In the past few years, adaptations of classic plays have become more the norm than otherwise in Australian innovative theatre. Two directors in particular wrenched opened the Pandora's box. Barrie Kosky led the way from the 1990s with refigured classics, such as Lear or the baroque opera Poppea, while Benedict Andrews's explored an austere theatricality in shows such as The War of the Roses. And there's Simon Stone's adaptations, from Hayloft's visually luscious Chekhov Recut: Platonov to the controversial Malthouse/STC production Baal to his sensitive reworking of Ibsen's The Wild Duck.

All these directors demonstrate the far-reaching influence of European auteur theatre on Australian work. Kosky and Andrews work as much in Europe as they do in Australia (Kosky, now the director of Berlin's Komische Oper, seems to have vanished from the local scene almost completely). Then there's Daniel Schlusser, who has been working rather more under the radar and whose work has been leading him in a strikingly different direction. Over the past few years he's been conducting a fascinating exploration of theatricality, mainly in the institutional shelter of the VCA, that has produced some of the most exciting work that Melbourne has seen in the past few years.

I wouldn't say Schlusser adapts classics so much as blows them up: this work is much more than rewriting. Using a practice he calls "hyper-realism", he makes theatre out of classic texts that is not so much a textual exploration as a haunting, a demonstration of how these works live in our collective unconscious. With his collaborators, he creates an alternative theatrical reality that is at once located firmly in the present and the past. The first I saw of these works was A Dollhouse, an investigation of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House at the VCA. The Dollhouse at Fortyfive Downstairs is a revisiting of this production with a (mostly) new cast, and it demonstrates how polished Schlusser's practice has become.

Watching it, I was forcibly reminded of a show I saw in Britain back in 2008: Chris Goode's brilliant ...Sisters, a deconstruction of Chekhov's Three Sisters by way of John Cage. The reason is the profound focus in both directors on the theatrical present. No matter how we imaginatively enter the realities on stage, we are always reminded that this is a work of theatre, an artifice. This is a characteristic of most work in this vein, but Goode and Schlusser in their different ways explore further the implications of what this means for performance. Crucially, both have an unerring, even poetic, sense of theatrical rhythm that makes their investment in the minutiae of human experience deeply riveting.

As with ...Sisters, the audience enters to find the actors already on stage, in pre-performance mode, getting dressed, flirting, having barely audible conversations, fiddling with props. The play itself is introduced by Schlusser (who plays Krogstad) reading Ibsen's stage directions through a microphone, but its action evolves organically from the the idle conversations and games of the actors. The delicacy of this transition is hard to overstate: the actors remain the actors, while slipping almost subliminally into their assigned roles. These performances remain unstable, since the actors might at any point slip back to being "the actors" (roles which are, for all their apparent unstudiedness, as much a performance as the roles in the play).

Complex as this might be to describe, in performance it is very lucid. And we get Ibsen's play, although this time much more radically translated than in the 2007 show. What's followed is the action, not the text. Nora (a transcendentally good Nikki Shiels) is a sexy young thing addicted to shopping, living in the gilded cage provided by Torvald (Kade Greenland), who works for the Macquarie Bank. Nora's friend Kristine (Edwina Wren) is an unemployed economist from Tasmania, and is, aside from the faithful Dr Rank (played with poignancy by Josh Price), her only confidant.

She is as imprisoned in deceit as Ibsen's Nora, but Torvald's tyranny is more subtle, a question of invisible strings. It plays out in the sexual manipulations she uses to attract Torvald's and attention and favour, her willingness to be a sex toy, her terror that Torvald will discover that she has fraudulently borrowed money from Krogstad (Daniel Schlusser). When Nora's lies catch up with her and her world collapses, we get as powerful an image of abjection as I've seen on stage: Nora, stuffing her mouth with marshmallows so they spill out half chewed, her face smeared with tear-smudged make-up, clutching her groin like a little girl who wants to wee, but here with a horrifying sense of sexual injury.

The action plays across a narrow metallic set designed by Jeminah Reidy. It's a house of expensive toys - Torvald's Playstation, litterings of Lego and brightly wrapped Christmas presents - that summons the empty materialism of Torvald and Nora's marriage, the objects and rituals that replace actual relationship. Although Schlusser has kept the rewritten ending, as he did in the first production, he gives us a much tougher interpretation: the actions of these people are more ambiguous and lost, Nora's sexuality more scarred and frightened, the subtext beneath seemingly inconsequential interactions more desolate.

This feels like a work in which every moment has been thought through, creating theatre of admirable emotional and intellectual rigor. Mandatory for anyone interested in the possibilities of the contemporary stage. It's on until Sunday, as part of the Melbourne Fringe.

Picture: Nikki Shiels in The Dollhouse. Photo: Marg Horwell.

The Dollhouse, adapted from the play by Henrik Ibsen, directed by Daniel Schlusser. Set design by Jeminah Reidy, costumes by Tiffany Abbott, lighting by Kimberly Kwa, sound by Martin Kay. With Nikki Shiels, Kade Greenland, Edwina Wren, Josh Price, Daniel Schlusser and Cate Bastian/Gabrielle Abbott. Fortfive Downstairs until September 25.

Last week Ms TN took a few days off to lounge about in the fleshpots of Sydney. And lo, it was good, although the perilous aspect of taking a short holiday is that it makes you understand how much you need a longer one. But it was not all caviar and champagne, I'll have you know. I had a good theatrical reason to be there: viz, it was the final week of Belvoir's justly acclaimed The Wild Duck, a contemporary take on Ibsen's play by Simon Stone and Chris Ryan.

It's so long since I last read this play that I couldn't remember what happened, so when I returned home I dragged out the Penguin classic. The translation is dodgy to say the least - it's full of people exclaiming "I say!" and "Oh, good Lord!", making you think of Bertie Wooster rather more than Nordic forests - but you can still squint through the creaky language and see the structures and ideas that informed the original.


Reading the original text only heightened my admiration of this production, which is the best so far of Simon Stone's increasingly interesting oeuvre. It's a fascinating evolution from Hayloft's Thyestes: Ryan and Stone are clearly applying and extending ideas from that production, but by no means repeating them. The text is, quite correctly, credited as "after Ibsen": it is effectively an extremely well-written new play. There are maybe three or four lines of Ibsen's text, if that, in this version. Major themes and a swathe of characters have vanished: the action is placed uncompromisingly in the 21st century, creating a strangely dislocated theatrical world, a contemporary Australian reality with Norwegian motifs.

What's astonishing (and, in the end, a little mysterious) is that you walk out of the theatre feeling that you have just watched an Ibsen play. The sinews of Ibsen's obsessions - the past that haunts and destroys the present, inheritance and paternity, the social critique of class and gender, the plutonium-enriched explosion of truth - are boldly translated into present day forms. Stone and Ryan's collaboration, astringently dramaturged by Eamon Flack, is a vital re-imagining.

In the first half the impending tragedy is built patiently, stroke by stroke, in a series of short, apparently naturalistic scenes. On the occasion of his second marriage to his 28-year old secretary, wealthy businessman Werle (John Gaden) welcomes home his estranged son, Gregers (Toby Schmitz). It's soon evident that Gregers bears a grudge against Werle for his treatment of his mother, who suicided after one of Werle's affairs. Gregers meets up with his old friend Hjalmar (Ewen Leslie), who runs a photography studio with his wife Gina (Anita Hegh). They live with their 17-year-old daughter Hedvig (Eloise Mignon) and Hjalmar's father Ekdal (Anthony Phelan), who is showing the first signs of dementia. Ekdal, we discover, has been imprisoned over some scandal to do with Werle's business, a disaster which has had far-reaching effects on his family.

In Ibsen's play, Gregers is a fanatic blinded by idealism, a man irrevocably wounded by his father's corruption who tragically wreaks worse destruction by attempting to right his father's wrongs. He worships Hjalmar's integrity, and claims that he will invigorate his life by revealing the lie at the heart of his marriage, but the results are predictably catastrophic. Here the character of Gregers is more ambivalent: he is a cynic who prides himself on his truthfulness, but the sense that his destructiveness is subconsciously driven by envy of Hjalmar's domestic happiness is palpable. Likewise, the marriage presented in the first half of the play is a good one, as opposed to the sense in Ibsen of an educated man limited by his wife's lower class: Hjalmar's family is chaotic, argumentative, loving and arrestingly real.

Part of this production's power comes from the simplicity, even crudity, of its framing. Here the design is exemplary in how it contributes to the meaning of the performance, from Niklas Pajanti's lighting to Stefan Gregory's sound design, which mics the actors so we hear their bodies as much as see them: the labial sounds of kisses, a deep, shuddering, in-drawn breath. Ralph Myers's set is a kind of terrarium or tank that seals the audience from the performers, a literal fourth wall which heightens the voyeuristic sense that we are transgressively peering into privacies. The window/mirror has almost become a cliche in contemporary theatre, but here the design, perhaps because it so aptly represents the play's dynamics, is fresh and striking. At the top of the set are electronic displays, harking back to the scene titles in Thyestes, that introduce each scene with a specific time date and time.

Harsh, directionless lighting reveals a bare, black, slightly scruffy stage. During the first half of the play, this alternates with blackouts between scenes that turn the glass into a mirror of the audience. The darkness itself becomes symbolic of the hidden truths and conflicts that are hinted in scenes played swiftly across the naked stage. The second half of the play is completely different: the Bach cello pieces that play between scenes in the first half is exploded by crashing electric guitar and the stage is flooded in merciless fluorescent light. Now scenes run together, instead of being meticulously individuated, with characters from different scenes simultaneously on stage.

The simplicity of these elements highlights the complexity and nuance of the text and performances. Stone has the talents of a remarkable cast: there is no performance which is not integral to the success of the work. The mark is hit in every moment, from the cauterised relationship between father and son in Gaden and Schmitz's meetings, to Mignon's bewildered pain as a daughter rejected by the father she adores, to Anthony Phelan's anguished portrayal of a disintegrating mind as Ekdal. The emotional weight of the tragedy falls on Hegh and Leslie, and their performances as two people who deeply love each other, but whose love is unable negotiate the disaster that befalls them, is as painful and real as anything I've seen on stage. Theatre seldom draws a hacksaw across your emotional nerves with such intelligent finesse.

It makes me look forward with even more lively interest to Stone's upcoming adaptation of Brecht's Baal, co-written with Tom Wright, which opens soon at the Malthouse as a co-production with the STC. In part this is because I have even less idea what to expect: it seems to me that Stone is continually lifting the stakes on himself, making work that refreshingly refuses to rest on its laurels. And that's exciting.

Picture: Anita Hegh as Gina in The Wild Duck. Photo: Heidrun Lohr

The Wild Duck, by Simon Stone and Chris Ryan, after Henrik Ibsen. Set by Ralph Myers, costumes by Tess Schofield, lighting by Niklas Pajanti, composition and sound design Stefan Gregory. With Johngaden, Anita Hegh, Ewen Leslie, Eloise Mignon, Anthony Phelan and Toby Schmitz. Belvoir, Sydney. Closed.

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


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

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

Peer Gynt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elektra

(Spoiler warning).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creditors

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

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

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

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

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

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

Picture: Four Lark's Peer Gynt.

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

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

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

Peer Gynt. What a loser! Liar, narcissist, storyteller, dreamer, wild boy, arms dealer, Emperor of the Self, so fixated on his own desires that he loses himself altogether. Sinless because there isn't enough of him to sin with. He's saved by a song. (Or is he?) Saved by love. (Or is he?) Kept alive in the heart of a woman. Or was that him? Did he exist? (Do any of us exist?) What is he doing in this work of theatre? Is it a work of theatre? What is a work of theatre?


Who is Peer Gynt? He doesn't know. He jumped out of the brain of a Norwegian playwright one hot summer in 1867. Henrik Ibsen was an expatriate in Italy, then in the midst of war: as Garibaldi marched against Rome to eliminate the Papacy, Ibsen grumbled his way through various Italian beauty spots, his crazy epic poem spiralling recklessly out of the brutally hot sirocco that hit Ischia that year, so that he rose in his nightshirt sometimes because his head was so full of verse, writing down his octosyllabics and decasyllabics, the iambics, trochaics, dactylics, anapaestics and amphibrachs that all translators claim are impossible to translate into English. On a day of 46 degrees, Ibsen sent the first three acts to his publisher. After a minor earthquake sparked his famous physical cowardice, Ibsen fled Ischia for Sorrento, then Naples and Pompeii, and finally Rome, where he finished the poem in October. It was published in Scandinavia a month later.

Unlike Ibsen's previous epic Brand, which featured a noble protagonist, Peer Gynt met mixed responses. The poem was eviscerated by Norway's most influential critic, Clemens Petersen, who called it an "intellectual swindle", and declared that it was not poetry. Georg Brandes, another critic, said: "Ibsen's poem is neither beautiful nor true; what acrid pleasure can any poet find in defiling humanity like this?" After his fury (Ibsen was a bitter hater of his critics), his most illuminating answer to his critics is in an inscription he wrote in a book: "To live is to war with trolls in heart and soul. / To write is to sit in judgement on oneself."

In all its unstageable recklessness, Peer Gynt is a pitiless self-portrait of a man fleeing the most essential conflicts within himself, endlessly seduced by his own trolls. Ibsen wasn't admired by people like James Joyce or Sigmund Freud for no reason: he was one of the first modern writers to externalise the demons of the unconscious, and Peer Gynt was the first of his extended explorations of the potent truths of nightmare and fantasy, the trolls beneath the skin of mundane reality.

Its fantastic elements mean that Peer Gynt is, like Goethe's Faust, famously unstageable. (Hence the joke in Educating Rita: How does one solve the staging problems in Peer Gynt? Answer: Do it on the radio.) In fact, in his astonishing production at the Victorian College of the Arts, it's debatable whether Daniel Schlusser has staged the play at all. He has rather conducted a parallel examination to Ibsen's of himself. He delves beneath the skin of Ibsen's text, reaching into its prior impulses in an attempt to summon the demons that lurk in contemporary realities. This production of Peer Gynt ambitiously extends the explorations begun in Schlusser's productions of A Dollhouse and Life is a Dream. Here Ibsen's savage nightmare becomes a haunting, fragmentary and hallucinatory, that spirals out of a distorted quotidian mundanity.

For the first 45 minutes, the play exists only in a snatched phrase or two, a scrawl of graffiti on the wall, a jokey reference to Grieg's famous music. The set - an extraordinary over-the-top design in day-glo colours by Anna Cordingley, mainly fashioned out of dozens of balloons - stretches the length of the studio theatre. On stage are a red sports car, a combi van, a blue swimming pool, banana lounges, a table. Nothing happens for a time, aside from some outrageously kitsch music and the sounds of magpies carolling (it is morning). A man stumbles out of the combi van and shuffles about the stage. He wakes a woman who is sleeping in the sports car. He gets a beer. Several beers. One by one, various actors in a confusion of costumes - a woman in white twinset and sunglasses carrying suitcases, a man in a panama hat, women in bikinis, a man in football beanie and shorts, people on motorbikes and bicycles - enter the stage. Some leave and return, some stay and fuss about with the banana lounges, opening champagne bottles, greeting each other with squeals of pleasure, gossiping inaudibly.

Gradually we understand, from fragments of conversation that we overhear as if by accident, that people are gathering for the rehearsal of a wedding. It's a wedding in which there is conflict; the bride is unhappy and keeps bursting into tears. Still the actors' movements are mysterious: they eddy about the stage, inscrutably private. It is as if we were watching a party from an elevated angle. And this is sustained for much longer than seems possible, flirting with the edges of frustration. Always, just as you begin to lose patience, something else catches up your attention: a man enters with an enormous bag of balloons and fills the swimming pool, or a fight breaks out, or a woman runs away crying.

Where, you begin to wonder, is Peer Gynt? And then you realise he is the skinny young man causing trouble at the edges of the gathering. And out of what seem like random swirls of activity, a story begins to emerge. It's the story of Peer Gynt, radically translated into contemporary symbols, barely recognisable but nonetheless present, through a glass darkly. The wedding is - or is like - the wedding at the beginning of the poem, in which Gynt's sweetheart is married unwillingly to the local butcher, and runs off with him for the night, causing his banishment. Imperceptibly, we find we are watching a double reality, a mundane and ugly reality that is infected by images from a dream.

At about this point the dream begins to shift to the foreground: the lighting states shift from general to specific, and fragments from the play begin to be enacted, spiralling out of the banal event we have been watching. It's never quite pinned down, and the reality is never quite stable. But from this fascinating confusion emerges moments of strange, almost surreal clarity that reflexively are excavated from the superficial and strangely heartless social occasion we've been witnessing. Peer Gynt himself (a marvellous performance by Kyle Baxter) stands out in relief at last against the action; he meets the trolls, he is mocked by a nameless voice wanting to know who he is, and he discovers, over an epic and strange journey to material success, that he has no idea who he is. He is, he finds, as empty as the middle of an onion: beneath all the layers that he is created of himself, he is nothing.

The urgency beneath the performance is a questioning of authenticity: of experience, of art. For all its fantastic nature and bizarre incongruities, what makes this show compulsively watchable is a profound veracity in its performances and intellectual exploration which is, all the same, radically dislocated from any sense of literal truth. It's most true to Ibsen's text in its poetic vision, how it has burrowed into and exploded the metaphors in the play, returning them to a surprising and vexed sense of truthfulness. It is an excoriating expose of the culture of narcissism that is nevertheless not without compassion, attending closely to the trivial details out of which people construct meaning.

In some ways, this production seems like a defiant wrenching of richness from a wide menu of emotional poverties. The ambiguity of the ending is telling: Schlusser pushes the sentiment of the love story between Peer and Solveig to the risible, placing them next to a giant pink heart made of balloons as Solveig sings a folksong of aching loveliness. And yet out of this extreme collision of kitsch, this strange wedding of contradictions, emerges a sharp splinter of real feeling; a glimpse, however ambiguous, of salvation.

Schlusser's re-blending of Peer Gynt is mischievous, beguiling and ultimately haunting, demonstrating that an act of creation is always simultaneously an act of destruction. He gets away with it because of the quality of attention in the direction: the stage is always focused, always dynamic, with a spatial discipline that recalls dance. If you expect to see a respectful performance of Ibsen's text, you'll be disappointed: the text is rather a provocation or occasion for thought. What you get instead is the chance to watch the continuing evolution of a fascinating investigation, in one of the most deeply interesting works of theatre you'll see in Melbourne this year.

Picture: Kevin Fa’asitua Hofbauer and Kyle Baxter in Peer Gynt. Photo: Jeff Busby

Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen, directed by Daniel Schlusser. Set and costumes by Anna Cordingley, lighting design by Kimberley Kwa, sound design and composition by Nick van Cuylenburg and Martin Kay. With VCA Acting Company 2009 and VCA Alumni. Space 28, Victorian College of the Arts, until April 1.

A Dollhouse by Henrik Ibsen, directed by Daniel Schlusser. Set design by Jeminah Reidy, costumes by Tiffany Abbott, lighting design by Kimberly Kwa, surround sound by Tessa Eleiff, composer Johnny Milner.With Katherine Harris, Nick Jamieson, Michael Wahr, Edwina Wren, Ben Pfeiffer and Veronica Bryant/Heloise Jackson. Company 2007, Victorian College of the Arts, 28 Dodds St, Southbank, until November 6.

When you read novels and plays from the late 19th century, it is sometimes a little depressing to discover how much intellectual discussion then has in common with what we argue about now. Women still complain about being infantilised or of being valued only for their appearance. Probity is still only a problem for a businessman if he’s caught in wrong-doing and publicly exposed. We still worry about materialistic values and imperalistic injustice and even whether God created the world. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.


Henrik Ibsen is a case in point. When he was writing A Dollhouse, he told his friend Hegel that it was “a play of modern life”. And its modernity is still striking: there may be the odd porter and housemaid, but the action begins with no preambles and runs cleanly to the end, and there are surprisingly few opinions expressed by the characters that would sound amiss to a contemporary ear.

In this VCA production, director Daniel Schlusser has taken Ibsen at his word, and delivered a modern play. A Dollhouse is set in contemporary Melbourne, in a converted warehouse apartment, and Torvald (Nick Jamieson) has just landed a top job at the Macquarie Bank. In his spare time, he enjoys yoga and Playstation. Nora (Katherine Harris) is a funky yummy mummy who likes a bit of shopping therapy. Some of their dialogue, peppered with the standard casual obscenities, would have given 19th century theatre critics – who were shocked enough by the idea that a woman might not submit to her husband – severe conniptions.

But I was surprised, reading the play again afterwards, how little of the text was changed. This production’s disrespect is wholly in the service of the play. As he says in the program, Schlusser’s intention is to recapture Ibsen's original radicalism. It’s impossible to wholly regain that moment when the slam of the door as Nora left her loveless marriage was said to echo through all Europe: but this is an intelligent look at a classic play that scours off the cultural verdigris and shows it to be as sharp as ever in cutting through the superficialities and deceits of contemporary mores.

Instead of observing its naturalism– in Ibsen’s time the radical edge of modern playwriting, but now so worn a convention we barely see it – Schlusser opts for an aggressive theatricality that exposes the mechanics of both the play and its staging. When the play opens, all five actors are on the narrow metallic set, which runs the width of the theatre. The sound deck is to the right of the audience, playing loud pop music. The wall at the back of Jemimah Reidy’s set is punctuated with a series of hatches, the wall-louvre of a gas heater, a door made of zipped fabric and a television screen set into the wall. As the play proceeds, the set gets more and more littered with the throw-way kitsch of consumer culture, and, of course, with toys (quite a lot of Lego, which is, after all, impeccably Scandinavian).

A voiceover recites Ibsen’s stage directions, and the actors launch into a brief comic aside that contextualises when A Dollhouse was written (and even perform a little of it for us in the original Norwegian). The actors begin to argue, and as their voices rise, so does the music, until Torvald screams at the sound technician to turn it down. Once the artifice of what we are watching is established, the play can properly begin: but now we’re consciously watching it at several levels. Nora’s performance as Torvald’s little lark is also, for example, a 21st century performance of attitudes that are conditioned by 19th century mores.

It’s classic alienation effect which, crucially, intensifies rather than removes the feeling of the play. When Brecht coined “Verfremdungseffekt” to describe his epic theatre, the idea was to heighten an audience’s critical consciousness of what it was watching; but it is a mistake to deduce from this that critical awareness is the same as refusing feeling. Rather, Brecht wanted the reverse: as he says elsewhere, “grab them by the balls, and their hearts will follow”. And this is in fact a deeply moving rendition of A Dollhouse.

Neither Schlusser nor his fine cast step back from the play’s complex passions, and the crucial dialogues are played straight. This production is notable for excellent performances from each of its five actors, beginning with performances of detail and depth from Harris and Jamieson as Nora and Torvald. When Dr Rank (Ben Pfeiffer) confesses his love for Nora, or informs her of his impending death, the scenes are pregnant with what is not said, and what must not be said. The love scene between Nils Krogstadt (Michael Wahr) and Kristine Linde (Edwina Wren) has the complex sadness of experience and failure. The final quarrel between Nora and Torvald – a sharp portrayal of self-blindness from Jamieson – is searingly painful.

Perhaps the most interesting decision is to adopt Ibsen’s rewriting of the end of the play. It’s had me thinking for days. When the play was first written, Ibsen was told in no uncertain terms that it was impossible to present the play with an unhappy ending. Rather than have his play butchered by other hands, Ibsen opted to perform “this barbaric deed of violence” himself. In this version, Nora is forced to look at her children, and finally cannot bear to leave them and, as translator Peter Watts says, "sinks to the ground as the curtain falls with masculine supremacy restored and Woman relegated to her proper sphere of 'Kirche, Küche and Kinder'."

The effect in this production is entirely different. As Nora storms out, there is a pause, and Torvald calls her name. He is holding in his arms a little girl, their daughter, and slowly Nora turns and comes back; and the play ends with all three embracing. It’s an ambiguous and complex moment, and the effect after the awful scene beforehand is the reverse of sentimental. In a time when it would be standard practice for the wife to leave, Nora’s recognition of the experience and embodied love she shares with Torvald has more power to surprise than the original ending. It is the moral alternative to the empty materialism that has characterised their relationship. And far from being defeat, Nora's return is an act of hope.

Picture: Katherine Harris and Nick Jamieson in A Dollhouse. Photo: Ponch Hawkes

Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen, adapted by Louis Nowra and May-Brit Akerholt, directed by Melanie Beddie. Design by Emily Barrie, lighting design by Richard Vabre, AV design Nicholas Verso, sound by Melanie Beddie. With Jay Bowen, Ming-Zhu Hii, Bruce Myles, Andrea Swifte and James Wardlaw. Branch Theatre Company @ Theatreworks until May 20.

Encountering Henrik Ibsen's plays is a little like reading James Joyce's Dubliners: you realise, with a blinding flash of revelation, where all that modern writing comes from. Here is the engaged social anger that led to Arthur Miller's masterpieces of political theatre (and to all the pilot fish that swim in his wake - on the Left, of course); here is the psychological accuracy, the insistence that we, as an audience, are watching something actually unfold before our eyes, that became the all-too-familiar "naturalism" that lies at the heart of so much 20th century theatre. And here, according to popular superstition, is the father of the "well-made play".

Oddly enough, to give Ibsen credit for his huge influence on contemporary drama is strangely to lessen him: his work is both stranger and more subversive than this picture allows. The image of the socially-engaged dramatic craftsman is largely due to Shaw's enthusiastic embrace of Ibsen, which has fatally coloured subsequent perception of his work. It is true, of course, but partial. Joyce, for example, was equally a passionate admirer, and his least successful work - his single play Exiles - bears the stamp of Ibsen writ large. Ibsen's psychological realism emerged more fruitfully in Joyce's exquisite suite of stories, Dubliners, and in the plays of Chekhov (which have a profound connection to Beckett); and the poetic of Peer Gynt and When We Dead Waken was one of the sources of both surrealism and expressionism. In fact, almost everywhere you look in 20th century writing it's possible to detect the faint marks of Ibsen's fingerprints.

Ibsen's agonistic relationship to poetry in theatre is well known - having begun with the verse plays Brand and Peer Gynt, he vocally rejected verse as the "enemy of theatre", and pioneered naturalistic prose dialogue in plays like A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler or The Master Builder. But it's a mistake to equate that decision with a rejection of poetic, and to think that it means that naturalism and poetry are mutually exclusive. Ibsen's poetic imagination is the engine that throbs beneath his prose, the deep source of its potency; and significantly, in his 70s he returned to verse bigtime with the symbolist drama When We Dead Waken, which features staging challenges worthy of Goethe's Faust.

In his day, Ibsen was hugely controversial. The London premiere of his 1881 play Ghosts, with its devastating attack on bourgeois hypocrisy and its themes of sexual degeneracy and disease, received reviews as scandalised as those which greeted Sarah Kane's Blasted. (Both were labelled "filth".) It's this radical, passionate Ibsen who is most often obscured by his reputation as a dull, stiff but worthy Norwegian whose "well-made plays" have provided justification for some of the dreariest theatrical writings of the past 50 years.

Such damping of the fire is, inevitably, part of the price of creating a heritage, of becoming a cog in the cultural machine: as Auden said of Yeats, "the words of the dead / Are modified in the guts of the living". One of the tasks of remounting the classics is to reignite the flame, to bring to contemporary life the radical soul of works that have been ossified into cultural monuments. Such a task is the stated aim of Branch Theatre Company's production of Ghosts: but sadly, it is a most frustrating experience. I left the theatre with my stomach in a knot, perhaps having caught something of the anxiety that seems to underlie almost every aspect of this production. Director Melanie Beddie ought to have had more faith in her man.

There is a strangely naive quality in this production, as if the notion that classic works can have purchase in present day society is a wholly new idea. The anxiety seems to lie in underscoring Ibsen's "relevance" by injecting the drama with a vaguely realised concept of contemporary theatricality. It seems unnecessary; the version of Ghosts used here, an adaptation by Louis Nowra and May-Brit Akerholt that remains respectful of the extant translations, gives the language a vernacular spin that does it no harm at all, and the play's themes remain as relevant now as they were in 19th century Europe.

Ghosts is the classic story of a shameful secret whose repression destroys everything that the secrecy was supposed to protect. The central obsessions of the play - its "ghosts" (or, more properly, its revenants, the dead walkers who return to the world of the living) - revolve around the clash between repressive middle class morality and Ibsen's idea of a truly moral life, in which people are freed of the personal lies and ideological blindnesses that trap and ultimately destroy them. Ibsen uses the central story of a son who inherits the venereal disease of his father to explore the corruption and hypocrisy that he perceived in the stifling mores of bourgeois ideology, and to icily examine the sexual repression that lies at the heart of patriarchal authority.

That Ibsen's plays are difficult to stage seems to me without question - aside from a great production of Peer Gynt featuring Robert Menzies that Anthill Theatre staged many years ago, I am yet to see him successfully performed. Ibsen's naturalistic prose presents steep challenges, demanding a depth of interpretation that is not present here. Like all great dramatists, his work is at once subtle and crude: the plot of Ghosts is melodramatic, the character lineation precisely and profoundly observed. This production seems to get lost between the large and the small, so that its chief quality comes across as uncertainty.

It's not unpromising: the company excavates enough of Ibsen's muscular, poetic intellect to permit you see within this show, like gems sparkling in the ore, a couple of potentially extraordinary performances. And Emily Barrie's striking design - an abstract stage-on-a-stage, with furniture wrapped in clear plastic to suggest an idea of prurient bourgeois hygiene - certainly offers a contemporary Ibsen. The frustration is that this promise is obscured by gestures towards an idea of theatricality that is nowhere explored in any depth.

The stage bustles with activity, but mostly to no good purpose, just as the eye-catching simplicity of the set is compromised by fussy details. And the production also features one of the most ill-thought soundscapes I've ever heard (at one point, I thought someone's mobile phone had gone off, before realising it was actually part of the play). Rather than stripping the play down to its bare emotional truths - the point, surely, of taking it out of 19th century museum-style naturalism - Beddie dresses it up with an extraordinary amount of stage business which seems to get in the way of, well, pretty much everything.

For example, there's a lot of action at the beginning of the play. While Ibsen gets down to business at once, with the maid Regina (Ming-Zhi Hii) barring her disreputable father Engstrand (Bruce Myles) at the door of the house, this production opens with a long prologue in which Regina enters with boxes and unloads them, takes off her boots, mops the floor, polishes a couple of glasses, and so on. Like much of the staging, these actions are sketchy, broadly illustrative rather than specifically meaningful. I found myself wishing that Regina would wash the floor, instead of impressionistically gliding a mop from one end of the stage to the other - I remembered a scene in Romeo Castellucci's Tragedia Endogonidia that consisted wholly of a woman mopping, an action executed with such concentration that this mundane task became absolutely riveting, a metaphor for all human labour.

More mystifyingly, as the prodigal son Osvald Alving, Jay Bowen spends a lot of time rootling about in a wardrobe that ingeniously opens out from a suitcase placed on the edge of the stage. At no point did I actually understand what he was doing, and I'm not sure the actor did either. He was merely filling the stage with movement, which seems the desired effect of much of the action. These examples may sound like carping, but they illustrate a problem that underlies much of the production: at issue is the question of what a gesture on a stage in fact might be. And my response is perhaps prompted by the absolutely spare psychological accuracy of Ibsen's dialogue, which creates a stark contrast to the fuss on stage.

Given this, it seems astounding that any of the actors manage to achieve anything at all. As Mrs Alving, the wife who has lived a loveless, hypocritical marriage for the sake of her son only to find that she has been an agent of his destruction, Andrea Swifte gives a felt and assured performance that at moments blossoms into the remarkable. And despite his burrowing in wardrobes, Jay Bowen's portrayal of Osvald becomes more and more compelling, culminating in a beautiful pas de deux with Swifte in the climactic moments of the play.

Others seem to be struggling. James Wardlaw seems to me miscast as Pastor Manders; he finds an accuracy that brings out the comedy of the priest's hypocrisy and small-mindedness, but at the same time misses the complexity and darkness of his crippled sexuality. Ming-Zhu Hii and Bruce Myles as the servants Regina and Angstrand appear to be playing them as if they're comic relief, the mechanicals of the show rather than integral parts of the central drama, which has the effect of displacing a crucial thread of the drama, and unwittingly reinforces the social divisions that Ibsen himself was questioning.

In short, Ghosts is, as I said, frustrating: a production that feels only half thought-through, teasingly threaded with glimpses of what might have been. One sighs for the missed opportunity. Branch Theatre Company is absolutely correct on one point: Ibsen is not done enough.