The notion of "authenticity" in art has whiskers all over it. Art, by definition, is artifice, mimicry, representation: at its most achieved, it can perhaps aspire to be authentically fake. It's entirely possible that the rest is marketing: celebrity didn't just start with Paris Hilton, after all. This generates one of the central paradoxes of art: what makes art matter, to those who encounter it as well as those who make it, is a quality that can best be called truthfulness. It's that quality, wherever it exists, which calls up the immediate sense of recognition that makes a work resonant. It goes through you, like wine through water, and changes the colour of your soul.


It is a quality at home in any form, and therefore as indefinable as it is recognisable. I've found it in work as diverse as the alternative realities of Ursula Le Guin or the astonishing visual poems of Cy Twombly; in HD's reconstructed etymologies or Beckett's astringent theatrical sculptures or, most recently, in Antonio Tarbucchi's novels. It's in Pessoa's multiple identities as much as in the passionate fakeries of Picasso's paintings. This quality might, as Viktor Shklovsky hints, come down to something as simple as the changes registered in a work of art, its movement from one state to another, mimicking similar psychic and physical states within wider human experience. Whatever it is, it is experienced as a sense of truthfulness: and in a work of art, no matter how difficult or tragic the truth might be that it communicates, that is a joyous experience.

Authenticity and truthfulness are not the same thing, although they're often confused. While truthfulness emerges from within the work itself, authenticity is a kind of certificate, an extrinsic guarantee that the work is, in some way, "genuine". In literature, for example, the author is often the guarantor, feeding a public hunger for the authentic that somehow elides the whole question of fictional truthfulness or even imagination. This is, of course, the primary reason for literary hoaxes like Helen Demidenko or Norma Khouri.

Namatjira, which opened last week at the Malthouse after a hugely successful Sydney season at Belvoir St, plays authenticity against truthfulness in deeply revealing ways. I haven't seen a lot of Big hArt's work, but it's an exemplary maker of community theatre, and one of the most interesting companies working in Australia. I first encountered Big hArt with the production Ngapartji Ngapartji, which featured in the 2006 Melbourne Festival, and later saw a moving documentary on their community work in the Northcott Housing Project in Sydney, which resulted in a Sydney Festival performance called Sticky Bricks.

Big hArt's headline festival performances are the publicly visible part of much larger long-term community engagements. Namatjira, which narrates the story of the hugely popular Aboriginal painter Albert Namatjira, is one aspect of a community project in Hermannsburg, Central Australia which, as the program note explains, "is designed to leave lasting legacies beyond this touring performance". It's this profound level of engagement which gives the production its sense of authenticity: for example, this story is told with Namatjira's grandchildren, Kevin and Lenie Namatjira, on stage. They are both painters themselves, and throughout the show, with fellow painters and family members Elton, Hilary and Kevin Wirri, work on the massive chalk drawings of country, representations of Namatjira's own paintings, that constitute the background of the set.

Such careful signals of a work's authenticity can set off all sorts of warning signals. When work like this is presented in the privileged, middle class setting of a theatre, it risks being merely worthy, served up with a sense of piety that replaces vitality and, worst of all, art itself. I don't deny there's an element of piety somewhere in the work, as well as in its reception, but mostly this is exploded with comedy, the mischievous parodying of precisely those careful contemporary proprieties. Big hArt are upfront about seeking connection with their audiences, and in their oscillation between these contradictory qualities of truthfulness and authenticity, this is what they achieve. The key is the art.

Namatjira, written and directed by Scott Rankin, is a supple mediation between the artifice of theatre - highlighted in the charismatic central performance of Trevor Jamieson, the major narrator, and his offsider Derik Lynch - and the realities that the story of Namatjira reveals, signalled by the presence of his inheritors on stage. Into this are layered the mediations of painting itself. The performance unfolds in what is effectively a giant, dynamic work of visual art.

As the audience enters, Robert Hannaford is hard at work on stage, painting a portrait of Trevor Jamieson, who sits patiently as the artist darts back and forth from the canvas to his palette. This is an allusion to Sir William Dargie's famous portrait of Namatjira, but it's also, quite clearly, a portrait in its own right of the actor who is playing Namatjira. Before a word is spoken, we are already in a complex world of representation.

The performance modulates into song and music - lush choral songs from the Lutheran Mission, country and western parodies, and Genevieve Lacey's haunting recorder compositions, played live on stage. It's a contemporary take on old-fashioned story telling, and irresistibly seductive: within ten minutes, Jamieson has his audience eating out of his hand.

The story itself is a fascinating fable of colonial Australia, at once tragic and hopeful. It starts with Namatjira's parents and his childhood on a Lutheran Mission in Central Australia, his meeting with his friend and mentor Rex Battarbee, and his decision to begin painting to feed his rapidly growing family. Then there's Namatjira's extraordinary fame and wealth at a time when Aboriginal people were still considered part of Australia's flora and fauna, and his subsequent exploitation by both whites and blacks (he supported his entire 600 member community). He was the first Aboriginal given citizenship, although this honour was conferred so he could be taxed.

There are also the various rip-offs - his desperate selling of his copyright, his unsuccessful bid to buy a cattle station - which demonstrated that, for all his fame, he was still a second-class citizen. And there was his old age, culminating in the humiliation of his unjust imprisonment to hard labour after an alcohol-related crime in his community for which he was considered responsible, and which broke and killed him.

The show is careful to pay attention to complexities: Namatjira was a victim of the conflicts that resulted from his stepping between both cultures. Here the depth and complexity of personal relationships are set against the blank impersonality of institutional racism: the friendship of Rex and Albert and their mutual exchange of knowledge becomes a glimpse of a lost possibility that the company itself seeks to resurrect in its work. It's not so far from what historian James Boyce described as "indigenising", a process in which a white underclass learned from black knowledge. It created a new way of living in this country, and was often violently repressed by colonial authorities. In the utopian space of theatre, this possibility is ignited as a hope for something better.

The word is never said, but Namatjira is an enactment of reconciliation. For one thing, it's a show consciously directed towards a white audience. White attitudes to Aboriginality are gently mocked, but this is never alienating; instead, mischievously, it invites its audience into its world. The fact that the production manages to do this without a trace of false sentiment, moralising or special pleading is a tribute to how artfully its makers step through the political minefield of this kind of community-based work. It's feel-good theatre that generates an answering goodwill in its audience, a sudden generosity of possibility. And that's a rare thing to witness.


Tim Winton's first play, Rising Water, is another vision of Australia, in its own way as artfully positioned as Big hArt's. Let's make no mistake: both these productions are unashamedly directed at mainstream audiences, and in their own ways are equally manipulative (as all art, in fact, is). But Rising Water, like Winton's novels, carefully shows us the Australia we would like to imagine, or at least, would like to talk about over our dinner tables. The artfulness here, rather than disarming me, made my teeth ache.

Rising Water is set on Australia Day, on three boats moored at a Perth marina on which live three different middle-aged characters, Col (Goeff Kelso), Baxter (John Howard) and Jackie (Alison Whyte). They all have secrets which are gradually revealed through the show. They are all stuck in the backwater of their lives, wondering how to go on. They all represent various aspects of Australia, or the Australian character (the action takes place on Australia Day, with various nationalistic tics going on in the background). Variously, they provide occasions for critiquing contemporary materialism, via WA Inc or the rapacious consumerism of suburbia, or nationalism, or change.

There are some secondary characters, played by Stuart Halusz, and a mysterious boy (Louis Corbett) floating around in a boat, whom at first I thought was a Ghost of Childhood Lost or somesuch, until in the second act he turned out to be a character too, with his own monologues. And lastly there's the young British backpacker (Claire Lovering) who sparks the action of the play. Foul-mouthed and drunk, with "Pogrom" (the name of a band, apparently) tattooed on her back, she represents what has happened to the Mother Country.

It feels like a thoroughly colonial work, in a way that Namatjira - which is wholly concerned with colonisation - totally manages to avoid. Even its diction seems like a colonial derivation of something else. Perhaps Winton's attention to a certain idea of authentic Australianness means it never feels quite truthful. Among other things, the play is about nostalgia, but at the same time the writing itself seems to be crippled by nostalgia. It is curiously old-fashioned, like a play written about fifty years ago.

The structure consists of dialogues punctuated by long reflective monologues, with moments of theatrical poetic usually signalled by the presence of the Boy. Winton gives us a kind of cod Tennessee Williams with Australian accents, only without the Williams pathos and passion. Most of the time, it's clear that this is a novelist's play: the language tends to the descriptive rather than performative. There's not a lot of sense that language is an act, a necessary understanding for writing in the theatre. This transformation does occur sometimes in Winton's dialogues, and when it does, the difference is palpable.

Kate Cherry's production is a suitably lyrical rendition in a minor key, with silhouettes of masts against a changing sky and the water itself represented by a highly polished black floor. The central performance, John Howard's Baxter, is hugely enjoyable, and makes the most of the text. Baxter is in fact the only character to whom anything happens; everyone else just witnesses it happening to him, doing a kind of psychological striptease along the way.

Given my reservations, and they are considerable, Rising Water wasn't nearly as bad as it might have been. For all its dramaturgical vagueness and its pandering to the dinner-party-fodder aspect of culture, I feel a bit eccentric for confessing that I was sitting there thinking, well, at least the man knows how to write a sentence. There are a few playwrights who could learn that skill to their benefit.

Pictures: Top: Trevor Jamieson in Namatjira. Photo: Brett Boardman. Bottom: Alison Whyte and John Howard in Rising Water. Photo: Gary Marsh

Namatjira by Scott Rankin, created with the Namatjira family. Set design Genevieve Dugard, composer and music director Genevieve Lacey, costumes by Tess Schofield, lighting designe by Nigel Levings, sound design by Tim Atkins With Trevor Jamieson, Robert Hannaford, Derik Lynch, Kevin Namatjira, Lenie Namatjira, Michael Peck, Elton Wirri, Hilary Wirri, Kevin Wirri. Malthouse Theatre and Big hArt, until August 28.

Rising Water by Tim Winton, directed by Kate Cherry. Costumes and set by Christina Smith, lighting by Matt Scott, sound design and composition Iain Grandage. With Geoff Kelso, John Howard, Alison Whyte, Claire Lovering, Stuart Halusz and Louis Corbett. Black Swan State Theatre Company at Melbourne Theatre Company, Arts Centre Playhouse, until September 10.

Hannie Rayson's new play, The Swimming Club, picks up the classic trope of middle-aged friends reuniting to relive their youth. Six people who met on a Greek island in their 20s gather again on Lesbos at 50, giving them plenty of opportunity to quote Sappho and Homer, or at least to mention the Iliad.

This kind of play is in the tradition of theatre holding "a mirror up to nature". The charm is supposedly that, as an audience member, I see my personal situation amplified on stage. About halfway through the first act, it dawned on me that I was in the target age-group.

I had been thinking that it was about people rather older than I am, an impression reinforced by the casting. For instance John Waters, who plays PR flack Dave Flinders, is, whatever the text says, at least a decade past 50.

The text plays bingo with every sociological cliche about middle age that ever peppered an opinion page, and includes a bonus goth rebel teen called Sappho (Megan Holloway). As the play's central character Kate Morton (Angela Punch McGregor) exclaims several times, "We are so bourgeois!"

This "we" has hefty mortgages, and teenage children in private schools who have ponies and ballet lessons. Or they were rockstar hippy chicks who began Lonely Planet-style publishing companies or became millionaire entrepeneurs. The characters are, I suppose, having midlife crises: cancer, divorce, disappointment. Certainly, they have the global financial crisis.

Most of all, they long for the sunny, innocent days when they were young and free and wild and splashing about with their friends in the Aegean, before carelessly motorcycling over to Troy (or maybe swimming to Turkey). Did I mention they were young and free?

The Swimming Club presents a fantasy vision of the post-boomer generation and will no doubt do for some of us what David Williamson did for the generation before. Kate Cherry's production does the job, if at times a little clumsily, on an elegant, sand-floored set that acts as a canvas for some very beautiful lighting effects.

Rayson overdoes her repetitions, which bogs down action that otherwise might flow more freely. And she rather oversalts the classical references - what does the Iliad, the original epic war poem, have to do with anything, really? Was it mentioned so often because no one had got around to reading The Odyssey - which, after all, has much more to do with aging? But there is a lightness and polish in the dialogue that gives it some welcome sparkle.

The play's worst flaw is a complete lack of structure, which means panic sets in through the second act. Scene follows scene in a way that could conceivably go on indefinitely, with new plot points turning up every 15 minutes. As it is, the play burbles on for almost three hours, rather like a myopic, well-meaning uncle looking for the exit door, and is saved only by recourse to deus ex machina. One for the Rayson fans.

This review is published in today's Australian.

The Swimming Club by Hannie Rayson, directed by Kate Cherry. Designed by Christina Smith, lighting by Matt Scott, sound design by Russell Goldsmith. With Tina Bursill, Caroline Gillmer, Megan Holloway, Nicholas Papademetriou, Angel Punch McGregor, Igor Sas and John Waters. Melbourne Theatre Company and Black Swan State Theatre Company. Sumner Theatre, Melbourne. Until March 14. Playhouse Theatre, Perth, March 27-April 18.

All My Sons by Arthur Miller, directed by Kate Cherry. Designed by Richard Roberts, lighting by Jon Buswell, composer Peter Farnan. With Janet Andrewartha, Melinda Butel, Matt Dyktynski, Luke Elliot, Paul English, Yesse Spence, John Stanton, Rebekah Stone, Teague Rook and Louis Corbett/Liam Duxbury or Gianluca Toscano. Melbourne Theatre Company, Playhouse @ Victorian Arts Centre until March 31.

Arthur Miller is the uber-craftsman of 20th century American theatre. He illustrates to an exemplary degree why the word "wright", which allies itself with the skilled trades - wheelwright, shipwright - should have attached itself to "playwright". Miller's best plays are beautiful machines, moving with the slick, remorseless efficiency of oiled steel; when he speaks of his craft, it is with the lyricism of a mechanic. That his play were machines designed to invoke feeling makes this no less true.



Written in 1947, All My Sons was his first major play. And it's here that Miller maps out the artistic territory that he was to explore afterwards in plays like Death of a Salesman, The Crucible and View From a Bridge. In All My Sons, Miller embraced, as he put it, a desire to "write rationally", to enact the motion of "cause and effect, hard action, facts, the geometry of relationships". He wished, he explains rather disingenuously, to make a play "as untheatrical as possible...so far as was possible nothing was to interfere with its artlessness".

Let me tell you, there is nothing artless in this play. Nor, as it happens, untheatrical. Miller welds the emotional force of Aeschylus to the naturalism of Ibsen (with a dash of Chekhovian melodrama) and forges them anew in the vernacular of mid-20th century America. All My Sons remains, like all Miller's work, very much a play of its time and place, a play that at once manifests the optimistic post-War belief in American progress, and fiercely critiques its darker side. If it weren't so well-written, it would now, for all the resonance of its themes of corporate war profiteering, seem rather quaint; but the fact remains that it is as well-written as it is, and the damn thing goes like a train.

Miller observes all the classic verities of tragic form: All My Sons begins as close to the end of the story as possible, and sedulously observes unity of time, place and action. The whole play takes place over the space of a day in a backyard that epitomises the dream of American affluence - a wide green lawn surrounded by poplars, the porch of a large house, comfortable outdoor furniture.

It's the home of a successful businessman and family man, Joe Keller (John Stanton), and at first offers us a scene of mundane peace: it is early Sunday morning, and Joe is reading the want ads, chatting idly with his neighbour Dr Jim Bayliss (Paul English). Only one thing breaks the illusion of suburban perfection: a young apple tree, broken near its base, lies across the grass. It's the first of many subtle Biblical resonances that underlie the play: the broken Tree of Knowledge, the Abrahamic sacrifice of sons, the expulsion from Eden.

We find out, through conversation that seems only casual and incidental, that the tree was planted for Joe's son, Larry, a fighter pilot reported missing in action three years before. His mother Kate (Janet Andrewartha) has never accepted that Larry is dead. And now Larry's former girlfriend, Ann Deever (Yesse Spence) is coming to stay, invited by Chris (Matt Dyktynski), Larry's brother. He has asked her specifically so he can propose to her, a move that his mother will inevitably take as a betrayal - she's "still Larry's girl".

To make things more complicated, Ann is the daughter of Joe's former business partner, Steve, with whom Joe made armaments during the war. Steve is now in prison, convicted of deliberately covering flaws in cylinder heads that later were responsible for the deaths of 21 pilots. Joe was exonerated of wrong-doing, but there are abiding suspicions that Steve was the patsy for a decision that was actually Joe's own. George (Teague Rook), Ann's brother, phones in agitation, having visited his father for the first time since his conviction: and now the stage is set for a showdown...

All this complex plotting is cunningly introduced, so the story emerges with a subtlety that fleshes out its melodramatic bones, and the whole is leavened by Miller's dry wit. The play's overt point is about corporate industry that, like Saturn, devours its own sons. But there is another point about the self-deception and, finally, self-alienation, that underlies corporate society.

Miller's description of the alienating mechanisms of capitalism is in fact straight out of Marx. As the playwright himself, always a reliable witness to his own work, comments: "[Joe Keller] is not a partner in society but an incorporated member, so to speak, and you cannot sue personally the officers of a corporation. I hasten to make clear here that I am not merely speaking of a literal corporation, but the concept of a man's becoming a function of production or distribution to the point where his personality becomes divorced from the actions it propels".

But what gives the drama its abiding force is the ancient and bloody theme of conflict between fathers and sons. Chris, inheritor of the blood money his father has sold his soul to make for him, has blindly participated in the family myth of his father's innocence. When all is revealed, his idealistic love for his father, and his own self-image, is shattered: "I know you're no worse than most men," he says to Joe. "But I thought you were better. I never saw you as a man. I saw you as my father."

Chris's final cry, "You can be better!" reflects the hope of progressives the world over. The play's naked idealism makes me wonder if such a work could be written now: for all his critique of the American dream, Miller believed in it with as much passion as any nationalist: he just thought it could better. Somehow, Miller's kind of ideological faith no longer seems possible without a good dose of doublethink; dissent now faces the challenge of stepping outside the paradigm, as, for example, in the biopolitics of Giorgio Agamben.

It strikes me that Miller's dramaturgical decisions - the machismo of those "hard" facts, those geometrical relationships, the carefully measured, brutally effective dramatic manipulations - are not so much in argument with the evils he critiqued, as an expression of those same ideologies. Yet there's no doubt that in the hands of a master these writerly mechanics still exercise an irresistible glamour; and it also seems to me that, in his best work, Miller mercifully escapes his own best intentions. Perhaps his major achievement is to use his steely craft to express genuine passion: the plays may be machines, but the ghost screams inside.

In plays of this kind, a major task of the cast and director is not to get in the way of the writing. Kate Cherry has chosen her cast wisely and given All My Sons a by-the-book production, which is, I suspect, the most effective way to approach Miller: on his own terms. Richard Roberts' set follows Miller's directions almost to the letter, only reorienting it to open haunting, luminous skies behind the poplars (there is something about evocations of sky on stage that always gets me - perhaps it's a race memory of Shakespeare's world stage). The cast meets the challenge, led by beautifully rounded performances from John Stanton and Janet Andrewartha. Matt Dyktynski is impressive as the idealistic Chris, and there's a nice cameo from Paul English as the disillusioned doctor.

Perhaps the most telling sign of its power is that the play runs for three hours, but it seems like half the time. It passed so quickly that at the end I checked my watch in disbelief. All My Sons is a classic production of a classic play that is seldom done here, and well worth seeing.

Picture: John Stanton and Janet Andrewartha in All My Sons. Photo: Jeff Busby

Boy Gets Girl by Rebecca Gilman, directed by Kate Cherry. Designed by Christina Smith, with Belinda McClory, Stephen Phillips, John McTernan, Kenneth Ransom, Rebekah Stone, Terry Norris and Kellie Jones. Melbourne Theatre Company at the Fairfax Studio, Victorian Arts Centre, until July 2.

I don't think my ho hum feeling about Boy Gets Girl was entirely to do with the revolve, but it's fair to say that the orchestration of the play didn't help. Director Kate Cherry had an idea, and stuck to it grimly. Like so: scene ends, turn up thriller-type music and industrial lighting effects, whirl those desks and beds sedately around the theatre, cue hurried prop preparation by the actors, and bingo! new scene...

Don't get me wrong, I like revolves, they're funky. But as somebody said of love making, repetition either enhances or deadens. In this case, the inexorable rhythm set by the revolve had me yawning by half time and longing for a static stage where lights could just come up, bang, without all this technological fuss. And although Cherry's direction flattened any dramatic arc the play might have had, I'm not sure that it had much in the first place. The only real virtue of this production is that it frames a virtuoso performance by that fine actor, Belinda McClory.

Rebecca Gilman's play is an earnest exploration of the effects that stalking has on its victims, in this case a bright literary journalist Theresa (Belinda McClory) who works for a swank New York magazine. Single and workaholic, she is set up for a blind date with Tony (Stephen Phillips) by a well-meaning friend. When she decides that she's not interested, Tony won't take no for an answer, and bombards her with flowers, letters, phone calls and emails that become steadily more sinister.

Being stalked is no fun at all, as I know myself, and Gilman does a good job, at least initially, of portraying the powerlessness, paranoia and frustration that it can induce, and demonstrating the frightening lack of legal recourses for stalking victims. Theresa finds her whole life invaded by her stalker: she loses her home, her job and even her identity. And she can do nothing about it.

Less successfully, Gilman ties the issue of stalking, via some conversations with Theresa's workmates Mercer (Kenneth Ransom) and Howard (John McTernan), to the sexist objectifying of women. Her fellow office workers engage in painful and somewhat tedious self-examination, and decide that stalking is at the dark end of a continuum which begins with male sexual desire.

This argument is extended in Theresa's comic interviews with an aging John Waters-type film director, Les Kennkat (Terry Norris), whose porno horror movies have become cult classics, and the young bimbo secretary Harriet (Rebekah Stone) who is, mystifyingly, dressed like Bubbles from Absolutely Fabulous.

In blaming the phenomenon of stalking squarely on media stereotypes and patriarchal attitudes to women, Gilman glosses over the fact that 20 per cent of stalking is done by women. Stalking is obsessed and delusional behaviour that isn't inherently to do with gender, although its behavourial peculiarities are naturally inflected through gendered behaviours. To claim that male sexual attraction is simply a milder version of stalking is, to say the least, problematic.

But this is a play with a message, designed to hold the mirror up to society so we can then question it, yadayadayada. Forgive my cynicism, but this idea of theatre bores the pants off me: it's all very worthy, but mightn't it be, perhaps, a teensy bit patronising...? Its analysis never moves beyond the realms of pop psychology, and its emotional high points are all confessions, a version of what my friend called the "emotional pornography" that drives shows like Oprah and Jerry Springer. Pace the disillusioned Hester Bell of a few posts ago, might not this be the kind of skilful, dull naturalism that makes people wonder why they don't stay home and hire a DVD?

Belinda McClory gives an excellent and nuanced performance as Theresa, the emotionally spiky and increasingly vulnerable journalist, and the cast generally supports her well. But even decent performances can't make up for the essential banality of this play. It reminds me of a lot of contemporary American poetry: it's very competently written and it's literate. As a play, it moves from scene to scene efficiently and has the requisite comic relief. But as theatre, it's about as interesting as the telemovies it so closely resembles.

Melbourne Theatre Company

Take Me Out by Richard Greenberg, directed by Kate Cherry, designed by Richard Roberts. With Paul Bishop, Kenneth Ransom and Jeremy Lindsey Taylor. Melbourne Theatre Company at the Arts Centre Playhouse, until October 2.

As cricket is to the English, so is baseball to the Americans: a pastoral dream of green fields peopled by shining gods. And being, like cricket, a "metaphor for life", it's inspired some pretty silly remarks. Among the sillier, Richard Greenberg's grandiose declamation that "baseball achieves the tragic vision that democracy evades" can hang with honour. (Unlike democracy, it seems, baseball has losers). Or, even better: "Baseball is a perfect metaphor for hope in a democratic society". Is the real problem in Baghdad that they don't play baseball?

Despite the undeniable comedy of Take Me Out, there's no getting away from the earnestness that underlies it. This is a play about identity; more specifically, it's a play about American identity, a particularly anguished question at the moment. And against the interior blankness of two of the central characters - the charismatic player who comes out of the locker, unexpectedly announcing during a press conference that he is gay, and the white trash pitcher who objects to "showering with a faggot" - is set the nostalgic romance of The Game.

Darren Lemming (Kenneth Ransom) is the star hitter of the Empires, a team rather like the New York Yankees, and his blankness is characterised by an unironic narcissism, an unchallenged sense of self-importance and centrality which segues gradually to a corrosive loneliness. "I don't have a secret," he says. "I am a secret." His polar opposite is the pitcher Shane Mungitt (Jeremy Lindsey Taylor), the ultimate untermensch, whose inarticulacy is matched by his lack of self awareness. The product of a childhood as nightmarish as underclass America can dish up, he is the acme of down south bigotry, complaining about "spics" and "niggers". But as becomes clear, the differences between these two players - one adored, one reviled - are eclipsed by what they have in common, which is their inner emptiness and violence. They are, Greenberg seems to be saying, the two faces of contemporary America, and each is tacitly and hostilely dependent on the other.

Greenberg is most at home in the earlier part of the play, when he is writing what is really a kind of camp Seinfeld: Lemming's dealings with his thicko compadres after his coming out are all urbane New York wit, with a light but pointed hilarity poking fun at political correctness or victim culture. When the play becomes more portentous, it is less successful; despite a couple of very powerfully-written scenes, the energy sighs out of it. Not uncoincidentally, that's when the big-picture metaphors about baseball really start flying around.

Kate Cherry's production is slick and fast moving, supported by a strong cast, and overcomes the problem of overblown rhetoric by camping it up (it seems in New York that the baseball epiphanies were said in all seriousness: that would definitely not have worked in Australia). This undercutting irony works very well in the first half of the evening, but after interval the play requires a shift of strategy which is not forthcoming, and the production and the performances lose conviction.

Although I think the production could have dealt differently with the second half, I wondered how much this slackening of energy had to do with the play's structure. (Or maybe it's just that the American Dream has been Dreamed to Death). This play's bloodlines are impeccably American - out of Arthur Miller by Malamud's The Natural - but it is written as if theatre stopped evolving after A View from a Bridge. It even has a couple of narrators - Kippy Sunderstrom, adeptly played by Paul Bishop, a similar figure to Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, and Greenberg's self-confessed mouthpiece Mason Marzac, an appealingly crumpled performance by Simon Burke, who is baseball's naive enthusiast and its real heart. Together they orchestrate a classic three-act structure which seems, like the pastoral echo of baseball itself, almost quaintly old fashioned. As the action gets more serious, the narration become more intrusive: in the end, it's hard to see why it is there, except as a means of neatly tying up the stories.

And, perhaps, the narrative deflects some of the play's emotional bleakness: that is, it shields the audience from the implications of the play, as perhaps baseball (I am almost sure that Greenberg does not mean this, though I find it an irresistible conclusion) shields the soul of America from its inner emptiness. In which case, Take Me Out very neatly fits Brecht's description of bourgeois theatre, affirming rather than challenging its audience. Essentially it's an extended sitcom, and it can't bear the weight of tragedy without becoming overblown and self important. It aims for the grandeur and sweep of Angels in America, another gay fantasia on the American soul, but without Kushner's political savagery or fatal beauty, it settles finally for the winsome. I suspect America deserves worse.

Melbourne Theatre Company