One would think that, after more than a month of thespian festivities, Melbourne theatre should have collapsed, gorged with its own dizzy art, and decided instead to enjoy the burgeoning spring in a sensible and above all relaxed manner. But lo! The laurels of Dionysus jiggeth still! All the shows that have been queuing patiently as the Fringe and Melbourne Festival hogged the spotlight are now shyly stepping forth and wiggling their wings seductively, crowding into the next few weeks before Melbourne shuts down for summer. Frankly, they're making my diary a clogged and clotted mess.

Which means that I can't attend an event I'd very much like to see, though you might be able to make it. The Wheeler Centre has organised a major reading at the Merlyn Theatre, The Poet's Voice: Lovers in Trouble. A celebration of the poems of Dorothy Porter, the much-loved poet who died almost exactly two years ago at an unjustly early age, it coincides with the release of Porter's Love Poems. Novelist Andrea Goldsmith, Opera Victoria's AD Richard Gill and actor David Trendennick are among those who will celebrate Porter's passionate art, alongside readings of other works in this rich tradition. Details and bookings on the Wheeler Centre website.

Meanwhile, I have a couple of reviews to finish and upload before the onslaught begins. Watch this space.

* There's no shortage of new writing in November. In fact, Melbourne is so lousy with readings of new plays that there is absolutely no excuse not to encounter at least one. Some are, however, happening in the teeth of bureaucratic resistance. Last week the fledgling writers theatre, MKA Richmond, was bizarrely thrown out of its new home in Richmond after only two days of operation. According to John Bailey, the council's action followed complaints from a couple of residents about "increased foot traffic" in the area. This must be some sort of record of bureaucratic efficiency: if only local councils moved as quickly on broken swings or pavements...

John has the full press release on Capital Idea, so I won't reproduce it; suffice to say that the company is undaunted, if justifiably outraged, and will continue its planned program of readings at a different venue at the QV complex in the CBD. Their ambitious Open Season of 25 Playwrights from around the world will continue right through November into December. The program looks well worth checking out, and includes work from Van Badham, Ben Ellis, Declan Greene and Chris Summers among many others. Details on the MKA Richmond site.

* Meanwhile, the second round of the MTC's Cybec Readings will be held later this month. The readings, curated by Aidan Fennessy, are the result of six months' artistic development, during which three playwrights were matched with three directors to write a new script. Michele Lee's Roundabout, directed by Sarah McCusker, will be read on November 18; David Mence's The Gully, directed by Anne-Louise Sarks, on November 19; and Natasha Jacobs's If I Can Dream, directed by Petra Kalive, on November 20.) All at 7pm in the Lawler Studio, MTC Theatre. More details on the MTC website.

* Artists should also check out the recently announced Climate Commissions, announced recently at the Malthouse. They consist of three major commissions for artistic projects that seek to grapple with the implications of transition to a carbon-free future, and range from the big (a $30,000 European/Australian collaboration between scientists and artists) to the small (commissions for works to take place in a person's home). Details on the Tipping Point website.

For the first time I can remember, Daniel Keene has two productions on at once in his home town. One, the comedy Life Without Me, opened last month at the Melbourne Theatre Company to enthusiastic reviews and sell-out audiences as part of the Melbourne Festival. The other, the delicate generational drama The Nightwatchman, opens later this month at Theatre Works in St Kilda as an independent production.

Since he lives in the same house as I do, I sneakily exploited our proximity to ask him some questions.

And, eventually, he answered them.

AC: To Elizabethans, says the critic Jan Kott, the world was the stage and the stage was the world. What world is your stage? What does it become in the hands of others?

DK: The stage is a frame. I like the frame to be simple and unornamented.

To put it a different way: the stage is a metaphor. It doesn’t need any other metaphors added to it.

The theatre is a pragmatic art. When I write a play, the action of the play has to happen somewhere. In a room? On a street corner? Both? I make fundamental delineations.


When I imagine a play, I imagine a bare stage, a source of light, an actor. Depending on the content of the play, I might call what I imagine ‘the lobby of a hotel’ or ‘the kitchen of a suburban house’ or ‘a building site’. In other words, I locate my actor standing lit on a bare stage in the world outside of the theatre. I am suggesting a simple recognition, nothing more or less. Once that recognition has occurred, we can all get on with the play. In other words, we can ask ‘what will happen?’

I write plays for the hands of others; the hands that make them and the hands that applaud (or don't applaud) them. A play is a casting off.

When we speak of poetry in the theatre, what do we mean? You read a lot of poetry, and sometimes write it yourself. What is the difference between a poem and a work for the theatre?

In a very, very basic way, a poem and a work for the theatre share a need for rhythm: the striking arrival of the next line, the feeling of inevitability when the line ends (an inevitability that is created by the line itself).

Perhaps it’s simply that I think every line in a play deserves the same attention as every line in a poem.

Is writing plays another kind of thinking?

Yes. It’s a very delicate, very crude way of thinking.

Who are the writers who matter most to you?

I keep discovering them. But there is no ‘most’.

What do you seek to make? Do you want anything? Do you simply arrive with empty hands?

I don't seek to make anything in particular. When I begin to write a play I never know what I’m going to make. I sometimes surprise myself and actually write a play. I abandon more plays than I finish. I sometimes have, as Beckett once said, 'the itch to make but nothing to say'. I think it's a kind of pathology. I don't understand it and have avoided trying to.

Empty hands? Yes, always. To want nothing, to know nothing, to bring nothing. And then the making. It’s a kind of magic, as is baking a cake or building a house.

For as long as you have been a playwright, you have worked closely with particular actors. How important is the actor to your imagining of a play?

The art of the theatre is the art of the word made flesh.

I am always aware that I am writing for the voice. I think that perhaps poets might have the same awareness. But where for a poet the voice is their own firstly (familiar), and secondly that of the reader (unknown), the voice(s) I am writing for belongs to a known other: it is not my voice, but it is a voice that I know, that I can hear as I write, the voice of the actor. I can hear what I imagine are the possibilities of that voice. I am not talking about the interpretation of the lines, but their music, their rhythm and cadence, their tone and volume. You could say that the voice is an instrument that I am writing for. The more familiar I am with that instrument, the more freedom I have. I can write lines that I myself could never say, lines whose expression is beyond my capacity even to imagine uttering them.

The voice comes from the actor’s body. When I write for the actor’s voice I am writing for his/her body. Generally, I don’t write many stage directions. I want the language itself to (literally) move the actor, for the voice and the body of the actor to become one energy, one dynamic expression of the language, without the ‘prompting’ of prescriptive directions. In other words, I want the act of speaking the lines that I write to propel the actor’s body, I want the act of speaking to bring the actor’s body to life.

Is the actor, alone and vulnerable on a stage, caught in the light before the eyes of an audience, the secret of the humanity of your theatre?

There is no secret. The actor, alone and vulnerable on a stage, caught in the light before the eyes of an audience is the beginning and the end of the theatre that I want to make.

In its exploration of the possibilities of absurdist comedy, Life Without Me strikes me as a play with a close relationship to Half and Half (2002), a two hander which you also wrote specifically for specific actors, in this case Robert Menzies and Dan Spielman. Comedy has always been an important part of the dramas you write, as far back as Silent Partner (1991). How important is it to laugh?

People often forget that in almost everything I have written there are moments of comedy (I call them ‘the funny bits’). Perhaps they forget because this comedy rarely lasts until the end of the play. In my plays laughter is usually the prologue to its opposite. Comedy makes the audience more open to what is occurring on stage (makes them more vulnerable to it). I try to create that openness by offering the possibility of laughter. Comedy is an invitation that I extend.

How important is it to grieve?

To grieve is to openly acknowledge our mortality. I think grief should be embraced. The acknowledgment of our mortality may be all that can save the human race from itself.

The theatre can be a place that opens a space for grieving. To put it another way: I take it that a metaphor can be understood as a displacement of reality that allows that reality to be more clearly perceived. The theatre is a place where metaphors are literally made in front of our eyes, where they exist only at a particular time and in a particular place. When the performance is over, nothing remains except our memory of it. It is as if the performance shares the mortality of its audience. This fact is in itself a metaphor (which may in fact lead us back to ‘all the world’s a stage’). If to grieve is to acknowledge our mortality, then the theatre can be the place where that acknowledgment is made manifest, where we can, literally, experience that acknowledgment as an emotional, intellectual and physical event in time and space.

That’s at least the beginning of an answer to your question.

Picture: Robert Menzies and Kerry Walker in Life Without Me. Photo: Jeff Busby

Life Without Me, directed by Peter Evans, is playing at the Sumner Theatre, MTC Theatre, until November 21. The Nightwatchman, directed by Matt Scholten, opens at Theatre Works, St Kilda, on November 24 and runs until December 12. Details and bookings online here.

This weekend, I spent two days at the Malthouse Theatre talking about the climate crisis. It was part of an event called Tipping Point Australia, a series of three forums in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. As it says on the website, the forums are "for invited international and Australian artists, scientists and others to explore ways in which we can adapt to and mitigate functionally, culturally and socially the effects of climate change.” Melbourne was the first.

The nexus between artistic practice and social or political commitment represents a vexed and often anguished question. I've been wrestling with the questions around artistic practice and social conscience for years, always discovering different means of failure. In a lecture for the International Federation for the Teaching of English in 2003, I speculated on the politics of representation, and the refusal of commodification versus the entrapments of ideological utilitarianism; at other times, I've wondered how an expression of hope might be about clear-sightedness rather than self-delusion or denial. Again and again, I've concluded that art itself is an act, an awakening of larger and enabling possibilities that in turn generate forms of agency.

This is not a particularly comforting conclusion, since it suggests that art achieves nothing in itself. In the face of climate change, is art anything more than more hot air, more toxic emissions? Given the systemic nature of the environmental crisis, its mind-numbing scale and complexity, what can be done? Is it actually possible to combat the processes now in motion - the grinding self-perpetuating machine of corporate global capitalism - in order to make any difference to those disastrously multiplying predictors?

I went to Tipping Point with two major questions. One is purely personal: it haunts my practice, and recently has silenced my poetry. Is the only act that honestly remains for art, given the scale of the catastrophe we face, a lament? What use is that? I’ve been writing elegies for the natural world since I was ten years old: and if that is all I can do, then it’s difficult to see the point. The second is: given that it’s quite clear that we can’t trust even a democratic system to deliver a government that will resist the corporate drive towards destruction, are there other ways of taking action, of changing social habits and ideas and fears before the planet is irrevocably wrecked, to the point where it no longer supports mammals like us?

They are complex questions, and I came away with the beginnings of complex responses. I talked to systems designers who said effecting change is all about being able to see the levers. I talked to a man who, using the best scientific advice he could access, took two years to design a zero-emissions blueprint for Australian industry, and I talked about reclaiming public language. I heard about Julia's Bicycle, the British collective of scientists and artists who are working tirelessly - and are succeeding - in reducing the footprints of the arts industry: replacing plastic CD covers, for instance, with cardboard, which reduces emissions by a staggering 97 per cent, or mapping the environmental impacts of theatre and concerts in order to find out how to reduce them. I heard Tim Jarvis speak about the work he is doing to create change in corporate and government practices. I heard a lot about how adapting our behaviour to a waste-free, carbon-free future is an opportunity, and how that is much more than a slogan.

There's no way I can summarise every aspect of this weekend: it was fascinating, inspiring, absorbing, exciting and, most of all, encouraging. Perhaps typically, none of the bad news – the scientific evidence of irreversible and disastrous crisis, or the legislative or corporate failures and blindnesses – came as a surprise. What was surprising was the sense of hopefulness I encountered. It’s not uninformed hopefulness, it’s not blind optimism. There is no single solution to an environmental catastrophe like the one now unfolding before us: but that doesn’t mean that we can do nothing, or that we can make no difference.

When I came home, I found myself thinking about Vaclav Havel’s book Living In Truth, written when there was still a Soviet Union. In an essay called Politics and Conscience, he speaks about a childhood memory of seeing smokestacks pouring their filth into the sky on his way to school, and of how this image, even without any adult understanding, seemed to him expressive of a terrible wrongness.

"The chimney 'soiling the heavens' is not just a technologically corrigible flaw of design, or a tax paid for a better consumerist tomorrow, but a symbol of a civilisation that has renounced the absolute, which ignores the natural world and disdains its imperatives. So, too, the totalitarian systems [of the Soviet Union] warn of something far more serious than Western rationalism is willing to admit. They are, most of all, a convex mirror of the evitable consequences of rationalism, a grotesquely magnified image of its own deep tendencies....

"These regimes are the avant garde of a global crisis of this civilisation.... They are one of the possible futurological studies of the Western world, not in the sense that one day they will attack and conquer it, but in a far deeper sense - that they illustrate graphically to what the 'eschatology of the impersonal', as Bělohradský calls it, can lead. It is the total rule of a bloated, anonymously bureaucratic power, a power grounded in an omnipresent ideological fiction which can rationalise anything without ever having to brush against the truth."

“The truth”, says Havel, meaning a human truth. “We must not be ashamed that we are capable of love, friendship, solidarity, sympathy and tolerance, ” he says later. “Just the opposite: we must set these fundamental dimensions of our humanity free from their ‘private’ exile and accept them as the only genuine starting point of meaningful human community.”

There is always hope. If sometimes we feel that hope is delusory, it is not simply because the graphs tracking "business as usual" all point to doom. It is because hope implies agency, and agency is what is refused in so many aspects of contemporary life, and is lost in the splintering of our disenfranchised communities. Fear and grief can be paralysing: we shovel our anxiety into the back of our minds, so we don’t have to look at them. It's hardly surprising that our biggest health issue world wide is mental illness.

Which brings me to another thing that surprised me this weekend: the grief I feel for the natural world. When I came home, I remembered the first time I felt it: on a visit to England in the early '70s, when I was ten years old. There were some woods which, when we had lived nearby as even smaller children, we had often visited. We picked primroses in the spring or gathered pine-cones and chestnut cases in winter, to be painted silver and gold for our Christmas tree. But when we went back to see them, the woods were being chopped down. I remember watching the men in the tractors looping chains about the corpses of those beautiful trees, and dragging them away through the mud, and I remember that the sight was like a knife in my heart.

At around that time, I read a poem which was in a book that was on a shelf in the room where I was staying in my grandmother's house. It's irrevocably linked to that experience of loss, of grievously wrecked beauty. I never forgot its quick, painful music, although it must have been a decade before I read it again and gave it a name - Gerard Manley Hopkins's Binsey Poplars.

I guess that was a formative experience. Although environmental destruction has formed the dominant imagery in my poems for two decades now, although I am perfectly aware of how deeply worried I am by what we are doing to the planet, destroying entire eco-systems, species, environments, and with them entire constellations of cultural knowledge and language, I had pushed that grief to the back of my mind. My question about lament didn’t take into account that there is, in fact, little space for lamenting in our world.

Perhaps seeing that grief reflected in the eyes of others permitted me to know it as more than a background shadow to everything I do. And that is a liberating thing: background shadow manifests as paralysing depression, the helplessness we all feel as citizens. I remembered that there is a place for lament: and I also remembered that it is not the only thing that art can do. It is sometimes important to be reminded of things you already know. I am comforted by those thoughts, even as I'm daunted by what needs to be done and by the uncertainty that attends it.

My last book, Theatre, contains a poem called Beasts, which was first published in Pretext, the literary magazine that comes out of the University of East Anglia, in about 2005. For Tipping Point, we were asked to bring an object along that expressed our feeling about climate crisis, and I brought that poem. It is, of course, a lament, but I principally brought it with me because it says my sense of individual helplessness in the face of the systemic nature of the crisis. It's a poem which emerges from that "eschatology of the impersonal" which, as Havel presciently pointed out in the 1980s, is as powerfully expressed in the rationalism of western corporate economies as it was in Soviet ideology. It is the reality I experience and resist in that expression: but I want to write towards other possibilities, other actions.

I can begin to see a map. Many maps, made by many people, which imagine other kinds of futures than the destruction we're creating. In order to change anything, you have to be able to imagine a future first.

Beasts

The beasts are retreating. They are sliding
into the dusk, into the supple light of vanishing trees,
into the glue of dreams. All their strangeness
wavers behind wire, between the four sides of a screen,
odourless and deathless. The beasts stare out of
bleached pages, enclosed at last, and the zoos
are silent, except when parrots and keepers
conduct their weird orchestrations.
Panic flicks in those slotted eyes but the sadness
is only ours. Police hunt corpses in rubbish dumps,
a pregnant mother and child. Beneath the surface,
submarine cries burst the ears of whales.
Coral is leached to stone by the stripped sunlight
and houses crouch by the shore, awaiting the wave
prophets see in the distance. In forests
that glow at night, there are boars and wolves
whose futures mutate daily. There is much that is unknown
as always and even more that now will never
be understood. The cedar forests of Lebanon
are tinder dry and bears starve on the wet tundra.
In the depths of night there may be a phone call
we dare not answer or a cry in the street
which makes the hair rise on the back of our necks.
They will not come back, something is happening
at the edge of our eyes, behind the reflections,
and billboards shout in the silence, delivering words
that in a more innocent age we thought were ours.

After several thousand words and a couple of days ruminating, what else is there to say about MIAF 2010? There it was. Here we are. We've had, as some commentators have put it, "solid festival fare": when you look at what was offered, there was little low-quality work, but equally, not a lot that set the mind on fire. The stand-outs - and for once, everyone agrees - were Stifter's Dinge, Heiner Goebbel's beautiful and mysterious automaton, and Bill Viola's installations. The Raft (which remains at ACMI until February) is a stunningly powerful work on human fragility, while Tristan's Ascension and Fire Woman, displayed at a little church in Parkville, were visceral imaginings of transcendence, first created in 2005 for Peter Sellars's production of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. I'm so glad I saw them.


I feel like I'm playing catch-up, because I was being a poet in October last year and so missed Brett Sheehy's first festival. I've been looking back through the blog, checking out my reports on previous festivals, and I rather feel my comments on MIAF 2008, Kristy Edmunds' last, bear a revisit:

The Melbourne Festival this year had a surreal edge. As capitalism crashed about our ears amid headlines of financial doom, it had the air of a dance at the edge of the abyss. I kept feeling that we were standing in the etched light of an oncoming storm, with long shadows streaming behind us. A little voice kept saying to me, This won’t happen again.

As we all know, it’s the last of Kristy Edmunds’ festivals, and boy, has she given us a party for the past four years. From 2005, her first festival and still one of the best this city has seen, she’s changed the main stage aspirations of this city. People started going to events with intense curiosity and emerging to have fierce arguments (I still remember the couple having a stand-up fight over asylum seekers after Ariane Mnouchkine’s Le Dernier Caravansérail). They were festivals of passion, excitement, artistic depth and, often, controversy. Her programming attracted some of the most vicious and sustained media attacks I’ve seen on an artistic director - first for being too “elitist” and then – when it was clear people were going – for being too “populist”.

Despite the attacks, she steadily continued to follow her nose, attracting a younger demographic with programming that reached into both popular culture and high art, and which unobstrusively demonstrated the humane and complex politics of art. Most importantly of all, she brought us great work, from Peter Brook to Jérôme Bel, from Romeo Castellucci to Diamanda Galas. This year has been no different: looking over what I’ve seen, the quality has been just as high. Possibly higher: festivals can be cut in an infinity of ways, but I’ve had a brilliant time. As in previous years, there have been some disappointments. But what would a festival be without something to argue about?

I also noted that in 2008, I saw 21 events. Naturally, I focus on dance and theatre, and 2010 was slanted towards visual art and music: but this year, even including the Viola installations as performance, I only saw 15 events. Of those, two thirds clocked in as "good" on the Croggon-meter, one third as excellent and maybe one fifth as mind-blowing. That's hardly a dreadful festival from my point of view, but there's no arguing that the bit that interests stage-dwellers was significantly reduced this year. In a city with such a rich dance culture as Melbourne, it seemed particularly bizarre to have only three dance works - and none of them local - in the program.

It's more a question of ignition. While individual events might have been interesting in themselves, their context lacked the sense of invitation and discovery that has animated the best arts festivals of the past - John Truscott's and Robyn Archer's as well as Edmunds. The slogan for MIAF 2006 was "Be Curious": for 2010, it might have been "Consume". We were offered art to consume, and we consumed it. Some of it was good, even very good; but there was little in the context around it that mitigated the problem of its merely becoming a commodity. And, as always when all one has done is consume, the result is that one feels a little ill. Hence the relief in week three, the most substantial of the program, when there began to be some sense of engagement, some sense of argument, some sense of communal commitment. This, the least measurable aspect of a festival, is actually the most crucial: a successful festival is about much more than selling tickets. Even if selling tickets is a side effect of this non-measurable feeling of cultural engagement.

There's no denying that any festival is, in essence, a huge marketing exercise, and that, given our institutional structures, we're limited to more or less interesting engagements with a central necessity of commodification. That's contemporary arts for you, a dilemma which is leading to all sorts of interesting subversions in unexpected places, including a rebirth of art as political radicalism. Here in Australia, sadly, we're nowhere near such a rebirth, and our cultural commentaries for the most part are teeth-achingly conservative. But all the same, over tables in every sort of room and in every sort of bar and cafe, Melbourne offers a possible site of resistance to the emptiness of consumption. It's the invitation that exceeds the commodifiable, this intangible sense of common weal.

Under the imaginative creative production of Emily Sexton, this year's record-breaking Melbourne Fringe generated that common weal much more successfully than MIAF. This difference is symbolised in the Malthouse Theatre's offerings for both festivals: the Fringe threw up (quite literally) one of the shows of the year, Hayloft's coruscating Thyestes, while for the Melbourne Festival, we had the mildly charming Intimacy. In a real sense, and perhaps rightly, the Fringe is picking up the vitality that MIAF created in this city through the noughties: a sense of cultural transformation at work.

Picture: Tristan's Ascension, Bill Viola.

So, that was MIAF 2010, signing off last night with a huge star-studded Black Armband extravaganza in the Myer Music Bowl. The weather gods of Melbourne decree that anyone with the hubris to stage a large outdoor event in October will be punished, and so it came to pass that Seven Songs To Leave Behind hurtled in on the icy wings of a wind from the bleak southern seas of Bass Strait. But it was some concert, well worth the brass monkey stuff.

There were plenty of highlights. The strongest acts of the evening for me were the chamber pieces, rather than the big symphonic numbers: Gurrumul Yunipingu's Bapa (in fact, all of his songs: I have absolutely no defence against that pure, soaring voice) a case in point. Ricki Lee Jones gave maybe the best set of the night: clad in an Orchestra Victoria beanie, she belted out a brilliant version of Gansta Paradise (reminiscent, as my partner commented, of Renee Geyer in Sleeping Beauty bringing out the wicked in Eminem's Go To Sleep) and a heartbreaking A Place for You, in duet with a recording of the voice of Archie Roach, who is presently recovering in hospital from a stroke. Sinead O'Connor's version of Shitlist and her skin-tingling renditions of Psalm 33 and Bob Dylan's Serve Somebody were frankly fantastic.

The women didn't have it all their way: John Cale opened his selection with a machine version of Heartbreak Hotel, and followed up with songs about Magritte and Picasso, and a viciously angry anthem about the war in Afghanistan, proving this is a man who has stayed awake. John Cale must be the coolest human being on the planet. When he came on stage - dark grey pants and jacket, white collar turned up so its points stroked his sideburns, white, stylishly ruffled hair, white ziff - he looked like some kind of overlord from a steampunk universe. I mean, pink highlights? No one his age should be able to get away with it.


Yes, far from a shabby end to what has been an interesting few weeks. And now to the hot topic of the day: Hotel Pro Forma's opera on evolution, Tomorrow, In A Year, which I saw last Thursday. I'm not sure that an opera has been greeted with such hostility from the arterati since Madama Butterfly was blown off stage by the Italian equivalents of raspberries and vuvuzelas. Melbourne audiences don't riot in the aisles (although, as on the night I went, they might boo). These days, they tweet their outrage. I'm intrigued by the anger it's engendered: the opera was described as an "atrocity", "painful, pretentious, passionless", a "disgrace". And I keep hearing again and again how it demonstrates a waste of taxpayer's money. Robin Usher summed up most of the objections doing the rounds in yesterday's Age: "Tomorrow, In a Year was so solemn it was boring - electronic music, inane libretto, old-fashioned set and dreary choreography".

Now, as you all know, I'm all for a bit of critical cut and thrust: and every festival needs an act like this, which brings everything to life by galvanising debate. Me, I wasn't one of the revilers: I found myself engrossed from the beginning of Tomorrow, In A Year. I have had some fascinating conversations with some very smart theatre watchers and makers who loathed it, and I can see their points. Still, without feeling it was the best thing I've seen, I liked it: I found it absorbing, strange, and alienatingly beautiful. Here I'll briefly attempt to dig back through the commentary to what I actually experienced while I was watching it.

As a side note, I don't know how much my openness to this opera might have to do with the fact that, for the past three weeks or so, I've spent my few moments of spare time obsessively watching BBC natural history documentaries narrated by David Attenborough. (I am currently halfway through Planet Earth.) As soon as I realised, in the opening scene, that I was watching an opera that spoke about fossil deposits in river beds and the origins of limestone cliffs, I was hooked.

The real jewel is The Knife's sumptuous electropop score. It's a gloriously complex mix of many different elements: pop and operatic voices, eight-bit sound and electronic and acoustic instruments, looped acoustic beats, field recordings, apparently structured from Richard Dawkins's gene trees. And I was delighted to see a new opera libretto using techniques of contemporary innovative poetry - notably, collage and found texts - something much rarer than it ought to be. The text draws intelligently from the writings of Charles Darwin, exploiting complex, anti-lyrical rhythms in rich antithetical repetitions. The final two songs, apparently from Darwin's writings on his dead daughter, veered perilously close to a disappointing sentimentality, but retrieved just enough obliqueness to avoid simplifying everything in a fake sense of uplift.


I'm hard to put to make much sense of the staging, but found it bizarrely hypnotic in its alienations, which I took to be an analogue of contemporary human alienation from the natural world. The dancing - a pretty ballerina en pointe, a man who seemed to be a piece of seaweed, another bald man dressed in a puffy white hoodie suit who did almost nothing for most of the show, until at the end he danced wildly in the Nightclub At The End Of The Universe - gave no sense of uplift or airiness, but all the same generated a weirdly static formal beauty. Everything was glued to the ground, bound by gravity.

The design featured lots of toxic lime-green, a colour that seldom occurs in nature: laser lights or projected text that scribbled phrases of Darwin's on the screens, or drew simple outlines over complex representations of nature - naturalist's drawings of different pigeon species, or a photograph of a cliff. When the lime-green wall that dominated the early part of the show was pushed back, it revealed something that looked like a hydroponic farm, artificial cultivations that begin to generate an alternative nature, just as we do in our cities. Cities as terrariums? Maybe not so odd. I found it all strangely compelling, like trying to read a text that's not only in a foreign language, but in an unknown script, and which is somehow also opaquely comprehensible.

Frankly, sometimes it's quite pleasurable to be a little mystified. Even if I didn't understand precisely what the directors were attempting, and sometimes felt that the various artists involved might be on different planets (what was with the surfboard, really?), I never at any point felt I was being gipped. I was, rather, fascinated by the centrifugal force driving all these different elements in differing directions on stage. It felt liberating to see theatre that was at once so crazily ambitious and unabashedly oblique, and which built its idiosyncratic realities on such tenuous connections. Bad? Good? They seemed irrelevant judgments. I don't think it's the future of opera, but I did think it was worth the trip. Which is why I'm a bit puzzled by the outrage. Isn't this kind of experience what festivals are for?


An Anthology of Optimism, Pieter de Buysser and Jacob Wren's theatrical lecture on the possibilities of what they call "critical optimism", made an interesting counterpoint the following night. This is totally disarming anti-theatre, which, if it were not so intelligent, might be too cute for words. The theatrical conceit is that one performer (Belgian writer, philosopher and theatre maker De Buysser) is an optimist, while the other (Canadian writer and performer Wren) is a pessimist. This crude polarity not precisely true, as they hasten to explain: but it's enough to drive the theatrical dialectic of the show.

The anthology of the title is a collection of things - writings, objects, quotations, photographs, paintings - donated by a variety of people who were contacted by the pair for this project. A selection of businessmen, artists, politicians, scientists and so on from around the world were asked to submit something that for them represented "critical optimism": optimism, that is, that is not blind, that pays attention to the facts (the facts being that "the world is going badly"), that is about "focusing on the next small experimental step instead of the big utopian dream", that is resistant. Embedded in this question is, what happened to the progressives? Is it still possible to hope that the world might be a little better?

Pessimism is, as De Buyssers claims, systemic and embedded in capitalistic ideology as a mode of disempowerment. All the same, so systemic are the challenges we face in making any difference to this world that is "going badly", that often pessimism seems like the only rational response to our situation. Yet doing nothing out of despair only serves to confirm our pessimism and so shore up the status quo. What to do?

Well, we could do worse than exploit De Buyssers' machine for optimism, the crucial mechanism in which is a "leap of faith". He's right, too. This blog is precisely an act of critical optimism, in the strictest definitions set out by the two in the course of their show: an act of resistance, an act of realism, a small step rather than hubristic idealism (well, look where that utopianism took us in the 20th century). An act of belief that is not, all the same, naive and blind. An act of belief that is, as Buysser says, a belief in...nothing: no god, no overarching ideology. Just a belief in the act itself. You have to begin somewhere.

Pictures: top and middle, Tomorrow, In A Year. Photos: Photo: Claudi Thyrrestrup. Bottom: An Anthology of Optimism. Photo: Phile Deprez

Seven Songs To Leave Behind, directed by Steven Richardson. Musical direction by Eugene Ball, Iain Grandage, Orchestra Victoria conducted by Benjamin Northey, sound Design by John O'Donnell, lighting Designer by Phil Lethlean, designed by Adam Gardnir. With Sinead O’Connor, John Cale, Meshell Ndegeocello, Rickie Lee Jones, Gurrumul Yunupingu, The Black Arm Band: Leah Flanagan, Shellie Morris, Dan Sultan and Ursula Yovich. Myer Music Bowl, October 23.

Tomorrow, In A Year, music by The Knife, directed by Ralf Richardt Strobech, Kirsten Dehlholm. Musical collaborators Mt Sims, Planningtorock, text by The Knife, Mt Sims, Charles Darwin. Concept and set design by Ralf Richardt Strobech, lighting design by Jesper Kongshaug, sound design by Anders Jorgensen, choreographic consultant Hiroaki Umeda, costumes by Maja Ravn. Performed by: mezzo-soprano Kristina Wahlin, singer/actor Larke Winther, singer Jonathan Johansson, dancers Lisbeth Sonne Andersen, Agnete Beierholm, Alexandre Bourdat, Bo Madvig, Jacob Stage, Jan Strobech. Hotel Pro Forma, State Theatre.

An Anthology of Optimism, by Pieter De Buysser and Jacob Wren. Campo. Fairfax Studio.

Finally, in its last week, the Melbourne Festival has warmed up. Quite literally - there's no doubt that a couple of balmy nights help light up the body electric. But more importantly - at least for an arts festival - there has been a sense of event. This week has been full of shows that made you want to go out and talk afterwards. The major place is to be is Seventh Heaven, the pink fluoro tent outside the tarted-up Curve Bar at the Arts Centre. It's like an incoherent vision of an '80s gay nightclub, complete with Ikea fittings and a mystifying neon installation, apparently a kind of magic portal, that seems to be pointing to the art gallery. Nothing looks more disconsolate than its angel kitsch abandoned in the rain. But even Seventh Heaven was jumping this week.


Even so, there have been complaints. The constituency that comments on TN has been complaining about a a feeling of corporate blandness in some of the work, and more crucially, about a lack of a sense of community. A festival is, after all, much more than a series of events: it also generates what binds these events together, the glue that we call culture. Meanwhile, Robin Usher, a reliable litmus of the conservative commentariat, is complaining in today's Age about the lack of a glittery festival event, like Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre, the centrepiece of this year's Adelaide Festival (my review of that opera here).

I think Usher's comments are a tad mean-minded - there's been no lack of spectacle, after all - although he might have a point about Sheehy's programming attempting to please everyone (though what's wrong with that, in a public festival?) And seriously, Usher can't complain about the lack of work that seeks to transform an artform on the one hand, while on the other condemning Tomorrow, In A Year, which certainly has change on its agenda, and provided the kind of controversy a festival needs. And, contrary to Usher's report, I've heard a bit of "wow": notably around Stifter's Dinge, which has been unanimously praised by those fortunate enough to see it, and Bill Viola's video installations.

Certainly, this is the first time I've seen Usher calling for work that "breaks new ground" or is "designed to change people's ideas about what an art form can achieve" - as I remember, during Kristy Edmunds' residency he was implacably opposed to anything that even smelled of formal experiment. But, after years of reading Usher's articles, I think he must be anchored to his principles - when the weather shifts, he hauls up his anchor and moves elsewhere.

More on all this when I wrap up next week, but thank god people are arguing. Now to my reports, which will be trickling out over the next few days, as I catch up. You'll have to excuse my slowness; I'm a little tired, but plan to discuss everything I saw, if not always at length.

A brief summary of my week: on Wednesday and Thursday I saw, respectively, Ivo van Hove's Opening Night and Hotel Pro Forma's Tomorrow, In A Year, both of which are consummate festival shows, and both of which have produced a lot of comment, disagreement and, in the case of Hotel Pro Forma, outraged tweeting. The anger Hotel Pro Forma has engendered is frankly amazing - I confess I don't quite understand it. Me, I was engrossed...but more of this tomorrow.

I took time out on Thursday afternoon to see one of the VCA grad shows, Daniel Schlusser's The Hollow, a riff on Agatha Christie and Cluedo which I recommend to anyone looking for some genuine experimentation. And last night, I dropped into An Anthology of Optimism, which was the sorbet on the week's various fare. Today I'm heading to Epi-Thet, a sound installation at North Melbourne, before I see the closing night extravaganza, Seven Songs to Leave Behind. But now to Wednesday night's show.

I suspect I might have enjoyed Ivo van Hove’s intriguing production of Opening Night a lot more if I hadn’t seen John Cassavetes's film. Van Hove claims not to have seen the film, working, as with a traditional play, directly from the text. This begs a few questions about the genesis of the show, which for me were not answered by the production. Although I saw the film quite recently, my memory of the script is far from photographic: all the same, it's clear that van Hove has by no means stuck to the original script. He has changed major characters and scenes, sometimes in the interest of theatricality, sometimes for reasons that are less easy to divine.

The film itself – a brilliant backstage study of the process of creation – is often given surprisingly short shrift in the Cassavetes canon, although it shows Gena Rowlands, one of the great divas of the cinema, in one of her great roles. Rowlands's performance was what I couldn't forget, no matter how hard I tried - and believe me, I did try - as I watched the play: it is the heart of the film, and the expression of its meaning. Take away her pain and complexity, and you're effectively left with an avant garde version of an Alan Ayckbourn backstage comedy.

Opening Night follows the leading actress Myrtle (Gena Rowlands in the film, the excellent Elsie van Brauw in the play) during the process of producing a play - in the film it's during an out-of-town tryout before a Broadway opening; in the play, they're rehearsing. Myrtle, a woman “of a certain age”, is struggling to animate a role about a woman attempting to come to terms with getting older. She can't make the writing live (one suspects that it is because this naturalistic play about an alcoholic, aging woman with a trail of ex-lovers and husbands behind her is actually not that interesting). But she is also afraid that if she succeeds, she will be typecast as an older woman.

One night after a performance, a young fan, the unstable 17 year-old Nancy, is killed in a car accident. Myrtle begins to be haunted by Nancy’s presence, permitting Cassavetes to create an an increasingly spooky and beautifully ambiguous portrayal of artistic possession. As Myrtle says, after one genuinely frightening scene in which Nancy beats her up in her apartment, she has herself summoned Nancy, because this is what actresses do. In an excruciating scene, she visits Nancy's family to offer her condolences, a childless, glamorous woman hovering over the mute pain of Nancy's family.

As Myrtle flirts with the edges of insanity, it becomes clear that Nancy represents not only her younger self, but the daughter she never had in her single-minded pursuit of her career. Most importantly, she is the anarchic self, the unknown Other, that all artists summon in the act of creation.

Gena Rowlands’s compelling and fascinatingly complex performance of Myrtle’s destructive act of creation sails so close to the wind it’s traumatic to watch. Elsie De Brauw, who plays Myrtle in this production, is clearly an accomplished actress, but she doesn’t get close to Rowlands’s fragile, razor-sharp edges. And while it quickly becomes evident that van Hove’s adaptation isn’t about exploring the traumatic heart of Cassavetes’s film, it's hard to see what it offers in its place. He gives us a surprisingly crude, pop-psychology adaptation of the story. Without having read the text, I can't help wondering if it's because Cassavetes is a better film-maker than scriptwriter.

I was especially troubled by the interpretation of the women. Van Hove has made the playwright Sarah (Chris Nietvelt) a figure of fun, a fussy middle-aged woman in too-high-heels, and significantly, the same age as as Myrtle (in the film, she is 20 years older). It means that Myrtle's panic becomes mere petulance: ridiculously, she won't even admit her age, in the face of being challenged to do so by a woman who looks younger than she is. In the film, she is denying something more difficult - the old age that is not far ahead in her future, and her inevitable death.

Most concerning is how van Hove reduced the delicate and troubled Nancy into a porn avatar of teen sexuality (what was with the nipple-pinching?) Meanwhile, Myrtle is presented to us as a post-sexual woman: the men keep assuring her that they love her, ad nauseam, but - again, in sharp contrast to the film, where they are genuinely bewitched - they are just attending to the fragile ego of a woman whose sexual attraction has faded, manipulating her and jollying her along for their own purposes. It seemed to me that what in the film is a network of ambiguous and fascinating and, above all, self-sufficient relationships between the various women, is transformed in the play into a series of portrayals of femininity as functions of male desire. A whole layer of subtlety and ambiguity was missing for me.

On the plus side, Van Hove’s adaptation is theatrically spectacular and beautifully performed by a first class ensemble. It gives us some familiar tropes of contemporary post-dramatic meta-theatre: the on-stage cameras with feeds to live action projected (with surtitles) onto screens around the stage, glass doors that transform into mirrors, live video of the foyer, and so on. From the auditorium, we get a side-on look to a huge backstage area, complete with costumes, stage crew, and make-up tables, that bleeds into a stage area. A bank of spectators is actually on stage, performing as the audience.

A lot of the meta-theatrics are, oddly enough, somehow flattened out by staging rather than filming them. Cassavetes masterfully exploits the ambiguity of film, so sometimes we aren't sure whether Myrtle is performing a role in the play or is just behaving weirdly. Somehow, in the act of watching theatre, this ambiguity is almost completely lost. While the naturalism of film can make it possible to forget the artifice of performance entirely, in theatre not forgetting that we are watching performance is at the basis of its poetic, its exhilarating suspension of disbelief.

This makes Myrtle's wicked intrusion of some aspect of her real life into her public performance - as when, for example, she calls one of her fellow actors by his real name on stage - much more interesting in the film than it is on the stage, where it becomes just another layer of performance. Even the mediation of the cameras - supposedly a documentary crew - does little to create the filmic dissonance. You wonder what it might have been like, for instance, if the actors had used their real names and played themselves, instead of fictional characters. But that would have been a different - and maybe more profound - exploration of theatre.

Where this show works brilliantly is in its comic ironies: the final scenes, when a dead-drunk Myrtle acts the final scenes of Sarah's play with her anarchic interpolations finally absorbed into her performance, are exquisitely performed, and very funny. When van Hove approaches the serious questions in Cassavetes’s script, he takes refuge in jokey melodrama. He is clearly no mean theatre-maker; but in this show, his virtuosity has a hollow core.

A version of this review appeared in Friday's Australian.

Photo: Elsie de Brauw and Fred Goessens in Opening Night. Photo: Jan Versweyveld

Opening Night by John Cassavetes, directed by Ivo van Hove. Set and lighting by Jan Versweyveld, costumes by An d'Huys, video design by Marc Meulemans. With Elsie van Brauw, Jacob Derwig, Daan van Dijsseldonk, Lien de Graeve, Hans Kesling, Lien Wildemeersch, Fred Goessens, Eelco Smits, Serve Hermans, Chris Nietvelt and Hadewych Minis. Melbourne International Arts Festival, Playhouse, Victorian Arts Centre, until tonight.

Death cultivates visibility...

The image does not reflect reality, but rather, the spectacular end of all reality.

To see, means to die; to watch, dying.

Wind and sand revel in worsting the eye, making it cry.

Yellowed with age, the image yields only nostalgia: image of a lost image.

The Line of the Horizon, Edmond Jabès

Contemporary life, says choreographer Akram Khan in a note in the program, is pulled along by horizontal forces: we sacrifice depth and height for breadth. And this is precisely my dilemma with Khan's extraordinary dance work, Vertical Road: I would like to spend a few days thinking about it, but simply don't have the time it deserves. This, for all its physical excitement, is a deeply contemplative work: a rich hour of dance that explores the other axis, the still point of the turning world where height and depth become manifest.


The design is absolutely simple, and consists of a series of revelations. When we enter the theatre, the stage is hidden by a black curtain that slowly draws back to reveal a bare space. A flexible transluscent membrane divides the space, with perhaps a third of the stage hidden behind it. A group of figures is folded in a semicircle near the screen, unmoving: they are dressed in white unisex costumes, a tunic over trousers, recalling the linens of the dead, perhaps, or the robes of a Sufi devotee.

There is a dim figure behind the screen, limned by a golden light, but we cannot see him clearly: he reaches forward and touches the screen, and his hand is suddenly clearly outlined, although the rest of his body remains blurred. We watch his hand as it dips and weaves, inscribing something on the screen: we can see the pressure of his finger, but the text is invisible. "The moving finger writes; and having writ, moves on," as Edward Fitzgerald says in his sumptuous translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The lights black out: and when they rise again, the membrane is opaque: we are in the material world, cut off from the divine.

The rest of Vertical Road is a series of approaches to the divine, a struggle between the earthy weight of the human body and its desire for flight. Khan's seven dancers enact possession, desire, fear, power: most of all, a sense of possession, as if an angel inhabits the body, violent and desirous, and just as suddenly leaves, the dancer standing puzzled and alone, his hands empty. The movement whirls out of a catatonic stillness (the dancers can be picked up and put down like pieces of furniture) into ectastic states. spinning like - but not exactly like - Sufi dervishes. The axis of the spin wobbles: the dancers might cartwheel in strange, insect-like formations diagonally across the stage, or dislodge into a sudden, disconcerting disharmony.

Sufism, the most poetic of all religions, is a continuous echo through this dance: the immanence explored here is mystic, the promise of a personal understanding of the divine. There is a constant dialogue of the text in tension with the body: the word - represented by seven tablets, just as there are seven dancers - is placed in ascetic contrast with the body. At one point, two lovers writhe across the stage, tumbling over and over, while a solitary dancer sits still with the tablets, posed in contemplation.


This apparent dichotomy is not straightforward: one of the great paradoxes in mystic writings is their erotic nature, how the most religious experiences, which struggle at the very limits of the possibilities of human expression, emerge as love poems and in metaphors of sensual desire: the poetry St John of the Cross or Rumi, or the visions of Hildegard von Bingen or the love mysticism of St Bernard of Clarivaux. The more ecstatic the body, the more presently it insists: a contradiction Khan's choreography perfectly expresses.

The movement is thrilling. It expresses the impulse to flight - the bodies of the dancers sometimes seem to lift of their own accord, rising out of their material limitations. In one final, beautiful scene, the dancer left alone on the stage wriggles and turns as if his shoulders are itching, as if he is sprouting wings from his shoulder blades, and for a moment, as his writhing becomes more violent, it is almost as if the wings are there. Equally, the movement makes us aware of the weight of bodies, of their material density, as they fall, smack, on the stage, or crawl haltingly towards a moment of death.

The dance is driven by an incredible score by Nitin Sawhney. It opens with the sound of wind: then there begins an insistent, throbbing pulse, a drumbeat that gets into the blood like fever, which itself moves the dancers, so all seven seem to be pulsing as one body. This retreats into a play of soaring voices backed by a menacing electronic groan, that rise up out of silences in which we can only hear the dancers gasping for air. The score is at once beautiful and terrifying, like the angelic intelligences it invokes.


This is the sort of work which invites the audience to make its own narratives. I am not religious, and certainly do not believe in life after death; yet I find these invocations of the divine deeply powerful. It's a function, maybe, of their stern beauty, which exists in their hesitations and doubts and refusals, as much as in the beautiful completion of particular gestures. I guess such works - written or performed - summon within me an involuntary faith in the immanent, rather than the transcendent: in the possibility held within each consciousness, that is its own sacredness, and which reflects or reveals the sacredness of both the animate and inanimate world.

In its realisation of the sacred, Vertical Road reminded me strongly of Bangarra's Of Earth and Sky, which I saw a couple of weeks ago. And also, in the beautiful tact of its expressing what cannot be expressed, of Bill Viola's Fire Woman and Tristran's Ascension, which I saw the night before, arriving at a little church in Parkville on a wet Monday night to find other devotees clustering in the porch, as if we were all members of a secret cult. The only proper response to any of these works is, in fact, a poem: but for the moment, these words will have to do.

Pictures: Vertical Road by Akram Khan. Photos: Carla Gottgens

Vertical Road, directed and choreographed by Akram Khan, composed by Nitin Sawhney. Lighting Design by Jesper Kongshaug, costumes by Kimie Nakano, set conceived by Akram Khan, Jesper Kongshaug and Kimie Nakano. Material devised & performed by Eulalia Ayguade Farro, Konstadina Efthymiadou, Salah El Brogy, Ahmed Khemis,Young Jin Kim, Yen-Ching Lin, Andrej Petrovic and Paul Zivkovich. Akram Khan Company, Merlyn Theatre, Malthouse, until October 23.

Now I'm facing Melbourne Festival Week #3: and I confess that my feathers are a little bedraggled, my tail and whiskers a little less than perky. Since the beginning of September, when I attended the 68th World Science Fiction Convention, life has been as tightly packed as a spiral erbium-doped waveguide amplifier; and believe me, that's tightly packed. If all the words I've written in the past six weeks had been devoted to a novel, I'd have written at least Death In Venice or The Leopard by now. (This is why I have these recurring nightmares of finding myself on my death bed with a list of all the great books I never wrote scrolling across the inside of my eyelids - but that's another plaint.)


Week #2 began benignly last Tuesday with Jack Charles V. The Crown, a genuinely feel-good show in which Indigneous performer Jack Charles tells his own story. In 2008, Charles was the subject of an award-winning documentary, Bastardy, which frankly examined his drug addiction and thievery. On the evidence of Jack Charles v The Crown, which functions as a kind of theatrical sequel, Bastardy changed Charles’s life, by giving him a chance to see objectively what it was, and opening him to a new public. Charles's frankly expressed sense of his own mortality and his plain desire to redeem his life - he has been clean now for six years - is one of the most moving moments of this show.

The show is essentially Charles’s plea to have his criminal record expunged. The second half is a theatricalisation of an address to the High Court, with the first providing biographical context. Strung together with songs, some nifty audio-visuals and a tight band, it makes a well-crafted piece of theatrical cabaret. It opens with a long voice-over, during which we watch Charles skilfully throwing a clay pot on a wheel, which generates all the absorption of watching a craftsman at work. At the centre of this show is the potent metaphor of clay - as an image of the malleability of the human soul, its ability to be turned towards good or ill, and especially to demonstrate the sensuous - even erotic - thrill of making.

Co-written by Charles and John Romeril and directed by Rachael Maza Long, this show literally embodies a significant slice of theatrical and social history. John Romeril - author of the Australian classic play The Floating World - has worked in Australian theatre for more than four decades, and was a founding member and leading light of the Australian Performing Group, which revolutionised Australian theatre through the 1970s. Rachael Maza Long is the daughter of playwright and actor Bob Maza, who was a driving force behind Indigenous theatre in the 1970s, and was also a prominent activist. Maza Long has had a distinguished career as actor and performer, and is the artistic director of Ilbijerri Theatre Company, the longest running indigenous company in Australia and the only one in Victoria.

And Jack Charles? He's social and theatrical history in person. Born during World War 2, he was taken from his mother at six months and raised in boys' homes in the suburbs of Melbourne, before embarking on a life of drug addiction and petty crime that saw him spend nearly half his life behind bars. Early in the show, Charles shows some photographs of himself, aged perhaps nine: a sweet-faced, luminous boy, notably the only dark-skinned child in the picture. The show is in part a simply biography, showing without self-pity how the mechanisms of racism and institutionalism (like many others, he was abused in the boys' homes) shaped this young boy's life.

Charles's story is the classic story of Aboriginal deracination: he was brought up in total ignorance of his own culture and family, and didn't even know that he had 12 siblings until he was an adult. When he first met his relatives, who lived in inner-city Fitzroy, he was dreadfully punished by his foster family, who were obviously terrified he might return to his black roots and shame them all. The psychic effects of his treatment are left to our imagination: we don't need to join many dots to see how poverty, addiction and petty crime emerge from a cultural vacuum that amounts to an erasure of oneself. It's a story that's been told again and again, and not only in the Stolen Generation narratives: the stories of Native Americans, for example, are horrifically similar.

Yet shot through this is another parallel story, that of the performer and maker: the Elder who founded the first Aboriginal theatre company, Nindethana, and who has worked major Australian stages and acted in some iconic films. For all the weight of the story, this is a light-hearted, even joyous, show, sharply directed by Maza Long. Nigel Maclean's musical direction drives the rhythms under the monologues, keeping things moving and tight. Even opening night uncertainties and the odd bit of prompting didn’t dampen the charm of this show, which is an open-hearted crowd-pleaser.


Adapting for Distortion & Haptic are two dances by Japanese dancer and choreographer Hiroaki Umeda that combine some electronic wizardry with a bit of stylised hiphop derived dance. It is almost at the opposite end of the theatrical spectrum to Jack Charles v. The Crown, a show where presence and heart is everything. Here, the body is an absence in the world of electronic signals, a shadow that interrupts the white noise of technology.

It certainly has its moments: Umeda vanishing altogether into shadows in Haptic as colours pulse on the stage; startling images of an absent body that paradoxically is stubbornly, even subversively there in Adapting for Distortion. Yet I couldn't help feeling that I had seen all this before, even if I haven't; I know that others have been talking about Chunky Move's Mortal Engine, which similarly (and more interestingly) puts the human body in uneasy dialogue with technology, but I'd rather think of Chunky Move's exquisitely satisfying solo piece Glow. which has rather more in common with Umeda's ambitions. Umeda's choreographic and visual vocabulary seems limited in comparison: I found myself feeling that the dance was merely repeating its tropes, rather than deepening their meanings. And so, despite their shortness, felt myself becoming a little bored.

Pictures: Top: Jack Charles. Photo: Steven Rhall; bottom, Hiraoki Umeda in Adapting for Distortion. Photo: Shin Yamagata

Jack Charles V. The Crown, by Jack Charles and John Romeril, directed by Rachael Maza Long. Design by Emily Barrie, lighting by Danny ettingill, music direction Nigel MacLean. Performed by Jack Charles, with music performed by Nigel MacLean, Phil Collings and Mal Beveridge. Ilbijerri Theatre Company @ Fairfax Theatre, Victorian Arts Centre (closed). Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney, March 30 to April 17.

Adapting for Distortion/Haptic, created and performed by Hiroaki Umeda. Sound by S20, images by S20 and Betrand Baudry. Merlyn Theatre, Malthouse. Closed.

This inertia of things is enough to drive one literally insane.
Molloy, Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett is famously one of the most recondite of writers, especially in speaking about his own work. Yet, in the one of paradoxes of modern literature, his work has spawned millions of words of scholarly exegesis. I’d swap much of this commentary for this performance by Conor Lovett: his bitterly lucid performance of extracts from Beckett’s trilogy of novels – Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable – tells you everything you need to know about Beckett, that isn’t said by Beckett himself.


Lovett’s performance reveals Beckett’s humility, that ironic compassion and obdurate, sly humour. There isn’t a trace of vanity in these cruelly comic narratives, built precariously before our eyes “to pass the time”. Lovett and his director, Judy Hegarty Lovett, wisely don’t attempt to summarise all the novels into what is already a marathon (three and a half hour) performance. Instead, they select a few passages from each work and structure the evening as a fragmentary progression. For those unfamiliar with the trilogy, it's an excellent introduction; for those who have already read them, it's a joyous exploration of a work that remains as freshly challenging as when it was written.

Beckett's characters enact powerlessness. Most obviously, it's at the hands of mysteriously intentioned others: the bafflingly charitable, who insist their charity on the benighted whether they desire it or not; or those who insist some kind of claim of obligation, perhaps the accidental death of a dog; or the policeman who embodies an irrational social order. Just as often, they are at the mercy of things: bicycles, trousers, trees, their own bodies. Yet, with a very human irrationality, if Beckett's characters have power of their own, they will exert it on others, and their actions are as cruel and absurd as those they suffer (less evident perhaps in this performance, than in the novels).

For Molloy and Malone, these encounters are merely symptoms of a brutal interior impotence, in which the self is in an unavailing struggle with itself. They are fictions who know they are fictions: and the hand that structures the writing, the author himself, despairingly sees himself in their inadequate mirrors, a thing of language at the mercy of the imperative of living, a drive for survival that is no more than a primitive instinct for continuation. It's in the clarity of this vision - as disinterested as a natural historian's - that Beckett's compassion is most evident.

Most of all, these characters are alone, in a wasteland bounded by the limits of their skulls. Through the three books the fictions narrow and focus, until the nameless protagonist of The Unnameable begins to grapple with the act of speech itself, tormentedly unsure whether he is saying the words or whether the language is saying him, his consciousness nothing but a series of predestined patterns in which individual choice is nothing but a fragile illusion. "Hearing nothing, I am nonetheless a prey to communication. And I speak of voices! After all, why not, as long as one knows it's untrue..."

The chief virtue of Lovett’s performance is how he embodies the struggles of Beckett’s absurd and tragic characters, in their struggle to exist and to remember; most of all, in their struggle out of silence, towards speaking. Dressed in dark clothes that change subtly for each recitation, he emerges from the audience for both Molloy and Malone Dies, as if to emphasise that these stories do not concern themselves with those who live in the limelight, but with more ordinary, anonymous lives. Speaking in a soft Cork accent, Lovett’s white face and fluttering hands articulate the cruel intelligence and surprisingly gentle ironies that animate the writing. Perhaps the performance is most powerful in its silences, which are impeccably timed, permitting the implications of what has been heard to flower vividly in the mind.

The staging is pleasingly bare. For the first two, a white circle of light snaps open on a huge, naked stage. We contemplate the light for some moments, until Lovett emerges from the audience and onto the stage. The Unnamable is staged in a narrowly angled blade of light that throws a monstrous shadow on the wall behind Lovett, and is more sober, more painful, than the preceding two. I find it hard to judge this last one: a migraine of titanic proportions clamped down on my skull, making being present at this performance a real struggle. Despite this, Lovett kept my attention, and somehow the physical pain seemed strangely appropriate for witnessing this anguished conflict with language and consciousness. Perhaps it was Beckett playing a final, mordant joke.

A shorter version of this review is in today's Australian.

Picture: Conor Lovett as Malone. Picture: Dylan Vaughan

The Beckett Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, by Samuel Beckett, writings selected by Colin Lovett and Judy Hegarty Lovett, directed by Judy Hegarty Lovett, performed by Conor Lovett. Gare St Lazare Players Ireland. Playhouse Theatre, Victorian Arts Centre. October 15.