Two Brothers by Hannie Rayson. Directed by Simon Phillips, designed by Stephen Curtis. With Rodney Afif, Caroline Brazier, Diane Craig, Nicholas Eadie, Laura Lattuada, Ben Lawson, Garry McDonald and Hamish Michael. Melbourne Theatre Company at the Arts Centre Playhouse.

Herald Sun instapundit Andrew Bolt seems to have taken his micro-appearance in Two Brothers as the columnist Andrew Blot rather personally. Frothing with self-righteousness and demonstrating his usual uncertain grasp of the difference between fact and fiction, he branded Hannie Rayson's play a "smug vomit of hate".

But he hasn't stopped there: in a quick follow-up, under the startling headline "Hannie's Evil Brew", he diligently researched Ms Rayson's CV in order to attack the "flood of government gold" that has funded her witchy career: the "tax-payer funded" universities, the "tax-payer funded" theatre companies and the "tax-payer funded" literary prizes.

Yea, verily, writ the Jeremiah of the tabloids: our Hannie is a "guzzling artist", profiting by a "great gush" of public money that is pouring all over those layabout chardonnay drinkers who vote Labor and thumb their noses at ordinary people. (If only it were true: studies have in fact revealed that artists are among the lowest paid and hardest working people in Australia. One wonders if Bolt gets as riled about the "taxpayer funded" post office workers or even the "taxpayer funded" Prime Minister and his extraordinary travel bill. But that's by the bye.)

Bolt is amusing as well as poisonous, much like Lord Haw-Haw. But I mention him because he nevertheless touches, if hamfistedly and inaccurately, a real difficulty with Two Brothers. It is morally, politically and aesthetically confused, and a large part of the problem stems from its thin fictionalising of actual people and events.

Two Brothers is openly based on the Costello brothers, Peter and Tim: one the Treasurer for the conservative Liberal government, the other a Baptist church leader who is a leading voice on social justice. In the play, they are transformed into "Eggs" Benedict (Garry McDonald), the wicked Liberal Minister for Home Security, and Tom Benedict (Nicholas Eadie), the bleeding heart liberal lawyer/activist defending the rights of asylum seekers.

The fictional characters bear very little resemblance to the Costellos themselves, but Rayson is clearly intending a polemic on current Australian politics and throws in constant topical references to underscore her point. Nevertheless, this is really a family drama with national politics thrown in to vamp up the psychic static. There's Eggs' neurotic socialite wife Fiona (Diane Craig), his naval son Lachlan (Ben Lawson) and the family tragedy of his dead son. On the other side, there's the outspoken Greek wife of Tom, Ange (Laura Lattuada) and their weak-willed son Harry (Hamish Michael).

The plot is fairly tortured, but it more or less follows the machinations after a boat full of refugees (suspiciously like the SEIVX) goes down in international waters on Christmas Day, drowning almost all aboard. The sole survivor, Hazem Al-Ayed (Rodney Afif) saw Australian naval vessels nearby which, instead of rescuing the drowning passengers, turned and abandoned them... and we have already heard, at the family Christmas dinner, the wicked Eggs (hiss) giving the order to "take no action". By an extraordinary coincidence, Eggs' son Lachlan happens to be on that very ship: he rings his father in distress and the wicked father slams down the phone on his upset son, and refuses to let him talk to his mother. And on Christmas Day, too! (Boo hiss).

By another extraordinary coincidence, the Iraqi survivor of the sinking is represented by... Tom! And Tom, naturally, finds out about the scandal of the Australian ships refusing to pick up the drowning asylum seekers. Eggs gets his even wickeder sidekick, the ball-tearing femocrat Jamie Savage (Caroline Brazier) to get the machinery working to silence his rather too vocal brother. Because Eggs has heard that the PM is retiring, and he is going for the Top Job, and nothing, repeat, nothing is going to stand in his way...

And... well, you can probably guess the rest. Although the second half really stretched my credulity in more than one way, at interval my friend and I took bets on what would happen at the end of the play and, sadly, we were both right.

Eggs is a bad egg all through. Not only is he a "callous bastard", a bully who all but beats his wife, refuses to go to marriage counselling and will use even the death of his son as a tool for manipulation; he's an adulterer, a liar and a power junkie driven by naked greed. There's even lightning when he first comes on stage. All he lacks is a waxed moustache and a black cloak.

Eggs loses credibility as both a character and a metaphor in the opening seconds of the play, when he stabs Hazem Al-Ayed after surprising him in his beach house. Rather than making government moral culpability clearer, this act muddies it altogether with a wholly inappropriate melodrama. Albert Speer or Adolf Eichmann were not convicted because they personally killed Jews; their responsibility was at arm's length. And this question of bureaucratic culpability is what Hannah Arendt went to great lengths to examine in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which she coined the famous phrase "the banality of evil".

After the opening scene, there is no hope of any investigation of this sort in Two Brothers, despite the odd conversation about "good" and "evil". The subtle discriminations and moral exactitudes of Arendt don't exist in this universe. Similarly, Rayson melodramatically exaggerates the actual circumstances of SEIVX (thus opening the door for Bolt's rabid ravings), the real circumstances of which are much more complex, if very disturbing.

The effect is to blur the political dialogue that the play seeks to engender. The human cost of border protection is supposed to be represented by the character of Hazem, played heroically by Rodney Afif, who is a fine actor. But the structure of the play permits him to be little more than the token Iraqi, an occasion for liberal sympathy in a play which is really a drama about a middle class family.

As Simone de Beauvoir said, "Heaven save us from those with good intentions!" I am all sympathy for work which engages with the issues facing asylum seekers in this country; it's a scandal that requires open public discussion. Unfortunately, I think this is precisely the wrong way to go about it.

Probably the archetypal play of liberal protest is Arthur Miller's The Crucible, written in response to the McCarthy-era hysteria against Communists. It's notable that, rather than caricaturing McCarthy himself, Miller went back 300 years in American history to the Salem witch trials to make his point. Another current model of theatrical protest is the tribunal theatre, a specialty of London's Tricycle Theatre, who have just opened with a dramatisation of the Saville inquiry into Bloody Sunday. In this theatre, there is no fictionalising at all: just a carefully honed presentation of fact. Another tack was taken in Melbourne recently, in a brilliant piece of movement theatre that addressed the treatment of asylum seekers, Subclass26A.

Whatever the merits of any of these approaches (I have real doubts about documentary theatre), there is no doubt that they are all effective ways of theatricalising political debate without cheating the issues. Rayson's fictionalising falls between several stools. Of course she has every right to make up what she likes: but it's hard to avoid a sense of exploitation in this work. Behind her exaggerated fictions are real tragedies and real questions and, moreover, real people. Fudging the differences between fact and imagination does service to neither; it confuses the debate (as Andrew Bolt's hysterical responses demonstrate) and raises the uncomfortable question of art exploiting human suffering.

Simon Phillips certainly gives the play a slick production. Stephen Curtis' elegant revolving set sweeps the short scenes across the stage, minimising any longueurs in the script with swift pacing, and he has a high quality cast. Garry McDonald manages his melodramatic role with a surprising flair; although there is absolutely no development in this character - or in any of the others - he generates a complex presence on stage of moral weakness and intransigent greed. Nicholas Eadie demonstrates that it's much more fun playing the bad guy; the only complexity he can find is an occasional kink in his halo.

I was troubled by the female characters. Fiona Benedict, Eggs' unfortunate wife, beggars belief as the browbeaten neurotic socialite. Diane Craig does her best, but in between talking about dresses and bursting into tears, there's really not much she can do to make her character credible. Jamie Savage (played with brutal efficiency by Caroline Brazier) is a porn fantasy of the working woman, and is the real source of evil in the play; one wonders, as an aside, why the strong public woman necessitates a scene of sexual humiliation. Even the supposedly liberated teacher, Ange (Laura Lattuada), demonstrates her feminine credentials by constantly talking about cooking: we can't have those feministas too out there, I guess.

But, as always with Hannie Rayson, this is impeccable middle class theatre about middle class characters directed to middle class audiences. It doesn't dig deep enough to disturb any assumptions or to be genuinely moving, but perhaps it provides the fodder for a few dinner party conversations. It resolves debate into easily digestible binaries - right vs left, good vs evil, victim vs oppressor. In this way it's a kind of negative reflection of the simplistic Manichean universe of our good friend, Mr Bolt. Therein, perhaps, lies its deepest problem.

Links
Drowning in Propaganda, by Tom Hyland: The Age
The Fiction and Fact of Two Brothers, by Hannie Rayson: The Age
Melbourne Theatre Company

The Ham Funeral by Patrick White, Journal of a Plague Year by Tom Wright. Directed by Michael Kantor, designed by Anna Tregloan. Lighting by Paul Jackson, costumes by Fiona Crombie. With Marta Dusseldorp, Julie Forsyth, Robert Menzies, Lucy Taylor, Dan Spielman, Ross Williams and Matthew Whittet. Malthouse Theatre.

As Michael Kantor's first presentation as Malthouse artistic director, this double bill is a provocative signal of intention. It offers an alternative means of imagining Australian theatre, outside the narrowly nationalistic or topical concerns which have dominated the Playbox aesthetic since the early 1990s. And although I don't feel it's an unqualified artistic success, I left feeling more hopeful about Melbourne theatre than I have for many years.

For a long time, mainstream plays in Melbourne have been presented under various aegises: as bearers of social issues, education, political commentary or, perhaps least offensively, as mere entertainment. As for theatre itself, it has sometimes seemed to be the Art That Dares Not Tell Its Name, a shameful embarrassment that has had to be decently cloaked in more palatable imperatives.



So it's a relief to be offered works that place themselves unapologetically in the culture and history of theatre itself. The paradoxical effect of this is to make theatre immediately less parochial in its concerns, to engage its tentacular ability to grasp social, literary and philosophical concerns and to thrust them onto the vulgar carnality of the stage. It's an aesthetic that is far from apolitical, but this is a politics which doesn't earnestly explore "issues", in order to coax from them a masochistically satisfying (but temporary) inflammation of the liberal conscience. Rather, it's a politics which begins by attempting to address some of the complexities of existence.

These two productions, presented in repertory with an ensemble cast, look back to major movements in 20th century theatre: the existential theatre of Beckett, the absurdism of Arabal and Ionesco, the revolutionary theatre imagined by Artaud. It's a truism that Australian theatre has marginalised these influences in favour of naturalistic conventions, but it seems to me that the truth of that story is much more complex than a simplistic naturalistic/non-naturalistic division. Our theatre has also ignored naturalistic writers like Peter Kenna; and some of the significant playwrights of the '70s, Jack Hibberd and John Romeril, for example, were certainly influenced by White and his contemporaries.

I suspect that the work which has been most marginalised over the past few decades is any theatre which refuses easy sentiment and pierces, instead, to the marrow of complex emotion. Which is to say, a tragic theatre. There is something in the Australian psyche which flinches against such difficult surgeries, preferring instead the "relaxed and comfortable" vision of life that was so attractively peddled by John Howard. All the same, I perceive a great and increasing hunger for this kind of work, as the world has darkened over the past few years. This cathartic emotional affect is also difficult to achieve. The Ham Funeral shows triumphantly how it can be done; the Artaudian Journal of a Plague Year how easily the grandiose gesture can flail and miss its mark.

The Ham Funeral was written in 1947 but was not produced until more than a decade later; astoundingly, this is its first professional production in Melbourne. It emerges from the formally adventurous theatre which grew out of European modernism, exemplified by playwrights like Arabal, Beckett and Ionesco. Watching The Ham Funeral, it seems strange that it is not mentioned in the same breath as Waiting for Godot (which it predates by two years) or Rhinoceros. Part of the answer might be in its stubborn Australianness; from its poetic cadences to its irreverent eclecticism to its joyous vulgarity, it's a profoundly antipodean work. But in Australia, it was simply considered too odd, or too obscene. We do not have a good record with our best artists.

The Ham Funeral is a post-romantic work written by an artist deeply uncomfortable with his own romanticism. It's about a young poet (Dan Spielman), who lodges with Mr and Mrs Lusty (Ross Williams and Julie Forsyth) in a boarding house full of "everlasting furniture". Mr Lusty suddenly drops dead, and Mrs Lusty takes the opportunity to give a lavish feast, "an 'am funeral", in his honour. Mrs Lusty, a woman driven by incontinent appetites, attempts to seduce the young poet, with comically tragic consequences. There's a fair bit of Jungian symbolism - the house as the self, the anima behind the door, the carnal desires in the basement - but this is merely a single strand in a play which works on a multiplicity of levels. One of its major obsessions is the insufficiencies of words in the face of life, the question of how language might escape its own imprisonments.

White's theatrical language is superbly dynamic, and imbued with a fearless vitality. It's resonant with allusion, prefiguring not only the slapstick of Beckett and the absurdist freedoms of Ionesco or Arabal, but also echoing poets as bizarrely diverse as Arthur Rimbaud and Walter de la Mare. Ultimately, the sophistication of White's linguistic skills works to evoke feeling at its most subterranean and mysterious. For all its vulgar comedy - among many other delights, it features a terrific fart joke - this is a play which reveals above all the anguish of consciousness, the pain and release which underlies any honest moment of self-recognition, and the price of risking the barren self to engage with the beauty and violence of the world. It's the kind of work which moves you to tears, without being quite sure why.

Michael Kantor's production is a beautiful realisation of the play. It's notable for its clarity: in one sense, Kantor has merely presented the text as simply and elegantly as possible. But this is a deceptive simplicity, gained through some thoughtful problem solving. Anna Tregloan has designed a flexible but evocative playing space: the boarding house is represented by a stage with a row of curtained windows backstage which can be lit or concealed, and fronted by the bare floor. The stairs - the liminal place between rooms where various characters pause to utter their uncertain thoughts - are indicated by bars of light. A red curtain drawn back by the Young Man foregrounds the artifice of the play, just as the text does. There are moments of memorable visual richness: a lyrical glimpse of Dan Spielman and Robert Menzies in overcoats, running through the rain with their umbrellas; the landlord's relatives, boxed behind windows, grotesquely attired in pyjamas like characters out of Endgame.

But ultimately the success of the production stands or falls on the performances; in particular, on the roles of the Young Man and Mrs Lusty, since this play is almost a two-hander with some extra characters. Dan Spielman and Julie Forsyth are up to the task. Spielman, always a performer notable for his emotional fearlessness, portrays the solipsistic romanticism of the Young Man and its violent fracture with scarcely a missed beat. If sometimes he subtly falls into what look like actorly habits, we can forgive him for his unfudged clarity of feeling and intelligent irony.

Julie Forsyth is a comic delight, always just this side of grotesque caricature: on the one hand in incandescent rebellion against the bleakness of her life, and on the other imbued with a touchingly innocent longing. The violent climax of the play, an extraordinary scene of miserable sexual violence between Mrs Lusty and the Young Man, is played by both of them with a raw passion that makes it devastatingly tragic. They are well supported: in particular, Ross Williams, one of the more underestimated actors in Melbourne, portrays the silent landlord with a deft tragicomic touch, and Robert Menzies has some gloriously black comic moments. Max Lyandvert's sound, a mixture of pre-recorded soundscapes and live piano music, also deserves mention.

The same cast also plays Tom Wright's Journal of a Plague Year. For this production, Kantor capitalises on the cavernous spaces of the Merlyn Theatre to create a huge black canvas on which he projects a series of tableaux. The cast creates a series of dramatic or grotesque images, some of which are strikingly memorable: the black-cloaked narrator (Robert Menzies) emerging from darkness, illuminated only by the lamp he is carrying; a plague victim (Matthew Whittet) crucified on a moveable panel, tormented by disembodied hands; Nell Gwynne (Lucy Taylor) in busty Restoration garb, singing '70s pop songs.

The major problem with this work is that these images, however striking, never amount to anything substantial; they are grotesquerie without emotional force, and so can never approach actual horror or tragedy. The problem begins with Tom Wright's script, which merits some discussion.

The pretext for this work is supposedly Daniel Defoe's 1722 novel A Journal of the Plague Year, an account of the plague that struck London in 1665. Defoe's novel is a early example of fictional journalism; it purports to be the memoirs of a pious Protestant merchant, H.F. It's a somewhat disorderly narrative, but all the same told with a meticulous attention to detail - Defoe researched the public records, and items like the death figures or public health measures are set down with an almost bureaucratic zeal. For all his piety, H.F.'s manner is free of pompous moralising or overblown religiosity: he is a practical and materialistic man, recording a tragic human phenomenon with an insatiable and sceptical curiosity.

Aside from its 17th century setting, its quotes from Defoe and the theme of the plague, Tom Wright's version has in fact very little to do with the original. A Journal of the Plague Year is essentially about survival; Defoe is fascinated by the endless ingenuity of human resistances against both the plague and its catastrophic economic effects. The novel ends with a rhyme about the plague which "swept an hundred thousand souls / Away; yet I alive!" Wright's Journal, on the other hand, is about apocalyptic extremity and exploits a religious fervour that Defoe's text pragmatically eschews. Its actual genesis is the avatar of the Theatre of Cruelty, Antonin Artaud.

Some artists are perilous influences; they tend to be innovative geniuses whose work is so idiosyncratic that imitators without equal abilities can only seem mannered. I'm thinking of writers like Dylan Thomas or Gerard Manley Hopkins; among theatre artists, Artaud is probably the most dangerous. Howard Barker's Theatre of Catastrophe or the plays of Sarah Kane are successful examples of the contemporary application of some of Artaud's ideas; both are fiercely moral writers who launch full-frontal attacks on the humanistic tradition of reason.

One problem with Artaud is that he means it, and any artist who decides to pick up on his ideas had better mean it, too. Another problem is that the logical end of Artaud's idea of "absolute revolt" is Pol Pot and Year Zero (Pol Pot was, it must be remembered, educated in Paris). Like Rimbaud, Artaud insisted on the collapse of any boundary between art and life: thought and act were to be completely identified. He despised empty formalism. "If there is one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time," he wrote in The Theatre and The Plague, "it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signalling through the flames." He insisted on a carnal theatre, a theatre that reinstated the poetry that had been corrupted by modernity and reason, a theatre that "recovers the notion of symbols and archetypes which act like silent blows, rests, leaps of the heart, summons of the lymph, inflammatory images thrust into our abruptly wakened heads".

Wright, unlike Kane or Barker, is altogether too cerebral to answer this kind of visceral demand. The contrast with Patrick White's theatrical language is stark; where White is dynamic, tactile and supple, Wright is static and abstract. But the work suffers also in comparison to writers who shape the banalities of language, playwrights like Michel Vinaver or Thomas Bernhard: neither of them speak in generalities, where Wright seldom escapes them.

Oddly, for all its gestures towards unreason, Wright's text seems tame; it is much more orderly than Defoe, who is quite happy for most of his book to ignore the demands of chronology or even literary logic. The details of urban life that swarm in Defoe's text are filleted out in favour of apocalyptic religiosity, and events taken from the novel are simplified and exaggerated into grand guignol melodrama. One example is the scene about plague victims being nailed into their houses; the actuality, as reported by Defoe, was both more complicated and less absolute. The victims in fact had their keys taken and a watchman set outside their door: and they often tricked the watchmen and escaped out the back. I personally find myself more attracted by the subversion of the original tale. And the constant equation of women with infection and sexual delirium has more than a whiff of misogyny. I think what bothers me most is that Wright has what poets call a "cloth ear"; a problem closely aligned to the lack of tactility or carnality in his language. He might get away with a lot more if he had more intuitive sensitivity to the cadences of a line.

The text is organised in a kind of modular prison, with Brechtian signs traversing the stage signalling each month (it's only a matter of time before you start calculating that there are five months until December). Each month ushers in a different theme - contagion's genesis, evil visions, interpretration of dreams, the pit of death - which the actors duly illustrate. But perhaps where Wright most inverts his apparently anarchic intentions is at the end, when he encloses the narrative with a moral homily about the essential bestiality of human nature. This is, despite its crazed dress, humanistic theatre after all.

I can't say I was bored, even if sometimes I was impatient. There was enough visual interest and flashes of wit to keep me from wanting to lay violent hands on myself. I particularly liked the philosopher's chat show, where Hobbes, Artaud and others seated at microphones dispute the nature of reality. Robert Menzies as the narrator generates enough energy to keep it together, despite what sounds like an almost unperformable text, and the rest of the cast does its best, which is in moments more than enough. It's a shame that all this effort amounts to little more than a procession of images.

Despite my reservations, it is a breath of fresh air to see mainstream theatre with ambition and intellectual clout, and that takes itself seriously as an art. I have no doubt this shift in artistic direction will generate a lot of controversy; Helen Thomson's bitterly hostile reviews (here and here) in the Age this week are probably symptomatic. I also have no doubt that this new phase at Malthouse is the best thing that's happened there in the past decade; and as a theatre goer, I am hoping that this is only the beginning of a more generous imagining of the Australian stage.

Picture: Matthew Whittet in Journal of a Plague Year
Malthouse Theatre

No reviews this week - I'm taking it a bit easy, due to recent ill health. But a couple of big shows coming up for next week's blog - Malthouse artistic director Michael Kantor's ambitious double bill of Patrick White's The Ham Funeral and Tom Wright's adaptation of Daniel Defoe's Journal of a Plague Year, with an exciting ensemble cast (featuring Robert Menzies, Dan Spielman and Julie Forsyth). This is the first taste of what the revamped Malthouse Theatre might be like. And show No. 2 is Hannie Rayson's play, Two Brothers, opening this week at the Melbourne Theatre Company with Gary McDonald and Nicholas Eadie. Today it was pre-emptively branded a "vomit of smug hate" by that well known arts connoisseur Andrew Bolt - exciting times indeed. Full TN reports next week.

And also some news - I have been asked to be a member of the Malthouse Theatre's (formerly Playbox) Artistic Counsel for 2005 (no, no spelling mistake in "counsel" - the emphasis is on the verb). This is a 10-member advisory panel coordinated by the Malthouse dramaturge Maryanne Lynch that is drawn from Melbourne's artistic community - both practising artists and commentators. Members will attend Malthouse shows and then proffer their full and frank opinions at the end of each season. These responses will then be folded into the Malthouse's artistic report to the Australia Council as part of its self assessment.

This is right up my alley, and I see no conflict of interest with my work on the blog, which from the start has been about initiating and participating in a conversation with the theatre and theatre practitioners. After Michael Kantor directed my play Lenz for the 1996 Melbourne Arts Festival, when he and I had a very serious artistic disagreement, he can be in no doubt that I don't pull my punches in my responses; and I think the creation of the Artistic Counsel, and its brief, is an excellent sign of a desire for open and honest dialogue. This can only be good; though I reckon the jury will be out on the impact and success of the changes at the Malthouse for at least a year.

Felix Listens to the World, devised and performed by Joseph O'Farrell, Miles O'Neil and Glen Walton. Suitcase Royale @ Gertrudes, Fitzroy.

Gentle reader, sometimes to be a critic - even a self-appointed creature such as I - is a question of commitment. Commitment and resolve. Commitment, resolve and guts of even a Quixotian nature. So it was recently, when one evening I sallied forth, via the peripatetic Melbourne public transport system, to see Felix Listens to the World.

Picture, if you will, the said critic (me), miserable with the depradations of a particularly vicious virus, venturing forth from her cosy fireside into the snow and sleet - oh, all right, into the somewhat brisk breezes of Fitzroy. Glamorously garbed in hat, scarf, gloves, coat and thick woollen underwear, the red-nosed one shivers her way across town, pathetically clutching cough lollies and her copy of the London Review of Books, her major defence against unreliable timetables.

And for what? An inextinguishable curiosity? A heroic desire to bring the word back from the Olympian heights of art? Sheer idiocy? All of the above? For as theatre goers know, theatre is a perilous enterprise...all this effort could have left me sulking soggily for an hour in a dark room, wishing I was home filing my nails.



But this, reader, was not one of those occasions. (Yes, I'm getting to the theatre now). I was to be translated out of my quotidian existence, by an enchantment particular to theatre; and since that existence was at the time fairly pitiable, this seemed to me an unalloyedly good thing. The sign that greeted the audience on their way to the assortment of cushions and couches that was the auditorium said: "Please turn off all links to the real world". I, for one, was only too happy to oblige.

Felix Listens to the World is the first work made by Suitcase Royale, a new company of three young performers, Joseph O'Farrell, Miles O'Neil and Glen Walton. They describe what they do as "junkyard theatre". The discarded objects of the not-so-distant past litter their stage: manual typewriters (remember them?), gramophones, lamps, fishing rods, battered suitcases, film projectors.

These objects are refugees from the 20th century, drenched with a nostalgia as gentle as the yellow lamplight that illuminates them, and they form the materials for the performance. The fear of giving an erroneous impression makes me hesitate to say that this show is child-like: it has a naivety that properly lives in the heart of all theatre, the "let's pretend" factor, but it rigorously avoids any sense of the saccharine. And this work draws on some sophisticated influences: in particular, European puppetry and physical theatre.

The story is as simple as possible: they enact a fable about the lovelorn Felix searching for his wife Rose, who has for unknown reasons sailed away in a teacup. Felix is played interchangably by the three performers, who are each dressed identically.

A large part of the delight of this show is in its ingenuity: Suitcase Royale employs performer-operated lighting, puppetry techniques, sound and clever inventions to continually surprise you with a shift in perspective. These techniques, like the comedy, depend on sharp timing and placement for effect, and the performers unobtrusively get it right. I especially loved all the changes in scale: a suitcase might open and reveal a tiny city, or a lamp suddenly transform into the moon.

It is enchanting in the best sense. The performance is suffused by an amiable comedy that strikes me as peculiarly European: the same kind of pleasure in the absurd that infuses films like The Triplets of Belleville or puppetry shows I've seen in Paris. Behind its charm is a tremulous sense of the mystery, unpredictability and absurdity of love. But there's a roughness in it I liked too, that stems from the insistence on using found objects, on noticing the humble and discarded aspects of our world.

This show won, deservedly, the 2004 Malthouse 3D Festival, and Best Performance in the 2004 Fringe Festival. Now Suitcase Royale are taking it to tour Canada. If it gets another showing in Melbourne, mark it in your diary. And watch these boys: it's hardly rocket science to predict that we'll hear more of them.

Picture: Joseph O'Farrell, Miles O'Neil and Glen Walton in Felix Listens to the World

Suitcase Royale

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Store Room
Critic Watch

Sixteen Words for Water by Billy Marshall Stoneking, directed by Lawrence Strangio, designed by Peter Corrigan, with Tim Robertson, Caroline Lee and Natasha Jacobs. La Mama, Carlton Courthouse until March 26.

"Pull down thy vanity", wrote Ezra Pound in a bleak moment. "Thou art a beaten dog beneath the hail / A swollen magpie in a fitful sun." Those lines give an arresting image of Pound himself: at once beaten and desolate, and swollen with vain intellectual hubris.

At the time he wrote them, after the liberation of Italy by the Allied forces, Pound was imprisoned by the American military authorities in a cage in Pisa. He had been making broadcasts for Mussolini's Fascist Italy that bitterly excoriated the US government. He faced the death penalty for treason in wartime, but was judged too unsound of mind to face trial, and was instead incarcerated in an American institution for the criminally insane for 13 years, until the campaigning of his literary friends resulted in his release.

Sixteen Words for Water is set at this time, when Pound was a celebrity lunatic visited by the literary elite and curious students, and a governmental embarrassment. Although this play was written more than 15 years ago, it seems to have a particular cogency now; either the times have caught up with it, or we have retreated back to Pound's era. Pound was a dissenter, and a most difficult one: a supporter of Fascism and a vocal anti-Semite, who railed against the sins of usury with the fervour of an Old Testament prophet.

But he was also one of the giants of 20th century literature: fascinating and infuriating, revolutionary and brilliant. T.S. Eliot famously called Pound "the greater craftsman" in his dedication to him in The Wasteland, to acknowledge the master's editorial advice. He is still a radical influence in contemporary poetry. His prosodic ability makes me catch my breath: he can make a line sing as few others can. And his Cantos remains one of the brilliant failures of modern literature, a monumental work that inevitably crumbled under the weight of its own ambition, as flawed and magnetic as its maker.

This poet represents a direct challenge to the odd idea that great art and great virtue necessarily go together. To admire an artist is not necessarily to share his or her vision or ideology; and an unpleasant ideology does not guarantee that an artist's work is no good. No one interested in modern literature can afford to ignore Pound. And his attraction to Fascism and anti-Semitism was not uncommon among artists in the early 20th century; Eliot and Djuna Barnes certainly shared his anti-Semitism, and Marinetti and the Futurists, among others, were famously Fascist.

Still, Pound's campaigns against the US government disturbed his friends. Puzzling over his political convictions, his great friend Williams Carlos Williams commented that, despite it all, Pound still had "the true naivety of a poet". This strikes me as an insightful comment: poets are apt - curiously perhaps, since poetry is an art that to a great extent depends on ambiguity - to be very literal about language, to demand that it means what it says. In a pragmatic world which to a great extent depends on hypocrisy and half meant statements, such naivety can be a perilous thing. It's an insight that informs Sixteen Words for Water, which is written by another American poet, Billy Marshall Stoneking.

Stoneking's approach is simple: the play consists of dialogues between Pound and two women, one a psychiatrist who is appointed to write a government report, the other an infatuated student. What the dialogues eventually reveal is the problem of Pound (not least the problem he posed for himself), as a stubborn, intelligent human being of surpassing loneliness. All his rhetoric is there, unvarnished and repugnant, but also his hatred of the capitalist war machine. He considered usury - the lending of money at interest - to be the great evil of the modern world; and who, in the age of Halliburton and international money markets, can really argue with that?

It makes for a wordy play, but Pound's irascible wit, mule-headedness, abrasive honesty and, in the end, his sheer pathetic humanity, more than compensates for those moments where the script tips over into the sheerly explanatory. This is a very finely directed production, staged with a subtle and witty theatricality by Laurence Strangio. There are many clever touches - I especially liked how Pound served tea, simply writing the word on a piece of paper. It at once has a Spike Milligan absurdity and suggests something about a poet's attitude to language.

Peter Corrigan's set is deceptively simple: a pen surrounded by orange plastic, hung with half a dozen washing lines on which Pound pegs his poems. The phsyical restraint of the washing lines - the actors are always having to stoop and lift them up to cross the stage - suggests imprisonment extremely effectively, and Pound's orange jumpsuit has more contemporary associations. The performances too are detailed and convincing. Natasha Jacobs and Caroline Lee are much more than mere foils to the central role of Pound but even so, Tim Robertson's bravura performance (is he channelling Ez?) steals the night.

The play leaves you with the dilemma that was Pound himself. Many of his beliefs (but by no means all of them) were indefensible. How can you disentangle the political beliefs from the poetry and the man? And is such a disentanglement - which has been attempted by some of Pound's admirers - in fact desirable? On the other hand, should he have been imprisoned simply for what he said? Of course, if he had not been a famous poet, Pound would have been summarily shot for treason; but all the same, the question remains - an uncomfortable question that has no easy answer - whether any state that imprisons its difficult dissidents can really claim to defend freedom of speech.

La Mama Theatre

The Big Con by Guy Rundle, directed by Aubrey Mellor and Denis Moore, with Max Gillies and Eddie Perfect. Malthouse Theatre until April 3.

Sometimes I feel ambivalent about political satire. Is it merely a comforting release that assures us (the Right - or in this case, the Left - Minded) that we are superior to those we dislike? Might it not be, in some way, inherently conservative, for all its assumption of subversiveness?

I wonder if, rather than provoking thought, satire might simply confirm one's beliefs. George Bush's surreal approach to the English language might be amusing, but does mocking it make any difference? After all, his hokiness is a large part of his appeal in the fundamentalist heartland; and sneering at it just proves that those chardonnay-sipping elites are, well, elitist.



On the other hand, laughter is a human survival technique. Witness the black humour that flourished in Poland under Communist rule, or Jewish comedy. Making jokes about things that would otherwise make one despair is a vital expression of human defiance. The Big Con is intelligent enough to generate that kind of vitality, but at the end of the evening, I found that ambivalence nagging me. Perhaps I like my satire very black indeed.

The Big Con is impression comedy, familiar to those of us old enough to remember Max Gillies' television shows in the 1980s. The conceit is that we are at a right wing convention hosted by the Centre for Independent Analysis (rather suspiciously like our own right wing think tank the Centre for Independent Studies but with the acronym CIA, which is emblazoned either side of the red velvet curtains).

Gillies has teamed up with comic cabaret crooner Eddie Perfect, complete with Australian Idol hair moussed up into an improbable fin on top of his head, and a footballer's tuxedo. He has the nasal pop star delivery and dazzlingly vacuous smile down pat, and a selection of songs which grow steadily bleaker as the evening wears on. Numbers like "Don't be so Damn September 10" or a happy holiday tune about the joys of Guantanamo Bay are coolly savage attacks on the cynical pragmatism of our times.

It is, as Barry Humphries might have it, a "very nice night's entertainment". The show works well in the cavernous Merlin Theatre, and Guy Rundle's script is pointed and wittily informed. Gillies skewers all the usual suspects - Alan Jones, Rupert Murdoch, Phil Ruddock and, in a portrayal of eerily accurate grotesquerie I found almost unwatchable, John Howard. I enjoyed especially the appearance of Keith Windschuttle, the revisionist historian, and the curiously likeable portrait of Amanda Vanstone, on tour with her show Amandatory Detention. Perhaps the most successful sketch is a surprise appearance by Tony Soprano, working some PR for the US government.

The satire encompasses its audience, and is almost as critical of the homilies of the Left as it is of those of the Right. Human folly is not, after all, confined to any particular ideological stripe. At times (I think this comment is the No. 1 sin of theatre reviewers, but hell, sometimes you have to say it) I thought the script was a bit wordy, and the comedy sagged. Sometimes it was derivative (George Bush's line, "My fellow electricians" is a direct steal from the Dead Ringers gag "My fellow watermelons").

Comedy of this kind is of the moment, dating as quickly as yesterday's papers, and necessarily parochial. I had a good time, for all my afterthoughts, and so did the full-house crowd; the two and a half hours whizzed by. It might only be speaking to the converted, and it didn't leave me with any powerful impressions which stayed to haunt me later; but, as that old cartoon has it, sometimes you've just got to laugh.

Picture: Max Gillies as Phillip Ruddock

Link:
Malthouse Theatre

Just to blow my own trumpet for a moment...

I have just uploaded issue 9 of my annual literary arts ezine, Masthead. Yes, theatre is part of it. But also many other riches - poetry, including a lot of work in translation, essays and visual art. Check it out!

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