*Spoiler alert*

In A Golem Story, Michael Kantor and Lally Katz reach into Judaeic folklore and mystic traditions, fashioning a work of theatre which is at once outstandingly beautiful and frustratingly perplexing. Mounted in the Merlyn, this is one of Kantor's most compellingly conceived works. The action occurs in a simulcrum of a candle-lit 16th century Prague synagogue, sketched by a scaffolding of iron geometry and bare wood, the sole decoration an elaborate candelabra. The performance is punctuated by Hebrew and Yiddish songs, led by cantor Michel Laloum, so the whole work has the gravity of religious ritual.

Ambitious, starkly simple and often brilliantly performed, I still felt naggingly that something was missing. I missed a sense of cross-grained complexity, a counter-argument, that at first I attributed to Katz's text. The odd thing is that the text reads with more complexity than it performs. I suspect that as theatre, the whole has the air of a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total artwork (first theorised, ironically enough given the subject matter, by anti-Semite Richard Wagner) in which all elements are sternly subordinated to a single idea, and that this has the effect of flattening out some of the textual ambiguities.


A Golem Story is based on the most enduring of golem legends, the Golem of Prague, which exists in many variations (a major source, peculiarly enough, is called the Katz manuscript). Most literary scholars date the legend to around the 1750s. It runs more or less like this: under the reign of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II in the 1500s, the chief Rabbi of Prague, Rabbi Loew, created a golem from the mud of the Vltava River to protect Jews against anti-Semitic pogroms. A golem is an automaton activited to life by language: in this version, the golem is given life by the name of God inscribed in a tablet kept in its mouth, its chem, and is destroyed when the tablet is removed; in others, the word Emet (meaning truth or reality) is inscribed on its forehead, and the Rabbi destroys the golem by rubbing out its first letter, making the word Met (death).

The Golem legend has inspired writers from Mary Shelley to China Mieville. It persists for its compelling metaphor, in which man's hubristic creation of sentience destroys him. Most often it's a narrative of transgression, as in Frankenstein, when a scientist follows his highest idealisms, only to create a misunderstood monster. Likewise, the Golem of Prague escapes the Rabbi's control and rampages murderously through the city killing Gentiles and, in some versions, its creators. It's a legend which reaches deeply into Judaic mysticism, and especially into the Kabbalah, a mindbendingly complex collection of esoteric lore which originated in 13th century Europe. The Kabbalah weaves a dizzying range of influences, including Gnosticism and Neo-Platonism, into Jewish theosophy. Central to the Kabbalah is the Sefer Yesirah (The Book of Creation), a text which dates from somewhere between the 1st and 6th centuries, in which are instructions for making a golem.

The last director to investigate these traditions in Melbourne was Barrie Kosky, in his early works for Gilgul in the 1990s, and here Kantor demonstrates that he is by no means an identikit of Kosky: this is a vastly different theatrical take on the same material. Kosky's interest in mysticism is evident in almost all his work: it manifests as a fascination with ecstatic states, in the uniting of the sacred and the profane. Kantor is, unexpectedly perhaps, more interested in the aesthetic shapes of ritual and, perhaps even more unexpectedly, in the word itself. This is not a theatre of irrational extremity, but of rational argument.

Katz's text is a parable of power, politics and transgression. My first thought was that there seemed to be a remarkable absence of Katz: there is little of that sense of barely restrained anarchic imaginings and unexpected collisions that characterise her work so far. Instead, she creates a disciplined, episodic narrative that draws on a number of golem stories and gives a contemporary twist. The play works as a fable, with each character carrying a symbolic charge: the Rabbi (Brian Lipson), the Student Amos (Dan Spielman), the woman Ahava (Yael Stone), the Guard (Greg Stone) and the Emperor (Mark Jones). So the Rabbi represents one argument about Judaeism and God, Amos another, the Guard represents the anti-Semitic Gentile, the Emperor the civilised Gentile, and Ahava - her name one letter away from the Hebrew for Eve - represents Woman.

None of these representations is quite so stark as written here, as I'll tease out below. But it does ask for an allegorical reading, and here I found myself confused and troubled. Although it can be read as a story about the perils of technology - genetic experiment, nuclear power - it's presented as a specifically Jewish story, exploring the dilemma of a persecuted people. The program features a quote from a children's book which comments: "Considering the Jewish people's long history of conflict and suffering, it is no surprise that the legend of the Golem, in which massive physical strength defeats overwhelming persecution, remains one of the most powerful traditional stories". And from there, it's a short step to contemporary Israel, which perhaps is its own Golem: the armed state lurching out of control into destruction.

Most reductively, it can be construed as a parable of Zionist militarism; and here the character of the Guard is especially problematic. The least nuanced of all the characters, he is a fanatic anti-Semite, driven by the mingled loathing and desire that constitutes hatred. When the Emperor decrees that the Blood Libel - the canard that Jews killed Gentile children to drain their blood for religious rituals - can only be reported by parents, he prepares to kill his own son, in order to unleash the slaughter of the Jews of the city.

The Guard's murder of his own child is so close to claims that Arabs slaughter their own children in terrorist attacks or, closer to home, to the Children Overboard affair, that it pulled me up short. In mediaeval Europe, Jewish communities were often accused baselessly of the murder of dead or disappeared children, but I don't know of any mediaeval precedent of Gentile parents killing their own children in order to libel Jews. (The closest is accounts, during the Crusades, of Jewish parents killing their own children and themselves, to save them being murdered by Crusaders.) As in these contemporary narratives of Arabs, the Guard is driven by reasonless, fanatical hatred.

Yet there is another major thread in the text - that of misogyny - which remains subliminal in the production, and which is perhaps the missing counter-argument. Most of the time it exists as a puzzle: it only becomes clear towards the end, when you realise that in this world, women are completely absent, except in the form that men have created: the feminine.

The play opens as Ahava wakes painfully from unconsciousness. She is told by the Rabbi that she has been possessed by a Dybbuk, the ghost of her former fiance, Israel Hasidim, who cut his own throat. Ahava herself has no memory of anything: she has no self, and worst of all, no sense of God. Throughout the play this emptiness exists as sexual longing: she pleads with both the Guard and Amos to touch her, to fill her up. The only female character in the play, she exists as sexual and spiritual absence. Amos, the student, regards her with terror as a blasphemy who will bring down destruction on the Jewish people. The only creature who responds to her panicked desire is the Golem.

The source of this emptiness only becomes clear towards the end of the play, when we find out that Ahava is a Golem herself, created by Israel Hasidim. Ahava is not a person, but an object, created by man to answer his own desires. She represents not so much Woman as the Feminine, the male-created sex: and as an object or chattel, she is the subject of bickering: the Emperor claims she is his commissioned artwork, while the Rabbi claims her for himself.


This twist is drawn from another Golem legend, but it suggests the rather more benign myth of Pygmalion, the sculptor who makes a woman of ivory so beautiful that he falls in love with it. For me it most compellingly recalls the Welsh myth of Blodeuwedd, one of the tales from the Mabinogion. Blodeuwedd was made out of flowers by the wizard Gwydion, to be a wife for the king Llew Llaw Gyffes. Blodeuwedd has an affair with Gronw Pebyr, together they plot to murder Llew, and as punishment Blodeuwedd is turned into an owl. Here the feminine turns deadly, defying the will that creates her in her will to selfhood. In A Golem Story, this doesn't become explicit until the very end, when Ahava claims her selfhood. She rejects her status as object and claims her place as a creator: "All these men - these men from God - but no man but the Golem loved me. I was made by them. But only the one I made held me."

The Guard's fanatic anti-Semitism becomes explicable when read as a form of misogyny. In her book Powers of Horror, Julie Kristeva links misogyny and anti-Semitism closely: she reads it as the forcible expulsion of the Other, as a symbol of the filth rejected from the self. The Jew and the Feminine are both, in this theory, expressions of the same horror. "There looms, within abjection, one of those dark, violent revolts of being ... a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the hope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable... The abject has only one quality of being - that of being opposed to the I." The master ego defines itself, in fact grounds its being, on what it rejects. "I sometimes wonder," muses the Guard earlier in the play, "if my elder son is more female..."

And here is the click, the mechanism of violence: the Guard's loathing of Jews and the violence against his own son emerges from the same source. "It is not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection, but what disturbs identity, system, order," says Kristeva. "What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite..." The Golem, poised between humanity and inanimate mud, life and death, male and female, is this ambiguity personified. So, as it happens, is the Emperor, whose almost amoral passion for art and hunger for knowledge is presented as feminine, even camp. Between the Golem and the Emperor are the Rabbi and his student: Amos will have no truck with this ambiguity, whereas the pragmatic Rabbi is prepared to negotiate. But in their rejection of the female, they are closer to the Guard than either would like to admit.

This thread is certainly present in the play (although it still seems unclear to me, perhaps because of the complete absence of an actual woman) but it sinks almost to invisibility under the production. I picked it out afterwards, thinking backwards from the end and from reading the text; and I know I wasn't inattentive while I was watching. This is partly because the episodic argument of the text is fragmented by the songs. Sometimes the singing acts as a kind of oratorio, and replaces action: at these points, especially in the final song (A Pastochl A Troimer, a song which berates God for His lack of care and calls for His burial), I found my inability to understand the words critical. The sheer beauty of the voices and performances paradoxically intensifies this sense of confusion. The critique of militarised masculism that is embodied in Ahava is obscured by a sense of reverence for the very things criticised.

It certainly makes for a fascinating evening of theatre. For all my reservations, I think A Golem Story demonstrates Kantor's strengths as a director: and the performances, by a top-rate cast, are compelling. It's an especial treat to see Dan Spielman back on stage - a scene where he describes the Golem's attack on the soldiers of Prague is a highlight - and Yael Stone's anguished performance physicalises the agony of growing consciousness. In Anna Cordingley and Paul Jackson's stunning design, the Golem is represented by a beam of light, a simple solution to a difficult theatrical problem. It's elegant, beautiful and powerful; perhaps too elegant, beautiful and powerful. Definitely not to be missed.

Photos: Top: Yael Stone in A Golem Story; bottom (foreground) Yael Stone, (back) Mark Jones and Brian Lipson. Photos: Pia Johnson

A Golem Story, by Lally Katz, directed by Michael Kantor. Sets and costumes by Anna Cordingley, lighting by Paul Jackson, musical direction and vocal arrangements by Mark Jones, Jewish/religious consultant Michel Laloum. Performed by Nicholas De Rossos, Joshua Gordon, Mark Jones, Michel Laloum, Brian Lipson, Dan Spielman, Greg Stone and Yael Stone. Merlyn Theatre, Malthouse Theatre, until July 2.

I saw three astonishing works of theatre last week, all created from texts not originally intended for the stage. One, A Woman in Berlin, is based on a personal memoir of the Russian occupation of Berlin at the end of World War 2. Another was Fragment 31's Irony is Not Enough: Essay on my Life as Catherine Deneuve, a poem by Canadian poet and scholar Anne Carson. The poem wasn't so much adapted - the collaborators performed the work as written - but "translated" into a fascinating work of theatre. The third was Barrie Kosky's terrifyingly beautiful The Tell-Tale Heart, an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's gothic story about a murderer's self-betrayal.

Unsurprisingly given the source material, each work is markedly different from the others. All the same, they each have something profound in common: none assumes that either language or theatre is transparent. And in transforming a written work into performance, they reveal something profound about writing itself.


All writing is a dance around absence. A text notates something that isn't present, and perhaps was never present; it enacts the magic of revelation, of making visible what is invisible. Writing is memory, imagination, thought, made manifest: it gives what is otherwise unseen and intangible an illusory solidity. It is a record of an act - the act of writing - that generates its meaning once the act is finished, once the text is written and can be read.

What is most crucially absent from the written word is the body itself. A body makes a text, a body reads it, a body imagines and responds; but the text itself is bodiless. Without flesh and nerves or organs, boneless and hairless, a text is merely marks on a page or a screen or a wall: it's a trace of something, not any thing itself. The fetish of book design, focusing on the book as object, conceals the evanescence of text with an appearance of permanence: yet the object remains obdurately silent, its meanings dormant, until the immediate moment in which it is read.

When a text enters the theatre, the body is pushed into its foreground: both performer and audience are present. The performer's body is mediated: it's a body shaped by language, that now in turn interrogates and transforms the text. Sensitive adaptations or translations understand this recouped embodiment as the primary gift of theatre: the performer is the presence through which meaning is animated. And this meaning, whatever it is, in turn becomes memory, a potential text carried in the bodies of the audience. Sometimes it seems that the whole of human communication exists in this constant transformation from one state to another and back again: from revelation to hiddenness, from object to subject, from the intangible to the palpable. One reason I find theatre so fascinating is that it makes these transformations impossible to ignore.

The three works I saw all place the body in the centre of performance, exposing it as a site of trauma. Here language fragments under the pressure of its enactment. The performer's body - ambiguous, carnal, paradoxically private - is the focus of attention as the bodily absence hidden in the writing spills into an excess of presence. In performance, these texts are thickened and made opaque by what language is unable, finally, to express: the tactility of pain and desire, the incorrigibility of physical experience.

The performer is a complex presence that cannot easily claim its own authenticity. He or she offers a re-presencing, an enacted present of an imagined past. Yet this representation can't dissolve either into sheer abstraction. It is immanent with its own authenticating physicality: the actor's sweat, the actor's voice vibrating in the same air the audience is breathing, the sense of bodily duration. In all truthful theatre, the performer's enactment carries a double knowledge: the body both represents and is; the actor is both herself and someone else. The mask is real.

*

To claim that A Woman in Berlin is a confronting text is to state the obvious. To begin with, it's a personal memoir, a vexed form that often sparks fierce battles about its authenticity. A diary of two months of the Russian occupation of Berlin in 1945, it gives a detailed first-hand account of the experiences of a young, "well brought up" woman attempting to survive in the city in the final days of World War 2. It is, above all, a dispassionate account of survival - pages are devoted to the urgent task of finding enough food and fuel to sustain life. But the most sensational - and deeply contested - aspect of the book is its account of rape by the Russian troops.

Historians give differing estimates of how many women were raped during the occupation - some say at least 100,000, others say up to two million. The troops that arrived were bent on revenge. Hitler's invasion of Russia is generally agreed to be the bloodiest war in history; by the end of World War 2, 30 million people had been killed on the Eastern Front. The orgy of destruction that took place in Berlin was one of the final atrocities of the war.

The anonymous author was named in 2003 by literary critic Jens Bisky as Marta Hillers, an educated and well-travelled journalist who had written some small-time propaganda for the Nazis, but was probably not a member of the party herself. She was in her early 30s when the Russian stormed Berlin. The book was initially released in 1954, when there was little interest in Germany (or elsewhere) in examining the suffering of Germans, the aggressors in history's most ruinous war; and the author herself refused to republish it. But in the early years of this decade, there was renewed interest: publications such as W.G. Sebald's A Natural History of Destruction, or Anthony Beevor's The Fall of Berlin, began to expose a history that had been hidden by shame or trauma.

Unsurprisingly, rape is the centre of the book's controversy. Anonymous's account - especially her semi-romantic, almost tender relationship with a Russian major, with its hints of treacherous collaboration with the enemy - was considered to have smirched the honour of German women, and the truthfulness or otherwise of the book has been fiercely contested. It's a text with literary qualities by a clearly literate woman; the original writings were retyped and expanded for publication. Paradoxically, the more literary it appeared, the less reliable it was assumed to be. The poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who republished it in 2000, demanded that it be seen as a strictly documentary source, a work of absolute historical truth, and historian Anthony Beevor validates its historical authenticity.

For all that, perhaps the most illuminating analysis is of the book as a literary work, because that is how it represents itself, complete with a epigraph from A Winter's Tale. Above all, the diary recounts the struggle to survive as an entire world is destroyed: a city breaks down under war, cutting off food supplies, electricity, all public services; and with it comes the collapse of all moral and social certainty. The most graphic symptom of that collapse is the transformation of the women in the book into into casual sexual prey.

The book is in part not just about rape, but its representation. "What does it mean—rape?," Anonymous asks herself. "When I said the word for the first time aloud ... it sent shivers down my spine. Now I can think it and write it with an untrembling hand, say it out loud to get used to hearing it said. It sounds like the absolute worst, the end of everything—but it’s not." The women in the book, and even the soldiers who rape them, whose relatives had been raped by Germans, oscillate between an understanding of rape as "worse than death" and a brutalised jokiness that is perhaps more confronting than any other aspect of the book. Anonymous's dispassionate observations make the line between victim and aggressor extremely unstable: at one point she even claims that Berlin's ordeal "balanced an account", extracting from the Germans some of the suffering they had dealt others.

Given these complexities, it would be misleading and reductive to present this text as a simple story of victimhood. It would be even more perilous to assume an immediate empathy with this young woman and the atrocities she suffered and witnessed; that would risk a kind of emotional pornography, an exploitative sensationalism. Instead, just as the diary is a literary imagining of real events, director Janice Muller and performer Meredith Penman frame A Woman in Berlin consciously as a work of art. Penman's performance permits us to witness an act of imaginative identification that shifts from the present to an evocation of the past.

The set appears to be an exhibition about the conquest of Berlin, with text and mementos on the white walls and a gallery bench in the centre. A young contemporary woman enters, wandering casually from item to item. She idly presses a button and listens to an audio in German. She earnestly contemplates a picture. She is any of us, peering from the outside into an atrocity we can barely understand. Then she drops her leather jacket, and her dress is subtly changed: she is no longer of the 21st century. She begins to speak extracts from the diary.

This is an extraordinarily powerful performance. Much of its power emerges from its intelligent restraint: it is only when it finishes that its trauma really registers. Penman presents a woman brutalised by her experience, not only of rape, but of the bare struggle to survive; the self she once knew - cultured, middle class, safe - splinters under the deprivations of war. She witnesses and reports, not only on what she sees, but on her own feelings: her observing, writing self is the single coherent element of a world reduced to madness.

In the end, all that matters is that she lives. Her survival is not triumphant, but a bitter, self-knowing will that recognises the shame of "naked life", as all the markers of civilisation are stripped away to a bare play of power: an animal instinct that overpowers every other consideration. We know that knowledge is now imprinted on her body and will never be undone: it is now part of who she is.

Then, just as the audience does, Penman transforms back into the young contemporary woman, picks up her jacket and walks out of the gallery.

***

"Irony is a mask," says Anne Carson in her poem Irony is Not Enough: Essay On My Life As Catherine Deneuve. "The problem is that we become the mask". It's an understanding of the paradox of performance that perhaps explains why Carson's work, intentionally or not, so often enters the theatre: in 2003, this particular poem also formed part of the basis for a dance/theatre work by William Forsythe, Kammer/Kammer.

Fragment 31's production is a brilliant collaboration between some of our most interesting theatre artists: performers Luke Mullins and Leisa Shelton, designer Anna Cordingley, composer Jethro Woodward and lighting designer Jenny Hector. In their rendition, the poem is presented unchanged: as they explain in the program, "to edit, re-write or change in any way the writing of Anne Carson is to defeat the purpose of choosing this writer and her work as the source material".

This signals what could potentially be an inhibiting reverence for the text. But this profoundly intelligent collaboration avoids fetishising the text, instead opening up its complexities into a parallel essay about fetish, the irrational displacement of desire. The poem's fragmented narrative is refracted through an equally fragmented performance, in which the component parts of theatre - design, sound, staging, performance and text - become fluid constructions that are made and unmade before our eyes.

When we enter the theatre, we seem to be entering a workshop: there are tables covered with technical equipment, and parts of set are still being dressed. The designer is kneeling on the floor, working on a design detail with tape and a box-cutter; the performers are leafing through files of script, checking the pages are all there, the sound designer is testing levels. There is an air of industry and preparatory concentration. Once the audience is seated, Leisa Shelton sits down with a businesslike air at a desk at the very front, only feet away from the audience. Darkness pulls in around her, a single light on her face. She says the first words of the poem: "Je commence". And so it does.

Most of the poem is spoken by Luke Mullins, with interruptions of pre-recorded text and dialogic lines spoken by Shelton. The writerly self, which seems a binding unity in the text despite its fragmentations, is immediately split and mediated. Carson's exact language is full of raw spaces, caesurae which electrically shift the speaker's realities. She is a classics lecturer suddenly pierced with desire for one of her students ("Knife of boy. Knife of girl.") Burned by this impossible desire, she imagines herself as Catherine Deneuve. She speaks of herself in the third person in one sentence, in the first in the next. She enacts the repetitions of traumatic desire in a cityscape chilly with snow.

Desire is traumatic, as Carson says, because it is felt as a disintegration of the known self. It can only be experienced as fragmentation. In response, Fragment 31 takes apart the supposed coherence of theatre: they present a series of contingent unities, theatrical images that collapse back upon themselves. Shelton dons a blonde wig and becomes Catherine Deneuve behind a table of telephones in a miniature set that mimics a bourgeois Parisian apartment: she does not answer the insistently ringing phone, but it is answered nevertheless. The designers focus a light on her, rearrange her clothes. They hold an empty black frame in front of her hand or her foot, so we might examine the parts of her body, adorned by a bracelet, a shoe, as if they are a close-up in a film. They hand Mullins a microphone, and he speaks into it.

The tableau collapses. The stage returns to a raw state of preparedness, and then is remade as something else. These pauses begin to generate a particular electricity: we are continually reminded that this is a performance, that it is an artifice. A poem, said Marianne Moore, is "an imaginary garden with real toads in it": what is real here is the articulation of feeling. Once or twice we seem to see the performers stripped of any mask at all. They stand in front of the audience at a momentary loss, and the entire pretence briefly dissolves into a larger understanding of our own implication in this anxiety, this painfulness and loss. All this occurs with an delicate and precise attention to rhythm - not merely the rhythms of Carson's language, but the breath of the stage, how it contracts and expands in the light, how the performers inhabit or leave a space.

And then, quite suddenly, we are at the end of the poem, and the work is finished. Blackout.

***


I had forgotten the sheer brilliance of Barrie Kosky's The Tell-Tale Heart. This was my second viewing: I saw it in 2007, when it was staged in the Malthouse workshop as part of the Melbourne Festival. Here Kosky's production is remounted by Michael Kantor in the Merlyn Theatre, with Michael Kieran Harvey taking Kosky's place on the piano.

Edgar Allan Poe's story is a famous parable of the self-betrayal of guilt. Its nameless narrator suffers from a disease that has resulted in a morbid over-sensitivity, which drives him to murder an old man, perhaps his father, with whom he lives. The murder, he explains, is necessary, even though he felt no animus towards his victim. Rather, the reverse - "I loved the old man. He had never wronged me... I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! He had the eye of a vulture - a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees - very gradually - I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever."

The murder might be an act of madness, but it is not irrational - as the narrator points out, he is extremely logical, and plans his crime meticulously. Poe's anti-hero is perhaps an extreme case of hyper-rationality, of a logic devoid of the wider considerations of felt reason: the perception of the whole is obliterated by a single anguished act of cognition, from which all else follows. He never explains why the old man's eye is so dreadful to him: it is enough that it is predatory and veiled, an inhuman organ. What he doesn't say is that the eye looks back at him. Perhaps what is most unbearable to the murderer is what it sees, or what he thinks it sees.

In this performance, The Tell-Tale Heart is a single act of theatre, as cleanly achieved as a knife: there is absolutely nothing extraneous, nothing that is not needful. It begins as the auditorium lights gradually fade on the sumptuous red curtain that veils the stage. We sit for what seems like a long time in total darkness and silence: there is the faint sound of the curtains opening, but otherwise nothing.

Then, so suddenly that it made me jump, there blares out a jazz era song which is, in its bright brashness, an assault, and a single spotlight illuminates a tiny object in the vast blackness. At first it seems as if might be a trick of the eye, but gradually you see that it is a face, or half a face: a mask. The spotlight shifts like a voyeur, exposing first one side of the face and then another, until at last there is the whole head, suspended in the darkness. It looks like the face of a corpse, or a ghost: tonight we will listen to the dead.

Martin Niedermair speaks thickly, as if his lips are decaying, as if the words must be imagined and created before he can utter them. He stops and starts unpredictably, distorting the shapes of sentences; at one point the struggle to speak reduces him to mere slavering. It's an extraordinary performance, in which the human body becomes itself a thing of shadow, opaque, mysterious and sinister. Even the boundaries of his body are questionable: by shaking his head rapidly from right to left, Niedemair blurs our vision and briefly becomes a living sculpture by Francis Bacon, a two-headed, anguished monster.

Paul Jackson's lighting is miraculous: he doesn't so much design light as sculpt the darkness. As the lights widen around Niedermair, they reveal the single feature of Anna Tregloan's set: a vertiginous staircase, bereft of banisters, floats in the darkness, stretching right up to the roof of the theatre. It's so steep that it's impossible not to fear that Niedermair might fall off: it's a tension that screws up with the narrative, until he is revealed lying impossibly upside down, as if he has indeed fallen, singing of his yearning for a love that he has himself murdered.

In the controlled environs of the Merlyn, this production has a feeling of absolute precision. Harvey's exquisite renditions of Bach and Purcell bring a new and aching loveliness to the performance, drawing out the palpable tensions between beauty and repulsion that drive this production. But there are more pragmatic reasons too: the blackouts occur, for example, without the distraction of ushers holding up boards to conceal the exit signs. It is, quite simply, one of the best works of theatre I have ever seen.

Pictures: Top: Meredith Penman in A Woman in Berlin. Photo: Andy Baker. Bottom: Martin Niedemair in The Tell-Tale Heart. Photo: Jeff Busby

A Woman in Berlin, by Anonymous, adapted by Jancie Muller and Meredith Penman, directed by Janice Muller. Set and costume design by Gabrille Logan, lighting by Matt Cox, sound design by Russell Goldsmith. Performed by Meredith Penman. Tower Theatre, the Malthouse, until November 28.

Irony Is Not Enough: Essay On My Life As Catherine Deneuve, by Anne Carson. Created by Anna Cordingley, Jenny Hector, Luke Mullins, Leisa Shelton and Jethro Woodward. North Melbourne Arts House. Closed.

The Tell-Tale Heart, after Edgar Allan Poe, directed by Barrie Kosky. Return season directed by Michael Kantor. Design adaptation: Anna Tregloan (set and costumes) and Paul Jackson (lighting). Performed by Martin Niedermair. Merlyn Theatre, Malthouse, until December 2.

Fame, so the proverb goes, is a calamity. To be sure, it's the kind of calamity that looks like a privilege, a disaster that masquerades as respect. But consider what happens when perhaps the greatest calamity of all befalls a writer and he turns into an adjective. A lifetime of work - diverse, idiosyncratic, speculative, contradictory, above all contingent - freezes into a single epithet. The words Chekhovian, Kafkaesque, Dantesque, Pinteresque, Beckettian, Shakespearean, become a deadly row of bullets the critic shoots into the blank wall of cultural regard.

It's part of the endless conflict between the cultural machine and art. Both need each other - without the cultural machine the artist might as well hide in a box, and without the artist, the cultural machine would have no reason to exist. Yet both are mutually hostile, waging a covert war that neither can really win. The machine likes its cultural product categorisable, recognisable, marketable: above all, it needs art to be tame. Artists - which is to say, artists who make any art worth the candle - resist cultural pigeonholes with every fibre of their being.


Naturally, the cultural machine likes its artists best when they are dead. "The words of a dead man," said Auden in his panegyric to Yeats, "Are modified in the guts of the living." Hence the faux reverence for Shakespeare, which viciously attacks any attempt to release the living artist from the half-life of monumental fame. Within this is a kind of love, but if it were transposed to actual relationships, it would be the possessive obsession in which the loved object is jealously locked in a dark room. Yet this transformation of living art to cultural monument is an inevitable and necessary process: despite its catastrophic side-effects, without cultural memory the artist and her work would be forgotten. And, as much as the erasure of radicality, this digestion can mean a renewal of vitality. I am the kind of audience member who always prays for the latter.

So, to turn to Brecht, who perhaps more than most others remains locked inside his adjective. "Brechtian" has become shorthand for many things: most immediately, it calls up the theory of Verfremdungseffekt, often misunderstood as an abjuration of feeling in favour of didactic intellection, which itself summons a kind of dour Marxist theatre about tractor drivers. Brecht is, quite rightly, regarded as the exemplary political playwright, and perhaps the most influential of the 20th century: but what is most often forgotten about Brecht - especially in the English language - is that he is a poet.

The Threepenny Opera is an early work of Brecht's. At the time of its writing, Brecht was 29; he had just had his first success with Man Equals Man and was working with the politically brilliant but financially unstable director Piscator, who first conceived of the idea of Epic Theatre. Brecht was then in the early stages of his encounter with Marx: he was yet to meet Walter Benjamin, was on the threshold of writing the first of his learning plays and was midway through his opera Mahagonny. The year before, he had released his first book of poems, The Manual of Piety (Die Hauspostille).

The Threepenny Opera, chaotically scrambled together with Kurt Weill's score and sets by Caspar Neher from Elisabeth Hauptmann's translation of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, was the work of a young man in extreme creative flux. The premiere famously teetered on the brink of disaster: the dress rehearsal reportedly went down like a lead balloon, and the first night audience sat unmoved through the first act, until suddenly something caught fire and they broke out into wild applause. And thus was born the biggest theatrical hit of the Weimar Republic.

Ever since, The Threepenny Opera has been something of an embarrassment to hardcore Marxist interpreters of Brecht. Its greatest fans were the bourgeoisie whom it supposedly attacked: they liked nothing better than having their greed, hypocrisy and amorality so entertainingly exposed, and no one could demonstrate that they were any the better for it. Yet Brecht never disowned it; rather, he remained somewhat obsessed with it, continually fiddling with the text and even writing a film version.

This alone shows that Brecht the poet always dominated Brecht the political didact. As Eric Bentley points out, with considerable perceptiveness, Brecht's Epic Theatre is really the theatre of a poet. "The epic theory can be represented by unfriendly critics as Brecht's attempt to make a virtue of the special limitation of his dramaturgy, the dramaturgy of a writer of ballads. To which one might retort that the epic form vindicated this dramaturgy and showed that one can derive drama from poetic balladry." Indeed.

Perhaps the most illuminating prepartory read for The Threepenny Opera might be his Manual of Piety, a collection of savagely beautiful ballads satirising religion, some of which later were included in The Threepenny Opera and Mahagonny. Here Brecht pays homage to a formative influence, the thief-poet Francois Villon, and writes blackly robust ballads about dead soldiers or people like the servant girl Marie Ferrar, "Born in the month of April / Rickets, no birthmarks, orphan, not of age", who after unsuccessful attempts to procure an abortion, is found guilty of infanticide. "Her prayers, it seems, had no effect".

It's this godless Hobbesian world, in which the weak wait in vain for the gates of Heaven to open while the strong trample them into the mud, that gives The Threepenny Opera its dark illumination. What's seductive about it is what drives Brecht's prowess as a poet: its amoral, irresistibly vital joyousness. Brecht the poet is the same as Brecht the entertainer: and all the supposed contradictions (as opposed to vitalising creative tensions) of his theory in relation to his writing emerge from glossing this vital aspect of Brecht's work. Even as his plays bent more consciously towards Marxist radicalism, he eschewed neither poetry or entertainment. "Grab them by the balls," he said once, "and their hearts will follow."

The great strength of Michael Kantor's production for the Malthouse is that it reanimates this Brecht, poet, entertainer and wicked trickster. Its first virtue is Raimondo Cortese's adaptation, featuring lyrics by Jeremy Sams, which transposes the action from Victorian London to a 1930s gangster Melbourne. It works for a couple of reasons: like Brecht's vision of Chicago in In The Jungle of the Cities, his Soho is pure theatrical fantasy, and Cortese has simply replaced this with a dystopian fantasy of Melbourne, slimming down Brecht's text by introducing Jenny (Paul Capsis) as a narrator. Crucially, it permits Cortese to exploit Australian obscenity, creating an unsentimentally vernacular diction that's as clean as a knife, and has an immediate contemporary tang.


The production itself takes place in a huge boxing ring which stretches the entire width of the Merlyn Theatre, its shadowy expanses exaggerated by Paul Jackson's lighting, which seems more an art of darkness visible than mere illumination. Into this space are wheeled Peter Corrigan's modernist monstrosities, huge mobile sets that jar the eye and act as simulacra of urban dissonance, an organically disturbing mess of architecture. Across this various stage-scape plays Brecht's nonsensical parable of human greed, vice and lust.

Its cheerful cynicism turns conventional morality on its head: here the bad guys win, simply because they are meaner than everyone else. The apparent deus ex machina, in which Mack the Knife is saved at the last minute from the hangman's noose, is a sardonic reversal that, rather than providing an escapist happy ending, reveals an uncomfortable truth: the biggest criminals get off scot-free.

Mack the Knife (played with charismatic swagger by Eddie Perfect) is far from a rough diamond. He’s a killer, a “sadist and a rapist”, a thief and a liar with, aside from a hypnotic sex appeal, no redeeming features whatsoever. Brecht’s undeceived vision saw that Mack’s charisma was not despite his wickedness, but because of it. Like today’s celebrity gangsters, Mack is rewarded for daring to enact society’s repressed desires: his dangerous attraction stems from our secret complicity with his crimes.

Kurt Weill's music, under the musical direction of Richard Gill, is presented in its original shape. It remains as fresh as the day it was written, and is a reminder of how brilliantly Weill wrote for the theatre, and how profoundly he has influenced popular music, from Tom Waits to Danny Elfmann. The music is the glue that holds this show together, and the counterpoint to its poetic dramaturgy.

Kantor and his cast simply go for it, generating an irresistible burlesque energy. For all its joyous spectacle, Kantor keeps the focus on simplicity: one of the few missteps is the decision to play Mack's underlings as hooting monkeys. Capsis and Perfect's riveting cabaret presences provide the vernacular base of the criminal underclass, crude and colloquially direct. The accomplished operatic clarity of Judi Connelli (Mrs Peachum), Grant Smith (Mr Peachum) and Anna O'Byrne (Polly Peachum) enact the gloss of the parasitic middle classes who suck their wealth from the suffering of the poor, who themselves are represented by the bruised and endlessly exploitable beggar Filch (Jolyon James).

Whether it makes an effective political statement remains a question of debate: like all satirists, Brecht was half in love with everything he hated, and that ambiguous sense of fun remains as blasphemous as ever. But as this Malthouse production shows, it's brilliant theatre. Most of all, it's brutally alive and wicked fun: which is to say, it's utterly Brechtian.

Pictures: Top: (L-R) Eddie Perfect and Paul Capsis; bottom, Judi Connelli, Grant Smith and Anna O'Byrne. Photos: Jeff Busby

The Threepenny Opera, by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, adapted by Raimondo Cortese, lyrics by Jeremy Sams. Directed by Michael Kantor, conducted by Richard Gill. Set design by Peter Corrigan, costumes by Anna Cordingley, lighting by Paul Jackson, sound design by Peter Ripon, choreography by Kate Denborough. With Casey Bennetto, Paul Capsis, Judy Connelli, Jolyon James, Melissa Langton, Amy Lehpamer, Anna O'Byrne, Eddie Perfect, Dimity Shepherd, Grant Smith and John Xintavelonis. Music performed by Stuart Brownley, Daniel Carter, Bob Collins, Martin Corcoran, Doug de Vries, David McSkiming, Evan Pritchard, Bruno Siketa and Nic Synot. Malthouse Theatre and Victorian Opera @ the Merlyn Theatre, Malthouse, until June 19.

Dario Fo makes people laugh. One would think this a harmless activity, except that in Fo's case, the laughter is allied to his revolutionary ideals: the targets for his satire are the rich and powerful, and his work has always dealt with the travails of the oppressed. During his long career, he has ridiculed the hypocrisy of the Pontiff and politicians, attacked no-go figures like the Mafia and exposed corporate corruption and greed. That this hasn't been taken kindly can be gauged by the responses.

Fo has been in court more than 40 times, facing charges like blasphemy, sedition, obscenity and defamation. After he made critical comments about the Vietnam War, he was refused a visa to the US for years. Some fanatical right-wingers took their objections further: they threatened to firebomb his home and theatre, and in 1973 his wife and long-time collaborator Franca Rame was kidnapped, raped and tortured by neo-fascists commissioned by high-ranking officials in Milan's Caribineri, or federal police.


His championing of the underdog explains his immense popularity in Italy, where his television and stage appearances have generated audiences of millions. For many years he has been the most performed living playwright in the world, and in 1997 he was awarded the Nobel Prize. So it's a little shaming that his work is so seldom staged in major theatres here.

As Fo himself said, looking back on his earlier years, "Mine has been a revolt against a hypocritical and deceitful order... As Marx says, 'The ruling ideas in society are those of the ruling class', and at that time it as only the ruling class which expressed its culture. Therefore my class, the peasantry, was viewed as a parasite that lived off that culture and aped some of its products." Fo was a practised subversive, taking popular bourgeois forms more usually employed to shore up the status quo, injecting them with vulgarity, and using them to expose darker truths about power.

In the process, he redefined modern political theatre. “Political theatre,” said Fo, “has become a kind of byword for boring theatre, conceited theatre, pedantic theatre, mechanical theatre, a non-enjoyable theatre.” In a time when political theatre mostly conjures Sir David Hare’s jejune docudramas, Fo’s criticism remains apposite. Fo's idea of political theatre came out of a collision of his Marxist ideals and popular forms, including television quiz shows, variety, cabaret and commedia dell'arte. According to the critic Tom Behan, his celebrated 1962 tv skit show, Conzonissima, was "unusual to say the least". The opening jokes consisted of "tramps criticising the rich in Milan, criticisms of German Nazis, sarcastic comments about television presenters, all this punctuated by established singers performing sugary songs about the moonlight shimmering over the silver sea".

In the 1980s, the wave of revolutionary fervour that brought Fo to the fore had subsided and splintered, and the Anglo world was dominated by the twin monster of Thatcher and Reagan. Fo, now collaborating with Rame, found himself more interested in issues such as feminism, and was as often attacking the extremities of the Left - he was highly critical of terrorism, considering it counter-productive - as of the Right. Elizabeth: Almost A Woman dates from 1984, and at the time was clearly a satire on Reagan: when it premiered in the US, and Fo was denied a visa to see the production, he began the play with a letter to Reagan, in which Elizabeth denied any possibility that a play about an aging, mentally unstable monarch indulging in covert operations could have anything to do with the present day.

Michael Kantor's production at the Malthouse gives us a chance to see a lavish staging of this lesser known play, given a new translation and free adaptation by Louise Fox and Luke Devenish. It demonstrates how far Kantor's direction has evolved over the past couple of years: since his production of Meow Meow's Vamp, he has honed his work to a style that focuses his gift for excess with a new and compelling clarity. We first saw how well this works in Happy Days which, like Elizabeth, was designed by Anna Cordingley and featured Julie Forsyth in one of her most memorable roles.

The design of Elizabeth is probably the best I've seen in the Merlyn since Chamber Made's 1990 production The Fall of the House of Usher, one of the first productions in this theatre. It is a feast for the eye: Cordingley's intricate costumes distort and exaggerate the human figure, creating a cartoon effect that contrasts sharply with the human body itself, revealed in its nakedness as vulnerable and absurd, like a snail without a shell. The stage is a huge revolve, its floor painted in faux-Tudor patterning, bisected by an extravagant ruched curtain. Steps lead down to an off-stage area, where the sound technician/musician/actor Mark Jones is visible in front. It's a simple and flexible space, and with the help of Paul Jackson's superb lighting, Kantor exploits all its resources to create some stunning mise en scene.

For all its spectacle, the design works as a frame for the performances and text, rather than a distraction from them, and the production is unexpectedly faithful to the spirit of Fo. The new translation preserves Fo's wit and, importantly, his poetry. The major change to the original text is the introduction of Shakespeare (Bille Brown) as a character on stage: here he becomes a sinister but strangely compassionate Master of Revels, orchestrating and witnessing the absurd and, finally, tragic action. The action occurs in Elizabeth's confused, paranoid mind, in a kind of farcical delirium of the Queen's final day.

In this portrayal, Elizabeth I (Julie Forsyth) is as far from the glittering queen beloved of the BBC and Hollywood as is possible to imagine. We see the aging tyrant possessed by paranoia and delusion, haunted by the ghosts of those she has murdered, obsessively waiting for her treacherous lover, the Earl of Essex. She is attended by her maid Martha (Nikki Shiels), her beaten and bruised Fool, Tom, (Chris Ryan), and her beautician Lady Donna Grozetta (Bille Brown), who spouts a Tourretian torrent of obscene puns as she renovates her Majesty with leeches and a waxing session.

Essex has been plotting Elizabeth’s murder and the overthrow of her realm, a police state riven by intrigue and murder. Meanwhile, Elizabeth is convinced that the real saboteur is Shakespeare, who lives in her head, plotting to destroy her. However, the actual villain is her oily chief of police Egerton (David Woods), a deadlier Sir Humphrey Appleby seeking to return England to Catholicism. Elizabeth, of course, has her own secret secret police spying on the secret police.

The plot is incidental and often makes little sense. The dynamic of this production is the switchback between outright vulgar comedy and genuine pathos: the violence of the action, rendered harmless by the cartoon quality of the grotesque, suddenly turns and bites with its realism. The first hint of cruelty is the massively bruised face of the abused Fool, the target of violence from everyone in the play: ignored except when he can be of use, his loyalty is rewarded only with slaps and kicks. The bridge between the unfeeling and the feeling is, unexpectedly and hilariously, pop music rearranged as Elizabethan madrigals. The effect is imbalancing and, ultimately, exhilarating: there's a bravura performance of Never Ending Story that might have come from a Broadway musical, which segues straight into the death of the queen.

This farcical and yet strangely moving play is at once a gloriously wicked satire on the backstage insanities of power and a paean to human mortality. Elizabeth was a tyrant, a woman in a man's world who retained her power by being more ruthless and smarter than her rivals; but her sex meant that, unlike a king, she could never marry without losing her authority. Her physical and emotional frailty are laid hard against the pomp of her circumstance and title, exposing the emptiness of power. As Shakespeare said (in another play): "For within the hollow crown / That rounds the mortal temples of a king / Keeps Death his court." The play also becomes a reflection on the role of the artist in the State, as critic and court jester. Shakespeare is both Bard and jester, the unacknowledged legislator of principle: but his double is the poor, exploited Fool, the lowest of the low, whose role is to divert and entertain, and whose cruel treatment is the bad conscience not only of the queen, but of all her minions.

There are no weak performances. The first-class cast nimbly negotiates the switchback of comedy and tragedy, although on opening night there were a few problems in the early scenes with audibility. In the title role, Forsyth is a triumph: ribald, tyrannical and at last hauntingly vulnerable. Bille Brown in his double role is consistently enjoyable, and linguistically dextrous. I thought it took around 20 minutes to warm up: there was a stickiness in the comedy that may have been ironed out by now, but may also be a problem with the slightly frantic staging in the beginning. It's more than made up for by the uncannily spooky final moments of the play, as Shakespeare dances away from the queen's corpse, chanting "Maggoty, maggoty, maggoty", his malapropism of Majesty, before vanishing into the darkness.

Picture: Julie Forsyth (left) and Bille Brown in Elizabeth. Photo: Jeff Busby

Elizabeth: Almost By Chance A Woman, by Dario Fo, freely adapted by Louise Fox and Luke Devenish, directed by Michael Kantor.Design by Anna Cordingley, lighting design by Mark Jones, sound design by Russel Goldsmith, choreography by Tony Bartuccio. With Bille Brown, Julie Forsyth, Mark Jones, Chris Ryan, Nikki Shiels and David Woods. Malthouse Theatre, until April 24.

After months of fevered speculation, the Malthouse Theatre announced today that Marion Potts, currently Bell Shakespeare's associate artistic director, will be its new artistic director. She replaces Michael Kantor, who leaves at the end of this year.

With last year's appointment of Ralph Myers as the successor to Neil Armfield at Company B, this completes the picture of what the theatre culture will look like in Sydney and Melbourne over the next few years. It's a cheering view: both bring to their posts diverse experience in mainstage and independent theatre, and both are responsible themselves for some of its liveliness.

Potts brings to the Malthouse a keen theatrical intelligence and formal curiosity, qualities that are aligned to a substantial history of directing plays, from classics to new work. She is less well known in Melbourne than she is in Sydney, where she has been active on main stages for the past few years, and one of her immediate tasks will be to forge relationships with Melbourne's indie theatre scene.

As part of her position as Bell Shakespeare’s associate artistic director, Potts is artistic director of its development arm, Mind’s Eye. For Bell she has directed Hamlet, Othello and Venus & Adonis (a co-production with Malthouse Theatre) as well as the Actors At Work programme, and this year will be directing John Bell in Lear. She was resident director for the STC from 1995-1999, and has also directed for the State Theatre Company of South Australia, the Queensland Theatre Company, the Melbourne Theatre Company, Company B, HotHouse Theatre, Sydney Opera House and Griffin Theatre Company.

She will have to endure speculation that her appointment is, at least in part, a response to the controversy last year about the lack of women in key creative positions in Australian theatre. I shall point out here that no man with Potts' CV would face any such speculation. But let's face it, the fact that a woman has been appointed to one of the nexus positions in Australian theatre is worth a quiet cheer or three.

Hot off the Malthouse's press machine: Michael Kantor today announced that he will depart the Malthouse at the end of 2010, after six years as artistic director and CEO of the company. He'll be leaving to pursue other opportunities as a freelance director.

"Theatre is the most malleable and mercurial of artistic forms, and needs to constantly reinvent itself to stay alive and relevant," said Kantor in today's statement. "My hope is that Malthouse does exactly that, while continuing to surprise and astound audiences with theatrical journeys in the dark that enliven the mind and enrich the imagination, both on its stages and as it takes work around Australia and to the world."

Since taking over the Playbox in January 2005 with executive producer Stephen Armstrong, Kantor has introduced diverse and flexible programming and a series of mentorships and artist residencies. He instigated the ‘Malthouse Greenlight’ project towards ecological sustainability and has toured Malthouse productions nationally and internationally.

By the end of 2009, he will have overseen the world premiere of 36 new Australian works, with Malthouse productions playing to over 250,000 patrons in Melbourne, and many more in 25 seasons in Sydney, Adelaide, Perth, Canberra, Brisbane, Auckland, Vienna, Amsterdam, Kuala Lumpur, London and Edinburgh. Most recently Kantor’s production of Optimism played to a sold out season at the 2009 Edinburgh International Festival. That show will tour to next year's Sydney Festival, and his production of Happy Days opens at Belvoir Street Theatre this October.

As Malthouse chair Simon Westcott says, Team Kantor has positioned the Malthouse as one of the most energetic, innovative and collaborative in the country. A new AD will be appointed in early 2010, with the position advertised late this year. With Neil Armfield's departure from Belvoir St next year (programming as his swan song a remount of his masterly Diary of a Madman, starring Geoffrey Rush), this opens the door to a new era in both Sydney and Melbourne. And opens a rich field of speculation about who will take over these signal positions.

Over the past few days. Ms TN and the man to whom she's a spectacularly Bad Wife (although, of course, a deeply empathic partner and awesome literary colleague) have been discussing whether to revisit Samuel Beckett's Happy Days, which both of us saw on opening night at the Malthouse. It ended up being a peculiarly Kierkegaardian dialogue.

"I think," said my beloved, "that I'd prefer to stay home. It was such a brilliant experience, it gave me so much, that I would only be trying to repeat it. And I'd prefer to treasure the experience I already have, rather than to overlay it with another memory." "On the other hand," said I, "I'm dying to see how Julie Forsyth's performance has evolved since opening night. It won't be the same experience, sure. But it would certainly deepen the memory." "Yes..." said the Man, a true Forsyth fan and so sorely tempted. "Lemme think about it."


The upshot of this kitchen table philosophising is that I'm going again, shepherding my eager offspring who are, encouragingly, all Beckett fans. And the man of the house, observing the dictum that you can't enter the same river twice, is staying home in the unusual quiet, perhaps trying to write his own play, or washing up the dinner dishes, or waiting impatiently for the next stage of Le Tour de France. And so peace reigns among the Croggon/Keenes.

Domestic voyeurism aside (which is not, after all, entirely inappropriate for this play) the point is that this is an unusual conversation. My crowded diary means I very seldom think about seeing a show more than once, no matter how much I enjoyed it. Michael Kantor's production of Happy Days is, however, a work of theatre that rewards on every level: emotionally, intellectually, sensually, spiritually. It's up there with The War of the Roses as one of my peak theatrical experiences this year, leaving me with that boundless elation that is the true rush of the theatre addict. As I said in my review for The Australian, employing my best reviewerese, it's "a great performance of a great play by two of our great actors".

It's difficult to do justice to elation, which might be why I've been shilly-shallying so much in writing about it for the blog. Another reason is that I wrote about Beckett a couple of months ago, when I saw André Bastian's season of short plays at La Mama, and I hate repeating myself. Much of what I wrote about the short plays applies to Happy Days: Beckett's uncompromising truthfulness, his stern theatricality, his strong relationship to visual art, his profound tenderness and compassion. But maybe what leaps most vividly out of this production of Happy Days, even more than his vaudevillean comic gift, is Beckett's attention to beauty.

Beauty is not a word often associated with our Sam. He's considered to be, well, hard work: worthy but glum, the province of humourless intellectuals who enjoy having the meaninglessness of life jammed down their throats. Yet, as even the briefest survey of his work attests, he paid a great deal of attention to the beauty of form. His work has never been especially biddable to those ideals which claim beauty as a conventionalising template of perception, a kind of anodyne fodder for the cultural consumer that anaesthetises the contradictory pains of living; but it's beautiful all the same.

Perhaps it's worth divagating for a moment to consider what beauty might be. As Ezra Pound said poignantly in the Pisan Cantos, "Beauty is difficult". The German composer Helmut Lachenmann has written compellingly on this question, in an essay called The 'beautiful' in music today (published in an early print edition of Masthead). Noting that the idea of beauty was "downright suspect" among the avant garde of the mid-20th century, he goes on to suggest that beauty has a profound moral dimension which artists ignore at their peril. As he says:

Today the call for beauty is more suspect than ever - whether the concept is a pluralism embracing all conceivable types of hedonism, or else a reactionary hangover after false hopes and promises, or just academicism of whatever sort. Its proponents betray themselves over and over again as they cry out for 'nature', for tonality, for something positive, 'constructive', for 'comprehensibility at last'... It is high time for the concept of beauty to be rescued from the speculations of corrupt spirits, and the cheap pretensions of avant-garde hedonists, sonority-chefs, exotic-meditationists and nostalgia-merchants. The mission of art lies neither in fleeing from, nor in flirting with, the contraditions which mould the consciousness of our society, but in coming to grips with them and dialectically mastering them...

Yet we still try to cultivate the hope that the human genus is capable of acting rightly, which presupposes that it is capable of recognising its own structure, and that of reality. We still believe in a human potential. Beauty is what we call that feeling of happiness which in art, as a human message, is released by the communication of some sort of belief. And yet such belief, even in its most illusion-free variants – such as in Beckett's art – is not contained in a philosophical or intellectually encoded message, but in the experience, communicated by sensory perception, of people who succeed in expressing themselves … knowing full well that the artist has not something to say, but something to create.

It's a good description of the kind of beauty Beckett creates. In Kantor's production of Happy Days sensory pleasure is foregrounded, paradoxically focusing Beckett's uncompromising attention to an illusion-free reality. Kantor's gift for theatrical excess is squeezed to a diamond focus by Beckett's unforgiving strictness, making the best of both of them. All the production elements - Anna Cordingley's spectacularly curtained set, Russell Goldsmith's bold sound design and Paul Jackson's lighting design - frame and amplify the performances, driving the experience home to the heart, where it most truly belongs.

The core is, of course, performance and text. Winnie is one of Beckett's most poignant characters: trapped in a mound of earth under a pitiless sun, her days shaped by the tyranny of an alarm bell, Winnie (Julie Forsyth) passes the time by chattering to her mostly invisible and mostly silent husband, Willie (Peter Carroll). With bright, unquenchable, but doomed courage, she finds consolation for the unbearable - encroaching death, soul-corroding loneliness - in the most trivial aspects of daily routine. And each discovery is greeted with rapture. "That is what I find so wonderful," she tells Willie. "Not a day goes by without some blessing."

Winnie's courage is in her lack of self-deception: she knows there is no hope, and that her life has no meaning beyond its immediate actions. But she persists anyway. So familiar is Beckett's language, so intimately real in all its theatrical absurdity, that Winnie gets under your skin. She is all of us, a soul trapped in the material decay of the body, longing to be loved, yearning towards the "holy light". Yet Happy Days is not only a shatteringly moving picture of loneliness endured. It's startlingly contemporary in its picture of humankind trapped in exhausted nature, a world in which the sun beats down so harshly that Winnie's umbrella catches fire. Like any great writer, Beckett made faceted metaphors which attract new meanings in every era, and climate change gives Happy Days a grimly apt relevance.

Forsyth - ironic, funny, despairing, heart-rendingly brave - finds every nuance in the fragile rhythms of Beckett's prose, creating a performance of limpid clarity. I still remember Forsyth in the Anthill production of Happy Days 20 years ago, and there are resonances of that performance here, refined and focused and deepened. I'm convinced that this is one of the great performances of the role.

Importantly, Kantor paid serious attention to casting Willie, which is, superficially at least, an unrewarding role: he's barely seen on stage, and when he is visible is mainly seen with his back to the audience. And yet, for all that, Willie is crucial to the play, as Winnie's (mostly) absent interlocutor. Peter Carroll is an inspired choice: he crawls around the set like a broken clown, and even when not visible he is palpably present. He almost steals the show with just seven lines.

And yes, I'm looking forward intensely to seeing it again tonight.


In some graceful programming, the Malthouse is simultaneously presenting Care Instructions in the Tower Theatre. An Aphids show directed by Margaret Cameron, it demonstrates how Beckett's tradition is still a living theatrical force. This show enchanted me at its premiere at La Mama's Courthouse Theatre last year, and it's no less enjoyable to revisit.

This production is sharper, its theatrical gestures heightened and thrown into relief. Care Instructions is basically a fairytale about washing. Its central theme - if one can speak about themes in a work like this - is the bad fairy in Sleeping Beauty who curses the young princess, and the show itself is a process of exorcism, a lifting of the curse. Cynthia Troup's allusive, fluid language makes this not so much a play as a spell.

Margaret Cameron's direction unites the Joycean fluidity of Troup's script with a Beckettian aesthetic: the three women appear in white mob caps and linen laundry bags against a black background. But the design also recalls the unsettlingly erotic sculptures of Louise Bourgeois. It's a reminder that an important strand of modernism, the great artistic movement of the early 20th century, was a liberating assault on the stereotypes of gender. James Joyce's famous Molly Bloom monologue at the end of Ulysses has, for example, been cited as an exemplary feminine text.

Just as important was the influence of brilliant women artists, not only giants such as Virginia Woolf or Gertrude Stein, but equally interesting if less well-known talents such as Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes or H.D. Troup's text, drawing on these traditions, is scored as accurately as music, and demands a similar kind of listening. Using myth, song, nursery rhyme, poetry and the washing instructions on labels of clothes, Care Instructions explores the archetypal figure of the godmother.

Personified by the laundresses Jane Bayly, Liz Jones and Caroline Lee, she is an ambiguous figure: slyly wicked, anarchic and disobedient, she's also a guardian and an agent of liberation. At the core of the performance is a delight in the small pleasures of sensual life: the smell of clean washing, the feel of wind and sunlight. The opening monologue by Jones, projected on to the front of a clothes dryer, is perhaps a few beats too long, slightly imbalancing the performance. But this show evades mere whimsy, generating an irresistibly playful charm.

Earlier versions of these reviews were published in The Australian.

Happy Days by Samuel Beckett, directed by Michael Kantor. Set And costume design by Anna Cordingley, lighting design by Paul Jackson, sound by Russell Goldsmith. With Peter Carroll and Julie Forsyth. Malthouse @ the Merlyn Theatre, CUB Malthouse until July 25.

Care Instructions by Cynthia Troup, directed by Margaret Cameron. Music by David Young, lighting by Danny Pettingill. With Jane Bayly, Liz Jones and Caroline Lee. Aphids and Malthouse Theatre @ the Tower Theatre until July 26.

In 1958, when the horrors of World War 2 were still fresh, Roland Barthes wrote a fascinating essay about Voltaire. Voltaire, said Barthes, was outmoded. For one thing, his enemies had all vanished - no longer were deists and atheists slugging it out in the public arena - and with this had vanished the spectacle of Voltaire's thought. "Better than anyone else, he gave reason's combat a festive style. Everything is spectacle in his battles ... the skirmishes between Voltaire and the world are not only a spectacle but a superlative spectacle, proclaiming themselves such in the fashion of the Punchinello shows Voltaire loved so much."

He was, said Barthes, not entirely as a compliment, "the last happy writer". "Voltaire's first happiness was doubtless that of his times," says Barthes. "Let there be no mistake: the times were very harsh, and Voltaire has everywhere described their horrors. Yet no period had helped a writer more, given him more assurance that he was fighting for a just and natural cause....What has disappeared is the theatre of persecution, not persecution itself: the auto-da-fe has been subtlilised into a police operation, the stake has become the concentration camp, discreetly ignored by its neighbours." The very enormity of racist crimes backed by a state and concealed by the apparatus of ideology "demands a philosophy more than an irony, an explanation rather than an astonishment".


No doubt Barthes would have been astonished to witness the contemporary return of theism as a force in fundamentalist ideologies of all stripes, so that court cases about the right to teach evolution in schools are as much as feature of contemporary life as they were in the late 19th century. And with the return of fundamentalism, so much a feature of millennial modernity, came the return of spectacle. The German avant garde composer Karlhein Stockhausen prompted a scandal when he remarked, a few days after 9/11, that the attack on the Twin Towers was Lucifer's "biggest work of art". (I feel compelled to explain that in Stockhausen's work, Lucifer is a figure of pure intelligence unmoved by love, whom even in that notorious press conference Stockhausen explicitly rejected).

Yet Stockhausen was correct in seeing 9/11 as an unparalleled media event, a murderous spectacle that galvanised the entire world, at once intimate and alienated as our own television screens. We had a preview of media war spectacle in the first Gulf War, but that was managed with admirable finesse: the graphics and distant tracer fire portrayed a technological fantasy, with surgical weapons making hygienic strikes that scarcely ruffled the hair of babes. In 2001, the Twin Towers collapsed again and again in our living rooms, and suddenly the spectacle of death was scorched again on the western retina: atrocity no longer occurred in secret, the product of mysterious famines or obscure ethnic wars. Three years later, we had the grim theatre of torture in Abu Ghraib, beamed out to a billion homes. The auto-da-fe as public spectacle was back.

So if the theatre of atrocity is returned to us, does it mean that Voltaire's sceptical game of reason, his stylish gaeity, has a new aptness? Is his theatrical irony again available as a response? Does, perhaps, the intimacy of theatre make it one of the few places where Voltaire can be realised, since it is a place where the massive scale of contemporary atrocity can be scaled back to a human size? For the counter-argument to Barthes' point about the "enormity" of the Nazi Holocaust is surely Genet's: that murder is an absolute crime and cannot be multiplied, for a universe is destroyed in each death.

Well, that's a long preamble, and it all spirals out of seeing Optimism, Tom Wright and Michael Kantor's adaptation of Voltaire's Candide, at the Malthouse last week. The word “optimism” first appeared in print in 1737 ("pessimism", which appeared around 60 years later, is supposed to have been coined by Coleridge: I guess it makes sense that a poet invented the term). At that time, optimism referred to a specific philosophical position embraced by thinkers like Rousseau and Leibniz: that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and that all is for the best.

The anti-philosophical satire Candide (Tom Wright’s adaptation uses its subtitle, Optimism) was Voltaire's famous riposte. It’s a picaresque, episodic frolic through catastrophe, in which Voltaire’s wide-eyed hero, clinging desperately to his doctrine of optimism, is exposed to all the reasons for despair: war, treachery, greed, folly, natural disaster and, finally, human mortality. Even so, Voltaire wasn’t arguing for pessimism. Rather, he was savagely challenging optimism’s claim that life was ruled by immutable forces, which was in Voltaire’s view a covert form of pessimism.

Optimism made me think that Voltaire's scepticism of systems and faiths is peculiarly apt now, his insistence on a human scale not merely a bourgeois evasion of responsibility, but a necessary ethics from which the only justice that means anything might emerge. There is something of Voltaire's scorching scepticism and supple wit, for instance, in the political writings of Slavoj Žižek.

Wright's script cuts Candide to the bone, but remains a surprisingly faithful adaptation of Candide's quest through catastrophe, preserving the essentials of Voltaire's story and argument. And there's no doubt this project plays to both Wright's and Kantor's strengths. Kantor's direction transposes Voltaire's relentlessly cheerful prose into a theatrical world of glittering curtains, puppet-like clowns and Eurovision musical kitsch. It's a world of constant speed that ultimately manifests, as Barthes points out, as immobility.

On Anna Tregloan's brushed steel set, a strangely modernist construction adorned by at least a dozen fans, the abiding metaphor is air travel, which at once encapsulates the hope and destructiveness of modernity. The show is punctuated by the brutal, obliterating noise of jet engines, and the chorus is provided by a series of air hostesses in purple uniforms, interchangeably played by the cast with no attention to gender. Frank Woodley, with his air of bewildered decency and unkillable hopefulness, is an inspired choice for the role of Candide, and provides some necessary intimacy with his stuttering monologues in front of the curtain. And he's an apt foil to Barry Otto’s Pangloss, the absurd philosopher who, despite everything, sees no reason to change his mind about anything.

They are backed by a superb cast, which includes the musical director, Iain Grandage. The characters, like Voltaire's "beloved Punchinello", are all puppets, or perhaps more properly in these times, cartoon characters: they undergo multiple rapes, obscene mutilations, horrific disease, even dissection, only to bounce back, scarred perhaps, but strangely unharmed, like Wil E. Coyote after he has been flattened by a hammer. When Alison Whyte in one of her several roles recounts her unlikely and tragic history as a former daughter of a pope, raised in luxury, the first response is laughter: Voltaire has her regaining consciousness after a massacre to a eunuch despairing that he is unable to rape her, and her buttock is sliced off and eaten by the starving defenders of a siege. And Amber McMahon's bitter despair as the prostitute Paquette is one of the funniest parts of the show.

Which begs the question: is such laughter inevitably heartless, unthinking and empty? I'm not so sure, although it is a real question. Perhaps the most uncomfortable parts of the show are those which reflect Voltaire's exoticising of the non-European world: the inflatable sufi mystic, for instance, or the ape-ish natives of El Dorado. When Candide reaches Surinam, he is confronted by a man who is missing an arm and a leg, both cut off by the colonial powers: this, he tells Candide, is what it costs to get cheap sugar in Europe. On stage, he is played by Hamish Michael in a bizarre plastic suit and blackface, howling a bleakly passionate version of Altered Image's I Could Be Happy. That was certainly not funny, but it's hard to say what it was. Do such images perpetuate or undermine racism? Or both? It seems to me suspended in its absurdity, at once tragic and bitterly grotesque; but perhaps its most unsettling aspect is what we might make of it.

Maybe the point is that the world, like the Eurovision Song Contest, has gone beyond parody, in the same way that no artistic spectacle can compete with the spectacles of our times. Is it brave or mistaken to tackle spectacle in the theatre, can entertainment ever really spark serious thinking about the issues it raises? Is it always merely evasion? Personally, I prefer this approach to the heavy-handed tackling of issues in so-called political plays; but it's worth remembering that Barthes accused Voltaire of being the arch anti-intellectual. "As a system of the non-system, anti-intellectualism eludes and gains... perpetually ricocheting between bad faith and good conscience, between a pessimism of substance and a jig of form, between a proclaimed scepticism and a terrorist doubt". Perhaps. But the downbeat image with which the show closes, with the cast members grouped hopefully around a pile of earth as Candide holds a watering can, stays with me, as a symbol of all that is beautiful and foolish about human beings.

Picture: (From left) David Woods, Francis Greenslade, Amber McMahon, Hamish Michael, Barry Otto, Frank Woodley and Alison Whyte in Optimism. Photo: Jeff Busby

A short review of Optimism was in Friday's Australian.

Optimism, after Voltaire's Candide, by Tom Wright, directed by Michael Kantor. Set and costume design by Anna Tregloan, composer Iain Grandage, lighting design by Paul Jackson, sound design by Russell Goldsmith. With Caroline Craig, Francis Greenslade, Amber McMahon, Hamish Michael, Barry Otto, Alison Whyte, Frank Woodley and David Woods, music performed live by Iain Grandage. Malthouse Theatre, CUB Malthouse, until June 13. Edinburgh Festival 2009, Sydney Festival 2010.

This should have been a continuation of yesterday's post about peripatetic Australians, but only arrived in today's mail: to wit, an announcement that the Malthouse's production of Optimism, which opens in Melbourne in May, is traveling to the Edinburgh International Festival and the 2010 Sydney Festival. Both festivals and the Sydney Theatre Company are co-producers of the work, an adaptation of Voltaire's Candide which will be directed by Michael Kantor and is written by Tom Wright. Wright's adaptation of Euripides's The Women of Troy was, incidentally, yesterday shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Awards Play Prize. You can find the other shortlistees through the link.

Before I begin today's sermon, it might be worth pondering for a moment the meaning of "masterpiece". My favourite definition, which comes from the great American poet Randall Jarrell's consideration of the great Australian novelist Christina Stead, is that a masterpiece is a work with something wrong with it; which reminds me, tangentially, of how Persian carpet makers always put a mistake into their work, so they will not offend God by presuming to rival His perfection.

A masterpiece is, on the one hand, an act of hubris, a work of poiesis that challenges the assumed perfection of God's universe. On the other, what matters most in the midst of this act of making, the element that makes the heart beat faster in its encountering, is the flaw in the glass, the necessary imperfection of beauty.


Considering ideal perfection in his exemplary short story Lenz, Georg Büchner wrote: "Only one thing abides: an infinite beauty that passes from form to form, eternally changed and revealed afresh, although you can't always capture it and stick it in museums or put it into music ... You need to love mankind to be able to reach the essential being of each individual, you must consider no one too lowly, no one too ugly .... the most ordinary of faces makes a deeper impression than any contrived sensation of beauty..." This is still, two centuries later, a revolutionary statement.

Which brings me to Woyzeck, the ur-play of modern theatre that is at once a work of revolutionary realism and of jagged poetic beauty. There are two major schools of thought on this play, both of which are completely valid, except when the extremes of one blot out the possibilities of the other. One is the school that sees Woyzeck as a major work of critical social realism, and annoints Büchner as the precursor of playwrights like Franz Xavier Kroetz. The other places it as a seminal work of German Expressionism, foreshadowing writers like Franz Wedekind.

As is the case with those rare works that can be authentically called masterpieces, both are correct. This complex provenance is illustrated by the history of the play. Woyzeck was still in progress when Büchner died of typhus in 1837, at the ridiculously young age of 23. The play languished in obscurity for decades until it was premiered by Gerhart Hauptmann - the leading dramatist of German Naturalism - in Munich in 1913. When Alban Berg used the play as the basis for his famous opera, which premiered in Berlin in 1925, the work's place in the canon was assured.

That Woyzeck was championed by both the Naturalists and the Expressionists, movements usually considered to be at each other’s aesthetic throats, is an indication of Büchner's range, his ability to absorb what superficially seem to be contradictory impulses. Like Ibsen, whose work influenced writers as diverse as George Bernard Shaw and James Joyce, Büchner is at once a realist and a poet. And like Shakespeare, whom he fervently admired, his work is impossible to confine in a single ideology.

His complementary impulses are nowhere clearer than in Woyzeck, which must be among the most disputed literary texts ever. There has been endless shuffling of the scenes as different interpreters attempt to divine Büchner’s intent; I have four different versions on my desk as I write. This formal instability, married to the undeniable brilliance of its writing, makes it arguably the most influential single play of European theatre, and it's commonly positioned as the beginning of modern drama.

Yet it's hardly ever done here. Our brethren bloggers in New York might be calling for a five-year moratorium on the text, but in Melbourne it's not like we're tripping over productions every week. Or even every year. My performance experience is limited to Barrie Kosky's exhilarating production of Alban Berg's opera for the AO in 1999 and Werner Herzog's film, featuring the psychotic performance of Klaus Kinski. Plus whatever imaginary performances have peopled my head whenever I've read the variously ordered versions.

The Malthouse's production of this new adaptation is thus a keenly anticipated event. A bold take by Icelandic playwright Gisli Örn Gardarsson, it features songs and music by Nick Cave and fellow Bad Seed Warren Ellis. The provenance is in fact a little muddy - Gardarsson's original production by his Reykjavik-based Vesturport Theatre seems, from squinting through its various reviews, to have erred rather on the side of spectacle. It also cut out some elements of the play (Marie's child was, for example, mystifyingly absent) and was also accompanied by pre-recorded music, albeit with the voice of Cave.

In the Social Realist/Expressionist equation, Michael Kantor’s passionate production comes down squarely for the Expressionist tradition. All the same, it seems to me that Kantor has stemmed the spectacular excesses of Gardarsson's work, which was heavily circus-based, injecting it with some necessary realism. He restores to the play its original unruliness and many of the cut scenes, and the emphasis is on performance, with the music, orchestrated by Peter Farnan, played live on stage by a tight band. It's a sexy, exciting and ultimately moving production, treading (if sometimes with a few wobbles) the narrow margin between spectacle and intimacy. But perhaps its greatest achievement is that, for all its technical complexity and rock’n’roll energy, Büchner’s text shines through, luminous and clear and sharp as an open razor.

Gardarsson’s adaptation chimes with the standard scholarship, beginning with the disturbing scene at the quarry that is generally agreed (by those who argue about these things in obscure cafes on the Continent, scratching their bunions and polishing their pince-nez) as the most likely - and certainly, the most dramaturgically satisfying - place to begin. An innovation is the introduction of the Entertainer, a kind of Mephistophelean narrator cobbled out of lines from other characters and played by singer Tim Rogers. It is Rogers's first time in a play, but I wager it won't be his last: his presence is electrifying, bringing a devilish Keith Richards physicality to the stage. There's a man who knows where his towel is.

Nick Cave as the lyricist is a no-brainer. It's hard to think of a contemporary rock musician whose work would be more appropriate to this play's tragic glamour. The high romanticism of Cave's driving murder ballads sit brilliantly in the text, vamping up its heightened vernacular. The music is much more deeply integrated into the performance than I expected – this is almost an opera, with scenes scored through with brooding electric violins, throbbing guitar solos and menacing percussion. Here music works as the theatre's blood, pumping oxygen through each scene and driving the staged rhythms.

Peter Corrigan's monstrous modernist set confirms the aggressive, in-yer-face tenor of this production. Corrigan has created a multi-level architectural construction that unabashedly draws on the excesses of Expressionism as well as the Vorticist fantasies of Wyndham Lewis to create the hollowed-out, broken earth of Woyzeck's hallucinations. Its nightmare geometries are lit sumptuously by Paul Jackson - jarring greens and reds and blues, corpselights and blood, which contrast with gentler, intimate ambers. It's an outrageous design, offensive, rude and sometimes incredibly beautiful. (And I hear too that in the very front rows it obscures a fair bit of the stage action - so be warned).

Kantor has cast a wide net in his cast, exploiting a variety of performance styles, and here his gift for excess is reigned in with a surprising subtextual discipline, with mostly rich results. Where this production misses out, at least on opening night, is in the emotional detailing of some scenes. When that detailing is there, it really hits the mark. There are moments such as a scene between Andre (Hamish Michael being quietly brilliant) and Woyzeck (Socratis Otto), or a moving admission of shame from Marie (Bojana Novakovic), where I felt my skin go cold or my heart leap into my mouth.

Without this detail, the characters are in danger of being emotionally generalised puppets; but there is enough complexity already present to make me suspect that the sketched-in scenes will fill out as the season progresses. Meanwhile, filling up the stage are performances of bravura grotesquerie from Marco Chiappi as the Drum Major, Merfyn Owen as the Captain (looking rather like a Roman soldier from the Asterix comics) and Mitchell Butel as the sadistic and obsessed Doctor, who generate a vision of orgiastic paganism that is like the worst party you've ever attended. And I've already mentioned Tim Rogers.


The ill-fated lovers Woyzeck and Marie are played as naifs destroyed by a predatory and exploitative society. Interestingly, the actors who play them - Socratis Otto and Bojana Novakovic - are the only performers who are not singers, in a cast that is otherwise pretty gifted in the voice department. I felt ambivalent about this decision, and still do: but I admit that it's dramatically powerful, highlighting their vulnerability and, by extension, the ambivalence of the whole act of performance.

In fact, a sense of restless ambivalence, even contradiction, rives this show and generates a lot of its energy. For this reason among others I feel absolutely certain that this is a production that will provoke serious arguments. It's too jagged not to: it has flair, spectacle, emotional excess, even the odd dubious decision (why the bombs?), drawn together into one unlikely and surprisingly cogent whole. But I liked it a lot.

To return to my beginning, it seems to me that Kantor's Woyzeck has the friable sense of "beauty that passes from form to form" that Büchner described in Lenz. It's a beauty which dramatises with disconcerting clarity how little it takes for our self-preserving illusions to break open and reveal a comfortless and hollow reality. As Woyzeck says:

It’s lovely weather, Captain, such a beautiful solid grey sky, makes you want to hammer in a piece of wood and hang yourself from it. All because of that little dash between yes and no. Yes - and no, Captain, yes and no? Did No make Yes or Yes make No? Oh, I need to think about that...

It's that moment of fracture that is written large here. This is art that offers no redemption, but we ought to know by now that the idea that beauty might redeem anything was always a self-serving and manipulative lie. What I do know is that I walked out of the show thinking to myself that Woyzeck is as great a play as has been written. A masterpiece, in fact.

A shorter version of this review will no doubt appear in the Australian in due course.

Pictures: (Top) Socratis Otto as Woyzeck; (Bottom) Left to right - Tom Rogers, Merfyn Owen and Marco Chiappi. Photograph: Jeff Busby

Woyzeck by George Büchner, adapted by Gisli Örn Gardarsson, English translation by Gisli Örn Gardarsson and Ruth Little. Music by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. Directed by Michael Kantor, sets, costumes and mask designs by Peter Corrigan, musical direction, sound design and additional composition by Peter Farnan, lighting design by Paul Jackson. With Mitchell Butel, Marco Chiappi, Hamish Michael, Bojana Novakovic, Socratis Otto, Merfyn Owen and Tim Rogers. Music performed by Simon Burke, Xani Kolac and Dan Witton. Malthouse Theatre at the Merlyn Theatre, CUB Malthouse, until February 28.