Yes, I know; but sometimes a gel has to do what a gel has to do. Today Ms TN has a piece on the ABC's website The Drum about David Williamson. It's a response to a last week's piece by political writer Annabel Crabb, which claimed, among other things, that "implacable hatred of [David Williamson] seems of late to have become an article of faith for the serious theatre-goer". My penny's worth is online here.

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Every time David Williamson writes a new play, the Australian theatre world launches into one of its favourite games. It goes like this.

There's a flurry of pre-publicity in which we hear, again, that Williamson is our best-selling playwright, a "national myth-maker" who takes the pulse of our times and touches the receptive hearts of the masses. We hear that "the critics" are unkind and out of touch with ordinary folk, and that the only reason people dislike his plays is because he's too popular. We hear that the theatre world is continually chanting that "you can't have naturalism on stage". Preferably, somewhere in the middle of this, someone mentions Barrie Kosky.


Then a good chunk of the theatre community gets dressed up to the nines and heads off to the premiere. The play occurs. Some people laugh. Some people leave at interval. A sizeable proportion of the audience applauds rapturously. Another sizeable proportion emerges in various states of crankiness and flees for a debriefing session over a stiff drink.

Then the fun begins. Some critic, bristling with righteous fury, writes a slashing review of the Williamson phenomenon. Said critic is in turn accused of general nastiness, humourlessness and elitism. Williamson fans point once again to the box office. Various right wing pundits weigh in to opine about Williamson's leftiness. Various left wing pundits complain about his lack of leftiness. Someone (often it's me) says something plaintive about art. And everyone, his or her expectations satisfyingly met, has a marvellous time.

Lather, rinse and repeat.

So it is with Don Parties On, the sequel to Williamson's 1970s mega-hit Don's Party, which opened at the Melbourne Theatre Company last Thursday. And here's my contribution to this particular circle of Hell.

In Don's Party: The Sequel we meet the central characters from the first play 40 years on, as they gather around Kerry O'Brien for the ABC telecast of the 2010 election. As Williamson says in his program note, he's doing a Seven Up on his fictional characters. Baby Richard (Darren Gilshenan) is now a Generation X advertising executive with marital problems. Don (Garry McDonald) is still married to Kath (Tracy Mann), who brings up a decades-old infidelity every two minutes or so. We hear that Don finally did write his novel, which sank like a stone after offending all his friends, and is the cue for some self-referential jokes about commercial writing not being proper art.

Don's mentor Mal (Robert Grubb) and his sharp-tongued wife Jenny (Sue Jones) have divorced, and Jenny has subsequently built a political career. Cooley (Frankie J. Holden), as lascivious as ever, has turned into an obscenely rich right wing lawyer with emphysema, and is married to a patient woman with a social conscience, Helen (Diane Craig). There's a sententious grand daughter, Belle (Georgia Flood), who watches Twilight DVDs and calls herself a Greenie, and Richard's lover Roberta (Nikki Shiels), a redhead whose histrionics are apparently explained by her Italian genes.

At the beginning of the play, Don and Kath are, once again, preparing tidbits for an election night party. Mal turns up early and asks Jenny along, to Don and Kath's dismay, as they haven't spoken for decades after a disagreement about Twisties. Meanwhile there is much rhubarb about Richard, who has left his wife for Another Woman. Richard's daughter Belle is displeased. Richard's wife makes a suicide attempt and ends up in hospital, and is promptly forgotten until the end of the play. Cooley turns up with an oxygen bottle and mask and his wife Helen, and lusts after the grand daughter until he has to put on his oxygen mask.

The actors watch 30 seconds of Kerry O'Brien and then mute the tv for some expository dialogue about the good old/bad old days. There are in-jokey references to Play No. 1. Richard turns up and makes the entire audience wonder how a whiny, hysterical boy-man could possibly be holding down a mega-buck job in advertising. There are revelations, a couple of heart-unwrenching confessions and some reheated scandal. Belle overhears it all and is displeased. Richard's lover turns up in high heels and low-cut dress and has conniptions. Belle is displeased again. And so on. And on.

Well, I practically went to sleep writing that. Williamson's great gift is that he is incapable of surprise. He is at once so popular and so reviled because he knows exactly how to meet the expectations of his audiences. It creates a dilemma for me, because I hate repeating myself; so forgive me for pointing to some earlier essays. In 2004, when Williamson announced his retirement, I wrote an essay on the Williamson phenomenon which basically sums up my responses to his work. You might also be interested in my review of Peter Evans's sparky production of Don's Party for the MTC in 2007, which incidentally features the same designers and the same set - for this production, Dale Ferguson's hyper-real evocation of a 1970s Lower Plenty house is updated to 2010.

In the 2004 piece, I discussed how troubling it is that state theatre companies, forced to make commercial decisions by their financial bottom lines, are so anxious to bruit Williamson as not only a best-selling playwright - which he undoubtedly is - but as a great playwright - which he emphatically is not. Harry Kippax did Australian theatre no favours at all when he compared Williamson to Chekhov. And this claim to artistic quality is my beef about Williamson, although the beef is smaller these days.

One of the things that seems clear in this round of the Williamson Game is that the theatrical conversation has shifted markedly. For instance, it seems (even more) ridiculous to claim that naturalism isn't allowed, when so many young companies are exploring it themselves. And I can't get too exercised about state companies making commercial decisions, given the paucity of their subsidies; although it could be I'm just tired of the argument. And really, who cares? Nobody said that people will be shot if they like going to Williamson plays. Some people merely objected when Williamson was promoted as the ne plus ultra of Australian theatre.

Recently, some defenders of the Williamson oeuvre have begun to say that Williamson is not a naturalistic playwright, a la Chekhov or Ibsen, but more a playwright of heightened social satire, a crafter of comedies of manners. This is in fact a much more accurate placing of his work, but it means that one has to assess him in the company of Sheridan or Feydeau or his contemporary Alan Ayckbourn, all masters of stage business. One of the things that has puzzled me for years about Williamson's reputation is that he is such an inept theatrical technician. Popular, as these other playwrights demonstrate, doesn't have to mean bad; but in the Dan Brown-Charles Dickens continuum, Williamson is definitely thumping the tan.

In Don Parties On, all his writerly clumsiness is writ large - the dire expository dialogue, the stereotypical characters, the almost neurotic repetitiveness, the constant machinations of getting people on and off stage. Much of the dialogue - the pronouncements on baby boomers, greenies, Australian politics and so on - in fact sounds as if it's been cribbed from some of Australia's more active political blogs. The people-moving is about as clunkily done as I've seen - characters are constantly announcing that now they must go into the garden to show each other photographs of their children, or to the bedroom to check on someone hysterical, or to the study to watch a DVD, so that two or three people can be left on stage to reminisce or reveal something shocking. Alternatively, you get rows of frozen actors standing on stage watching as two or three others do their dialogue.

Robyn Nevin's direction makes as decent a fist as is possible of this stylistic rubble - I left feeling that it could have been a lot worse. The actors fail to make the characters credible, but it's hard to blame them given that they are all written as walking cliches; although Sue Jones gives some feisty life to the character of Jenny. But for me, there was no escaping the creeping numbness as the evening wore on.

Naturalism this certainly isn't. Considered as a comedy of manners, it lacks the grace, wit and formal mastery that gives the form its champagne fizz. A direct comparison with Don's Party starkly demonstrates how stale Williamson has become: the lively colloquialism of the original, its chief virtue, has long leached out. This really is zombie theatre, devouring the brains, not only of its audience, but of its own playwright.

Yes, some people love it. The guy next to me, for instance, was having a super time: he kept up a running commentary and walked out happily humming the Credence Clearwater Revival song that is the subject of one of the running gags. As always with Williamson plays, it will continue to please those who like his work and annoy everybody else. He's still making the box office go ka-ching, and as long as people keep buying tickets, companies will keep programming his work. And there it is.

Picture: Don Parties On. Top row, l-r: Frankie J. Holden, Garry McDonald. Bottom row: Sue Jones, Diane Criag and Tracy Mann. Photo: Jeff Busby

Don Parties On, by David Williamson, directed by Robyn Nevin. Set by Dale Ferguson, lighting by Matt Scott, sound by Russell Goldsmith, costumes by Jennifer Irwin. With Diane Craig, Georgia Flood, Darren Gilshenan, Robert Grubb, Frankie J. Holden, Sue Jones, Garry McDonald, Tracy Mann and Nikki Shiels. Melbourne Theatre Company, Arts Centre Playhouse, until March 8.

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New York playwright Will Eno joins David Williamson and Michael Gow in Staged Lives: a conversation on theatre, writing and the line between life and fiction on March 9 at State Library of Queensland.

Jane O’Hara, Brisbane Writers Festival Director and host for the evening, says: "Audiences can engage in an open discussion with three very talented and different writers – Michael’s work is a well-crafted mix of the personal and the political, with touches of the fantastic and a ready wit, whereas Will Eno’s writing is considered subversive, challenging and evocative. Australians universally acknowledge the popular appeal of David’s writing and the incredible craft that goes into reflecting our politics, society and foibles on stage".

(Well, I don't know about the "universal" acknowledgment of "incredible craft", but hey. It's a press release.)

As a side note, Melburnians get to see Will Eno's Lady Grey, which premieres in Australia at the Lawler Studio, MTC Theatre, next week. And permit me to point out John Bailey's excellent interview with The Man here.

Staged Lives is free, but RSVPs to info@playlab.org.au are essential. At the State Library of Queensland Auditorium 2 on March 9.

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Scarlett O’Hara at the Crimson Parrot, by David Williamson, directed by Simon Phillips. Melbourne Theatre Company @ the Playhouse Theatre, Victorian Arts Centre, Melbourne, until July 12. Bookings: 1300 723 038.

Scarlett O’Hara at the Crimson Parrot is, as one of David Williamson’s characters might say, a dog.

It’s a dog with one theatrical idea, which is stretched very thin over two and a half hours. And it’s not quite a nice dog. It has the slightly resentful expression of a labrador that might pee on your shoes if you turn your back.

The play is the story of Scarlett O’Hara (Caroline O’Connor), an incompetent waitress in the sort of restaurant that gives Gordon Ramsay conniptions. In between pratfalls, she deals with her mother, a manipulative bully, and sighs with unrequited passion for her boss.

She fills the emptiness in her life with Hollywood movies. That’s the single theatrical idea: Scarlett drifts into Daydream No. 1 and the backstage screen fills with iconic images of a past era, Bogie and Bergman enacting grand passion for those who can merely watch and dream.

The restaurant is staffed by stereotypes – the dumb blonde (Marney McQueen), the testosterone-fuelled wog (Simon Wood), the frustrated chef-artist (Andrew McFarlane), the aging queer (Bob Hornery). Even Scarlett’s mother Maureen (Monica Maughan) is a cliché, drawn from classic tv shows like Steptoe & Son and Mother and Son.

As I sat stonily under a little private cloud in Row F, the audience around me rocked with laughter. What’s the point of cavilling against that? It inevitably seems mean-minded: as the program suggests, it means that you can’t see Williamson in the “right perspective”, and believe that popularity equals lack of seriousness.

But hey, I’m all for the popular. I adored the ingenious theatricality of the MTC’s production of The 39 Steps, which also riffed off classic Hollywood movies. I’m happy to be counted as a member of the Caroline O’Connor fan club. So why not let the laughter ripple on?

Travelling home with my cloud, I pondered why this work doesn’t merely leave me indifferent, but depressed. It’s to do with Williamson’s startling ability to think solely in media-generated stereotypes, and the complacent laughter this elicits from an audience.

In his essay Politics and Language, George Orwell speaks of a decadent English, in which “phrases [are] tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse”. “Language,” Orwell warns, “can corrupt thought….Every such phrase anaesthetises a portion of one’s brain.”

Williamson’s entire dramatic craft is prefab: at no point do we see through cliché to real feeling. This makes it insidiously comfortable to laugh at wogs, or footballers raping stupid blondes, or lonely old women.

And that’s depressing.

This review was (I think) in Friday's Australian. I am posting from London, so I can't check, as it's not online. There's no doubt alot more to say about politics and language, and I realise I have scarcely mentioned the production itself - 400 words doesn't leave much room - but Ms TN, ever ready with handy excuses, pleads jetlag. I invite you all to talk among yourselves...

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In 2004, our most popular commercial playwright David Williamson decided to go into semi-retirement. His decision was on doctor's order's - as the Age reports today, "The pressure of coming up with one, sometimes two, plays a year had taken a toll, as had some of the vitriolic views of critics". (Hey, he should try being me for a few years). Anyway, he's back, writing a vehicle play for the rightly esteemed diva Carolyn O'Connor, which will premiere in the MTC's next season. You can hear the financial excitement crackle through the land.

Despite the awful strain of it all, there are compensations for being Williamson - his last play took $1 million at the box office. And without the annual Williamson play to bump up the coffers, the State companies went into mourning. This is about the economics of survival. As I said in 2004, on the occasion of Williamson's retirement:

The fact that our major theatres are funded so poorly explains why Williamson is a fixture on our subsidised stages. The MTC receives only 15 per cent of its funding from government sources, which leaves 85 per cent of its budget to be raised by box office and sponsorship. In 1996, the most recent figures I could find, the comparable flagship companies in France, the National Theatres, received 73 per cent of their funding from the State, 21 per cent through the box office and the remaining six per cent from other sales.

I'm unsure of the present levels of MTC funding, but they might be even less. Certainly, the STC's government funding amounts to 7 per cent. At this rate, our two largest theatre companies can barely be said to be subsidised. And while our flagship companies are so scandalously funded, it is unsurprising they should fall on Williamson's neck with cries of joy.

Nor, perhaps, is it surprising that the anxiety of underfunding should foster a fortress mentality that makes the State companies reluctant to enter the critical discourse on wider questions about theatre in Australia (such as Lee Lewis's paper on Cross-Racial Casting). But it's lamentable, all the same. And in the end, you have to feel a little sorry for Williamson, who seems to be carrying our State companies on his back. It's not his job, after all.

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Don's Party by David Williamson, directed by Peter Evans. Design by Dale Ferguson, lighting design by Matt Scott, composition and sound design Basil Hogios. With Glenn Hazeldine, Anita Hegh, Colin Lane, Steve Le Marquand, Mandy McElhinney, Travis McMahon, Rhys Muldoon, Christopher Pitman, Felicity Price, Jacinta Stapleton and Alison Whyte. Melbourne Theatre Company @ the Arts Centre Playhouse until February 10.

The organ known as my heart was, I confess, a little heavier than usual as I donned the gladrags for the opening night of Don's Party. This play helped to turn David Williamson into the minesweeper of Australian theatre, imploding critical objections with an unerring radar for the popular nerve centre of middle Australia. He must be great, the theatre managers (and some shameless critics) would say: just look at that box office!


As if that's not enough to hold against Don's Party, I'd already suffered through it. My review of that production, a revival directed by Graeme Blundell, led some columnist to call me (I recall approximately) a joyless feminist twat with a humour bypass. Though, true, I was singularly joyless as I watched that piece of anthropological ham: I like my theatre live, thank you, like those Japanese gourmets who demand their dinner swimming on their plates.

Breathless reader, let me relieve your suspense (I know you are anxious for me): I didn't stagger out of Don's Party lobotomised by boredom and irritation, which is my usual Williamson experience. Peter Evans' production pricked some life into the play, and even suggested how bracing it might have been on its first outing in 1971: people talking on stage as they actually talk at parties! Banal marriages at various stages of disintegration! Sex! Lewdness! Profanity! Suburban middle class tragedy! This was Us! Finally! And we're funny!

(There's something to be said for this: maybe as much now as in the 1970s, since we have witlessly become an American cultural colony as opposed to a British one, and even have our own version of Vietnam. It's a little depressing that there's a refreshing cognitive frisson in hearing someone affectionately called "cunt features" in Australian on stage.)

In my fairer moments I admit that, once upon a time, David Williamson was known to write real plays. I have a modicum of respect for his early work, which, while it never reached the heights of his English contemporaries - I'm thinking of writers like Trevor Griffiths, Howard Brenton or Arnold Wesker - had a rude liveliness and dramatic sensibility that for a time promised something rather more than the boulevard theatre that Williamson ground out, year after year, until he retired a couple of years ago.

So, it's not Chekhov. I don't expect anybody except Chekhov to be Chekhov, and I certainly wouldn't bring this up if David Williamson himself hadn't claimed that he is Anton's reincarnation, backed up in this delusion by a raft of directors who appear to think that all that Chekhov did was to invent a few bourgeois characters and stick them in a loungeroom to chat morosely around the samovar. Let me be stern with the ghost of HG Kippax, who is perhaps responsible for this particular myth: if David Williamson is doing anything remotely like Chekhov, then I'm Mikhail Baryshnikov. Since I have three left feet and at ten years of age was my ballet teacher's private Gehenna, that should be enough to be going on with.

No, in Don's Party, Williamson is making a vernacular Australian version of the English drawing room comedy, the kind of thing exemplified by Noel Coward. Oddly, Coward died shortly after this play premiered, although I don't think there's a connection. Tarted up with an edge of drunken melancholy (hence, I suppose, the Chekhovian allusions), the play moves from order to chaos, and everyone's dirty financial secrets/underwear/strange sexual habits are exposed in the course of the play.

Instead of a fantasy of the English upper classes, we have the educated bourgeoisie, facing the first failures of middle age: Don himself (Steve Le Marquand), the novelist who has settled for being a school teacher, his wife Kath (Mandy McElhinney), popping anti-depressants, his best mate Mal and an unlikely assortment of friends, ranging from the elegant artist Kerry (Anita Hegh) married to a jealous dentist Evan (Colin Lane) to the Liberal-voting accountant Simon (Glenn Hazeldine) and his flirty blond wife Jodi (Felicity Price).

The occasion is the the 1969 Federal Election, which saw the Australian Labor Party vote bitterly split by the DLP. Don and his friends have gathered to allegedly watch the vote count on television, but really to drink, pose, abuse each other, thrash out petty resentments and try to get each other into bed. The men flock around the blonde right wing bimbo, the women cluster in the loungeroom and talk about their children and their unsatisfactory sex lives.

It's funny, but it's not that funny, and it's sad, but hardly tragic in the Chekhovian sense; it's full of those famous one-liners and the farcical bedroom comedy is enough to keep you going, mostly. My boredom meter started creeping into the orange zone in the second half, during all those maudlin confessions. But I've had worse nights.

Peter Evans has assembled a good cast, a meld of actors and comedians, and they inject this (it must be said, rather jejune) comedy of manners with a bit of vim. It's directed sharp and fast on a naturalistic set that's designed to chime with nostalgic chic: the smart suburban brick veneer, the paper lanterns, the vinyls on the turntable, the home-made pizzas (which seem to be actually cooked during the course of the play). The soundscape in punctuated by MOR 60s hits: the Rolling Stones, the Beatles. The wankers talk about French film auteurs, the lefties about marginal seats and mortgages. It's the play as social document par excellence, but the actors generate an admirable energy that makes the evening pass relatively painlessly.

One virtue of this production is that the women's roles are foregrounded. It's not as misogynist as it can seem (it might be truer to say it is merely misanthropic), although, no matter how you cut it, the hero is Cooley (Rhys Muldoon). The women adore him and the men want to be him. He's the ultimate portrayal of the Australian intellectual larrikin, the flawed but loveable hero-in-his-own-trousers, who lends any gathering a refreshing frankness and honesty: life is about shaving, shitting and fucking, and anyone who claims otherwise is a wanker. Although - like many of us, I expect - I've been cornered by his ilk at parties, and in such situations it's hard to see anything but a boor comfortably insulated from the smallest twinkle of self-knowledge.

Perhaps the least likeable character is the pretentious artist (played with a strange, hypnotic acccuracy by Anita Hegh) who says things like "I'm just getting into texture" and humiliates her browbeaten husband when he discovers her in bed with Cooley. Don's Party exposes the pretensions of all ambition, the inevitable compromises that life imposes on the lofty hopes of youth. Don's novel never gets written, Mal's political ambitions devolve into armchair expert and the only person who practises what she preaches turns out to be a hollow vessel indeed.

This play certainly satirises the follies of the middle classes, but the real question is: at what point does it begin to celebrate them? There is a difference between exposing pretensions and claiming that pretensions are all there are. To bring in old Anton again: although Chekhov explores human folly with the cool precision of a surgeon, he does so in order to discover the ways in which people attempt to make meaning in lives which threaten to crush human resilience altogether. Williamson's vision is never so large: he has been so popular because he uncritically reflects the way Australians like to see themselves. The virtue, in the end, is in the compromise, the via media. Art, ideals, principles: who needs them? They were only ever a wank, anyway.

Williamson showed us people like us. Or our parents (or grandparents) anyway. And the box office went ka-ching! Which is why Williamson gets the credit for bringing Australians on to the colonised stage, when in fact he wrote in a context of fine but largely forgotten dramatists like Peter Kenna, Patrick White or Richard Beynon. Well, I can't grudge him his royalties: I only grudge him the title of "Australia's Greatest Playwright", which is frankly embarrassing. Nothing that a glass of champagne doesn't allay, of course. It was that kind of night.

Picture: Rhys Muldoon and Travis McMahon in Don's Party. Photo: Jeff Busby

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Translations by Brian Friel, directed by David Mealor. Design by Kerry Reid, lighting design Geoff Cobham. With William Allert, Michaela Cantwell, Elena Carapetis, Lizzy Falkland, Patrick Frost, John Kelly, Andrew Martin, Dominic Pedlar, Stephen Sheehan, Geoff Revell and Rory Walker. Flying Penguin Productions @ the Malthouse, until December 10.



Wandering through Irish galleries earlier this year, I was struck by the the similarities between Irish and Australian art around the turn of the last century. Ireland has, for example, its equivalents to post-Impressionist artists like Tom Roberts. If you felt like it, you could group most of this work neatly under the heading "Colonial Art".

But there are vast differences as well: we certainly don't have a visionary genius of the status of Jack B. Yeats painting in the early 20th century. And one genre of visual art that Australia almost completely lacks is that of the heroic revolutionary: the closest we got to anything like revolution was the little massacre of incipient capitalists at the Eureka Stockade in 1854.

Irish art is, by its very definition, political. Much of its seminal modern literature - Synge and Yeats, for example - is deeply veined with the issue of Irish nationalism. The inability to escape the "Irish question" may in part explain the fact that two of its most famous sons, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, were, equally famously, expatriates.

That same question is also, after all, responsible for a lot of sentimental kitsch, from the shamrock-laden souvenir shops in Dublin to Irish Australia's romance with the "old country" to the sodden cliches about alcoholic Irishmen with the hearts of poets. One can understand any writer's ambivalence towards his or her culture, but in Ireland's case it is particularly vexed. The issue of British occupation still runs deep and bitter, and much Irish art, overtly or covertly, constellates with varying degrees of suspicion around the questions of Irish nationalism, identity and rebellion.

In the late 20th century, many writers were influenced by the post-colonial critique pioneered by thinkers like Edward Said. They were, among other things, questioning the 19th century verities about Irish nationalism, when the continuing violence of the British occupation of Northern Ireland threw these issues into sharp relief. Among these artists was Brian Friel, who with the actor Stephen Rea founded the influential Field Day Theatre Company in Derry, Northern Ireland, in 1980.

Field Day attracted a number of Irish artists (among others were the novelist Seamus Deane and the poets Seamus Heaney and Tom Paulin). Field Day has also published widely - its releases include anthologies of Irish writing and a series of pamphlets by intellectuals such as Deane himself, Edward Said and Terry Eagleton - that place its theatre work firmly in the context of post-colonial thought.

The first play this company produced was the work widely considered to be Friel's masterpiece, Translations. Perhaps more directly than any of his plays, Translations illustrates this perceptive comment of Seamus Deane's:

Friel is unique ...in his recognition that Irish temperament and Irish talk has a deep relationship to Irish desolation and the sense of failure. It is not surprising that his drama evolves, with increasing sureness, towards an analysis of the behaviour of language itself and, particularly, by the ways in which that behaviour, so ostensibly within the power of the individual, is fundamentally dictated by historical circumstances. His art, therefore, remains political to the degree that it becomes an art ensnared by, fascinated by, its own linguistic medium. This is not obliquely political theatre. This is profoundly political, precisely because it is so totally committed to the major theatrical medium of words.

This broadens Friel's concerns far beyond specifically Irish concerns. As its title suggests, Translations is a play about language: in particular, about the power of naming. It is set in 1833, when the British Army Engineer Corps conducted a major ordnance survey of Ireland, mapping and renaming the entire country. The act of colonisation is always also an act of language, as the governmental spin on in the invasion of Iraq shows all too clearly: and description is, as Said has argued, one of the first acts of colonisation. In Translations, Friel explores some of its ramifications, one of which was the death of the Irish language as a living tongue.

Perhaps what is most admirable about this play is how Friel has explored a subject that is, in his own country, of white-hot emotive power while evading easy vulgarisation or sentimentality. This compelling drama drives its exploration into the heart of language itself, as a living entity that both makes realities and is made by them. Friel refuses to present a simplistic view of the brutal British stamping down the rebellious Irish: rather, he gives a nuanced reading of the tangled relationships between language, power and identity.

And, although Friel is very clear-sighted about the realpolitick that attends cultural engineering, this play is by no means a simplistic nostalgic lament for the death of Gaelic. "Yes, [Irish] is a rich language, Lieutenant," Hugh remarks to Yolland, "full of the mythologies of fantasy and hope and self-deception - a syntax opulent with tomorrows. ...But remember that words are signals, counters. They are not immortal. It can happen... that a civilisation can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of fact."

Set in a Hedge School in an Irish-speaking community in County Donegal, Translations covers the events of a few days in the life of a tiny community. The school is run by Hugh (Andrew Martin) and his son Manus (Rory Walker) and their adult pupils vary from the wild-haired Maire (Elena Carapetis), who demands to be taught English since Latin and Greek are no use to her, to Jimmy (Patrick Frost) who can quote reams of Ovid and Homer and to whom the Greek Gods are as real as any of his fellow villagers.

The drama begins as Manus' brother Owen (William Allert), who has left the village and found a well-paid job working for the British as a translator, returns home with two British officers, Yolland (Stephen Sheehan) and Lancey (Geoff Revell). Yolland, a shy romantic and a bad fit in the colonial system, finds himself falling in love with the countryside and the music of a language that he doesn't understand and, in particular, with Maire. Lancey, on the other hand, is there to do his job as efficiently as he can: to rename the land in the King's English.

The central scene in this play is a moving and funny dialogue between Yolland and Maire. Friel uses the conceit of replacing Irish for English, so while all the dialogue is transparent to us, it is not to all his characters: he exploits the comic possibilities of miscommunication and misunderstanding with a dab hand.

When Yolland and Maire slip out from a dance and attempt to express their mutual desire while barely having a word in common, Friel explores delicate human realities that language can, in fact, distort or conceal. These realities, he suggests, have very little to do with words. The tentative beginnings of mutual understanding expressed in this scene lead to tragic and brutal consequences, a fair metaphor for the bloody political dilemma of Ireland itself.

Flying Penguin have mounted a beautiful production of this play. Kerry Reid's design sets the tone: it is a naturalistic representation of the byre in which the scenes are set, aside from the Irish writing that covers every wall. David Mealor heightens the artifice by introducing John Kelly as a narrator, who reads Friel's stage directions at the beginning of the play, and by making the actors direct most of their speeches out to the audience; but otherwise he lovingly details it as the naturalistic drama it is. He has drawn excellent performances from his diverse cast, who work as tightly as an ensemble, though perhaps it isn't unfair to pick out Andrew Martin's magisterial performance of Hugh as a highlight.

Watching Translations, I couldn't help reflecting on what has happened to the naturalistic play in Australia. It hasn't been treated well: a while back, theatrical naturalism was colonised by television and voila! this fine form became synonymous with playwrights like David Williamson and Hannie Rayson, the apogee of dead bourgeois theatre. Yet it isn't as if it has always been a moribund form here - Peter Kenna and Richard Beynon wrote some fine naturalistic plays.

Still, its present zombiedom is a disappointing cul de sac for a theatrical form birthed by playwrights like Henrik Ibsen and Anton Chekhov. There are profound pleasures to be had from seeing a superbly-written play done well. In its execution and intellectual context, Translations is an exemplary reminder that the naturalistic three-act play isn't necessarily a synonym for conservative, aesthetically bankrupt theatre.

Picture: Elena Carapetis (Maire) and Rory Walker (Yolland) in Translations. Photo: Shane Reid

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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.

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The Female of the Species by Joanna Murray-Smith, directed by Patrick Nolan. Designed by Dale Ferguson, lighting by Matt Scott, composer David Chesworth. With Michael Carman, Roz Hammond, Peter Houghton, Sue Ingleton, Bert Labonte and Bojana Novakovic. Melbourne Theatre Company @ the Victorian Arts Centre Playhouse, until September 30

In the mutual loathing stakes, Joanna Murray-Smith and I, who are exact contemporaries, go back a long way. For around 15 years, she has considered me a bitch and I have thought her a dill. I hated her plays, she hated my criticism. She called herself post-feminist and berated feminism for her problems: I called myself a feminist and thought her a privileged whinger. Even our hair colour expresses our disagreements: she's blonde, I'm brunette.

Once, at the old Playbox Theatre, we sat directly opposite each other at lunch and snubbed each other as only women can. Face to face for more than an hour, we spoke not one word to each other. Not even a gritted greeting.

So I suppose all my friends will be rushing over to take my temperature. This week I went to see Murray-Smith's most recent play, The Female of the Species, and didn't come out breathing fire or wanting to kill. Did my brush with death last week make me a wiser, kinder person? Or have all these drugs numbed my aesthetic perceptions?

Sadly for the moralists, I don't think that suffering has made me more generous. Nor, despite a certain giddy feeling, do I think that the drugs have much to do with it. My theory is that Murray-Smith has put away self-pity for the cruel pleasures of revenge, and in the process has discovered that she's really a comedian.

The Female of the Species is, supposedly, Murray-Smith's take on the legacy of Germaine Greer. As an intellectual argument, don't even think about it. Murray-Smith's feisty, foul-mouthed, charmingly arrogant celebrity feminist Margot Mason may, thanks to a champagne performance by Sue Ingleton, look and sound uncannily like Greer, but there is in fact no resemblance between the intellectual fiction and the fact. The plot too, such as it is, borrows from a real event - the invasion of Greer's Essex home by a disturbed student - but departs from it almost at once.

Margot Mason is working on a deadline for her latest book when a young woman, Molly Rivers (Bojana Novakovic) turns up with a gun and handcuffs Mason to her desk. Molly wants to shoot Mason, because she blames her for warping her mother's mind and ruining her life with her hit book The Cerebral Vagina. First, following Mason's advice, Molly's mother gave her away as a baby so she wouldn't be enslaved by motherhood. Then she jumped under a train clutching The Cerebral Vagina to her breast. Finally, in order to preserve her creativity Molly has sterilised herself so she can't have children, only to be told by Mason that she has no talent at all.

Then Margot's daughter Tess (Roz Hammond), who has embraced the full-time mother and housewife gig and, according to her mother, thrown away everything that was interesting about herself, stumbles through the French windows in her muddied pyjamas. She has blown a fuse after spending all night building a model cinema in balsa wood for a school project. When she sees Molly Rivers waving a gun around, she is in full agreement; her mother ought to be shot.

What follows is an increasingly improbable collection of people having increasingly absurd arguments, with all the classic farcical shifts of power and various revelations, including a nod to the identity questions in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. Finally there are six characters on stage - the three women, plus Tess' emasculated SNAG husband Bryan (played with dazed charm by Peter Houghton), the virile ethnic taxi driver Frank Pecorini (Bert Labonte) and Margot Mason's over-the-top gay publisher, Theo (Michael Carman).

The Female of the Species is Murray-Smith's first full-length comic play, and is written in that most unforgiving form, the farce. A farce is a kind of glittering theatrical machine with a murderous clockwork logic that must be wound up tightly in the first scene. The rest of the play simply plays out the theatrical kinetics. In the best farces - Michael Frayn's Noises Off, Joe Orton's What the Butler Saw or The Importance of Being Earnest - the machinery is unobstrusive, exerting its necessity with a kind of deus ex machina inevitability.

Murray-Smith is not quite this skilled, and you can see some of the joins. The energy of the play begins to run down perhaps about two thirds of the way through, and the monologues that turn up around then are not a substitute for action. Every now and then Murray-Smith also falls into the temptation of making what sounds suspiciously like a serious statement ("Sexism these days is subverted by irony"; "men aren't our problem; old feminists are"). I wish she wouldn't. When she leaves her characters unencumbered by credibility or meaning, permitting them to be recognisably sharp caricatures, the satire can be deadly: but the slightest sense of earnestness or moralising dulls its edge.

This is a fine production, with an elegantly practical design by Dale Ferguson which effectively updates the classic farce design from the English Edwardian stage: exits to right and left and (of course) French windows. I particularly liked Matt Scott's subtle lighting, which luminously and unobstrusively shifted the stage time from morning to night. And, of course, a large part of the charm of the evening is the cast, who under Patrick Nolan's assured direction seem to be having a ball. All of them have good lines, and they play their absurdities with the requisite self-blindness, the essential innocence, that farce profoundly requires.

People have already said that the laughter in the theatre, which must be music to the MTC finance officer's ears, reminds them of the heyday of David Williamson. I think that Murray-Smith is much funnier than Williamson. Her writing is more fluently intelligent, and she handles dramatic form with a sharper imagination.

And yes, it doesn't do to look too closely at the ideas in this play: despite the putative subject matter, it is not actually about feminism, but about that old comic standby, motherhood. Like a lot of satire, The Female of the Species has a blackly conservative subtext; don't expect any Ortonesque subversion here. The laughter is about recognition and affirmation, and gets no more dangerous than that. Yet. One feels that Murray-Smith's pen could get a lot more wicked, if she let it. I can't help feeling a lively curiosity about what she might do next, if she continues to open this vein.

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Today, for a couple of reasons, I was going through some old work, and I found this essay. I don't think it has ever been published, and some of you might find it interesting. Among other things, it outlines how my brilliant career at the Bulletin went bung, and gives a snapshot of how I saw things in 1997. And it also articulates many of the reasons why I started this blog. Those who regularly read Theatre Notes will know that I feel rather more hopeful about Melbourne theatre now than I did then, and of course my views have evolved considerably. But of course there is the other argument, that the more things change, the more they remain the same...

Little Alison and her battle against the eunuchs

VLADIMIR: Moron!
ESTRAGON: Vermin!
VLADIMIR: Abortion!
ESTRAGON: Morpion!
VLADIMIR: Sewer rat!
ESTRAGON: Curate!
VLADIMIR: Cretin!
ESTRAGON: (with finality). Crritic!
VLADIMIR: Oh!
He wilts, vanquished, and turns away.

EVERYONE loves to hate critics. All too often, they make it easy. No matter how much you believe in the importance of public debate, no matter how passionately you argue that a vigorous, informed critical culture is essential to the health of a democratic society, some pompous ignoramus will prove to the world in the Saturday supplements that critics are on the bottom rung of intelligent life forms. Nevertheless, one must fight the good fight. This is the story of part of my personal battle, the three years I spent as a theatre critic for the Bulletin and the absurd results of my high-minded crusade to get cultural debate happening in Australian theatre. It is all, like all comedies, tragically illuminating.

In considering the contemporary disappearance of the moral authority of the critic, Hans Magnus Enzensberger comments:

... it seems that the appearance of the critic is related to the rise of bourgeois society, as if he had dominated this society for just as long as this society held on to the idea that the public discussion of cultural norms is something essential: that is, crudely put, from Boileau to Sartre, from Samuel Johnson to Edmund Wilson, from Lessing to Benjamin, from Belinsky to Shlovsky. What characterises these fabulous intellectual beasts? Legend has it, and it is confirmed by reading the works they left behind, that they were writers who wrote about the books of other writers. Further, these critics are said to have been independent people, who owed their significance solely to their work, not to an institution or an industry, at whose service they had placed themselves. Apparently the essay was their preferred form, the journal their favoured medium. They are said to have known what they wanted - obstinate, uncomfortable spirits, looking to long-term results instead of quick turnover.

Enzensberger concludes the days of the critic are over, that what remains are the mouthpieces of an industrial machine. I think he is correct, but at least he has the privilege of speaking out of European culture. Australians might well yearn for such a dilemma. Here, in a culture scarred by colonial insularity, there has never been the cultural curiosity that permitted serious public discussion of literature or art or anything else. Now that snappy advertising allows us to delude ourselves that we are a serious culture, we can catch up breathlessly with the ruins of Europe - a culture polluted by fashion, public relations and the imperatives of the culture industry.

Unlike Germany, we do not have several centuries of brilliant public thinking to shore up at least the idea of critical thought. In a country that has an insecure sense of its place in the world, the merest whiff of criticism is enough to send the so-called aesthetes screaming towards the courts of special pleading. No one thinks of donning their armour for a pyrotechnic bout of intellectual fencing for the delight and illumination of anyone who cares to watch. At best we get a bit of mud slinging, with all its attendant crudity and mess. At worst, we have the edifying anthropological spectacle of tribal groups of cultural heavies licking each other’s bottoms.

It is no accident that some of our most famous exports - Robert Hughes, Germaine Greer and Clive James - are all critics. Nor that they all appear to be singularly isolated talents. One can only speculate what might have happened had they chosen to remain here. The grim guess is, not much. The impregnable fog of stupidity would have stifled them in the end. But this can only be fantastic speculation. There was nothing to keep them here in the first place.

One of our fondest myths is that everything has changed since the dull daze of Menzies. My suspicion is that, despite a glittering cosmopolitan veneer, things are probably worse. At least then it was obvious how bad things were. Australia has proved to be a good breeding ground for brilliant, isolated talents - among them a disproportionate number of extraordinary poets - the only kind tough enough to survive the death by a thousand cuts that is the lot of the artist working in Australia. Nothing is as deadening as apathy. Nothing is as savage as pettiness called to question. Nothing is as unanswerable as wilful ignorance.

I came to theatre reviewing by accident. The first job I was offered as a freelance journalist after I resigned from the Melbourne Herald in 1985, was to write the theatre pages for TV Scene, an execrable tabloid that met its unlamented demise when Rupert Murdoch bought the Herald and Weekly Times. My job for the Bulletin came about because the publicity person for the Melbourne Theatre Company suggested my name to James Hall, then the Bulletin’s art editor, when his incumbent critic couldn’t cover a play. I have no doubt my name was suggested because it was expected that, out of gratitude for the chance to move up the career ladder, I would write glowing quotes for the PR blurbs.

However, I was naive enough to take the job seriously: the chance to write something of substance had come my way rarely as a journalist. The production was Hedda Gabler. I read the play closely, mugged up on Ibsen, went to see the show and was disappointed. I said so, and why, in my review. The publicity lady was grossly offended and the director didn’t speak to me for two years. Invitations to MTC opening nights mysteriously stopped arriving, although this made me perversely ensure I went along anyway. In my beginning, as Eliot was wont to say, was my end.

Two months later James Hall offered me the position of Melbourne reviewer for the Bulletin, a post I held for the next three years. I was, in most ways, a fairly typical reviewer. I had, at best, a sketchy and local knowledge of theatre: I knew only a little of its history, its theory and its techniques and almost nothing at all about contemporary theatre elsewhere. However, in other ways I was not typical.

One was a sound intuition that, in order to write well about theatre, I had to watch it. I wanted to abandon the privileged role of “critic” and participate in the theatre as a member of the audience. I never took notes; I found that if I did this I couldn’t watch the stage. I thought note-taking accounted for the fact that many reviews seemed to be about a completely different play to the one I had seen. I found that with concentration and practice my memory served me very well. I also, whenever possible, read the plays I reviewed, especially if they were new work.

I used the style of tabloid journalism in order to write seriously about art, for two reasons. One was to destabilise the privileged art-speak that dismissed an audience as stupid. I wanted to demonstrate to the people who read my reviews that the audience, also, has a vital place in the theatre, that it isn’t there merely to worship at the hallowed shrine of culture, which is often more accurately the hollow shrine of money and cultural status.

The other reason was pragmatic. Newspaper and magazine editors believe that reviews serve two purposes: to tell their readers where, when and how a production is on, and to act as a consumer guide. To talk about art is considered a wank, as art in itself is not considered interesting. I think art by itself is interesting and wanted to talk about it: and this technique was one way of subverting the formalities of a newspaper review and getting serious ideas in, as it were, under the door.

My ideas about art were informed by the belief that, as Trotsky said, true art is truly revolutionary. I don’t mean that art exists as a form of social engineering - it is ultimately too private an act for such grandiose designs, too complex for ideologies - but that true art can shatter the comfortable constructions we all build within our lives, privately and publicly, and force us to a radical reappraisal of ourselves and our world. “A book,” said Franz Kafka, “must be the axe to break the ice within.”

Theatre can offer such radical experiences. Australian theatre usually doesn’t, because theatre is by its nature a social act. One person cannot make theatre on her own and repressions, conscious and unconscious, operate at almost every level of its production and reception. A major repression is the fear of ridicule and dislike. Our theatrical institutions ensure that the work they produce is acceptable to its audience. This is not a problem confined to Australia; in every Western culture, theatre producers face the bogey of the subscription audience, which is too often the death of theatrical courage. Everything is carefully airbrushed to a nice beige, in order not to offend anyone, and younger artists, rebelling as they must against the prevailing order, produce a lot of radical - beige. It is worth remembering that Patrick White, one of our really great writers, became a monster, a popular cultural icon of artistic nastiness who fulfilled public expectations of his behaviour most obligingly. It is difficult not to suspect that a source of his corrosive anger was the need to assert within himself the validity of excellence in the face of the indiscriminate acceptance of mediocrity.

My own critical practice was largely shaped by my practice as a poet. My work had always been informed by astute and rigorous criticism from other people. I learnt early to distinguish between what I thought of as “useful” and “useless” criticism. Useful criticism was specific, attuned to the ambitions of the work, honest and carefully argued; useless criticism was characterised by generalised statements that responded to a nimbus of preconceptions surrounding the work rather than the work itself. Useful criticism stimulated me to heighten my own critical faculties: it raised questions that forced me to scrutinise my work and evaluate what I was doing there. Useless criticism, positive or negative, stimulated nothing. Perhaps the most important aspect of useful criticism is its implicit love of the art form it interrogates. Useless criticism is devoid of love; it is at best indifferent to art’s imperatives.

I wanted, first of all, to be a useful critic. I saw that theatre and criticism have a dialectical relationship and I wrote my reviews as part of the dialogue, or polylogue, of a continuum called theatre. I never believed they bore the imprimatur of irrefutable judgement: I wrote them to stimulate discussion, to raise questions, to disturb assumptions. I never saw any point in denying my subjectivity, because I thought subjectivity was an essential admission. I worked to make my subjectivity informed, to understand as much as I could of the techniques, histories and ideas that make theatre what it is. In this aim, I was influenced particularly by David Mamet’s passionate address to critics in Writing in Restaurants. I wanted to be a critic like that. I don’t believe I achieved my ambition. But it wasn’t for lack of trying.

The more I reviewed, the more clearly I understood the fraudulence of what often passes for art and arts commentary in our culture. Art in Australia is massively beauracratised and stupidly written about in our mass media: and these things conspire to ensure that art as a genuinely radical dynamic is all but invisible. All art, interesting or not, is blurred into a sludge called culture, an industry which mainly exists to employ mediators who ensure that the “products” are passively consumed. The essentially uncommodifiable quality of aesthetic is pushed off the agenda.

As a substitute we have celebrity, watered-down social issues and the odd trite controversy. The effect is the creation of an “official” culture, well-oiled by public relations, which keeps in place a number of cherished assumptions and careers by the simple expedient of appearing to be challenging, cutting edge, exciting and everything else a culture is supposed to be, without any of the substance. This hypocrisy is endemic in all of our arts and is reflected in the repression of dissenting voices.

While I was reviewing, I was the only critic I knew who regarded it as a full-time job. Most critics worked part-time, having other jobs in academia and journalism, because otherwise they would have been as poor as I was. The media is not interested in having good critics: a mediocre critic serves its purposes just as well and is far less trouble. And there’s no doubt I was troublesome. The Bulletin copped a law suit over one review and many angry letters from outraged recipients of my altruism. I was only 25 when I started, so my innocence is perhaps excusable: I was amazed that people became so angry with me, because I thought it was obvious that everything I said stemmed from my love of theatre, and didn’t they love theatre too?

The major row during my time with the Bulletin was with the Playbox theatre. Contrary to the wisdom of gossip, that harassment didn’t get me sacked. But perhaps it is only from this distance that I recognise with clarity how extensive, malicious and unremitting it was.

The facts are simple and petty. When, during the season of 1990, the Playbox Theatre’s first in its swish new Malthouse Theatre, I reviewed awful play after awful play, Carillo Gantner, who was then artistic director, decided that I was a blot on the landscape that had to be removed for the good of Australian culture. He started with a series of phone calls to the arts editor, Diana Simmonds, in which he suggested it may be a good idea to sack me. When that failed, he tried the Bulletin’s editor, James Hall. When that also failed, he started a smear campaign that attacked my credibility. It included a highly libellous letter to the Victorian Council for the Arts that asked for their help in getting me sacked for my alleged campaign against Playbox caused by my “psychotic” personality (there could be no other reason why I found the plays below par). Finally, he banned me from the theatre for “unprofessional conduct” after an unspecified “incident in the foyer”. James Hall rang me and asked what I had done: had I drunkenly abused the actor involved, or what?

The “incident” bears some examination. Then, as now, I had many friends who worked in the theatre. One day, an old friend, an actor then employed in a Playbox production, rang me and asked me out for a coffee because he was troubled. He told me that the day before, he had been called into Gantner’s office and cross-examined because he had been seen talking to me in the foyer at the Malthouse on the opening night of the play. Our conversation had been, briefly, about the play: I hadn’t liked it and had apologised to him, in advance, for the review.

It was after this that James Hall rang me about Gantner's complaint. Clearly, my speaking to my friend was the “incident”, given some considerable spin by the Playbox machine. I couldn’t ask the actor concerned to stand up for me in public: he would probably never have been able to work in Melbourne again. I had no recourse against this gross slander except to say it wasn’t true. Argument was reduced to the level of the pre-school sand pit - “Did so!” “Did not!” “Did so!” - in which the loudest always wins.

Gantner’s strategy transparently sidestepped the censorship at the root of his actions; he claimed that my banning from Playbox was nothing to do with what he called my “vitriolic” and “personally abusive” reviews. I wrote a letter passionately arguing against the censorship of debate, pointing out how damaging such censorship was to the arts and to the culture. (I have a thick file of the correspondence between the Bulletin, myself and Gantner which is probably most notable now for its absurd comedy.) I even attempted to explain that to criticise someone’s work was not the same as a personal attack. I was making a fundamental mistake: although even Gantner was forced to concede that my reviews were accurate, what was at stake was Playbox’s funding and stature, which he claimed I was directly threatening. The larger arguments of artistic quality, the only questions with which I was concerned, were pushed aside and remained unanswered. It began to dawn on me that some artistic organisations are interested in anything but art.

When it became obvious even to Gantner that he was making a fool of himself, the whole fracas sank into a silent pool of embarrassment. It was tacitly agreed that everyone should just get on with their jobs. By then I was exhausted and sick of the whole affair and its attendant notoriety. I wondered why I had worked so hard, for so little money, for such trivial results. If I had “played the game”, if I had refused to have any thoughts of my own and had simply followed the line of least resistance, no doubt I would still be attending opening nights and dozing my way through reviews. But why would I want to do that? Life’s too short.

Shortly afterwards, on the strength of the free publicity I had given the Bulletin, I wrote and asked for the retainer that I had been promised for two years. I had already decided that if I was to live in abject poverty, it would be more profitable to resign from journalism and concentrate on my real work, poetry. Unfortunately, at the Bulletin my old mate James Hall had been replaced as editor. (The media is a volatile profession). The new editor impolitely told me to go jump. So, impolitely, I did. I think it is no coincidence that I resigned at the same time that I finally felt I knew enough to do the job properly.

It was a most unedifying affair. It did teach me a lot about pettiness, dishonesty and why Australian theatre is peculiarly insulated from ideas.

There is one crucial aspect of theatre that doesn’t apply to most other arts: its temporality. A poem can be read five hundred years later, a film can be watched fifteen times. But if you’re not there at the theatre, you’ve missed it. This means that theatre criticism has another function: as a record. Our theatre history is seriously compromised by our theatre criticism.

I’ll cite one example: former Age critic Leonard Radic’s 1991 book The State of Play. Anyone looking for an informed and stimulating discussion of the past 25 years of Australian theatre will be disappointed. The book is a cliche-ridden, limp regurgitation of received wisdom, written with the false objectivity that masks an entrenched subjective smugness. What it tells you is what we all know: that David Williamson, John Romeril, Jack Hibberd et al started at the Pram Factory and La Mama and thus was Australian theatre born. Williamson scores a whole chapter to himself, and a cringing, crawling summation it is.

There is only the briefest mention, for instance, of the work that was occurring simultaneously in the early 70s and which helped to make that time so exciting: the productions of work by European playwrights like Arabal, Handke, and others, some of which was the first to be performed in English anywhere in the world, or the work by women such as Sue Ingleton. There is no critical intelligence exploring, except in the crudest nationalistic terms, the political agendas that were operating within the theatre. Radic, whose analysis of plays only approaches that of an intelligent high school student, is simply not up to it. The history of the Pram Factory in the early 70s has yet to be written. All the ferment, all the excitement, all the variousness, is pared down to the level of a press release: and now, for a student like me, it may as well not exist.

This uninteresting book wouldn’t matter if other useful critical commentaries were easily available: but they’re not. There is a scrappily researched history produced by Currency Press, but that is as useless. Nowhere do we have, for instance, books like Michael Billington’s One Night Stands or Kenneth Tynan’s collected reviews of British theatre, that can tell you what it was like to be there, why it mattered, why it was exciting.

Radic was the senior theatre reviewer in Melbourne for more than two decades. I have no doubt that in that time he caused immeasurable damage to Melbourne’s theatre culture, by sins of omission as well as commission. For 20 years he told audiences that theatre’s greatest aim was to be “warm hearted” and informed theatre practitioners that the only thing that counted was box office approbation. The theatre of ideas, of imagination, of spiritual and intellectual struggle, of beauty and tragedy, of vulgar comedy and robust protest, the theatre that bore Shakespeare and Aeschylus and Beckett, simply did not exist for him. And Melbourne theatre slowly went into a disenchanted sleep, from which no prince’s kiss has yet awakened it.

Amid the snores, I haven’t been able to rid myself of the desire to write about my responses to art. I do so when I am asked and sometimes when I’m not, for my own reasons. I do not expect any real debate to result from my work. The work, and the rewards, are purely private. I’m quite aware of how ridiculous a position it is since, unlike almost any other literary mode, criticism is primarily a public act. Theatre reviewing remains as dull and ill-informed as it ever was - perhaps a little duller, since no doubt other reviewers took note of what happened to me and took more care not to think. The theatre has, sadly, the critics it deserves: the critics have the theatre they deserve. Who is cheated? Theatre’s audience, and any artist attempting serious work. And most of all, theatre itself.

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It Just Stopped by Stephen Sewell, directed by Neil Armfield, designed by Stephen Curtis. With Marcus Graham, Catherine McClements, Rebecca Massey and John Woods. Company B Belvoir St and Malthouse Theatre, Merlyn @ Malthouse until April 23.

Stephen Sewell is an anomaly, the leftist firebrand we have to have. His work occupies a cultural place analogous to that of Edward Bond's in contemporary English theatre, with whom he has a few things in common. Sewell has written nothing of the brutal power of Bond's early play, Saved, which remains a landmark in British theatre, and unlike Bond, whose recent work is more commonly produced in France, Sewell's work does find big stages and audiences in his home country. But there are teasing similarities.



Bond and Sewell share a belief (however contingent) in reason, and see theatre as a venue for dialectic argument. Indeed, since around the early 1990s Bond's plays have been dominated by the idea that drama consists of two ideologically opposed characters arguing with each other on stage. This is, to my mind, a recipe for deadly theatre; if nothing is going on beyond an arguing of the abstract idea, if language is not what people do to one another, but merely what people say, no amount of committed acting is going to make up its lack of theatrical dynamic. And it makes for theatrical conservatism; neither Bond nor Sewell approach the aesthetic radicalism of playwrights like Howard Barker or Sarah Kane, or even the potent realism of Franz Xavier Kroetz. * [see note below] But even so, Sewell's work doesn't sit quite comfortably within mainstream culture.

Much Australian left wing theatre - for example, that of David Williamson, Hannie Rayson or Michael Gurr - makes the locus of political conflict the family, a tradition which goes beyond Hamlet to classical Greek theatre. Sewell has mined this vein more intensely than most others: all his political narratives are also stories of familial betrayal. And it has to be said that next to these other Australian playwrights, Sewell's work has an energy and ambition, an unruly anger, which must be admired. Sewell might overwrite to the point of catatonia (the "short" version of Myth, Propaganda and Disaster in Nazi Germany and Contemporary America runs to 142 pages), his style and thought might be an undisciplined mess that amounts sometimes to no more than a rant, but he never settles for the merely anodyne.

At their best, his plays seek to access a tragic revelation of self through the stripping away of ideological blinkers to some kind of emotional or existential bedrock. That they fail to attain this is I think largely a function of their dominant dialectical structure. This is centrally the problem in It Just Stopped, a pallid and perhaps ultimately decadent continuation of Sewell's political explorations in plays such as The Blind Giant is Dancing, Dreams in an Empty City, Hate, and most recently, Myth, Propaganda and Disaster in Nazi Germany and Contemporary America.

It Just Stopped is a bizarre and sometimes foolish play, leavened with sparks of genuine wit and featuring some classic Sewell rants. It opens almost like a David Williamson comedy of bourgeois life, featuring a well-off professional couple, Beth (Catherine McClements), a radio producer, and Franklin (Marcus Graham), a music critic for the New York Review of Books, who live in a funky high rise apartment with a feature wall made of jellybeans. Beth makes jokes about Franklin's small penis and lack of sexual prowess, and he counters with jibes about the hypocrisy of her working for a right wing shock jock despite her supposedly liberal beliefs. So far, so much situation comedy.

One morning they wake to find that there is no power, no telephone connections and then no water; they are trapped 47 floors up with no elevator, no communications and no idea what is happening in the wider world. Is it some kind of apocalyptic disaster? Things take a surreal turn with the arrival of cardboard box magnate Bill (John Wood), a billionaire art connoisseur (not like Richard Pratt) whose attitude to life, business and art is cheerfully amoral, and his wife Pearl (Rebecca Massey). They offer Franklin and Beth a "business proposition", that they become Bill and Pearl's slaves: a model of the relationship between capital and culture, in which art is reduced to entertaining the rich.

Act 1 features an intermittent argument about art and politics between Franklin and Bill. Franklin is defending the Arnoldian notion of art transcending the grubby world of politics. Bill, who is, for all his rapaciousness, the true appreciator of art in these scenes, thinks these claims are a charming waste of time; he echoes Beckett's argument that art is just something that "passes the time". Bill is living proof that culture is not a force for moral good; he leaves his idiot child tied to a bedpost, in an echo of cruelties in Endgame or Lucky's debasement in Waiting for Godot. There is something incredibly depressing about seeing Beckett transformed, at whatever metaphorical remove, into the figure of an amoral capitalist: it expresses a crude nihilism which Beckett himself never embraced. (One hears his plaintive cry: "But I do give a fuck!")

Act 2 is like one of those tedious nightmares which bore rather than frighten you, with realities shifting beyond absurdity to unconvincing bathos and melodrama or, perhaps, low-grade horror. It is actually difficult to work out what Sewell thinks he is doing here. According to the program notes, you are supposed to understand that middle class people just go on in the face of disaster, like Winnie in Happy Days, pretending that nothing is wrong; Sewell has created a number of conflicting realities to mimic the neurotic denials of everyday middle class life. But to recall Beckett's aesthetic and philosophical rigor is to see more clearly how much the writing here fails itself.

Franklin is supposedly the model of an urbane American intellectual, the proto-fascist lurking inside his windy claims for the universality of art. He is emasculated (this is explicitly connected to his work as a critic) and juvenile, and supposedly represents the inner hypocrisy of contemporary Western (especially American) intellectual life. The problem is that you don't believe for a moment that a music critic for the New York Review of Books (however much one might want to argue with the aesthetic that journal expresses) would speak with such sophomoric naivety.

When, eventually, Franklin's worldview collapses into an impassioned cry to hear the suffering of the world beyond himself, the rhetoric is equally as empty, although I think you are meant to assume that it holds some truth value. But perhaps this emptiness is the point, given that the play ends with the old fantasy cliche of waking up to find it was "only a dream", that the entire evening's action was simply a psychic breakdown, a neurotic expression of middle class anger and guilt sparked (presumably) by the crash of Franklin's computer.

Which makes me wonder if, after all, this is a completely cynical play: its negation of itself lets the audience completely off the hook. Not that we got put on the hook in the first place. The last words of the play are "Tell me it's not real". Well, of course "it's" not real, even if the issues supposedly canvassed (global warming, incipient world war) are. Does It Just Stopped make us more aware of our denials and helplessness? It's hard to see how its comedy reaches much beyond the urbane satire of a play like Moira Buffini's Dinner. It never attains the bleak laughter that attends, say, Friedrich Durrenmatt's The Physicists, which in its portrayal of nuclear madness (the physicists are all lunatics locked in an asylum) accesses a true sense of absurd horror. It Just Stopped left me feeling, paradoxically, that all these issues are just, well, trivial.

The play is very slickly produced, with an impressively groovy multi-level set that thrusts diagonally into the audience. But Neil Armfield's direction is surprisingly banal, simply illustrating rather than realising the play. He sets the actors neurotically rushing up and down stairs or popping in and out from behind the feature wall; at one point, for no discernible reason, Beth takes all the objects out of her handbag and lays them all out in a row, and then, a little later, puts them all back. Gesture here seems almost like a physical version of Tourette's syndrome, a flurry of movement that fills up space but is otherwise meaningless. Likewise, the performances are sometimes so mannered that at times they are simply distracting. The whole seemed very much less than the sum of its parts, a lot of sound and fury and precious little significance.

But it's hard to see how the writing might permit the production to escape the trap of caricature. Sewell's work attempts to reveal the playwright as political thinker. A big problem is that thinking is not Sewell's metier; the arguments presented in his plays always seem bowdlerised, simplistic polarisations of more complex ideas. I suspect that his true power has always resided in the anarchic anger that erupts in the more poetic passages that pepper his plays. These are, in their cadences and apocalyptic vision, reminiscent of similar passages in the work of Peter Weiss; the difference in their effect lies in Weiss's much more radical approach to theatrical form.

Although Sewell situates his plays in contemporary political realities, he doesn't embrace the spurious authenticity of documentary theatre exemplified by writers like David Hare. There is enough of a poet in Sewell to insist on an imaginative dimension in theatre, even a sense of anarchy that seems often at odds with his concomitant belief in reason. One often feels, in a vague and unverifiable way, that Sewell's private psychological dramas are being staged for us as global conflicts. This may be no more than the necessary hubris of the writer; the problem is that it comes to us clotted and raw, a barely congealed mess of words. At its worst, it dissipates in the kind of nonsense seen in It Just Stopped, dressing up its intellectual pretensions with trinkets from Freud or a Marxism borrowed from John Berger, but stripped of Berger's sparely honest humanity.

A feeling of uninvolvement is underlined by Sewell's oddly utilitarian attitude towards the characters in his plays. Ultimately, they embody not themselves but opposing ideologies: the idealistic socialist Ramon versus the corrupted idealist Allen in The Blind Giant is Dancing; Talbot, the academic attempting to reveal truth, versus the corrupt careerist Max in Myth, Propaganda and Disaster; Franklin and Bill in It Just Stopped. Human relationships are presented as relationships of power, but this power is articulated rather than enacted by the characters. It creates a dissonance between language and act that seems analogous to the gap between Sewell's conservative aesthetic and his radical politics. Aristotle's subtle idea of the argument of the play being its plot is turned inside out: you get argument instead of a plot.

Perhaps as a result - because despite a lot of surface activity, nothing, dramatically speaking, is happening - the plays inevitably collapse into melodrama, having nowhere else to go. It's tempting to speculate that the irony that undercuts the melodrama in It Just Stopped expresses a kind of aesthetic despair, the recognition of an end point. For all his violent attempts to break out of it, Sewell has long seemed trapped in theatrical naturalism; ironically, given his often anti-US themes, it is a naturalism recognisable in many contemporary American models. It is as if his much exercised animus towards America expresses a frustrated fascination and love.

I should note here that Sewell's most recent play, Three Furies, is an anarchic cabaret based on the life of Francis Bacon; it could be (I haven't seen it) that this work represents Sewell's liberation, at last, from the model of didactic argument that has always crippled his poetic. If so, it might release the potentials so teasingly hidden in all his work.

* This is a careless observation on Bond's work, readdressed in the comments below.

Picture: Marcus Graham and Catherine McClements in It Just Stopped. Photo: Jeff Busby

Further reading:

Manifesto for a Progressive Theatre by Walter A. Davis
17 Ways of Looking at Theater by George Hunka

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So, David Williamson has announced he's retiring: it's time, he tells us, that he made way for new blood. And naturally, the tributes are dutifully rolling in. I have been reading so many nice words about David Williamson that I feel a bit misanthropic. It's not that I have any personal animus against the man; I wish him only the best in his new, stress-free life in Noosa. Neither do I believe that Williamson's plays shouldn't be done: he has an audience, and they have every right to see his plays. What gives me a pain in the cerebellum is the broad implication that Williamson is Australia's most important playwright, and if only those nasty critics would leave him alone, why, he might even be Chekhov.

Williamson is not, by a long shot, Australia's most important playwright. He isn't a patch, for example, on Patrick White, and he has never matched the craft of Peter Kenna's or Richard Beynon's plays, nor the imagination of Dorothy Hewett's. Every time I pick up one of his scripts, I am amazed afresh at how badly written it is. Since Travelling North, his last decent play, Williamson has churned out a series of formulaic duds: he picks a topic out of the newspaper headlines, and then fashions a drama around it which includes the usual set of vaguely glamorous middle class characters - journalists, footballers, socialites - who look at paintings and say things like "That's an Arthur Boyd, isn't it?", in between cracking an endless series of one-liners. Any subtext is usually worn on the outside, like Superman's underpants. When I watch stuff like this, I get a numb patch in the middle of my brain, about where the third eye is supposed to be. I think it's called boredom.

None of this would matter if people came clean and didn't try to pretend Williamson was writing great theatre. Williamson writes commercial plays, pure and simple, and his barometer of success is their popularity. This is not in itself a problem, or it wouldn't be if Australia had a healthy commercial theatre sector and a subsidised theatre which was funded sufficiently to pursue a truly artistic agenda. It is a problem when Williamson is placed in the same category as Chekhov and Shakespeare and when, to survive at all, our subsidised theatres are forced to program commercial plays.

Aubrey Mellor, artistic director of Playbox Theatre, compares Williamson to Chekhov; as indeed, Williamson does himself. Mellor says this is because Williamson has "a kind of humanism and genuine curiosity about people". I can walk down to the local supermarket and meet any number of humane, curious people, but this doesn't make them Anton Chekhov. Chekhov is a great playwright because (as reading his exquisite short stories confirms) he is, in the first place, a great writer: formally curious, subtle, perceptive, with a kind of lyrical wit which can blaze suddenly into moments of extraordinary passion. And crucially, behind all Chekhov's comedy is the consciousness of a tragedian.

David Williamson, on the other hand, is a journalist of the theatre, and his oeuvre is by no means tragic. He writes popular plays which aim to chronicle "relevant" issues and to present a middle class audience with reflections of themselves. When you compare Williamson's theatre to the equivalent writers elsewhere (the English playwright Alan Ayckbourne, for example, or Stephen Sondheim) the poverties of his writing become absolutely clear. Ayckbourne is a popular playwright with sufficient skill to sometimes write a genuinely interesting play. Williamson has never matched Ayckbourne's technical wit in, for example, the intricate structure of The Norman Conquests, nor the adventurous formality of A Woman in Mind, a dark theatrical exploration of mental illness. This is because, for at least the past decade, Williamson's theatrical world has taken its values almost wholly from the mass media: the factual issues-based universe of current affairs and the aesthetic of television naturalism.

This is one reason his plays are so popular: the conventions are as familiar to us as our own lounge rooms. Williamson's plays fulfil perfectly Peter Brook's famous definition of "the deadly theatre". They are examples of extremely conservative, even reactionary, theatre which challenges nothing; despite its claims to grapple with contemporary issues, its outcome is merely to confirm all the middle class values it represents.

The fact that our major theatres are funded so poorly explains why Williamson is a fixture on our subsidised stages. The MTC receives only 15 per cent of its funding from government sources, which leaves 85 per cent of its budget to be raised by box office and sponsorship. In 1996, the most recent figures I could find, the comparable flagship companies in France, the National Theatres, received 73 per cent of their funding from the State, 21 per cent through the box office and the remaining six per cent from other sales. (This doesn't count other indirect forms of funding, like the unemployment benefits for itinerant workers. The Chirac Government's decision to cut back these benefits, which take into account the seasonal nature of their work and is a major resource for French performing arts, has caused rolling strikes by arts workers across France over the past year, that among other things forced the cancellation of last year's Avignon Festival. Such activism is as impossible to imagine here as the existence of such funding in the first place.)

But even conservative governments in France acknowledge the central importance of culture, and French artists, true to their revolutionary tradition, are prepared to go to the barricades to defend it. In Australia, the very assumption that culture matters beyond its economic value has to be fought for, and for the past decade the arts have been losing badly. Hence the dilemmas faced by our major companies. Williamson brings in crowds, and the big theatres need hits; they can't afford to operate without them. Williamson is a commodity, and he has been - in Australia, if not elsewhere - an extremely successful commodity. But what is important about art is precisely what can't be commodified, and under the dominance of the Williamson aesthetic it has become much harder to argue for that non-commodifiable, indefinable, essential factor.

Because the big state companies which mount Williamson's plays are subsidised, they have to maintain the fiction that somehow his works contribute to Australia's cultural richness. My view is that for many years his work has done precisely the reverse, that Wiliamson has contributed to the creation of an orthodoxy of Australian theatre which is stiflingly narrow, to conventions which owe more to television naturalism than any theatrical tradition or innovation, to an ersatz convention of social critique which in fact challenges nothing. The terms in which theatre is discussed are those which fit Williamson's aesthetic; the diverse, unruly universe of theatrical form is divided neatly into two - "naturalism" and "non-naturalism" - and plays are judged by their "relevance" and "topicality". Words like "beauty" or "imagination" are off the agenda. You get the idea that they might even be considered embarrassing.

Once upon a time, Williamson's plays would have been, rightly, the province of commercial stages. When our subsidised theatres began to produce commercial plays that were previously put on by companies like Hocking and Woods, it signalled the beginning of a new era of conservatism in Australian theatre. For one thing, independent play producers could not compete with the funding of subsidised theatres, and disappeared: now commercial theatre is almost solely the province of musicals. And more crucially, the space for innovative theatre on our subsidised stages has grown more and more restricted. In New York, the ontological theatre of the bizarre Richard Foreman, or the Wooster Group, are so famous to be practically regarded as mainstream; in Paris, Ariane Mnouchkine and Peter Brook work on main stages; in English theatre, which has lost the lustre it possessed in the '60s and '70s, you can still point to Sarah Kane. The only Melbourne director with anything like that stature of innovation, Barrie Kosky, is now working in Vienna. When a mildly experimental play by a writer like Harold Pinter is dismissed by a major company as a "fringe play", as happened a few years ago, you know you're in trouble - if even Pinter's recent work hasn't a chance of being performed on a big stage with major resources, what chance is there for any of our young, innovative theatre artists?

To be fair, this is hardly Williamson's fault; his dominance is not a cause, but a symptom of a much deeper malaise in the Australian arts. A large part of this problem is simply financial. I am all for the arts having economic recognition (ie, artists being paid). I agree that arts companies ought to be fiscally savvy and that, if they are to be given public money, they need to be accountable. But while they are important, those pragmatic considerations, it seems to me, should serve the arts. Most often, it seems to work the other way around. The arts are considered to have utility value, as educational aids, as employers, as tourism promoters, as generators of economic exchange. But the idea of the value of the arts as an expression of human imagination and intellect, as a vital arena of human activity which challenges and questions received realities, seems to have disappeared almost entirely.

Part of the problem resides in the issues of what form public accountability ought to take, and what arts advocacy might be; and these are genuinely vexed questions. I can remember when people started talking about the "arts industry", back in the early '90s. I thought at the time it was a harbinger of doom. The argument used to lobby for arts funding was almost exclusively economic: the arts created employment, generated tourism, and so on. (There was, I think, a little discussion about social capital.) This focus seems to have modelled almost all subsequent advocacy for the arts. And what we have created is a monster, to which all the arts must now pay tribute: the arts industry is here to stay, and arts companies are expected to function like other economic entities, and to justify their existences by making a profit for their "stakeholders". As the former Arts Minister Richard Alston breezily said in connection with yet another review of cultural funding aimed at cutting it back yet again, "You've got to look at results." Alston makes clear that he means financial results. It is more than a tired truism that in these terms, much of the most significant art of the past three centuries - from Paradise Lost to Madame Butterfly to Ulysses - failed dismally on its first appearance. This is not to say that great art and commercial success are mutually exclusive; Shakespeare is a case in point. But more often than not, artistic triumph does not translate to instant commercial success; that's why we have arts funding in the first place.

Cutting arts funding is most often censorship by stealth; it was one of the policies, for example, of Ceaucesu's totalitarian regime in Romania. Ceaucesu whittled away the funding of the eminent Bulandra Company by 90 per cent, a more effective way of stifling its voice than even the extensive censorship to which it was subjected. Ceaucesu did not dare to ban Shakespeare, despite the fact that his plays were staged as expressions of revolutionary freedom, but he could easily deprive the company of the resources to stage him. The Howard Government's campaign against the arts is the same mechanism under less extreme circumstances and, as our rights are gradually cut back under the pressures of the "war on terror", these issues go to the heart of our democratic freedoms. It is worth remembering here that cultural rights are enshrined as basic human rights under Article 27 of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and that the UN notes the responsibility of the State to "respect the freedom indispensible for scientific and creative activity" and to promote "the conservation, the development and the diffusion of science and culture".

Given its devastating impact on these ideals, it is not surprising that the idea of the "arts industry" has been attacked recently by several eminent Australians, including Donald Horne. Horne says the "economisation of culture" is a fundamentalist creed. "It's not supported by public stonings or beheadings but its effect can be pretty ruthless," he said in a speech in 2002. "It's the kind of language that turns our society into 'the economy', our citizens into 'the consumers' and our public funds into 'taxpayers' money'." He described the phrase "the arts industry" and the adoption by arts advocates of the vogue-ish terminology of the markets as a Trojan horse. "How is it," he asks, "that people concerned with speaking up for 'the arts' and other cultural activities have been reduced to that kind of twaddle?"

Twaddle it is. But as long as theatres are forced into the kind of doublethink which requires them to talk up David Williamson as a major artist, as long as commercial values masquerade as tacit synonyms for artistic significance, there will be no change. What happens when "popular" is conflated with "good" is that you get the worst of both worlds: serious art loses its nerve before the exigencies of the "bottom line", and commercial art puffs itself up with pretensions to an artistic significance it does not possess. In this falsity, both lose their focus and vitality. Everyone is cheated - audiences, theatre companies and, perhaps most sadly, the artists themselves.

Links

Fund artists, not buildings - The Age
Funding in the spotlight - The Age

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