Festen, dramatised by David Eldridge, based on the dogme film and play by Thomas Vinterberg, Mogens Rukov and Bo Hr. Hansen, directed by Simon Phillips. Designed by Shaun Gurton, lighting by Matt Scott. With Nicholas Bell, Julia Blake, Melinda Butel, Ditch Davey, Jason Donovan, Julie Eckersley, Kim Gyngell, Bob Hornery, Chris Kirby, Alex Menglet, John Stanton, Kat Stewart and Greg Ulfan. Melbourne Theatre Company at the Fairfax Studio, Victorian Arts Centre, until September 23

I have to begin this review with an abject confession. Yes, gentle reader, in things cinematic, Theatre Notes is a dolt. Not only have I not seen Thomas Vinterberg's film Festen, on which this play is based: I have never even seen a Dogme film.

As everyone else knows, Dogme was a Danish collective of avant garde film makers started by Lars Von Trier in 1995. Dogme was defined by a manifesto which excoriated the decadence of contemporary cinema and called for a new, democratic purity. Directors were exhorted to put aside the bourgeois individualism of the auteur, refuse artifice and devote themselves to revealing reality. To this end, they were expected to adhere to a Vow of Chastity.

Festen (Celebration) was in fact the first Dogme film. Given the austerity of the Dogme vow - which prohibits any kind of illusion, including props, sets, lighting or even bringing extraneous items into a location - it seemed to me an unpromising basis for that child of metaphor and illusion, the theatre. And in any case, I am inclined to be suspicious of theatre that chases the illusory glamour of film.

I am, of course, always glad to be proved wrong, and Eldridge's adaptation turns out to be brilliantly theatrical. Although I found its conclusion mystifying (which may have been a function of the production), I was compelled by a script that was at once tough, subtle and muscularly gestic.

The celebration of the title is the 60th birthday of a wealthy hotelier, Helge Klingelfeldt (John Stanton), held shortly after the suicide of one of his daughters. When his oldest son Christian (Jason Donovan) rises to give the toast, he reveals a shocking family secret. This prompts a succession of increasingly violent reactions as the household - the extended family and servants as well as the parents and children - struggles through denial and is finally forced to confront the truth.

It's not quite as direly therapeutic as it sounds in this bald summary. It is saved from the Oprah Winfrey genre by the complexity and subtlety of its characterisation, which allows for a truly human contradictoriness to emerge in its portrayals, and by how the drama opens up metaphorically to become an indictment of bourgeois mores. Its exposure of the sadism, hypocrisy, racism and exploitation running underneath the skin of capitalist society made me think (uncharacterically) of a film that also opens with a family celebration - Visconti's masterly exploration of the roots of Nazism, The Damned.

Moreover, there is a genuine fascination in its close observation of the rhythms of social convention, how human beings protect themselves from painful realities through rituals of habit. This is reinforced by staging meals in real time - tables are set, people are seated and real food is eaten - which gives the action a compelling frame of veracity. And there are moments of theatrical magic - one scene weaves three separate dialogues from three bedrooms seamlessly together, replacing simultaneity of time with simultaneity of space. In a beautiful piece of choreography, all six characters end up on the same bed. Awesome theatre.

The Dogme anti-aesthetic aims to focus attention entirely on the story and performances. It is possible to do something similar in the theatre: there's a parallel aesthetic in the early Keene/Taylor Theatre Project productions, which were presented in a working Brotherhood of St Lawrence warehouse using only the objects found there as props.

The necessary artifice of the stage presents its own obvious challenges. The English production of Festen, directed by Rufus Norris, solved this problem with a design of formidable austerity that sculpted a play of light and shadow on a mostly empty stage. Simon Phillips gives us a much softer interpretation. Shaun Gurton's set - a semicircular framing of hauntingly-lit birch trees - avoids the literal, but it is a tad pretty and lyrical. And it is overdressed, a frequent flaw in MTC designs, with gratuitous touches such as a chandelier descending from the flies that distract not only the eye, but the mind.

This slightly fudged air continues through the production, which leaves you feeling as if you just missed something: it's as if the emotion of the play is a melody half-heard in the distance. Phillips has some excellent actors at his disposal, and elicits some fine performances - in particular, John Stanton as Helge and Julia Blake as his wife, Else, who give controlled, understatedly powerful performances. Julie Eckersley and Ditch Davey as Christian's dysfunctional brother Michael and his put-upon wife create an authentic energy of violent, damaged sexuality. Bob Hornery, Alex Menglet and Kim Gyngell as the comic mechanicals provide some requisite black humour; but few of the other performances quite hit the mark.

Jason Donovan in the central role of Christian is an emptiness in the middle of the production. There is, of course, a sense in which he is meant to be a kind of black hole, exerting a traumatic gravity into which he draws the rest of the family; but for all his exertions - and there is no doubt he is working his arse off - Donovan seems strangely absent as an actor. He mistakes mere blankness for the emotional numbness of trauma, and confuses emoting for the material of real feeling.

A sense of actorly self-consciousness flaws Kat Stewart's performance of Christian sister Helene as well. For all its toughness, Festen is a delicate play that depends crucially on a sense of authenticity in performance, and in this production emotional nuance is terminally blurred. Hence, I think, the puzzling ending, in which the writer has either lost his nerve or something has been crucially misunderstood.

The final scene is a family breakfast which appears to tie off the traumas of the previous night's action in a neat bow: catharsis is attained, everyone is healed and the repentant malefactor is punished. It all feels rather too pat. Here I really am hampered by not having seen the film: does it really finish with such simplistic psychologising? I had the feeling that something else was happening subtextually that just wasn't apparent in this production: a certain menace, perhaps a certain manipulative reassertion of patriarchal power. But here I am only guessing.

Despite this, Festen has moments of real potency, and Phillips' flair for stage choreography is well in evidence, especially in its early scenes. It's an opportunity teasingly missed by a very small margin. Unfortunately with a play like this, the small things really matter.

Picture: Jason Donovan as Christian. Photo: Jeff Busby

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Today, for a couple of reasons, I was going through some old work, and I found this essay. I don't think it has ever been published, and some of you might find it interesting. Among other things, it outlines how my brilliant career at the Bulletin went bung, and gives a snapshot of how I saw things in 1997. And it also articulates many of the reasons why I started this blog. Those who regularly read Theatre Notes will know that I feel rather more hopeful about Melbourne theatre now than I did then, and of course my views have evolved considerably. But of course there is the other argument, that the more things change, the more they remain the same...

Little Alison and her battle against the eunuchs

VLADIMIR: Moron!
ESTRAGON: Vermin!
VLADIMIR: Abortion!
ESTRAGON: Morpion!
VLADIMIR: Sewer rat!
ESTRAGON: Curate!
VLADIMIR: Cretin!
ESTRAGON: (with finality). Crritic!
VLADIMIR: Oh!
He wilts, vanquished, and turns away.

EVERYONE loves to hate critics. All too often, they make it easy. No matter how much you believe in the importance of public debate, no matter how passionately you argue that a vigorous, informed critical culture is essential to the health of a democratic society, some pompous ignoramus will prove to the world in the Saturday supplements that critics are on the bottom rung of intelligent life forms. Nevertheless, one must fight the good fight. This is the story of part of my personal battle, the three years I spent as a theatre critic for the Bulletin and the absurd results of my high-minded crusade to get cultural debate happening in Australian theatre. It is all, like all comedies, tragically illuminating.

In considering the contemporary disappearance of the moral authority of the critic, Hans Magnus Enzensberger comments:

... it seems that the appearance of the critic is related to the rise of bourgeois society, as if he had dominated this society for just as long as this society held on to the idea that the public discussion of cultural norms is something essential: that is, crudely put, from Boileau to Sartre, from Samuel Johnson to Edmund Wilson, from Lessing to Benjamin, from Belinsky to Shlovsky. What characterises these fabulous intellectual beasts? Legend has it, and it is confirmed by reading the works they left behind, that they were writers who wrote about the books of other writers. Further, these critics are said to have been independent people, who owed their significance solely to their work, not to an institution or an industry, at whose service they had placed themselves. Apparently the essay was their preferred form, the journal their favoured medium. They are said to have known what they wanted - obstinate, uncomfortable spirits, looking to long-term results instead of quick turnover.

Enzensberger concludes the days of the critic are over, that what remains are the mouthpieces of an industrial machine. I think he is correct, but at least he has the privilege of speaking out of European culture. Australians might well yearn for such a dilemma. Here, in a culture scarred by colonial insularity, there has never been the cultural curiosity that permitted serious public discussion of literature or art or anything else. Now that snappy advertising allows us to delude ourselves that we are a serious culture, we can catch up breathlessly with the ruins of Europe - a culture polluted by fashion, public relations and the imperatives of the culture industry.

Unlike Germany, we do not have several centuries of brilliant public thinking to shore up at least the idea of critical thought. In a country that has an insecure sense of its place in the world, the merest whiff of criticism is enough to send the so-called aesthetes screaming towards the courts of special pleading. No one thinks of donning their armour for a pyrotechnic bout of intellectual fencing for the delight and illumination of anyone who cares to watch. At best we get a bit of mud slinging, with all its attendant crudity and mess. At worst, we have the edifying anthropological spectacle of tribal groups of cultural heavies licking each other’s bottoms.

It is no accident that some of our most famous exports - Robert Hughes, Germaine Greer and Clive James - are all critics. Nor that they all appear to be singularly isolated talents. One can only speculate what might have happened had they chosen to remain here. The grim guess is, not much. The impregnable fog of stupidity would have stifled them in the end. But this can only be fantastic speculation. There was nothing to keep them here in the first place.

One of our fondest myths is that everything has changed since the dull daze of Menzies. My suspicion is that, despite a glittering cosmopolitan veneer, things are probably worse. At least then it was obvious how bad things were. Australia has proved to be a good breeding ground for brilliant, isolated talents - among them a disproportionate number of extraordinary poets - the only kind tough enough to survive the death by a thousand cuts that is the lot of the artist working in Australia. Nothing is as deadening as apathy. Nothing is as savage as pettiness called to question. Nothing is as unanswerable as wilful ignorance.

I came to theatre reviewing by accident. The first job I was offered as a freelance journalist after I resigned from the Melbourne Herald in 1985, was to write the theatre pages for TV Scene, an execrable tabloid that met its unlamented demise when Rupert Murdoch bought the Herald and Weekly Times. My job for the Bulletin came about because the publicity person for the Melbourne Theatre Company suggested my name to James Hall, then the Bulletin’s art editor, when his incumbent critic couldn’t cover a play. I have no doubt my name was suggested because it was expected that, out of gratitude for the chance to move up the career ladder, I would write glowing quotes for the PR blurbs.

However, I was naive enough to take the job seriously: the chance to write something of substance had come my way rarely as a journalist. The production was Hedda Gabler. I read the play closely, mugged up on Ibsen, went to see the show and was disappointed. I said so, and why, in my review. The publicity lady was grossly offended and the director didn’t speak to me for two years. Invitations to MTC opening nights mysteriously stopped arriving, although this made me perversely ensure I went along anyway. In my beginning, as Eliot was wont to say, was my end.

Two months later James Hall offered me the position of Melbourne reviewer for the Bulletin, a post I held for the next three years. I was, in most ways, a fairly typical reviewer. I had, at best, a sketchy and local knowledge of theatre: I knew only a little of its history, its theory and its techniques and almost nothing at all about contemporary theatre elsewhere. However, in other ways I was not typical.

One was a sound intuition that, in order to write well about theatre, I had to watch it. I wanted to abandon the privileged role of “critic” and participate in the theatre as a member of the audience. I never took notes; I found that if I did this I couldn’t watch the stage. I thought note-taking accounted for the fact that many reviews seemed to be about a completely different play to the one I had seen. I found that with concentration and practice my memory served me very well. I also, whenever possible, read the plays I reviewed, especially if they were new work.

I used the style of tabloid journalism in order to write seriously about art, for two reasons. One was to destabilise the privileged art-speak that dismissed an audience as stupid. I wanted to demonstrate to the people who read my reviews that the audience, also, has a vital place in the theatre, that it isn’t there merely to worship at the hallowed shrine of culture, which is often more accurately the hollow shrine of money and cultural status.

The other reason was pragmatic. Newspaper and magazine editors believe that reviews serve two purposes: to tell their readers where, when and how a production is on, and to act as a consumer guide. To talk about art is considered a wank, as art in itself is not considered interesting. I think art by itself is interesting and wanted to talk about it: and this technique was one way of subverting the formalities of a newspaper review and getting serious ideas in, as it were, under the door.

My ideas about art were informed by the belief that, as Trotsky said, true art is truly revolutionary. I don’t mean that art exists as a form of social engineering - it is ultimately too private an act for such grandiose designs, too complex for ideologies - but that true art can shatter the comfortable constructions we all build within our lives, privately and publicly, and force us to a radical reappraisal of ourselves and our world. “A book,” said Franz Kafka, “must be the axe to break the ice within.”

Theatre can offer such radical experiences. Australian theatre usually doesn’t, because theatre is by its nature a social act. One person cannot make theatre on her own and repressions, conscious and unconscious, operate at almost every level of its production and reception. A major repression is the fear of ridicule and dislike. Our theatrical institutions ensure that the work they produce is acceptable to its audience. This is not a problem confined to Australia; in every Western culture, theatre producers face the bogey of the subscription audience, which is too often the death of theatrical courage. Everything is carefully airbrushed to a nice beige, in order not to offend anyone, and younger artists, rebelling as they must against the prevailing order, produce a lot of radical - beige. It is worth remembering that Patrick White, one of our really great writers, became a monster, a popular cultural icon of artistic nastiness who fulfilled public expectations of his behaviour most obligingly. It is difficult not to suspect that a source of his corrosive anger was the need to assert within himself the validity of excellence in the face of the indiscriminate acceptance of mediocrity.

My own critical practice was largely shaped by my practice as a poet. My work had always been informed by astute and rigorous criticism from other people. I learnt early to distinguish between what I thought of as “useful” and “useless” criticism. Useful criticism was specific, attuned to the ambitions of the work, honest and carefully argued; useless criticism was characterised by generalised statements that responded to a nimbus of preconceptions surrounding the work rather than the work itself. Useful criticism stimulated me to heighten my own critical faculties: it raised questions that forced me to scrutinise my work and evaluate what I was doing there. Useless criticism, positive or negative, stimulated nothing. Perhaps the most important aspect of useful criticism is its implicit love of the art form it interrogates. Useless criticism is devoid of love; it is at best indifferent to art’s imperatives.

I wanted, first of all, to be a useful critic. I saw that theatre and criticism have a dialectical relationship and I wrote my reviews as part of the dialogue, or polylogue, of a continuum called theatre. I never believed they bore the imprimatur of irrefutable judgement: I wrote them to stimulate discussion, to raise questions, to disturb assumptions. I never saw any point in denying my subjectivity, because I thought subjectivity was an essential admission. I worked to make my subjectivity informed, to understand as much as I could of the techniques, histories and ideas that make theatre what it is. In this aim, I was influenced particularly by David Mamet’s passionate address to critics in Writing in Restaurants. I wanted to be a critic like that. I don’t believe I achieved my ambition. But it wasn’t for lack of trying.

The more I reviewed, the more clearly I understood the fraudulence of what often passes for art and arts commentary in our culture. Art in Australia is massively beauracratised and stupidly written about in our mass media: and these things conspire to ensure that art as a genuinely radical dynamic is all but invisible. All art, interesting or not, is blurred into a sludge called culture, an industry which mainly exists to employ mediators who ensure that the “products” are passively consumed. The essentially uncommodifiable quality of aesthetic is pushed off the agenda.

As a substitute we have celebrity, watered-down social issues and the odd trite controversy. The effect is the creation of an “official” culture, well-oiled by public relations, which keeps in place a number of cherished assumptions and careers by the simple expedient of appearing to be challenging, cutting edge, exciting and everything else a culture is supposed to be, without any of the substance. This hypocrisy is endemic in all of our arts and is reflected in the repression of dissenting voices.

While I was reviewing, I was the only critic I knew who regarded it as a full-time job. Most critics worked part-time, having other jobs in academia and journalism, because otherwise they would have been as poor as I was. The media is not interested in having good critics: a mediocre critic serves its purposes just as well and is far less trouble. And there’s no doubt I was troublesome. The Bulletin copped a law suit over one review and many angry letters from outraged recipients of my altruism. I was only 25 when I started, so my innocence is perhaps excusable: I was amazed that people became so angry with me, because I thought it was obvious that everything I said stemmed from my love of theatre, and didn’t they love theatre too?

The major row during my time with the Bulletin was with the Playbox theatre. Contrary to the wisdom of gossip, that harassment didn’t get me sacked. But perhaps it is only from this distance that I recognise with clarity how extensive, malicious and unremitting it was.

The facts are simple and petty. When, during the season of 1990, the Playbox Theatre’s first in its swish new Malthouse Theatre, I reviewed awful play after awful play, Carillo Gantner, who was then artistic director, decided that I was a blot on the landscape that had to be removed for the good of Australian culture. He started with a series of phone calls to the arts editor, Diana Simmonds, in which he suggested it may be a good idea to sack me. When that failed, he tried the Bulletin’s editor, James Hall. When that also failed, he started a smear campaign that attacked my credibility. It included a highly libellous letter to the Victorian Council for the Arts that asked for their help in getting me sacked for my alleged campaign against Playbox caused by my “psychotic” personality (there could be no other reason why I found the plays below par). Finally, he banned me from the theatre for “unprofessional conduct” after an unspecified “incident in the foyer”. James Hall rang me and asked what I had done: had I drunkenly abused the actor involved, or what?

The “incident” bears some examination. Then, as now, I had many friends who worked in the theatre. One day, an old friend, an actor then employed in a Playbox production, rang me and asked me out for a coffee because he was troubled. He told me that the day before, he had been called into Gantner’s office and cross-examined because he had been seen talking to me in the foyer at the Malthouse on the opening night of the play. Our conversation had been, briefly, about the play: I hadn’t liked it and had apologised to him, in advance, for the review.

It was after this that James Hall rang me about Gantner's complaint. Clearly, my speaking to my friend was the “incident”, given some considerable spin by the Playbox machine. I couldn’t ask the actor concerned to stand up for me in public: he would probably never have been able to work in Melbourne again. I had no recourse against this gross slander except to say it wasn’t true. Argument was reduced to the level of the pre-school sand pit - “Did so!” “Did not!” “Did so!” - in which the loudest always wins.

Gantner’s strategy transparently sidestepped the censorship at the root of his actions; he claimed that my banning from Playbox was nothing to do with what he called my “vitriolic” and “personally abusive” reviews. I wrote a letter passionately arguing against the censorship of debate, pointing out how damaging such censorship was to the arts and to the culture. (I have a thick file of the correspondence between the Bulletin, myself and Gantner which is probably most notable now for its absurd comedy.) I even attempted to explain that to criticise someone’s work was not the same as a personal attack. I was making a fundamental mistake: although even Gantner was forced to concede that my reviews were accurate, what was at stake was Playbox’s funding and stature, which he claimed I was directly threatening. The larger arguments of artistic quality, the only questions with which I was concerned, were pushed aside and remained unanswered. It began to dawn on me that some artistic organisations are interested in anything but art.

When it became obvious even to Gantner that he was making a fool of himself, the whole fracas sank into a silent pool of embarrassment. It was tacitly agreed that everyone should just get on with their jobs. By then I was exhausted and sick of the whole affair and its attendant notoriety. I wondered why I had worked so hard, for so little money, for such trivial results. If I had “played the game”, if I had refused to have any thoughts of my own and had simply followed the line of least resistance, no doubt I would still be attending opening nights and dozing my way through reviews. But why would I want to do that? Life’s too short.

Shortly afterwards, on the strength of the free publicity I had given the Bulletin, I wrote and asked for the retainer that I had been promised for two years. I had already decided that if I was to live in abject poverty, it would be more profitable to resign from journalism and concentrate on my real work, poetry. Unfortunately, at the Bulletin my old mate James Hall had been replaced as editor. (The media is a volatile profession). The new editor impolitely told me to go jump. So, impolitely, I did. I think it is no coincidence that I resigned at the same time that I finally felt I knew enough to do the job properly.

It was a most unedifying affair. It did teach me a lot about pettiness, dishonesty and why Australian theatre is peculiarly insulated from ideas.

There is one crucial aspect of theatre that doesn’t apply to most other arts: its temporality. A poem can be read five hundred years later, a film can be watched fifteen times. But if you’re not there at the theatre, you’ve missed it. This means that theatre criticism has another function: as a record. Our theatre history is seriously compromised by our theatre criticism.

I’ll cite one example: former Age critic Leonard Radic’s 1991 book The State of Play. Anyone looking for an informed and stimulating discussion of the past 25 years of Australian theatre will be disappointed. The book is a cliche-ridden, limp regurgitation of received wisdom, written with the false objectivity that masks an entrenched subjective smugness. What it tells you is what we all know: that David Williamson, John Romeril, Jack Hibberd et al started at the Pram Factory and La Mama and thus was Australian theatre born. Williamson scores a whole chapter to himself, and a cringing, crawling summation it is.

There is only the briefest mention, for instance, of the work that was occurring simultaneously in the early 70s and which helped to make that time so exciting: the productions of work by European playwrights like Arabal, Handke, and others, some of which was the first to be performed in English anywhere in the world, or the work by women such as Sue Ingleton. There is no critical intelligence exploring, except in the crudest nationalistic terms, the political agendas that were operating within the theatre. Radic, whose analysis of plays only approaches that of an intelligent high school student, is simply not up to it. The history of the Pram Factory in the early 70s has yet to be written. All the ferment, all the excitement, all the variousness, is pared down to the level of a press release: and now, for a student like me, it may as well not exist.

This uninteresting book wouldn’t matter if other useful critical commentaries were easily available: but they’re not. There is a scrappily researched history produced by Currency Press, but that is as useless. Nowhere do we have, for instance, books like Michael Billington’s One Night Stands or Kenneth Tynan’s collected reviews of British theatre, that can tell you what it was like to be there, why it mattered, why it was exciting.

Radic was the senior theatre reviewer in Melbourne for more than two decades. I have no doubt that in that time he caused immeasurable damage to Melbourne’s theatre culture, by sins of omission as well as commission. For 20 years he told audiences that theatre’s greatest aim was to be “warm hearted” and informed theatre practitioners that the only thing that counted was box office approbation. The theatre of ideas, of imagination, of spiritual and intellectual struggle, of beauty and tragedy, of vulgar comedy and robust protest, the theatre that bore Shakespeare and Aeschylus and Beckett, simply did not exist for him. And Melbourne theatre slowly went into a disenchanted sleep, from which no prince’s kiss has yet awakened it.

Amid the snores, I haven’t been able to rid myself of the desire to write about my responses to art. I do so when I am asked and sometimes when I’m not, for my own reasons. I do not expect any real debate to result from my work. The work, and the rewards, are purely private. I’m quite aware of how ridiculous a position it is since, unlike almost any other literary mode, criticism is primarily a public act. Theatre reviewing remains as dull and ill-informed as it ever was - perhaps a little duller, since no doubt other reviewers took note of what happened to me and took more care not to think. The theatre has, sadly, the critics it deserves: the critics have the theatre they deserve. Who is cheated? Theatre’s audience, and any artist attempting serious work. And most of all, theatre itself.

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Your faithful blogger is again hosting Things on Sunday at the Malthouse Theatre on, yep, Sunday. The topic is "The Empty Space", and I'll be hearing from Gideon Obarzanek of Chunky Move, Malthouse Theatre AD Michael Kantor and Juliana Engberg from the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) as they discuss space and design and their relationship to dance, theatre and visual art.

August 13, 2.30pm. Cost: $10, free for Malthouse Theatre subscribers
Bookings highly recommended: Box Office (03) 9685 5111

And while we're on things Malthouse, Chris Boyd has a radically different response to Not Like Beckett, demonstrating that beautiful ability of theatre to polarise audiences:

For the first time in my life, I climbed over people to get out of a theatre. Climbed? I almost fell over people to get out.

Me, I went again last night (I was being Peter Clarke, who was unable to host the Time To Talk session because of family problems) and was able to review my response - it still works for me, especially when - say, 15 minutes in - it ceases to be a homage to our Sam. Chris, I think you missed the good bits...

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Not Like Beckett by Michael Watts, directed by Michael Kantor. Design by Anna Cordingley, lighting by Niklas Pajanti, sound and composition by Darrin Verhagen. With Russell Dykstra. Beckett @The Malthouse Theatre until August 20.

It's hard to know how to describe Not Like Beckett. Should I take a cue from the title and do some negative theology, attempting to describe it by listing all the things it is not? As it says on the box, it is not at all like Beckett. It isn't like Ibsen or Chekhov or Miller, either.



However, it is, in a particular and very recognisable way, extremely Australian. The iconic Yellow Peril that dominates the set is only the most obvious signal that this is a work about us, from us and for us. But there is nothing earnest - and not a shred of the provincial - in this anarchic, rambunctious and liberatingly offensive piece of theatre.

Not Like Beckett embodies many of the things that I love about Australian culture: its irreverence, energy, intelligence, fearlessness and wit. There is no contradiction in the fact that it highlights our good points by exposing our bad: here, written large, is our racism, the apathy that segues into cruelty, the tinpot triumphalism of colonialisation, the sexual viciousness. But it's in all in the name of good, filthy fun.

Our lone protagonist is a rabbit (Russell Dykstra, sans bunny ears), who may or may not be Walter Walloon Beckett, disreputable scion of the famous Beckett clan of pioneer rabbits, famous travelling comedian and, scandalously, the lover of an indigenous bilby, Boo Boo.

As the play begins, he is caught in a rabbit trap, waiting for the trapper to come and turn him into a fur hat. (As this is theatre, his being caught in a trap doesn't stop Dykstra from scrambling all over Anna Cordingley's ingenious set). He alternately laments his fate, admires the beauty of the view and tell us the story of Walter Walloon's brilliant career.

An outcast at school, Walter Walloon discovers popularity with his signature joke, sticking a carrot up his bum. He then shocks his respectable settler family by entering showbusiness and, most egregiously of all, falling in love with Boo Boo, the last of her race, whom he liberates from a cage in a shop window by buying her.

Walter Walloon's love for Boo Boo - and somehow we believe that he really does love her - doesn't stop him from treating her with the most brutal misogyny. Walter Walloon is monstrous, and knows he is monstrous: hence the increasingly despairing denial of his Becketthood. As the metaphor of the rabbit trap makes plain, this is no simple victim/oppressor narrative: Walter Walloon may be a monster, but it is impossible, all the same, to wholly dislike him. After all, he is us.

And he's hilarious. The laughter he elicits is, to be sure, barbed and uncomfortable. Walter Walloon gives us a picture of colonialisation that is at once fanciful and brutally real. Its critique in fact goes deeper than might be possible in a realistic play, because it permits an irony and heartlessness that in a more literal rendering would be simply unbearable.

While it's a little difficult to disentangle Watts' writing from the full-on production Michael Kantor has given it, it's clear that Michael Watts writes tough theatrical prose that shifts effortlessly between vulgar comedy, mordant wit and delicate lyricism. If the play begins under the shadow of Samuel Beckett, with a sub-Beckettian soundscape of mutters and cries ("I am not like Beckett!") echoing around the hectically-revolving set, Samuel Beckett himself drops out of the picture fairly quickly.

The prologue, at least as staged, is effective; but the least successful part of the play is the first ten minutes, before Watts's writing shakes itself free of negative obesiance to this genius of modern theatre and finds its own identity. Calling so baldly on the ghost of Sam inevitably provokes comparison, and it has to be said that Watts' writing lacks Beckett's astringently mandarin intellect and severe poetry. Nor does it possess the profound understanding of visual art that Beckett brought to his creation of theatrical mise en scene.

Watts, in fact, best invokes Beckett's tradition when he stands as far away from him as possible. The authentic connection between Watts' and Beckett's writing is in their mutual exploitation of music hall and vaudeville. Watts invokes a rich Australian tradition of performance, drawing from the Tivoli and, in particular, Roy Rene's iconic character, Mo McCackie, who is recalled in Dykstra's own white-faced clowning.

The character of Walter Walloon Beckett also plugs into a robust modernist heritage of Australian theatre, and stands with Monk O'Neill, the Beckettian antihero of Jack Hibberd's Stretch of the Imagination, as one of the memorable creations of the Australian stage. Dykstra's astonishing performance - surely among the most sheerly outrageous and courageous I've seen - is, in fact, almost a potted history of Australian performance styles from Roy Rene on. There are shades here of the anarchy of 1980s comedy, such as Tick Where Applicable or Los Trios Ringbarkus, or the 1970s "larrikin" theatre of the Australian Performing Group. (And a touch of Sid Vicious, in case it's all getting too parochial).

Dykstra's performance has more than a little of Jacques Lecoq's bouffon, the grotesque clown to whom nothing is sacred, and whose extreme fooling cleanses the social body. Certainly, to get away with what Dykstra doles out to us requires a certain effrontery. He shamelessly enacts some of the most racist and misogynist jokes in the Australian repertoire. He charms us with the simplest of materials: shadowplay with his hands, or the dumbest products of the joke shop. He spends an inordinate amount of time eating a carrot. The slightest doubt, the smallest hesitation, and the entire performance would collapse into embarrassment; but fortunately, Dykstra owns the stage.

Michael Kantor's direction weaves all the disparate elements at work into a seamless whole and keeps the audience continuously surprised. Not least in the tapestry is Cordingley's set, designed around a model of Ron Robertson-Swann's public sculpture Vault (popularly known as "The Yellow Peril"). This creates its own cascade of associations: Vault was originally designed for the Melbourne City Square and, as is often the way with contemporary art in this culture, fell foul of conservative critics.

The sculpture lasted only six months before it was ignominiously dismantled and removed. It spent some time skulking in Batman Park before it was restored and reinstalled in Southbank, just down the road from the Malthouse Theatre, in 2002. Vault's fate is a tempting metaphor for the outright hostility often faced by contemporary art in Melbourne, and it's rather charming to see it celebrated so fondly in this production, in which it becomes a humpy, a stage, a mountain and even a flight of stairs.

The only thing you can be certain of in this show is that you don't know what is going to happen next (although you suspect that it will all end badly). If part of Kantor's project as artistic director of the Malthouse is to redefine what is meant by the phrase "Australian theatre", this production is a fascinating and powerful addition to the conversation.

Picture: Russell Dykstra in Not Like Beckett. Photo: Lisa Tomasetti

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TN has been catching up on her blog reading, which was interrupted by a refreshing three weeks away from a computer screen. And to say I am delighted to see the return of Encore Theatre Magazine after a long downtime is putting it mildly. Rude, witty, stylishly written and, most importantly, deeply informed and passionate about theatre, the indefatigable Theatre Worker (a pseudonym for an anonymous collection of English theatre types) bracingly reminds you that theatre is hip, intelligent and beautiful. (Well, sometimes it is.)

The site is named after a British theatre magazine that circulated almost 50 years ago, and states its mission thus:

The life of Encore was brief but furious. For little more than a decade, between 1954 and 1965, the magazine railed at the state of British theatre, championing work that it saw as standard-bearing for the experimental, challenging, vital theatre it sought. It was not an ideologically-driven magazine; it was not consistent; it admired the Royal Court, Theatre Workshop, Ionesco, Arden, and Tynan, and it often attacked all of these. But it had passion and it had curiosity. Its standards were invariably high. It knew what it wanted.

We've named this site after Encore. We're not reviving the magazine but maybe we can revive its spirit. We want the online Encore Theatre Magazine to champion what is good and attack what is not. Just like its predecessor, we want to be a voice for a new theatre, building on the firmest foundations left to us, but pulling down the timbers of the rotten playhouses.

Words to warm the cockles of an old blogger's heart. Get thee hence for some frankly hilarious scalpeling of Tom Stoppard's latest play Rock'n'Roll, which opened to much celebrity hoohah while I was in London. And lest you think Encore's appeal is all schadenfreude, hang around to read its meditations on the Royal Court's 50th anniversary. And much else.

Meanwhile in New York, Mr Hunka at Superfluities is lamblasting commercial excesses in this post. And on this continent, Mr Boyd over at The Morning After has been getting to quite a few shows I've missed, including Unspoken, recently on at the Malthouse, and the Sydney production of Marius von Mayenburg's The Cold Child.

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The Australian finally catches up (via the London Times) on the Comedie-Francaise/Handke stoush, an issue followed closely on Ben Ellis' Parachute of a Playwright blog and on this blog here and here and here and here and here and, oh yes, here as well... Well, you get the picture.

The latest is the sacking (correction: unexpected non-renewal of contract) of the Comedie-Francaise adminstrator, Marcel Bozonnet. Covered by Mr Ellis a week ago.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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My response to the Craven/Usher attacks on MIAF runs in the The Age today - online here.

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Good to have news of local pigs kicking up their heels in New York. The inimitable George Hunka of Superfluities reports on Lally Katz, Chris Kohn and the rest of the Stuck Pigs Squealing gang, who this week did a showing of a work in progress at Richard Foreman's legendary Ontological-Hysteric Theatre.

Clearly George was charmed. But us Melburnians, we're charming, no?

This preview was the result of a collaboration with US writer Mac Wellman and other American artists, and the plan is to return to New York next year with the finished production. Meantime as a sidenote, I see that the Malthouse is producing a Richard Foreman play - Now That Communism is Dead My Life Feels Empty, directed by composer Max Lyandvert - as part of its most interesting upcoming spring season.

Addendum: Chris Kohn has posted in the comments a link to the Stuck Pigs' rehearsal blog, for those curious about what they've been doing over there...

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This one's for my friend Dan, who told me that he's really sick of reading that last "Gadding About" post. Yes, impatient readers, I flew back in on Friday, and have been acclimatising myself over the past few days to being back in Melbourne. This has been rather a mixed pleasure.

On the one hand, I love this place, even in winter. My trips to the UK are marked by the wistful and resigned pursuit of a decent coffee that doesn't taste like soap from Starbucks. The English just don't do coffee. (For reference, the Bar Italia in Soho does a Melbourne-quality latte - sheer bliss - shown to me, not surprisingly, by a fellow Melburnian...) I miss the cafes and the food culture here. I miss the bay. I even miss my family, sentimentalist that I am. While I was away, the bombs went off in the Mumbai trains and Israel started bombing Lebanon, and the world spun a little more darkly on its axis. Times when one wants to be home.

But oh, I had a good time. The Soundeye Festival is an attentive, listening, intelligent space with maybe the best audience for poetry I have ever read to. This year there were other pleasures as well - a contemporary Flamenco dancer declaiming Lorca, for example, on the Cabaret Night, where scores of eager young people materialised from somewhere to see poets with video and music, poets with violins, installation pieces and bands playing gypsy folk from Eastern Europe... And then I hung out in London (and, yes, Harrods) which was alive with summer and perspiring Londoners. I went to the Tate and discovered that Cy Twombly is a genius. I met with some dear friends.

I saw a magical production of Ovid's Metamorphoses by the London Bubble Company in a park by Highgate Cemetary, which reminded me of the sheer power of poetic language: on the one hand, a totally contemporary, ironically witty take on Ovid's myths; on the other, absolutely true to the sheer enchantment of the poetry. Children paid spellbound attention for two hours as the actors told of the creation of the world, of Orpheus and nymphs and Apollo's passion for Daphne, who became a laurel... Unlike many Australian takes on classic literature, there was no feeling of embarrassment at the beauty of the language: and the unabashed beauty was not incompatible with sheer fun, even slapstick. I loved it.

I missed, to my sorrow, Michael Gambon in Atom Egoyan's adaptation of Beckett's Eh, Joe. I just couldn't get there. I so wish I could have stayed longer. But I did get to the Bloomsbury launch of Gavin Selerie's extraordinary tome, Le Fanu's Ghost. It was so crowded with London poetry types that they had to be crowbarred out of the room. The book itself is a beautifully produced 350 pages, with graphics by Alan Halsey. As Marina Warner says, in an unusually accurate blurb on the back cover, the book is "oral, brash, sparky, and yet grounded in a deep knowledge and love of the highest poetic tradition...and will give great pleasure to readers". Indeed. More details - this is a must-have book for anyone interested in contemporary poetry - at Five Seasons Press's website.

So it's a little desolating to return to the belljar of Official Australian Culture. Is there anywhere else in the world where the arts are so roundly and openly despised by mainstream outlets? Catching up on my return, two things caught my eye: the on-going campaign in the Age to discredit and belittle Kristy Edmunds' programming for the Melbourne International Festival of the Arts (Robin Usher and the always reliably pompous pseud Peter Craven), with some side-swipes, while they're at it, at the "fringey" atmosphere now prevailing at the Malthouse. The bloggers, bless us all, have been onto it - Ben Ellis and Vitriolics Anonymous dish out some richly deserved scorn.

I can't even begin to parse the bullshit assumptions that underlie these articles. By what cultural measure is Robert Wilson a "fringe" artist? How can Ariane Mnouchkine be remotely described as making worthy theatrical docudramas? Are these "arts commentators" aware of the solid achievements of the Australian artists they routinely belittle? Don't these people have eyes? Didn't they notice how many ordinary Melburnians went to these shows, both local and international, and that many of the shows were, gasp, booked out? Didn't they notice how the city felt briefly like a metropolis, rather than a parochial country town? Wherefore this false dichotomy between Bach, the avant garde of his day, and contemporary innovative art? My dears, any healthy culture has both of them.

And then I saw how the Australian had stung the literati by sending out a chapter of a Patrick White novel. Kerryn Goldsworthy sums up all the tacky dimensions of this affair very well on her own blog:

I can't work out which is the worst:

(a) the bad faith of the entrapment, the smugness of its aftermath, and the shabby (and incoherent, as Jeff Sparrow points out in this excellent piece) reactionary agenda behind the exercise,

(b) the failure of the agents and publishers' readers who rejected the chapter to recognise either the actual novel or, at the very least, White's unique, highly spottable style, and the incontrovertible evidence it provides that people getting jobs in Australian publishing houses have clearly not seen fit to make it their business to read a little Australian writing, or

(c) the unambiguously, unashamedly and exclusively commercial agenda behind some of the rejections.

I could just cry.

Which reminds me that Patrick White, our sole Nobel Laureate, is out of print in Australia. You can buy him in bookshops overseas, but not in his native land. Consequently, he is scarcely read: the biography by David Marr is much more widely read than any of his work, and I suppose it's easy to maintain the fiction that White is elitist and inaccessible if he is unavailable to read (he is neither of those things, just a masterly, sensual, intelligent storyteller).

It's as if the English decided not to read or publish Shakespeare. It makes no sense at all. And like Kerryn, I could just cry.

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