The most contemporary thing about contemporary art is its crisis...

The Accident of Art, Paul Virilio

It's always interesting to revisit a show, and doubly interesting when it's as fascinating as Daniel Schlusser's production Life is a Dream, an enactment of the 17th century Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca's famous philosophical play about the nature of reality. Theatre in its purest forms is flux made visible and plastic, a constant interrogation of the present through the conditionings of the past. (I mean this quite literally. Weeks or months of rehearsal, countless orchestrations of bodies, objects, sound, spatial arrangements, make every action a deliberate and conscious choice that, if it is to possess any life, must manifest in the now as if it were newly discovered: a paradox theatre can never resolve so much as embody).


Heraclitus, whose ambiguities and musical language make him a poet among philosophers, argued that: "On those stepping into rivers the same, other and other waters flow" (for the Greek scholars among you, "Potamoisi toisin autoisin embainousin, hetera kai hetera hudata epirrei"). Not so much that one can't step into the same river twice, which is Plato's interpretation, but that in returning to the same river, one will encounter other waters: the river remains what it is only through the constancy of its change.

Likewise with revisiting a work of theatre: the work's structure and identity remain constant, but the experience will be, in countless subtle ways, a different meeting, buffeted by variable currents. This change is, crucially, the condition of its vitality. In the case of Life is a Dream, focus inevitably shifts on a second viewing, and becomes more layered: what I said about its first season last year, with Company 08 at what was then the Victorian College of the Arts, remains true. (And since I hate repeating myself, that review contains a discussion of the original play and its relation to the performance which I'll not explore here).

Yet, wholly unsurprisingly, this incarnation is more conscious, more practised, and more immediately legible. As much as any evolution in the work itself, this is also because I was sitting close enough to the performers to hear their private dialogue, which was mostly inaudible the first time. Although in both cases the emerging power relationships between the performers was very clear, there was a quality to this inaudibility that I missed, a heightened sense of voyeurism that underlaid some of the work's strange unease.

Schlusser uses very little of the original play; it exists as shining moments of pure dramatic poetry that bubble out of the riveting banality of the performance on stage. He weaves fragments of Beatrix Christian's translation through what he calls "poorer" speech: a casual domestic conversation that establishes its own routine - boiling a kettle, tea making, instructions to comfort or to attack another performer. The conceit is that the performers are, like Segismundo himself, damaged adults abandoned by parental authority; they are caught in a traumatic repetition that attempts to restore order, clear lines of authority and power, where none existed in the first place.

This initial reality is established patiently and without any concession to dramatic artifice: there is no attempt to persuade an audience to empathy, no overt manipulation. The action on stage flirts constantly with the edges of boredom, but its apparent artlessness is belied by its careful orchestration. The stage dynamic escalates insensibly from a mundane if degraded domesticity to excesses of cruelty and desire with an action like breathing: it eddies in and out of crisis, gradually generating a concentration of energy until the poetry of Calderón's play becomes possible.

The power of this production depends crucially on the nine performers who, with the exception of Johnny Carr who plays the imprisoned Segismondo, are unable to escape our gaze. They inhabit the reality of the stage with unwavering concentration, hooking and keeping an involuntary attention with the depth and detail of their performances. When they shift seamlessly from casual spoken language to the startlingly beautiful poetry of Christian's text, it has both the shock of contrast and an underlying continuity.

The show's sense of unity stems from the central metaphor that is filleted out of the play and extended in performance - the figure of the abandoned and mistreated child. Here the fairytale mother is dead in childbirth, the father an absent tyrant; the child is betrayed by those who should have most cared for him. When Segismundo is brought out of his prison in chains, his legs and elbows agonisingly chafed and blistered, he is the embodiment of abjection. His suffering, according to the king, is the condition of the kingdom's security: he is the scapegoat for the king's fears and, as a result of his mistreatment, also embodies them.

Life is a Dream plays out the aftermath of damage: it's clear in the neurotic repetitions, the infantilisms of mutual dependency and the relentless scapegoating, as much as in the complex denials that are encapsulated by mundane routine. In particular, it illuminates how traumatic shifts of power are domesticated and normalised, just as after revolution the king - Napoleon, Stalin - restores the lines of authority that have been blown violently apart. Freedom glimpsed through the lens of revolution is, after all, terrifying, and perhaps there is something in the human psyche that craves the security of tyranny.

This production is in some ways deeply pessimistic: trapped in the damage of childhood, it suggests, we can never embrace either freedom or responsibility. Against this is posited a fragile hope in a possible ethics, Segismundo's statement that the good we do matters, whether it occurs in a dream or in reality. It offers no resolution: the production is simply a playing out of crisis. It's a crisis of art as much as it is of conscience, poising us, just as the performances do, on the razor-edge of contingency, between the ghosts of the past and the trash of the present.

*

THIS week I also caught Andrew Bovell's When The Rain Stops Falling, which finishes its MTC season today after a national tour. This production has been bouncing from festival to festival, with plaudits showering down like the torrents mentioned ad nauseam in the play itself. And I'm frankly baffled by the fuss.

The structure is an uncomfortable conceit that stretches Arthur Miller-style realism towards surreal ends. The writing is like a lot of the Australian brand of so-called magical realism, which employs an enervating faux lyricism to dress up what are essentially banal conclusions with some pretty imagery (in this case, fish and rain). The anxiously detailed plot (paedophilia, suicide, child murder, child abandonment, love affairs, fatal car accidents, all swimming in the thematic broth of climate change) is strung together by a bunch of increasingly unlikely coincidences, ranging across four generations of two families to trace the genealogy and resolution of psychic damage.

Yet for all this frenetic ambition, it nowhere strikes a true emotional note: all through the play, statement ("I'm going mad!") substitutes for the emergence of feeling. It's amazing how agonisingly boring this becomes: the falsity mounts to an almost hysteric over-compensation, which is perhaps most noticeable in the copious tears shed by various actors. And it's not helped by the leaden pace of the production, which delivers its holy truths with an earnestness worthy of George Lucas retelling the Christian myth in the Star Wars prequel. Repetitions are archly (and frequently) deployed to demonstrate the fatal connections across generations, but they function chiefly as a plot contrivance, rather than as a deepening of metaphor.

The design is stylishly imagined by Hossein Valamanesh, but in the end amounts to a parade of pretty tableaux unveiled to a neo-Glass soundtrack, which is at least played live. The performances, perhaps worn down after several seasons, varied wildly the night I saw them; Neil Pigot's bizarre decision to play both his roles as if he were an old man whose boots were full of water was intensely distracting, as were some very poorly rendered British accents. For the record, Yalin Ozucelik got his accent pitch-perfect, and Paul Blackwell's understated performance was a pleasure to watch, which provided some compensation for all the mugging.

Even more than its intellectual fuzziness - the issue of climate change, for example, is basically a kind of aesthetic wallpaper - its main lack is emotional precision, which would seem crucial in a work that is essentially about the life of feeling. Ironically, given its obsession with rain, it made me think of some lines of Ezra Pound's: "dry casques of departed locusts / speaking a shell of speech... / Words like locust-shells, moved by no inner being..." It gives the whole a strange air of being an imitation of something else.

Life is a Dream, adapted from Pedro Calderón de la Barca, translated by Beatrix Christian, directed by Daniel Schlusser. Designed by Marg Horwell, lighting by Kimberly Kwa, special make-up effects by Dominique Noelle Mathisen, composed by Darrin Verhagen, stage management by Pippa Wright, produced by Sarah Ernst. With George Banders, Brendan Barnett, Johnny Carr, Andrew Dunn, Julia Grace, Sophie Mathisen, Vanessa Moltzen, Sarah Ogden and Josh Price. The Store Room until November 29.

When the Rain Stops Falling by Andrew Bovell, directed by Chris Drummond. Desined by Hossein Valamanesh, composer Quentin Grant, lighting design by Niklas Pajanti. With Paul Blackwell, Michaela Cantwell, Carmel Johnson, Kris McQuade, Yalin Olucelik, Anna Lise Phillips and Neil Pigot. Brink Productions, presented by the Melbourne Theatre Company and Melbourne International Arts Festival, Sumner Theatre untl November 22.

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Attract/Repel is an intriguing work of theatre at the Store Room which meets, head-on, the question of racism. One of the best things about it is how it does so without fuss or apology, yet instead of visiting the expected arguments of victimisation or entitlement it manages - delicately and with humour - to excavate something of the complexities of human social relationships, to explore the fluidity of the categories of "us" and "them".

A devised work directed by Ming-Zhu Hii, and generated in collaboration with the performers (Jing-Xuan Chan, Fanny Hanusin, Georgina Naidu and Terry Yeboah), Attract/Repel it has a pleasing transparency about its motives and aesthetic which focuses on the particularities of experience to illuminate general truths, rather than the other way around. The most important aspect of this approach is that contradiction is embraced rather than glossed.


As it begins, the four cast members enter the space one by one, each carrying a suitcase. Each is regarded with suspicion by those already occupying the territory of the stage, until they find their own space. It's an elegant introduction, and is almost a theatrical illustration of an image used by the poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger. In an essay on migration, he describes how one passenger in a train carriage will immediately occupy it. When another enters, he is regarded with mistrust, even veiled hostility; but once he has settled in, he too occupies the carriage. When a third passenger enters, both will regard the new occupant with the same mistrust, until she too has settled in. Enzensberger uses this metaphor to describe the tensions between successive waves of immigrants, pointing out that migration has been the essential history of human beings for millennia. Difference always generates hostility until it is absorbed into the fabric of a society, at which point it becomes part of the "us" that makes a "them".

Once all four performers are on stage, they introduce themselves by asking each other their full names. Because they are from different cultures - Chinese/Australian, Chinese/Indonesian, Indian/Celtic, Ghanaian - they each have names that immediately signal their differences: none has a standard western christian and surname, although their names have all been "translated" into western formats. They ask each other how many languages they speak (an average of about three each, as I recall). They ask each other to say "I love you" in their native language. Georgina's native language is English.

And so begins an intriguing exploration of the mechanics of making human beings "other". The achievement of Attract/Repel is that it at once enters the realm of personal experience and frames it in a series of wider questions: what is racism? Who is racist? Is racism only a question for white privilege? How, in a supposedly multicultural society, does it actually function? What does it feel like to encounter racism? And through these apparently simple questions, which immediately subvert themselves in ways that are comic, unexpected and moving, a picture emerges of something that is not simple at all: a social texture that is full of ambiguity and contradiction, and which is reinforced by the most apparently trivial of gestures as much as by its coarser manifestations.

Ming-Zhu Hii has learned a lot from Jérôme Bel, notably from the apparently straightforward simplicity of his approach in Pichet Klunchun and Myself. However, she has framed this work in a sculptural installation of neon lights designed by Damien McLean, originally inspired by a Dan Flavin installation. This framing makes it more self-consciously theatrical and less joyously transparent than Bel's work, but has its own attractions. The cast use chalk to write on blackboard walls, giving the work a pedagogical frame that is undermined by the playfulness of the performance. There is some stylised movement which doesn't always throw off the smell of studio improvisation, but on the whole the conceit is startlingly successful. The stern simplicity of the work liberates a sense of play, which in turn releases a very human complexity that evades the traps of earnestness or simple moralising.

What makes this work is ultimately the generosity and skill of the performers; they slip with grace and subtlety between raw expressiveness and artifice, keeping both qualities constantly in play. We are never quite permitted to forget that this is a performance, that these performers are playing characters, even if those characters are themselves. At the same time they bring to this consciously theatrical construction a disturbing ability to generate authentically naked emotion. It's intelligent and deeply felt theatre, alert to all its possible pitfalls and evading most of them. Ming-Zhu Hii and her collaborators have created a work that seems to be all light surfaces but which resonates in some deep places.

The Ridiculusmus Readings were, as the name suggests, a series of play-readings of works in progress by Ridiculusmus, the British comic duo, David Woods and Jon Haynes, who brought us an unforgettable The Importance of Being Earnest a few years ago. Over four nights, they read differing combinations of three plays, one of which involved a volunteer cast of around 50 people.

I'm not quite sure how to describe the reading I saw, which included the play with the cast of 50 (a hyper-theatrical and possibly awful play about Princess Diana called Goodbye Princess). For one thing, in the tiny La Mama space, the cast outnumbered the actual audience, although maybe it's truer to say that in many ways the cast and the audience were the same. Which made it a peculiarly immersive experience.

Both plays were reflections on contemporary Britain. Total Football is a two-hander about a PR campaign to jazz up enthusiasm for British Identity by finding golden moments in British public history (including Winston Churchill's declaration of war on Germany and a winning goal by David Beckham). It was a sly and hilarious pisstake on nationalism as a brand, performed with faultless comic timing by Haynes and Woods. Goodbye Princess was read by practically everyone. I guess it had the same concerns as the first play, with added metatheatrics and idiot royals. But what made it totally enjoyable was being in the middle of this anarchic communal reading, complete with misreadings, missing characters and lots of coarse acting. Totally irresistible fun.

Picture: Attract/Repel at the Store Room Theatre.

Attract/Repel, conceived and directed by Ming-Zhu Hii. Lighting design and dinstallation by Damien MacLean, with Rachel Burke, music by Yusuke Akai. With Jing -Xuan Chan, Fanny Hanusin, Georgina Naidu and Terry Yeboah. The Melbourne Town Players @ The Store Room, Melbourne Fringe Festival, until October 10.

Ridiculusmus Readings by David Woods and John Haynes. La Mama Theatre, Melbourne Fringe Festival. Closed.

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Well, I'm dug back into my burrow after a fortnight out of the office. I've been doing some in-depth theatrical investigation of a story by one of my favourite pin-up boys, Anton Chekhov. It's been a chance, rare in my life, to concentrate on one thing for a whole two weeks. Well, almost one thing: I did see a few shows, and still want to think a little further on the MTC's production of Pinter's The Birthday Party.

But stepping aside from the quotidian pressure for a little while has been a much-needed opportunity to touch base, and to reflect on the things I value, in life as much as in art. They're the same things I've always valued, but to articulate them is difficult; perhaps this constant unfolding and evolution, this desire to express what it is that delights and hurts us, is the entire practice of a life. Anyway, while I've been pondering the meaning of existence, work has been piling up on my desk: piles of envelopes and a few hundred emails in my inbox, reminding me of a bunch of things that have gone under the TN radar lately. I'm slowly catching up, which seems to be the refrain of my days.

Among several interesting events and shows, I missed the launch of the Store Room Theatre's 2009 season. Relaunching after a hiatus of public performance, artistic director Todd MacDonald has put together an ambitious program that looks rich, various and deeply interesting. It's a staggeringly diverse program that includes new work by Ming Zhu-Hii, Ross Mueller, Tommy Murphy, Cerise de Gelder and Lee Blessing. One work, designer Anna Tregloan's The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, is part of the Melbourne Festival program. (Tregloan's last piece at the Malthouse, an installation/theatre piece called Black, was a fascinating immersive experience.) Which reminds me that we're coming up to the Melbourne Festival's official launch next week, and I'm working on a thorough preview of Brett Sheehy's first program. Watch this space.

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Letters from Animals by Kit Lazaroo, directed by Jane Woollard. Design by Amanda Johnson, lighting design by Bronwyn Pringle, sound design by Colin James and Jane Woollard. With Glynis Angell, Georgina Capper and HaiHa Le. Here Theatre and Store Room Theatre Workshop until November 25. Bookings: 9481 8496

Kit Lazaroo, who’s been quietly gathering plaudits and prizes since 2003, has been sitting in my mental filing cabinet with the stamp “must investigate” for some time now. Big red stars in texta were drawn on the file after the sell-out season of her play Asylum at La Mama last year, of which much praise trickled Williamstown-wards. Well, I might be slow, but I get there in the end.


It’s hard to know where to begin with Letters from Animals, now on at the Store Room in a simple but beautifully realised production. It’s much more difficult to write about than it is to see; it's a delicate, complex work that can seem merely whimsical, when in fact a bleak and uncompromising intelligence runs through it like a steel rod. Perhaps it’s an indication of its richness that this play prompts comparisons in so many directions.

Lazaroo is one of a number of noteworthy new playwrights presently enlivening Melbourne’s stages (others include Lally Katz and Ross Mueller), although her imaginative diction also reminds me of Sam Sejavka, who has been writing since the 1980s. And these writers have something in common with others further afield, people like Britain’s Philip Ridley or Germany’s Marius von Mayenburg.

For all their variousness, these playwrights reflect a sensibility that seems to me quite particular and of our time, but I’m sniffing: I’m not quite sure how. I suspect it's partly to do with a certain formal playfulness, a post-television consciousness that returns to the basics and throws them up in the air for questioning; but they also have an underlying darkness, an uneasiness that reflects contemporary anxieties and uncertainties. All of them approach the world elliptically, avoiding the easy statement, the play-as-message; but that can be said of every serious artist. And certainly, all of them are writers who understand the inherent poetic of the theatre.

Letters from Animals is several things. It’s a sorrowful and absurdly comic fable on memory and forgetting; a bleak warning about stupidity, greed and treachery; a satire on bureacractic oppression; and a lament of considerable lyric power. One of the admirable things about it is how it keeps so many things in play at once, so nothing ever quite comes to rest on a conclusion.

It's set in an imagined future, in a world in which animals no longer exist. This is a world destroyed by pollution and global warming, flooded with poisonous water and “sludge”. The only living things on earth are human beings. Or, more precisely, women: there seem to be no men at all. No doubt they have mutated out of existence thanks to the oestregen in the water and perhaps the women all reproduce by parthonogenesis: the playwright doesn’t say. Every other living thing has been eradicated, as harbingers of disease and uncleanliness from the "Days of Filth".

Queenie (Glynis Angell) is a former scientist living on the margins of society, who is attempting to restore the animal world from the few fragments – biological and semantic – that are left. This is subversive work in a world run by the sinister and faceless Developer; here people are controlled by regular inoculations which wipe their minds clean of memories and dreams and guard them against the possibility of remorse. Queenie is being investigated by the bureaucrat Shelley (Georgina Capper), who sends the young and ambitious Gretel (HaiHa Le) to spy on her activities.

In the meantime, the animals themselves – in the form of a Rat, a Vulture and a Cockroach – are demanding their return, perhaps even planning a revolution. It is never clear whether the animals exist independently or as alter-egos of the three characters; in the oneiric logic of this play, they are both. And, being peculiarly literary animals, they are sending letters to the women, asking to be remembered, to be restored, to be mourned.

Most of all, this is a play about language: the extinction of our fellow creatures is reflected by a linguistic and, crucially, an emotional impoverishment. As we lose their names, their descriptions, so we lose the ability to understand ourselves. Animals are everything that escape human order and human law; but they are also in us, in our animal selves, and with us. In the terrible future imagined here, they need us. Or is it simply our need speaking through the memory numbed by their absence? As the animals say in one of the letters that mysteriously haunt the bureaucrat Shelley:

Unaccustomed as I am to putting pen to paper. I find myself in need of your assistance. I trust you haven’t forgotten me. I cut your foot once when you went swimming. You looked through the boards of the jetty and watched me push against the current. I was in a cage at the zoo. I lived under the roof of your house. I ate food from your bin. You saw me resting in the mud. You caught me in a glass jar and put me on a windowsill. I fell out of a tree when the sun was hot and spat at your feet. You kept me in a shoebox under your bed and fed me the wrong leaves until I died. Don’t forget me. Bring me back. Speak my name.

Balancing the comedy, pathos and mystery of a play like this is not an easy ask, even in the best of circumstances, let alone in the confines of the Store Room. Here Theatre pulls it off admirably. After the theatrical excesses of The Madwoman of Chaillot two nights before, it was an inexpressible relief to be reminded that it really is true about two planks and a passion.

What counts most in making this imaginative world are the performances, and all three actors are equal to the task. Georgina Capper in particular, in the double role of the disintegrating bureaucrat Shelley and the French Vulture, is an actor I want to see more of. Director Jane Woollard deftly evokes Lazaroo's elliptical realities with the help of a lot of smoke, Bronwyn Pringle’s ingenious lighting, several buckets and an evocative sound design.

It’s an exemplary demonstration of how theatre can be political and contemporary without being didactic or simplistic. In short, it rocks.

Picture: Glynis Angell and HaiHa Le in Letters from Animals.

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A Mile in her Shadow by Robert Reid, directed by Aidan Fennessy. Design by Anna Cordingley, lighting design by Matt Scott, original music and sound design Kelly Ryall. With Ben Harkin and Katie-Jean Harding. The Store Room Theatre Workshop until December 10.



The Store Room has an enviable history of premiering excellent independent theatre - Construction of the Human Heart and The Yellow Wallpaper, among the best work on at the Malthouse this year, began here. Recently it proposed a fascinating new initiative, the Store Room Theatre Workshop, which asks theatregoers to subscribe to a notion of works in progress rather than a series of programmed product. To this end, artistic director Ben Harkin has collected a rather stellar group of theatre artists to develop work together over a three year period.

Each season, the Store Room plans to announce a series of works which will be put into development, some of which will go into production. This seems to be a flexible structure that permits artists to work seriously on projects without the pressures of programming work that isn't necessarily ready for it, while at the same time having the chance to try them out on a public stage.

A Mile in her Shadow is the first production from the Store Room Theatre Workshop, and it certainly bears out its creative promise. Robert Reid is a Melbourne writer of unruly but real talent, and here he attempts something very difficult: to create a theatrical analogue of the subjective state of mental illness; in this case, dissociative disorder.

Here comparisons become inevitable. It is impossible to watch this play and not to think of Sarah Kane's 4:48 Psychosis, to my mind the most brilliant of this brilliant writer's works. Reid doesn't possess Kane's faultless ear, the tough poetic that permits her to examine such a rawly subjective state as mental illness through the focus of fiercely disciplined language. Kane is both more extreme and more restrained than Reid.

That said, and given that it's no disgrace not to be as good as Sarah Kane, Reid has made a pretty good fist of it here. There is no moment of this play that slackens into the merely confessional, and despite moments of over-writing, it balances finely between the aesthetic demands of a work of art and the raw expression of the sheer terror and confusion of disordered mental states. It's well structured, effectively using repetition to destabilise its various realities, and shifts ingeniously between differing states of mental being.

True (Ben Harkin) is, in all senses of the word, the subject of this play, and we watch him play out his relationships with the Other, represented by She (Katie-Jean Harding). While True is always himself, She is many people - True's lover, his psychiatrist, strangers. True's distress and terror is played against his sometimes bewildering and cruel behaviour towards She, and his world, in which nothing is stable enough to be confidently called "reality", is compellingly evoked.

What makes A Mile in her Shadow so deeply interesting is the close knit between the text and all aspects of its production. Aidan Fennessy has given the production a stylised edge which at its best moments throws the molten emotional core of its subject into sharp relief. Anna Cordingley's design is both clever and beautiful. We witness the play through a curtain, drawn around the two sides of the L-shaped stage: when we enter it is black, but when action is lit behind it, it becomes as transparent as a scrim, alienating us subtly from the action on stage. In such a small theatre, this is particularly effective.

The set itself is an upside-down room of unrelieved squalor: on the ceiling are a mattress, a blanket, rubbish, a collection of empty bottles. On the floor are two chairs. The room at the back of the set, usually off-stage, is drawn surprisingly into the design by the ingenious use of a mirror. The whole is sumptuously lit by Matt Scott with a startling depth of sensual colour.

It's physically demanding of both actors. Harkin negotiates the extremities of his character with utter commitment and an ability to move precisely between contrasting states of mind, although there were moments when I thought a cool restraint might have been more effective than than reaching for emotional extremity, which risked being histrionic.

As all the "other" characters, Katie-Jean Harding distorts her willowy body with the grace of a dancer, creating a physical language that is dislocating and disturbing, although sometimes her vocal skills don't quite match her physical capacities: where Harkin was in danger of over-reaching, Harding's coolness could sometimes slip into mere blankness.

The text is presented almost like an aria or a musical poem, with Kelly Ryall's textured score of original music and sound punctuating the spoken language. It complements the action beautifully, except at times when it is simply too loud, and obtrudes over the words rather than bringing them to a fuller life.

A Mile in her Shadow is a compelling, if not entirely successful, production, which shows what can happen when artists are given the room to experiment. It bodes extremely well for the Store Room's future as a generator of independent theatre. The only real criticism is the shortness of the season, although perhaps there will be a chance for this production to return again, polished by the experience of this first presentation.

Picture: Ben Harkin and Katie-Jean Harding in A Mile in her Shadow.

The Store Room

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The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, adapted by Peter Evans and Anita Hegh, directed by Peter Evans. Design by Adam Gardnir, lighting by Luke Hails, sound by Roger Alsop. With Anita Hegh. The Tower @ the Malthouse until November 26.

I saw The Yellow Wallpaper at the Store Room in March last year, where it was already a remarkable show. On its reincarnation at the Tower, it is an even better remarkable show. It seems silly to rewrite my earlier observations, so below, to save you the trouble of clicking through, I will reprint my March review.

Of course, it isn't exactly the same show. Without losing a certain necessary roughness, the venue permits subtle refinements of staging and lighting, of which Peter Evans and Luke Hails take full advantage. But what has most impressively richened, in both nuance and depth, is Anita Hegh's performance. She has found an accuracy and clarity of gesture and voice that gives this text a harder and more tragic edge although, paradoxically, the real revelation of this production is its comedy, the black lustre of Gilman's ironic wit.


What was already more than good has become great: this is a stunning performance of a fascinating text. But don't take my word for it: go and see for yourself. You'll be sorry if you miss it. Meanwhile, here is what I wrote last time:

AS SOON as Anita Hegh props herself primly on a wooden schoolroom chair and glances neurotically at her right hand, as if it were some wild animal that might escape any moment, you realise that you're in for a special performance. Nothing that follows disabuses this expectation.

It's an enactment of a short story by the early feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in which an unnamed woman who is being treated for a nervous condition is confined by her doctor husband in a room decorated with particularly ugly wallpaper. The story traces her mental breakdown through a series of snatched diary entries. The Yellow Wallpaper rivals Georg Buchner's story Lenz as a compelling depiction of the subjectivity of madness, notable for both its imaginative expressiveness and the almost clinical precision of its observations.

In a 1913 article, Gilman was very clear about why she wrote this semi-autobiographical work. "For many years," she wrote, "I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown ... During about the third year of this trouble I went ... to a noted specialist in nervous diseases, the best known in the country. This wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still-good physique responded so promptly that he concluded there was nothing much the matter with me, and sent me home with solemn advice to 'live as domestic a life as far as possible,' to 'have but two hours' intellectual life a day,' and 'never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again' as long as I lived. This was in 1887.

"I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over. Then, using the remnants of intelligence that remained, and helped by a wise friend, I cast the noted specialist's advice to the winds and went to work again - work, the normal life of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite - ultimately recovering some measure of power.

"Being naturally moved to rejoicing by this narrow escape, I wrote The Yellow Wallpaper, with its embellishments and additions, to carry out the ideal (I never had hallucinations or objections to my mural decorations) and sent a copy to the physician who so nearly drove me mad. He never acknowledged it. ...Many years later I was told that the great specialist had admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of neurasthenia since reading The Yellow Wallpaper. It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked."

Gilman's passionate account here implies much of the history of female neurosis and its relationship to the medical profession; and more precisely, the difficulties faced by creative women in restrictive patriarchal societies that find such women to be, at best, oddities, and at worst, monstrous. In these contexts normal human desires, such as the wish for meaningful work or satisfying sex, are considered the province of men; when they appear in women, they are thought to be pathological or wicked.

The historical repression of intelligent and passionate women, from witch burnings to hysterectomies to institutionalisation, is not within my purview here; but it's a gruesome and sad and ongoing story. It is easy to say, in Melbourne in 2005, that those times are now long past; but the persistence of conditions like anorexia nervosa or the obsession with celebrity culture suggest that, even here, contemporary ideals of femininity might be little less imprisoning now than they were a century ago.

Hegh's performance is a compelling physicalisation of the fractures and deformations that the imposition of the "feminine" can do to a woman's self. In the beginning, Hegh sits or stands in poses that are exaggeratedly prim, her neck and chin extended like a mannerist painting, and the strange calmness of her voice has an anxious, nail-biting edge. But there are more violent disturbances in this ladylike facade; her body does not appear to wholly belong to her. She jumps with sudden, neurotic intakes of breath; she strikes strange poses, grotesque parodies of the feminine grace of a ballerina; her eyes flicker, as if her face were a prison through which her soul fleetingly and pleadingly emerges, only to vanish into the repetitious tics of conventional womanhood.

Her right hand, her working hand, is a focus of anguish and desire. Forbidden by her husband to write, she makes her diary entries furtively, obsessively recording her observations of the "optic horror" of the yellow wallpaper in the room where she is genteely imprisoned as a kind of sick child. In keeping with her infantalisation, this room is a former nursery, and the windows are barred. Eventually she becomes convinced that the ghastly patterns conceal a creeping woman who is attempting to get out; but that woman, of course, is herself.

The wallpaper itself becomes a potent symbol of the inscrutable and devious social codes by which the woman is disempowered. "On a pattern like this, by daylight, there is a lack of sequence, a defiance of law, that is a constant irritant to a normal mind. The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing. You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you..."

The increasing sense of dislocation and imbalance is intensified by the cunning use of props and lighting; Hegh might put on a single high-heeled shoe, forcing her to limp, or don sunglasses that mask her face with a terrifying maenad-like anomymity. A wedding dress becomes at once the symbol of her imprisonment and the badge of her illness. When at last the woman breaks free into madness - the only freedom left open to her - Hegh growls the text through a microphone, declaiming like a rock star poet.

Peter Evans directs The Yellow Wallpaper with nuance and precision; it's inventively lit and the sound design, using music and pre-recorded text, is spare and effective. Without any fuss, the staging frames and focuses Hegh's performance admirably. On all levels, The Yellow Wallpaper is a very classy piece of work: riveting, disturbing and beautiful.

Picture: Anita Hegh in The Yellow Wallpaper. Photo: Peter Evans

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I just did something unprecedented, and closed off the comment thread to my post on the threat to La Mama's funding. TN had swum into the purview of the right-thinking wingnuts, and suddenly they were swarming in like Darth Vader's TIE fighters to do a bit of arts bashing.

The comments included the recommended dose of abuse, personal smear and innuendo (a couple of which I removed) laced with the proud sentiment that they don't know anything about art, but they know what they hate. The argument, which is sufficiently outlined in the comments and elsewhere on the net, is that those pinko / commie / poofter / parasite artists (or is it rich, possibly French, aristocrats?) are stealing money from honest hardworking joes to finance their nefarious, leftoid and morally dubious activities. If only it were not all so predictable and boring. Thanks to those who weighed in or emailed me, and heartening also to see a guest appearance from Joe Orton's alter ego, Edna Welthorpe.

I do wonder why these tender-hearted anti-arts activists are not more exercised by straight-out corporate theft than by the tiny amounts of state money which are given to generate the well-documented benefits - employment, tourism, urban revitalisation, creative thinking, pleasure, even health - that the arts give to the community. Though perhaps the real problem is an uneasy suspicion that someone, somewhere, might be having a good time.

Being a parasitical and lazy arts wanker, and consequently having a 500 page novel to write, I don't have time to deal with politico trolls with irony bypasses. Frankly, my feeling is that if you think that artists aren't worth 0.02 per cent of the GDP - what the Australia Council actually costs - you can go jump. Any more trolling comments will be deleted forthwith. This is a blog for debate about theatre (see above). If any of those commentators are actually interested in theatre (say, if they go to see an actual play) they are welcome to contribute. Those who think that theatre ought not to exist at all can vent their spleen elsewhere.

However, as Lao Tsu recommends, perhaps we should embrace our enemies. A couple of local bloggers, alarmed by the argument here, express concern about the reluctance of the arts community to defend itself. Supernaut has some stern words for artists remaining quiet out of the fear that speaking up may affect their funding:

So this in a country where largely the very people and organisations being lined up for the abattoir are too afraid to speak out because they may lose funding, Dance Works gone, Sydney Dance Company, La Mama on notice, and I've lost track of the number of remaining companies also with that noose around their necks. It seems like all of them.

The last thing the arts in Australia needs when Australia Council is busy trying to work out how to not fund anyone, and Neil Jillett, Andrew Bolt and assorted other colonial trash are basking in the right-wing anti-arts thuggery of Australia today is for the artists themselves to be too pathetic to even respond. It's in no small way ironic the voice for survival of performing arts so often comes from journalists who aren't concerned with self-protection so that we artists can have our freedom of speech.

And at Minktails, young artist Ming-Zhu Hii talks about the necessity of speaking up for what we believe in:

I do not in any way shape or form advocate silence, and I believe that there are many of these such arguments out there that we are showing only our silent backs towards. As artists and supporters of a rich and diverse culture, it is time that we spoke a little more loudly. In general. Perhaps we would not have to waste our breath on defending our totally justified exasperation towards issues such as the threat to La Mama's funding. Perhaps, just perhaps, then, we wouldn't be exasperated in the first place, because the livelihood of the theatre would not be in jeopardy.

UPDATE: A wonderful post from Ben at Parachute of a Playwright speculating on why these attacks on the arts are so vitriolic:

As I type, the thought occurs to me that perhaps the reason that the thug-wits go after people who write like Alison, who point out that the arts is not a luxury add-on to a lifestyle but an essential element of coming to understand and to navigate our lives... well they go after such ideas because the ideas remain powerful. The facts are powerful. And there is something so unsettling about the idea that human beings MUST express or we will be walking dead that provokes the zombie attacks.

And Ben also points out the absolute necessity now for all of us who value the arts and what they stand for to speak up against the libels and the smears and the lies, to negotiate our own differences and to create spaces where difference and debate is actually possible:

It's too easy to listen to abusage of the arts and roll my eyes and think that the person doing the abusing won't change, so what point is there? Sometime I wonder whether I've been simply rolling my eyes at concepts I find uncomfortable and don't want to do the work of engaging with. But we have to engage. Of course, we have to pull the plug on anonymous threats and smears, but we mustn't expect them. We have to talk. If there's one thing that characterises the Howard era it's that, under attack, we've become silent even amongst ourselves. Say something. Every voice adds nuance and richness. Let's stop believing, too, that disagreement within our circles implies that we want those who disagree with us destroyed or humiliated. Let's take it as a starting point for finding out more about one another. Enough of the silent simmering - it has only let the scum rise in the public sphere.

Of course, well-known arts connoisseur Andrew Bolt dishes the dirt as well. It seems I am married to the playwright Daniel Keene!!! Deep investigative journalism there - he just has to read the sidebar on this blog. And clearly, my poor pathetic husband needs my support to ensure his future staging at La Mama! Why else would I think the damn place mattered?

And obviously my huge influence as a poet and freelance journalist swings him those stages at Theatre de la Ville, Theatre de la Commune, the Theatre du Rond-Pont, the National Theatres of Bordeaux and Toulouse, the central stage at the Avignon Festival (some of the most prestigious theatres in France, btw) and all those other productions since 2000... which, little does Andrew know, add up to thousands and thousands of tickets sold. (A little googling might have enlightened him, but we all know that Andrew never lets the facts get into the way of a good smear.)

Like they say on Dragonball Z: I'm more powerful than I ever imagined...

And another PS: while we're at it, let's not forget the Sedition laws, which are a crucial part of the mix that is targeting free speech and impacting on artists. The whole Anti-Terror Act, which contains these laws, can be downloaded here. The Australia Law Reform Commission's reports and recommendations on the Sedition laws, rejected by the Attorney General, are available here.

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Good things come to those who wait. The Age finally ran my opinion piece on La Mama Theatre being put "on notice" by the Australia Council, almost two weeks after I sent it in, and only after Robin Usher caught up with the same story. After I submitted it, which ruffled my feathers slightly. An old journalist never loses those scoopish instincts.

A couple of things to note about the subbing: in the original, I said La Mama was picking up where the Community Cultural Development Board left off. Grammatical expediency now includes the New Media Board as well, which in the lo-tech environs of La Mama is patently absurd. And a couple of pars about the Sedition Laws were chopped, which is a pity. For the record, they ran:

Some aspects of this war on freedom of speech, such as the new editorial policies at the ABC, are much discussed. Others are more insidious, such as Attorney-General Phillip Ruddock’s refusal to amend the Sedition provisions in the new anti-Terror Laws, despite recommendations from the Australian Law Reform Commission and a Senate Committee. These laws, according to a range of legal opinion, particularly threaten artists.

Artistic organisations protesting the Sedition laws say they will have a “chilling” effect on artistic expression. “Freedom of expression and public debate is not only the foundation of a free and flourishing literature,” says Angela Bowne, President of Sydney PEN. “It is one of the critical underpinnings of our democracy.”

UPDATE: The cerebral heavyweights over at Tim Blair's blog get stuck into La Mama (and Croggon). Heady, edifying, deeply informed stuff, as you might expect.

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Was it me who said I had to pull back on this blog? I'm good at foolish statements like that. No sooner do I say that poetry has burned itself out in my soul, than I start producing epic sequences; if I mutter that I'm giving up prose, suddenly I start writing novels. You'd think I'd understand my perverse nature better by now. I've just noticed that since announcing the newer, slimmer blog, I'm posting nearly every day.

All by way of irrelevantly introducing the new Store Room initiative, launched last night (I'm told) at the swish BMW Edge Theatre. It's called the Store Room Theatre Workshop, and it's pretty interesting.

Eleven invited Associate Artists will work on five selected projects during the year, and instead of subscribing to a season of plays, audience members can subscribe to a process: exclusive invites to work-in-progress showings (with, I notice, "opportunity to offer feedback", a perilous enterprise - hopefully these won't be the equivalent of movie industry pre-release screenings, with questionaires, nor the confused good intentions that mostly animate the workshop model...)

What catches my eye is the Associate Artists. They're a very interesting bunch, and include among others writer/director Rob Reid, actor/director Todd MacDonald, actor/writer Tyler Coppin, writer Ross Mueller, designer/creator Anna Tregloan and director Wesley Enoch. The five projects also look extremely promising. More details at thestoreroom.com.

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Construction of the Human Heart by Ross Mueller, directed by Brett Adam. Lighting by Rob Irwin, sound by Casey Bennetto. With Fiona Macleod and Todd MacDonald. The Tower @ the Malthouse until September 3

Physical pain, says Elaine Scarry in her groundbreaking study The Body in Pain, destroys human language. The problem is that, as Scarry puts it, "the act of verbally expressing pain is a necessary prelude to the collective task of diminishing pain".

Behind this is an assumption that we have a ready vocabulary for emotional suffering. And certainly, you can wave a hand at millenia of literary expressions of grief, loss and despair, or even at the stumblingly moving In Memoriam poems in the daily newspaper. But for all their expressiveness, can these millions of words really mitigate an iota of anguish?



For my part, my private nadirs have always exposed language - otherwise the DNA of my conscious being - as utterly useless. I have no doubt that the ability to articulate emotional pain is better than being unable to do so, and yet I have never quite felt either that therapeutic faith which underlies so many of our assumptions about human expression. A facility with language may even be counter-productive: language can be something to hide in, a means of denial as much as of admission.

This is the emotional and intellectual territory of Construction of the Human Heart, which is my first acquaintance with the writing of Ross Mueller. Where have I been? Mueller is surely one of the most intelligent, formally adventurous and emotionally brave playwrights now writing in this country.

On the face of it, a play that is about a play - worse, a play about two writers and a play - sounds like a sure recipe for unbridled narcissism. In Mueller's hands, it becomes a desolately moving meditation on human helplessness in the face of overwhelming grief.

Construction of the Human Heart is about a couple, Him and Her, who are haunted by two deaths. Her returns obsessively to the death of her mother, a relationship scored by unbridgeable absences and alienations. The other death is that of the couple's son. We never find out why he died, or even how old he was; but his death has triggered mechanisms of blame, denial and anger that really only conceal the utter devastation of his loss.

The play sets up a disarmingly simple conceit which, almost by the bye, also interrogates the formal conventions of theatre and writing. The stage in the Tower Theatre is simply a raised platform, the acting area delineated by white paint. On the stage are two chairs, each with a bottle of water placed beside them. We are, it seems, about to attend an informal public reading of a work in progress.

The actors, Fiona Macleod and Todd MacDonald, enter through the side door when the house lights are still up. They clear their throats, fiddle with their scripts, smile nervously at the audience and settle down on the chairs. They begin to read the first scene.

So far, so conventional. Then Him drops his script, the two start bickering and you begin to understand that Him and Her are partners and that they are reading Her script, which is written out of their personal lives. At this point I realised that the house lights had gone down. They had dimmed so gradually that, although I was expecting them to go dark, I hadn't noticed when it had happened. The transition from a public reading, where the audience is visible to the actors and to each other, to a formal piece of theatre, where we sit in the dark witnessing the action on stage, is cunningly imperceptible.

The effect is a potent sense of complicity between the audience and the actors: they have seen us as much as we have seen them. And this reinforces a sense of voyeurism as the actors move in and out of differing imaginative realities - the relationship they are enacting before us, and the script they are reading. A third layer is added by Casey Benneto's pre-recorded voiceovers, which boom increasingly baroque stage directions. They describe powerful visual and sonic elements that never eventuate on the bare stage, becoming at once cues for the audience's imagination and sly satires on theatrical convention.

The dynamic between the read script and the "real" play becomes increasingly more complex and more fraught. Is Her, as Him claims, really the one in control, the one who can articulate what happened and deal with her grief? Or is she as lost as Him, floundering in her grief as she uses her imaginative life to deny that her son is dead?

What becomes clear is how little these two people can help each other. As writers they both have a privileged relationship to expression, but even this doesn't help them communicate or even to understand the actuality of their own pain. Even their love is not enough. "The land of tears," as St Expury says in The Little Prince, "is so mysterious".

In Brett Adam's hands, this complex script is given its full emotional and intellectual range. The stripped-down design and Rob Irwin's unobstrusive but effective lighting frame two extraordinarily generous performances. Neither Macleod nor MacDonald miss a beat: on them rests the human weight of the play, the painful silences behind the words, and they meet the challenge with performances that articulate its subtleties and emotional power.

It makes superb, thoughtful theatre, which manages to be at once astringently intelligent and heartbreaking. And this stylishly minimal production, imported into the Malthouse after a successful season at the Store Room, is as polished as any I've seen.

Picture: Fiona Macleod and Todd MacDonald. Photo: Deryk Alpin

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The Trial of Salome, adapted and directed by Bob Pavlich. Designed by Romanie Harper, lighting by Gwendolyna Holmberg-Gilchrist. With T'mara Buckmaster, Emma Goldsworthy, Adrian Mulraney, David Adamson, Alex Pinder and Josh Ryan. La Mama @ the Carlton Courthouse, until August 5.

Oscar Wilde's enduring popularity is due, in part, to the fact that he is a figure of unsettling modernity: the fin de siècle decor of his writings, which otherwise might date him as badly as Swinburne, is underlaid by a tough, unsparing intelligence. This is as true of his less well-known writing as it is of the plays which established him as the greatest comic playwright since his fellow Irishman, Sheridan.

The fairy tales in the collection The House of Pomegranates ("intended," said Wilde, "neither for the British child nor the British public") rank high in his achievement: they are not only enchanting, beautifully wrought stories, but among his most serious meditations on (for example) the relationship between art and feeling, or the place of love in religion, or the ethics of public authority. And they also demonstrate his capacity - more evident in his prose, in fact, than in his poetry - for sustaining extremes of poetic language.

Of Wilde's plays, the closest in both sensibility and diction to his fairy tales is Salome. Perhaps the strangest of Wilde's plays, this one-acter retells the Biblical story of Salome, step-daughter of the tetrarch Herod Antipas, who requests the head of Jokaanan (John the Baptist) on a silver platter as her reward for dancing the Dance of the Seven Veils.

Originally written in French, its English premiere was cancelled when the Lord Chamberlain refused it a license, deeming it illegal to represent Biblical characters on stage. This ban held until 1931, but it did not stop private performances of the play, including one that sparked a 1918 trial for criminal libel which bore startling similarities to the trial that brought about Wilde's own downfall.

The suit was brought against Noel Pemberton Billing, the properietor of a right wing journal called The Vigilante, by the actress Maud Allen, who, in an attack on a production of Salome in which she performed the title role, was accused of being a member of the "Cult of the Clitoris" - a coded accusation of homosexuality.

For The Trial of Salome, director Bob Pavlich has cut together original transcripts from the trial with adapted excerpts from Wilde's play. Aside from Salome (T'mara Buckmaster), all the cast plays double roles - Herod (Adrian Mulraney) is also the Judge, Emma Goldsworthy is Herodias and Maud Allen, and so on.

It's an intriguing concept which, among other things, demonstrates with eye-popping clarity the close relationship between misogyny and homophobia. In Billing's eyes, a woman's uncontrolled sexuality is as much a threat to the clean-living heterosexual male as is the disease of homosexuality. The clitoris, we learn, is a mysterious organ known only inside medical journals and to perverts; in the grip of its influence, a woman might "be driven to an elephant".

If it hadn't actually happened, it would be hilarious. Sadly, as religious fundamentalism ensures that homophobia and misogyny creep into the core of public life, especially in the US, this is rather more than a period piece. As in Sylvere Lotringer's blackly funny Overexposed: Treating Sexual Perversion in America, a series of interviews with psychologists "treating" sexual criminals, it becomes increasingly clear that the real perversities exist in the fantasies projected by those who claim to be preserving the moral health of the nation.

Pavlich has created a fine piece of dramaturgy, theatrically cutting between the two realities in ways that are neither unsubtle nor predictable. The excerpts from Salome - a drama that is, in fact, about a woman savagely protecting her chasteness from the lust projected onto her by nearly every man she encounters - become an ironic counter-argument.

Perhaps what was most troubling to the censors was the beauty of Wilde's language (described during the trial as a certain sign of the sodomite). This beauty is felt as a moral affront; and in fact, the authorities were quite correct to feel this. In Wilde's moral universe, sensuous beauty was a radical imperative, a manifestation of love - even divine love - that struck profoundly at the heart of political and moral authority. For example, in The Fisherman and his Soul, the Priest, having cursed the lovers whose profane corpses have been cast on the beach, prepares to preach a sermon of fire and brimstone:

"He began to speak to the people, desiring to speak to them of the wrath of God. But the beauty of the white flowers troubled him, and their odour was sweet in his nostrils, and there came another word into his lips, and he spake not of the wrath of God, but of the God whose name is Love. And why he so spake, he knew not..."

The passions induced by Salome's beauty are much darker. For Salome, what matters is her chasteness, her moon-like integrity, which are constantly assailed by the lusts she unwittingly inspires in men, including in her stepfather Herod. Her revenge is deadly, and most deadly against the one man who inspires in her an answering desire, only to spurn her, Jokanaan.

Salome knowingly uses the lust she inspires to gain her own ends, finally acceding to Herod's impassioned requests that she dance for him, and then refusing all the riches he can offer her in favour of Jokanaan's head. "There are not dead men enough!" she says, as she orders soldiers to bring it to her.

When Herod witnesses the reality of Salome's desire, he is horrified, calling her "monstrous", and orders her death. But it's clear that her desire has been made monstrous by its constant erasure. She is only ever the object of desire, her own wants ignored by the men who, blinded by their lust, fail to perceive her at all. In this way they are no different from Jokanaan, who will not even look at her.

Stephen Berkoff brought his National Theatre production of Salome here several years ago. Although widely disparaged by Melbourne critics, it left me open-mouthed: aside from featuring one of the most sheerly beautiful designs I have ever seen, the company's performances of Wilde's Solomonic language was revelatory, showing me how powerful poetic language can be on stage, if uttered with complete physical and emotional conviction.

Unlike Berkoff's production, this co-op show hasn't the resources to meet the ambitions of this most interesting script. Aside from Mulraney and Goldsworthy, both fine, experienced actors, the cast has real trouble coming to grips with the extremes of Wilde's lyrical theatricality. For the most part (though this is also a function of the direction) they seem static in space, physically ungrounded, uncertain how to pitch either the poetry or the comedy.

And puzzlingly, given the intelligence of Pavlich's script, his direction seems to be misconceived, most grievously in Buckmaster's portrayal of Salome as a petulant, seductive teenager. There is no sense of the wounded pride which erupts so murderously in the play's climactic scene: the performance is more Paris Hilton denied a new pair of shoes than barbarian princess struck by the curse of Cupid's arrow. The decision to spread the part of Jokanaan between all the male cast members on the one hand emphasises their common blindness but, on the other, robs Jokanaan of his singularity and, perhaps most crucially, of his physical presence.

Despite my reservations, The Trial of Salome is worth seeing for the sheer interest of the script, which deserves a better-resourced production, and for its admirable ambition.

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The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, directed by Peter Evans, performed by Anita Hegh. Design Adam Gardnir, lighting design Luke Hails, sound design Roger Alsop. At the Store Room until April 3.

As soon as Anita Hegh props herself primly on a wooden schoolroom chair and glances neurotically at her right hand, as if it were some wild animal that might escape any moment, you realise that you're in for a special performance. Nothing that follows disabuses this expectation.



It's an enactment of a short story by the early feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in which an unnamed woman who is being treated for a nervous condition is confined by her doctor husband in a room decorated with particularly ugly wallpaper. The story traces her mental breakdown through a series of snatched diary entries. The Yellow Wallpaper rivals Georg Buchner's story Lenz as a compelling depiction of the subjectivity of madness, notable for both its imaginative expressiveness and the almost clinical precision of its observations.

In a 1913 article, Gilman was very clear about why she wrote this semi-autobiographical work. "For many years," she wrote, "I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown ... During about the third year of this trouble I went ... to a noted specialist in nervous diseases, the best known in the country. This wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still-good physique responded so promptly that he concluded there was nothing much the matter with me, and sent me home with solemn advice to 'live as domestic a life as far as possible,' to 'have but two hours' intellectual life a day,' and 'never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again' as long as I lived. This was in 1887.

"I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over. Then, using the remnants of intelligence that remained, and helped by a wise friend, I cast the noted specialist's advice to the winds and went to work again - work, the normal life of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite - ultimately recovering some measure of power.

"Being naturally moved to rejoicing by this narrow escape, I wrote The Yellow Wallpaper, with its embellishments and additions, to carry out the ideal (I never had hallucinations or objections to my mural decorations) and sent a copy to the physician who so nearly drove me mad. He never acknowledged it. ...Many years later I was told that the great specialist had admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of neurasthenia since reading The Yellow Wallpaper. It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked."

Gilman's passionate account here implies much of the history of female neurosis and its relationship to the medical profession; and more precisely, the difficulties faced by creative women in restrictive patriarchal societies that find such women to be, at best, oddities, and at worst, monstrous. In these contexts normal human desires, such as the wish for meaningful work or satisfying sex, are considered the province of men; when they appear in women, they are thought to be pathological or wicked.

The historical repression of intelligent and passionate women, from witch burnings to hysterectomies to institutionalisation, is not within my purview here; but it's a gruesome and sad and ongoing story. It is easy to say, in Melbourne in 2005, that those times are now long past; but the persistence of conditions like anorexia nervosa or the obsession with celebrity culture suggest that, even here, contemporary ideals of femininity might be little less imprisoning now than they were a century ago.

Hegh's performance is a compelling physicalisation of the fractures and deformations that the imposition of the "feminine" can do to a woman's self. In the beginning, Hegh sits or stands in poses that are exaggeratedly prim, her neck and chin extended like a mannerist painting, and the strange calmness of her voice has an anxious, nail-biting edge. But there are more violent disturbances in this ladylike facade; her body does not appear to wholly belong to her. She jumps with sudden, neurotic intakes of breath; she strikes strange poses, grotesque parodies of the feminine grace of a ballerina; her eyes flicker, as if her face were a prison through which her soul fleetingly and pleadingly emerges, only to vanish into the repetitious tics of conventional womanhood.

Her right hand, her working hand, is a focus of anguish and desire. Forbidden by her husband to write, she makes her diary entries furtively, obsessively recording her observations of the "optic horror" of the yellow wallpaper in the room where she is genteely imprisoned as a kind of sick child. In keeping with her infantalisation, this room is a former nursery, and the windows are barred. Eventually she becomes convinced that the ghastly patterns conceal a creeping woman who is attempting to get out; but that woman, of course, is herself.

The wallpaper itself becomes a potent symbol of the inscrutable and devious social codes by which the woman is disempowered. "On a pattern like this, by daylight, there is a lack of sequence, a defiance of law, that is a constant irritant to a normal mind. The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing. You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you..."

The increasing sense of dislocation and imbalance is intensified by the cunning use of props and lighting; Hegh might put on a single high-heeled shoe, forcing her to limp, or don sunglasses that mask her face with a terrifying maenad-like anomymity. A wedding dress becomes at once the symbol of her imprisonment and the badge of her illness. When at last the woman breaks free into madness - the only freedom left open to her - Hegh growls the text through a microphone, declaiming like a rock star poet.

Peter Evans directs The Yellow Wallpaper with nuance and precision; it's inventively lit and the sound design, using music and pre-recorded text, is spare and effective. Without any fuss, the staging frames and focuses Hegh's performance admirably. On all levels, The Yellow Wallpaper is a very classy piece of work: riveting, disturbing and beautiful.

The Store Room
Critic Watch

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Phaedra's Love by Sarah Kane, directed by Julie Waddington, design Julie Waddington and Luke Hails, sound by Nicholas Albanis. With Ben Noble, Georgina Capper, Fabienne Parr, Peter Roberts, Nick Austin, Pablo Calero, Alison Boyce, Jacinta Perry and Keira Lyons. Abstract Chaos with Instorage at the Store Room, until November 21.

Sarah Kane is the most exciting British playwright to emerge in the past decade. Her work was long overshadowed by the tabloid frenzy sparked by the 1995 production of her first play, Blasted, notoriously greeted as the product of a "sick" mind by a succession of rabidly foaming reviewers. The Daily Mail's Jack Tinker memorably labelled it a "disgusting feast of filth".

In common with many English-language writers treated without honour in their own countries (Samuel Beckett, Edward Bond, Howard Barker), European theatre was quick to recognise Kane's significance and welcomed Blasted as one of the most important plays of the 1990s. Critical opinion in Britain began to turn in 1998 with the premiere of Crave, but her suicide the following year made her the poete maudite of her generation. After her suicide, Kane's plays - like Sylvia Plath's poetry, and to their equal detriment - were mostly read as autobiographical expressions which foreshadowed her untimely death. As much as the claim that she wrote to shock for shock's sake, this romanticised notion obscured her uncompromising theatrical innovation.

In Australia, despite her steadily growing international reputation, Kane's work is still the province of the "fringe". She has been staged by theatres like Brisbane's La Boite and Sydney's New Theatre or the Stables, or by small independent theatre companies in Melbourne. I mean no disrespect to independent companies when I say that it's a shameful reflection on Australian theatre that one of the most important contemporary playwrights in the English language is unable to get a gig on a major stage.

Kane was one of a post-Thatcher generation of playwrights which emerged in the 1990s and challenged the pedagogic "theatre of journalism" exemplified most notably by David Hare. Many of them looked to playwrights like Caryl Churchill and Martin Crimp, or to Howard Barker's "theatre of catastrophe", as animating inspirations. As Kane's work evolved, her plays successively attacked the notion of theatrical naturalism in a distinctively visceral way. The revulsion and shock her plays invoke is never gratuitous, but is intended to provoke a re-evaluation of reality.

Although these playwrights were called the Nihilists or the New Brutalists, Kane's vision is far from nihilistic. It exposes a moral universe in which, as Hamlet says, "there is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so", and searches uncompromisingly for an ethics which can survive the violence of our contemporary world. But even 4:48 Psychosis, her final, excoriatingly beautiful masterpiece, finishes with a fragmentary but stubborn hope that should not be dimmed by her subsequent suicide.

Abstract Chaos' production of Kane's second play, Phaedra's Love, is an uncertain rendering of Kane's work, but worth seeing nevertheless. The night begins promisingly, but by the end has fallen off the unforgiving tightrope that Kane sets up with such deceptively simple assurance. It exemplifies the kind of difficulties - lack of resources, lack of time - faced by independent theatre productions. I should add that some of its problems may resolve as the season progresses.

Phaedra's Love is Kane's take on Seneca's and Euripides' tragedies Hippolytus, which tell the legend of Phaedra, the wife of Theseus. She is cursed by Aphrodite and falls desperately in love with her stepson, the beautiful and chaste youth Hippolytus, with catastrophic results. It is most famously adapted by Racine in his play Phaedre, which is written in what are allegedly (I have to take George Steiner's word for it) sublimely beautiful alexandrines.

Kane's take couldn't be more iconoclastic, although it still has traces of the naturalism which she afterwards abandoned altogether. Phaedra's Love is the most darkly funny of her plays and is also the first which explores the nature of love, a theme that became the major obsession of the later work. Here she perverts Phaedra's tragedy to create what is at once a chilling vision of the nature of obsessive love, and a strange liberation from despair.

In Phaedra's Love, Hippolytus (Ben Noble) is very far from being the chaste and beautiful youth of the original story. He is physically and emotionally repugnant, seen in the opening scene watching tv while wanking into a sock. (He checks that he hasn't blown his nose in it first). Phaedra's (Georgina Capper) fatal passion for him is therefore inscrutable and terrifying; when she declares her love, in a scene of skin-crawling humiliation, she performs oral sex on him while he watches television and snacks indifferently from a bag of lollies.

Yet in his monstrous boredom, his disgust with the falsity of everything that surrounds him, Hippolytus is also a curiously attractive character. Behind his joylessness and refusal of any human contact lies a desire for absolute honesty, a ruthless integrity which will have no truck with a world that disgusts him. The only time he shows anything like wonder is after he hears of Phaedra's suicide: "She really did love me... Bless her." And it becomes clear that Phaedra's accusation of rape against him is not the act of revenge that it appears to be, but a gift: the orgy of violence which follows is, at last, a real moment, in which there is no trace of human deceit. Hence his final words: "If there could have been more moments like this."

Phaedra's suicide is the logical result of the fire which has so consumed her, her abnegation the utter loss of self which is, as Kane perceived, tragically attracted to its opposite, the self that will compromise nothing. The gravity exerted by these extremes detroys everything around them - Phaedra's daughter Strophe (Fabianne Parr) is raped and murdered by Theseus (Peter Roberts) in the final carnage. But Kane's humour here is wicked: the murders of the Royal family are represented as a barbecue, with Hippolytus' genitals becoming a gruesome sausage.

Kane's grand guignol violence contains a serious critique, of classical theatre as much as of the nature of human love and the dilemma of the self. It's in eight tautly written scenes, which move rapidly to its horrifying and obscenely funny conclusion. Unfortunately, Julie Waddington's direction seldom matches the icy clarity of the text, so nothing is ever quite in focus.

Stylised acting at the pitch this play demands requires a depth of polish that the standard four weeks' rehearsal simply cannot achieve with any certainty. Georgina Capper's performance as Phaedra is the most successful in negotiating the challenges of the play's stylistic formality, and has some genuinely thrilling moments. Ben Noble's Hippolytus achieves his character's grossness, but falters at the extremity of his despair and so cannot reveal his perverse nobility. I had the feeling that often the other performances were hesitant or even, at times, without conviction. This means that the final scene has all the faults of stage violence when it doesn't work: despite the liberal application of tomato sauce it merely looks fake, and the audience laughs for the wrong reasons.

I thought the set design a major problem in this production. Admittedly, Kane wrote with a fine disregard for the difficulties of designers: at one point Phaedra's body is meant to be set on fire, which defeated the ingenuity of this production team. At times, however, the set literally gets in the way of seeing the action, and the pace is hindered by cumbersome moveable blocks which are rearranged between scenes. The set changes impede the flow of the tragedy, stilting its emotional movement so it achieves neither apotheoses of horror nor comedy. Despite these reservations, it's a rare chance to see - if through a glass darkly - a fascinating work by a major contemporary dramatist.

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The Conquest of the South Pole by Manfred Karge, directed by Todd Macdonald, designed by Luke Pither. Performed by Paul Denny, Damien Donovan, Josh Hewitt, James Saunders, Anita Hegh, Julie Eckersley, Mark Hennessy. Instorage at The Store Room, until October 31.

Good theatre writing often has an air of indestructibility, as if it could survive almost anything. I recently saw a school production of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children which traversed all the categories of naive acting, from sheer raw talent to squeaks of stage fright: Brecht survived the lot. It's even possible that in some ways the rough treatment made the language shine more brightly, like a stone in a polisher.

The Conquest of the South Pole is tough theatrical poetry at its best. From the moment it begins, the language picks you up by the scruff of the neck and drags you head-first into the play. This is because Manfred Karge is part of a Brechtian tradition of theatre which has not divorced itself, as has most English-language theatre, from the living traditions of poetry. Brecht is as great a poet as he is a playwright and, in Germany at least, his poetic legacy is as strong as his political influence.



Like his colleague Heiner Muller, Manfred Karge is a product of the Berliner Ensemble, the company Brecht and Helene Weigel began in 1949 and which has negotiated many changes, including the chaos of reunification. Karge began at the Berliner Ensemble as a young director in the 1970s, when Germany was still divided, and he still works there. He places himself squarely in the Brechtian tradition of political critique: it's a dialectic position perhaps best exemplified by Muller, who was at once Brecht's most loyal heir and fiercest critic.

The poetic in Karge's play is immediate, a lyrical attention to rhythm and sound and repetition which roots itself firmly in the vitality of vernacular language. This is much more than a decorative effect: as its first English translators, Tinch Minter and Anthony Vivis, said: "Much of the vocabulary in The Conquest of the South Pole would not appear in a standard German dictionary. ... Often, the characters' attempts to hold on to their individuality is expressed in wordplay, or through references beyond their immediate experience: myth, fairytale, historical event or quotation." Which is to say, the poetry itself is a means of resistance and recuperation against impersonal historical or economic forces.

The Conquest of the South Pole was written in 1986, three years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and concerns itself with the soul-eroding problems of endemic unemployment. The play is about four young men in a small German town, who stave off the despair of joblessness by re-enacting Amundsen's expedition to the South Pole in an attic. It's a kind of kitchen sink epic; except by implication, there are no structural attacks on capitalism, and it is set wholly in a claustrophobic domestic sphere.

When Slupianek (Paul Denny) and his two mates Buscher (Damien Donovan) and Braukmann (James Saunders) come home to find their friend Seiffert (Josh Hewitt) about to hang himself, Slupianek proposes a "fairy tale" as an antidote to the rhythm of "pinball and schnapps" that is slowly killing them: Amundsen's conquest of the South Pole.

And thus begins a heroic journey, both Amundsen's (as read from a book) and that of the young men and their friends. The polar ice becomes a metaphor for their struggle against a pitiless system which leaves them, despite their desperate desire to work, both without a job, and carrying the blame for their own unemployment. Slupianek's appropriation of Amundsen's triumph over the South Pole is his means of recuperating his dignity.

This is not, however, merely a story of triumph and hope through imaginative resource, but a rather more complex fable of resistance and inevitable failure. Buscher, the realist to Slupianek's idealist, rebels against Slupianek's leadership, claiming that the real metaphor for their situation is Shackleton's disastrous expedition:

"It's not triumphs we need to act out, friends, not triumphs," he says. "We do failures better, they're our staple diet. Every trip to the job centre is a failure. Every phone call about a job ad is a failure. Opening so many doors you polish the knobs. Every refusal a failure...Human beings are just one big failure. And so the failure must go on and on for ever and ever, a hundred times, a thousand times, until we're all sick to death. It's only when you're up to your eyes in shit, desperately gasping for air, and the thinnest current of air is getting thinner and thinner, when you're really on your last legs, then the vomit might rise so high in your throat that you lash out mercilessly in all directions. Then, Slupianek, we wouldn't just be shooting a few dogs..."

As Buscher recognises, an imaginary triumph remains, after all, only imaginary. Once the South Pole is conquered, it's still the South Pole. These young men remain lost in the wastelands of the dole office or their dead-end jobs; whether employed or unemployed, they are still victims of their lowly status in the economic food chain in a blindly consumerist society. Braukmann's wife (Anita Hegh), speaking of her day at work in a fish and chip shop, observes: "People go on guzzling. They moan, but they keep on guzzling...They're chockful of misery, and choking as they guzzle...The smoke from the stall gets in my eyes, gets in my lungs, and even gets in my heart."

Under Todd Macdonald's clear and precise direction, the play rings loud and true. Luke Pither's design reverses the claustrophobic space of the Store Room, so the audience enters the theatre through a small room strewn with the detritus of depressive living - take away containers, a flickering television, empty bottles of beer - where the actors are lounging aimlessly. The stage itself is a stylised ice floe, which transforms into an attic or a kitchen as the play slides between different realities.

However, the emphasis of this production falls, rightly I think, on the writing and performances. Macdonald has cast well, and makes the most of it. Paul Denny plays the charismatic Slupianek with an increasing poignancy and despair, giving the performance of the night: but the text is well served by everyone in the production. Perhaps it's as true to say that the actors are well-served by the script; its linguistic demands give them, perversely, a chance to explore some emotional freedoms. It's a play rarely done here - to my knowledge, it was last done around 15 years ago at Belvoir Street - and it is well worth the revisiting. Karge's restless questions are as pertinent now, in our restructured days of casual, insecure employment, as they were in 1980s West Germany or Thatcher's Britain.

Picture: Paul Denny, Damien Donovan, Josh Hewitt and James Saunders in The Conquest of the South Pole

The Store Room

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Sweet Staccato Rising by Robert Reid. Directed by Lauren Taylor, with Hamish Michael and Lauren Urquhart. Theatre of Decay at The Store Room, until August 22.

Talking about my g-g-generation: nothing is calculated to make me feel more like J. Alfred Prufrock than some bouncy young artist insisting on his or her youth. It is unarguable that 40 is older than 20, and I guess quoting Eliot says it all: how last century can a creaking old ague-ridden carcass get?

But I can't help it, the ague or the age. So here one stands, rolling up the bottoms of one's trousers, checking out the crows' feet around one's eyes and that lascivious softening of the flesh that occurs around one's middle, if one pays too little attention to lifestyle clubs and botox. It is indisputable that I am over 38 (eew, old! they say with disgust of 38 in Sweet Staccato Rising) and wear my age gracelessly, if only to point out that disaffected youth didn't spring new-minted from the ground in 1984. And if Robert Reid's play Sweet Staccato Rising makes me feel my age - so what? Was it worth the discomfort? Or - perhaps more pertinently - was it in fact as discomforting as it sought to be?

Sweet Staccato Rising covers familiar territory. It tracks the alienated young lovers Gunner (Hamish Michael) and Slitfish (Lauren Urquhart) as they implode in mutual self-destruction. It's that old romance of sex and death, Bonnie and Clyde or Sid and Nancy for a new generation. I've never really bought into the generational concept, which seems to me a device invented by market researchers, but, for the record, Reid claims to speak for those born in the mid-80s "between two Gulf Wars", articulating a familiar nihilism which is nevertheless aggressively particular to contemporary Melbourne.

The play's parochial focus gave me pause, for a number of reasons. One danger is that its brand of suburban angst runs the risk of seeming little more than self-indulgent, a cry of rebellion which turns out to be no more than "nobody loves me". (But is there anything more, after all, to the young Brando's iconic sneer?) And admittedly, the endless eastern suburbs of Melbourne, especially when seen from a train window, are bleakness itself: the heartland that spawns Neighbours and Kath & Kim is mile after mile of identical suburbia, sterile and heart-shrinking, the only sign of vitality the graffiti which blazes garishly along kilometres of fencing. It's not surprising that, in this landscape, youth suicide statistics are among the highest in the world.

Still, it was the stifling petit bourgeois respectability of Charleville which engendered the incandescent talent of Arthur Rimbaud, probably the first and still arguably the greatest of adolescent rebel angels. It is poverties of spirit that are germane here, not material poverty, despite the statistics about youth poverty flashed, a la Brecht, onto the theatre wall. Gunner and Slitfish are from the disenfranchised white middle class, not the underclass who inhabit towerblocks and caravan parks; they are not migrant workers or asylum seekers or disenfranchised indigenous people or, to begin with, homeless. Gunner might burn down his house, but he has a house to burn down in the first place: and it's a house with a lawn. Slitfish can afford a ticket to New Zealand, even if she is raped there. There are claims made for disenfranchisement which sit rather nervously over what is revealed in the play; I would have felt less bothered if there had been no claims, if I had been permitted simply to watch the story of these two abusive and abused young people. But this is theatre which seldom escapes a didactic edge.

Reid has written a series of dialogues which outline the limited arena of Gunner's and Slitfish's lives. They are given a high-octane delivery by Hamish Michael and Lauren Urquhart in two very interesting performances. Both are in clownish white-face make-up and lit only by white light in a black box theatre, and their physicality is jerky and artificial, as if they are marionettes or anarchic dolls. It's a risky strategy: these alienations only work sometimes, most effectively in the final scene, when the artifice of the direction and performance pays off in a true heightening of feeling. There is little attention to nuance in Lauren Taylor's direction, and although I admired the full-on, relentless assault of the energies of the performers and the play, the shock of dialogue delivered in a monotonal shout is one of diminishing returns. The effect is more often numbing than awakening.

The major problems with the production seemed to me to be in the writing itself. Sweet Staccato Rising aims for a tragic arc which drives towards a cathartic climax, but Reid has an uncertain grasp of the dramatic mechanics which make this possible, and the energies of the play are consequently largely dissipated in meandering dialogues. Despite a surface appearance of action, very little in fact happens until the final scene, where at last a real conflict occurs between the characters and the dialogue becomes forceful and dynamic and, dare I say it, moving.

The challenge in work like this is to create a mimesis of pointless and meandering lives without making the work itself meandering and pointless: it's a hard ask, and Reid only partially succeeds. I admire the ambition, which is the first ingredient of achievement, but I suspect this work is not ambitious enough. If it were, it might reach past its own naivetie, a nagging sense of narcissism which ultimately compromises its politics.

The Store Room

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