You all know that my worser self takes over now and again. I'm afraid I had a day like that yesterday. Oh, I could just slap myself.

Andrew Bolt, who much prefers to play the man rather than the ball, had a couple of goes at me when I took issue with him over the programming - and the non-existent non-audiences - at the Melbourne Festival. Specifically, he got personal about our respective book sales. "Considering part of my copyright fees were used to help send Croggon to read her poetry in Britain," he says (is that envy I detect there?) "I think she could at least be more grateful. I’m pretty sure I’ll never get an overseas junket in return that’s funded by her sales." Take that, Croggon. But he forgot - that is, if he ever knew - that I actually write popular books.

So I've pointed out that my sales are simmering along nicely. While hardly in JK Rowling territory, they are now in six figures. He's being uncharacteristically shy about his own sales, so my fingers flew to Amazon. Amazon US doesn't list him at all, but on British Amazon - underneath various books about bolt-action rifles - you can find Mr Bolt's immortal tome, Still Not Sorry (released by News Custom Publishing, ie, our mutual employer, in 2005). Amazon UK today puts its sales rank at 1,416,346. In comparison, today's ranking for The Crow (it changes, but it's usually around there) on amazon.co.uk is 2551. Or maybe it might be fairer to look at The Riddle, released, like Still Not Sorry, in 2005. It's at 2806. Take that, Bolt.

And now the Bolt defenders are telling me huffily that mere sales are not a reflection of quality! The irony is exquisite! And you were saying about the MIAF box office, Andy...?

(PS: In the fact-free parallel universe that is Boltworld, it seems that selling out 10 shows after the first weekend means that "nobody is going". I wonder what one has to do to be a hit? Sell as well as Andrew's books?)

This beak is not just a prosthetic: over the next few weeks, Ms Alison will be plunging her wits - or what's left of them, anyway - into the beating heart of Melbourne's cultural life. (I'm just hoping that any blood that ensues is not mine). Yes, the Melbourne Festival opened last night. And so did the heavens: foul weather is the rule for the next couple of weeks. Oh, Melbourne.

However, this didn't damp the enthusiasm for the opening shows. While my Esteemed Colleague Mr Boyd was wowed by Barrie Kosky's Poe show, I was at the State Theatre enjoying the total sensory experience of Robert Wilson's spectacular The Temptation of St Anthony. (More of that on Monday: some of my blog reviews will be conditioned by press deadlines). Judging by the rafter-lifting that was going on after the show, it was a winner. If you haven't booked, do so: although I believe that you might have to mug someone for tickets, as I hear it's sold out. As is The Tell-Tale Heart. Always worth a try, though.

Not everyone is so engagée, it must be said. Brightened by Corrie Perkin's mention of his name in a feature on MIAF and, in particular, its suggestion that he has Influence In High Places, Andrew Bolt is ringing the funeral rites on Melbourne culture once again. Our Great City, says Da Bolta in a hollow voice, is in Artistic Decline. Decadence - personified by the likes of Robert Wilson, Peter Brook, Barrie Kosky and Merce Cunningham - is rotting the heart of Melbourne.

(You know, it's hard not to think of the National Socialist Society for German Culture and their 1937 exhibition of "Degenerate Art" when you read this crap. That exhibition hosted names like Chagall, Ernst, Kandinsky and the exquisite Franz Marc, and the beauty of their works was no defence against the stormtroopers for Good Clean Artistic Fun. They put labels next to the paintings, remember, indicating the amounts of money laid out by museums which purchased the works, to inflame taxpayers' hatred of these fat-cat Bolshevik modernists.)

Bolta's idea of Art is, by the way, Priscilla Queen of the Desert: The Musical. And we all know what Richard thought of that. Now, that's decadence.

I guess these noises are part of the ritual now: and those full houses suggest that nobody is taking any notice. I rather suspect that Melburnians like their culture.

News just in: after some nervous waiting, La Mama Theatre tonight announced that it has had its funding confirmed for 2008. Not only that, the company has been granted an extension of its previous funding levels, with 2.7 per cent indexation. And, along with all other Key Organizations, an additional one-off payment of "$50K+".

In what must be the understatement of the year, the company simply reports: "We are relieved and delighted."

And so are we. That a vital and unique cultural institution like La Mama was put on notice by the Australia Council (background here) exposed just how parlous the situation is for small to medium theatre companies.

So roll on the celebrations for La Mama's 40th Birthday, which I for one am looking forward to. They do good bashes. I remember reciting a poem at - was it the 21st? - holding a very small baby. And now Josh will soon be turning 20. Tempis fugit indeed...

The Homecoming by Harold Pinter, directed by Duncan Graham. Designed by Sarah John, lighting design by Nic Mollison, sound design by Andrew Howard. With Don Barker, Wayne Anthoney, Wendy Bos, Nathaniel Davison, Patrick Graham and Renato Musilino. Floogle @ The Studio, Holden Street Theatres, Hindmarsh, Adelaide, until October 20. Bookings: (08) 8225 8888

Harold Pinter sometimes seems like an uncomfortable fact lodged in the craw of mainstream drama. What is one to do with him? He's not at all nice. He never does an audience the courtesy of telling it what to think. His plays are discomforting, unforgiving, implacable. He is like a bad conscience that will not go away.


Pinter's oeuvre is the sort of work, in short, which Australian theatre finds on the whole easier to honour in the breach. Much respect is paid to Pinter - who is, after all, the winner of a Nobel Prize - but he is done surprisingly seldom for a playwright who is generally acknowledged as among the most significant of the past half century. It is most often left to the smaller companies to premiere the recent work, or to revitalise the classics.

Which is how your bloodhound blogger found herself in Adelaide this weekend, where a young independent company, Floogle, is mounting a production of The Homecoming. And here I've really dug up the truffles. This lucid reading of Pinter's most famous play is as elegant a realisation of his darkly comic terror as you are likely to see.

Duncan Graham's production strikes a number of difficult balances. It's a respectful and powerful rendering of a classic that is neither anachronistically dressed in contemporary clothes nor redolent of mothballs. It neither over-aestheticises the play, nor flinches from its extreme formal challenges. And, without in the least compromising the terror in the play's core, it's blackly hilarious.

The Homecoming is, as the critic John Lahr says, "a brilliantly sculpted stage event". The visual metaphor is apt: there is a strong sense in which this play is a dramatic object, an almost mathematical calculation of relationships and oblique perceptions proffered up, like a painting by Francis Bacon, for our uneasy contemplation. Perhaps the chief difficulty in presenting Pinter's work is in finding the balance between this abstraction and his equally strong realism, which is so vivid and precise that it attains an air of the surreal.

At its most simple, The Homecoming is a story about a family of men living without a woman in the house. Max (Don Barker), a former butcher, is the patriarch. He lives with his brother Sam (Wayne Anthoney) and his two sons Lenny (Patrick Graham) and Joey (Nathaniel Davison) in a house in North London. At the beginning of the play, his oldest son Teddy (Renato Musolino), who teaches philosophy at an American university, returns home unannounced in the middle of the night, with his wife Ruth (Wendy Bos). Teddy has not told his family that he is married, nor that he is, like Max, the father of three sons.

Over the following day, the plates shift. Ruth seduces both of Teddy's brothers, and then decides to abandon her children and husband and stay in North London, where she will earn her keep as one of Lenny's whores. She has no objection to this work, and drives a bargain that is distinctly to her material advantage. Teddy leaves for America without her. The homecoming of the title is, as it turns out, not Teddy's, but Ruth's.

As in a dream, the actions of the characters, no matter how seemingly irrational, violent or unconscionable, are accepted as wholly natural. At no point does anyone proffer any explanation, or even protest. The shock it caused on its 1964 premiere was, as Martin Esslin commented, not only that a completely respectable woman could turn so rapidly into a whore, but that she accepted it with such nonchalance. (Before second wave feminism, I suppose, the notion of marriage as legalised prostitution might not have been so obvious as it is now.)

No matter how you look at it, the actions of Pinter's characters remain mysterious. Not that much ink hasn't been spent on trying to decipher them. Esslin himself made a brave attempt at The Homecoming, reading it in psychoanalytical terms as a drama of Oedipal sexual conflict between fathers and sons. ("Ruth," he says startlingly, "is obviously a nymphomaniac".) But no matter how ingeniously such a theory plays through the text, the fact remains that there is always something unsatisfactory about such readings, a recondite core in the work that stubbornly eludes any such pinning down.

Perhaps the clue in approaching Pinter - and where I think Floogle's production succeeds admirably - is in refusing interpretation, which will be inevitably reductive, in favour of a focus on the formal shape of the work itself. This permits the dark concatenation of the play's action to exert its full unsettling power. Here it's probably worth remembering Susan Sontag's classic essay, Against Interpretation:

This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else. . . .But it should be noted that interpretation is not simply the compliment that mediocrity pays to genius. It is, indeed, the modern way of understanding something, and is applied to works of every quality. Thus, in the notes that Elia Kazan published on his production of A Streetcar Named Desire, it becomes clear that, in order to direct the play, Kazan had to discover that Stanley Kowalski represented culture, while Blanche Du Bois was Western civilization, poetry, delicate apparel, dim lighting, refined feelings, and all, though a little the worse for wear to be sure. Tennessee Williams' forceful psychological melodrama now became intelligible: it was about something, about the decline of western civilization. Apparently, were it to go on being a play about a handsome brute named Stanley Kowalski and a faded mangy belle named Blanch Du Bois, it would not be manageable.

Pinter is decidedly not "manageable". But when he is done well, it becomes clear that what is generally called his "difficulty" isn't in the text, which is not itself inherently obscure. Even if we are unsure of motive or meaning, nothing that happens on stage is difficult to understand: people speak, move, drink, smoke, fight, ignore each other. Something happens, and then it stops happening. And, in a quite real sense, that is the beginning and end of it.

The play's alleged "difficulty" exists - even 40 years after it was written - in the frustration of the expectations an audience might bring to the theatre: the idea, for example, that a play will signal how an audience is supposed to respond, or will provide a clear moral viewpoint from which the action might be judged. Pinter simply refuses to supply any such framework, instead delineating with a ferocious precision actions that are at once banal and deeply inscrutable.

This effectively exposes the abyss beneath the surface of social intercourse. The terror of mere existence opens between the gaps of his language, and is acknowledged in the anxiety behind the laughter of the audience. It's appropriate that John Lahr quotes Sartre, the pope of existential angst, when he discusses the uncanny power of Pinter's linguistic dislocations. In The Homecoming, Lahr says, consciousness is "a great emptiness, a wind blowing towards objects".

The uneasiness - not to say creeping terror - that Pinter can provoke stems from his brutal stripping away of the mitigating social masks that conceal the animal roots of human behaviour. In Pinter's hands, language is not a mark of our superiority as a species: it remains as bestial as claws and teeth.

One of the most illuminating essays written about The Homecoming is Irving Wardle's The Territorial Struggle, in which he analyses Pinter's dramaturgy using models derived from animal behaviour. "The play," he says, "has to be understood in territorial terms, or not at all... what we see is a ritualised tournament in which the two instincts of sexual desire and territorial aspiration fight it out..." Which gives a special poignancy to a comment reportedly overheard on its premiere: "These people," said a woman disgustedly. "They're just like animals."

In Floogle's production, this quality is brought to the surface with a bitter clarity through some very precisely focused performances. The play is beautifully cast, and the orchestration of Pinter's rhythms is well-judged and various, although I felt in a few isolated cases near the beginning that more could have been made of those famous pauses, that more space could have been carved out around the words. It is a tribute to the actors that Pinter's language is wholly absorbed into the action: I forgot all about the sophistication of Pinter's linguistic games, and found myself simply watching the play.

This lucidity stems from close attention to detail: there is nothing on stage that is not absolutely necessary. Sarah John's design, for example, is an exercise in elegant minimalism. The stage is slightly raised, revealing the exposed foundations of a house, and the set consists of items of furniture - a sofa, a chair, coffee tables, a sideboard - lit in a lush palette of umbers. Nic Mollison's unobstrusively beautiful lighting and Andrew Howard's sound design, mainly isolated chords that subtly disrupt rhythmic expectations, do much to heighten the poise of this production.

In a night of generally strong performances, perhaps I most liked Renato Musolino's portrayal in the deeply ambiguous role of Teddy. Musolino, looking disconcertingly like a young Harold Pinter, has the one moment when raw emotion breaks through the traumatic dislocation between speech and action. In a painful speech towards the end, he reveals both Teddy's impotence and his sense of separation from his family. This alienation is the price of his self-consciousness: it might make him aware of his actions, but it does nothing to free him from their implications. Knowledge merely fills him with revulsion. "You're just objects," he tells his family. "You just... move about. I can observe it... It's the same as I do. But you're lost in it.... I won't be lost in it."

It seems to me that, in its directness and sophistication, this is a particularly Australian take on The Homecoming. What is signally lacking is any skerrick of earnestness: it fully brings out the lustre of Pinter's grotesque comedy, giving the lie to anyone who claims that his plays are a morose series of high art pauses. The play sparkles like a malign crystal in all its complexity, as relevant and disturbing as it was the day it was written. If you're anywhere nearby, don't miss this one.

Picture: Wendy Bos and Patrick Graham in The Homecoming. Photo: Sam Oster

Theatre Notes flew to Adelaide as a guest of Floogle, on the understanding that they got the review they got.

George Hunka is back at a smart new site, a new play in his pocket, after a meditative few weeks hanging out Montauk with burbling nature (and Edward Albee, which is probably not at all the same thing) at the Albee Foundation.

Here at TN we've been sorely missing his voice in the blogmix, but he's assuaging us already with notes on Wedekind, contemporary French theatre, a quote on Messiaen and Schönberg (which contains my latest favourite phrase, "liberated dissonance") and, of course, the ongoing Organum, where he dares to speak of love. Sadly but understandably, the comments section is gone, but he courteously provides an email address for conversation.

Fringe Festival: Cake by Astrid Pill, directed by Ingrid Voorendt. Designed by Gaelle Mallis, lighting design by Geoff Cobham, composition by Zoe Barry. With Astrid Pill and Zoe Barry. Vitalstatistix and Malthouse Theatre @ The Tower until October 7.

Kin, directed by Stephen Page. Design by Stephen Page, lighting design by Glenn Hughes, videography by Douglas Watkin. With Isileli Jarden, Sean Page, Ryan Jarden, Josiah Page, Samson Page, Hunter Page-Lochard and Curtis Walsh-Jarden. Malthouse Theatre @ The Merlyn Theatre until October 6. Bookings: 9685 5111.

There's a beautiful synergy in the pairing of these two shows at the Malthouse this week. It goes further than the pleasing alliteration of Cake and Kin: like those racing horses Montaigne once admired in Italy, they're both "small but exquisitely formed". And both are stylishly realised devised productions that explore delicate reaches of the human psyche with tact, humour and honesty.


Cake comes to the Malthouse from a hit season at the Adelaide Fringe. It's easy to see why this show attracted attention: it irresistibly combines the erotic attractions of eating and sex, and seductively tickles your senses - taste and smell as well as eyes and ears. (Even touch, if you're lucky enough to get a cupcake). But it is more than a sensory feast: in ways that remind me of Margaret Cameron's brilliant show Things Calypso Wanted To Say, a fond memory from around 1990, Cake is an excoriatingly honest, funny and sometimes bleak examination of subversive feminine eroticism.

The first thing you notice is Gaelle Mellis's design. When you enter the Tower, you walk to your seat across a stage sprinkled with icing sugar, trying not to trip over small piles of cupcakes that are piled on the floor. The two performers, Astrid Pill and Zoe Barry, are already present, softly singing the nursery rhyme "Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker man".

The show is performed in the round to a small audience. In the centre of the stage is a wooden kitchen table, and in the corners are a table with tea things, a glockenspiel and a chair. The feeling of intimacy is heightened by Geoff Cobham's subtly fanciful lighting design, which mostly consists of a raft of classic Australian kitchen lights hung low over the table.

Under Ingrid Voorendt's precise direction, Cake becomes a detailed integration of text, music and physical theatre. Pill narrates two parallel narratives, one in the first person and one in the third. The first follows a woman's hopeless passion for the baker in her local cake shop, from whom she purchases unseemly numbers of cakes, while never daring to tell her love; the other is a piercingly exact - even at times brutal - examination of a relationship, that explores the grief of losing a baby.

The narration is interspersed with songs, including a wicked version of This is the House that Jack Built. Zoe Barry, dressed identically to Pill in a demure skirt, shirt and stilettos, is Pill's wordless counterpoint: she performs the lush score live, becoming Pill's inner, witnessing self.

It could all be too cute for words, but the show's intelligence and wit - and its slyly obscene subversion of the apparently inhibited femininity it explores - ensures that it never is. Such a show could be in great danger of simply confirming the diminutive of the feminine; instead, its artists gracefully steer it to a surprising affirmation of the female self. Who can bake her own cakes.

Kin, on the other hand, is yang to Cake's yin. This show is an exploration of maleness: in particular, it looks at the fertile, delicate period of prepubesence, when boys are poised between childhood and manhood. In particular, and with a gentleness that is the best kind of tact, it explores the issues faced by Indigenous boys. It's advisedly named: the performers, all aged between 10 and 14, are the nephews and the son of its director, Bangarra Dance Theatre's Stephen Page.


Like Mellis, Peter England has designed this show with great care for the spatial relationships between performers and their audience. Except for a row of seats at the back, the stage is surrounded on two sides by a bench arrangement, which immediately gives it a pleasant informality (a quality heightened by the number of children present on the night I went - I wish that children were seen more often at the theatre).

The show opens with the boys casually gathering together for a jam under a spill of light on the wide Merlyn stage. It's an ingenious opening that unobstrusively harnesses those young, potentially chaotic energies. And, as the familiar Led Zeppelin chords echo across the stage, it is immediately and charmingly recognisable to anyone who has had anything to do with teenage boys.

As you would expect, Kin is exquisitely choreographed, moving between several loosely-connected scenes that enact different aspects of the boys' lives. They muck about in a beaten-up car; they stun themselves into insensibility sniffing petrol; they dance - both rap and traditional dance - for us and for each other.

The show deals with serious issues with a light touch, exploring domestic violence, racism and land rights. In a highlight, the boys perform a rap version of Oodgeroo Noonuccal's (formerly Kath Walker) 1962 poem, Aboriginal Charter of Rights, reminding us that Indigenous activism has a long and distinguished history that is still very much alive.

Perhaps what is most striking about Kin is how these young performers own it: it is very clear that their performances emerge from their individual physicalities and experiences. It's an exemplary example of sensitive collaboration with young people, which expresses their worlds without exploiting them. The show is short - around 35 minutes - but length is no synonym for substance: as it shifted to its final scene, a videoed projection of an initiation into adulthood, I felt I had come a long way.

I hope it is not merely sentimental to say that around halfway through, I found myself in tears. I think what moved me was the freedom of a particular gesture as a boy danced, a piercing moment of joyousness that exquisitely expressed the vulnerability and pride and tumultuous anarchy of boys on the threshold of manhood.

It was one of those moments when theatre justifies itself, when it reveals our connections as well as our differences. In such moments, theatre becomes an intricate dance between audiences and artists, between our social and private selves; a place of fleeting but profound communion. In this sense, the most generously human, both Cake and Kin are profoundly political works.

Picture: Astrid Pill in Cake. Photo: Jeff Busby

Apropos of a discussion of Adam Broinwoski's Know No Cure in the review and comments of Hotel Obsino, Age writer Maher Mughrabi sent me a response to the Theatreworks production that he wrote at the time, and which remains unpublished. As it gives a very interesting slant on a controversial production that I didn't see, and picks up on some of the aspects of the play's language that most interested me, I think it's worth a splash here. Read on for Maher's take:

An appeal to me in this fiendish row – is there? Very well; I hear; I admit, but I have a voice too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced. 1

IN THE car on our way to St Kilda to see this play, my wife and I listened to a news item about a corporation called Dia-B Tech which had “discovered” a treatment for diabetes and obesity. The source was a plant that grows in Tonga and “traditional knowledge”. The use of this plant for medicinal purposes by generations of islanders was acknowledged in Dia-B Tech’s press releases, but they weren’t willing to name it until they could complete the patent process.

An academic suggested that the company owed it to Tonga and its people to share some of the financial benefits from this “discovery”, that there should be a “re-negotiation” with the communities that had provided the knowledge.

Since we’re unlikely to be granted a seat at that meeting, if indeed it ever occurs, Adam Broinowski’s Know No Cure offers a compelling alternative view of such talks. Like most meetings, it is slow to get going, but by the end it has a rhythm, an inner life – and death – all of its own.

The play is a negotiation between two actors, each charged with a multitude of roles. Matt Crosby is by turns the Lonely Planet tourist in search of his own personal Shangri-La, the multinational boss on the make and the colonist mapping out an undiscovered world which he hopes might give his own wanderings meaning. At the same time he is drugged up, liquored up and ruptured, a wide-eyed doomsday merchant but still unable to take that last step into the unknown.

His counterpart, played by Majid Shokor, is the native agent, the local guide, passport control and the exotic temptress (veil or no veil, your choice). He is the one-time inhabitant of a jungle, a swamp or a desert in the land where Crosby’s jet-engined magic carpet touches down. He dreams of being a “lazy, lazy fisherman” and sitting in the river again, until he is rudely reminded by his new employer/customer/governor that he doesn’t even remember how his forefathers fished and anyway, that river has long since become a waste valve for some “vigorous, dynamic” enterprise.

How much of this and other exchanges you actually pick up over the course of an hour and a half will depend largely on your ability to absorb jargon of all kinds – medical and military, economic and advertising. This language is all around us, but Broinowski must be listening to and reading it very carefully, since he writes largely in its cadences and phrases. It is a language that, despite its blandishments and all the unpleasant things it tidies up for our viewing, most people find either offputting or bewildering in such concentrated doses, which is a shame because apart from the odd bum note here and there, which may be as much the pressure of delivery on the actors as the writing, there’s a hell of a lot of meaning squeezed into these lines.

“Where are you from?” the passport officer asks. “Remote,” replies our intrepid adventurer, suggesting at once distance and control. “I am a civil engineer,” he says later, defending himself against the charge of plundering resources. “Your civil is member-exclusive,” the native accuses. “My civil is legitimate,” the engineer parries, before snapping under the close questioning: “I COME WITH NO MALICE!”

To come without malice, however, is not the same as coming in peace, or with love. At various points in the play, Crosby and Shokor’s relationship – their episodes of contact – are those not of explorer and indigene but of lovers, or even husband and wife. Arguments, silences, billing and cooing in German and Arabic, the public and private faces of coupledom, all lead us back to the same point on the map: the terra incognita at the heart of our dealings with every other human being. “You’re holding out on me,” Crosby rails. “You’re holding on to me,” Shokor replies, shaking free.

It is this fabled hold-out that Crosby’s explorer, his businessman, his secret agent needs to penetrate. “Can you take me to the interior?” he asks again and again. “No visa,” Shokor’s insider, all sunglasses and slicked-back hair, assures him at first. “The jungle is air-conditioned, mosquito-free.”

But what will the explorer bring to that place? And what will that mean for his faithful Man Friday? Both men begin to wonder, and to doubt. In the first sequence of the play, we are asked the question from a surgical perspective: how can we be sure that the foreign body will accept or reject a transplant? For me, this segment, with Crosby and Shokor in white coats and hairnets, hung at a rather awkward angle to the rest of the play, though its meaning eventually became clearer.

Transplant procedures are governed by the codes and practicalities of medicine, but the codes that govern sojourns in foreign lands are altogether less predictable, as the Bali Nine or the three Australians held in the United Arab Emirates for their alleged drunken misbehaviour on board an international flight attest. “I pride myself on being universal,” Crosby proclaims. But we do not yet live in a “borderless Babylon”, and there are still boundaries one can cross – and transgress.

For Shokor’s tourist guide, it turns out that the opposite of malice is not love but . . . golf, a sport of the universal jet set, in which the grass is as green in the desert of Dubai as it is in St Andrews or Augusta, Georgia. “Hate is a four-letter word,” the guide insists. “So is golf,” the tourist reminds him.

It takes a lot of water to maintain a golf course in a desert, a lot of air conditioning to keep the superstars of the PGA tour in the comfort to which they’ve become accustomed. It is this cost that begins to erode the native’s certainty, to make him wonder if he can even find the interior anymore, and what will be left of it if he does. He has become a stranger in his own land, a half-man who reminds us of the African fireman on Marlow’s boat in Heart of Darkness as it steams down the Congo:

. . . upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat . . . A few months of training had done for that really fine chap . . . he was hard at work, a thrall to strange witchcraft, full of improving knowledge . . . neither that fireman nor I had any time to peer into our creepy thoughts.2

Broinowski and his actors do plenty of peering, at footage of windswept refugees, rivers of rush-hour traffic, burned and blighted forests and endangered species. Shokor’s native, like Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, begins to wonder if he is not already a “living fossil”, as Crosby dubs him, someone who can never connect with the prayers and daily life of his own father. Broinowski coins the word “endohistory”, which means internal history but also reminds us of the “end of history”, the universal triumph of free-market liberalism predicted by Francis Fukuyama in the 1990s. Has the latter been substituted for the former, or must the former “betray” the latter to survive?

These are questions which today have their pivot not in the scramble for Africa but the war for the Middle East. Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, recently returned to office as the country’s defence minister, once warned his countrymen that they live in “a villa surrounded by a jungle”. But what does it mean to talk about a jungle here? And whose jungle is it, anyway?

Sitting in the theatre, my mind spun back to the time of the millennium, when I was in London to meet a fellow Palestinian. At one Tube station I caught sight of Jerusalem’s golden Dome of the Rock. It was a poster of the Israeli Tourism Ministry. “In the land where the first millennium began . . .” it read, with a silhouette picture of fishermen on the Sea of Galilee, “. . . The dome has already been built.”

For a moment, the cheeky reference to London’s troubled Millennium Dome distracted me from the use of a sacred Muslim site in occupied territory to entice holidaymakers to the Jewish state. Then I felt it, all at once: anger, humiliation, the irretrievable loss of my own past, powerlessness to remove the advert and what it stood for in the present.

The publicity for Broinowski’s play mentions that it was written in “the countdown to September 11”, a countdown few indeed can claim to have heard. Yet I wondered if Broinowski, or anyone in his audience, knew the story of September 11 terrorist Mohammed Atta’s return to Cairo in 1995. Atta had won a German grant to study plans to convert the capital’s old “Islamic city” into a tourist complex:

The government planned to “restore” the area by removing many of the people who lived there . . . repairing the old buildings and bringing in troupes of actors to play the real people they would displace. Bodenstein (a fellow student) described what happened: “We had a very critical discussion with the municipality. They didn’t understand our concerns. They wanted to do their work, dress people in costumes. They thought it was a good idea and couldn’t imagine why we would object.”

It was Atta’s first professional contact with the Egyptian bureaucracy and it distressed him, Bodenstein said. 3

To say that this episode alone might explain what followed is absurd. Yet there is a series of encounters and power relations at work in this story, and that of Dia-B Tech and the Tongan healers, or those tourists taken to specially enclosed African reserves to hunt big game provided for the purpose, that Broinowski clearly has an ear for. Safari itself is a Swahili word that comes from the Arabic word for travel. The two players bring such journeys to life in startling, moving and amusing fashion, giving us a sense of what is at stake and the dangers into which we venture. As Shokor tells Crosby, with a smile fresh from a brochure: “Choose your clubs carefully.”

Maher Mughrabi
July 2007

Notes
1 Marlow floating down the Thames narrates his memories of floating down the Congo in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (Penguin, 1995), p. 63.
2 Heart of Darkness, p. 64.
3 Terry McDermott, “A Perfect Soldier”, Los Angeles Times, January 27, 2002, cited in Gilbert Achcar’s The Clash of Barbarisms: Sept 11 and the Making of the New World Disorder (Monthly Review Press, 2002), p. 55.

They're still dancing the ol' blogger-print tango. This time it's Rónán McDonald, who has written the latest in a series of books that claim that blogging is the end of the West, or something. "Controversial artists have often been brought to a resistant public by prominent critics," he opines on the Guardian's blog page. "Clement Greenberg did it for Jackson Pollock. John Ruskin did it for Turner. But are there now critics of sufficient authority to perform this role?" The Critic, he proclaims morosely, is dead: "The critic-as-instructor, as objective judge and expert, has yielded to the critic who shares personal reactions and subjective enthusiasms." Yeah, like Ruskin was an "objective judge". And I suppose Coleridge would never have been caught being personal or anything. As we say raucously in these here parts, get off the prawns.

This so-called debate is getting a little old. Blogger luminaries like Andrew Haydon or the London Financial Times theatre critic Ian Shuttleworth bravely make the sensible rejoinders. And there's another good take at Counter Critic. Can we stop now and just accept that blogging is a medium like everything else?

So here's why I've been flying along the Australian coastline like a confused fruitbat. From today's Australian, your peripatetic crrritic reports:

The phone rang. A mysterious voice crawled out of the receiver. Somebody, the voice whispered, is peddling productions of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? All over Australia. What’s the deal?

It was a slow week. A slow year. Whatever. So I poured the rubbing alcohol down the sink and pulled out my gumshoes, and ever since I’ve been wearing a groove up and down the eastern coast, tracking down the knowledge on Edward Albee’s classic marital bloodfest.

Company B at Belvoir Street in Sydney lit the flame at the beginning of August, with an auteur production directed by Benedict Andrews. The Melbourne Theatre Company followed panting on its heels, with a season directed by Peter Evans; and finally, the Queensland Theatre Company opens today with another by Michael Gow.

Is it that the zeitgeist is zinging with Albee? Does this 40-year-old play express something urgent about our time? Or is it simply that, following hallowed Australian theatrical tradition, our major companies looked across the pond to New York?

I guess it’s a bit of both; but it’s hard not to incline to the latter theory. Main stage Australian theatre takes most of its cues from the West End and Broadway, and it’s hardly coincidental that Kathleen Turner has been starring in a celebrated Broadway revival since 2005.

And – after a certain amount of hemming and hawing and stroking of chins – it no doubt dawned on various company directors that this play is not only a classic, it is hot. And hit is, after all, a mere vowel away…

I’ve now sat through around ten hours of George, Martha and the gang; and it seems to me that, whatever the reason, all the chin-stroking was to good effect.

Woolf’s international revival is part of a late-career comeback that Albee has been enjoying since the early 1990s. After his early 1960s successes, his career trotted along nicely until everything fizzled in the 1980s, when Albee’s brand of dark, visceral mischief went out of fashion. Then, in 1991, Three Tall Women garnered him his third Pulitzer, and suddenly, like a rather cantankerous prodigal son (he turns 80 next year), Albee was back in the limelight.

Despite the compulsory homilies about relevance, topicality and so on, there’s only one real reason to put any play on. It has to be good. If it’s good, it will always be relevant.

Woolf is a great play. Given the kind of play it is, it has to be. Theatre has changed since the 1960s, but Albee hasn’t swum with the times.

As he told the LA Weekly earlier this year, Albee believes that theatre’s job is solely to interpret a writer’s vision. “The big problem,” he said, “is the assumption that writing a play is a collaborative act. It isn’t. It’s a creative act, and then other people come in... I’m in the lucky position where I just say, ‘Go fuck yourself; if you don’t want to do the play I wrote, do another play’.”

It’s an understandable attitude, when you consider the brutal commercial waters in which contemporary US playwrights are forced to swim: but Albee sometimes gets close to accusing theatre of being a massed conspiracy against the solitary genius of his writing. Luckily, he’s excellent at what he does.

Still, Albee’s mid-century, writer-dominant approach to theatre can give his aesthetic a fusty air. Like Arthur Miller’s plays, and unlike Shakespeare, or even the passionately lyrical plays of his contemporary Tennessee Williams, Albee’s work doesn’t easily bear radical interpretation.

Although Martin Esslin claimed Albee for the Absurdists, from this end of the telescope a play like Woolf looks more at home with, say, Death of a Salesman than with Ionesco. Its naturalistic poetic stamps its diction indelibly with its own time. The question is whether it can be reworked for the 21st century, or whether it must remain in its own, an unsettling mirror flashing out of our past.

Albee himself believes the latter. As Miller was in his lifetime, Albee is notoriously protective of his work, refusing interpretations of Woolf that compromise its 1960s setting. Benedict Andrews’ production for Belvoir Street came within a whisker of being cancelled when Albee saw the design, and was only saved by some very fast talking.

Andrews’ was by the far the most adventurous of the three productions, an aggressive attempt to drag it into the present day. It featured a gorgeously chic set, all mirrors and glass and ice, and stylised performances which at their most powerful moments revealed an unexpectedly operatic extremity in the writing. What Andrews exposed was the play’s profound theatricality.

Still, I had reservations. Despite a stunning performance of cumulatively powerful understatement from Marton Csokas as George, it suffered from uneven casting, making it clear that this play is crucially a quartet. The cool design was matched by coolly alienating direction, a slow drawing of viscera which made for a sluggish first act.

As the set disintegrated, like the respectable façades of Albee’s characters, into a smeared, tear-stained mess, Andrews exploited its reflective surfaces to create some unforgettably beautiful stage images. However, for all its style and unarguably potent moments, sometimes this production seemed histrionic rather than profound.

Albee’s dramaturgical craft is a great strength of Woolf. Such is its structural and verbal solidity, a conservative production featuring fine actors such as is offered by Michael Gow in Queensland, with Andrew McFarlane and Andrea Moor in the main roles, will always produce the goods.

Gow stages it on a minimalist set that exposes the machinery of the theatre, with naturalistic details sketched in on a steeply raked stage. The effect is interestingly pictorial, with the skewed perspectives reflecting the distorted relationships in the play.

In Scott Johnson, Gow’s production probably has the strongest Nick, who is the weakest role in the other shows. As the clean-cut biology professor who proves himself as hypocritically venal as George claims he is, Johnson is the only actor with the requisite air of veiled physical aggression.

What Gow’s production lacks, and the other two possess, is directorial flair. Certain scenes – Honey’s interpretative dance, for instance, or crucial moments between Martha and George – seem comparatively truncated, even perfunctory. It’s a production that dutifully serves the play, without quite hitting you between the eyes.

In the end, the George and Martha who stick with me are Garry McDonald and Wendy Hughes in Peter Evans’ MTC production. In Alison Bell, the MTC also featured the best performance in the role of Honey, despite some heavy competition from Robin McLeavy in Sydney.

In both productions, Honey’s drunken dance was a comic highlight, with McLeavy driving her interpretation to a perverse performance of sexualised violence. But Bell’s scream of anguish when George pitilessly skewered her in his cruel game of “Get The Guests” hit the direct nerve of genuine distress.

Such moments make me suspect that, despite its apparent conservatism – a comically heightened ‘60s design and American accents – Evans’ production might be the most slyly daring of all three.

McDonald is an unexpected George, but in his viciously tender disillusion, he gives the most raw portrayal. With Wendy Hughes as a pyrotechnically drunk and vulnerable Martha, the stink of mortality was palpable. They made the least glamorous pairing, and were also, from the opening lines, the most brutally funny.

This was the production that, as George says in the play, splintered through the bone to the marrow. It was painful from the very beginning, and by the end it laid bare the aching hollow inside the social façade.

It was the only production that wholly attained the devastation of the play’s final moment, when George and Martha clasp each other desperately against their loneliness, turning to face an empty and uncertain dawn.

And at the end of my quest, I think I’ve found the answer to the mystery of our affair with Albee. It’s as simple – and as complex – as love and pain.

You can’t have one without the other. That’s Albee’s unpalatable and liberating truth. And as long as human beings are around in all their gloriously contradictory messiness, that truth is always going to strike us where it hurts.

TN's review of the MTC production

I just couldn't manage the Fringe. Here's why, with a potted summary of my week so far.

Thursday and Friday: two openings, with an increasingly heavy head cold. Saturday: my nose in full flood, I cancel my plans to see Red Stitch's production of Jack Goes Boating. Early Sunday evening: a quick visit to Emergency with severe breathing difficulties (yeah, I know, I gotta stop smoking). Monday: armed with sufficient steroids to ensure several lifetime bans from the Tour de France, I fly to Brisbane to see a preview of Michael Gow's QTC production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Tuesday: I fly back to Melbourne, slightly less bug-eyed than when I left, thanks to said wonder drugs. Wednesday: recovery. Sort of.

So I'm planning to write up last week's openings tomorrow - before I fly to Adelaide on Friday, to see another play. I'm not complaining, I swear. It's all brilliant. But I really see the point of those performance-enhancing drugs. Just don't tell Dick Pound...