Your faithful correspondent has been somewhat scattered of late, like a barrel of popcorn given a hefty thump. I have excuses, with which I won't bore you; suffice to say that recently my other lives have been demanding. In TN's bright new 2011 reincarnation, which frankly looks pretty much like last year's model, I am pursuing my aim of seasoning the madness of doing this blog with some kind of sweet reason. Some might say that, as with previous attempts, I'm failing miserably, but as the saying goes, it's a long, hard, bitter, uneven struggle.

I don't seem to have been very successful in cutting down my theatre attendance. However, I am exploiting the luxury of not attending every show on opening night, and instead going later in the season. Another resolution is that I won't necessarily be writing 1200 word reviews about everything I see. Even given these innovations, I'm still a little tardy in my notations. Howie the Rookie, for example, closed over a week ago, and even though I saw it in its final week, this response is late. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, etc, but a gal is only human, and sometimes barely that.


On to Howie the Rookie, staged at Red Stitch as part of its 10th anniversary season by Greg Carroll after a successful first season in 2002. Mark O'Rowe's Terminus was part of the Melbourne Festival a couple of years ago, and I heard Good Things (although sadly I was overseas and missed it) so I was curious to catch up with this writer. Howie the Rookie is an early O'Rowe play, written his twenties, and its evocation of working class Dublin sizzles with linguistic invention, brashness and wit. Its two halves consist of interlinked monologues, performed by Howie Lee (Paul Ashcroft) and Rookie Lee (Tim Ross).

It's given a bravura, if somewhat overdressed, production by Carroll. Ben Shaw's modular set design creates a surprising illusion of space on the small Red Stitch stage, but is full of fussy details - a painted image of a boy in a hoodie, or what appear to be cattle bones - that end up being merely decorative and therefore distracting. No one can say that the monologues are not delivered with energy, but I felt that the performances rather trampled the text into the ground. Red Stitch is a small space, and and there was a lot of shouting. I left with ringing ears.

This is a problem of direction rather than performance: both actors clearly had the gamut of emotional response at their fingertips, and when they didn't shout, the intelligence of the text had a chance to shine. The production seems driven by the idea that male aggression and sexual energy is, well, loud. Of course it can be, if not all the time: but O'Rowe's satire on masculinity, and its ultimate pathos, gets lost in the noise. Carroll has gone for stylised theatre, so the text is accompanied by high energy physicalisations, but again this lacks the subtlety of the text, as the movement is almost exclusively literal and illustrative. Still, an impressive early play from O'Rowe.


Last week, I got to the Alexander Theatre in Monash to see a showing of Hypatia II, a work in progress by Jane Montgomery-Griffiths, directed by Adena Jacobs. Last year Griffiths was responsible for the exquisite Sappho... in 9 fragments at the Malthouse, and Jacobs directed Anne Carson's Elektra at The Dog Theatre, and their combined firepower is reason enough even for a domestic rabbit like me to strike out into the wilds of the eastern suburbs.

Like Sappho, Hypatia II is a monologue that weaves together two narratives from past and present. In this case, it's the tale of Hypatia, a brilliant 4th century Alexandrian mathematician, scientist and astronomer who was horribly murdered under a fundamentalist Christian regime, and that of a contemporary maths lecturer who is publicly humiliated by a young lover. It was originally commissioned by Stork Theatre, and has undergone further development with Jacobs. As Griffiths says in her program note, it is now a different show.

Griffiths's performance is a riveting anatomy of misogynies, then and now: the sexual hatred that refuses women the humanity that permits their full potential to flower and grow. Hypatia's death was part of a larger torching of knowledge under the Coptic Bishop of Alexandria, when fanatics burned what was left of the great Library of Alexandria; but in her subsequent excision from history, she suffered a particularly feminine fate. Her modern equivalent is a woman who can't hope to match Hypatia's achievements: self-doubting, crouched in the shadow of her brilliant father, her enabling ego is snipped and pruned at every turn. Yet she identifies with Hypatia to the point of madness.

Without claiming a cheap equivalence, Griffiths's show takes the image of Hypatia's being flayed alive and gives it a contemporary spin. As Sarah Kane showed brutally in plays like Blasted, there is a direct link between psychic and physical violence: this text makes a similar link, and with an equally powerful linguistic viscerality. It works very effectively on a large stage, with Jared Lewis's monochromatic lighting design further isolating the performer, in wide angles of intense light or sudden darknesses. I hope to see this one again.


Lastly... I went to see Sarah Ruhl's In The Next Room, Or The Vibrator Play, which is currently enjoying a season at the MTC's Sumner Theatre. It's given a luscious production by Pamela Rabe. Tracy Grant Lord's two-level set is at once ingenious and lovely to look at, and her costumes are a Victorian fantasia. Hartley TA Kemp's lighting design is a nostalgic paean to the days of softly-lit drawings rooms and Iain Grandage's sound design is at once lush and nicely judged. The performances are impeccable. In short, there is nothing to criticise in the production.

The first act washed over me without much complaint: there was plenty to look at, and I even laughed a few times. Set in the days when middle class women were supposedly beset by the symptoms of hysteria - often a syndrome associated with feminine ambition or sexual desire - and were diagnosed the administration of medical orgasm as a treatment, it is pretty much a one-joke act about women who don't understand their own bodies. I couldn't help reflecting, as I watched the shenanigans, that another common treatment for hysteria was hysterectomy, a procedure that up until 1880 had a mortality rate of 80-90 per cent. Or that the poet Anna Wickham's husband incarcerated her in an asylum when she refused his prohibition on writing and published her first book in 1911. Which is to say, Victorian patriarchy was never quite this benign.

On the evidence of the first act, this play is more accomplished than last year's Dead Man's Cell Phone, and, as I said, it's very beautifully produced. Still, there's something about Sarah Ruhl that brings out the Dorothy Parker in me. I'll never know what happened in the second act. At interval I found myself outside the theatre. And somehow, gentle reader, I never found my way back in.

Pictures: top: Paul Ashcroft in Red Stitch's Howie the Rookie; middle, Jane Montgomery-Griffiths in Hypatia II. Photo: Pia Johnson; bottom, Helen Thomson and Jacqueline MCkenzie in In The Next Room. Photo: Brett Boardman.

Howie the Rookie, by Mark O'Rowe, directed by Greg Carroll. Set design by Ben Shaw, lighting by Claire Springett and sound design by Brett Ludeman. With Timothy Ross and Paul Ashcroft. Red Stitch (closed).

Hypatia II, written and performed by Jane Montgomery-Griffiths, directed by Adena Jacobs. Sound and lighting design by Jared Lewis, set and costume by Dayna Morrissey. Lunchtime performance, Alexandra Theatre, Monash University.

In The Next Room, or The Vibrator Play, by Sarah Ruhl, directed by Pamela Rabe. Set and costumes by Tracy Grant Lord, lighting by Hartley TA Kemp, composition and sound design Iain Grandage. With Jacqueline McKenzie, David Roberts, Helen Thomson, Marshall Napier, Mandy McElhinney, Sara Zwangobani and Josh McConville. Sumner Theatre, Melbourne Theatre Company, until May 21.

As the poet Anne Carson points out, it was Sappho who first described eros as “bittersweet”. “No one who has been in love,” says Carson, “disputes her”. Desire is, after all, fraught with paradox: it is the zenith of human bliss, but its annihilating power destroys the illusion of human autonomy. As Sappho describes in her most famous fragment (here in Carson's translation), it can seem like dying:

...when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking
is left in me

no: tongue breaks and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
fills ears

and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead - or almost
I seem to me.

After two and a half millennia, Sappho’s poems still speak across what would seem unbridgeable gaps of time and culture, expressing with a directness and delicacy that has rarely been matched the contradictions of “limb-loosening” desire. In her extraordinary performance Sappho…in 9 Fragments, actor/writer Jane Montgomery Griffiths takes on Sappho’s legacy, exploring the history of her texts and the various myths and conjectures that fill the absence of knowledge about her life. Lesbian, wife, mother, suicide, exile, tenth muse of the archaic Greek world: how can we hear her elusive voice, through the clamorous myths that cluster about her name?

Sappho...in 9 fragments is not so much a homage to Sappho as a reanimation of the body of her work (with an emphasis on "body") through a particular subjectivity. Most of all, it's a passionate engagement with the poetry itself, a multifaceted imaginative dance with Sappho’s work brought with painful intensity into the present moment. Montgomery Griffiths does a seemingly impossible thing, and makes theatre out of an act of understanding.

Reading, listening, watching, comprehension, become - both in our watching, as audience members, and in Montgomery Griffiths's performance - acts of love: the stroking of a page is also the stroking of skin. Before our eyes she enacts the creation of meaning, which is always a collaboration, a dynamic exchange, between the artist's work and those who encounter it. But it's an act fraught with peril, with the risk of annihilating damage and pain. Eros wakes an unassuagable longing, making us aware of our incompleteness, our existential solitude. As Atthis says in Fragment 8, recalling Plato:

"Once, we were whole. A smooth, round completeness of total happiness... But we did something wrong, and the gods punished us. We were split and sundered... and our two dismembered halves were left to wander. Looking for each other. Looking for that wholeness. But when we met again, the damage was too great....And when we embraced, all we felt was our hollowness. And so we parted. Resigned to live forever with our emptiness and our lack."

First performed at the Stork Hotel in 2007, this complex, moving and powerful work has been further developed by Malthouse Theatre under the direction of Marion Potts. I missed the first production, but was very glad to see this one. The writing is sharp, witty and passionate: Montgomery uses her own free translations of Sappho which, unlike the spare renderings of Carson or Diane Rayor, spiral in intensifying thickenings of linguistic desire that work surprisingly well in performance.

Anna Cordingley’s design, lit with Paul Jackson's usual sensitivity, is breathtakingly beautiful. The audience is placed on three sides, facing a tank that appears to be full of honey, which gradually empties onto the stage during the course of the monologue. Sappho’s naked body is gradually revealed inside the tank, at last emerging from this amber prison to a soundscape composed of fragments of Greek, the trickling of fluid and archaic percussion. It's a bold and hauntingly lovely opening to a riveting show.

Through the performance, Montgomery Griffiths embodies several things at once. She performs the poet herself, but also becomes her poems - there's a moment where she is the fragments of papyri which have lain underground for centuries, begging to be discovered, to be read again. There are skin-tingling recitations of the fragmented poems in the original Greek, which invite us into Sappho's exquisite musicality. Montgomery Griffiths explores, with various degrees of irony, their lexigraphical adventures through the centuries, and the invented biographies of Sappho that have rounded out the few historical facts, while also adding her own projected narrative.

Montgomery Griffith's Sappho is seductive and terrifying: a potent, desirous and desirable woman, as unforgiving and vulnerable as the art she creates. She and her avatars are in fluid dialogue with the voice of Sappho’s lover Atthis (“there can be no Sappho without an Atthis”), told through a contemporary story of seduction and betrayal. Sappho is figured through a famous actress playing that great victim of love's extremity, Phaedra, and a lowly chorus member who catches her eye. This sometimes painfully comic narrative twines through the other voices, enacting the passions - desire, love, jealousy, anguish, loss - of the poems.

Montgomery Griffiths’s performance is outstanding; like her wit and intellect, the virtuosity of her superb physical and vocal skills do not serve as masks so much as tools to excavate the unmediated rawness of feeling. She can be spiky, predatory, even bestial, and in the next moment expose a piercing vulnerability, walking a tightrope of extremity which, if she faltered, could tip her into bathos. But her assurance and, finally, her naked honesty, ensure there is not a trace of sentiment in her performance. Anyone who believes that passion and intelligence are opposites should see this show, where each crucially informs the other. Not to be missed.

Picture: Jane Montgomery Griffiths in Sappho...in 9 fragments. Photo: Jeff Busby

A shorter version of this review was published in the Australian last Friday

Sappho...in 9 fragments, written and performed by Jane Montgomery Griffiths. Staging by Marion Potts, set and costumes by Anna Cordingley, lighting design by Paul Jackson, composition and sound design Darrin Verghagen. Malthouse Theatre @ The Beckett until August 21.