The Zombie State by Ben Ellis, directed by Daniel Schlusser. Set and costumes designed by Kate Davis, lighting design by Niklas Pajanti and Danny Pettingill, sound design by Darrin Verhagen. Melbourne Workers Theatre and Union House Theatre @ the Union Theatre, Melbourne University, until September 27.

For all my enthusiasm for popular culture, I am not hugely au fait with the genre of horror films. I can cope with the arty, Henry Jamesian end of things, but hard-core schlock horror has far too powerful an effect for me to watch it with any kind of pleasure. One of my more embarrassing moments, back in the days when I was a wage-slave journalist, was being sent to write my one and only film review for the now defunct tabloid shocker, The Sunday Press.


In those pre-DVD days, the half-dozen or so Melbourne crrritics were assembled in a mini-theatre at Hoyts for the preview. The film happened to be a remake of the old classic The Fly, starring Jeff Goldblum. I'm surprised I remember anything about it: I spent a lot of time with my hands over my eyes, moaning "you mean, people pay to watch this stuff?", while the hardened hacks regarded me with deep perplexity. In a mini-cinema, everyone can hear you scream.

That was, quite rightly, the end of my film reviewing career. Since then, the only time I've dared to watch horror films is on the back of plane seats, where the screen is six inches wide and I can switch to a deeply unfunny Gwyneth Paltrow comedy when the music begins the shrill violin thing which means that the wide-eyed woman who is creeping down a dark hallway in her nightdress is about to die horribly with the maximum amount of splat.

And so it is that I've never watched a zombie film (well, not all the way through, anyway), which means that there are aspects of The Zombie State that are lost on me. For all that, it's not difficult to see the subversive possibilities of zomboid metaphors in critiquing contemporary society. The dehumanising power of corporatism seen through automonic workers was first explored in Karel Čapek's 1921 SF play Rossum's Universal Robots, and has been a hardy theme through radical 20th century writing. And it's a cue Ben Ellis and Daniel Schlusser have picked up with enthusiasm.

The Zombie State, which has been developed under the aegis of the Melbourne Workers Theatre, is maybe the first play to have a go at the clean, mean team of Kevin '07: the impeccably coiffured, business-friendly "third way" socialism you have when the Left as a governmental force as shrivelled and died, leaving in its place what is effectively a one-party state. It is also one of the first Australian plays which attempts to deal with a political landscape in which designations like "Right" and "Left" are increasingly meaningless, and in which traditional theatrical politics are drastically alienated from the social forces that they allegedy embody.

Ellis developed some of the dialogue from transcripts of workers' testimonials in the Howard Government's Commission for a Living Wage, and originally envisaged a piece of verbatim theatre, before deciding that a zombie play would be more fun and just as pertinent. The result is one of this year's more fascinating failures: a text that falls between straight satire and a more poetic impulse that never quite comes into focus.

The play opens in a waiting room - perhaps a Medicare office, perhaps Social Services, perhaps a hospital - in which a row of people sit in plastic chairs. On the left are those whose blank, dead eyes are deeply shadowed with zombified exhaustion; on the right are a group of people in smart suits, wearing phone headsets. For some time nothing happens, and we watch a smartly choreographed comedy of institutional boredom.

Then a woman demands robotically of a young man: "I'm sorry to ask this, but do you have private health insurance?" The lack of private health insurance means the young man can't afford to save an infected tooth. Instead, he has it extracted in an exquisitely carnal operation, and turns into a zombie: despite his pain, he insists on working his shift as a waiter in a nightclub, covered in blood and drugged to the eyeballs. And so zombiedom spreads it undeadness...

The neatly suited man is Kevin, the Prime Minister (Syd Brisbane). Kevin is visiting Melbourne with his team of four identical diary secretaries, for the 2021 Summit: he needs the best and brightest brains to power his new economy. What he intends to do with those brains becomes, of course, bloodily clear during the course of the play.

Spouting the groupspeak of think tanks and focus groups, the Canberra visitors move through the undead of Melbourne, marvelling at the effect of the brave new economy. They are staying at the casino, which is notable for its huge gas flames that used to roar up and roast unlucky seagulls before they introduced subliminal sound to keep the charred corpses at bay. The hellish gouts of flame are recurring images, flaring up and hypnotising the zombies, just as governments and people are hypnotised by the lure of fast cash.

Of course, the zombies (and seagulls) wreak their revenge, and it turns out that the head zombie is the PM himself, sacrificing his human vitality for the good of the country or, at least, for its corporate sector. And a fair bit of mayhem goes on in between, with dark plots involving bus drivers and bargain basement shopping centres and seers in wheelchairs.

Some of the more powerful moments are monologues from zombies, surreally fragmented descriptions of mundane suffering (tooth ache, mortgage panic) that perhaps are the shadows of the verbatim genesis of this project. This sits uneasily with the more didactic political satire, which amounts to a straightforward condemnation of the alienated and self-serving government-speak spouted by the politicos. The political fable overshadows the human experience that drives it, making the whole, finally, less than the sum of its parts.

There is a feeling that the production and text are straining against each other, and at times cancelling each other out. Certainly, the production dominates the play. Director Daniel Schlusser has assembled a hugely impressive team and uses it to good effect. Kate Davis's design features a screen that lifts to reveal a foreshortened hotel lobby/hospital space, with glassed boxes on both sides that be used as performance spaces or, with blinds drawn, for projections, which include scenes filmed in black and white.

The set is lit with the requisite bloody flair by Niklas Pajanti and Danny Pettingall, and features a brilliant soundscape by Darrin Verhagen. Schlusser has 23 performers, whom he directs in a constantly changing and always interesting mise en scene. It amounts to a hugely ambitious project that somehow loses sight of the trees in the thick of the forest, but which is still well worth a look.

Picture: The Zombie State, by Ben Ellis. Photo: Ponch Hawkes