Much has been said about The Manganiyar Seduction, a stunning theatrical presentation of Rajasthani music, and no doubt I will simply add another bunch of superlatives. Indian director Roysten Abel has created a work that had the Melbourne Festival audience standing up, cheering and stamping its feet. Like everyone else, I was seduced: by the musicianship, by the passion of the music, by the production itself.


The Manganiyars are a caste of musicians, an unknown concept in western culture. The performers in The Manganiyar Seduction are mostly Muslim, although there is one Hindu, and mostly, intriguingly, have the surname "Khan". Their work combines both classical and folk traditions, creating a music of winding complexities: driving rhythms that get under your skin and make you want to dance contrast with solo voices that seem to express all human longing, edged with raw feeling and yet astonishingly skilled in their flexibility.

At first we're presented with four tiers of booths curtained in red velvet, each surrounded by light globes. The progression of the show is through revelation: one by one, two by two, three by three, the curtains open and reveal singers and musicians, until there are 37 musicians all playing together. It was like an Advent calendar, and I found myself pleasurably looking forward to finding out what I would see next. The other simple conceit is that the globes around the booths light up when individual musicians are playing, and darken when they stop. This creates a constantly changing geometry, and permits the conductor/percussionist/dancer (Deu Khan) who performs before the set to act as a conductor of the visuals as well as the music.

The performance itself consists of three songs, which fluidly connect in a text-book example of theatrical orchestration. The primary song is a Sufi work by the poet Bulleshah, Alfat Un Bin In Bin, which explores the love of God and the Sufi journey of gnostic self revelation. Two other songs are woven into the first: Halariya, a traditional welcome for newborn children that describes the birth of Lord Krishna, and Neendarli, a comic song about a wife attempting to seduce her husband.

I wished I could understand the words: not that the music wasn't enough in itself, because it was, but because the directness of its emotional effect made me want to know what they were singing. However, I didn't need to read the program afterwards to know that all these songs were about love. That was absolutely palpable. This show made me want to cry with happiness.

*



I walked out of Rhinoceros in Love shaking my head. One of the Melbourne Festival's headline acts, it's a production from the National Theatre of China, billed as China's "most popular contemporary drama". It was first produced in 1999, and was the National Theatre's resident playwright Liao Yimei's first play. We're seeing the fourth production, directed by Meng Jinghui, who has, among other things, specialised in bringing productions of the European modernists - Dario Fo, Samuel Beckett - to the Chinese stage.

This production is a bizarre collision of Chinese and European traditions. And yet... for all its faults - and these are legion - it generates a seductive energy that I found impossible to resist. Within this work is a feeling that I think western theatre has largely lost: it manifests an expressive liberty which reminded me strongly of the modernists of the early 20th century, a sense of almost defiant arbitrariness. All the dramaturgical care, all the polish and experience that can be brought to the best western theatre, can have a constipating effect, creating a feeling of aesthetic politeness and, in the worst cases, a "by the rules" stolidity. There's something refreshing in the total lack of attention to our unwritten laws of aesthetic production here, and in its best moments it creates an electric sense of the unexpected.

The play itself is the tale of Ma Lu's (Zhang Nianhua) hopeless passion for Mingming (Qi Xi), who is herself in love with an abusive man who won't love her back. Ma Lu is a zookeeper, and his only confidant is a lone rhinoceros, to whom he addresses his confessional monologues. This dodgy love story is punctuated by satirical clowning scenes, in which the reckless individualism represented by Ma Lu and Mingming is counterpointed by the conventions of the state or market. There is, for example, a series of "Love Tutorials", in which young people are taught the proper expressions for love through Hollywood cliches and pop songs.

Ma Lu's obsession reaches stalker territory - he declares that he will keep loving Mingming until she loves him back, no matter what she says, and that she will never be allowed to escape. There's no irony in this: he is presented as the heroic individual who persists in his beliefs against all odds. Perhaps it's not surprising that there should be a rape joke in there. Again, and this time not in a good way, it made me think of the early 20th century.

It's quite clear where the expertise lies in this production: in the performances, which are highly skilled, especially in the impeccable chorus work, and, for all its problems, in the text. I don't know enough about Chinese culture to be able to read this clearly against tradition, but even through the uncertain surtitles it seemed to me that Liao Yimei's text spirals out of a long tradition of Chinese poetry. The play's lyricism and obsession with the natural world recalls Li Po and Du Fu, who famously celebrated the romantic figure of the poet as an exile from society, and also contemporary poets such as Yang Lian, one of the figures who unites Chinese traditions with European modernist influences.

The design is probably its worst aspect. The set features suspended metal rectangles and reflective panelling at the back, and is very approximately lit: the lighting design has some good ideas, but is indifferently executed. The whole looks like a bricolage of modern effects, but doesn't appear to mean anything. Likewise, the show opens with a flourish of percussion which is never seen again, and which seems to bear absolutely no relationship to anything else. This, and a lot of the clowning, made me think of the acrobatics which were interpolated into Shakespeare's productions: these elements seem designed to catch the attention of the groundlings in the pit.

To one side of the stage is something like a billiard table that turns out to be a treadmill. This is the locus of one the production's hilariously kitsch moments: a Chinese pop song rises and the two lovers are running together, in an analogue of making love. It made me feel as if I had strayed into a bad anime. Towards the end of the play, the stage is flooded with water, forcing the cast, rather charmingly, to don green gumboots. In the climax, Zhang Nianhua ends up standing on a table being drenched with a private rainstorm, passionately declaiming his stalker ambitions. I still don't know why he had to be so wet.

Pictures: Top: The Manganiyar Seduction; bottom, Zhang Nianhua in Rhinoceros in Love.

The Manganiyar Seduction, conceived, arranged and directed by Roysten Abel, conducted by Deu Khan. Sound engineer, S Manoharan, set and lighting design by Roysten Abel. Melbourne Festival. Closed.

Rhinoceros in Love, by Liao Yimei, directed by Meng Jinghui. Design by Zhang Wu, lighting by Zhang Jian, sound design by Yan Guihe. With Zhang Nianhua, Qi Xi, Zhao Hongwei, Zhang Ziqi, Kou Zhiguo, Lui Chang, Wang Xiaoshen and Feng Qilong. National Theatre of China and the Melbourne Festival. Closed.

One of the strongest aspects of this year's Melbourne Festival program is the local performance. I can remember a time when under-developed local shows too often made an embarrassing contrast with the production-polished international work: not so in 2011. It demonstrates the depth of achievement that has been nurtured in this city over the past decade, and festival director Brett Sheehy's good fortune in being able to draw from such a rich field.


This cultural depth has come about through the patient investment of many institutions and people. Companies like Back to Back or Chunky Move or BalletLab don't spring up overnight: they emerge from initial risks taken on raw and untested talent, years of often unrewarding work, and, crucially, the faith that gives this work stages and audiences beyond the "fringe". For example, Back to Back's Small Metal Objects premiered at Kristy Edmunds's 2005 festival. That exposure led to an international tour which established their European reputation and to their subsequent 2008 Melbourne Festival premiere, Food Court. This leads directly to the confidence and experience that can mount a show as ambitious and finely worked as Ganesh Versus the Third Reich.

Chunky Move, one of the driving forces behind Melbourne's thriving dance culture, is another. Founded in 1995 by Gideon Obarzanek, this company has constantly surprised its audiences with work that restlessly explores the possibilities of dance performance. It actively nurtures new talent (Byron Perry, whose work Double Think is also in this year's program, is a Chunky Move protege). Obarzanek himself has choreographed everything from extravagant multimedia spectacle to a minimalist one-man show. In Assembly, his last work as artistic director of Chunky Move, he has shifted the goal posts once again, joining forces with Victorian Opera and its director Richard Gill to give us a meditation on the discrete self and communal identity, and the conflicting human longings for belonging, connection and individuality.

Assembly focuses entirely on the bodies of its 62 barefoot performers. They provide the entire score - breathing, yelling, hissing, drumming their feet, or drenching us with the harmonies of plainsong or sacred Renaissance choral works. Obarzanek and Chris Mercer's design is a plain wooden construction of bleachers or stairs, which sits beautifully inside the panelling of the Melbourne Recital Centre. This apparent simplicity belies the sophistication of the design: costumes which appear to be the casual outfits of the performers reveal themselves to be a carefully designed palette of reds and blues (Harriet Oxley), and Nick Schlieper's lighting is a masterly demonstration of the power of subtlety.

Eight dancers, six principal singers and 48 choir members in itself makes a considerable impact on a stage, and Obarzanek's choreography takes full advantage. The movement is bound by a notion of pneuma, the Greek word for "breath" which also means spirit, or creative energy. Even the stage seems to be breathing: at one moment it's crowded with people, and in the next, seemingly by magic, it's empty. People flood over the top of the steps, or stream in from either side, and as quickly vanish. Assembly demonstrates Obarnzanek's control of the dynamics of space: he exploits every plane of the set, vertical, horizontal and diagonal, to full advantage. The work's various moods transform the space from a public area - stairs in a public square, for example, or a football crowd - to stylised abstraction that brings us back to the public act of dance, to an interior evocation of private loss, an expression of the human longing for connection in an alienating world.

Assembly balances its austere structure with a surprising richness and variousness, and creates moments of unexpected beauty. Obarzanek constantly disrupts focus: at one moment we are studying the mechanisms of flocking behaviour, with gestures rippling through a crowd, and in the next are aware of the performers as disunited individuals. He divides his cast into a hostile halves, hissing and shouting at each other, before uniting them in a joyous celebration of a goal, and then immediately shifts us to a different notion of communal harmony with the choral music. The eight dancers emerge from the crowd, spilling down the stairs in gestures of defiance, or abjection, or longing, or expressions of humanity as machine, with pneumatic sounds (breath again) emphasising mechanical movements, and as suddenly dissolve into the collective.

The first half provides some of the most overwhelming moments of the show. The sheer beauty of the choral music emerging from the apparently "ordinary" crowd lends its emotion a strong utopian focus: a choir is a powerful image of community. Here, the work strikes chords with the collective behaviour that is presently re-entering the public sphere, with demonstrations from the Arab Spring to the Occupy Wall Street movement in the US, and feels like a forceful expression of the zeitgeist.

The dance shifts in the second half towards an exploration of coupling, of the individual within relationship: the crowd becomes an expression of the conventions which surround, extend and confine the anarchic possibilities of sexual desire and love. Here the dance becomes more obviously formal: Obarzanek creates a texture of symmetries, with couples mirroring each other's gestures, or weaving images out of their limbs that are reminsiscent of Hollywood dance movies. He certainly isn't afraid of kitsch: at one point the dancers even shape a heart with their arms.

These displays of romantic convention play against a subtext of conflict, desire, confinement and loss, including a fragmentary spoken text that suggests a man inarticulately defending himself against accusation. The final image is of solitude and longing: Alisdair Macindoe, isolated mid-stage, makes stylised gestures of weeping that seem to come from the vocabulary of Asian theatre, as Paul Capsis appears out of nowhere (he is not in the previous dance) and sings an a cappella love song. It feels surprising how far this work has evolved from its opening image of a loudly chattering crowd: by this time, we've had a chance to see all these people as individuals, and to contemplate them (and us) as both social and solitary beings. It's a fascinating and moving multi-faceted work, and a fitting finale to Obarzanek's achievement with Chunky Move.

Picture: Assembly. Photo: Jeff Busby

Assembly, directed and choreographed by Gideon Obarzanek, musical direction by Richard Gill. Lighting design by Nick Schlieper, costume design by Harriet Oxley, set design by Gideon Obarzanek and Chris Mercer. Dancers: Sara Black, Nathan Dubber, Benjamin Hancock, Alisdair Macindoe, Lily Paskas, Harriet Ritchie, James Shannon and Frankie Snowdon. Principal singers: Casselle Bonollo, Olivia Cranwell, Frederica Cunningham, Tobias Glaser, Jeremy Kleeman and Matthew Thomas. With Paul Capsis and the Victorian Opera Youth Opera. Chunky Move, Victorian Opera and Melbourne Festival. Melbourne Recital Centre. Closed.

I've been dithering over this post for days, trying to find a way in to writing about this extraordinary show. As with Back to Back's Food Court, which remains one of the most compelling experiences I've had in a theatre, Ganesh Versus The Third Reich takes an idea which initially appears to be very simple, and then, with cumulative force, systematically unpicks every expectation that you might have formed, until the psyche finds itself at such a point of vulnerability that you are suddenly confronted with - what? The Human Condition? Your own existential solitude? The naked soul as Foucault imagined it, criss-crossed and scarred by the traces of power and authority?


One of the problems in discussing Back to Back, the little theatre company from Geelong that could, is that it creates experiences that defeat description. Outlining a production's shape gives an idea of its characteristics, its morphology, if you like; but this morphology doesn't explain the vitality that inhabits the work. I feel, even more than usual, as if I were attempting to invoke an entire life, with all its incidence, richness, mundanity, conflict and beauty, by dissecting a corpse.

Bruce Gladwin and his collaborators make a work that can only happen in a theatre. It can't be translated into another medium, because it exists so fiercely in its transient present, in the particular moments in which it's witnessed by the particular people who happen to attend. Its transformations are a kind of alchemy, a human magic that ignites in the shifting relationships between the performers and the audience. It's at once transparently simple and profoundly complex.

As those who have followed the mild controversy that greeted its publicity will know, Ganesh Versus The Third Reich is, in part, a fable about how Ganesh, the elephant-headed Hindu god, travels to Nazi Germany to wrest back the swastika from Hitler. A major god in the Hindu pantheon, Ganesh is the deity of obstacles: he not only removes them, but will place them in situations that need to be checked. One of his lesser aspects is as lord of letters and learning, an avatar of stories (which is why I have two small brass effigies of Ganesh on my desk).

Ganesh's aspect as remover of obstacles must have special significance for a company in which most members are disabled. And Back to Back's decision to interrogate Hitler reminds us that, well before their plans to eradicate Jews, homosexuals, Roma and Slavic people, Nazi Germany targeted its disabled population. In 1939, the state systematically began to murder people with mental and physical disabilities, labelling them "unworthy of life", with estimates of deaths varying from 200,000 to 250,000. These murders were the experimental laboratory for what later became the death camps: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka.

Given such a dark subtext, not to mention the questions of cultural appropriation in employing the figure of Ganesh, it's unsurprising that the company discarded their initial idea for Ganesh Versus The Third Reich. "We knew our narrative was morally fraught," says Bruce Gladwin in his program note. "Over time our thinking shifted. Our self-imposed censorship - our reasoning that we should not create the work - became the rationale for bringing it to life."

What is presented instead is a double reality. We see the actors - Mark Deans, Simon Laherty, Scott Price and Brian Tilley - and director David Woods creating their Holocaust fairytale. When we walk in, the stage is a working studio littered with tables, ladders and other miscellaneous mess, with a row of huge curtains tied up at the side of the stage. As the performers argue in a desultory fashion, the director comes in and takes charge.

These glimpses of rehearsal are punctuated by scenes of theatrical spectacle, in which the semi-transparent plastic curtains, painted with silhouetted outlines of trees, houses and other illusions, are drawn across the stage. They are backlit, so performers can be seen in silhouette as well, or are used as a screen for shadow puppetry. The shifts from mundane reality to fairytale are swift, signalled by sound and lighting, and completely transform the stage, so that you are plunged wholly into mythic realities and just as suddenly, almost with a sense of bereftness, dragged out of them.

What is hard to explain is how this rhythm of contrast intensifies into a shattering potency during the show. As in Food Court, the work is an ambush: gestures and relationships which seem of merely mundane importance, or which begin as comic confrontations, inexorably gather emotional force. Subtly and incrementally, connections begin to accrete between the two storylines; for example, David plays Mengele, the Nazi doctor who conducted horrific experiments on, among others, disabled children, and David's very correct treatment of his actors begins to collect sinister undertones.

Perhaps part of this sense of ambush is in how lightly these connections are drawn. The rehearsal scenes are leavened by absurd comedy: Simon, for instance, complaining about his part as one of Mengele's experimental subjects: "It's hard being a Jew." They argue, passionately, about the issue of appropriation. There are sudden and confronting gestures towards the audience: David flinging his hand towards us, as if he is addressing a bank of empty seats, claiming that the audience is just coming to watch "freak porn". As the arguments between the performers intensify, his contempt becomes double-edged, and you begin to wonder if the person most interested in "freak porn" is David himself.

When these arguments explode into violence, the effect is devastating and shocking: the disparate elements and themes of the production suddenly fuse in a wholly unexpected way. The final image is unforgettable. David, tired of his job, tired of these freaks, is left with Mark, who has been the silent focus of many of the cast's arguments. Mark's mother will pick him up later. David, using all his professional skills in people management, deals with the annoyance of Mark by suggesting that they play hide and seek.

Mark hides under the table; David, pretending to look for him, picks up his things, and leaves the room. As the light closes in on him, Mark remains crouched under the table, wriggling with delight at the game, waiting to be found. Even thinking of this moment shakes my heart. It's not simply that this disabled man has been carelessly abandoned by someone who should know better. It's how this apparently trivial gesture becomes, in the deepest and most vulnerable echo chambers of the consciousness, a metaphor for the betrayal of all human hope.

This shows the power and ambiguity, also, of what Back to Back do to the notion of performance. David Woods is the only actor without disability, and his is, in the conventional sense, a brilliant performance. There is no question, at any time, that the rest of the cast isn't making a performance: this is the company's counter-argument to the bitter notion of their being "freak porn". But these actors bring another edge, a sense of perilous exposure that is intensified under Gladwin's impeccably sure direction. I can't think of another company which so foregrounds the knowledge that this work is being made, in each moment, before our eyes: it is a great part of why the audiences becomes so deeply involved.

Back to Back have never had any truck with "special" treatment: their work has a harsh honesty that makes it impossible to patronise. But they also specialise in moments of breath-taking beauty that assert the sheer power of their skills. There are images I won't forget: the impossible poignancy and strangeness, for example, of Ganesh, dressed in a business suit, standing before Hitler, who is played by Simon in a ridiculous knitted Hitler costume. Or an evocation of Indra's net, when a back curtain of stars was lifted to reveal a blazing light, like a sunrise. I've never seen anything like this show, because only Back to Back could make it. They are, simply, our most important independent theatre company.

Picture: David Woods and Brian Tilley in Ganesh Versus The Third Reich. Photo: Jeff Busby

Ganesh Versus The Third Reich, directed, designed and devised by Bruce Gladwin. Lighting design by Andrew Livingston, Bluebottle; design and set construction by Mark Cuthbertson, design and animation Rhian Hinkley, composer Jóhann Jóhannsson. Performed by Mark Deans, Simon Laherty, Scott Price, Brian Tilley and David Woods. Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne Festival and Back to Back Theatre. Merlyn Theatre, Malthouse, until October 9.

Your faithful blogger has been shanghaied by the day job lately, dealing with an editing deadline for my forthcoming novel. (Forthcoming Christmas 2012, that is - lead times are long in the publishing world). And I find, lifting my weary head from the coalface of the imagination, that I've fallen rather behind in my reviews, and this despite steadfastly missing nearly the entire Melbourne Fringe. I'll apologise here to those who invited me personally to their shows - I tried to reply to everyone, but believe me when I say that my inbox exploded. And I know I missed some worthy events. Perhaps my biggest regret is Nicola Gunn's At The Sans Hotel, at La Mama, which I meant to see last Sunday. That plan was derailed by a migraine, another regular pothole in the Croggon road to enlightenment. The spirit is willing, etc...


Despite my most cunning attempts at theatre evasion, I was still lured to three shows. Clybourne Park at the Melbourne Theatre Company opened two weeks ago, which demonstrates how tardy I am. The other two are the first harbingers of the Melbourne Festival, which officially opens tomorrow. (Expect TN's usual blanket Melbourne Festival coverage; I've cleared my desk and will be focusing on being a critic for the next three weeks.) The Malthouse got in early last week with The Border Project's Half-Real and Back to Back's Ganesh Versus The Third Reich. Back to Back's show is an exceptional work, which confirms this company's place as one of the most significant we have; more on that tomorrow later. Half-Real is mostly striking as a missed opportunity. But, first, to Clybourne Park.

Bruce Norris's Pulitzer Prize winner springs from Lorraine Hansberry's groundbreaking 1959 play, A Raisin in the Sun. Hansberry's play is based on the hostile racism (culminating in a lawsuit) that she experienced during her childhood when her family moved to a white neighbourhood in Chicago. It follows the fortunes of the Youngers family as they attempt to move into the middle class, along the way exposing the mechanics of North American racism, especially as expressed through the housing market. In A Raisin in the Sun, the family buys a house in a suburb called Clybourne Park: and this is where Bruce Norris picks up the story.

The first act of Clybourne Park, also set in 1959, is almost Ayckbournian in how it fills in the "other" side of Hansberry's play, although Australian audiences, unlike American theatre goers, will miss most of the cross-textual references. It begins as Russ (Greg Stone) and Bev (Alison Whyte), haunted by the suicide of their war veteran son, are selling their house in Clybourne Park.

When it becomes known that it has been bought by a black family, all hell breaks loose: their neighbours, who claim to be all very tolerant of black people in their place, are horrified by the thought of their being next door. Community leader Karl (Patrick Brammall), a take on A Raisin in the Sun's character Karl Lindner, even offers the family money to buy elsewhere. The second act is set in the same house fifty years later. Clybourne Park has in the meantime become a black neighbourhood, and now the new white gentry are moving back in, thoughtlessly obliterating a complex history.

This juxtaposition permits Norris to make mordant fun of liberal hypocrisies, exploring how little has changed in American social relations. Aside from race, its major question is the place of memory and history in a world defined by the marketplace. It's a conventional realist play, with nods to the expressionist theatre of Arthur Miller as well as situation comedy and farce. And it's strikingly well written: while it never reaches the heights, say, of Death of a Salesman, it's rare to see a play this well crafted, and that goes a long way to dispel the inevitable mustiness of its form.

The production is as well-crafted as the play itself: it's beautifully lit by Matt Scott, with a simple and effective set design from Christina Smith and an unobtrusive but evocative sound design from Jethro Woodward. Director Peter Evans brings together an exceptional cast, who ably negotiate the various levels at play in the text. The tone shifts with blinding swiftness from farce to robust comedy to tragedy, and the actors step nimbly and exactly from one to the other, with such skill that you barely notice the artifice.

It's truly an ensemble effort, but to pick out some highlights: Greg Stone as the depressive Russ handles the role's miserable aggression with wit and force and, in the end, moving humanity. We've long known that Bert Labonté (Albert/Kevin) is one of our best stage comedians, but I had no idea Zahra Newman (Francine/Lena) could be so funny. Given that I've seen her playing the title role in Elektra, and more recently in Debbie Tucker-Green's stunning one-woman play Random, this woman is blazing a trail as one of our most complete actors. And Patrick Brammall's Karl is a comic jewel. I often come out of these kinds of plays badly needing some artificial stimulants, but I really enjoyed this.


The main question bouncing around after the premiere of The Border Project's Melbourne Festival offering Half-Real was: why? Anyone wanting to prove the popular thesis that video games and art are an incompatible mix will find their prejudices amply affirmed by this show. Its successes - mainly in Geoff Cobham, Michael Marner and Chris More's fascinating digital design - only highlight how badly Sam Haren's production misses the mark.

The premise is that a woman has been murdered. Audience members, furnished with a Wii-like controller (minus buttons), are invited to investigate aspects of the crime by voting to choose which aspects of character or event they would like to witness, thereby "solving" (or not - my audience certainly didn't) the murder. While it was kind of fun waving the controller and seeing if your choice got up, it's fair to say that the novelty palls.

Half-Real's basic choose-your-own-adventure format is the first problem: as productions like LA Noire or Heavy Rain demonstrate, videogames outgrew simplistic narrative structures years ago. They offer far more sophisticated experiences, with morally complex stories and deeply designed environments. But even the most basic shoot'em up offers player choice and participation in ways that theatre is challenged to match: within a guided structure the player controls every action, not simply, as here, which chunk of story they wish to witness. And games are not confined by theatrical limitations of time.

Immersive theatre has been the buzz phrase over the past few years, with companies such as the UK's Punchdrunk leading the way. And there's continuing discussion about the formal possibilities interactive digital technologies offer for theatre. For my part, it's easy to see why writers might be excited about exploring the narrative structures pioneered by games. It's not a big step from the complex interactivity of games to, say, the aleatory playfulness of John Cage or even (as is teasingly hinted in Duncan Graham's text) the kinds of oblique narratives imagined by a writer like Roberto Bolaño.

Half-Real, however, only demonstrates the limitations of a by-the-numbers story. There's little evidence that the concept was thought through beyond the superficial details of structure: what such an approach could mean for theatre itself is barely examined. As a consequence, we get neither the best of theatre nor the best of gaming: instead of an imaginative collision of different forms, we get a reduced vision of both of them.

The impressive aspect is the design, in which projections transform an angled set into different environments. Digital characters are represented as shadows which are voiced by actors standing off-stage, and interact seamlessly with the actors. It's ingenious and sometimes beautiful. This is let down by DJ TRIP's sound design, which is almost a parody of bad videogame music. But even an actor as good as Amber McMahon can't rescue the banality of the story or, more profoundly, of the concept.

Pictures: top: (L-R) Patrick Brammall, Laura Gordon, Bert Labonté and Zahra Newman in Clybourne Park, photo Jeff Busby; bottom, David Heinrich in Half-Real. Photo: Steve Tilling

Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris, directed by Peter Evans. Set and costumes by Christina Smith, lighting design by Matt Scott, composition by Jethro Woodward. With Greg Stone, Alison Whyte, Zahra Newman, Luke Ryan, Bert Labonté, Patrick Brammall and Laura Gordon. Melbourne Theatre Company @ the Sumner Theatre, until October 26.

Half-Real, by Duncan Graham, directed by Sam Haren. Design consultant Geoff Cobham, lighting design by Chris Petridis, video art by Chris More, video system design by Michael Marner, composition by DJ TRIP (Tyson Hopprich). With David Heinrich, Alirio Zavarce and Amber McMahon. The Tower, Malthouse Theatre, until October 15.

Bangarra Dance Theatre's Belong demonstrates, once again, why Bangarra is one of our leading dance companies (and why it has such a huge international reputation). It consists of two dances: About, by Torres Strait Islander Elma Kris, and ID by artistic director Stephen Page. Both of them add up to "stunning".

The opening work enacts myths about the wind from Kris's Islander culture, opening out traditional movements into contemporary dance, and features an astounding set design by Jacob Nash that recalls the abstract beauties of bark paintings. Each of the four sequences takes a different aspect of the wind - the south wind Zey, the storm wind Kuki, the gentle north wind Naygay and the gusty south easterly Sager - and translates their stories and, crucially, the sensations of each wind into breath-taking dance, combining physical excitement with lyrical grace.

ID comes out of the world of tradition and nature into a bleaker present. Here Stephen Page confronts the question of Indigenous identity, in all its complexities. Page's theatrical imagination and sureness of touch make this a riveting work: by turns devastating, comic, poignant and intimate.

It opens with a tour de force of multimedia, in which a black and white projected film of a family, dominated by the dignified figure of an Aboriginal grandmother, is projected on a back stage screen. A changing cast of figures move in and out of view, looking curiously towards the camera. In turn, different dancers approach the camera until their faces loom in close-up and disappear. The same dancer then appears on stage, rolling out from behind the projection, so it seems that he or she literally emerges into three dimensions from the image.

ID segues into different sequences that are constantly surprising - a satirical take on skin-colour, for example, in which the dancers, dressed as school children, squabble on bleachers before smearing their faces with vegemite to create a startlingly cheeky take on blackface; a devastating death in custody scene, in which an Aboriginal is beaten by uniformed guards and his dead body, transformed subtly into a tree, is dragged away on a tarpaulin. In its portrayal of powerlessness in the face of brutal authority, this last is as potent as the brutal beating sequence in Castellucci's Tragedia Endogonidia. ID finishes with a powerful evocation of tradition being woven into contemporary identity.

Emotionally powerful, gorgeously realised and danced with impeccable virtuosity, Belong demonstrates the richness that Indigenous traditions of performance bring to the contemporary stage. Absolutely not to be missed.

Pictures: Bangarra, About (middle) and ID (bottom). Photos: Jeff Busby

Belong: About, choregraphed by Elma Kris, and ID, choreographed by Stephen Page. Design byJacob Nash, coustmes by Emma Howell, composers David Page and Steve Francis. With Bangarra Dance Theatre dancers. Playhouse, Victorian Arts Centre, until September 24.

In the past few years, adaptations of classic plays have become more the norm than otherwise in Australian innovative theatre. Two directors in particular wrenched opened the Pandora's box. Barrie Kosky led the way from the 1990s with refigured classics, such as Lear or the baroque opera Poppea, while Benedict Andrews's explored an austere theatricality in shows such as The War of the Roses. And there's Simon Stone's adaptations, from Hayloft's visually luscious Chekhov Recut: Platonov to the controversial Malthouse/STC production Baal to his sensitive reworking of Ibsen's The Wild Duck.

All these directors demonstrate the far-reaching influence of European auteur theatre on Australian work. Kosky and Andrews work as much in Europe as they do in Australia (Kosky, now the director of Berlin's Komische Oper, seems to have vanished from the local scene almost completely). Then there's Daniel Schlusser, who has been working rather more under the radar and whose work has been leading him in a strikingly different direction. Over the past few years he's been conducting a fascinating exploration of theatricality, mainly in the institutional shelter of the VCA, that has produced some of the most exciting work that Melbourne has seen in the past few years.

I wouldn't say Schlusser adapts classics so much as blows them up: this work is much more than rewriting. Using a practice he calls "hyper-realism", he makes theatre out of classic texts that is not so much a textual exploration as a haunting, a demonstration of how these works live in our collective unconscious. With his collaborators, he creates an alternative theatrical reality that is at once located firmly in the present and the past. The first I saw of these works was A Dollhouse, an investigation of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House at the VCA. The Dollhouse at Fortyfive Downstairs is a revisiting of this production with a (mostly) new cast, and it demonstrates how polished Schlusser's practice has become.

Watching it, I was forcibly reminded of a show I saw in Britain back in 2008: Chris Goode's brilliant ...Sisters, a deconstruction of Chekhov's Three Sisters by way of John Cage. The reason is the profound focus in both directors on the theatrical present. No matter how we imaginatively enter the realities on stage, we are always reminded that this is a work of theatre, an artifice. This is a characteristic of most work in this vein, but Goode and Schlusser in their different ways explore further the implications of what this means for performance. Crucially, both have an unerring, even poetic, sense of theatrical rhythm that makes their investment in the minutiae of human experience deeply riveting.

As with ...Sisters, the audience enters to find the actors already on stage, in pre-performance mode, getting dressed, flirting, having barely audible conversations, fiddling with props. The play itself is introduced by Schlusser (who plays Krogstad) reading Ibsen's stage directions through a microphone, but its action evolves organically from the the idle conversations and games of the actors. The delicacy of this transition is hard to overstate: the actors remain the actors, while slipping almost subliminally into their assigned roles. These performances remain unstable, since the actors might at any point slip back to being "the actors" (roles which are, for all their apparent unstudiedness, as much a performance as the roles in the play).

Complex as this might be to describe, in performance it is very lucid. And we get Ibsen's play, although this time much more radically translated than in the 2007 show. What's followed is the action, not the text. Nora (a transcendentally good Nikki Shiels) is a sexy young thing addicted to shopping, living in the gilded cage provided by Torvald (Kade Greenland), who works for the Macquarie Bank. Nora's friend Kristine (Edwina Wren) is an unemployed economist from Tasmania, and is, aside from the faithful Dr Rank (played with poignancy by Josh Price), her only confidant.

She is as imprisoned in deceit as Ibsen's Nora, but Torvald's tyranny is more subtle, a question of invisible strings. It plays out in the sexual manipulations she uses to attract Torvald's and attention and favour, her willingness to be a sex toy, her terror that Torvald will discover that she has fraudulently borrowed money from Krogstad (Daniel Schlusser). When Nora's lies catch up with her and her world collapses, we get as powerful an image of abjection as I've seen on stage: Nora, stuffing her mouth with marshmallows so they spill out half chewed, her face smeared with tear-smudged make-up, clutching her groin like a little girl who wants to wee, but here with a horrifying sense of sexual injury.

The action plays across a narrow metallic set designed by Jeminah Reidy. It's a house of expensive toys - Torvald's Playstation, litterings of Lego and brightly wrapped Christmas presents - that summons the empty materialism of Torvald and Nora's marriage, the objects and rituals that replace actual relationship. Although Schlusser has kept the rewritten ending, as he did in the first production, he gives us a much tougher interpretation: the actions of these people are more ambiguous and lost, Nora's sexuality more scarred and frightened, the subtext beneath seemingly inconsequential interactions more desolate.

This feels like a work in which every moment has been thought through, creating theatre of admirable emotional and intellectual rigor. Mandatory for anyone interested in the possibilities of the contemporary stage. It's on until Sunday, as part of the Melbourne Fringe.

Picture: Nikki Shiels in The Dollhouse. Photo: Marg Horwell.

The Dollhouse, adapted from the play by Henrik Ibsen, directed by Daniel Schlusser. Set design by Jeminah Reidy, costumes by Tiffany Abbott, lighting by Kimberly Kwa, sound by Martin Kay. With Nikki Shiels, Kade Greenland, Edwina Wren, Josh Price, Daniel Schlusser and Cate Bastian/Gabrielle Abbott. Fortfive Downstairs until September 25.

I will be seeing very little of the Fringe Festival this year. This is because Life is getting in the way. To wit: the edits for my novel Black Spring (coming out late next year, but the lead times are astonishing in book publishing) have arrived and must be dealt with asap, and preferably before the Melbourne Festival opens, and I have a couple of music theatre workshops coming up in early November that require some pre-attention. And then there's Stuff, such as eating, sleeping and handing my wallet to my children.

I will, however, be talking on a Fringe panel, Your Show Is Fifteen Minutes Too Long: Arts Reviewing and Criticism in the Digital Age, with colleagues John Bailey, Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris and Josh Wright. It's a forum for "bold, inspiring and ambitious arguments", apparently, which gives us something to live up to.

However, other bloggers are blogging. For reviews, try the excellent Andrew Furhmann, who is presently reviewing for Time Out, and still occasionally blogging at Primitive Surveys, and Cameron Woodhead, who logs his Age reviews at Behind The Critical Curtain. Anne Marie Peard is both previewing and reviewing, with a bunch of artist profiles at Sometimes Melbourne. Richard Watts, usually a heroic blogger of the Fringe, might blog at Man About Town, but I see he has been slack lately. Perhaps because he's busy at ArtsHub. Thats how I'll be tracking what I'm missing, anyway.

The Australian Theatre Forum. Where to begin? For the past two days, I've been locked in a box with 260 theatre makers - performers, directors, designers, composers, writers, critics, arts funders, bloggers, producers. They came from all ends of Australia, from the regions and the capital cities, from the major companies to tiny independent outfits, descending on the Brisbane Powerhouse by the river to talk, drink, socialise, exchange and plot as only theatre makers can. They're still talking as I write, as the final day is today.

This is the second national forum. The first was held at the North Melbourne Meat Market in 2009, and was a similarly intense experience. Perhaps the first value of such gatherings is outside its formal proceedings, in the countless intimate conversations that happen between. Nothing breaks down hierarchical barriers with such inexorable force as the maelstrom of encounter. But it's not just what the French call a "gas factory": theatre makers are practical people, and practical outcomes came from the first, such as Wesley Enoch's idea for a National Indigenous Theatre Forum which is now mentoring young Aboriginal artists from remote regions. I'm certain others will emerge from 2011.

For those who can't be there, there's plenty of documenting. Augusta Supple and Jane Howard have been blogging on the run, reporting sessions as they happen, and there's an active tweetstream. The video below of Angharad Wynne-Jones's presentation during the introductory Postcards from the Future session gives a flavour of what it was like to be there.




I can't begin to note every idea that was discussed, even from my partial view. People talked about micro-touring, about new writing, about women in theatre, about new ways of collaborating, about environmentally sustainable practice both front and back stage, about technology, rethinking funding, cross-racial casting, queer theatre, rethinking corporate and company structures, theatre for young people, about failure and risk. And more. But what was palpable was the air of generosity and optimism with which these ideas were approached. There were frustrations and differences, but they were all part of the creative flux. For me the keynote was struck in the introduction by new Theatre Board chair Stephen Armstrong. "Theatre might not save the world," he said. "But let's imagine it might."

Cameron Woodhead and I flagged a lively session in the Open Space that debated the place of and space for criticism. I'm particularly concerned about how critical discourse (of all kinds, not merely reviews) can be nourished and sustained in a context where there is absolutely no incentive for young critics to learn this difficult, laborious and rewarding art. Mainstream spaces for arts are diminishing: most recently, for example, the ABC has cut all its in-house arts programming. And as things stand, the ad hoc nature of the internet can't pick up the slack. I think this is a problem that going to get worse, not better.

These thoughts are in part sparked by my recent meltdown(s), and in particular by a conversation with my colleague James Waites about the challenges of sustaining a critical output over the years that are required to create continuities and perspective. We all know that as theatre is a temporal art, the discourse is crucial as archive as much as it is as dialogue. It is a major connection between an art and its public. And as with every aspect of culture, its health depends on its diversity. In particular, I'm worried that so many new voices - the next generation of critics, who are there, who are writing now - have nowhere to develop their skills and knowledge, and nowhere to go. (I hurriedly add that I'm not concerned, or at least, not at the moment, with financing this blog.) Is it time to think, as some people are in wondering where quality journalism is to come from, about subsidising our critics?


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I was part of a panel on the first day with Amitesh Grover (an independent artist from India), funding theorist Cathy Hunt and Indigenous literary critic Sandra Phillips. We were asked to speak for ten minutes on innovation. Which was a curly one, frankly. As a final note, my response is below.

The New and the Old

Thinking about innovation in the abstract is difficult. It’s one of those things which you know when you see it. It's word that is routinely written on funding applications. As artists we accept as a Good Thing. We know that without it, a culture grows stale and dull. But what is it?

I come from the poetry world, where poets tend to flinch at the various phrases – innovative poetry, alternative poetry, the avant garde - which are used as shorthand to describe exploratory or experimental practice. Mostly they’ve dropped the phrase avant garde, which has an early 20th century feel, quite aside from its militaristic connotations. As Ionesco pointed out in his imitable way, the problem with the avant garde is that you don’t know it’s the avant garde until it’s all over, because it can’t be ahead of a movement until the movement has actually happened. And, of course, that doesn’t happen until the avant garde has stopped being avant.

Poets tend to be pedantic and sceptical about language, and as they point out, such labels can be so general as to be almost meaningless. All the same, we need labels to describe things, however misleading they can be, because they point to something real. 

As is my wont, I went to the dictionary. Websters is quite straightforward: it defines innovation as 1: the introduction of something new. 2: a new idea, method, or device. Another definition caught my eye, from the online business dictionary, which says innovation is “the process by which an idea or invention is translated into a good or service for which people will pay.” That second meaning might seem particularly inapplicable in the arts, where so often the new is precisely the service or good which is least commercial; but artists do ask people to pay, in attention and time, and most especially with new work.

When I think of cultural innovation, I think of old things as well as new. The new is only recognisable in relation to what isn’t new. More importantly, the new is not possible without the old. This paradox is explored by one of my favourite critics, Viktor Sklovsky, who was part of one of the greatest explosions of artistic innovation in history. His peers were some of the great modernist artists – Malevich, Mayakovsky, Meyerhold – who emerged in the intellectual, artistic and political ferment of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in the early 20th century.

In his book Bowstring, Sklovsky describes the contradictions of innovation well. “Art cognises by implemeting old models in new ways and by creating new ones. Art moves, transforming. It changes its methods, but the past does not cease to exist. Art moves using its old vocabulary and reinterpreting old structures, and yet at the same time it seems to be static. It changes fast, not for the sake of changing, but to impart the sensation of things in their difference through rearrangement.” So much of art, it seems to me, is about perceiving and negotiating difference.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, another great innovator at the centre of another artistic revolution, Romanticism, said something similar in describing imagination as a force which “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create”. You see this impulse in all truly radical art. Elfride Jelinek takes the assumptions of classical art and subjects it to fierce re-examination in plays like Clara S, opening jarring new perspectives, creating new ways of thinking about language. Bill Viola takes the contemplative art of the Renaissance and remakes it for a godless world in a new medium, video. Every artist you can think of creates his or her tradition, looking back to destroy and to remake, opening the new by responding both to the art that inspires them and to the times in which they live.

Given this, it seems to me that the first condition for an innovative culture is a diversity of stimulus. The broader the range of forms and practice and technology available, the more the new is possible. The greatest threat is to the new is homogeneity, a culture in which dominant forces obscure the variousness of experience in an ever-narrowing circle of self-confirmation. The other side of that equation is that innovation is also self-confirming, as I think we’ve seen over the past few years here in theatre: innovative art sparks more innovative art.

In a culture like ours, perhaps the biggest challenge is maintaining diversity. Out of a sense that opportunities are limited, we are very often presented with either/or choices: we can either have new writing, for example, or we can have "classics". Yet just as a culture that only values the old and canonical will stifle itself without their constant reinvention, a culture devoted only to the new will remain shortsighted, trapped in an ever-decreasing and ever more homogenous present.

The real challenge is how to sustain as much variousness as possible, to broaden the bases of our culture in a time when we face real difficulties. The good news is that everything we need is already to hand. We live in a time when our resources in every direction, from our environment to our funding, are under critical pressure. The one resource that is infinite is our imaginations. And that's first thing that must be nourished if we are to face the challenges ahead.

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Lastly, on a personal note, I'd like to thank, truly heartfeltly, the many people who have told me over the past few days how much they value Theatre Notes. It matters. I do it for you.

For four decades, Michael Leunig's savage and wistful universe has been one of the constants of Australian popular culture. His cartoons were a ubiquitous part of my childhood. Back in the 1970s he was still working for the lamented Nation Review, and I saw many of his cartoons for the first time in its pages - that is, until my father cancelled our subscription after a particularly pornographic review of a Cocteau film.

It seemed that a copy of The Penguin Leunig was in every Australian household. My sisters and I spent hours flipping through it, staring with wonder and hilarity at the Moomba princess strung by her toothy smile on the telegraph wires, the powdered ladies, the nose polisher.  We laughed at those mute, comic animals and the strange erotic encounters that imbued us with a mysterious sexual thrill we were too young to understand. I think we did understand, however vaguely, his darker visions, in which his wavering, fragile line revealed human beings minced in an economic machine, alienated from each other and themselves in an atomised world.

In Look Right Through Me, Kage, Kage's Kate Denborough collaborates with Leunig, leaping off many of his best-loved cartoons to create a darkly beautiful work of physical theatre. She has resisted the temptation to literally illustrate them, instead looking to translate the imagery of his imaginative world into the languages of theatre.

As with her sensitive work Headlock, which played at the Malthouse five years ago, this is a meditation on masculinity. Look Right Through Me is a manifestation of Leunig's inner world. It's a series of dreamlike sequences that move from mental imprisonment to freedom, driven by a score by Jethro Woodward that embraces, like Leunig's cartoons, the lyrical and the absurd.

Julie Renton's set, lit by Rachel Burke, puts a chainlink and barbed wire barrier between the stage and the audience. Behind it, on a darkened set lit by revolving amber lights, are a number of Leunig-like constructions: an abstract tree, a rowing boat which rears up over some small models of ducks, a bed head, a ladder. At the back is a kind of cubby house, in which there lives a small boy. At the beginning of the show, he wanders out and hangs a sign on the corrugated iron fence at the back of the stage: "Dreams will be towed away". This is, of course, a reference to Leunig's famous cartoon of the drunk in the gutter.

The world revealed here is not so much one of inner-city harshness, but rather the squalor of the suburbs: it explores a more spacious kind of desolation. The central performer, Timothy Ohl, and the child who echoes him - reflections of each other, but separate - move through a bewildering and often cruel world. The performance moves towards a reuniting with innocence, a stepping away from the seductions of alienation.

The other four dancers - three men and a woman - dramatise the man's encounters through several sequences that leap from particular cartoons. There are familiar images - a man resting in a tree, or lying in a bed sprouting grass, or a grotesque carnival - but these are occasions for investigation rather than illustration, an explication of masculine vulnerability and lostness. The danger of such an adaptation is that Leunig's fragile ethos, which always teeters on the edge of sentimentality, might be coarsened in the theatre into mere bathos. Denborough and her collaborators avoid this by making it very much its own work.

The movement itself is a mixture of dance and circus, with an exciting feeling of physical risk. In its lyrical gestures and its reach towards a naked emotional expression, some of the performance is strongly reminiscent of Pina Bausch, whose Cafe Mueller I coincidentally watched the night after seeing Look Right Through Me. This is especially true of a sequence in which Fiona Cameron flings her arms about Ohl and is repeatedly dragged away by the other performers. Thinking about Bausch, whose sense of rhythm was scrupulous, highlights the uncertainties in the dramaturgy: there are moments when the action on stage seems to splinter into dislocated elements and loses its energy, or when its repetitions cease to enrich its language. But these longueurs are balanced by some riveting moments of dance.

Pictures: Look Right Through Me. Photos: Jeff Busby

Look Right Through Me, conceived and directed by Kate Denborough, creative collaborator Michael Leunig. Designed by Julie Renton, lighting design by Rachel Burke, music composed by Jethro Woodward. Co-devised and performed by Craig Barry, Fiona Cameron, Timothy Ohl, Cain Thompson, Gerard Van Dyck, Oscar Wilson and Declan Edwards. Malthouse Theatre and Kage at the Merlyn, until September 18.

NB: This review contains spoilers

"Shakespeare," says Jan Kott, "is truer than life. One can play him only literally." It might seem counter-intuitive to some, perhaps, that Kott goes on to say that to play Shakespeare naturalistically is to butcher his plays. Shakespeare's world is not a mirror held up to mundane life, so much as an intensifier of its significant moments. The spectacle magnifies and absorbs reality, making it "truer". Kott is clearly not speaking of factual accuracy. It seems that to Kott, who demonstrates here a profound understanding of poetic, "literal" and "poetic" are pretty much synonyms.

Bell Shakespeare's production of Julius Caesar is poetic in this sense. Peter Evans examines the literal truth of the play, and forges a contemporary language in which to make it plain. The result is a lucid, profoundly exciting production that intelligently excavates a play for our political times. But first, some reflections on the politics of Shakespeare.

For Kott, Shakespeare was the artist non pareil of the Grand Mechanism of history, a tragic vision which Kott describes as a kind of metaphysical escalator peopled by the kings. "There are no bad kings, or good kings; kings are only kings," he says. As the kings claw their way to power, their actions reveal the contradiction between the world of action and the "moral order", a recognition that implicates their entire kingdoms. The kings step over the bloody heads of their predecessors to take their place at the top, only to be butchered in their turn. History is the amoral mechanism that turns good men to brutal and ruthless actions, and which deprives them of the choice to be otherwise. It is, as Kott says elsewhere, "the situation".

Betraying my intellectual crudity, I have never been sure whether the Grand Mechanism, a phrase so pregnant with portent and abstract agency, might not be more mundanely called "politics". At its most basic, politics (derived from the Greek for "citizens" or "city") is the means of making collective decisions. It is the complex mediation of power, the process of deciding who decides and who is at the mercy of decision.

Where Kott sees a monumental and crushing "reality", a world determined by a tragic mechanism called History, I see a web of intensely complex interactions through which power is produced, attacked and defended. The crux of this political reality is amplification: the kings are the productions, the amplifications, of countless actions, public and private, significant and insignificant, linguistic and military, historical and contemporary. This, however, may be merely a rephrasing for a latter time. The lack of choice that Kott describes as the condition of power remains the same, and the fulcrum of Shakespeare's historical tragedies is this recognition of powerlessness.

Two of Shakespeare's Roman plays - Coriolanus and Julius Caesar - reflect this more complex drama by explicitly bringing the state - the Roman Republic - into the purview of tragedy. As Kott says, the scene shifts from the staircase of kings to the arena of class struggle between patricians and plebians. In these plays, he says, history ceases to be a demonic history of the royal. "It is," he says, "only ironic and tragic". Certainly, Julius Caesar, in its language and dramaturgy as much as in its political insight, remains a startlingly modern play.

As Shakespeare can demonstrate, theatre is a powerful simulacrum of the political. Indeed, politics is often pejoratively described as "theatre", mostly by people with little interest in theatre itself: if politics is mere "theatre", then it is considered to be with without meaning, a dumbshow of empty gesture that has nothing to do with "reality". There is, however, a profound relationship between politics and theatre: theatre, as a conscious simulacrum of reality, mimics how politics itself is a show of simulacra, a series of simulations. Politics is a primary maker of simulations that stand in for reality, claiming to be the thing itself, and which at last infect the real with their own reality. Another is art.

The tension in politics is not between the authentic thing and its forgery, so much as between warring simulacra, those that have invaded the previous reality and themselves become "real", and those which have yet to realise their reality. (As an aside, I invite you to examine the close etymological relationship between the word "real" and "royal". Or that the real was once a unit of Spanish currency. Facing "reality" is not as straightforward as it might seem.)

There is, in this vision, no authentic "real", only a series of simulacra that stretch back through history, producing the reality that will in turn be usurped by the next simulation. In other words, it's elephants all the way down. If you follow this thought, it becomes clear that theatre is as real as anything that occurs in Parliament. It's certainly much truer.


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So, to Bell Shakespeare's production of Shakespeare's political tragedy, Julius Ceasar. It's one of his shorter plays, based on Plutarch's account of the conspiracy to assassinate Julius Caesar (Alex Menglet), at this time Emperor of Rome in everything but name, by a cabal of plotters led by Cassius (Kate Mulvany) and Brutus (Colin Moody). The action moves swiftly and cleanly to its crisis - the murder of Caesar in the Capitol - and its aftermath, when the plotters lose their battle for power in Rome, and fall on their own swords.

Despite its title, the play is the tragedy of Brutus, the honourable man whose ideals lead him to murder. At issue is the Republic, the state run by citizens (defined as people who were not slaves, or poor, or women). Most of the conspirators, caviling against Caesar's absolute authority, have baser reasons for seeking to murder the proto-Emperor, but Brutus is a true believer, and his motives, as he explains again and again, are disinterested. Caesar must die because he threatens the ideal of Rome, because in his ambition he seeks an Imperial tyranny in which his word is law. The irony is that the blood shed in the Capitol is as fatal to the Republic as Caesar's ambition.

The other major actors in the tragedy are the people of Rome, the plebians whose support is crucial to Republic and tyrant alike. Peter Evans's elegant production approaches the play as both a private and a public tragedy: Brutus's destruction parallels the destruction of free Rome. It begins with the people celebrating Caesar's return after his defeat of Pompey, the first death blow to the Republic, and ends with Brutus alone in the dark, demanding of the audience that someone hold his sword so he might run on it and kill himself.

Evans and his co-dramaturg Kate Mulvany capitalise on the modernity of Shakespeare's language to make a text that moves swiftly and fluidly across the space. Most cuts are in the final acts: the battles are here reported by Portia's ghost speaking into a microphone, and there are no eulogies for Brutus in the final moments: he is left on the brink of death, facing the destruction of all his hopes. It makes a brutal vision.

As in the "real" world, politics in Rome consists of two main means of persuasion: force of arms, and language. The play turns on two speeches made at Caesar's funeral: the first by Brutus, a bluff honourable man who believes in decency and justice, and the next by Mark Antony (Daniel Frederiksen), Caesar's off-sider, whom Brutus's decency has spared against the pragmatic advice of Cassius. Antony understands the art of manipulation far more profoundly than Brutus, who is the kind of man of thinks a spade is a bloody shovel.

Antony's speech is a masterly work of oratory, in which he sedulously keeps to the letter of Brutus's stipulation that he "shall not in your funeral speech blame us". He says only that the conspirators were "honourable men", but in each repetition of the phrase, it becomes weighted with a dreadful irony, until he might as well have proclaimed them bloody murderers to the crowd. The people, who cheer Brutus one moment as a hero, now turn against the conspirators; and from that moment all hope for the Republic is lost.

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Here we are watching something fascinating: the beginnings of a performance language. If it doesn't quite feel fully developed, it is already a powerful tool. You can see the influence of constructivist theatre in the disciplined physicality of the actors, especially in the choreography as they build a high scaffolding. But a strong and exciting sense of physical theatre imbues the details of the performances, in how they move and relate in space, in their observation of the edges of the stage (when each actor exits, he or she pauses briefly just before they step off). There are two microphones, which are used for private asides or for the voices of the public, and also as elements of Kelly Ryall's sparely brilliant sound design: actors strike the mics or breathe into them to make an earsplitting crowd noise.

There are extremely effective formal gestures as well: the actors use no props, and when Cassius shows his sword, Mulvany simply extends her hand. The murder of Caesar is performed by each actor striking him with their hands, and the violence is represented by white powder, which puffs out and floats in the light (a steal from Benedict Andrews's The War of the Roses, here given a different spin).

Alex Menglet as Caesar is the only actor who doesn't observe these formalities: as Caesar does, he breaks all the rules. His Caesar is huge: generously brutal, charismatic and careless. Moody's Brutus is his dark contrast, bowed by the weight of his conscience, unbending and breaking. As it should be, because it plays out the central meaning of the play, this is a powerful performance: Moody is as good as I have seen him in this role. We get a man in whom all passion is fiercely repressed, only to explode in rage and despair.

Kate Mulvany as Cassius is fluidity against Moody's implacability, all supple determination. It's a fascinating decision to cast her in this role, and it wiggles open the play's politics: she is left ambiguously gendered, the male nouns left unchanged, the pronouns all feminised. (Despite its contemporary relevance, the role recalls Margaret Thatcher rather than Julia Gillard.) The fight between the brothers, in which Brutus rebukes Cassius for taking bribes and betraying the ideals of the Republic, is a highlight, hair-raisingly and viciously passionate. In the supporting roles, Daniel Frederiksen's Mark Antony is in comparison disappointingly monotonal; the language carries him, rather than the other way around. I was especially taken by Katie-Jean Harding as Portia: she found a musical extremity in the language that reminded me a little of Melita Jurisic.

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The Republic is represented in Anna Cordingley's design by a classical pillar that reaches up to the ceiling, surrounded by workman's railings. In the beginning, it is already a neglected ruin, with weeds growing around it. This reminder of old Rome glowers over the set, which is a performance square marked out by chairs and surrounded by arc lamps that throw a low, yellowish light (design by Paul Jackson) over the action. After Caesar's murder, the column is splashed with blood. 

Just before Antony's speech, the performers begin to construct a scaffolding. As the power struggle rages between the conspirators and the Triumvirate that eventually wins Imperial power, the scaffolding rises until it is the height of the column. In the final moments of the play, screens are let down down over the scaffolding. On them is drawn an anaemic, life-size sketch of the column that conceals the column itself. The simulacrum of the Republic is complete, and now the Empire can begin. It's as devastatingly eloquent an image of what has happened to western democracy as I have seen.

Disclaimer: I am under commission for a music theatre work with Bell Shakespeare's Mind's Eye.

Picture: Colin Moody and Kate Mulvany in Julius Caesar. Photo: Joe Sabljak

Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare, directed by Peter Evans. Designed by Anna Cordingley, lighting design by Paul Jackson, composer Kelly Ryall. With Keith Agius, Rebecca Bower, Daniel Frederiksen, Benedict Hardie, Katie-Jean Harding, Alex Menglet, Colin Moody, Kate Mulvany, Gareth Reeves and James Wardlaw. Bell Shakespeare at the Fairfax Studio, Victorian Arts Centre, until September 17. Opens Sydney Opera House October 25. National tour dates at Bell Shakespeare.