Cruel and Tender by Martin Crimp, directed by Julian Meyrick, design by Ralph Myers. With Catherine McClements, Jacek Koman, Paul Ashcroft, Kim Gyngell, Colin Moody, Betty Bobbitt, Melissa Chambers, Katerina Kotsonis, Ratidzo Mambo, Dino Marnika, Elliot Noble, Jasper Swarray. MTC at the Fairfax Studio, Arts Centre until April 23.

I'm unconvinced by Cruel and Tender, Martin Crimp's new take on on the "War on Terror". There's a certain over-artfulness in its art, a shallowness in its metaphor. Put it beside coruscating theatrical imaginations like Howard Barker (whose play The Castle remains one of the political masterpieces of recent British theatre) or the visceral sexual politics of Sarah Kane, and its lustre dims considerably.

The first play of Crimp's that I encountered was the genuinely impressive Attempts on her Life, and on reflection I think this vertigo-inducing text, with its cumulative excavation of the way mediated representations enter and distort our realities, is a much more pertinent and powerful comment on our times than Cruel and Tender, despite the latter's overtly contemporary attention to issues like the war in Iraq. This play is an updated take on Sophocles' tragedy The Trachiniae, or The Women of Trachis, and I can't help thinking it might have been more interesting to stage the original play.

Sophocles' tragedy has the grand clarity of Classical Greek theatre, in which human action is drenched in a kind of transparent inevitability, the capricious workings of Destiny or the Gods on fragile mortals. It is based on the myth of the hero Herakles, who in the opening scene is away from home conquering Euboas, a region of Greece. He sends some of his booty - the captured princess Iole - to his pining wife Deianeira. Alarmed and jealous, Deianeira sends her erring husband a shirt impregnated with the blood of a centaur who tried to rape her and was killed by Herakles. In his dying moments, the centaur told her that his blood will magically ensure her husband's fidelity.

But the centaur, predictably perhaps, turns out to be vengeful rather than generous. The shirt has a very different effect to that Deianeira intends - Herakles is stricken with a "blood-fed flame" that devours his skin, and in his agony seeks the escape of death. When Deianeira's son Hyllus charges her with murdering his father, Deianeira kills herself. In the final scene, Herakles orders Hyllus to kill him, to release him from his agony, and to marry Iole, both of which charges he accepts reluctantly.

Crimp follows this basic storyline, but updates it with contemporary references. Herakles becomes a General (Jacek Koman) who is pursuing the hydra-headed War on Terror by means of bloody campaigns in Africa. Deianeira is his spoiled wife Amelia (Catherine McClements) , who is waiting his return amid rumours that her husband is a war criminal. Iole is Laela (Ratidzo Mambo), an African princess for whom the General has razed an entire town. The Chorus is replaced by Amelia's attendants, and various messengers and other dramatic dogsbodies become UN or government officials. The centaur's blood is transformed into a phial of biochemical liquid, the gift of a former spurned lover who now works in a germ warfare institute.

On the evidence of this play, Crimp simply doesn't possess a tragic muse. And while he deftly handles the various levels of language - from high Classical rhetoric to naturalism - it doesn't translate into effect. It's a play written with avowedly political intent but, unlike its model, it suffers from a certain metaphorical fuzziness. If it's meant to be read as an analogy - and this is what it seems to ask - it actually doesn't throw any but the most general of illuminations over our darkly flickering modern world.

The notion of terror as a hydra which grows two heads each time one is slashed off is one I can get, sure. But that's a very minor motif. A reference to germ warfare rebounding on those who use it is fine - but as a love philtre - even a revengeful love philtre - it's beginning to stretch even my credulity. The idea of the war hero-turned-criminal, spurned and betrayed by those who initially supported him, is perhaps more interesting - but the public politics of this durable theme is better pursued in Shakespeare's Coriolanus. Crimp's main point is to set the play in Amelia's bedroom, looking to sexual politics as a metaphor for warfare. In doing so, whether he intends to or not, he literally domesticates the politics of the War on Terror.

It's not as if this idea hasn't been explored before, and brilliantly: the connections between war and sexuality were assayed with damning force by Sarah Kane, most notably in her play Blasted. What Kane has, and Crimp lacks, is a heightened sexual anger, and the ability to express it. This difference is perhaps best discussed by looking at the character of Laela, the General's African mistress whom he has sent to Amelia to care for until his return.

Laela is all Otherness, knowingly exploiting her sexuality as material leverage. Her violent capture, despite her initial refusal to speak, seems to disturb her surprisingly little: she is a willing accomplice in her own subjugation. Her main concern is to be "nice" to the General so he will buy her the dresses she wants. Perhaps this is an ironic portrayal of the Stockholm Syndrome, or perhaps this is Crimp's commentary on corrupt regimes complicit with the War on Terror; but to my mind it backfires badly. If Laela is meant to symbolise "Africa", or any nation ravaged by the West's "diplomacy by other means", it's a portrayal full of the traditional Imperialist cliches: Africa is amoral, grasping, childlike, inscrutable, and willingly connives in its own rape.

In the original tragedy, the captured princess Iole is not from a distant land, but from a neighboring province of Greece. Her grief and shock at her abduction by Herakles is conveyed with poignancy and dignity by her total refusal to speak: her muteness holds all her protest. The transformation of this character into Laela matches the mutation of the character of Deianeira - queenly, distracted and tough - into the egocentric narcissism of Amelia.

The metaphoric blur that results is partly because of a collision between the literal realities to which the play is referring and the poetic myth of the original tragedy. There's nothing wrong with keeping both aspects in play, but I never felt free to enter either reality: somehow, instead of highlighting each other, they cancelled each other out.

Cruel and Tender was originally produced (in English) at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, directed by Luc Bondy, who commissioned it. From what I have read, Bondy's production foregrounded the media portrayals of the "War on Terror" and the knickknacks of contemporary technology, and may have filled out some of the complexities and ambiguities signally lacking in the MTC version, directed here by Julian Meyrick.

And perhaps my doubts arise as much from Meyrick's rather one-dimensional and sometimes clunky production as from any shortcomings in the script itself. Amelia's cry that she is not a victim resonates especially uneasily. In this play, she is nothing but a victim, a bored and faithless trophy wife eating her heart out for her absent husband, and she suffers her fate in gratifyingly traditional ways.

In this production, which lacks any ironic distancing, the gesture towards the archetype of the "strong woman" remains only a gesture. “I could be mistaken for a victim,” cries a defiant Amelia, “and, that’s not a part I’m prepared to play!” This is not a feminist rallying cry, as it is played: like everyone else, Amelia is a victim. Her defiance is a luxury, the result of her privilege, which comes at a terrible and unacknowledged cost to others. This subtext is simply absent from Meyrick's production.

The performances themselves are never less than competent, but I feel that most of the cast has problems in pitching the differing registers of the text as it shifts from realism to mythic grandeur. Many of the more heightened passages or monologues are actually obscured by the music which rises, increasingly predictably, to signal another "poetic" bit. The stage comes alive late in the play when the General (Jacek Koman) finally appears, horribly disfigured by his disease. Koman, always a reliably skilled and committed actor, is the only one who really handles Crimp's challenging shifts in linguistic register.

The design - basically a naturalistic bedroom of hotel-style blandness and luxury - is unsuited to the Fairfax Studio, where the audience sits diagonally on two sides of the stage. Like Luc Bondy's original production, the design of which was more abstract and clinical, it features a reflective window back stage. Behind the darkened glass, lighted figures can suddenly appear and vanish. It's an interesting device; but on a stage that is not a proscenium arch its effects are obscured from those who aren't watching it front on - which includes at least a third of the Fairfax audience.

In short, Cruel and Tender strikes me as a fair bit of sound and fury signifying, when you really examine it, surprisingly little. On the other hand, this is the latest in a number of recent productions which confront the important issues of our times and, if nothing else, it places theatre squarely in the charged social arena where it belongs.

Melbourne Theatre Company

The Laramie Project, written by Moises Kaufman and members of The Tectonic Theatre Project, directed by Chris Baldock, scenic design by Janine Marshall. With David Gardette, Ron Kofler, Catherine Kohlen, Olivia Hogan, Paula McDonald, Vicki Smith, Dan Walls and Brett Whittingham. Act-O-Matic 3000 at Chapel off Chapel, Prahran, until March 30.

Ok, I'll out my own bigotry first: documentary theatre isn't my bag, baby. I usually end up wondering why somebody didn't write a play.

The proper retort is, of course, that a documentary play is still a play, as much an imaginatively-made artefact as any five act tragedy. But in less than scrupulous hands, the knowledge that the story enacted before you actually happened to real people can obscure this simple fact, in the worst circumstances demeaning both theatre and the event it records. In the case of The Laramie Project, which centres on a vicious homophobic murder, this could be an especially difficult problem.



On October 7, 1998 a young gay man, Matthew Shepard, was discovered bound to a fence in the hills outside Laramie, Wyoming. He had been savagely beaten by two local men, and left to die. The crime became an international cause célèbre, a symbol of shocking intolerance and hatred. The impact on the tiny rural town of Laramie was profound, and it is this impact that the play documents.

For the first ten minutes or so, as the actors earnestly outlined the process of traveling to Laramie and setting up the interviews, I wondered if someone wasn't making a terrible mistake. There's a certain piety in some kinds of American soul searching that I find difficult to swallow. Even by the end, when I was genuinely moved, I still wasn't quite convinced that as a play The Laramie Project was wholly successful. But even given my reservations, which are too complicated to elaborate here, I can't argue with the quality of the work: this is powerful theatre, and beautifully realised by Act-O-Matic 3000.

New York troupe The Tectonic Theatre Project created The Laramie Project after visiting Laramie six times over two years. They recorded more than 200 interviews, which were then shaped into a play by Moises Kaufman and the company. Perhaps I'll be forgiven some investigation into the formal properties of this work, as they are such an important part of its effect.

In his approach to the writing, Moises Kaufman consulted the master. He derived the play's form from Bertolt Brecht's essay The Street Scene, in which Brecht suggests "an eyewitness demonstrating to a collection of people how a traffic accident took place" as a model for epic theatre. "The epic theatre," says Brecht, "wants...to return to the very simplest 'natural' theatre, a social enterprise whose origins, means and ends are practical and earthly." A pragmatically human enterprise, then, refusing transcendence in favour of an activist social purpose.

The Laramie Project also places itself squarely in a strong American tradition of artistic critique - for example, it has close affinities to Truman Capote's non-fiction novel In Cold Blood, about the reasonless murder of a wheat farmer and his family in rural Kansas; and its belief in theatre as an arena for moral drama is exemplified in playwrights like Arthur Miller.

Kaufman decided to frame the company's exploration of what happened in Laramie in its own terms: the mechanisms of creating the project are exposed as part of the action, and the actors relate the circumstances of interviews before enacting them. This has a signal advantage: it permits a degree of honesty which it would be otherwise difficult to attain. The company's judgments and responses are as exposed as the people they interview.

At the same time, the form of the play does something interesting. The audience is never allowed to believe that the play is transparently telling a story; the "willing suspension of disbelief" which permits an audience to believe in "characters" is continually disrupted by a deliberate distancing. As an audience we are asked the same question that Father Roger Schimdt asks of the theatre company: are they telling it "correct"?

An important part of this aesthetic is the stripping away of theatrical illusion. One of the effects is, according to Brecht, to shift the focus of an audience's moral judgment: character is revealed by a person's actions and not, as in more traditional ideas of writing, the other way around.

Another effect is to foreground the complexities of conflicting perceptions of an event. In the case of The Laramie Project, it is a stunningly successful convention: preconceptions are blown away, and reveal instead something much more complex - and perhaps in some ways more troubling - than the media-driven picture of a redneck small town. Laramie, like most human communities, is imperfect and contradictory; but I think what comes over most strongly is a vindication of George Orwell's faith in the basic decency of ordinary people.

It does not end - cannot end - on a note of triumphal redemption; the human desire to find meaning in the terrible death of Matthew Shepard is balanced by the homophobic hate-speech of bigots like the Rev Fred Phelps, or the bitterness of the statement that, despite everything, nothing is substantially different, that no legislative changes have been made to enshrine anti-discrimination laws in Wyoming. Given the growing power of fundamentalist right wing forces in the US, that bitterness seems justified. But the play's concomitant focus on the power of ordinary resistances - on human decency - is a reminder of genuine hope.

A question Brecht asks in his essay is: "What about the epic theatre's value as art?" The elegantly stripped-down aesthetic of The Laramie Project, present in both the script and the production, is here its own answer. Its artistic value is not in question.

Director Chris Baldock intelligently eschews props or costumes, exploiting instead the full resources of his excellent ensemble cast. The very beautiful set, evocatively lit by John Cooper, is simply eight chairs placed on a bare stage which has a painted backdrop of a skyscape. Baldock imaginatively works the mise en scene to enact things as various as diary entries, a meeting by the fence where Shepard was found or a busy court room, the actors shifting between different roles as the script demands. Like the conceit of the play itself, these are deceptively simple means which work with brilliant efficacy.

Act-O-Matic 3000 is certainly a company to watch. I last saw them producing some short plays in the back room of a pub in Richmond. Then, I was impressed by their focus, passion and intelligence. It's exciting to see what this committed company can do with some resources. This is political theatre at its best: theatre that offers its questions with a clarity that never compromises their complexity, and that asks its audience, first of all, to think.

Picture: Act-O-Matic 3000 performing The Laramie Project

Act-O-Matic 3000
The Guardian: Extreme Prejudice

Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand, translated by Marion Potts and Andrew Upton, directed by Simon Phillips, design by Gabriela Tylesova. With David Wenham, Bob Hornery, Asher Keddie, Alex Menglet, David Lyons, Gerry Connolly, Carita Farrer, Hayden Spencer, Stephen Ballantyne, Adam Zwar, Russell Fletcher and Jay Bowen. Melbourne Theatre Company at the Arts Centre Playhouse until April 2.

George Bernard Shaw once contemptuously dismissed Cyrano de Bergerac as mere "pasteboard". This is a little like attacking King Lear because it's a bit depressing. Cyrano de Bergerac is about the artifice of theatre at least as much as it's about the tragedy of having a huge honker.



It was a period piece when it was written, set in a fantasia of 17th century Paris. Rostand took theatrical conventions that in 1897 were already two centuries old and whipped them into a delectable new froth. It permits him to make rude jokes about practically everyone in classical French literature, from Molière to the now (it seems deservedly) obscure Balthazar Baro, and to parody theatre itself with a fond mercilessness peculiar to its practitioners.

Simon Phillips has a flair for this sort of play, which is light without being insubstantial; I fondly remember his 1989 production of The Importance of Being Earnest, with an Aubrey Beardsley-derived set and a performance of memorable loathing from Frank Thring. He directs Cyrano de Bergerac with style, employing a spectacular design by Gabriela Tylesova, and casting David Wenham, the thinking woman's crumpet, in the title role.

This production uses a new translation by Andrew Upton and Marion Potts, which has been adapted further by Upton. The play is streamlined, excising some extraneous characters and scenes and conflating others, and updates many (but not all) of Rostand's jokes. Most riskily, the translators preserve much of the rhymed verse of the original. The gamble pays off: they create tough, vital dramatic verse, adorned with flourishes of Byronic wit. The adaptation gives Rostand a contemporary colloquial edge without in the least compromising the complexities of the original. I am all admiration.

Aside from its satirical energy which, like Molière, attacks social hypocrisy and pretension at every turn, the major reason the play has lasted is the enduring attraction of Cyrano de Bergerac himself. Cyrano is a man incapable of compromise, a shamelessly proud and idealistic poet who would, literally, die for his "panache". The irony is that if it were not for his nose, he would not be the romantic paragon he is; it's his conviction of his physical repulsiveness that drives him to such impossible moral purity.

He is the most literary of fictional heroes, a man whose passionate nature is cursed by his outrageous schnozzle (to paraphrase Eliot, only those with large noses know what it means to want to escape from them). His real tragedy is that, like his hero Don Quixote, he is born into a time and place which has little time for his ideas of honour. The difference between Quixote and Cyrano is that Cyrano is aware of his own absurdity. His vaulting literary ambition, which sneers at superficial success, is as crippling as his nose: both ridiculous and ennobling.

This self-conscious ambiguity is why Cyrano de Bergerac is more than bathetic sentiment (another Shavian judgment). Its farcical narrative of human flaws unfolds into genuine pathos. Refusing to reconcile his ideals with the corrupt and decadent world in which he lives, Cyrano creates mayhem and stirs up enemies wherever he goes; in the first half hour he leaves about eight corpses strewn about the stage. Even his most ardent friends tell him that he is a pain in the arse, and his rigid adherence to his code of honour denies romantic happiness not only to himself but to his great love, Roxane. It's the triumph of Rostand's writing that we accept that Cyrano cannot be anything other than he is, and admire him for it.

Wenham's proboscis is as astoundingly long as some of his speeches (Cyrano de Bergerac is, in the fullest sense, a play on words). He gives Cyrano a swaggering physical presence, an arrogant machismo tempered by the private delicacy and passion of his feelings. It's difficult to believe in his ugliness, even under the umbrella of his nose; this Cyrano is a handsome man obscured, rather than a man whose moral comeliness trumps his surface blemishes. Like the text, his performance is adorned with irony and seductive wit, but what shines through by the end is Cyrano's stoic moral courage, of a plainer and more stylish mode than his showy machismo, and thus more poignant.

Asher Keddie as the beautiful but distressingly literate Roxane convincingly manages the transition from intellectual infatuation and vanity to real feeling, and makes a grand foil for Wenham's Cyrano. They are ably supported, most notably by Alex Menglet at his comic best as the poetic baker Ragueneau, David Lyons as the handsome but witless lover Christiane de Neuvilette, and Hayden Spencer as his rival de Guiche, the rich nephew of Cardinal Richelieu. The cast draws on a wide range of comic tropes, both contemporary and historical; there are nods to The Young Ones and Blackadder as well as to the satires of Molière.

As the play moves towards its tragic conclusion, Wenham tends to a repetitive cadence, a dying fall on each line, which enervates the language and marginally compromises its feeling. And for all their energy, some performances lack the highly polished clarity and precision this kind of European-style theatre demands, muffling its effect. The sword fights, for example, seem hesitant, as if the actors are afraid of being cut; and some performers were hard to hear, an essential in a play which is so much about language. It gives an overall effect of being ever-so-slightly out of focus. But this feeling may well dissipate as the play warms into its season.

Gabriela Tylesova's set, sumptuously lit by Nick Schlieper, creates a rich and flexible space which draws wittily on the theatricality of the play. The transformations - from decadent Parisian society, to a set which recalls the desolate battlefield in Abel Gance's film of Napoleon to, finally, a serene evocation of a convent in autumn - are magnificently expressive realisations of the play's differing moods. And her costumes are fantasies, from Roxane's extraordinarily beautiful mourning dress to the ludicrously exaggerated fripperies of the Parisian fops.

Ian Macdonald's original music, scored for electric violin, adds considerably to the production's expressiveness, especially as it's played live on stage by Michael Harris masquerading as a blind street musician. Phillips' direction exploits the set like a conjurer, with performers popping up from trapdoors or from among the audience, or being suddenly revealed inside curtained boxes that are theatres within the theatre, or surreal bakeries, or coaches made of cheese. It's magic like this that makes me think that the proscenium arch is such a fine idea. Pasteboard? Yes, absolutely; but pasteboard with panache.

Picture: David Wenham as Cyrano de Bergerac with Asher Keddie as Roxane

Melbourne Theatre Company

Out on a Limb: unsynchronised body parts, conceived, devised and performed by by Sarah Mainwaring, in collaboration with Lloyd Jones. La Mama Theatre.

The entire emphasis of Out on a Limb, which took place over four evenings, was on the process of expression. For Sarah Mainwaring, this has a special urgency. When she was six years old, she was involved in a major car accident that left her with serious brain damage. This was followed by more than a decade of rehabilitation. Her body remains damaged by the accident: her limbs will not immediately obey her, and tasks the able-bodied manage without thinking are challenges that require all her will and ingenuity.



But, importantly, this is not a performance about conquering the limitations of the body, so much as about inhabiting and accepting it. Mainwaring's invitation to the audience to witness her struggle with her own body has an astonishing generosity and humility. That I might feel confronted by my own desire to watch such private struggles is, I think, my own business.

The performance takes place in an installation designed by Lloyd Jones and Mainwaring, which gives an impressionistic idea of the walls of a suburban house. There is a single, evocative sound, a constant harsh rustle, which I finally tracked to a plastic bag hung in front of a fan. It begins with Mainwaring peering through a window. She asks in a kind of sprachgesung, half singing, half speaking: "Who am I?" She then emerges, in a tight dress, shiny blazer and a startlingly red hat, and performs a series of tasks. The first is to pull out some wrapping paper from a basket, fold it, and tie it up with string. She makes about half a dozen little parcels, and the process takes a long time. When she has finished, the parcels are hung up on hooks on a trellis, to add to the evolving installation. She then plays with a drum, attempting to hit it and missing, puts it away, dances, poses herself in positions of entrapment and frustration.

All these simple actions take a long time, but induce a meditative patience which is particularly rewarding. Mainwaring's struggle to control her materials divests her - and therefore us - of any self-consciousness, and tying a knot in a piece of string, say, becomes absolutely mesmerising. I found myself reflecting on all sorts of things: what it means to make something, what it means to watch an action, my relationship with my own body. Mainwaring's performance includes a sense of self-parody, and that it's possible to laugh without discomfort says a lot for her evolving intimacy with the audience, an intimacy which is reinforced by Lloyd Jones' gentle coaching from the seats.

Finally, Mainwaring strips to her underpants behind the back wall, visible through a doorway, which reinforces the unsettling ambiguity of voyeurism which circles around this show. An assistant helps to take off her clothes, puts goggles over her eyes and covers her in talcum powder. Then she moves to the front stage and throws blue paint over her body. The transformation is startling, from the grotesquely powdered, goggled body to a strange, beautifully marked marine creature that writhes on paint-slicked plastic with unabashed eroticism. She stands up, with assistance as the floor is treacherously slippery, wipes the paint from her eyes, and moves to a ladder, where she sings again: "Who am I? What will I be? I hope it includes some really interesting sex."

Writing the bare outline of what happened is manifestly inadequate to the experience of being there. Out on a Limb is performance art, coming out of the late 20th century tradition in which artists have used their own bodies as art objects, framing ordinary human actions in ways which force us to see them anew; but it has its own particular challenge and abrasiveness. Perhaps I should employ some negative theology, and say what it was not. It was not "politically correct". It was not exploitative. It was not patronising. It was not artless.

"Yves Klein," said another audience member afterwards. And yes, indeed; Out on a Limb can't but echo Yves Klein's The Monotone Symphony, during which naked models daubed themselves with blue paint and, under the direction of the maestro, painted with their bodies. It also made me think of the album cover of Roxy Music's Siren, which featured Jerry Hall as an alien and beautiful mermaid. But unlike both of these things, which ward the erotic off into a distant objectivity, it put the audience in radical relationship to it, implicated in its intimacy.

Clearly it raises issues, about expectations of the body and sexuality, and about human expressiveness. And, with a peculiarly gentle insistence, it's liberating, both for the performer and those who witness her. "The artist," says the program, "is creating a form". That is all this piece is "about", and it is quite sufficient; such meanings as an audience might seek in that form are there for them to find, if they wish. For it is always possible to take nothing away. For me, Out on a Limb was a moving struggle towards freedom, a compelling expression of desire. Perhaps most signally, it had the unpornographic courage of artistic nakedness.

Picture: Sarah Mainwaring

La Mama Theatre

After the Rain by Sergi Belbel, directed by Scott Gooding, designed by Kathryn Sproul, with Gloria Ajenstat, Penelope Bartlau, Simon Kearney, Colin MacPherson, Melissa Parente, Clare Springett, Elizabeth Thomson and Shaun Worrell. Translated by John London, David George and Xavier Rodriguez Rosell. Vicious Fish Theatre at Theatreworks until March 5.

I haven't often walked out of a theatre as baffled as I did from After the Rain. I felt clear on only one point: I hadn't enjoyed the experience. But mere reactive opinion is, after all, the least interesting of responses. Why I was so bored, puzzled and frustrated is much harder to work out.

I had gone to see this production with high expectations. After the Rain is the second part of an on-going project by Vicious Fish Theatre to present the plays of Catalan playwright Sergi Belbel to Melbourne audiences. The first, Caresses, was a drama rooted in a gritty urban vernacular, and revealed a complex, poetic playwright with an intriguing formal imagination. Moreover, After the Rain won the Molière award - the French equivalent of the Tony - for Best Comedy in 1999.

It is very difficult to see what the French found so funny, or to square the tough theatrical sophistication of the play I saw last time with the apparent pointlessness of After the Rain. This makes me suspect that the first culprit might be the translation itself. Unlike Caresses, this play has three translators, and perhaps there were simply too many cooks muddling the broth.

But even given the possible shortcomings of the English text, the evening need not have been so tedious. A great deal has to be shafted home to Scott Gooding's deadeningly literal direction, which is often bizarrely at odds with the script. I'm not sure that I've ever seen a play so thoroughly obscured by a production, and this makes analysing it more perilous than usual.

My spies tell me that the French translator of Belbel's play was one of the most respected in the country, which tends to confirm my notion that the English translation has problems. But it's possible also - given that theatre in France is, for good or ill, a director's theatre - that After the Rain is an inferior play to Caresses, but was dressed to advantage with a brilliant production.

I'm unable to read Catalan, and can only guess what the play might be like in its original language. Certainly I can form no opinion of Mr Belbel. Squinting through my memories of the script, I can make out echoes of a poetic based on repetition, perhaps a shadow of the kind of linguistic satire that Michel Vinaver attains in his own plays on corporatism: in any case, various hints of verbal complexity and depth that might have made something interesting of what otherwise seems to be a structurally predictable work.

After the Rain is set on the roof of an multistorey office building in a city which has been drought-stricken for more than two years. It consists of a series of short scenes between various office workers who escape for an illegal cigarette. In this corporate world, addiction to nicotine can cost a worker their job, and so (in the beginning, at least) the office workers' trysts are secretive and paranoid. However, as the play progresses, it turns into a kind of surreal comedy, with love affairs and corporate intrigues being played out between dream-scenes and increasingly irrational events. It culminates in comedic Shakespearean couplings, with various characters abandoning their restricted corporate lives to run away in happy pairs.

Presumably part of the metaphor at play here is between sterility (drought, emotional and literal, in an authoritarian corporatised world) and an opposing fertility (rain, sex and babies). There is a troubling subtext of misogyny which is, at least in this production, presented without irony: a long speech by one character about how much he hates powerful women; the brutal and reasonless murder and rape of the wife of another character; the resolution of one woman's madness by that old remedy, "a good fuck"; another woman's life, however successful otherwise, rendered meaningless by her infertility. Given my wholesale reservations, I am utterly unsure what to make of this aspect of the play: it could be commenting on misogyny, rather than being itself misogynistic. It is impossible to tell.

I can only surmise that some mistaken decisions were made early on about how to approach the text, which then trapped the entire process. This seems borne out by the design. Kathryn Sproul's set - a rooftop set forestage, surrounded by metal railings - forces the actors to clamber on and off stage via a ladder, which makes entrances and exits cumbersome, time-consuming and mind-numbingly predictable. A row of watercoolers set behind the raised roof do nothing more than suggest what we already know, that off-stage there are offices. Dominating the back of the theatre is a huge screen, which remains strangely unexploited for almost the entire evening (even some projected clouds would have been welcome). To emphasise the static staging, the lighting states remain monotonous for the whole show, shifting maybe twice to indicate that a particular scene is a dream rather than "reality".

The effect is to reduce to a stilted literalness a play which is clearly meant to move fluidly between surreal and actual realities. This mono-dimensional direction extends to the performances, which attack the script with an edge of hysterical parody that tramples any subtleties it might have had. Simon Kearney and Colin MacPherson are the only actors who manage to find some kind of complexity in the script, and certainly Simon Kearney seems to be in a different play.

These problems are compounded by a lack of attention to detail. For example: perhaps to emphasise the corporate tyranny, the performers are costumed in uniforms that are in no way supported by the script, which means that a long speech by the Blonde Secretary about how she never wears black shoes is somewhat undermined by the fact that she is, in fact, wearing black shoes. And so on.

It's hard to escape the conviction that this is a very naive production of a potentially interesting play. I only hope the next production in the series serves us - and Sergi Belbel - rather better.

Link

Theatreworks

Subclass26A, directed by Bagryana Popov, performed by Rodney Afif, Ru Atma, Natalie Cursio, Simon Ellis, Nadja Kostich, Majid Shokor; music by Elissa Goodrich; design by Anna Tregloan; dramaturgy by Maryanne Lynch.

The vexed question of politics and art is one of the fiercest debates of modern culture. Broadly the argument rages between two poles. In the blue corner (or the red, if one is American) are those who contend that art is above politics, an argument stemming from Matthew Arnold's imperial ideas about culture. In the opposing corner are the revolutionaries, who claim that art has a duty towards radical ideologies. Most artists, who are by nature sceptical of dogma of any kind, can be found slugging it out somewhere in the middle, arguing on the one hand that all art is inescapably political, and on the other that its highest duty is to its own imperatives.

It's wholly untrue to assert, as many conservative critics do, that art that engages with social and political critique compromises an essential artistic purity. Much of the significant art of the past three centuries - from Shelley's Masque of Anarchy and Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro to the work of Brecht's Berliner Ensemble or Brazilian theatre activist Augusto Boal - has been in the tradition of political and social dissent. As well as, it must be confessed, much of the worst - we've seen agitprop, and we don't like it.

Art, after all, should do rather more than restate arguments that would be better expressed in a pamphlet. Subclass26A, a powerful group-devised movement piece which addresses the question of Australia's brutal treatment of asylum seekers, demonstrates beautifully how this can be done.

I will describe the theatre in a moment. But first, some background, necessary because this piece employs a fragmentary text drawn in part from a variety of real sources: documents from the Department of Immigration, letters from asylum seekers, and primary research conducted by the artists themselves.

Our treatment of asylum seekers is one issue that starkly exposes the darker side of Australia's self-image as "the lucky country". We are the only nation in the world which compulsorily imprisons asylum seekers, a policy which calls up unsettling echoes of gulags and concentration camps. Tellingly, as Richard Ackland commented in 2003, the Federal Government's "Pacific solution" demonstrated a baffling insensitivity to the grim connotations which still attend that word "solution".

As Malcolm Fraser and others have pointed out, our immigration policies are racist and inhuman. But those who protest the totalitarian aspects of these policies are attacked as "bleeding heart liberals" with an "agenda", their voices marginalised by a combination of misrepresentations or outright lies and populist xenophobia.

Asylum seekers are the only class of people who may be locked up indefinitely, beyond the redress of any court. They have fewer rights than convicted paedophiles or murderers, despite the fact that they have been charged with no crimes, and the even more appalling fact that many of them are children: between 1999 and 2003, 2,184 children had been held for varying lengths of time (averaging more than a year) in detention centres.

The suffering caused by the Howard Government's policies has been widely documented and has attracted widespread international and local condemnation, including rebukes from all six of the human rights agencies of the UN. Even the horrors of the SEIVX and the heart-rending personal testimonies of the children whose lives have been blighted by imprisonment have made no impact on the public apathy towards those the popular media dub, erroneously, "illegal immigrants". The sheerly brutal cynicism of our policies toward refugees and asylum seekers is an on-going scandal of Australian society.

Bagryana Popov and her performers address these issues with intelligence and passion, eschewing the temptations of simplistic agitprop. Neither do they go down the now conventional road of "documentary theatre": the added element of dance (three performers are dancers, three actors) gives the piece a stylised, alienating edge which, in a paradox peculiar to art, intensifies its emotional power.

While this group is deeply engaged with the issues, it is equally concerned to give these experiences the dignity of art. This work has the clarity of a high degree of moral and intellectual sophistication. The fragmentary text - a collage of individual experience spoken in English and Arabic, bureaucratic documents and dialogues - is poetically cadenced. Dramaturges Maryanne Lynch and Tom Wright create a simple narrative spine around three asylum seekers, telling a story of arrival, detention and Kafka-esque bureaucracy. Against the impersonal officialese of imprisonment, the human body speaks an anarchic tale of despair, love, anger and madness.

Popov's direction has an attentive eye to focus, creating eddies of movement and speech which rise chaotically and suddenly clear to brief vignettes, only to be caught up again in a flurry of movement. There is an emphasis on neurotic repetition, both the endless monotony of institutional life ("breakfast from 8.30 to 9am, lunch 12 to 12.30...") and the increasingly dissociated movements of mental illness. The emotional fluctuations are stringently orchestrated by Elissa Goodrich'sspare, percussive score.

This approach permits a moral and political complexity often missing from theatre which has previously addressed these issues. Brutality is not confined to officials: the prisoners themselves are capable of cruelty. One of the striking elements of this piece is its focus on how such policies brutalise those who implement them as much as their targets. The despairing social worker unable to help increasingly desperate people, the guards who lose their capacity for empathy, are as trapped as the asylum seekers in a nightmare of systemic, soul-eroding sadism.

Anna Tregloan's stylishly minimalist design uses the white box space of fortyfivedownstairs to magnify the sense of human alienation, the notion that asylum seekers and refugees are infections which must be quaratined from the social body. The huge window which usually dominates the theatre is covered by a white wall into which is let a tiny, opaque window, which provides the only glimpse of freedom. The stage is divided by lighting and subtle design elements into rectangular areas through which the performers move uneasily, dark human figures in an antiseptic, inhuman universe. The audience is seated at the near end of the theatre, and the production takes full advantage of the stage's depth, creating a surprisingly rich texture of physical gesture and spatial image with a rigorously limited vocabulary.

A great deal of this production's success stems from its disciplined restraint, its refusal to press the standard emotive buttons and so diminish the complexities of the human issues it addresses. Subclass26A powerfully communicates not only the despair of detained asylum seekers, but the reasons for that despair; we can work out the injustice for ourselves. One of the performers, Iraqi actor Majid Shokor, is quoted in the program as saying: "theatre is a place where justice and redemption can be found". I don't believe that anyone involved in this production believes that this work will stop the mistreatment of those who only ask for our help; but the urgent desire to express the complexities of human experience, to redress the silencing of the powerless, is nevertheless a potent political act. An act of hope.

Links
fortyfivedownstairs
Fitzroy Learning Network
The National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention
Human Rights Watch:Deterring Asylum Seekers by Violating Rights

So another of the giants of 20th century drama has gone. It's a measure of Arthur Miller's enduring distinction that his death has generated headlines around the world. I won't add to the thousands of words heaped on his passing, except to note briefly that Aubrey Mellor, now director of NIDA, said only this week that Miller was still the dominant influence on Australian theatre, which ought to have "moved on" by now. Well, progress is an odd concept when applied to the arts, and The Crucible seems, sadly, to be coming back into its own. Perhaps, like most influential artists, Miller needs to be rescued from his imitators and his fame. Below, a few links:

Obituary - Independent
Obituary - The Guardian
Memoir - Independent
Obituary - New York Times

Trapped by the Past: Why our Theatre is Facing Paralysis, by Julian Meyrick. Platform Paper No. 3, January 2005, Currency House, ISBN 0 9581213 7 0

"Those who cannot remember the past," said George Santayana, "are condemned to repeat it". Applied to theatre, this is a vision of terrifying sterility: some outer circle of Hell, decked out like a cross between an English drawing room and the set of Neighbours. And as Julian Meyrick argues in his very interesting polemic, Australian theatre's ignorance of its own history dooms it to an endless cycle of "forgetting and despair".

Too right, say I: if memory is a form of consciousness, then Australian theatre, as a discrete if debatable entity, is a dead duck. We barely have a repertoire: how often do we see reinterpretations of classic texts by White, Hewett, Beynon, Kenna, Hibberd, or any other playwright who has made a mark in the past fifty years? And how many new plays have any life beyond a single four week season?

I'm grateful to Meyrick - that rare beast, a theatre historian - for his careful delineation of this problem in his paper Trapped by the Past. He spends some time discussing how institutional and governmental structures and assumptions have formed the present, and he chronicles a depressing history of botched or even hostile public policies and damaging intercinine rivalries. But Trapped by the Past is, most importantly, an impassioned plea for cultural memory.

"Donald Horne's complaint that the industry's idea of cultural debate is a one-line telegram signed by twenty artists points up the lack of articulated vision coming from theatre professionals on the ground today," says Meyrick. "At a recent public meeting on the future of Playbox, I was not the only one struck by the lack of specific knowledge about the company we had come to discuss. And when, at the end, someone stood up - as someone always does - and said 'Who needs the past anyway?' - as someone always does - a vision rose before my eyes of a wheel of fire on which Australian theatre was to be endlessly wracked, our historical forgetting a constituent part of our on-going suffering."

The Greeks said (they got a lot of things right) that Memory was the mother of the Muses, so cultural amnesia is probably about half of the thousand cuts that are currently bleeding Australian theatre dry. But Meyrick's thesis is not so much that Australian theatre has forgotten its past, as that it only remembers certain parts of it. He points out that theatre is an art form with a history that extends far beyond our sea-girt shores and into a past far deeper than the past thirty years, facts which too seldom seem to enter our theatrical conversations; but here his main concern is with local history.

His experience of finding teasing glimpses of alternative, unwritten histories echoes my own when, as a young critic, I was attempting to inform myself about Australian theatre. I remember being told about all sorts of interesting things - the international avant-garde edge in the APG, for example, or the feminist theatre of the '70s - to which I could, frustratingly, find little or no reference in the histories and overviews I consulted. Meyrick mentions how whole swathes of experience - that of older actors trained in the "Anglo" tradition of theatre, who remember the Tiv and music hall - have been forgotten, and how much poorer we are for this loss. The commonly accepted story is how this kind of theatre, colonial and hidebound, was swept aside in the larrikin "New Wave" of the late 60s and early '70s, when Australian theatre, as the myth goes, first found its "voice". These other, overshadowed histories made the prevailing myth - which is, of course, not entirely inaccurate - both more interesting and more complex.

As Meyrick says, "Australian theatre is an art form in wilful ignorance of its own past, and the upshot is an industry that appears less interesting than in fact it is... the truth is fabulous, intriguing, high coloured, a story of titanic struggles, colossal achievements, massive defeats, murderous betrayals..." Which, if it recalls one of those thrillers with raised gold lettering so prominent in airport bookshops, has the virtue of sounding more exciting than the usual unquestioning narratives of nationalism vs. colonialism.

Although he focuses on generational change and, in particular, on the disastrous dominance of Playbox Theatre in the recent development of new Australian work, the true value of Meyrick's paper resides elsewhere. Meyrick does claim that a generation of theatre artists who are now in prominent positions through Australian theatre are, deliberately or not, stifling innovation in the art. But he says this is the result of a fracture that occurred when the New Wave first appeared, polarising the culture - on the one side, the conservative, authoritarian model, on the other the brash, questioning, anti-authoritarian Vietnam protesters - and the twain ne'er met anywhere. And he claims that the lack of a perception of a common ground - a recognition that, whatever their differences, they were pursuing to their best abilities a mutual passion for an abstract but real thing called "Australian theatre" - led to an impoverishment of theatre culture that is now having disastrous consequences for younger artists.

"The real problem," says Meyrick, glancing over the tangle of spats and rivalries which characterise the discourse, "is that the 'debate' is founded on such a fierce determination not to understand other points of view that any intellectual gain from the sparring of competing minds is lost."

Bravo, Mr Meyrick: that's the underlying problem in a nutshell. What he is describing is a pervasive anti-intellectualism that has been the bane of Australian theatre on all sides, and a lack of disinterested commitment to theatre itself. As much as reducing discourse to pitched battles and skirmishes between rival interests, this often expresses itself in a puzzling incuriosity about theatre as an art form. Most bizarrely, given its often nationalistic dress, it manifests as a condition of cultural cringe which very often marginalises new or original Australian voices which (as they should) challenge prevailing mores. Meyrick, whose main concern is with what he calls "verbal drama" (aka plays), correctly questions where that leaves new playwrights and other emerging theatre artists.

There is, in fact, a surprising number of young and engaged theatre writers; but as things stand, their outlook is fairly bleak. As Meyrick says, the lack of a well-supported middle sector of theatre, between co-op fringe productions and the major state institutions, means that it is extremely difficult for new artists, and especially new playwrights, to evolve. He fields some depressing statistics, courtesy of Geoffrey Milne, about the shrinkage in contemporary theatre. Between 1986 and 2003, the number of new productions by state theatre companies declined from 49 to 29.8 - a drastic fall approaching almost 50 per cent. And, even worse, the production of new plays by local and overseas writers in alternative companies has declined by 30 per cent in twenty years.

This situation is in part a result of the withdrawal of funding for the middle tier companies - Anthill, The Church, Theatreworks, the Red Shed and others - which actively commissioned and produced new works. Australian theatre has never recovered from this policy-driven act of cultural vandalism. In Victoria, Playbox Theatre was supposed to pick up the slack, providing a greenhouse for the tender young shoots of new work; but Playbox's devastatingly poor audience figures reflect the failure of this policy. It is neither possible nor desirable to replace what was once the province of many alternative theatres with a single, corporatised entity: like all ecosystems, theatre needs diversity to survive. And it is a measure of theatre's ill-health that its diversity has been declining in both absolute and generic terms over the past two decades. Not only are fewer plays being produced, but fewer kinds of plays.

All the same, in the general atmosphere of gloom one shouldn't overlook the energies and vitalities that do exist. Out of the vacuum have sprung many small, independent companies which produce new plays, both Australian and international, with minimal or no funding. And one should not forget La Mama either, a unique treasure which actively supports the notion of an open and diverse theatre culture. Yet the fact remains that, however hard-working and imaginative they may be, these independent companies struggle with a paucity of resources that severely limits what they are able to achieve. The genius of Australian theatre has so often lain with "poor theatre": great things have happened there. But as a default policy, it is no way to grow a vibrant and stimulating culture. There is a point where companies, simply, need money to make the art they should.

There's no getting away from the fact that part of the many-faceted crisis facing Australian theatre is the increasingly tight availability of funds, a complex issue in itself bedevilled by the whole problem of arts advocacy. Meyrick often refers to the "theatre industry"; a common enough phrase, but a symptom of a deeper problem. As I said in an essay last year, picking up on Donald Horne's observations on the "economisation" of the arts:

I can remember when people started talking about the "arts industry", back in the early '90s. I thought at the time it was a harbinger of doom. The argument used to lobby for arts funding was almost exclusively economic: the arts created employment, generated tourism, and so on. (There was, I think, a little discussion about social capital.) This focus seems to have modelled almost all subsequent advocacy for the arts. And what we have created is a monster, to which all the arts must now pay tribute: the arts industry is here to stay, and arts companies are expected to function like other economic entities, and to justify their existences by making a profit for their "stakeholders"....

Given its devastating impact ... it is not surprising that the idea of the "arts industry" has been attacked recently by several eminent Australians, including Donald Horne. Horne says the "economisation of culture" is a fundamentalist creed. "It's not supported by public stonings or beheadings but its effect can be pretty ruthless," he said in a speech in 2002. "It's the kind of language that turns our society into 'the economy', our citizens into 'the consumers' and our public funds into 'taxpayers' money'." He described the phrase "the arts industry" and the adoption by arts advocates of the vogue-ish terminology of the markets as a Trojan horse. "How is it, "he asks, "that people concerned with speaking up for 'the arts' and other cultural activities have been reduced to that kind of twaddle?"

Yes, we need another phrase. But that aside, Meyrick's main claim is that theatre practitioners need to overcome their distaste of the nationalistic connotations of the term "Australian theatre", and to regain a concept of a "whole" Australian theatre, a sense of common endeavour and generosity which admits difference (and history). Which raises two questions for me, neither of them rhetorical: when was this golden age, before we lost this sense of "over-arching identity"? Might it not rather be an imaginary Eden that now must be, to mix my metaphors, forged fresh in the smithy of our souls? And, secondly, do we need the term "Australian" at all, or could this sense of identity be found simply in the term "theatre"? It sometimes seems to me that the term "Australian" is so vexed that often the idea of "theatre" gets elided altogether.

This is not to ignore, but rather to embrace, Meyrick's point about specific Australian traditions. To think of a common practice of theatre is to enfold these traditions into a wider and richer context which includes all theatre, in all times and all languages. Australian theatre is still overwhelmingly Anglophone, looking over its shoulder towards London and New York - even the name of this series, Platform Papers, is taken from a National Theatre initiative. And I would suggest that this linguistic parochialism is one of its problems, and one reason why such a narrow range of aesthetic is admitted into mainstream discussion.

With the Anglophone bias goes the traditional Anglo suspicion of "intellectuals". Meyrick digs up some classic artist-bashing, of the kind made familiar by such pundits as Andrew Bolt; but what is less easy to see and, I think, ultimately more damaging, is the anti-intellectualism within the artform itself. I remember speaking to a distinguished literary critic, then reviewing theatre, who told me airily that he never read new plays as they weren't "literary", something that astonished me. What is sadder is that playwrights themselves, mistaking "literary" for meaning "prosaic" or "untheatrical", often have a similar idea about their own work. At one stroke, this removes the art of writing plays from the entirety of experiment and argument that is imaginative and critical literature, and places it - where? In an isolated playpen with crayons and dolls?

A result of this is that much theatrical experiment in Australia has been confined to "non-verbal drama" of various kinds, out of a feeling that "verbal drama" is aesthetically limiting, and the writing of plays itself has desiccated into a hidebound naturalism. It is common to hear "text-based theatre" spoken of in a dismissive way, as the conservative wing of theatrical artistry. This is inaccurate in terms of wider history, where writing has been the engine for most innovations in modern theatre, but here it has a certain self-fulfilling truth. And this raises a crucial issue, which is the lack of a critical discourse which can discuss aesthetic qualities in any useful manner. In the absence of this, no amount of structural institutional analysis - useful and necessary though it is - can make any sense. The mere presence of new Australian work is no guarantee of cultural health; it has to be Australian work that matters. But how one determines what makes it matter is another, and even thornier, question.

Links

Currency House
SMH - Talking 'Bout Another Revolution
The Age - Getting Bums on Seats

Season's greeting to all Theatre Notes readers, and my best wishes for 2005.

When I started this blog, back in June, I said I'd continue if it was found readers and was fun. TN has managed both very nicely, so we'll be continuing into next year, building on what's been started here. We've scored around 8500 hits since we started - modest but solid - and TN has been guesting on ABC Radio and elsewhere. The main joy of doing this blog is my complete independence; if the odd typo sneaks in past my editing, at least no one is slashing my carefully wrought copy to pieces. I have a few ideas which might get a run over the next few months, hoping to open out a context which is slightly more international, and I'm looking forward to seeing how the site evolves over the next year.

I'd like to thank Melbourne theatre companies for their support, and a special thanks to all those who have emailed or otherwise contacted me and given me such encouragement over the past six months. I've been quite taken aback by the level of good will I've discovered in the theatre community here, and that, more than anything, convinces me that what's happening here is worth doing. Champagne to the lot of you.

I won't do an end-of-year review, as I've only got six months to look back on. But I will say it's been an interesting time, and I've seen some remarkably good theatre. January will be relatively quiet here, though there will be a couple of reviews. But mainly I have to put my head down and finish my novel before I grow senile, and so that is where I'll be putting most of my energy for the next few weeks. And then I'll be back full-throttle.

See you in 2005!

Alison

Hamlet by William Shakespeare. Directed by Oscar Redding, with Richard Pyros, Adrian Mulraney, Nicki Paull, John Francis Howard, Thomas Wright and Ben Packer. DDT Studio, 515 High Street, Northcote. La Tragedie d'Hamlet, directed by Peter Brook, with Adrian Lester, Jeffery Kissoon, Natasha Parry, Bruce Meyers, Scott Handy, Shantala Shivalingappa, Rohan Siva, Asil Rais, Yoshi Oida, Akram Khan, Nicolas Gaster, Antonin Stahly, Jerome Grillon. DVD, Agat Films 2001.

On the face of it, it may seem very unfair to compare these two versions of Hamlet. One is a filmed production by one of the greatest theatre directors of the past century, created in Brook's gorgeous Paris base, the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord; the other an exemplary example of poor theatre, put on by a young Melbourne director in a shop front in High Street, Northcote.

As it happens, it is not unfair; theatre is a great leveller. Perhaps for similar reasons - a certain straightforwardness in approaching Shakespeare - both are notable for their clarity, and they share a great text and remarkable actors. Where Redding's production lacks Brook's exquisite aesthetic polish, it gains in robust irreverence and visceral power. But what strikes me most is how both these productions spin the focus on this most protean of texts, to reveal a Hamlet in whose body itself turns the sword of politics.

The great Shakespearean critic Jan Kott says of Hamlet that it is a play that absorbs its times. So there are, among many others, the Romantic Hamlet of the 19th century, wanly melancholic; the mid-Century Hamlet, which Kott particularly documented, in which interpretation leans on the pitiless wheel of power; and now this 21st century Hamlet, at once sensuous and full of loathing, raging against the mortal trappings of his flesh.

Part of the reason for these many Hamlets is that the six hour text is seldom performed entirely as written. It means that each production is cut according to the cloth of its interpretation. Both Brook and Redding take a broadly similar approach, removing the cumbersome opening scene with the ghost, and cutting out entirely the complicated narrations of battles and politics. They fillet out a claustrophobic family tragedy of individuals trapped in remorseless passions. In these productions, the personal is most assuredly political.

This approach rejects most modern interpretations of Hamlet, in which the character of Fortinbras is brought to the foreground. Fortinbras - who claims the throne of Denmark after all the corpses stop twitching on the floor - is in some versions an alter ego of Hamlet, in others, the legitimate heir to the throne, the man who restores order to the broken kingdom. "If one wishes to places Hamlet's moral conflicts into a historical context," says Kott, "one cannot ignore the role played by Fortinbras".

Well, in these versions Fortinbras has disappeared entirely. But I think this is not so much a symptom of ahistorical consciousness, as a lack of belief in the possibility of the restoration of order, or even in the possibility of order itself. No king now comes to make it all right: the plays ends with the slaughter. Today's Hamlet is considerably darker than previous versions: it contains no illusion of consolation.

The brooding sense of claustrophobia is reinforced by the doubling, some of which is repeated in both productions: in both, Polonius and the gravedigger (Bruce Meyers in Brook's, and John Francis Howard in Redding's), and Claudius and the Ghost (Jeffrey Kissoon and Adrian Mulraney respectively) are played by the same actor. The doubling of Claudius in particular throws Hamlet's revulsion against his uncle into ironic relief: we are reminded that he is importuned to kill his own kin, outraging familial ties just as his uncle did in murdering Hamlet's father.

Redding goes much further, doubling the roles of Gertrude and Ophelia (Nicki Paull), which makes the play's incestuous sexual drama even more knotted. His most audacious move is to double the roles of Hamlet and his friend Horatio: Horatio is played as a handpuppet. That you accept this without question is a considerable tribute to the intensity and skill of Richard Pyros' performance. What is fascinating is its theatrical ambiguity: part of the time, it is quite possible to imagine seriously that a ridiculous pair of pink eyes is Horatio, Hamlet's only friend; at other times, the hand puppet seems another aspect of his madness and loneliness, a crazed aspect of Hamlet's splintered self.

Adrian Lester's Hamlet is gentler than Richard Pyros', whose wit is crueller and violence more dangerous (especially when he is holding a huge kitchen knife to Gertrude's throat). Lester's performance is framed by lush, rich sensuousness: the rust-red walls of the theatre, the naked flames of lamps, luxurious crimson fabrics, the melancholy scrape of a cello. Pyros, on the other hand, is working in a bare, scruffy space lit by fluorescent tubes, with the sound of high street traffic as background accompaniment.

But again I was struck by similarities as much as differences: these Hamlets are mercurial, impelled by savage laughter rather than by dark melancholia. They describe an intelligence tormented by circumstance: that circumstance being primarily mortality, the fate of all flesh, but also its sullying, a fatal disgust at moral and fleshly corruption.

Of course, there is more to Hamlet than Hamlet; and these productions feature ensemble casts of great depth. One would expect that of Brook; but Redding has gathered together some very fine actors, who have created a subtlety and depth of performance which rivals, and in the case of Ophelia surpasses, that Brook elicited from his. All deserve mention, but Adrian Mulraney's authoritative and subtle performance as Claudius - both unrepentant usurper and repentant brother - never falters.

In Redding's production, the women's roles are strong and disturbing. Nicki Paul plays Gertrude as an alcoholic, constantly sipping from a jam jar, who imperceptibly becomes more and more drunk as the play progresses, until by the final scene she can barely stand. Her announcement of Ophelia's death - told through uncontrollable fits of laughter - brings home the terror of the girl's suicide in a way that no sober rendition could. And Ophelia's mad scene is shaming and pitiable, in the way that real madness is.

It is very clear in this drama how the women are destroyed, both morally and physically, by their entrapment within male power. The single power Gertrude and Ophelia possess is their sexuality: it is their "virtue", a commodity which belongs to the family, not to themselves, and it is not theirs to bestow freely. Laetres (Thomas Wright) and Polonius lecture Ophelia at length about how she ought to be behave, and Hamlet likewise has no hesitation in censuring his mother for outraging the legitimate bonds of marriage. The fear of women's anarchic sexual desire lurks uneasily beneath the surface of the action, erupting in male disgust ("Frailty, thy name is woman!") or in female madness and despair.

But it is not the women who are treacherous, but the men: most notably, Claudius's murder of his brother to gain the crown, the betrayal which unravels all the rest. And there is also Hamlet's feigned detestation of Ophelia, which drives her to suicide; Rosencrantz and Guildernstern's deceptive spying on Hamlet, betraying the bonds of friendship; Laertes' betrayal of honourable combat, by poisoning his sword.

Hamlet is, more than almost any other Shakespearean play except perhaps The Tempest, deeply concerned with the provenance of theatre itself. Almost no one in the play is who he or she seems to be: all are playing roles, whether self-imposed or not, and this is underlain by our knowledge that the "real" characters are played by actors, who are also not who they seem to be. Is this merely deception and betrayal? Hamlet's pretended madness is, rather, an attempt to find the truth: as he says, "the play's the thing/ In which to catch the conscience of a King". These potent ambiguities, the mask as a revealer of truth and as a lie, drive the fascination of the action as much as the repressed sexual passions.

There is a vital difference between these two productions: one was performed four years ago, and was watched on a screen; the other occurred live, feet away from me. No recorded performance beats the living experience, no matter how artfully filmed it might be. But they both gave me a new Hamlet, and reminded me that it is, as Kott says, "the strangest play ever written".

Both productions tear away the cultural barnacles that so often weigh down this most monumental of English icons - the deadening reverence, the fear of poetry, the stereotypical expectations - and deliver it into the present, with all the complexities and contradictions of a living thing. It's a rare experience that always leaves me elated. And such experiences are why I persist in going to the theatre.