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

Melbourne International Arts Festival: The Busker's Opera, directed by Robert Lepage. Music composed, arranged and performed by Frederike Bedard, Martin Belanger, Julie Fainer, Claire Gignac, Frederic Lebrasseur, Veronika Makdissi-Warren, Kevin McCoy, Steve Normandin, Marco Poulin and Jean Rene. Dramaturge Kevin McCoy. Ex Machina. The Return of Ulysses by Claudio Monteverdi, directed by William Kentridge, puppets by Adrian Kohler and Handspring Puppet Company, music performed by Ricercar Consort. Playhouse, Victorian Arts Centre.

There are times when the blindingly obvious clambers over the event horizon of my mind and gives a big friendly "hoy!" Such a moment occurred somewhere in the middle of The Busker's Opera, Robert Lepage's exuberant, sexy, vulgar take on John Gay's 18th century The Beggar's Opera. I thought, oh gosh (or expletives to that effect): opera's just a bunch of songs that tell a story.

The story, it must be confessed, doesn't make a lot of sense. But as John Gay himself wrote, "you must allow that in this kind of drama 'tis no matter how absurdly things are brought about". In The Busker's Opera, unlike the original, the over-wived Macheath is actually executed (by lethal injection), although he takes off his orange suit straight afterwards and comes and sings in the epilogue of how "the wretch of today may be happy tomorrow". And thus death shall have no dominion. To be honest, I wasn't entirely sure why he was condemned to death in the first place, although it seemed to have something to do with his getting rather friendly with a soprano in a silver dress on top of a piano.

I hesitate to call The Busker's Opera an adaptation of Gay's piece. It is more a kind of merry pillage: Lepage appears to have simply filleted out the songs and then has given them to the cast and musicians, who set them in a bracingly various set of styles, ranging from rock to hiphop to 17th century baroque, and perform them with all the rough vitality of street performers. He uses almost no dialogue and none, that I could see, from The Beggar's Opera. But I do think it's entirely in the spirit of the original.

Gay's opera opens with a dialogue between a Beggar (who has written the opera) and a Player, who discuss the piece we are about to see. Similarly, Lepage opens with a conversation between a Busker, who for the purposes of the show has authored the piece, and an Agent. It then swings, like Gay, into a nonsensical story about various exotic lowlifes, including "a prison scene, which the ladies always reckon charmingly pathetic".

But there, more or less, the similarities end. Lepage himself claims the opera is a tilt against corporatisation, or in particular, the "Weill corporation", which cancelled his production of Brecht's Threepenny Opera (Brecht's own take on Gay). It's hard to see anything so grandiose as a critique of corporatisation in the sketchy narrative of sleaze in the music business which follows, but there are certainly a couple of fingers up to the Weill family.

Lepage seems to have decided to out-Brecht Brecht, but it is fair to say that he lacks Brecht's political perspicacity. Nevertheless, his direction possesses considerable wit and style, and attains the kind of simplicity which only comes with a great deal of thought and money. The stage is divided into two main areas: backstage, where are the musicians and instruments, and the forestage, where performers come forward to do their numbers and scenes. A huge flatscreen video is moved around the stage by some complicated mechanics. It provides all the lyrics and scene details, a la Brecht, occasional live footage and various complementary images.

What makes the two hours fly is the high-octane performances by a wonderful ensemble cast, which give the production both the roughness and skill it needs. It's like a rather beautiful rock concert, or a mutated, overblown cabaret. Lepage also has the absolute gift of Gay's tough lyrics, which somehow make the transition to contemporary rock or blues as if they absolutely belong there. Perhaps this makes perfect sense. Gay's opera, after all, contained no original music, for all the songs were set to popular airs of the period; and if they are sung here in another mode, it is still a mode all their own.

I had a fabulous time. So, judging by the cheers, did a lot of other people, although by the end I was surrounded by a sea of empty chairs. I was wearing my most delicious - in my fact, my only - perfume, so I really don't think I smelt that bad. It must have been the opera. There is a rather undergraduate statement on the program that warns hopefully: "this opera may offend everybody". Frankly, I was surprised that it offended anybody, but I assume that it must have.

I had a different kind of fabulous time at The Return of Ulysses. This is the kind of art which makes profound connections below the level of everyday consciousness. The effect is rather like being ambushed: it liberates feelings at some primeval strata of thought, and then, while you're innocently enjoying some exquisite music, they sneak up behind and pole-axe you with your own unsuspected emotion.

This is, to digress for a moment, an experience I always associate with beauty: a word which is abused to meaninglessness but which nevertheless means something to me. The idea of beauty often exercises poets, as it mercilessly exposes the inadequacy of words in attempting to communicate states of extreme subjectivity. Despite this difficulty, in my novella Navigatio I attempted to analyse what my experience of it is:

"...beauty is nothing, sang Rilke, but this terrifying beginning... The terror of beauty is that everything is beautiful. It is the chaotic self, the chaotic body, the chaotic world, fragmentary, diffuse, unassigned to meaning, against which form, an aesthetic armour, a self by which we understand our given selves, defends itself from the chaos within and without it. And yet art contains the terror of obliteration, which inhabits the centre of beauty. It admits the reality of death, of human finitude and failure, it admits that the world is not us and that we do not control it. This admission is love: the voluntary renunciation of self-tyranny, the ascension to the place of ordinary beauty, which redeems nothing."

The Return of Ulysses, which is directed by the extraordinary South African visual artist William Kentridge, seemed to me to be dealing very directly with this idea of beauty. It is a production which is multiple at every level; I would have liked to have seen it at least once more, in order to absorb more of its complexities. Yet one of its achievements is that what is really a very complicated event is given an air of illusory simplicity.

It is a co-production between the South African group Handspring Puppets, with whom Kentridge has had an on-going collaboration, and the Belgian ensemble Ricercar Consort. The story of Ulysses' return home to Ithaca and his reuniting with Penelope and Telemachus (after the slaughter of all his rivals) is told simply in Monteverdi's baroque opera, here cut to half its normal length by Philippe Pierlot and scored for a viola da gamba trio and plucked instruments such as the harp, theorbo and guitar. Pierlot's adaptation creates a work of great clarity and poignancy, performed to great emotional effect by an extremely accomplished cast of singers.

From the opera, the production builds up in two main layers: the puppets, which are manipulated by the singers as well as the animators, and Kentridge's own animated drawings, which are projected onto the back of the stage. Adrian Kohler's expressive puppets are almost life-size, and hand carved from wood. They are operated bunraku style, with the manipulators visible to the audience. I am always fascinated by how, in the hands of master puppeteers, this artifice isolates human gesture and endows it with feeling in ways that can't be achieved by actors. Anime masters like Miyazake can manage exactly the same thing: a schematically drawn cartoon of a child can be utterly convincing if its movement is meticulously accurate.

The puppets follow a simultaneous double narration: firstly a literal illustrating of the opera; and secondly a man, represented by a second, identical Ulysses, dying in his bed in hospital. These stories intertwine with the much more abstract narration which is unfolding on the screen backstage. It's hard to describe the impact of Kentridge's allusive, transformative animation, which is hand-drawn in charcoal using an austere palette of greys and browns. The images are incredibly various, and include sonar scans of the body, x-rays, video footage of water or heart operations, landscapes which transform from ancient Greece to bleak visions of contemporary South Africa, or lushly sensual flowers and vines. The images circle a constant refrain of death, decay and regeneration, metamorphising liquidly from one state to another with a dynamic which is disturbingly erotic.

The whole is brought together on a stage which is shaped like a lecture theatre, the musicians seated around in a half circle while the action flows before and behind them. It is lit by a rich play of Rembrandtian colours that highlight the nuances of the woods of the instruments and puppets. The opening scene, in which the gods discuss Ulysses' fate and mortal frailty, is in fact modelled on Rembrandt's painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp. The singers and manipulators gather around the prone body of the second Ulysses, and introduce the tenor of this production. It is in fact a memento mori, a theatrical version of those mediaeval images which urged people to remember that they, too, would die. In contemporary contexts, the capricious figures of the gods become the equally mysterious workings of the interior of the human body: an angiogram of a heart attack, for example, is the equivalent of Zeus' thunderbolts.

With such a subtle and multifarious work, it is hard to trace the motion of action and effect; it works cumulatively and patiently at levels which are often subconscious. At the end, the death of the hospitalised Ulysses, which occurred while the other puppet was enjoying a rapturous reunion with his long lost wife Penelope, was unexpectedly devastating. I found myself suddenly and embarassingly in tears. I suppose I was crying for myself. As Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote to a young girl grieving for the dead leaves of autumn, "It is the fate that man was born for. / It is Margaret you mourn for."

Melbourne International Arts Festival

Melbourne International Arts Festival: Via Dolorosa, written and performed by David Hare, directed by Stephen Daldry, Athenaeum Theatre.

I had a number of difficulties with David Hare's Via Dolorosa, but a principle problem was that I became bored. About half an hour before Sir David ended his whistle-stop tour of Israel and Palestine, I was obsessively longing for a coffee. With renewed alertness, I noted that he had reached his last interview; perhaps that was it. No, he had to get on the plane. And off the plane. And catch the train from Gatwick to Victoria. And then a Black Cab. A couple of flashback quotes... And then turn right, and right again... His dog, of course. The front door. A final, telling reflection...

Well, that coffee was pretty damn good by the time I got to it. I wondered if my coffee compulsion was a kind of Pavlovian response: I like caffeine with my Sunday newspaper. What I was listening to was the kind of thing that is published on weekends in quality English broadsheets (Via Dolorosa was, in fact, excerpted in The Guardian): erudite, intelligent, self aware, sceptical, leavened with an ironic if empathetic eye and a deprecating wit. Quintessentially English liberal bourgeois. Bourgeois that knows it's bourgeois, dammit; hence the deprecation.

Via Dolorosa recounts a visit to Israel that Hare made in 1997, when his play, Amy's View, was presented in Tel Aviv. His visit was also prompted by deeper reasons: as he says, "It is only now... that I realise, almost without noticing, that for some time my subject as a playwright has been faith. My subject is belief. And so it comes to seem appropriate - no, more than that, it comes to seem urgent - that the 50-year-old British playwright should finally visit the 50-year-old state."

What follows is a series of encounters with Palestinians and Israelis, mostly prominent people: religious Jewish settlers in Gaza; the respected head of the Palestinian Red Crescent, Haider Abdel Shafi; Menachem Begin's right wing son, Benni Begin; the Palestinian historian Albert Aghazerin; the theatre director George Ibrahim and poet Hussein Barghouti. These conversations are noted with painstaking even-handedness, and recounted with the deft lightness of a practised raconteur. And they are interesting in their own right, revealing some of the intractable, tangled contradictions that underly the Israeli occupation of Palestine. The sort of thing, as I said, which one might read with interest and attention in a broadsheet newspaper, and argue about afterwards.

A big problem with a play like this is that it dates quickly: I suspect it has lost a lot of punch by its inevitable assumption of the glaze of history. It was first performed in 1998, and the situation in the Middle East since then has grown immeasurably worse. What Hare describes seems, in comparison, almost a kind of idyll: this was when Ramallah had a "cheerful air", before it was bulldozed by the IDF.

Wisely, Hare does not attempt to act; he merely stands and speaks, assisted only by a couple of minimal lighting changes and one bizarrely kitsch moment when his visit to the Temple Mount summons a luminous gold model of the Mount to float in the dark space at the back of the stage. These things seem mere gestures towards theatre, a kind of dressing to assure us that this is, indeed, a play. I am not usually given to categorical assertions, but I was not convinced that it was a play at all.

I don't mean to limit what theatre can be to the spectacle, and personally I have a fatal attraction to the kind of show which features a spotlight, a performer and a harrowing script. Walking into the Athenaeum and seeing the naked stage bathed in a bluish light, a table with a glass of water set forestage, I thought I might be in for my sort of night. Instead, I came out with a feeling that I had just witnessed something that was tantamount to a kind of artistic death.

What David Hare presented was not anti-theatre: the Temple Mount moment exploded any sense of such a stern aesthetic. It was more a kind of un-theatre. I was more troubled by it than I expected, and not for any of the obvious reasons. It seems to me that Hare's insistence on "witness" and "reportage" is symptomatic of a wider contemporary crisis in art; ironically, given Hare's stated subject, of a loss of faith in art itself.

According to Hare, Via Dolorosa is primarily a vehicle for "enlightenment": "In fact, what I'm doing with Via Dolorosa is trying to pull theatre back to a fact-based theatre where the audience knows more when they leave than when they went in," he explains in an interview. This jostles uneasily with his disclaimer elsewhere that "theatre doesn’t work like journalism, and the suggestion that it is a form of journalism is untrue". It is hard to see that Via Dolorosa is anything but journalism, although that need not be a sneer - journalism, after all, includes writers like Martha Gellhorn and Ryszard Kapuschinski. But Hare's stated intention does beg the question: if I want some understanding of the Middle East, why am I not better off reading the reports of Robert Fisk or Juan Cole's analysis? Why would I want to go to a play?

Hare has not always been averse to making things up, although he comes out of the left wing British theatre of the 1970s and he was one of the pioneers of documentary theatre in his work with Joint Stock. His brand of politically committed work, rooted in actuality, has continued to be massively influential. Documentary theatre is currently the dominant vehicle for political dissent in British theatre; Hare's most recent play about the Iraq war, Stuff Happens, is now on in London.

Like his contemporaries Howard Brenton and Trevor Griffiths, Hare stands squarely in a broad tradition of British left wing activism which goes all the way back to before the Fabians. It's a tradition often fatally marked by the earnest belief that, with enough work, enough commitment, enough care, enough education, enough Reason, Progress will prevail. "But what is the way forward?" Hare kept asking his interviewees, with increasing plaintiveness. With the benefit of hindsight - this play was first performed in 1998 - it is clear that there has been no way forward, just an intractable locking in of conflict and bloodshed between two sides which are themselves riven by deep divisions. Hare's own Via Dolorosa is, of course, his discovery of the inadequacy of secular reason in the face of the apocalyptically irrational.

One of the ironies of Via Dolorosa is that, for all Hare's stated objectives of presenting "facts" and removing his mediating presence as author to permit his interviewees to speak for themselves, it is, in the end, a work about David Hare. But it is a Hare so conscious of his desire to be even-handed and of his status as an outsider that he speaks in chains, leaping in alarm when he dares to entertain a thought. I agree with Hare on the unimportance of opinion, but the aesthetic and morality of any artwork is much more than mere opinion. One wonders, tangentially, at what point fair-mindedness becomes moral vacillation.

Hare is scrupulously factual, working from his belief that his job is primarily to inform his audience of things they should know, in order to form a rounded moral view of the world. "Give us the facts, just the facts," he says, of a visit to the Holocaust Museum in Via Dolorosa, remarking that the art works there strike falsely in relation to the actual evidence of atrocity. It is a watered down version of Adorno's famous statement that, after Auschwitz, it is no longer possible to write lyric poetry. But unlike Adorno, who, with Hare, is speaking of the impossibility of representation in the face of atrocity, Hare's argument is full of sly libels against imagination itself.

In an interview on Via Dolorosa, Hare says: "Well, let's say it's the Jewish tradition that knowledge is as important as imagination. And so in some way I think its true that Jews traditionally distrust fiction. In other words, why make up stories when the world is already incredibly various and interesting?" Aside from the leap Hare makes from knowledge being as important as imagination to its being markedly less important, his sweeping statement about the Jewish distrust of fiction seems a little tough on writers like Franz Kafka, Saul Bellow, Andre Schwartz-Bart or Elias Canetti.

Of course, any artist can't but be aware of the essential inadequacy of art in the face of intractable experience. The political place and force of culture was one of the principle questions of the 20th century, and has perplexed much sharper minds than mine. But given art's inability to justify itself, I still wonder what point there is in making works that eschew imagination, why it is necessary to deny the complex truths that only art can communicate, as if this is the only way to restore to it an authenticity and authority to speak. It seems to me that any authenticity it gains is very often grounded in spurious perceptions, as hoaxes such as the recent Norma Khouri scandal have shown. And such supposed authenticity comes at a high cost. To deny human imagination seems a shackling of the one freedom that art can authentically offer, a capitulation in advance to the circumscribing forces of industrialised culture.

Which brings me back to my initial boredom. This is the kind of theatre people tend to like because it's recognisable and predictable: it's written in a form that is instantly familiar and challenges nothing about our processes of perception and understanding. But formal imagination is a huge part of the politics of representation, an issue Hare discusses to some extent in his work, and limiting theatre to the ethics and aesthetics of journalism is a profoundly political - and, I would say, ultimately conservative - decision. My reactions to Via Dolorosa made me think of another one-man show I saw a couple of weeks ago by a writer who was unashamedly a journalist - The Last Days of Mankind by Karl Kraus. Although it is almost a century older than Hare's play, it has the political bite, immediate relevance and experiential profundity that only imagination can confer. As Ezra Pound said of poetry, art is news that stays news.

Links:
Via Dolorosa
National Theatre: Platform Papers
To Each His Via Dolorosa, Al-Ahram
PBS interview
Arnold Wesker's open letter to David Hare

Melbourne International Arts Festival: Alladeen, The Builders Association and motiroti. Directed by Marianne Weems, conceived by Keith Khan, Marianne Weems and Ali Zaidi; performed by Rizwan Mirza, Heaven Phillips, Tanya Selvaratnam, Jamine Simhalan, Jeff Webster. Failing Kansas, conceived, performed and directed by Mikel Rouse, film footage by Cliff Baldwin.

These days most of us move between real and virtual spaces without thinking about it much. We have become used to the intimate spectacle of atrocities which are beamed instantly into our living rooms, the multiple identities we assign ourselves in phonespeak and cyberspace, the hyper-saturation of media images and the seductions of celebrity culture. Consciously or not, we swim through a flux of unsatisfied desire that lives in the eye rather than the tangibility of smell and touch; a desire which, if it is not precisely disembodied, is fragmented and displaced, and so becomes both more potent and more dangerous.



Such ways of being can create a desolating dislocation, and Alladeen, a spectacular multimedia work which explores the decentralised world of call centres, leaves a disturbing aftertaste. While it forthrightly explores the technological mechanisms of contemporary colonialism, it is by no means a technophobic show; Alladeen is at once celebratory and admonitory of our brave new wired-up world. But one of its most telling images is a woman dancing alone in a karaoke nightclub, talking to her absent lover on her mobile phone.

A collaboration between the New York-based The Builder's Association and the London company motiroti, Alladeen is itself a phenomenon of globalisation. The theatre piece is only one part of a triptych which includes a website (www.alladeen.com) and a music video. On the stage, the action moves between London, New York and Bangalore, between projected animations, documentary footage, live film and actors. Like all successful multimedia, it reveals and exploits the gap between the real power of theatre - the fleshly presence of actors and audience - and the potent, decontextualised image.

The informing metaphor is the story of Alladin, the poor boy who, through no fault of moral goodness, finds a genie and is transformed into a prince. It becomes a means of expressing the unsatisfied desire which drives consumer culture, but it also has more profound implications. Alladin, one of the most popular oriental fairytales, first appears in early translations of A Thousand and One Nights, but was not one of the original stories: it was inserted by a creative 17th century Frenchman. Alladin is one of the many narratives by which the Orient was culturally imagined and colonised by the West, a process Edward Said traced in his remarkable and necessary classic Orientalism.

Like Said, Alladeen does not take a monumental "clash of civilisations" approach to the question of Western colonisation, but instead is alert to the nuances of human beings as social animals, how cultural influences do not simply travel a vector of brute force, but are multiple and cross-pollinating. The documentary footage of call centre workers in Bangalore, for example, does not reveal a downtrodden third world population, but something rather more complex: a number of ambitious and energetic young people who are aware of the comedy inherent in their work, where they must take on a false persona and learn how to speak American. (They are given lectures on such cultural icons as Friends, and probably know more facts about Illinois than most people who live there).

None of this makes the ruthless eradication of any trace of "mother tongue" from Indian call centre workers less disturbing; success equates to becoming a kind of cultural ghost. And this disembodiment of identity is not confined to call centre workers: it is an aspect of the world we all inhabit now. Alladeen exposes the essential isolation of the age of communication, where human intimacy fractures on the bright, illusory surfaces of projected desires.

Failing Kansas is at the other end of the multimedia experience: rather than a stage saturated with so many images that it is impossible to know where to direct your eye, Mikel Rouse gives us a man, a backing tape and a screen of black and white images.

Failing Kansas is drawn from Truman Capote's masterly non-fiction novel In Cold Blood, a book generally credited with being an early harbinger of the New Journalism. Capote spent six years researching the apparently reasonless murder of the Clutter family, a wealthy Kansas wheat farmer, his wife and their two children, each killed by a shotgun blast to the forehead by two drifters, Perry Smith and Dick Hicock. The murderers stole forty dollars, a radio and a pair of binoculars.

The Clutter family, law-abiding church goers, could have stepped straight out of a Norman Rockwell illustration. No one, as local residents told police, didn't like the Clutters. Their murderers couldn't have come from a more different America. Hicock's family was stable but poor, and he had a background of petty crime. Perry's was broken and violent, and two of his siblings had committed suicide. Perry, more sensitive and more guilt-ridden than Hickock, was the focus of Capote's interest - he recognised that, but for the grace of God, it could have been him. At the time, his empathetic portrayal of Perry caused a scandal.

Mikel Rouse is not concerned to retell a story which anyone can go and read for themselves. Instead, he uses the book as an occasion for an extraordinary effusion of lyrical riffs which spring from a variety of sources: phrases in the book; songs by Perry himself; contemporary hymns; and fragments of poetry by Robert Service and Thomas Gray. He uses a technique he calls "counterpoetry", "the use of multiple pitched voices in strict metric counterpoint", to create live and pre-recorded layers of words and music. Dressed in a grey suit, standing in front of the mic, he delivers the songs in an obsessive sprachgesung, with a strange and oddly compelling physicality which owes more to rock than drama.

The staging is starkly simple: at the end of each aria, if I can call it that, the stage blacks out, Rouse moves to another microphone on the stage, the lights come up on him, and he begins again. The lighting is subtle and evocative, a palette of soft yellows and whites. Behind him, a grainy black and white film shows images of rural US towns, objects, photographs, news headlines, neon lights, beauty shows, cars and roads, people talking silently to the camera: a moving collage as repetitive and hypnotic in its own way as the endlessly iterated words.

The more words and phrases are repeated, the more detached they become from ordinary usages; it's a work in which meaning is located in texture, rhythm, nuance and context, rather than in the semantics of words. It is in this way a profoundly poetic experience. Rouse creates a claustrophobic, paranoid mindspace in which thoughts echo and jostle and repeat, as if we were witness to a vocalising of the junk in someone's brain. Failing Kansas is at once a lament, a meditation on hope and redemption and a portrayal of a savagely forlorn America. And it's absolutely riveting.

www.alladeen.com
Melbourne International Arts Festival

Fringe Festival: Into The Fire: Wallpaper by Lucy Stewart & Interrogation by Ben Noble, St Martins Youth Theatre; Spatial Theory, created and performed by Bill Shannon, music by DJ Richie Tempo, lighting David Szlasa, North Melbourne Town Hall.

First, a mea culpa: a lethal combination of the school holidays and severe laryngitis meant that my fingers slid nervelessly off the pulse of Melbourne theatre, right in the middle of one of its busiest times. And so, belatedly coming to, I realise I've missed out on a few things I would have dearly liked to see: the Theatre of Decay's latest version of intimate theatre, viewed from the back seat of a car, for example, or a production of a play by France's most eminent playwright, Michel Vinaver. And you can't exactly rent out the dvd if you miss the show: the beauty and terror of theatre is, alas, its ruthless temporality.

However, I collected myself in time to catch a couple of interesting shows. At St Martins Youth Theatre I saw Into The Fire, a double bill of two young Melbourne playwrights, Lucy Stewart and Ben Noble. They are part of a new generation of Melbourne theatre artists which looks restlessly beyond parochial influences, and these two demonstrate that contemporary British writing is beginning to make itself felt in new writing here.

Although very different from each other, both these works eschew conventional ideas of character and narrative in favour of splintered, disconnected realities. Stewart's play Wallpaper is a theatrical exteriorisation of disturbed subjectivities, with sharp, unheralded shifts between differing levels of actual, imagined, remembered or deranged states of being. It's a technique Sarah Kane exploited spectacularly, but Stewart uses it here to different ends.

At the opening of the play the central character, Nigel (Chris Jefferson), is celebrating his twenty third birthday. He is undergoing a kind of early-life crisis, with his marriage falling apart and his work in an introduction agency echoing hollowly the lack of love in his personal life. As his sense of self disintegrates into a chorus of mocking voices, he begins a relationship with a girl (Miriam Glaser) who emerges from the grey walls of his house. The people around him - his wife Kiki (Naomi Francis), her sister Jeannie (Hope Hayward Rowling) and his employer Malcolm (Kristian Sartori) increasingly become less real to him than the strange young girl who sinisterly demands his love.

This kind of writing is much more challenging than conventional plot-driven drama, and Stewart doesn't always manage to achieve her ambition. The dramatic dynamic falls on emotional contrast and metaphoric connections rather than narrative suspense, and such complexities require a concomitant clarity in the writing. While it was never difficult to work out what was going on, I felt that Stewart often flinched from the more difficult implications of what she was writing about, relying on a fey lyricism or absurd humour to get her through. This feeling was reinforced by James Adler's rather fuzzy and fussy direction. The play's virtues are its freshness and ambition, and I look forward to Stewart's future work, especially if she finds a drivenness and focus her work presently lacks.

Ben Noble's Interrogation is a much darker play, directed with a sure and spare hand by Julie Waddington to make compelling theatre. Noble is clearly a startling and intelligent talent: he is the only actor on stage, and has given himself the material for a virtusoso performance. The play also features filmed scenes acted by Alison Boyce, Shaun Brown, Sylvie de Crespigny, Daniel Frederksen, Fiona MacLeod and Peter Roberts. The videos are naturalistic grabs of story or conversation, captured voyeuristically (we are always aware of the camera), which are interspersed with quotes from the Bible and an obscure text called The Encridion, which I can find nothing about and so suspect may be fictional. The monologues performed by Noble are all characters whom we also see on the screen, which creates a number of gaps between the differing representations. These gaps grow perversely more dislocating as the stories become clearer.

The links between the narratives are the murders of three young women. The masculinist equation of eroticism and death is well-trodden ground, but Noble makes an interesting fist of it here, only stepping falsely when he makes the dead woman speak of her longing to be watched or even stalked. Even if it is a projection of the imaginings of the men, this is a moment which comes uncomfortably close to the notion that women desire the violence to which they are subjected.

Interrogation is vaguely reminiscent of Martin Crimp's tour de force Attempts on Her Life, but instead of a named woman whose identity and story shifts and fractures from scene to scene, there are three nameless victims and three potential murderers. The final opening out of the play into the literal realities of the writer and the audience/reader did seem, perhaps, a little pat: given the power of Noble's performance and the intelligence of the writing, I think I wanted something that more disturbingly revealed that a fiction is also a reality.

I also saw Spatial Theory, New York street performer Bill Shannon's attempt on theatre made, he says with contagious insouciance, because you make more money in theatre than in the street (a fact that, frankly, I find hard to believe).

Bill Shannon is a beguiling entertainer, his improvisatory repartee honed in the harsh market of the street where a moment's boredom means your audience will wander off, and he is dynamically supported by the amazing sound work of deejay Richie Tempo, a mixture of jazz, hiphop and percussive funk. The show is a bastard cross between dance, a lecture (complete with videos) and stand-up comedy, with all the joins showing. While each section is slick, the movement from one to the other is often awkward, and a director might have excised a few repetitive longueurs. However, this show is conscious and ambiguous enough to make a fetish of its own awkwardness, and to make discussing the whole idea of success an uneasy prospect.

Shannon was diagnosed at the age of five with Legg-Calve-Perthe disease, a kind of arthritis which means that he is dependent on crutches. He hasn't let that stop him, and Spatial Theory demonstrates that he is not called "The Crutchmaster" for nothing. With his especially designed dance crutches and a skateboard, he creates moments of breathtaking lyricism and grace out of an uncompromising street aesthetic. The crutches are extensions of his body and become elements of his fluid expressiveness - a cross, a cage, wings - both the badge of his limitations, and the means of his freedom. Perhaps the most interesting moment was a dance in which he performed more and more difficult tricks until he fell over, flat on his back, the music stopping instantly. The gasp from the audience was instantly turned back on us, the audience's willing him on to "success" gently satirised by his own dislike of being patronised, of help that is more about the helper excercising their own notions of themselves as humane people than anything the other person might actually need.

Underneath the comedy and strange beauty, Spatial Theory is mining some uncomfortable areas, exploiting the ambiguity and uncertainty the abled feel towards the disabled, and what it means to be a disabled person in a public place. He fearlessly launches himself into the pathos and comedy of failure, in the process both creating an aesthetic of heroicism and redefining that word "ability". How can a person of such abilities actually be "disabled"? And what was I watching? An artist making a show, or a disabled person transcending their disabilities? As Shannon says, turning the question back on us, "Is it a dance, or is it a trick? Is it a trick, or is it a dance?" The answer is, I suspect, that it is both of these things, or neither of them. The truth is, I still don't know.

The Last Days of Mankind, by Karl Kraus, with Justus Neumann. Music performed by Julius Schwing. Original direction by Hanspeter Horner, additional direction Daniel Schlusser. La Mama Theatre until September 26.

Think of a real work of art: have you never had the feeling that something about it is reminiscent of the smell of burning metal you get from a knife you're whetting on a grindstone? It's a cosmic, meteoric, lightning-and-thunder smell, something divinely uncanny!

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

Every now and then, it is necessary to be reminded of the true resources and possibilities of art. Sometimes it seems that dullness is all, that we merely consume, like lobotomised laboratory rats, the enforced idiocies of mass culture. A real work of art calls up without shame the seriousness of being, the mind's restlessness, its functions as critique and rebuke, inspiration and provocation. All fiery discontent, artists are indeed of the devil's party; but, like Milton, they must sing as if they were angels.

Karl Kraus was such a malcontent. He was one of an extraordinary generation of Austrian artists who emerged after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the catastrophe of World War One, a period which included geniuses like Robert Musil and Joseph Roth, and the chilling visions of painters like Otto Dix and Oskar Kokoschka. Perhaps it is that time's unique sense of apocalyptic transformation which makes these artists seem so relevant now, and gives their writings such a bitter air of prophecy.



Kraus, considered one of the great satirists of last century, was arguably the most sophisticated media commentator of his day. He saw before almost anyone else the baleful influence of press-driven propaganda on public life. Ironically, he used the transient forms of journalism to articulate his critique, most notably in his famous journal Die Fackel. The Last Days of Mankind, a sprawling 800-page epic which is still not fully translated into English, is generally acknowledged to be Kraus' masterpiece.

The play is reportedly a melange of quotes from sources such as Goethe and Shakespeare and the Bible, a mixture of historical and fictional characters, songs, cinematic elements, polyphonic crowd scenes and scenic fragments. Justus Neumann opens with a quote from Kraus' prologue, in which he says: "The events shown in this play, no matter how unlikely, actually took place; the words spoken in this play, no matter how unlikely, are true quotations." In a play which features God Himself, this is hardly an appeal to documentary ideas of verity. But there is no doubt that it is an account which is bitterly, blackly true, in the way that only art can be true. And it is deadly funny.

A performance which lasts for just over an hour clearly offers a radically edited version of Kraus' epic, and I am in no position to judge either the quality of the translation (made for this performance by Neumann and Matthew Lilias) or how the redacted version compares to the original. However, I can say that Neumann's adaptation makes stunning theatre.

Neumann, an Austrian actor whom I last saw perform almost 20 years ago in a virtuosic one-man piece called Kill Hamlet, is an actor's actor, a performer of consummate skill who has the strange glamour of invisibility that only the best actors attain. Your attention is so focused on the narrative, the character, the performance, that the actor himself is paradoxically effaced. From the first moment Neumann shows himself, half-lit halfway down La Mama's stairs, and reads in that bewitching voice from Kraus' prologue, you know you are in the hands of a master.

The set is self-consciously a stage: a raised dais draped with a black cloth, and a table with a chair, on which lies a book. At the other end of the stage is Julius Schwing - as I found out afterwards, Neumann's 17-year-old son - who tickles acoustic melodies from an electric guitar, as Neumann walks slowly to the small stage and begins what is effectively a dramatised reading of the play. But what a reading...

To call it a reading, although that it what it is, threatens to undersell its subtleties and power. The Last Days of Mankind is theatre at its simplest, a matter of unadorned words, music, and performance, but the production is, within the rigors of its stern palette, astoundingly full of colour and variousness. Aside from Neumann's ability to play a cast of at least dozens (he contains multitudes), this is due to the beautiful and precise shifts of Niklas Pajanti's lighting states, the suggestive placings of Neumann's body, certain stillnesses and gestures. His performance is counterpointed with the responsive and passionate live music, which varies from gentle arpeggios to the anguished electric scream of Hendrix or Deep Purple, summoning in the tiny space of La Mama the technological apocalypse of modern warfare.

If it is true, as Heiner Müller says, that the major political function of art today is to mobilise the imagination, then this production of The Last Days of Mankind performance is profoundly political. Without spectacular sets or casts of thousands, the atrocity and scale of world war is made palpable. The play's scope ranges from intimacies - a scene, for example, where children play "world war" - to public utterances of all kinds: a teacher to his pupils, a disillusioned God to His creation. The most frightening, perhaps, are where Kraus strips back the rhetoric of war's glory and exposes its homicidal insanity.

In this most nuanced of writers, no linguistic manipulation is left unexamined: Kraus is alert to all the political dimensions of language, from the most private to the most public. He shows how abuse of language directly creates the realities which permit the human tragedy, the grief and piteousness, of war.

Kraus considered the press one of the driving forces towards war - a major reason his work resonates so uncomfortably in the age of Fox News. The play opens, tellingly, with the news being shouted in Vienna of the assassination of the Prince Franz Josef in Sarajevo. Neumann plays "The Crowd", recreating the whirlpool of nationalism, racism, bellicose excitement, stupidity and bloodthirstiness which accompany a public lust for war. And one of his characters is an actual journalist, Alice Schalek, whose prurient interviews with soldiers and officers reveal an excitement bordering on the obscene.

"Satisfied?" she asks rhetorically, in raptures over being on a battlefield. "Satisfied is not the word for it! Patriotism, you idealists may call it. Hatred of the enemy, you nationalists. Call it sport, you moderns. Adventure, you romantics. You who know the souls of men call it the joyous thrill of power. I call it humanity liberated!"

It made me go cold, to hear that familiar glorification of mass murder in the name of human freedom. Those words were written almost a century ago, but for all our dazzling technological innovations, for all our trumpetings of progress, how much have things actually changed? We seem to have learned nothing. And as a response - an intelligent, undeceived, conscious response - to a world of increasing fascistic paranoia and irrational passions, it puts most contemporary works to shame. Don't miss it.

La Mama Theatre

Julia 3 by Michael Gurr. Directed by Bruce Myles, with Kate Fitzpatrick, Peter Curtin, Todd MacDonald and Greg Stone. Designed by Christina Smith, lighting design by Glenn Hughes, sound design Andrew Pendlebury. Playbox at the Malthouse Theatre, until September 25.

In the past, Michael Gurr's plays have left me either bored out of my skull or shaking with rage. Or both. Given my extreme reactions, I have sometimes wondered if Gurr represents everything I fear in myself about being a middle class writer with a humanitarian conscience.

Julia 3 gave me a chance to look again in this dark mirror. In this play, directed with a stylish minimalism by Bruce Myles, Kate Fitzpatrick plays a wealthy philanthropist who invites her three lovers - recipients of the favours of her foundation, as well as her bed - to her husband's funeral. Her husband represents, I suppose, Global Capitalism (he has "no character", but he has lots of money, a predatory sexual attraction towards third world children and a karmic cancer). The three lovers represent Science (Greg Stone), Culture (Peter Curtin) and Literature (Todd MacDonald). Julia herself, if we are to follow the allegory - if, indeed, it is an allegory - is the desperately compromised human conscience, haunted by the world's evils and attempting to change what she can.



Gentle reader, I confess; I was mainly bored. But I must be growing up, for I didn't walk out spitting with anger. Instead, Julia 3 left me worrying at a bunch of questions. For instance: is this play really as vacuous as it appears to be, or is Gurr being ironic? Has he in fact written an attack on the covert corruption of the liberal humanist, pointing out the complacency of the cultural imperialism which writes the whole world in the West's image? Or, instead, is he serious when he seems to be saying that nice rich people can change the world, by arranging the murders of the nasty rich people who cause all the suffering?

If he's serious on that last point, which is possible, the play begs a lot of questions. For instance - global capitalism is surely not a phenomenon driven, like a nineteenth century steel mill, by a top-hatted Captain of Industry, but a staggeringly complicated, gargantuan network of financial forces and institutions. Gurr is certainly not advocating structural change - the money can stay where it is, it seems, as long as it behaves decently to those less fortunate than itself. Or is it that the assassinations are supposed to be ironic, the ultimate corruption: capitalism turning on itself, like a senile mother cat eating her kittens?

But then again, if Gurr is being ironic, why all the conscience tweaking, the endless descriptions of third world suffering, those poor Others who live in appalling circumstances because of Us? And (more insidiously) why is Charlie the writer, a young man with pretensions worthy of the pen of Stella Gibbons, the only representative of Western culture who gets away with a shred of moral probity? (More troubling still, he is writing a book of ponderous ineffability, about Love...)

So it is that I can't get any purchase on this work; my mind glides off it. Watching it, I found myself gloomily remembering Harold Pinter's 1996 play Ashes to Ashes, which inhabits similar territory to Julia 3. But unlike Gurr, Pinter can take the minutae and superficialities of middle class life and reveal its hidden profundities, its beauty and and its atrocity.

Ashes to Ashes is a dialogue between a man and a woman in a drawing room, a conversation which keeps circling around an infidelity. Pinter ritualises the dialogue, which is allusive, evasive and, indefinably, more and more threatening, until he is able to make a real imaginative connection between the atrocities of Nazi Germany and this drawing room conversation. He builds towards a profoundly intimate sense of shock, which illuminates Hannah Arendt's argument about the banality of evil with a new emotional understanding.

Like Mountain Language, another of Pinter's later political works, Ashes to Ashes is a poetic play which deals with questions of moral complicity. But Pinter takes Emily Dickinson's advice, and tells the truth slant. His moral and political subtleties highlight what is fuzzy or badly thought through in Gurr's work; and most importantly, as a dramatist Pinter generates a charge of feeling which is seriously lacking in Julia 3.

It troubled me also that Gurr does not question the actual representation of atrocity. It is enough, he suggests, to describe it, to imagine it, to be aware of the "soft avalanche of disasters" which fill the morning newspapers. Yet the representation of atrocity as we know it becomes a kind of voyeurism, yet another form of exploitation; even, perhaps, a subtle form of colonisation, in which the victim as abject Other is enfolded into a wholly Western subjectivity. This is never questioned in this play. And the constant iteration of suffering in Julia's monologues has, like its equivalent on the news, an anaesthetic effect.

Gurr has written a poetic play, the kind of drama which depends on metaphorical connections and a dynamic of feeling, rather than more conventional dramatic machineries. My problem with it is that it contains scarcely any poetry. Aside from a little time travel between the present of the funeral and six months before, Julia 3 seldom pushes its realities beyond the literal. What does stay with me from the play is a dreamlike monologue in which Julia describes buying a hairbrush from a woman in a department store whose name tag has "apostrophes in it".

She began to brush her hair to show me how soft and delightful it was. And as she brushed, the blood began to come. First in drops, then in clusters and streams.... She wanted me to have the best. And by the time I left the blood was in her eyes and she had to blink it out, that black-red blood spreading from her scalp to her neck, but she never stopped smiling and she never stopped brushing.

This speech conjures a more complex subjective reality than is otherwise offered, and for me signalled a point where the writing began to become alive, to truly imagine itself, and the horror Gurr had been attempting to describe in monologue after desensitising monologue at last became visceral and disturbing.

(A serendipitous aside: while thinking about this, I stumbled across an interview with the performance artist Marina Abramovic. She describes her work Art must be beautiful, Artist must be beautiful thus: "I brush my hair with a metal brush held in my right hand and simultaneously comb my hair with a metal comb held in my left hand. While so doing, I continuously repeat: 'Art must be beautiful. Artist must be beautiful', until I have destroyed my hair and face".)

I realise it's unfair to worry the play to the exclusion of the production, especially as it has a fine design and a committed cast. Kate Fitzpatrick is so well cast the part might have been written for her, and she is ably supported by her "gentlemen", despite the thinness of the characters they must play. Peter Curtin gives a complex and humane performance as Leon, the art curator who is making his own compromises, and Greg Stone is all aggression and testosterone as the oncologist Joe. Todd MacDonald does his best as the young writer Charlie, and I really don't think he is responsible for the fact that his character annoys me beyond measure.

In Christina Smith's design, the stage of the Beckett is at first shrouded by a black theatre curtain. But instead of the curtain rising when the play begins, it is lit from behind, so it becomes a funereary veil, an image which beautifully introduces the notion that the whole of this reality exists within Julia's mind. And there was one moment of extraordinary stage magic - a newspaper on a table, its pages turning by themselves, as if it were being read by a ghost.

Kate Fitzpatrick and Greg Stone in Julia 3. Picture: Ponch Hawkes

Playbox Theatre Company

In which the PLAYWRIGHT (Abe Pogos) and the CRITIC (Alison Croggon) come to fisticuffs. Er, actually, no - in which two writers attempt to have a discussion about what matters to each of them about drama, following the criticism by one of the other's work. This is an edited version of a private email exchange, which Abe has very kindly permitted me to post here. This kind of dialogue will, I hope, be an irregular feature on the blog.

- AC

Dear Alison

Sorry I've taken so long to get back to you about your review.

I've decided not to post a response on your web site. I had a number of gos at a detailed analysis but I couldn't come up with anything I was happy with. When I tried to be funny I sounded bitchy, when I tried to be serious I sounded boring. Inevitably I found myself writing a review of my own play and I just felt embarrassed.

I gave up on trying to write an essay (I also gave up on trying to respond with a film script, an opera and an epic poem) and I've just included some general responses.

I felt that to some extent you reviewed the play according to expectations that were raised by the blurb on the Currency edition and that one of the play's failures was that it didn't live up to those expectations. I think the blurb (which I didn't write) unduly influenced you into placing emphasis on what I think are secondary concerns in the play. As a thesis on racism and genocide the play may be limited. While those issues are part of the fabric of the play I don't think they're the most important aspect. I wished you'd engaged more directly with the narrative and the drama of the piece which seemed to me to focus more on other things. The clue to what those things might be is somewhere in the following territory:

When Joan enters in the play's opening scene, the four characters on stage are the same ones who appear at the very end. In that first scene Joan discovers Toby being beaten by Christie under the authority of Duke. In the final seconds of the play Joan is weeping over the body of Christie who has been murdered by Toby while Duke is offering Toby Christie's badge. Joan is weeping over Christie oblivious to the fact that he has killed her first lover, Duke is offering Toby the badge oblivious to the fact that he's murdered Christie and Toby is on the ground whimpering in despair in spite of the fact he's been offered the two things he asked for at the beginning of the play (to be held and to be a sheriff).

I'm not sure what the moral of all that is, but the meaning of the play and its themes are contained in the sweep of the story and its ending, and the issue of racism is one part of it. You said the play has some "terrific bits...but where's the whole?" It begins in scene one and includes all the steps that take us to a climax where all the characters' and their relationships to one another have drastically changed. Directly or indirectly every scene leads to that climax and in that sense the play is organic and logical. That doesn't automatically make the play entertaining or compelling (and if you're right and the characters are unbelievable then the play fails anyway) but I'd argue there is a fundamental sense of design that you didn't see. It seemed like you decided or assumed what the play's themes ought to be or were trying to be, then got discombobulated because the narrative didn't stack up . Again I think it's because your emphasis on its themes and intentions was misplaced (I blame the blurb).

You make an attempt to state what my intentions were:

PLAYWRIGHT: I wanted to show how easy it is for people to become - other. For people to be made afraid of anyone different, and then to become cruel and murderous.

I'd argue the emphasis is the other way around. My starting point was to see what might happen if an outsider tried to gain acceptance by embracing the bigotry that marginalised him in the first place. You may argue that the Blood Libel story that Duke tells is evidence that I was attempting to analyse and deconstruct genocidal beliefs, but when I interpret the action of the scene (act 1, scene 10) I think it has a different dramatic focus.

In the scene Duke tells Toby about a child murder blamed on Gypsies some years earlier. What's most important to me is not the detail of the history lesson, but the fact that Duke is giving Toby a history lesson at all. Why? He despises Toby. It's because Duke has experienced a succession of humiliations to his dignity and his authority. He has been stripped of power and status. He can't sack Christie, he's afraid of Garth and young boys bare their arses at him. In fact his whole journey through the play is about loss of power and identity and his attempts to regain it (one reason why the scapegoating of Gypsies becomes crucial to him). He wants to be "a beacon for others" but they ignore him, so he is reduced to giving a drunken history lesson to someone on the lowest rung of the food chain and the only person who takes him seriously. The scene is not primarily about what Duke is saying, but what Duke is doing, or more importantly being; a teacher, a mentor, a father figure, an officer of the law, all the things that give him identity and status.

At the end of your review you say:

CRITIC: I thought and thought. Racism isn't about hallucinations and madness.

Again, I disagree with your emphasis. Duke's racism is a given which is there at the beginning of the play and he has no problem with it. It's what happens to him through the course of the play that sends him spiralling downward. I don't think the play is saying that racism is about madness (though I think Duke's Blood Libel story does demonstrate both "skewed realities" and "a certain kind of emotional logic"), but it might be saying that Duke's madness is a consequence of loss of power and status. (Incidentally, that's also what I think his Alien hallucination is about. Duke, having just been stripped of his badge, begins to doubt himself and God. He hallucinates another kind of divine entity that will end his torment, but even that leads to further humiliation.)

The following passage is from one of my failed attempts to write a detailed analysis of your review.

CRITIC: Suddenly it's not about these people arguing, instead they're talking about the Law. Suddenly a whole lot of imponderables and abstracts enter the conversation. Suddenly the life goes out of it.

The discussion of the law is on page one of the script. It spans about three sentences and it's not really about the law. Christie is using the law as an excuse for disengaging himself from the fool he's in the process of robbing. There's nothing imponderable or abstract about it. Also, it's an inextricable part of their argument, not something that takes place instead of their argument. When Duke enters the tension that began the play continues. If the life goes out of it, it's not because imponderables or abstracts enter the conversation. Whatever they're discussing, their actions and objectives remain constant throughout; Toby seeking acceptance, the sheriffs rejecting him. The scene is organic and logical. It doesn't begin as one thing and derail to become something else. If it fails it's for other reasons. You then suggest one of these reasons:

CRITIC: ... if you're dealing in imponderables and abstractions, (I don't think I was but anyway) if the characters are telling us all the time what they're thinking instead of, well, just thinking it - or even not just thinking it, but being it, at a level below consciousness - then it all becomes a bit too self conscious.

Trying to prove the play isn't self conscious is too abstract and imponderable for me. And if self consciousness is a fault in Toby that isn't the inevitable consequence of filling the play with characters that are "telling us all the time what they re thinking". The characters in Toby tell us what they think far less than in masterpieces like Macbeth or Long Day's Journey Into Night. It also doesn't inevitably follow that characters who constantly tell us what they think are incapable of "being...at a level below consciousness". In any decent play characters should be more than what they tell us. What you're suggesting is that my characters are only what they tell us and this makes it impossible for the actors to live inside the characters or behave in character, that my dialogue forces actors to describe, explain or illustrate the character they're playing so they can t really be the character:

CRITIC: It all ends up being like the shape of things, rather than the things themselves.

I believe all my characters allow actors to achieve a state of "being...at a level below consciousness" but there's nothing definitive in the text that I can show you to prove the point. In fact it's almost a contradiction if I could show you. How can they be at a level below consciousness if the text makes it explicit?

Anyway, my characters are not telling us all the time what they're thinking. Most of the characters lie and deceive at crisis points throughout the play and Christie, the second most prominent character in the play, lies and deceives in almost every scene he's in. Again that doesn't mean it's a good play but I question the way you've characterised its flaws.

CRITIC: And seeing as it's set in a (The CRITIC checks the back of the book) nineteenth century European village - don't you think it could have been a little more - specific? More like a nineteenth century European village?...It didn't seem like a nineteenth century European village at all.

Your complaint about the European village makes my head hurt. Maybe we can chat about it over a coffee one day.

You said there were only a couple of times when you believed the characters. I'll respond to the one character you dissect in any detail, Joan.

CRITIC: But I just don't understand why that girl Joan - played by Tess Butler - had to be so Pollyanna. She seemed the most symbolic of the characters, she might as well have had "WOMAN" tattooed on her forehead, how the men all owned her, how obedient she was, how her sexuality was her only means of power. I didn't believe her for a second. What can a performer do with that?

If Joanne is a Pollyanna at the beginning she isn't by the end. She s not a Pollyanna anyway and she isn't particularly obedient and her sexuality isn't her only means of power. She uses ridicule and shame and eventually lies and deceives. The fact that the men try and own her doesn't mean they actually do. They defer to her constantly and when her lover, Garth, says "she's mine", he can only say it out of earshot because he's in the process of a deception that he knows she won't tolerate. Lots of people didn't like Joan because they thought she was conceited, manipulative and ultimately opportunistic and duplicitous, not because they thought she wasn't real. She's not the greatest female role in theatre history but her actions are clear, she drives the scenes she's in, and she goes on a journey that means she's in a different emotional space by the end of the play. A performer can do a lot with that.

Abe


Hi Abe

Cor!

I’m not sure that what is basically a light review can stand or in fact deserves such close analysis; some of your objections are to comments that are basically jokes, since much of the review is a satire on the whole process of criticising in the first place. The only really serious bits are at the end, when I talk about Woyzeck and grapple with the problem of moralising that happens in spite of itself (this is actually an attempt to think about a question which I think is really about form, and how possible it is to subvert it).

No, I wasn’t influenced by the blurb. I don’t take blurbs seriously, can’t write them myself since they always seem like pure corn to me – I always get other people to write them for my own books - but some critics do. That comment is in fact a satirical aside on critics who do that (or take their lead from press releases, a bugbear of mine).

As for your other points: I’m not sure I’m going to be able to articulate what I mean. My main real criticisms of Toby were firstly its metaphorical problems, because the metaphor of the play, and its internal metaphors (the alien &c) were I felt extremely confused; and secondly its dramatic language, which fell too often out of the gestic and into these abstractions - in fact, in your defences of it, I felt that those abstractions loomed large - speaking for instance of "objectives" in a scene is already a step away from a character's actual being, and into psychology (I think psychologising is one of the enormous problems, nay falsities, of much contemporary drama, and one of THE great abstractions).

Say - the aim of wanting objectives to remain "constant" through a scene is, in my mind, a real problem, since all interesting drama is about derailment in one way or another. Which is to say, the interest of drama or characterisation is not in the constants, which may or may not be there, but in the dislocations - obvious in Strindberg or Barker or Shakespeare say, not so obvious in Ibsen or Chekhov, but I would still absolutely argue it. Toby was the best character in the play, and the only one who didn't seem to have some kind of ultimately didactic role in which their behaviour meant something and was designed to achieve something beyond themselves (what does Beckett say about "we're not beginning to mean something?", Hamm, or was it Clov?); everyone else seemed to be symbolising something, fulfilling some role inside the plot, and didn't have a life beyond that. Now you would say that Macbeth is being symbolic beyond himself, and I would agree, but not primarily: he is all sorts of things, abstractly speaking, which represent all sorts of things about human beings, if you care to make him so: but first of all, he is Macbeth - a fictional, imagined character - and these other things are incidental next to that fact.

Not sure if this is clear, but I suspect that within this conversation is a real difference about what we both consider drama to be. Which is always an interesting point to begin. I want it to be poetic, and by that I mean a whole raft of stuff which I really can't write down here. The things you want from it are maybe more prosaic (I'm not attaching value judgements to either of these descriptions, btw, I write a lot of prose...)

I still think it would be interesting to have this conversation on the blog, with all its difficulties and reservations of presentation and expression.

A


Dear Alison,

I did wonder if you were doing an impression of a bad critic but I wasn't game to say it. The fact that you indicate that you had serious critical points to make at the end of the review muddies the satire.

I won't go into what you've written here in too much detail for now (I've already spent five hours on the earlier correspondence). I do think a discussion of what we mean by drama is worth considering and I was thinking of asking you to look at extracts from Toby that embody your reservations, and compare them to extracts from any other play of your choice that embody your values. Obviously Toby won't compare to Shakespeare or any work of genius, but my issue is not about it's relative quality, but about the way the dramatic impulse functions. I guess I want to see if you can show me examples to demonstrate your argument.

I'm not sure what you mean by abstractions. I also don't understand what you mean when you say "speaking for instance of "objectives" in a scene is already a step away from a character's actual being, and into psychology. "(I think psychologising is one of the enormous problems, nay falsities, of much contemporary drama, and one of THE great abstractions). Say - the aim of wanting objectives to remain "constant" through a scene is, in my mind, a real problem, since all interesting drama is about derailment in one way or another."

I don't see how you can divorce someone's objectives from "their actual being" and I wonder if there is a confusion of what we mean by our terms. I even wonder what you mean by "derailment" because I'd have thought there was quite a bit of it in Toby. (I should have a read of Woyzeck.)

Abe


Hi Abe

I've been thinking in a troubled fashion about what we've been saying.

I am shocked you haven't read Woyzeck. I mean, it's not like it's a minor or unimportant play or something; it's the beginning of modern drama. There's a film by Werner Herzog with Klaus Kinski which isn't bad, but you should read it, and a good translation; I've got about five different versions, and some are much better than others. The thing is that Buchner didn't finish it before he died, and so nobody knows what order the scenes should be in. But I digress.

This business about having objectives and thwartedness being the essence of the dramatic seems incredibly reductive to me. Yes, of course, you can look at most plays and figure out objectives for each character, but if the play is any good, you won't be revealing anything interesting about what's going on by doing so, because you'll have to ignore about 90 per cent of what is actually happening in a scene. Conflict is about so much more than that, and drama is about so much more than conflict. Shakespeare is about the most un-psychological writer there is, but even Ibsen doesn't do that (people forget that his first plays were verse dramas, and that his naturalism is inherently poetic).

What about the formal attributes of writing? Of language? Do you think that the dramatic impulse has nothing to do with these things?

And a question: this emanates from my experience of writing character-based novels as much as any reading or watching plays. Do you ever not know what a character is doing, or why they're doing it?

A

I haven't yet dealt with stuff about poetics and language. Anyway...

I don't know if the idea of "having objectives and thwartedness" is "the essence of the dramatic" but it's a good place to start.

"Let's go/We can't/Why not?/We're waiting for Godot."

The idea of struggle is at the heart of most drama. Characters striving for more than they have - or at least keeping what they've got - and the possibility of failure or loss is what engages audiences because these things resonate in our lives.

The issue about having objectives is a practical one. How do actors bring a text to life without having objectives? A text may embody many layers of meaning, be full of ambiguities, mystery, poetry and may be open to many possibilities as to how it may be performed, but actors can't play them all. They have to be selective and find an impulse to bring the thing to life. Having objectives (what do I want?) is a fundamental animating impulse of drama, and it's the actions (what am I doing?) a character plays to achieve their objective that defines character.

Defining an objective doesn't have to be "reductive" or mean you have to "ignore about 90 per cent of what is actually happening in a scene". If the text has mystery or ambiguity actors can convey that without actually playing it (in fact I don't think you can play mystery or ambiguity). Defining an objective can also be a key to revealing layers of meaning that may not be apparent on reading a text. I'll use the example of the Cheek By Jowl production of Othello which I described to you recently.

"Emilia in this production was presented as a woman who truly loved Iago and their relationship had once been loving and passionate. Her objective was to somehow rekindle their love and the scene when she gives Iago Desdemona's hanky was playful and sexy. We then saw Iago cruelly extricating himself from Emilia's advances once he gets the hanky. It conveyed the sense of Emilia's bewilderment at a breach in their relationship which Iago has never spoken about. Like Desdemona, Emilia is in the dark as to what's gone wrong. At the end when Emilia discovers how Iago has used the hanky, her sense of betrayal and loss is palpable on many levels. The tragic heart of the play in this production is not with Othello, it is with Emilia."

Assuming my interpretation is in the right ballpark, Emilia's objective of trying to win back Iago added a layer of meaning and texture that seemed to resonate throughout the play. For one thing, it drew a parallel between Emilia's journey and Desdemona's - something that had never occurred to me before.

In response to the question "Do you ever not know what a character is doing, or why they're doing it?"

In that moment when I imagine what the characters are saying or doing to one another I usually know why. I may not know everything about that moment and with time and reflection I'll come to understand that there are more dimensions to what that moment means then I realised at the time, but in that moment I can usually articulate what a character's actions are about. That may sound reductive but at some point I'm going to be in a rehearsal room and an actor or director will come up to me because that moment is not working and they'll ask, why is the character doing or saying that? To me it's a cop out to say I don't know. I read an interview with a playwright/director who said that if a writer was in a rehearsal room and couldn't get up and demonstrate how a line or scene works, then they had noright to expect an actor to solve the problem for them. I wouldn't go that far (I can't act for one thing) but if I'm expecting an actor to invest their time, craft and humanity in realising my work in performance, I should be able to impart some clue to help them if they don't understand me. if I can't help them then I should consider re-writing.

I'd be curious to know what your experience has been in regard to this question (in the writing process and in the rehearsal room).

More importantly, did you ever do something without knowing what you were doing or why you were doing it? (Anything you might have done under the influence of substances doesn't count.)

Another question.

What you think of notions of identification? A fundamental of any script is having someone we identify with. If we don't identify at some level, why should we care?

Abe


Hi Abe

I think we have to make a distinction between what actors might (think they) want from a text and the processes and experiences of writing. Actors always ask questions of a text, this almost goes without saying. And often what they say is very interesting and illuminating. But that does not mean that their questions ought to be answered all the time: and I think it is perfectly possible, even desirable, to write a credible character who says or does something that you don't fully understand; and if that happens, the only honest answer is that you don't know. It might be far better to let an actor or a director make certain specific decisions about a text, following his or her own creative intuitions, than to permit the actor to think that someone else has the ultimate answers. That is, after all, the actor's work. The writer's work is to make a text which permits the occasion of the actor's work: that is a writer's full and actually total obligation. (You can't ask any questions if the author is dead.) If the words on the page do not provide enough for the actor to work with, then no amount of explanation by the author is going to make up the deficit.

Now, this is not to deny that writers and actors can both very often be stupid about each other's, and very often their own, work. I am trying to imagine the best possible circumstances, rather than the worst. We both know how easy it is to fail in the theatre, and how very difficult it is to make all these elements work. Let's take that as a given.

The fact is that the actor, in having to create a character on stage night after night, is the person with the ultimate answer in any particular production of a play. And one actor will find one definitive answer in a particular production, and another actor another equally definitive - but perhaps startlingly contradictory - answer in another one. Both answers will be equally derived from the text, equally "true", which suggests that the text can encompass both contradictory readings. And this suggests that a text might have something that particular actors don't want or need, some kind of surplus, and actors might have something that is beyond the text. So these questions about actorly and writerly characterisation, while being superficially related, might actually be about very different aspects of a text.

Also, if an actor asks a writer a question about a character, it is with the assumption that the writer knows better than the actor, and has a final authority in declaiming on his/her text. I would seriously question that authority.

I think a writer ought to know everything possible about the aesthetic/formal decisions he or she has made. He/she should know everything he/she brings to making a work: its antecedents, its influences, its devices, its structure/architecture, the usages of syntax, the etymologies of words, the allusions, and so on. The better a writer is, the more conscious he/she is of all the gross and minute formal aspects of any particular piece of writing. I think Shakespeare is like this. (I'm sick of this he/she thing, I'll just use one or the other from now on) But there are things that a writer does not and should not know, although she might guess or hope. These things are, I believe, to do with the emotional life and affect of a text. This is the stuff that you can't be wholly conscious about, but which is absolutely vital to the ultimate coherency of even the most fragmentary text (eg Muller). You can't be wholly conscious about it, because, if brought into consciousness, these aspects immediately go absolutely dead and lose their potency. They have to exercise some kind of kinetic, potential charge below the surface level of the text (as you suggest). To go back to the question of the actor, this emotional affect is what an actor will respond to - most actors, in my experience, and certainly most of the best actors I have talked to, are quite inarticulate about their process: they seem to work primarily physically and intuitively, exploring some sense of "rightness". When the actor's inarticulacy meets and expresses a writer's inarticulacy, all those things that can't be said but are inherent somehow within the words, something happens.

I don't want to be mystical. Nevertheless, I think what one doesn't know, what one can't pin down, what is unpredictable, is extremely important in any creative process. You would probably say this is a cop-out. But I would suggest the opposite: that to embrace and accept what you don't know is to accept the full responsibility of your vocation, to "dance over the abyss", as Nietzsche says. To know what your work is doing all the time is a desire to possess meaning, to pin it down, and the fact is that meaning is not a possessible quality. Meaning is evanescent and contingent: if theatre has taught me anything, it is the importance of context and temporality. Also, the feeling of any text (prose, poem, play) is for me a vastly important aspect of its meaning, as are its formal qualities. These things - formal qualities and feeling - are not vehicles in which "meaning" is conveyed from writer to actor to audience. One simply cannot possess all the meanings of a text, even - or even especially - if one has written it (check out Blanchot on the question of the impossibility of authors reading their own work - I think he's right).

So, to answer your question: have I ever done anything without knowing what I was doing? The answer is, sadly, yes, even without substance abuse (in real life, I do not necessarily think this is a good thing; in fact, it is not the same question). In the realm of writing, it is most certainly "yes". I have finished stories and plays in order to find out what happened at the end. I never know what a poem is going to be before I write it, and I wrote a whole 450 page narrative novel with no idea what was going to happen next, or what my characters were going to say or do. Even when a narrative is planned, there is still an enormous indeterminacy in the writing of it. Writing for me is almost wholly a process of discovery, otherwise I couldn't imagine why the hell I would do it. When the process works, and sometimes it does, it looks as if you meant it all along. But you didn't.

Saying a play or a character is about an objective is reductive, without question, if you think it is the only or primary thing that matters in the texture and the meaning of the play. Any moment of any person's life is very complicated: at the moment, I am thinking about this, while Ben is nagging me to go to the park, and so part of me is thinking about that; the temperature has just dropped in the past five minutes; I must finish off the washing for school tomorrow; and I ought to turn the light on, as the room is getting dark. And so on... It is very seldom that only one thing happens in anybody's mind, and a good text gives the illusion - and it is an illusion - of that kind of complexity. There may be an overriding objective which drives the text, but it operates on a gross level: what makes a play interesting is all the things happening underneath that informing arc, and perhaps most of all, their contradictions. To take a crass example: Iago's objective is to destroy Othello: why is it, then, that you're sure that he loves him?

- Also, and this is a big problem I have with the Objective School, it ignores the whole question of metaphor. And I think metaphor is so crucial to theatre and theatre writing that I don't know how theatre can be talked about without it. And yet almost nobody does. As soon as an actor is on a stage, without opening his mouth, it is a metaphor. It is at once itself - the banal fact of a human being on a stage - and something else - The Theatre! Another reality, which is inherently unreal and poetic and exists in the dimensions of imagination.

As for notions of identification: it really depends on what you're writing. In my young adult novels, I write characters who are absolutely to be identified with: when fans write me "I am Maerad", I am well pleased. Maerad is an attractive character, and she embodies all sorts of terrible problems about the self that young people can passionately see in themselves. This is partly because I am writing something that I want to be popular literature, and because of the kind of book it is. It is by no means the only thing that is going on in these texts, but it is a means by which I am able to manage a number of other things which interest me.

But I don't think this question of identification matters as a universal law: I disagree that it is a "fundamental of any script". What about a play like Offending the Audience? Barker's work? (Who do identify with in The Europeans or Victory?) Heiner Muller? Brecht? &c &c, there are hundreds of examples. There are many reasons to be interested in a script, and identifying with a character is only one of them. Brecht would perhaps say that this question of identification is absolutely about pandering to an audience, about making a text "safe". This is when the question of identification becomes, as it most often does, a question of "liking" a character. It's a common criticism that characters in a piece are unlikeable, and nothing makes film producers more nervous than unlikeable characters. And this functions as a huge leverage of censorship, of reality as much as of representation. The fact is that it is possible to wholly dislike a character and yet find them fascinating - Heathcliff, say, in Wuthering Heights, is one of the most compelling characters in literature. Yet have a look at Bunuel's film, the only one which really gets Bronte's savagery, and see how cruel he is, how deeply unlikeable.

That's a really complicated question, and I have probably written enough. And now I really have to go and do the washing!

A

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Melbourne Theatre Company