For the first thirty seconds I thought we were in for something special in Queen Lear. Robyn Nevin in the titular role, regally costumed in red, is lushly illuminated backstage studying her face in a mirror, a cameo blooming out of impenetrable darkness. Four corridors of light delineate the borders of the stage and she paces them slowly, marking out her realm. It is arresting and bold theatrical image-making. But almost nothing in this production bears out the opening promise. Misled, misconceived, misdirected, Queen Lear is almost baffling.

Robyn Nevin in Queen Lear. Photo: Jeff Busby

There's absolutely no reason why Nevin, one of our most majestic actors, should not play this towering role. What's much less clear is why Lear therefore had to be a woman. In Benedict Andrews's sublime The War of the Roses, Cate Blanchett and Pamela Rabe played Richard II and Richard III without changing the sex of the role: as I said at the time, "we are made pricklingly aware that Richard is an actor, a player who is, moreover, a woman, Pamela Rabe, who after the play is over will walk off the stage, strip off her costume and take a shower. This double consciousness of performance is a particularly Shakespearean trope, and Andrews has exploited it to the hilt in The War of the Roses." The playing of the kings by women in that case heightened Shakespeare's essential theatricality, and brought the question of gender into intriguing play.

Here the assumption seems to be that feminising Lear has only a superficial effect on the play's meaning: as in a Lego set, all you have to do is take out the boy toy and stick in the girl toy. Since Lear is, among many other things, a profound study of patriarchy, one would expect that changing the sex of the title role might have been thought through a little more. Afterwards, seeking some clues, I read director and dramaturge Rachel McDonald's note in the program. It opens with a bald statement: "King Lear is a political story that also deals with revelation, reconciliation and the infinite".  The "infinite"? O-kay...

McDonald then drags us through some pop psychobabble ("in dysfunctional relationships, we often fall into the roles of Bully, Rescuer or Victim. In this play we watch characters continually rotate their way through this Drama Triangle"). There's reference to single-parent families - Gloucester and Lear - and "abusive parenting". We are told that "Lear's gender is almost irrelevant. The play doesn't concern itself with gender issues..." And then, confusingly: "Our female Lear is not gender-neutral casting: we are not side-stepping the issue of gender. We are embracing it, imagining the story as written for a woman in the first place." What we have, according to McDonald, is a "re-focusing" of the story, with a bad mother instead of a bad father.

Briwyant

On the evidence of Briwyant, Vicki Van Hout is rightly celebrated as one of our up-and-coming choreographers. There are moments of brilliance in this performance, which takes a Dreamtime legend and retells it as a wrong skin romance of contemporary Indigenous Australia. Van Hout's physical wit and precision are given sharp elucidation by an extraordinary company of dancers and the best sequences show a promising theatrical imagination at work.

(L-R) Raghav Handa, Henrietta Baird and Rosealee Pearson in Briwyant. Photo: Jeff Busby

Yet Briwyant is a mess, mainly due to a series of baffling design decisions. The uncredited set, which incorporates three video screens, makes it look like a refugee from the 1990s. The videos themselves add little to the show's meaning, and largely distract from the dancers. Forestage is occupied by a floor sculpture, a kind of landscape constructed of playing cards, which means in practice that for the most part the dancers are confined back stage. This limits the geometry of the choregraphy, placing most of the action at a distance, and crucially diffuses the energy of the performers and their relationship with the audience. This is exaggerated by murky lighting which means that sometimes the dance is difficult to see. The sound design is equally murky: despite some interesting compositions from Elias Constantopedos, it switches uncomfortably from amplified recorded sound to acoustic voices.

It took me a while to recover from the ill-advised opening scene that introduces the Dreamtime story, a spoken word poem weirdly rich in 19th century diction and 21st century doggerel that is theatricalised with painful obviousness. Again there's no credit for this, the only substantial text in the show, and I couldn't but wish the job had been given to one of the many fine Indigenous poets around: maybe someone with the clean, tough lyricism of Ali Cobby Eckermann. What this show lacks is focus: the dance itself is often superb, but you have to squint through the detritus to see it.

The McNeil Project

Jim McNeil is Australian theatre's version of a criminal literary celebrity. He was serving a 17-year sentence in the 1970s for armed robbery and shooting a police officer when he wrote The Chocolate Frog and That Old Familiar Juice. Both these short plays, remounted at fortyfive downstairs, are examinations of the morality of prison life. They are naturalistic dramas set in a cell with three prisoners, and both take the premise of an innocent newcomer being introduced to prison mores. The first excavates the hatred for the informer (the "chocolate frog") and the second is about the rape of a younger prisoner by one of the older men.

Richard Bligh, Cain Thompson and Luke McKenzie in That Old Familiar Juice.

McNeil's concern was to demonstrate that life inside a prison, with its brutally enforced hierarchies and hypocrisies, is a reflection of life outside it, rather than an aberration. The dialogue is tough and intelligent, and it's here given a plain and unadorned reading by director Malcolm Robertson and his cast. The standout is Richard Bligh, playing an old alcoholic prisoner in That Old Familiar Juice. Although well executed, the performances lack a necessary sense of real physical danger. The whole production has a whiff of the museum about it: McNeil's diction is very much of his time, and little in the production gives the plays the urgency of now. Worth checking out all the same for an interesting slice of Australian theatre history.

Why the capsule reviews? Reasons here.


Briwyant, directed and choreographed by Vicki Van Hout, in collaboration with the performers. Videography by Marian Abboud, lighting design by Neil Simpson, composition by Elias Costantopedos. Merlyn Theatre, Malthouse Theatre until July 14.


The McNeil Project: The Chocolate Frog and The Old Familiar Juice, by Jim McNeil, directed by Malcolm Robertson. Lighting by Katie Sfetkidis. With Will Ewing, Luke McKenzie, Cain Tjompson and Richard Bligh. Fortfive Downstairs until July 29.

The Golden Dragon

L-R: Jan Friedl, Ash Flanders, Rodney Afif and Roger Oakley in The Golden Dragon. Photo: Melissa Cowan

Roland Schimmelpfennig's deconstructed play The Golden Dragon teases out the verities of performance by pushing the text into the face of the audience. We are not asked to "believe" in the reality on stage: instead, we are asked to understand it. Everyone is cast against type: women are played by men, Asian characters by westerners, old characters by young actors, and so on. Actors move fluidly between different parts, with spoken stage directions serving as narration: the usually silent parts of a playtext - especially the pause - are said out loud. This is something like the conceit of Elevator Repair Service's Gatz - the most baffing avant garde hit of all time, in my isolated opinion - but much wittier. And, as its story unfolds, of much more significance.

The Golden Dragon is a series of vignettes featuring characters who live in an apartment block, on the ground floor of which is an Asian restaurant. The catalyst for what becomes a meditation about the treatment of illegal immigrants, exile, misogyny and violence is the extraction of a young waiter's poisonous tooth by the other restaurant staff. Daniel Clarke's sharp production takes Schimmelpfennig's conceit at face value and flies, with a top-flight ensemble cast who judge both the comedy and pathos unerringly. It also features Andrew Bailey's ingenious pop-out set, which is unpacked at the start of the play from a shipping container. After Robert Reid's On The Production of Monsters, this demonstrates that the Lawler Studio season at the MTC has invested in some classy writing. Closes July 7, so hurry.

sex.violence.blood.gore

Matt Furlani and Zoe Boesen. Photo: Sarah Walker

It's no surprise to read that Singaporean enfant terrible Alfian bin Sa'at is a poet as well as a playwright. sex.violence.blood.gore (co-written with Ching Tze Chien) is a play that exploits the poetic of theatre, pushing at the edges of rupture that also concerned Jean Genet. Like Genet, bin Sa'at explores a queer aesthetic that links sexual and colonial violence, invoking disturbing fantasies of power that open up the perversions of repression and lacing the anger of his writing with moments of unexpected lyrical tenderness. He is a moralist in the same sense as Genet, wrenching open the hypocrisies and hidden desires that writhe inside conventional moralities and offering up the resulting complexities, with a curiously dispassionate air, for our inspection. Which is to say: MKA has done us a service in breaking our Anglocentric bubble and bringing this significant writer to our notice. Singapore is just up the road, people: we (meaning me too) should know more about what's going on there.

The play itself is really a series of short plays: a repressed geography teacher whose suddenly released sexual rapacity must be destroyed at all costs; a viciously satirical skit on British colonial women fantasising about their Cantonese maids;  two lovers and two soldiers in the wake of the Japanese occupation of China and the infamous Rape of Nanking; two teens meeting a pair of transvestites on a train; a monologue from Annabel Lee, a cross between the "world's biggest porn star" Annabel Chong and Lee Kuan Yew. Stephen Nicolazzo directs a compelling production: Eugyeene Teh's set frames the action in a pink simulacrum of a traditional proscenium arch, all wonky Grecian columns and Hans Belmer naked limbs, and the cast is costumed in archly pornographic corsets, dog collars and panties, with the white-face make-up of Kabuki theatre. The performances - as in The Golden Dragon, cast against expectations - are outstanding.

Terrain

Anyone who saw Frances Rings's Artefact, half of Bangarra's double bill of earth and sky, will be aware of the power of this choreographer's sensual expressiveness. Terrain - a nine-part dance work inspired by Lake Eyre - is her first full-length work, and it's a dazzler. Springing from the Indigenous traditions of this inland sea, Rings weaves a dance of dualities - salt and water, male and female, fluidity and obduracy, body and landscape - into intricate harmonies of movement.

Parts of this work made me cry for the sheer unashamed beauty of it. This is no anodyne prettiness, but a tough, detailed and confronting grace that offers an experience of the sacred which is rare in Australian theatre.  (There's a solo by dancer Elma Kris - who must be some kind of shaman - that gave me goosebumps.) As this dance reminds us, this knowledge of the sacred is no anthropological curiosity, but as contemporary and alive as the continuing struggle for land rights. Beautifully scored by David Page with sounds ranging from Indigenous songs, throbbing electronic sound, chants for Land Rights to unadorned lyric melody, it also features a stunningly minimal design from Jacob Nash. This is a work that totally possesses you for the duration and leaves you exhilarated.

Why the short reviews? Here's why.

The Golden Dragon by Roland Schimmelpfennig, translated by David Tushingham, directed by Daniel Clarke. design by Andrew Bailey, lighting by Emma Valente, sound by Russell Goldsmith. With Rodney Afif, Ash Flanders, Jan Friedl, Dana Miltins and Roger Oakley. Melbourne Theatre Company, Law Studio, until July 7.

sex.violence.blood.gore by Alfian Bin Sa'at (with Chong Tze Chien), directed by Stephen Nicolazzo. Design by Eugyeene Teh, lighting by Yasmine Santoso, sound by Claudio Tocco. With Genevieve Giuffre, Caherine Davies, Matt Furlani, Whitney Boyd, Amy Scott-Smith, Zoe Boesen and Caitlin Adams. MKA Theatre at MKA Pop-Up, 64 Sutton St, North Melbourne, until July 17. Bookings.

Terrain, choreographed by Frances Rings. Composed by David Page, set design by Jacob Nash, cosotume design by Jennifer Irwin, light design by Karen Norris. Bangarra Dance Theatre, Arts Centre Melbourne, until July 7. Sydney Opera House July 18-August 18. IPAC Wollongong August 24-25. Adelaide Festival Centre August 29-September 1. Canberra Theatre Centre, September 13-15. QPAC, Brisbane, October 3-7.

Limitations. I haz them. And right now, I have to face the fact that I'm unable to run this blog as I would like. My other activities - which mean, among things, that I have a prospect of paying the rent - are very demanding. (I laid them out last week, so I won't repeat a list here). Regular readers will know that I've been grappling with this problem for a long time, but this winter it's felt a bit tougher than usual. A swift look through this year's reviews will show that I've tried not to compromise the writings on TN, but the fact is that they don't come easy: they take a lot of concentrated hours, brow-wrinkling, space-staring and assorted bookish riffling. I know all this stuff is what makes people value Theatre Notes, and it's also what makes it worth doing personally. But right now, what's being squeezed in between the novels, the blog and my life is me. Reluctant as I am to admit it, the pressure is doing me in.

The most sensible option is to temporarily put the blinds up here while I work on the current novel, but somehow I don't want to do the sensible option: even if it's not fully ambulatory, I'd rather keep the blog on a drip. So although it feels like a cheat, I'm going to wind things down radically. Seeing fewer shows doesn't seem to be working as a policy, so instead I'll be writing less. While I work on my latest soon-to-be-best-selling fantasy, I'll be writing capsule reviews instead of the usual essay. I should be able to post responses more promptly, and they'll at least have the virtue of alerting you to anything I consider worth seeing. In theory, this should avert total collapse. Crossing fingers, toes, eyes etc. We'll see how this works.

This week has been unexpectedly busy (in a non-theatrical manner), as the final copy edit for Black Spring arrived, marked "urgent", and has taken all of my time. And I also had to review Kate Lilley's fascinating book of poems, Ladylike (review now uploaded at Overland Journal). So I've been deleting commas and pondering Freud instead of writing about Roland Schimmelpfennig's The Golden Dragon, which opened last week at the Melbourne Theatre Company's Lawler Studio. It's on the to-do list, but while I recover my sanity, get thee a ticket.

As a slightly irrelevant PS, I have a poem in today's Australian. I can't link, as poetry is too oldfashioned to be on the internets.

First, an apology and an explanation. Your humble blogger is heroically attempting to get out less, but Melbourne, you make it hard. I seem to be presently measuring the worth of Melbourne performance by the quality and number of invitations I am forced to turn down. I feel a twinge every time I refuse an event that ticks my boxes of potential interest, and there have been a lot of twinges lately. Extrabloggish activities - talks and panels, literary reviewing and countless other sundries - are certainly gobbling much of my time. But the major distraction is making a living, which for me means novels.

Finucane & Smith's Glory Box

Looking back at the halfway mark of 2012, I realise this year has been pretty busy. My British publishers, Walker Books, have this month re-released my Pellinor quartet, in schmick new editions, with new translatory introductions (and a light edit). My Gothic novel Black Spring will be out in Australia at the end of this year with Walker Australia (early 2013 in the US and the UK). Last month I finished a new novel, Simbala's Book, another stand-alone speculative fiction work, which is now with my agent. And I am presently about a quarter of the way through a Pellinor prequel, which I haven't titled yet - titles are a constant bother for me - but which I hope will be finished to first draft status by September. Somewhere in between all the writing and editing, I also wrote a libretto for composer Gerardo Dirié, head of music studies at Queensland Conservatorium, for an opera project called Flood.

It adds up to a lot of words being pounded out on this old keyboard. I am very loath to stop seeing theatre, which gets me out of the house and which - most crucially - is not about my own work. Writers spend a lot of time in their own heads, and a large part of the value of theatre for me is that it gets me out of mine. A selfish motivation, I agree, but it probably explains why the blog is still alive after all these years. All the same, it's fair to say that at the moment I am feeling the pressure. I am considering shutting the blog down soon for a few weeks to enable me to get some serious pages under my belt, and to catch my breath.

In Macbeth, the ruling metaphor is darkness. Macbeth's "black and deep desires", pricked into life by the prophecies of the witches, overthrow the deepest oaths of feudal manliness: loyalty to king and tribe and, perhaps the strongest tabu of all, to a guest under his own roof. As bloody ambition seizes Macbeth's mind, the clear boundaries of daylight vanish in the murky shadow. The solid earth is not what it seems: it "hath bubbles, even as the water has", and quakes with portent. Even the sun is hidden: "By th' clock 'tis day," says Ross. "And yet dark night strangles the traveling lamp."

Macbeth (Dan Spielman) and the witch (Lizzie Schebesta) in Macbeth

This brooding sense of infecting darkness makes Macbeth the most claustrophobic of Shakespeare's plays. It's also one of the shortest, tracing a swift trajectory of temptation, corruption and fall. For all its feudal morality, it remains a compelling and intimate study of the paranoia of tyranny, which sews its downfall into its very fabric. Macbeth's initial murder of King Duncan to gain his crown ensures the crimes that follow, which in turn spark the rebellion that destroys him. But more germanely, as is compellingly clear in Peter Evans's lucid production for Bell Shakespeare, Macbeth's murder of Duncan is equally a violence to himself. "To know my deed 'twere best not know myself," he says, contemplating his bloody hands. It's that zombie conscience, as ruthlessly put down as the rebellious thanes but never quite dead, that drives him to madness.

In Evans's production, Macbeth becomes the hallucinations of a tormented mind. Anna Cordingley's strikingly elegant design summons mediaeval Scotland with a bare stage of rank grass. It's roofed by an angled mirror that reflects obscurely what happens beneath it, just as in the play the heavens reflect the dark acts of men. The night is made visible by a lot of haze and Damien Cooper's moody lighting, which shifts between brutal exposure and enscarfing shadow.

There is no attempt, except in a poetic sense, to make a realistic world: contemporary costumes cut against the Elizabethan language to place it in no-time, a troubled dream of the present. The stylised Meyerholdian movement of the performances is studded with images of stark realism: Banquo's half-naked corpse, for example, boltered with blood, mouth grotesquely gasping, as he sits at Macbeth's table. The effect is, startlingly, to foregound the language: Shakespeare isn't naturalised, but made strange, and so brought into thrilling focus.

Over the past couple of years, Chamber Made Opera, under the direction of David Young, has been investigating domestic space as a means for creating contemporary opera, quite literally producing operas in people's houses. The results have often been stunning: Daniel Schlusser's Ophelia Doesn't Live Here Any More, or Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey's beautifully situated Dwelling Structure. I missed Another Lament on its first outing, when it was performed in a house in Malvern, but fortunately for me, Malthouse Theatre remounted it.

Another Lament at Malthouse Theatre

Another Lament is a collaboration with Rawcus, a company which works with performers with disabilities, that draws on the songs of Purcell. Emily Barrie's set recreates in astonishing detail a wood-panelled Malvern house, complete with all its chilly Edwardian formality: there's sliding doors that open on a huge hallway, a piano, a huge chocolate cake on a occasional table surrounded by china cups and saucers.  There are even sofas in the auditorium, to reinforce the illusion of being in a house.

Director Kate Sulan uses physical performance and the crafty articulations of Jethro Woodward's sound design to create a series of tableaux that manifest something like the repressed subconscious memories and desires of the house. The performance centres on the singer and double bass player Ida Duelund Hansen, who is riveting from the moment she opens her mouth. Baroque music has often been used as a means of illuminating the quotidian - I'm thinking here of Ranters' devastatingly elegant Holiday, or even Pina Bausch's Café Müller. The purity of its lyricism works every time to generate a poignancy that seems to flower from the very centre of the mundane, rather than as decoration.

Over the past few years, I've lost count of the number of columns I've read which lament the Youth of Today. Pundit after pundit has informed me that young people, Generation Whatever, are spoilt, self-obsessed, materialistic and non-political. This always makes me think of the poet Kenneth Rexroth, who as a fascinated elder statesman was one of the first people to chronicle the youthful counter-culture of the 1960s. Back then, as Rexroth reported with constant surprise, newspaper columnists also regularly lambasted the apathetic, non-political, self-obsessed youth of the day. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose...

Publicity shot for Atlanta Eke's Monster Body

Like Rexroth, I think that underneath the surface, something interesting is stirring in Generation Youth. Of course, as in the 1960s, the majority of the population observes the status quo: what matters is the critical mass of those who don't. It doesn't take an especially sharp observer to see the symptoms of a new political urgency occurring everywhere: the raw protest of the Occupy movement through 2011, the resurgence of feminism and Marxism, the resistances against increasingly repressive regimes worldwide in Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, the responses to increasing environmental crisis. As with the apocalyptism of the Cold War, coming out of the birth of the nuclear bomb and the disaster of the Vietnam War, there is a sense of global crisis driving politics now. And, as it was back in the 1960s, you'll only find the surface reflected in the news.

Given the tumultuous events of the past couple of years, it's unsurprising that much of the work in the Next Wave festival harks back to the art of the 1970s. The difference between what's going on now and what happened then is that this is a generation that knows what has already happened: it's perhaps the most historically self-aware generation we've had, with more access to more information than at any point in human history. At its most shallow, this results in the pomo irony of the hipster. But, as performance art works like Atlanta Eke's Monster Body or Justin Shoulder's The River Eats demonstrate, this awareness of the past can lead to something altogether more interesting.

As you probably know, Ms TN has been trying to get out less. I am writing a novel which I'd like to finish before September, or at least in the next decade, and then there are all the numberless sundries that presently seem to be the texture of my life. I'm not complaining, you understand; for one thing, it's all my own fault, and for another, I love everything I do. But most of the time I feel like a mini-avalanche waiting for a jolly mountaineer to let loose a careless yodel. And then along comes something like Next Wave, trampling the heights with trumpets and elephants, and down comes the full disaster.

No Show's Shotgun Wedding

In practical terms, the past fortnight's shenanigans means that TN is about eight reviews behind. In the diary, this weekend is marked: "Catch up on Next Wave". Let's see how Alison runs, eh? If I'm a little breathless, you'll know why.

Last Saturday I saw No Show's Shotgun Wedding. Co-creators Bridget Balodis and Mark Pritchard have had an idea for a brilliant new social institution: how about we invent this thing called "marriage", right, a life-long union between "a man" and "a woman"? Let's randomly pick one of each from the people milling about on the pavement outside St Peter's in East Melbourne, and "marry" them. Let's divide the crowd in two, with half belonging to the "bride" and half to the "groom", and let's get going. Right? Right.