow, Andre Schwartz-Bart or Elias Canetti.

Of course, any artist can't but be aware of the essential inadequacy of art in the face of intractable experience. The political place and force of culture was one of the principle questions of the 20th century, and has perplexed much sharper minds than mine. But given art's inability to justify itself, I still wonder what point there is in making works that eschew imagination, why it is necessary to deny the complex truths that only art can communicate, as if this is the only way to restore to it an authenticity and authority to speak. It seems to me that any authenticity it gains is very often grounded in spurious perceptions, as hoaxes such as the recent Norma Khouri scandal have shown. And such supposed authenticity comes at a high cost. To deny human imagination seems a shackling of the one freedom that art can authentically offer, a capitulation in advance to the circumscribing forces of industrialised culture.

Which brings me back to my initial boredom. This is the kind of theatre people tend to like because it's recognisable and predictable: it's written in a form that is instantly familiar and challenges nothing about our processes of perception and understanding. But formal imagination is a huge part of the politics of representation, an issue Hare discusses to some extent in his work, and limiting theatre to the ethics and aesthetics of journalism is a profoundly political - and, I would say, ultimately conservative - decision. My reactions to Via Dolorosa made me think of another one-man show I saw a couple of weeks ago by a writer who was unashamedly a journalist - The Last Days of Mankind by Karl Kraus. Although it is almost a century older than Hare's play, it has the political bite, immediate relevance and experiential profundity that only imagination can confer. As Ezra Pound said of poetry, art is news that stays news.

Links:
Via Dolorosa
National Theatre: Platform Papers
To Each His Via Dolorosa, Al-Ahram
PBS interview
Arnold Wesker's open letter to David Hare

"Art has no duty" - Howard Barker

English playwright Howard Barker must be in the zeitgeist. Just last week, Barker's play Wounds to the Face opened at Theatreworks in Melbourne (review next week) and his dystopian fantasy Victory closed after a sell-out season at the Sydney Theatre Company. I found myself again browsing his book of essays, Arguments for a Theatre, and the following day noticed an extraordinary attack on Victory in the current issue of Quadrant.

Victory aroused the ire of one Geoffrey Partington. I am unable to find out much about Mr Partington; I assume he is the same Geoffrey Partington who has written other articles for Quadrant and who describes himself as "a South Australian educationalist". He writes as if he is seated in a manorial chair in tweeds, puffing on a pipe and lamenting the rise of the split infinitive, and his spluttering is the sort of thing which would warm the cockles of any old radical's heart.

On the evidence of his essay, Partington's only knowledge of Barker is what he has read in the mainstream media - his one sourced quote is from an interview in The Australian - and it is impossible to determine if he has actually seen the play he is attacking. This seems a rather poor basis for an "educationalist" to launch an attack on a writer even The Times refers to as "one of the UK's greatest living playwrights". He is entitled to his apoplexy, which mainly agitates around Barker's cavalier treatment of historical fact (more of this later). What most concerned me about his article was, in fact, this statement: "I do not wish to prevent others from spending time and money on travesties such as Victory, but I resent it bitterly if public money subsidises them in any way." ¹

Since a production of the scale of the STC's would not be possible without public money, his is a call for such theatre to be effectively banned from our main stages. There have been too many calls to censor art lately, from too many quarters; and Partington's essay is in fact an attack on the basis of art's freedom, imagination itself. So perhaps it is worth examining in some detail.

Barker's plays have had occasional productions in Australian theatres over the past couple of decades, but the relative popularity of his work since the late '90s is largely due to the former director of Adelaide's Red Shed Company, Tim Maddock. He introduced Howard Barker to a new and young audience when he directed The Europeans and Uncle Vanya for Brink Productions in Sydney and Adelaide. This culiminated in an extraordinarily ambitious production of Barker's six hour epic The Ecstatic Bible, a co-production between Brink and Barker's own company, The Wrestling School, which premiered at the 2000 Adelaide Festival. Since then, the most high profile production has been the STC season of Victory, which featured a return to the stage by Judy Davis, and which attracted Partington's displeasure. I was green that I could not see it myself, but a lot of Sydneysiders did.

Partington is as peeved by Victory's full-house success as he is by its existence, and sneeringly mentions "the paucity of performances his plays receive in Britain" to suggest that those Sydney theatre crowds were sadly misled in their enthusiasm for the play. He drags out the usual abusive labels. Barker is apparently "postmodernist", a term which isn't defined, though it could be argued that his work is actually closer to the individualistic modernisms of playwrights like Jarry and Artaud; and it is heavily implied also that his work is "PC", surely one of the more bizarre criticisms of Barker's iconoclastic ouevre. Even stranger when you consider than Partington is also exercised by Barker's celebrated usage of obscene language (especially that "c" word).

But Partington's major objection to Victory is that Barker gets his history wrong. After pointing out Barker's historical errors - that certain incidents didn't happen, and that certain people never in fact met - he goes on to claim that Barker "purports that the events displayed on the stage, or something very like them, actually took place" and that he is exploiting his audience with "a tissue of sheer lies". This is, to say the least, disingenuous, since even Partington notes that Barker purports nothing of the sort, and least of all historical verisimilitude: his whole artistic credo revolts against such a conception of theatre. It also assumes that the audience of Barker's work is ignorant, malleable and credulous, which seems more than a little patronising.

If Partington takes his own strictures on historical accuracy seriously, he must disapprove of Shakespeare even more vehemently than Barker. It is generally accepted, to take an obvious example, that Richard III is a base libel of the historical Richard; for one thing, Richard didn't have a hump and, as English kings go, he was relatively just. As the director Richard Eyre says, "Shakespeare treats historical incident with little reference to fact - incidents are conflated, characters meet whose paths never crossed".² A historian who based her research on Shakespeare's history plays would be on somewhat shaky ground, and anyone who tried to argue his tragedies were historically accurate would be considered frankly insane. The verisimilitude of Shakespeare's play lies elsewhere, in what Barker describes as "emotional truths".

Barker openly and aggressively defends his right as an artist to make things up, to imagine rather than to represent reality; and he is clearly accurate in intuiting that this is a contemporary heresy. In this, he reflects Theodor Adorno's critique of the culture industry and its effect on human imagination. Speaking of boredom, Adorno says: "it is symptomatic of the deformations perpetrated upon man by the social totality, the most important of which is surely the defamation and atrophy of the imagination...those who want to adapt must learn increasingly to curb their imagination." ³ Clearly, Barker is maladaptive; but he is seldom boring.

Partington's defamation of imagination is not novel; after all, poets were to be banned from Plato's totalitarian Republic for their moral irresponsibility in fictionalising the truth. In Partington's world, the proper reasons for attending theatre are "to improve ... historical knowledge or cultural range", and he castigates Barker fiercely for refusing to fulfil at least one of these aims (I assume that a broader "cultural range" is a landscape which does not include such "travesties" as Victory).

Barker's view of theatre's function is rather more interesting. He doesn't believe theatre is there to convey messages, or to teach, or to entertain. Rather he sees theatre as a place which makes demands on an audience, in order to lead them into moral and emotional conflict and, through this conflict, to encounter a "hard won" freedom. "In a society disciplined by moral imperatives of gross simplicity, complexity itself, ambiguity itself, is a political posture of profound strength," he says. "The play which makes demands of its audience, both of an emotional and interpretive nature, becomes a source of freedom, necessarily hard won. The play which refuses the message, the lecture, the conscience-ridden expose, but which insists on the inventive and imaginative at every point, creates new tensions in a blandly entertainment-led culture. The dramatist's obligation is (to) his own imagination. His function becomes not to educate by his superior political knowledge, for who can trust that? but to lead into moral conflict by his superior imagination." ⁴

In the service of this idea, Barker has written plays which range from the mythic landscapes of classical antiquity to official and unofficial histories of the great massacres of the 20th century. He advocates a tragic, confrontational theatre, the "theatre of catastrophe", which is partly derived from Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty. It is a theatre in open conflict with the rationality of the humanist philosophy which has come to dominate British theatre practice, and which Barker has contemptuously labelled the "theatre of journalism".

The "theatre of journalism" is currently the major vehicle for left wing political dissent on the British stage. Companies like Max Stafford-Clark's Out of Joint and the Tricycle Theatre have dusted off the concept of documentary theatre, pioneered by companies like the Joint Stock Theatre Group in the '70s, and given it new life. Last year Out of Joint produced a documentary play by David Hare on the privatisation of British railways, and Tricycle have developed what they call "tribunal theatre", in which they theatricalise issues such as the Hutton Inquiry or the Stephen Lawrence murder, using only words which have been uttered by the participants. Their latest production, which closed a week ago, is Guantanamo: "Honour Bound to Defend Freedom", written by Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo from interviews with prisoners and others connected with Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay. These have all been extremely successful examples of political theatre, popular and critically acclaimed, which have brought debate on issues such as the Iraq War squarely into the theatrical arena.

This strand of British theatre derives from the English Brechtian tradition, via a dose of Shaw. It is also a dominant philosophy behind much Australian play writing, from the productions of the Melbourne Workers Theatre to the mainstream plays of Hannie Rayson, who herself started in community theatre. And it is the kind of theatre which launches Howard Barker into his most provocative polemic mode.

He fulminates against "the drama of conscience", "a spectacle of relentless harmony" which he sees as merely preaching to the converted at the expense of artistic freedom and invention. "There is great safety and security to be enjoyed in the exchange of conscience-ridden observations, affirmations of shared values, humanistic platitudes," writes Barker. "But the stage remains essentially sterile, and the insistence on the representation of what passes for the real world only enhances the decadent sense of social responsibility while devastating the landscape of dramatic invention." Elsewhere in the same essay, he observes: "We swim in a tepid bath of humanistic accord, writer, actor, audience, an alliance of foregone conclusions which diminishes the possibility of innovative practice." ⁵

This deeply challenges Partington's strange claim that Victory is a polemic for the Australian republic because, in its unhistorical portrayal of the English Civil Wars, it seeks to expose the nastiness of English monarchs. The play is, in line with Barker's stated aesthetic, a rather more complicated experience than this simplistic agenda suggests (a major reason why I wonder whether Partington has actually seen it). In Barker's dystopia no one - monarchist or reformer - comes over well, and no message is parcelled out for theatre consumers to take home.

Barker's politics are by no means conservative, and Partington's attack is a not-untypical right wing reaction to Barker's work. And given that most mainstream British theatre is broadly liberal and humanistic - that is, precisely the kind of theatre on which Barker unleashes his hostility - perhaps the reasons for the relative paucity of productions of Barker's work in Britain become clear. Although his theatre is profoundly political, it is antagonistic to most shades of the ideological spectrum. He remains a radical and exciting playwright, a necessary grit in theatrical vision, a provocative inspiration. The only real question is why our own uncomfortable and innovative talents - writers, for example, like Margaret Cameron - remain marginalised within our theatre culture, while an artist like Barker is widely celebrated. If what we seek is a vital, exciting theatre, work like this is precisely where public money ought to go.


Links

Howard Barker
LIFT inquiry on theatre, Independent

Notes

1 Pyrrhic Victory, Geoffrey Partington, Quadrant, June 2004
2 Utopia and other places, Richard Eyre, Vintage 1994
3 Free Time, TW Adorno, The Culture Industry, Routledge Classics, 1991
4 The Politics Beyond the Politics, Howard Barker, Arguments for a Theatre, Manchester University Press 1993
5 A bargain with impossibility: the theatre of speculation in an age of accord, ibid.