Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand, translated by Marion Potts and Andrew Upton, directed by Simon Phillips, design by Gabriela Tylesova. With David Wenham, Bob Hornery, Asher Keddie, Alex Menglet, David Lyons, Gerry Connolly, Carita Farrer, Hayden Spencer, Stephen Ballantyne, Adam Zwar, Russell Fletcher and Jay Bowen. Melbourne Theatre Company at the Arts Centre Playhouse until April 2.

George Bernard Shaw once contemptuously dismissed Cyrano de Bergerac as mere "pasteboard". This is a little like attacking King Lear because it's a bit depressing. Cyrano de Bergerac is about the artifice of theatre at least as much as it's about the tragedy of having a huge honker.



It was a period piece when it was written, set in a fantasia of 17th century Paris. Rostand took theatrical conventions that in 1897 were already two centuries old and whipped them into a delectable new froth. It permits him to make rude jokes about practically everyone in classical French literature, from Molière to the now (it seems deservedly) obscure Balthazar Baro, and to parody theatre itself with a fond mercilessness peculiar to its practitioners.

Simon Phillips has a flair for this sort of play, which is light without being insubstantial; I fondly remember his 1989 production of The Importance of Being Earnest, with an Aubrey Beardsley-derived set and a performance of memorable loathing from Frank Thring. He directs Cyrano de Bergerac with style, employing a spectacular design by Gabriela Tylesova, and casting David Wenham, the thinking woman's crumpet, in the title role.

This production uses a new translation by Andrew Upton and Marion Potts, which has been adapted further by Upton. The play is streamlined, excising some extraneous characters and scenes and conflating others, and updates many (but not all) of Rostand's jokes. Most riskily, the translators preserve much of the rhymed verse of the original. The gamble pays off: they create tough, vital dramatic verse, adorned with flourishes of Byronic wit. The adaptation gives Rostand a contemporary colloquial edge without in the least compromising the complexities of the original. I am all admiration.

Aside from its satirical energy which, like Molière, attacks social hypocrisy and pretension at every turn, the major reason the play has lasted is the enduring attraction of Cyrano de Bergerac himself. Cyrano is a man incapable of compromise, a shamelessly proud and idealistic poet who would, literally, die for his "panache". The irony is that if it were not for his nose, he would not be the romantic paragon he is; it's his conviction of his physical repulsiveness that drives him to such impossible moral purity.

He is the most literary of fictional heroes, a man whose passionate nature is cursed by his outrageous schnozzle (to paraphrase Eliot, only those with large noses know what it means to want to escape from them). His real tragedy is that, like his hero Don Quixote, he is born into a time and place which has little time for his ideas of honour. The difference between Quixote and Cyrano is that Cyrano is aware of his own absurdity. His vaulting literary ambition, which sneers at superficial success, is as crippling as his nose: both ridiculous and ennobling.

This self-conscious ambiguity is why Cyrano de Bergerac is more than bathetic sentiment (another Shavian judgment). Its farcical narrative of human flaws unfolds into genuine pathos. Refusing to reconcile his ideals with the corrupt and decadent world in which he lives, Cyrano creates mayhem and stirs up enemies wherever he goes; in the first half hour he leaves about eight corpses strewn about the stage. Even his most ardent friends tell him that he is a pain in the arse, and his rigid adherence to his code of honour denies romantic happiness not only to himself but to his great love, Roxane. It's the triumph of Rostand's writing that we accept that Cyrano cannot be anything other than he is, and admire him for it.

Wenham's proboscis is as astoundingly long as some of his speeches (Cyrano de Bergerac is, in the fullest sense, a play on words). He gives Cyrano a swaggering physical presence, an arrogant machismo tempered by the private delicacy and passion of his feelings. It's difficult to believe in his ugliness, even under the umbrella of his nose; this Cyrano is a handsome man obscured, rather than a man whose moral comeliness trumps his surface blemishes. Like the text, his performance is adorned with irony and seductive wit, but what shines through by the end is Cyrano's stoic moral courage, of a plainer and more stylish mode than his showy machismo, and thus more poignant.

Asher Keddie as the beautiful but distressingly literate Roxane convincingly manages the transition from intellectual infatuation and vanity to real feeling, and makes a grand foil for Wenham's Cyrano. They are ably supported, most notably by Alex Menglet at his comic best as the poetic baker Ragueneau, David Lyons as the handsome but witless lover Christiane de Neuvilette, and Hayden Spencer as his rival de Guiche, the rich nephew of Cardinal Richelieu. The cast draws on a wide range of comic tropes, both contemporary and historical; there are nods to The Young Ones and Blackadder as well as to the satires of Molière.

As the play moves towards its tragic conclusion, Wenham tends to a repetitive cadence, a dying fall on each line, which enervates the language and marginally compromises its feeling. And for all their energy, some performances lack the highly polished clarity and precision this kind of European-style theatre demands, muffling its effect. The sword fights, for example, seem hesitant, as if the actors are afraid of being cut; and some performers were hard to hear, an essential in a play which is so much about language. It gives an overall effect of being ever-so-slightly out of focus. But this feeling may well dissipate as the play warms into its season.

Gabriela Tylesova's set, sumptuously lit by Nick Schlieper, creates a rich and flexible space which draws wittily on the theatricality of the play. The transformations - from decadent Parisian society, to a set which recalls the desolate battlefield in Abel Gance's film of Napoleon to, finally, a serene evocation of a convent in autumn - are magnificently expressive realisations of the play's differing moods. And her costumes are fantasies, from Roxane's extraordinarily beautiful mourning dress to the ludicrously exaggerated fripperies of the Parisian fops.

Ian Macdonald's original music, scored for electric violin, adds considerably to the production's expressiveness, especially as it's played live on stage by Michael Harris masquerading as a blind street musician. Phillips' direction exploits the set like a conjurer, with performers popping up from trapdoors or from among the audience, or being suddenly revealed inside curtained boxes that are theatres within the theatre, or surreal bakeries, or coaches made of cheese. It's magic like this that makes me think that the proscenium arch is such a fine idea. Pasteboard? Yes, absolutely; but pasteboard with panache.

Picture: David Wenham as Cyrano de Bergerac with Asher Keddie as Roxane

Melbourne Theatre Company

Out on a Limb: unsynchronised body parts, conceived, devised and performed by by Sarah Mainwaring, in collaboration with Lloyd Jones. La Mama Theatre.

The entire emphasis of Out on a Limb, which took place over four evenings, was on the process of expression. For Sarah Mainwaring, this has a special urgency. When she was six years old, she was involved in a major car accident that left her with serious brain damage. This was followed by more than a decade of rehabilitation. Her body remains damaged by the accident: her limbs will not immediately obey her, and tasks the able-bodied manage without thinking are challenges that require all her will and ingenuity.



But, importantly, this is not a performance about conquering the limitations of the body, so much as about inhabiting and accepting it. Mainwaring's invitation to the audience to witness her struggle with her own body has an astonishing generosity and humility. That I might feel confronted by my own desire to watch such private struggles is, I think, my own business.

The performance takes place in an installation designed by Lloyd Jones and Mainwaring, which gives an impressionistic idea of the walls of a suburban house. There is a single, evocative sound, a constant harsh rustle, which I finally tracked to a plastic bag hung in front of a fan. It begins with Mainwaring peering through a window. She asks in a kind of sprachgesung, half singing, half speaking: "Who am I?" She then emerges, in a tight dress, shiny blazer and a startlingly red hat, and performs a series of tasks. The first is to pull out some wrapping paper from a basket, fold it, and tie it up with string. She makes about half a dozen little parcels, and the process takes a long time. When she has finished, the parcels are hung up on hooks on a trellis, to add to the evolving installation. She then plays with a drum, attempting to hit it and missing, puts it away, dances, poses herself in positions of entrapment and frustration.

All these simple actions take a long time, but induce a meditative patience which is particularly rewarding. Mainwaring's struggle to control her materials divests her - and therefore us - of any self-consciousness, and tying a knot in a piece of string, say, becomes absolutely mesmerising. I found myself reflecting on all sorts of things: what it means to make something, what it means to watch an action, my relationship with my own body. Mainwaring's performance includes a sense of self-parody, and that it's possible to laugh without discomfort says a lot for her evolving intimacy with the audience, an intimacy which is reinforced by Lloyd Jones' gentle coaching from the seats.

Finally, Mainwaring strips to her underpants behind the back wall, visible through a doorway, which reinforces the unsettling ambiguity of voyeurism which circles around this show. An assistant helps to take off her clothes, puts goggles over her eyes and covers her in talcum powder. Then she moves to the front stage and throws blue paint over her body. The transformation is startling, from the grotesquely powdered, goggled body to a strange, beautifully marked marine creature that writhes on paint-slicked plastic with unabashed eroticism. She stands up, with assistance as the floor is treacherously slippery, wipes the paint from her eyes, and moves to a ladder, where she sings again: "Who am I? What will I be? I hope it includes some really interesting sex."

Writing the bare outline of what happened is manifestly inadequate to the experience of being there. Out on a Limb is performance art, coming out of the late 20th century tradition in which artists have used their own bodies as art objects, framing ordinary human actions in ways which force us to see them anew; but it has its own particular challenge and abrasiveness. Perhaps I should employ some negative theology, and say what it was not. It was not "politically correct". It was not exploitative. It was not patronising. It was not artless.

"Yves Klein," said another audience member afterwards. And yes, indeed; Out on a Limb can't but echo Yves Klein's The Monotone Symphony, during which naked models daubed themselves with blue paint and, under the direction of the maestro, painted with their bodies. It also made me think of the album cover of Roxy Music's Siren, which featured Jerry Hall as an alien and beautiful mermaid. But unlike both of these things, which ward the erotic off into a distant objectivity, it put the audience in radical relationship to it, implicated in its intimacy.

Clearly it raises issues, about expectations of the body and sexuality, and about human expressiveness. And, with a peculiarly gentle insistence, it's liberating, both for the performer and those who witness her. "The artist," says the program, "is creating a form". That is all this piece is "about", and it is quite sufficient; such meanings as an audience might seek in that form are there for them to find, if they wish. For it is always possible to take nothing away. For me, Out on a Limb was a moving struggle towards freedom, a compelling expression of desire. Perhaps most signally, it had the unpornographic courage of artistic nakedness.

Picture: Sarah Mainwaring

La Mama Theatre

After the Rain by Sergi Belbel, directed by Scott Gooding, designed by Kathryn Sproul, with Gloria Ajenstat, Penelope Bartlau, Simon Kearney, Colin MacPherson, Melissa Parente, Clare Springett, Elizabeth Thomson and Shaun Worrell. Translated by John London, David George and Xavier Rodriguez Rosell. Vicious Fish Theatre at Theatreworks until March 5.

I haven't often walked out of a theatre as baffled as I did from After the Rain. I felt clear on only one point: I hadn't enjoyed the experience. But mere reactive opinion is, after all, the least interesting of responses. Why I was so bored, puzzled and frustrated is much harder to work out.

I had gone to see this production with high expectations. After the Rain is the second part of an on-going project by Vicious Fish Theatre to present the plays of Catalan playwright Sergi Belbel to Melbourne audiences. The first, Caresses, was a drama rooted in a gritty urban vernacular, and revealed a complex, poetic playwright with an intriguing formal imagination. Moreover, After the Rain won the Molière award - the French equivalent of the Tony - for Best Comedy in 1999.

It is very difficult to see what the French found so funny, or to square the tough theatrical sophistication of the play I saw last time with the apparent pointlessness of After the Rain. This makes me suspect that the first culprit might be the translation itself. Unlike Caresses, this play has three translators, and perhaps there were simply too many cooks muddling the broth.

But even given the possible shortcomings of the English text, the evening need not have been so tedious. A great deal has to be shafted home to Scott Gooding's deadeningly literal direction, which is often bizarrely at odds with the script. I'm not sure that I've ever seen a play so thoroughly obscured by a production, and this makes analysing it more perilous than usual.

My spies tell me that the French translator of Belbel's play was one of the most respected in the country, which tends to confirm my notion that the English translation has problems. But it's possible also - given that theatre in France is, for good or ill, a director's theatre - that After the Rain is an inferior play to Caresses, but was dressed to advantage with a brilliant production.

I'm unable to read Catalan, and can only guess what the play might be like in its original language. Certainly I can form no opinion of Mr Belbel. Squinting through my memories of the script, I can make out echoes of a poetic based on repetition, perhaps a shadow of the kind of linguistic satire that Michel Vinaver attains in his own plays on corporatism: in any case, various hints of verbal complexity and depth that might have made something interesting of what otherwise seems to be a structurally predictable work.

After the Rain is set on the roof of an multistorey office building in a city which has been drought-stricken for more than two years. It consists of a series of short scenes between various office workers who escape for an illegal cigarette. In this corporate world, addiction to nicotine can cost a worker their job, and so (in the beginning, at least) the office workers' trysts are secretive and paranoid. However, as the play progresses, it turns into a kind of surreal comedy, with love affairs and corporate intrigues being played out between dream-scenes and increasingly irrational events. It culminates in comedic Shakespearean couplings, with various characters abandoning their restricted corporate lives to run away in happy pairs.

Presumably part of the metaphor at play here is between sterility (drought, emotional and literal, in an authoritarian corporatised world) and an opposing fertility (rain, sex and babies). There is a troubling subtext of misogyny which is, at least in this production, presented without irony: a long speech by one character about how much he hates powerful women; the brutal and reasonless murder and rape of the wife of another character; the resolution of one woman's madness by that old remedy, "a good fuck"; another woman's life, however successful otherwise, rendered meaningless by her infertility. Given my wholesale reservations, I am utterly unsure what to make of this aspect of the play: it could be commenting on misogyny, rather than being itself misogynistic. It is impossible to tell.

I can only surmise that some mistaken decisions were made early on about how to approach the text, which then trapped the entire process. This seems borne out by the design. Kathryn Sproul's set - a rooftop set forestage, surrounded by metal railings - forces the actors to clamber on and off stage via a ladder, which makes entrances and exits cumbersome, time-consuming and mind-numbingly predictable. A row of watercoolers set behind the raised roof do nothing more than suggest what we already know, that off-stage there are offices. Dominating the back of the theatre is a huge screen, which remains strangely unexploited for almost the entire evening (even some projected clouds would have been welcome). To emphasise the static staging, the lighting states remain monotonous for the whole show, shifting maybe twice to indicate that a particular scene is a dream rather than "reality".

The effect is to reduce to a stilted literalness a play which is clearly meant to move fluidly between surreal and actual realities. This mono-dimensional direction extends to the performances, which attack the script with an edge of hysterical parody that tramples any subtleties it might have had. Simon Kearney and Colin MacPherson are the only actors who manage to find some kind of complexity in the script, and certainly Simon Kearney seems to be in a different play.

These problems are compounded by a lack of attention to detail. For example: perhaps to emphasise the corporate tyranny, the performers are costumed in uniforms that are in no way supported by the script, which means that a long speech by the Blonde Secretary about how she never wears black shoes is somewhat undermined by the fact that she is, in fact, wearing black shoes. And so on.

It's hard to escape the conviction that this is a very naive production of a potentially interesting play. I only hope the next production in the series serves us - and Sergi Belbel - rather better.

Link

Theatreworks

Subclass26A, directed by Bagryana Popov, performed by Rodney Afif, Ru Atma, Natalie Cursio, Simon Ellis, Nadja Kostich, Majid Shokor; music by Elissa Goodrich; design by Anna Tregloan; dramaturgy by Maryanne Lynch.

The vexed question of politics and art is one of the fiercest debates of modern culture. Broadly the argument rages between two poles. In the blue corner (or the red, if one is American) are those who contend that art is above politics, an argument stemming from Matthew Arnold's imperial ideas about culture. In the opposing corner are the revolutionaries, who claim that art has a duty towards radical ideologies. Most artists, who are by nature sceptical of dogma of any kind, can be found slugging it out somewhere in the middle, arguing on the one hand that all art is inescapably political, and on the other that its highest duty is to its own imperatives.

It's wholly untrue to assert, as many conservative critics do, that art that engages with social and political critique compromises an essential artistic purity. Much of the significant art of the past three centuries - from Shelley's Masque of Anarchy and Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro to the work of Brecht's Berliner Ensemble or Brazilian theatre activist Augusto Boal - has been in the tradition of political and social dissent. As well as, it must be confessed, much of the worst - we've seen agitprop, and we don't like it.

Art, after all, should do rather more than restate arguments that would be better expressed in a pamphlet. Subclass26A, a powerful group-devised movement piece which addresses the question of Australia's brutal treatment of asylum seekers, demonstrates beautifully how this can be done.

I will describe the theatre in a moment. But first, some background, necessary because this piece employs a fragmentary text drawn in part from a variety of real sources: documents from the Department of Immigration, letters from asylum seekers, and primary research conducted by the artists themselves.

Our treatment of asylum seekers is one issue that starkly exposes the darker side of Australia's self-image as "the lucky country". We are the only nation in the world which compulsorily imprisons asylum seekers, a policy which calls up unsettling echoes of gulags and concentration camps. Tellingly, as Richard Ackland commented in 2003, the Federal Government's "Pacific solution" demonstrated a baffling insensitivity to the grim connotations which still attend that word "solution".

As Malcolm Fraser and others have pointed out, our immigration policies are racist and inhuman. But those who protest the totalitarian aspects of these policies are attacked as "bleeding heart liberals" with an "agenda", their voices marginalised by a combination of misrepresentations or outright lies and populist xenophobia.

Asylum seekers are the only class of people who may be locked up indefinitely, beyond the redress of any court. They have fewer rights than convicted paedophiles or murderers, despite the fact that they have been charged with no crimes, and the even more appalling fact that many of them are children: between 1999 and 2003, 2,184 children had been held for varying lengths of time (averaging more than a year) in detention centres.

The suffering caused by the Howard Government's policies has been widely documented and has attracted widespread international and local condemnation, including rebukes from all six of the human rights agencies of the UN. Even the horrors of the SEIVX and the heart-rending personal testimonies of the children whose lives have been blighted by imprisonment have made no impact on the public apathy towards those the popular media dub, erroneously, "illegal immigrants". The sheerly brutal cynicism of our policies toward refugees and asylum seekers is an on-going scandal of Australian society.

Bagryana Popov and her performers address these issues with intelligence and passion, eschewing the temptations of simplistic agitprop. Neither do they go down the now conventional road of "documentary theatre": the added element of dance (three performers are dancers, three actors) gives the piece a stylised, alienating edge which, in a paradox peculiar to art, intensifies its emotional power.

While this group is deeply engaged with the issues, it is equally concerned to give these experiences the dignity of art. This work has the clarity of a high degree of moral and intellectual sophistication. The fragmentary text - a collage of individual experience spoken in English and Arabic, bureaucratic documents and dialogues - is poetically cadenced. Dramaturges Maryanne Lynch and Tom Wright create a simple narrative spine around three asylum seekers, telling a story of arrival, detention and Kafka-esque bureaucracy. Against the impersonal officialese of imprisonment, the human body speaks an anarchic tale of despair, love, anger and madness.

Popov's direction has an attentive eye to focus, creating eddies of movement and speech which rise chaotically and suddenly clear to brief vignettes, only to be caught up again in a flurry of movement. There is an emphasis on neurotic repetition, both the endless monotony of institutional life ("breakfast from 8.30 to 9am, lunch 12 to 12.30...") and the increasingly dissociated movements of mental illness. The emotional fluctuations are stringently orchestrated by Elissa Goodrich'sspare, percussive score.

This approach permits a moral and political complexity often missing from theatre which has previously addressed these issues. Brutality is not confined to officials: the prisoners themselves are capable of cruelty. One of the striking elements of this piece is its focus on how such policies brutalise those who implement them as much as their targets. The despairing social worker unable to help increasingly desperate people, the guards who lose their capacity for empathy, are as trapped as the asylum seekers in a nightmare of systemic, soul-eroding sadism.

Anna Tregloan's stylishly minimalist design uses the white box space of fortyfivedownstairs to magnify the sense of human alienation, the notion that asylum seekers and refugees are infections which must be quaratined from the social body. The huge window which usually dominates the theatre is covered by a white wall into which is let a tiny, opaque window, which provides the only glimpse of freedom. The stage is divided by lighting and subtle design elements into rectangular areas through which the performers move uneasily, dark human figures in an antiseptic, inhuman universe. The audience is seated at the near end of the theatre, and the production takes full advantage of the stage's depth, creating a surprisingly rich texture of physical gesture and spatial image with a rigorously limited vocabulary.

A great deal of this production's success stems from its disciplined restraint, its refusal to press the standard emotive buttons and so diminish the complexities of the human issues it addresses. Subclass26A powerfully communicates not only the despair of detained asylum seekers, but the reasons for that despair; we can work out the injustice for ourselves. One of the performers, Iraqi actor Majid Shokor, is quoted in the program as saying: "theatre is a place where justice and redemption can be found". I don't believe that anyone involved in this production believes that this work will stop the mistreatment of those who only ask for our help; but the urgent desire to express the complexities of human experience, to redress the silencing of the powerless, is nevertheless a potent political act. An act of hope.

Links
fortyfivedownstairs
Fitzroy Learning Network
The National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention
Human Rights Watch:Deterring Asylum Seekers by Violating Rights

So another of the giants of 20th century drama has gone. It's a measure of Arthur Miller's enduring distinction that his death has generated headlines around the world. I won't add to the thousands of words heaped on his passing, except to note briefly that Aubrey Mellor, now director of NIDA, said only this week that Miller was still the dominant influence on Australian theatre, which ought to have "moved on" by now. Well, progress is an odd concept when applied to the arts, and The Crucible seems, sadly, to be coming back into its own. Perhaps, like most influential artists, Miller needs to be rescued from his imitators and his fame. Below, a few links:

Obituary - Independent
Obituary - The Guardian
Memoir - Independent
Obituary - New York Times

Trapped by the Past: Why our Theatre is Facing Paralysis, by Julian Meyrick. Platform Paper No. 3, January 2005, Currency House, ISBN 0 9581213 7 0

"Those who cannot remember the past," said George Santayana, "are condemned to repeat it". Applied to theatre, this is a vision of terrifying sterility: some outer circle of Hell, decked out like a cross between an English drawing room and the set of Neighbours. And as Julian Meyrick argues in his very interesting polemic, Australian theatre's ignorance of its own history dooms it to an endless cycle of "forgetting and despair".

Too right, say I: if memory is a form of consciousness, then Australian theatre, as a discrete if debatable entity, is a dead duck. We barely have a repertoire: how often do we see reinterpretations of classic texts by White, Hewett, Beynon, Kenna, Hibberd, or any other playwright who has made a mark in the past fifty years? And how many new plays have any life beyond a single four week season?

I'm grateful to Meyrick - that rare beast, a theatre historian - for his careful delineation of this problem in his paper Trapped by the Past. He spends some time discussing how institutional and governmental structures and assumptions have formed the present, and he chronicles a depressing history of botched or even hostile public policies and damaging intercinine rivalries. But Trapped by the Past is, most importantly, an impassioned plea for cultural memory.

"Donald Horne's complaint that the industry's idea of cultural debate is a one-line telegram signed by twenty artists points up the lack of articulated vision coming from theatre professionals on the ground today," says Meyrick. "At a recent public meeting on the future of Playbox, I was not the only one struck by the lack of specific knowledge about the company we had come to discuss. And when, at the end, someone stood up - as someone always does - and said 'Who needs the past anyway?' - as someone always does - a vision rose before my eyes of a wheel of fire on which Australian theatre was to be endlessly wracked, our historical forgetting a constituent part of our on-going suffering."

The Greeks said (they got a lot of things right) that Memory was the mother of the Muses, so cultural amnesia is probably about half of the thousand cuts that are currently bleeding Australian theatre dry. But Meyrick's thesis is not so much that Australian theatre has forgotten its past, as that it only remembers certain parts of it. He points out that theatre is an art form with a history that extends far beyond our sea-girt shores and into a past far deeper than the past thirty years, facts which too seldom seem to enter our theatrical conversations; but here his main concern is with local history.

His experience of finding teasing glimpses of alternative, unwritten histories echoes my own when, as a young critic, I was attempting to inform myself about Australian theatre. I remember being told about all sorts of interesting things - the international avant-garde edge in the APG, for example, or the feminist theatre of the '70s - to which I could, frustratingly, find little or no reference in the histories and overviews I consulted. Meyrick mentions how whole swathes of experience - that of older actors trained in the "Anglo" tradition of theatre, who remember the Tiv and music hall - have been forgotten, and how much poorer we are for this loss. The commonly accepted story is how this kind of theatre, colonial and hidebound, was swept aside in the larrikin "New Wave" of the late 60s and early '70s, when Australian theatre, as the myth goes, first found its "voice". These other, overshadowed histories made the prevailing myth - which is, of course, not entirely inaccurate - both more interesting and more complex.

As Meyrick says, "Australian theatre is an art form in wilful ignorance of its own past, and the upshot is an industry that appears less interesting than in fact it is... the truth is fabulous, intriguing, high coloured, a story of titanic struggles, colossal achievements, massive defeats, murderous betrayals..." Which, if it recalls one of those thrillers with raised gold lettering so prominent in airport bookshops, has the virtue of sounding more exciting than the usual unquestioning narratives of nationalism vs. colonialism.

Although he focuses on generational change and, in particular, on the disastrous dominance of Playbox Theatre in the recent development of new Australian work, the true value of Meyrick's paper resides elsewhere. Meyrick does claim that a generation of theatre artists who are now in prominent positions through Australian theatre are, deliberately or not, stifling innovation in the art. But he says this is the result of a fracture that occurred when the New Wave first appeared, polarising the culture - on the one side, the conservative, authoritarian model, on the other the brash, questioning, anti-authoritarian Vietnam protesters - and the twain ne'er met anywhere. And he claims that the lack of a perception of a common ground - a recognition that, whatever their differences, they were pursuing to their best abilities a mutual passion for an abstract but real thing called "Australian theatre" - led to an impoverishment of theatre culture that is now having disastrous consequences for younger artists.

"The real problem," says Meyrick, glancing over the tangle of spats and rivalries which characterise the discourse, "is that the 'debate' is founded on such a fierce determination not to understand other points of view that any intellectual gain from the sparring of competing minds is lost."

Bravo, Mr Meyrick: that's the underlying problem in a nutshell. What he is describing is a pervasive anti-intellectualism that has been the bane of Australian theatre on all sides, and a lack of disinterested commitment to theatre itself. As much as reducing discourse to pitched battles and skirmishes between rival interests, this often expresses itself in a puzzling incuriosity about theatre as an art form. Most bizarrely, given its often nationalistic dress, it manifests as a condition of cultural cringe which very often marginalises new or original Australian voices which (as they should) challenge prevailing mores. Meyrick, whose main concern is with what he calls "verbal drama" (aka plays), correctly questions where that leaves new playwrights and other emerging theatre artists.

There is, in fact, a surprising number of young and engaged theatre writers; but as things stand, their outlook is fairly bleak. As Meyrick says, the lack of a well-supported middle sector of theatre, between co-op fringe productions and the major state institutions, means that it is extremely difficult for new artists, and especially new playwrights, to evolve. He fields some depressing statistics, courtesy of Geoffrey Milne, about the shrinkage in contemporary theatre. Between 1986 and 2003, the number of new productions by state theatre companies declined from 49 to 29.8 - a drastic fall approaching almost 50 per cent. And, even worse, the production of new plays by local and overseas writers in alternative companies has declined by 30 per cent in twenty years.

This situation is in part a result of the withdrawal of funding for the middle tier companies - Anthill, The Church, Theatreworks, the Red Shed and others - which actively commissioned and produced new works. Australian theatre has never recovered from this policy-driven act of cultural vandalism. In Victoria, Playbox Theatre was supposed to pick up the slack, providing a greenhouse for the tender young shoots of new work; but Playbox's devastatingly poor audience figures reflect the failure of this policy. It is neither possible nor desirable to replace what was once the province of many alternative theatres with a single, corporatised entity: like all ecosystems, theatre needs diversity to survive. And it is a measure of theatre's ill-health that its diversity has been declining in both absolute and generic terms over the past two decades. Not only are fewer plays being produced, but fewer kinds of plays.

All the same, in the general atmosphere of gloom one shouldn't overlook the energies and vitalities that do exist. Out of the vacuum have sprung many small, independent companies which produce new plays, both Australian and international, with minimal or no funding. And one should not forget La Mama either, a unique treasure which actively supports the notion of an open and diverse theatre culture. Yet the fact remains that, however hard-working and imaginative they may be, these independent companies struggle with a paucity of resources that severely limits what they are able to achieve. The genius of Australian theatre has so often lain with "poor theatre": great things have happened there. But as a default policy, it is no way to grow a vibrant and stimulating culture. There is a point where companies, simply, need money to make the art they should.

There's no getting away from the fact that part of the many-faceted crisis facing Australian theatre is the increasingly tight availability of funds, a complex issue in itself bedevilled by the whole problem of arts advocacy. Meyrick often refers to the "theatre industry"; a common enough phrase, but a symptom of a deeper problem. As I said in an essay last year, picking up on Donald Horne's observations on the "economisation" of the arts:

I can remember when people started talking about the "arts industry", back in the early '90s. I thought at the time it was a harbinger of doom. The argument used to lobby for arts funding was almost exclusively economic: the arts created employment, generated tourism, and so on. (There was, I think, a little discussion about social capital.) This focus seems to have modelled almost all subsequent advocacy for the arts. And what we have created is a monster, to which all the arts must now pay tribute: the arts industry is here to stay, and arts companies are expected to function like other economic entities, and to justify their existences by making a profit for their "stakeholders"....

Given its devastating impact ... it is not surprising that the idea of the "arts industry" has been attacked recently by several eminent Australians, including Donald Horne. Horne says the "economisation of culture" is a fundamentalist creed. "It's not supported by public stonings or beheadings but its effect can be pretty ruthless," he said in a speech in 2002. "It's the kind of language that turns our society into 'the economy', our citizens into 'the consumers' and our public funds into 'taxpayers' money'." He described the phrase "the arts industry" and the adoption by arts advocates of the vogue-ish terminology of the markets as a Trojan horse. "How is it, "he asks, "that people concerned with speaking up for 'the arts' and other cultural activities have been reduced to that kind of twaddle?"

Yes, we need another phrase. But that aside, Meyrick's main claim is that theatre practitioners need to overcome their distaste of the nationalistic connotations of the term "Australian theatre", and to regain a concept of a "whole" Australian theatre, a sense of common endeavour and generosity which admits difference (and history). Which raises two questions for me, neither of them rhetorical: when was this golden age, before we lost this sense of "over-arching identity"? Might it not rather be an imaginary Eden that now must be, to mix my metaphors, forged fresh in the smithy of our souls? And, secondly, do we need the term "Australian" at all, or could this sense of identity be found simply in the term "theatre"? It sometimes seems to me that the term "Australian" is so vexed that often the idea of "theatre" gets elided altogether.

This is not to ignore, but rather to embrace, Meyrick's point about specific Australian traditions. To think of a common practice of theatre is to enfold these traditions into a wider and richer context which includes all theatre, in all times and all languages. Australian theatre is still overwhelmingly Anglophone, looking over its shoulder towards London and New York - even the name of this series, Platform Papers, is taken from a National Theatre initiative. And I would suggest that this linguistic parochialism is one of its problems, and one reason why such a narrow range of aesthetic is admitted into mainstream discussion.

With the Anglophone bias goes the traditional Anglo suspicion of "intellectuals". Meyrick digs up some classic artist-bashing, of the kind made familiar by such pundits as Andrew Bolt; but what is less easy to see and, I think, ultimately more damaging, is the anti-intellectualism within the artform itself. I remember speaking to a distinguished literary critic, then reviewing theatre, who told me airily that he never read new plays as they weren't "literary", something that astonished me. What is sadder is that playwrights themselves, mistaking "literary" for meaning "prosaic" or "untheatrical", often have a similar idea about their own work. At one stroke, this removes the art of writing plays from the entirety of experiment and argument that is imaginative and critical literature, and places it - where? In an isolated playpen with crayons and dolls?

A result of this is that much theatrical experiment in Australia has been confined to "non-verbal drama" of various kinds, out of a feeling that "verbal drama" is aesthetically limiting, and the writing of plays itself has desiccated into a hidebound naturalism. It is common to hear "text-based theatre" spoken of in a dismissive way, as the conservative wing of theatrical artistry. This is inaccurate in terms of wider history, where writing has been the engine for most innovations in modern theatre, but here it has a certain self-fulfilling truth. And this raises a crucial issue, which is the lack of a critical discourse which can discuss aesthetic qualities in any useful manner. In the absence of this, no amount of structural institutional analysis - useful and necessary though it is - can make any sense. The mere presence of new Australian work is no guarantee of cultural health; it has to be Australian work that matters. But how one determines what makes it matter is another, and even thornier, question.

Links

Currency House
SMH - Talking 'Bout Another Revolution
The Age - Getting Bums on Seats

Season's greeting to all Theatre Notes readers, and my best wishes for 2005.

When I started this blog, back in June, I said I'd continue if it was found readers and was fun. TN has managed both very nicely, so we'll be continuing into next year, building on what's been started here. We've scored around 8500 hits since we started - modest but solid - and TN has been guesting on ABC Radio and elsewhere. The main joy of doing this blog is my complete independence; if the odd typo sneaks in past my editing, at least no one is slashing my carefully wrought copy to pieces. I have a few ideas which might get a run over the next few months, hoping to open out a context which is slightly more international, and I'm looking forward to seeing how the site evolves over the next year.

I'd like to thank Melbourne theatre companies for their support, and a special thanks to all those who have emailed or otherwise contacted me and given me such encouragement over the past six months. I've been quite taken aback by the level of good will I've discovered in the theatre community here, and that, more than anything, convinces me that what's happening here is worth doing. Champagne to the lot of you.

I won't do an end-of-year review, as I've only got six months to look back on. But I will say it's been an interesting time, and I've seen some remarkably good theatre. January will be relatively quiet here, though there will be a couple of reviews. But mainly I have to put my head down and finish my novel before I grow senile, and so that is where I'll be putting most of my energy for the next few weeks. And then I'll be back full-throttle.

See you in 2005!

Alison

Hamlet by William Shakespeare. Directed by Oscar Redding, with Richard Pyros, Adrian Mulraney, Nicki Paull, John Francis Howard, Thomas Wright and Ben Packer. DDT Studio, 515 High Street, Northcote. La Tragedie d'Hamlet, directed by Peter Brook, with Adrian Lester, Jeffery Kissoon, Natasha Parry, Bruce Meyers, Scott Handy, Shantala Shivalingappa, Rohan Siva, Asil Rais, Yoshi Oida, Akram Khan, Nicolas Gaster, Antonin Stahly, Jerome Grillon. DVD, Agat Films 2001.

On the face of it, it may seem very unfair to compare these two versions of Hamlet. One is a filmed production by one of the greatest theatre directors of the past century, created in Brook's gorgeous Paris base, the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord; the other an exemplary example of poor theatre, put on by a young Melbourne director in a shop front in High Street, Northcote.

As it happens, it is not unfair; theatre is a great leveller. Perhaps for similar reasons - a certain straightforwardness in approaching Shakespeare - both are notable for their clarity, and they share a great text and remarkable actors. Where Redding's production lacks Brook's exquisite aesthetic polish, it gains in robust irreverence and visceral power. But what strikes me most is how both these productions spin the focus on this most protean of texts, to reveal a Hamlet in whose body itself turns the sword of politics.

The great Shakespearean critic Jan Kott says of Hamlet that it is a play that absorbs its times. So there are, among many others, the Romantic Hamlet of the 19th century, wanly melancholic; the mid-Century Hamlet, which Kott particularly documented, in which interpretation leans on the pitiless wheel of power; and now this 21st century Hamlet, at once sensuous and full of loathing, raging against the mortal trappings of his flesh.

Part of the reason for these many Hamlets is that the six hour text is seldom performed entirely as written. It means that each production is cut according to the cloth of its interpretation. Both Brook and Redding take a broadly similar approach, removing the cumbersome opening scene with the ghost, and cutting out entirely the complicated narrations of battles and politics. They fillet out a claustrophobic family tragedy of individuals trapped in remorseless passions. In these productions, the personal is most assuredly political.

This approach rejects most modern interpretations of Hamlet, in which the character of Fortinbras is brought to the foreground. Fortinbras - who claims the throne of Denmark after all the corpses stop twitching on the floor - is in some versions an alter ego of Hamlet, in others, the legitimate heir to the throne, the man who restores order to the broken kingdom. "If one wishes to places Hamlet's moral conflicts into a historical context," says Kott, "one cannot ignore the role played by Fortinbras".

Well, in these versions Fortinbras has disappeared entirely. But I think this is not so much a symptom of ahistorical consciousness, as a lack of belief in the possibility of the restoration of order, or even in the possibility of order itself. No king now comes to make it all right: the plays ends with the slaughter. Today's Hamlet is considerably darker than previous versions: it contains no illusion of consolation.

The brooding sense of claustrophobia is reinforced by the doubling, some of which is repeated in both productions: in both, Polonius and the gravedigger (Bruce Meyers in Brook's, and John Francis Howard in Redding's), and Claudius and the Ghost (Jeffrey Kissoon and Adrian Mulraney respectively) are played by the same actor. The doubling of Claudius in particular throws Hamlet's revulsion against his uncle into ironic relief: we are reminded that he is importuned to kill his own kin, outraging familial ties just as his uncle did in murdering Hamlet's father.

Redding goes much further, doubling the roles of Gertrude and Ophelia (Nicki Paull), which makes the play's incestuous sexual drama even more knotted. His most audacious move is to double the roles of Hamlet and his friend Horatio: Horatio is played as a handpuppet. That you accept this without question is a considerable tribute to the intensity and skill of Richard Pyros' performance. What is fascinating is its theatrical ambiguity: part of the time, it is quite possible to imagine seriously that a ridiculous pair of pink eyes is Horatio, Hamlet's only friend; at other times, the hand puppet seems another aspect of his madness and loneliness, a crazed aspect of Hamlet's splintered self.

Adrian Lester's Hamlet is gentler than Richard Pyros', whose wit is crueller and violence more dangerous (especially when he is holding a huge kitchen knife to Gertrude's throat). Lester's performance is framed by lush, rich sensuousness: the rust-red walls of the theatre, the naked flames of lamps, luxurious crimson fabrics, the melancholy scrape of a cello. Pyros, on the other hand, is working in a bare, scruffy space lit by fluorescent tubes, with the sound of high street traffic as background accompaniment.

But again I was struck by similarities as much as differences: these Hamlets are mercurial, impelled by savage laughter rather than by dark melancholia. They describe an intelligence tormented by circumstance: that circumstance being primarily mortality, the fate of all flesh, but also its sullying, a fatal disgust at moral and fleshly corruption.

Of course, there is more to Hamlet than Hamlet; and these productions feature ensemble casts of great depth. One would expect that of Brook; but Redding has gathered together some very fine actors, who have created a subtlety and depth of performance which rivals, and in the case of Ophelia surpasses, that Brook elicited from his. All deserve mention, but Adrian Mulraney's authoritative and subtle performance as Claudius - both unrepentant usurper and repentant brother - never falters.

In Redding's production, the women's roles are strong and disturbing. Nicki Paul plays Gertrude as an alcoholic, constantly sipping from a jam jar, who imperceptibly becomes more and more drunk as the play progresses, until by the final scene she can barely stand. Her announcement of Ophelia's death - told through uncontrollable fits of laughter - brings home the terror of the girl's suicide in a way that no sober rendition could. And Ophelia's mad scene is shaming and pitiable, in the way that real madness is.

It is very clear in this drama how the women are destroyed, both morally and physically, by their entrapment within male power. The single power Gertrude and Ophelia possess is their sexuality: it is their "virtue", a commodity which belongs to the family, not to themselves, and it is not theirs to bestow freely. Laetres (Thomas Wright) and Polonius lecture Ophelia at length about how she ought to be behave, and Hamlet likewise has no hesitation in censuring his mother for outraging the legitimate bonds of marriage. The fear of women's anarchic sexual desire lurks uneasily beneath the surface of the action, erupting in male disgust ("Frailty, thy name is woman!") or in female madness and despair.

But it is not the women who are treacherous, but the men: most notably, Claudius's murder of his brother to gain the crown, the betrayal which unravels all the rest. And there is also Hamlet's feigned detestation of Ophelia, which drives her to suicide; Rosencrantz and Guildernstern's deceptive spying on Hamlet, betraying the bonds of friendship; Laertes' betrayal of honourable combat, by poisoning his sword.

Hamlet is, more than almost any other Shakespearean play except perhaps The Tempest, deeply concerned with the provenance of theatre itself. Almost no one in the play is who he or she seems to be: all are playing roles, whether self-imposed or not, and this is underlain by our knowledge that the "real" characters are played by actors, who are also not who they seem to be. Is this merely deception and betrayal? Hamlet's pretended madness is, rather, an attempt to find the truth: as he says, "the play's the thing/ In which to catch the conscience of a King". These potent ambiguities, the mask as a revealer of truth and as a lie, drive the fascination of the action as much as the repressed sexual passions.

There is a vital difference between these two productions: one was performed four years ago, and was watched on a screen; the other occurred live, feet away from me. No recorded performance beats the living experience, no matter how artfully filmed it might be. But they both gave me a new Hamlet, and reminded me that it is, as Kott says, "the strangest play ever written".

Both productions tear away the cultural barnacles that so often weigh down this most monumental of English icons - the deadening reverence, the fear of poetry, the stereotypical expectations - and deliver it into the present, with all the complexities and contradictions of a living thing. It's a rare experience that always leaves me elated. And such experiences are why I persist in going to the theatre.

But of course money isn't everything; great theatre can be made with very little, as it is in Australia, over and over again. It's simply a pity that it can't be made a little easier . . . but for that to happen, you’d have to have a government that actually cared about culture and not the gang of moral and cultural bankrupts that are in power at the moment, who seem determined to silence creative voices and reduce us all to frightened, well behaved children. You'd also have to have an audience that felt empowered, that felt the theatre was something important, and that it belonged to them and meant something to them.

Last night, playwright Daniel Keene delivered the keynote address for graduation students at Swinburne University of Technology's Small Companies and Community Theatre Course. His experiences working as a writer in French theatre give a different slant to the possibilities of theatre's place in the community. For the full speech, click on...

I've been invited here tonight to say something about my experience as a playwright, with specific reference to my work in France and my involvement with French theatre companies, particularly concerning those companies’ Community Theatre work.

I should first explain briefly what my involvement with French theatre is.

My work has been produced in France, in French, for the past five years. I have had six volumes of plays published by Editions Theatrales (that’s 22 plays in all). My plays have been performed at Scene Nationales (National Theatres) in Toulouse, Calais, Bordeaux, La Rochelle, Nimes, Strasbourg, Nantes, Challon, Douai, Limoge and Marseille among others. It has also been produced at theatres such as the Theatre de la Ville in Paris (which annually attracts the largest audiences in the city, and has two theatres of 1,000 and 800 seats respectively), at the Theatre de la Commune and Theatre du Rond-Point, both also in Paris, at the Theatre de la Moliere in Bordeaux and at the Avignon Festival. I've had five plays produced by France Culture (French National Radio) and one broadcast on Arté (French national television). For the past six years I have travelled to France at least once or twice a year, staying for about two months each time.

I am at present working on a number of commissions for French theatre companies, including two opera librettos, a play for marionettes, an adaptation of a novel by the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare and a play for Maurice Benichou, an actor/director who has worked with Peter Brook at the International Centre of Theatre Research in Paris for the past thirty years.

The theatres I work with are all state funded. I have not been involved in the Private Theatre (what we’d call Commercial Theatre) which is limited to musicals, light comedies and bedroom farces, the tackiness of which sometimes defies description: basically, private theatre provides slick, popular (if expensive) entertainment for the upper middle class. For me, it's what Peter Brook describes as 'deadly theatre' in his book The Open Space, which remains one of the best books ever written about theatre and what it can mean.

The funding and structure of French theatre is a complex business. But to be very brief, the two main tiers of state funded theatre are Scene Nationales (National Theatres) and CDNs (National Dramatic Centres). I probably needn’t tell you that the funding theatre receives in France makes the funding it receives here look like a mere pittance (which in fact it is).

I currently have three plays running in Paris: Paradise at Theatre de la Commune, (a co-production with Theatre de la Ville), Because You Are Mine at Theatre de l’Opprimé (the Theatre of the Oppressed, which was founded by the Brazilian director, playwright and theatre activist Augusto Boal in the 1970s during his political exile in Paris) and Black is the Colour at La Boutonniere (The Buttonhole: a small, newly established, studio theatre).

For me, one of the many reasons for working in France is the breadth of the theatrical possibilities it offers me. While in Australia I am considered a "fringe playwright", in France my work is produced in popular, mainstream theatres. Of the plays currently running in Paris, Paradise is the largest production. It opened in September and will run until March next year, playing in at least five cities. The budget for the production is 600,000 euros (that's just over one million dollars). There’s a lot you can do with that much money.

But of course money isn't everything; great theatre can be made with very little, as it is in Australia, over and over again. It's simply a pity that it can't be made a little easier . . . but for that to happen, you’d have to have a government that actually cared about culture and not the gang of moral and cultural bankrupts that are in power at the moment, who seem determined to silence creative voices and reduce us all to frightened, well behaved children. You'd also have to have an audience that felt empowered, that felt the theatre was something important, and that it belonged to them and meant something to them. But perhaps all of that's another matter, for another time.

To get back to France:

Theatre de la Commune, where Paradise is currently playing, is a CDN. The theatre is subsidised by the both the National and Regional governments (80 per cent of its budget comes from government sources, 20 per cent from Box Office: an interesting fact when you consider that government funding for the MTC is only 15 per cent of the MTC's budget). Funding for CDNs is triennial and requires an explicit commitment to the goal of extending theatre to new audiences. There is at least one CDN in each of the 22 Regions of France.

An important point to note is that these subsidies are granted only if the theatre fulfils a legal requirement that the theatre provide a public service. This public service can take many forms and is often called Social Action (it's what we in Australia would call Community Theatre). The same goes for National Theatres. There are many kinds of Social Action, ranging from actors and directors running workshops or performing plays in prisons and in hospitals, working with handicapped people, running classes and performing in schools and workplaces and running workshops for specific groups such as new immigrants, the unemployed, single parents, retired people, etc. All of this is offered to the people involved at no cost to them.

What all of this means, of course, is that theatre is obliged to participate in and contribute to the wider social, cultural and political life of the community in which it exists. This is not seen by the theatres as any kind of burden, but as an essential part of the theatre's work; in fact, it is considered one of the fundamental reasons why the theatre exists at all. In France, theatre is considered and has always been considered to be a central part of the social, cultural and political life of its community. What is most important is that the community understand that the theatre belongs to them: it exists for their benefit, to help express their concerns, to celebrate their lives and their culture and, ultimately, to defend and maintain their right to free and open public expression.

I could go on about how the role of the actor is perceived politically and culturally (and it is important in relation to the place of theatre in French culture) but that's outside the scope of what I want to talk about tonight. Suffice to say that actors never talk about working in an "industry". Culture is perceived as its own reward; its value isn't measured by how many jobs it creates or how many tourists it attracts or how much income it generates, as it generally is here. Actors have an important role within the culture, not merely a job promoting it; and this role is recognized and supported by the state, even when an actor isn’t actually employed. But all that’s another, complex, matter.

To get back to the point . . . this sense of "public ownership" of the theatre is at the heart of Social Action, which is, in effect, the establishment of a genuine, working relationship between the theatre and its audience.

I have been involved in a number of such "Actions". I’ll begin with the most simple example.

The National Theatre of Challon is in the heart of the Champagne region on the river Marne. It's quite a small town, maybe a little larger than, say, Castlemaine. It's about two hours by train from Paris. It has a large, modern theatre with two performance spaces (800 seats and 250 seats) and an exhibition space. Like all National Theatres, dance and music events are also presented by the theatre. I should also add that all National Theatres and all CDNs have a year long program of Theatre for Young People (from pre-schoolers to teenagers).

Anyway, in Challon every second Saturday (market day) the theatre puts on something that it calls "home from market". An open invitation is issued to the town's residents: lunch will be served at the theatre at one o'clock and all are invited. All you have to do is bring something to eat (some bread, some fruit, some cheese); this will be shared among all who attend. The theatre supplies its own food as well, and wine and, of course, champagne. The theatre's staff attend the lunch, including the administrator, the public relations officer and the artistic director. Actors and directors are also invited, as are writers. The event is very informal.

About two months ago, I was a guest at one of these lunches. There were about 50 "guests" from the town. Before lunch began, the artistic director made a short speech, briefly outlining what work the theatre would be presenting over the next few weeks, what theatre companies would be involved, etc. I was then introduced and made a short speech, explaining why I was in Challon and what else I was doing in France. Then it was time for questions, which lasted about half an hour. Lunch lasted for about three hours. As I've said, the event was very informal, and people talked (and ate and drank) non-stop. It ended with everyone being invited to a play reading later that afternoon. Admission was free. The actors reading had travelled from Paris, where they were preparing a production of the play. The play to be read (Low) was one of mine and I would be available afterwards to answer (more) questions. More than half the people at the lunch attended the reading, as well as a few dozen others. This time the questions lasted for over an hour and a half.

That evening, I went to a large house on the outskirts of the town. Three of my plays, all monologues, were to be performed in the house. One in the bedroom (Brief Darkness), one in the cellar (What Remains) and one in the living room (The Rain). There were about twenty audience members, invited by the woman who owned the house.

The actors were from the champagne region and often worked at the National Theatre. The performances were fantastic. Very simple lighting was used; almost no technology was involved. It was all about the actor and the text: the most simple and dramatic equation. The audience sat, or stood, where they could. It was an extraordinarily open and generous event. Then we had dinner. And more champagne. The three plays are still being performed in people's houses and apartments in Challon, and will be until the end of the year; all someone has to do is call the theatre and "invite" the plays into their home. They then invite their audience (the theatre may also invite some people, depending on the size of the house).

All of this, of course, costs money. The theatre considers the expense an investment in its community. It is holding the doors of the theatre open to anyone who wants to come in, as well as taking its work, literally, into people’s homes: in this way, the theatre can become a part of people’s every day lives. The theatre is, of course, creating and educating its audience by doing this; and it is creating in the minds of that audience the idea that the theatre is an active part of their community and its life: the theatre is something that belongs to them.

This sense of ownership has one particularly interesting outcome, among many others: it is the possibility of the audience questioning the decisions of the theatre, feeling that they have the right to criticise the theatre's programming choices and feeling that they have the right to ask for the kind of theatre that they want. In other words a dialogue is possible, between those who come to the theatre and those who create it. It’s a (wait for it . . . ) relationship.

I should pause a moment here to say that the situation of theatre in France is far from ideal, even if I might seem to be describing it as such But I am giving a brief, rather schematic description of the situation of French theatre; I am talking about what I perceive as its ideals and what I have seen, what I have been privileged to experience at first hand. The broader politics and some of the harsher day-to-day realities of creating theatre in France are outside what I am properly able to discuss. But I know that many of the freedoms and rights of French theatre are under threat, as are all freedoms and rights in countries that have essentially right wing governments.

The creation of theatre is always and always has been a struggle, no matter where or when it is created; theatre is ephemeral, it lasts only a moment. It can only happen when an agreement is made, between those who create it and those who witness it, to come together in a certain place at a certain time to share a particular event: to witness the presence of the actor, who speaks the words of the writer (well, most of the time), in a space created by the designer, under the guidance of the director, for the benefit, for the delight, in the service of the audience. It's all terribly human, terribly fragile and can be enormously powerful.

So it is always difficult, because that's its nature: any situation where human beings attempt to work together towards a common end can always be a tragedy waiting to happen or impossibly comic. But the creation of theatre is even more of a struggle now, when the right to dissent, to disagree with those who hold power, to demand the right to speak, to hold culture above profit, to thumb your nose at authority or accepted wisdom, to celebrate difference rather than to fear it, is deemed to be a threat to the security of the state. I might seem to be exaggerating. I hope that I am. But I only have one pair of eyes and I can only see what I see. I fear for the rights we take for granted. I think that we all should, because we may at some time be called upon to defend them. And it will not be easy.

But that's enough of that. I tend to wander. I'll be here all night if I'm not careful.

So, to return to good old France:

More complex than the relationship that I have described between the theatre and its community in Challon is the relationship between the theatre and its community in Marseille, where I have worked each year for the past three years.

In Marseille I work with Michel Andre, a theatre director about the same age as me. His mother was Corsican and his father Belgian. He grew up in Belgium, a decent, working class boy who had no idea where he belonged. He was kicked out of school (because he had no talent for "academic" subjects) and became a motor mechanic. Theatre was the final refuge he found in his twenties, by accident; and he discovered that he was good at it. But that’s another story.

Michel speaks three languages. Unfortunately English isn’t one of them . . . and my French is appalling. He often speaks to me in Italian, which is a language I don’t speak at all. But somehow we communicate. I don't know how. It’s a small miracle.

Not so long ago, or should I say "Once upon a time", Michel was a well respected actor. Well, anyway, our story begins when he was in a touring production of a play by Moliere, playing to full houses in large, very swank theatres. He was having a great time, and so were the audiences. The production was a success and so was he. But prior to curtain one night Michel happened to look out of his dressing room window. What he saw in the near distance was a block of what we'd call commission flats: bleak, featureless boxes stacked one on top of the other where "the poor people" lived.

Michel knew that none of the residents of that block of flats would be attending the performance he was about to take part in. Well, that was bloody obvious, wasn't it? Well, perhaps it was. But Michel suddenly wondered (despite the obvious) why, actually, wouldn't they be in the theatre to see this rude, funny, beautifully written, well acted play? Apart from the fact that going to the theatre was too expensive and too intimidating (and full of wankers and other middle class dickheads), it was because the theatre meant nothing to them; it had nothing to do with their lives; it was a distant luxury that could be done without; it was meaningless. Michel was suddenly appalled. He quit the production. Yes, it was a rather extreme thing to do. But why did he do it? Because he couldn’t tolerate being part of something that could be considered meaningless by people who would actually be delighted by it, if they only felt that they had been invited to enjoy it.

Michel decided to "invite" people into the theatre; the people in those bleak, featureless boxes stacked one on top of the other where "the poor people" lived.

After Paris, Marseille is the second biggest city in France. It is a hard, difficult place. A century ago it was a thriving, wealthy metropolis. But times have changed, and they've changed quickly. You only have to see the dozens of boarded up "Grand Hotels" and derelict, obviously once fashionable department stores in the centre of the city to know this. Today, Marseille has enormous unemployment problems. Racial violence is common. It's a city of immigrants, of refugees, of itinerants, of outsiders. It's a harsh, troubled place. It's where France comes face to face with its brutal colonial history. And it's not dealing with it very well.

But, you see, again and again, it's impossible to talk about French theatre without finding a way to speak about its social, cultural and political context. It's meaningless to describe Michel Andre's work without describing its context. His work is a product of and a response to the community (the city) in which he has chosen to live. There are no "abstracts" involved. The work is specific to the environment in which it is created, specific to the people involved, both on the stage and in front of it.

Which is where I come in: the total stranger who cannot speak any of the languages I have to confront in Marseille.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's step back a moment.

Michel creates theatre with people who are not actors. They are people who live in those bleak tower blocks he saw from the window of his dressing room, most of whom have never been to the theatre. They become a part of the theatre without really knowing what the possibilities of theatre are. Michel is the focus . . . of some event, an event that he is going to help them create, that will give them (at least) something to do, that he promises will be exciting and rewarding, that will give them strength, that will allow them to express themselves, that will be safe and dangerous at the same time, that will be demanding while at the same time be liberating, an event in which they can hide themselves while at the same time revealing what they feel, what they desire, what they fear, what they love. And there will be people who will witness this event, people from the same tower blocks, and others who are interested in such events, who want, who perhaps even need to participate in this kind of event.

What Michel is describing is an act of theatre.

Michel has been working with a group of about forty people for about five years. Most of them are unemployed or at best have part time, usually menial, jobs. He gathered them together by simply putting up posters. Basically, the posters said "Got nothing to do? Come and do something". People come and go as they wish. Some people have been with the group since the beginning. New people arrive from time to time. At present, they range in age from a ten year old girl to a man of seventy. Many of the people he works with are first or second generation immigrants; they come from places like Cameroon, Algeria, Sicily, Morocco and Guinea. Some of these people can barely speak French. It took him about a year, working three days a week, to get anyone to stand up alone in front of the others and speak. What did he ask them to speak about? About themselves. It was a long, slow process. Eventually everyone told their story. From these stories the group created their first performance, entitled What Is Happening To The World? The piece was performed at the National Theatre of Marseille (The Merlan) for three nights. It was also performed in the car park outside a large supermarket.

I met Michel at the Avignon Festival in 2000. He had read my plays and wanted to meet me, to tell me about his work and invite me to collaborate with him. I went to Marseille and stayed for a few weeks; I met the people he was working with, I listened to their stories, I watched them improvise. Michel wanted to create another play, but this time he wanted the people in his group to discover what it was like to speak words written by someone else, to find out what it was like to make someone else's words your own, to tell stories about "imaginary" characters and to find out how this could be a way of telling a different kind of truth; he wanted them to discover a new kind of freedom. He wanted them to be actors.

I came home with pages and pages of notes, suggestions, ideas, impressions. My job was to write a play that was actually a sequence of short plays; a collection of fragments that Michel and his actors could arrange as they saw fit: I would give them the raw material and they would invent the construction of the play. Not everyone in the group could be involved in the project; those who weren’t worked with Michel’s assistant, Marie Isabelle. They worked on a play of mine, Low, a two hander of 25 scenes. They played each scene with two different actors (that’s 25 couples) discovering some strange, comic, tragic combinations.

The play I wrote for the group was called The Possible Ways. Rehearsals lasted six months. Again it was performed in the National Theatre, which funded the project along with Michel's own company. It played for three nights to packed houses; most of the audience came from the commission flats where most of the actors also came from.

I wrote another play for Michel and his actors last year. It was called In These Uncertain Times. It was a more formally structured play. Again I drew on the lives of the people involved, but this time I moved little further away from their reality, making bolder imaginative leaps, taking the play further into a fictional world which nevertheless retained the echoes of the actors' day to day lives. What Michel and I were hoping to do was to discover a way for his actors to find a freedom of expression; to escape, if only briefly, the confines and the boredom of their poverty, the discrimination they encounter, the prison of the tower blocks they live in. At least that's what the actors told us the play did for them.

I'm now writing a new play for Michel. It's a two hander, for himself and a young boy in the group, Cedric, who's twelve. It's about a boy who leaves his parents and chooses another father, another life. This time, the other members of the group will be in the audience. They go to the theatre now.


Daniel Keene, November 24 2004.

Daniel Keene's Home Page

The Sapphires by Tony Briggs, directed by Wesley Enoch. With Wayne Blair, Rachel Maza, Ursula Yovich, Lisa Flanagan, Deborah Mailman, Stephen Lovatt, Aljin Abella and Chris Kirby. MTC at the Arts Centre Playhouse, until December 18.

My thoughts about The Sapphires were complicated by a huge argument I had afterwards with a friend. This friend, who shall remain nameless, had not actually seen the show. But he pointed at the photograph of the the four lead actors posing in sequinned frocks Supremes-style on the front of the program, and said: "Well, that's the only way you can get Aboriginal actors onto the main stages. Don't talk about anything difficult - just get them to dress up like Americans. Lots of singing and dancing. Very worthy. Pack 'em in."



There's enough of a cruel truth in this response to give pause. It's difficult to imagine the MTC producing a play that, for example, deals front-on with the problem of domestic abuse in remote Aboriginal communities. Or, on the other hand, matter-of-factly casting a hot young Aboriginal actor as Hamlet.

And The Sapphires is as close as anything I've seen to a sure-fire hit. Its energy, from the moment Wayne Blair steps onto the stage and revs up the audience, is irresistible, and its narrative - that of four young working class Aboriginal sisters in the 1960s, who form a girl group and tour Vietnam - is appealingly up-beat, toughened by some black (forgive the pun) humour. It's something to see the usually staid MTC audience whooping and yelling like teens at a rock concert.

The Sapphires is, in many ways, light-weight theatre. But it has a lot of redeeming features, not the least of them being its complete lack of po-faced "worthiness". Probably the most obvious comparison is with Minefields and Miniskirts, a music theatre piece about the Vietnam War produced by Playbox earlier this year. Where Minefields and Miniskirts was leaden with the weight of its own significance, The Sapphires brashly bounces in, grabs you by the lapels and forcibly reminds you that Aboriginality is about more than victimhood. The note of special pleading dies in its first big number.

After all, the notion that Aboriginal artists should be solely concerned with the social problems of their people is an imprisonment in itself, a circular dilemma which is familiar to most thoughtful feminists. The Sapphires joyously kicks over these chains, showing an aspect of Aboriginal culture which is less familiar than it ought to be. Popular music - rock and roll, motown, country, blues and soul - is deeply embedded in contemporary Aboriginal culture; in Central Australia, children learn to play guitar almost as soon as they can walk. For those kids, and for the women in The Sapphires, music is the doorway to dreams. And sometimes, it works.

The story is economically told, between gutsy performances of classics like (Love is like a) Heatwave, Think and Heard it Through the Grapevine. It concerns four Koori sisters, Gail (Rachel Maza), Kay (Lisa Flanagan), Cynthia (Deborah Mailman) and Julie (Ursula Yovich), most of whom work boring factory jobs in Melbourne. Their little sister Julie, clearly miserably pregnant, has run away from home to live with her sisters, who with typical sibling cruelty leave her at home while they sail out in their bright dresses to a talent quest in a nightclub. But of course, Julie follows them, and proves to have the best voice of the lot...And so they get their first big gig - touring Vietnam to entertain the troops.

Tony Briggs' rapid-delivery dialogue relies on sardonic humour; when Cynthia says that she wants to be a model, her sister bursts out laughing. "A model? Haven't you noticed? You're black! The only time we get photographed is when we're arrested." This writing does exactly what is required, without doing any more; and it reveals the tougher details of these women's lives - Kay's horrific abortion at 14, which has left her sterile or, in one particularly good scene, Julie's terror when she wanders into a trench full of US soldiers and the air is suddenly thick with the threat of rape - with a direct realism which forbids self pity.

There's a well-handled sub-plot about a young Vietnamese boy, Joe (Aljin Abella), searching for his family, three different comic romances, and a tragic ending which is swallowed up, inexplicably I think, by a sudden swing into a song. Perhaps this is a fear of ending on too depressing a note, but it left me feeling slightly cheated - The Sapphires had cut itself enough slack to play its tragedy as well as its celebration.

Wesley Enoch's production is characterised by very slick staging, helped by good use of a revolve and curtains: the stage is stripped to its bare essentials, focusing on the band, with stylised elements of each scene (a kitchen sink and door, an army jeep) sweeping in and out as required. But most of all I liked its robust theatricality. This is great popular theatre, which is confident enough to take no prisoners. And the singing is fabulous.

Melbourne Theatre Company