The Lord of the Flies, based on the novel by William Golding, adapted by Nigel Williams, directed by Bob Pavlich. La Trobe University Student Theatre @ Trades Hall, closed Sunday.

All of us of a certain age were forced to read William Golding's The Lord of the Flies at school, and dragged along to see Peter Brook's famous film (without doubt my first experience of Brook). I suppose it was considered excellent for the average adolescent to consider his (there are no girls in this story) innate savagery.


Watching it on stage in La Trobe University Student Theatre's very creditable production, it occurred to me that while the book says nothing about so-called "primitive" tribes - such societies have, after all, social tabus and courtesies of a complexity and strictness that rival Regency England - and maybe, beyond a few general platitudes, not much more about universal human nature, it says a lot about the savagery inherent in the European class system of the time. And, for all I know, now. Which is to say, it's most interesting as a social text if read as a savage critique of the civilisation it seems to be advocating.

In Golding's classic story, a group of English schoolboys survive a plane crash on a tropical island. In the course of the book, they rapidly descend from well-behaved public (ie private) schoolboys to murderous tribalism, thus demonstrating the thinness of the veneer that civilisation pastes on our barbarian selves.

The only force that holds back the primitive tyranny that beats in our blood is, according to Golding, the influence of wise and fair authority; a naval captain, for example. At its heart The Lord of the Flies is, essentially, a reactionary text, a cautionary fable about the necessity for patriarchal (preferably English) authority to prevent us all falling into the bloody mire of Original Sin.

Now, don't get me wrong. Anyone who has had anything to do with children (and who isn't blinded by sentimental ideas about childish innocence) knows that children are capable of a cruelty that is unmediated by an adult capacity for empathy, which is a quality that is, on the whole, a learned one. Children also have a limited capacity for foresight: they do not necessarily understand the connection between an act and its aftermath. This is why children charged with serious crimes are not tried as adults: they are considered - in my view, quite rightly - to have diminished responsibility for their actions. There's a lot of truth in Golding's portrayal of childish society.

But there's no escaping the, well, British Empire flavour of the story, or the questionable underlying assumptions about what constitutes both primitive and civilised behaviour. The book's virtues exist in the vividness of its characters and its writing. And yes, it's a fable, and so capable of many interpretations, many of which have been rehearsed in school essay after school essay.

It's a tribute to the commitment of the La Trobe University Student Theatre that they made me put aside my quibbles with the story. I even stopped wondering about Australian public school accents and the fact that a bunch of young women were playing prepubescent boys. Such, after all, is the magery of theatre when it works.

Student productions are often well worth a look: the tickets are cheap, the production standards are generally good and they often feature texts that are seldom done elsewhere. La Trobe, while lacking the considerable resources of the Victorian College of the Arts, put on The Lord of the Flies as part of an insanely ambitious double bill (the other half was Orson Welles' adaptation of Moby-Dick). And, from what I saw, they pulled it off.

Bob Pavlich's production features a minimal set - two scaffolds, a real pig's head, some back curtains and sparely used lighting. It's intelligently staged, with the mise en scene exploiting the height and breadth of the Trades Hall Ballroom. Using Nigel Williams's economical 1992 adaptation, which is briskly theatrical in a Brookian kind of way, the energy of the cast progressively generates the necessary willing suspension of disbelief to make the story wholly absorbing and, ultimately, moving.

The zeitgeist is a wonderful thing. Days after my mini-discourse about poetic idioms in contemporary theatre in the comments of my review of Villanus, a call for conference papers on the "poet's theatre" in the US serendipitously crosses my desk. It's for a panel called "Contemporary Poet's Theater: L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E and Beyond" that's proposed for the 20th Century Literature Conference in Louisville in February next year. Professor Laura Hinton at the City College of New York gives a fairly comprehensive description of "poet's theatre" from the poetry end, which some of you might find interesting (and maybe highly arguable), and is worth quoting in full:

In recent contemporary poetics, the term "poet's theater" has become linked with the "Language" group of writers and often directors of poetry-plays produced as low-budget staged performances in the late 1970's and '80's. Today, new productions of classic "Language"-oriented poet's theater abound, by writers including Leslie Scalapino, Carla Harryman, Charles Bernstein, among others. Yet there are also many contemporary playwrights in other settings doing work that is not only aesthetically related to "Language"-oriented theater, but which might be productively critiqued in terms articulated by Language writers and others writing on avant-garde performance art. These "others" are theater writers are those who are engaging in "poet's theater," by virtue of treating a written text as an act of performance -- the drama thus emerging not from some external "signified," but from within the "signifier", the poetic language, itself.

This panel is an attempt to ground a definition of the term "poet's theater" in a potentially expanding notion of the contemporary working scene of today's American theater, both through under-financed small public venues (like cafes or coffee houses or art-spaces) or in venues like Off-Broadway. And it is an attempt to look at what the embodied stage and poetic experiment have to offer one another. It is a given that contemporary-American poet's theater (which this panel coordinator views as a major but often overlooked postmodern genre that
perhaps defies many attempts to identify and categorize it) stands well outside the established American "realist" theater tradition of, say, O'Neill, Miller or Tennessee Williams. The poet's theater we speak of is more likely to be influenced, instead, by early 20th-century European experimentalists of the stage, like Brecht, Beckett, and Artaud. American modernists, of course – like Stein, Pound, and Djuna Barnes – wrote poetry plays that defied the conventions of narrative drama. However, the focus of this panel will examines their more contemporary inheritors. We will consider for the proposed panel any papers about works and theater practitioners who have emerged during or since the early stages of Language writing (for example, John Ashbery, Bernstein, Ntozake Shange, Harryman, Scalapino, Amiri Baraka, Cherie Moraga, Tracie Morris, as well as "non-poet" playwrights like Adrienne Kennedy, Anna Deavere Smith, or Suzan-Lori Parks - the latter of whose works are based in a non-linear use of lyrical language and the performativity of individual and community speech acts.)

So it seems that I'm not the only one noticing. If any TN readers want to submit an outline (I'm idly thinking of it but, given my workload, probably won't), Laura is asking that you send a 250-300-word abstract and title describing your proposed topic no later than September 12, by e-mail only, to: Laura Hinton, Professor of English, The City College of New York (laurahinton12@gmail.com). And include the following cover-sheet information: name, address (preferably home), e-mail address, telephone number, academic affiliation (if applicable) and a personal biographical note, (100-150 words).

So George Hunka is asked along to a show at Playwrights Horizons in New York, and his invitation stipulates that he is asked to blog his thoughts, positive or negative. The show gets on his wick so badly he leaves at interval. He then, as requested, blogs his displeasure. And the shit hits the fan.

Not from the aggrieved theatre company, which quite properly has nothing to say, but - perhaps surprisingly - from his fellow bloggers. Some, like Matt Freeman, are discomforted by his leaving at interval. (This question has already been debated on this blog, after a controversial walkout of my own. At the time, Age dance critic Hilary Crampton picked up on TN's walkout and defended the critic's right to express outrage and "take strong action", claiming that "in claiming democratic rights to freedom of speech, artists must also allow critics the freedom to comment on their public presentations".)

But Matt was simply, rather mildly, asking a question. Not so Leonard Jacobs, a critic and editor at Back Stage and blogger at the Clyde Fitch Report, who went ballistic. His beef is that the show to which George was invited was a preview. (Unlike here, where we have maybe three or four days of previews, NY previews go for weeks; this particular show doesn't officially "open" until later in September.) In a series of increasingly inflammatory posts, Leonard accuses George - and then, when it was revealed that a number of bloggers had been invited under the same conditions, Playwrights Horizons - of appalling dereliction of professional ethical standards. Mixed up with this is a fuzzy objection to bloggers getting free tickets, which seems to be regarded as a form of payola: as he elegantly puts it, "just because there's a pimp doesn't mean you have to fuck everyone".

Well, here's my 2c worth. TN doesn't review previews. I saw a Malthouse show in preview a while back because I was going overseas and it was the only performance I could attend (for the record, I thought the show was poor) and that was on the understanding that I did not blog it. So I didn't. But in this case, where comment has been specifically invited by the theatre, I don't see any problem.

Elsewhere, bloggers who pay for preview tickets now regularly blog about shows that haven't officially "opened" for print. The Guardian theatre page often rounds up these responses. In the strange case of the recent RSC production of King Lear, which was officially in "preview" during its entire Stratford season, the only critical responses for weeks were from bloggers. In this case, there is a clear line drawn before "official" and "bloggy" reviews. Here in Melbourne, where the performing arts culture seems to be miles ahead in its acceptance of bloggers into the general discourse, the line is a little fuzzier.

TN has uncontroversially operated as a freelance reviewer from the start, requesting and receiving free tickets like any other critic. Perhaps it's an Australian thing: along with with my fellow bloggers Chris Boyd, Nicholas Pickard, Richard Watts and Matt Clayfield, I operate on a nexus between print and online publication, reviewing for both, and perhaps this makes us seem marginally more legit. Though I think it's more that many people here have been starving for some decent public conversation about theatre.

More germanely, the upset seems to be about George's "destructive" negative reaction (positive reviews on another blog seem to have attracted no controversy at all), a perennial issue in theatre reviewing. As he quite rightly asks, if his response had been rapturous acclaim, would anyone have been bothered? I expect not. In a general sense, it still seems to be considered impolite for a critic to criticise, along the lines that "if you can't say anything good, don't say anything at all".

As far as I'm concerned, this is the death of dialogue: such an attitude has pretty well killed off critical discourse in Australian poetry, where people regularly refuse to write about books they don't like. To take a local whipping horse, Age theatre critic Cameron Woodhead: I might disagree - and often - with what he has to say, but I'll defend to the death his right to say it. And conversely, my right to take issue with what he says.

Apropos of this question, I was buttonholed at a Melbourne Writers Festival dinner last week by historian Ross McMullin, who wanted to grill me about my reviews of Hannie Rayson. McMullin is the biographer of Elliot Pompey, the real-life model for a couple of characters in The Glass Soldier, and is also a friend of Hannie's. This very pleasant man was clearly one of those for whom my reputation as bitch critic had gloriously preceded me.

Given my record with Hannie's plays (four strikes out of four, as I recall), he suggested that I should not review them at all. He seemed to think that having an aesthetic viewpoint in itself represented some kind of conflict of interest.

When I asked if he was suggesting that I had a personal animus towards Hannie which then informed my reviews - which I would strenuously deny since, whatever else I am as a critic, I seriously attempt to be at once honest and fair - he said no, he wasn't suggesting that. I then said that I always went to the theatre hoping that it would be good, and that if it ever happened that I enjoyed a play by Hannie Rayson, I would have no hesitation in saying so. And launched into my impassioned spiel on the necessity for frank and honest discourse yada yada. I'm not sure I convinced McMullin, though he did allow that he himself had been known to review books negatively, and that it was legitimate to do so.

Finally, to leave the last word with George, it's a question of respect - for audiences, for readers, and for theatre practitioners.

Artists are not children to be coddled and protected from criticism when they, or their producing organization, invite it from whatever source, and critics are not paternalistic playground monitors, to pat artists on the head when they do well or scold them when they do poorly. Artists are fully-grown mature adults, well aware that they conduct their professional lives in the public arena. Criticism, whether it's from a reviewer or from a friend over drinks after a show, is the risk one takes, consciously, when one chooses the profession.

Readers of both blogs and newspaper reviews, similarly, are not children. ...they are fully capable of reading, fairly and critically, the reviews we write and decide on the basis of that whether they want to see the show or not. They are aware that these are opinions, nothing more and nothing less. And the more familiar they are with an individual critic's prejudices and interests, the more they are fairly able to judge whether the play itself holds any interest for them or not. People who have been reading "Superfluities" for the past few years, as well as the reviews I've written for other publications, are well-aware of my own, and my fairness when it comes to reviewing shows which don't conform to the aesthetics I hold for my own creative work.

Yay to that. The alternative is a bland, boring, defensive culture that actively seeks to eradicate difference. I've lived in a culture like that, and believe me, it's no fun at all.

Villanus, by Vlad Mijic and Rhys Auteri. Performed by Vlad Mijic, with Raphael Hammond (video). Lighting and set design by Vlad Mijic, music by Raphael Hammond. Welcome Stranger Theatre Company, Old Council Chambers, Trades Hall, until September 2. Bookings: (03) 9782 2625.

Lately I've been thinking about the poetic language that's turning up in so much of Melbourne's contemporary theatre. There's a lot of it about, and it's an interesting - and I think healthy - phenomenon. Many inquisitive minds are turning back to the word, after a period of its banishment from any serious exploration of theatrical form.

A decade or so ago, "text-based theatre" was most often a pejorative term, considered synonymous with the faux naturalism that then dominated our main stages. But, as Robert Musil illuminatingly pointed out in 1926, this is a mistake, even if the so-called laws of the stage are "nothing but a dramaturgy of cutting real spiritual cloth down to marketable size". "Many of our contemporaries," he wrote, "have rebelled against the mindlessness of the stage, with the result that all parts of a stage performance were 'discovered' and made, one after the other, the chief part." He goes on to elucidate the "new theatre" of the time:

The actor's theatre, the director's theatre, the theatre of acoustic form and that of optical rhythm, the theatre of vitalised stage space, and many others have been offered to us.... They have taught us much that is worthwhile, but about as one-sidedly as the assertion that one should throw a man who has a cold into the fire,which is also fundamentally based on a correct idea. ... As incomparably as something unutterable may be expressed at times in a gesture, a grouping, a picture of feeling or an event, this always happens in immediate proximity to the word; as something hovering, so to speak, around its core of meaning, which is the real element of humanity.

Musil suggests that the danger of radical reforms that ignore the intellectual possibilities of the word is an inescapable inner banality. "The experience of our senses are almost as conservative as theatre directors," he says, and only language can take us beyond what we already know.

Musil's statements, which pertain to the German theatre of his time, are of course highly arguable. But they remain provocative and, I think, pertinent to some of the work I'm encountering around Melbourne. I'm thinking of, for example, the work of Stuck Pigs Squealing, who last week had a showing of a work-in-progress that dislocated linguistic meaning using techniques imported from sound poetry, or Luke Mullins' exploration of Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, or Carolyn O'Connors' Material Mouth (having a remount soon at Arts House), or Adam Broinowski's unrapturously received Know No Cure, the text of which, at least, deserves some notice for its densely poetic attack on theatrical language.

There's a lot of rethinking of how written language can be used in theatre: attempts to expand the vocabulary, that are in part reactions to the banalities of both text-based and non-text based theatre. As Musil's statement shows, there's nothing new under the sun; but there are always new contexts in which these old things can be reilluminated.

Which brings me, at last, to Villanus, the latest work of Welcome Stranger, one of a rash of young independent theatre companies in Melbourne that are exploring a vein of what might be called junk theatre. This is theatre that questions conventional theatrical aesthetic, defying the idea that theatre is a consumable object. In junk theatre, you are unlikely to see anything resembling a three-act play, or expensive and lavish sets. What you will often encounter is a dramaturgy ordered along poetic, rather than narrative, principles. The connections in the text will be metaphorical and allusive, and its apparent meanings and stories will be ironised, subjected to an aggressive and restless interrogation.

It's all to different ends, of course, and very much a work in progress. Junk theatre is occurring under the aegis of tiny companies like the Black Lung, which last year saw its very rude – in all senses – Rubeville sweeping the awards at both the Adelaide and Melbourne Fringe Festival. Uncle Semolina and Friends presented a lo-tech version of Gilgamesh at the 2005 Melbourne International Arts Festival that featured toy cars and a sandpit. They appeared in a double bill with the charming Suitcase Royale, who make their ingenious and intricate props out of discarded objects like old telephones and typewriters.

Like these others shows, Villanus looks defiantly messy. The set consists of a jumble of television screens and other electronic equipment, a table, a bookshelf on which are placed random objects, and various rough scaffoldings. A major design element is packing tape. The apparent artlessness of the set belies the intelligence of the theatre that follows, a series of discrete verbal arias in which notions of self and identity are put under intense interrogation.

The show opens with a stumbling disclaimer from Mijic, in which he explains that although this performance is partly autobiographical, it is also a tissue of lies and half truths. Playing a version of himself called Vlad, Mijic launches into a paranoid exploration of what it means to be called a “villain”. Wearing a piece of paper taped to his back which says "Vlad is dead", he begins with the obsessively repetitive recording of a video diary. “If you are watching this now,” he says intently into a camera, “I have been murdered”.

Mijic and his co-creator Rhys Auteri are most concerned with the notion of mediation, with how much our self-image - individually and collectively - is formed by expectations projected onto it. Much of the text, which is both spoken and written in Texta on butcher's paper or projected onto a screen, consists of lists (a major trope of much contemporary poetry): lists of personal characteristics, of fragments of text rescued from unlikely places, of scraps of received reality that enter a world-view and then form it.

At the centre is the question of Vlad's Serbian ancestry: Serbs being, before the sudden stardom of Saddam Hussein, the arch-villains on the international global stage. He was born in Yugoslavia, he tells us, but now Yugoslavia no longer exists: like his primary school, which was shut down by Jeff Kennett, it is now a place that only lives in memory. What is the fiction called Vlad to make of this? Is his inescapable ethnicity a reflection of an inherent monstrousness, or is his villainousness simply a desire "not to disappoint" expectations (a desire immediately ironised by this show's anti-aesthetic presentation)? This question splinters and fragments through fantastic or even surreal obsessions, several posthumous death scenes and a comedically dislocated self-reflection on the process of making Villanus itself.

In its sensibility and diction, the text isn't a million miles from the Serbian poet Vasko Popa, who often explores how the hidden, even murderous self relates to its social masks. His unsettling poem In The Village of My Ancestors is not untypical:

Someone embraces me
Someone looks at me with the eyes of a wolf
Someone takes off his hat
So I can see him better

Everyone asks me
Do you know how I'm related to you

Unknown old men and women
Appropriate the names
Of young men and women from my memory

I ask one of them
Tell me for God's sake
Is George the Wolf still living

That's me he answers
With a voice from the next world

I touch his cheek with my hand
And beg him with my eyes
To tell me if I'm living too

Mijic is a strangely uncertain presence, at once summoning and deflecting attention; "acting" seems the wrong word for what he is doing here (in a short extract from Edmund's "bastard" speech in King Lear, he gives us an extreme version of acting that parodies the whole idea). But he holds your attention, standing in that uncomfortable place where a performer is not quite removed from his quotidian self, in which role-playing becomes the whole of identity.

In any case, Villanus is a show that provokes a lot of thought. I'm not sure that it's wholly successful - whatever success might mean in this context. For example, it feels tautologous to criticise its dramaturgy, which towards the end deliberately and wickedly tests the audience's patience, although I suspect that if there are future incarnations, it might be shorter and structured in such a way to make its final monologue seem less like a postscript. But it certainly transcends the dangers of narcissism that attend a project like this, and it's well worth a look for anyone interested in the livelier edges of Melbourne theatre.

Little Ms Alison is a bit wan today: the last week has been full-on, and I've been out and about and missing my burrow. So I'm putting my feet up and Mrs Rabbit is making me some nice chamomile tea. In the meantime, let me point you to Villanus, performed by Vlad Mijic and co-authored with Rhys Auteri, which I saw at the Trades Hall last Thursday. It's well worth a look, as I briefly report in today's Australian. Hoping to say more later, when my ears are less rumpled.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee, directed by Peter Evans. Design by Christina Smith, lighting design by Matt Scott, sound design by Ben Grant. With Alison Bell, Wendy Hughes, Garry McDonald and Stephen Phillips. Melbourne Theatre Company @ the Fairfax Studio, Victorian Arts Centreu, ntil October 6. Bookings: 1300 136 166.

Edward Albee’s savage lullabye Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? reminds you that the Elizabethans enjoyed their theatre in the interludes between bear-baiting. Four decades after it was first staged, it remains an inimitable piece of theatrical bloodsport.

It is also one of the most disturbing love stories ever written: Martha and George give vivid life to the old saw that hatred is the other face of love. Their dysfunctional marriage is – quite literally – a performance that brings to the surface the demons that seethe beneath the conventions of middle-class career and marriage. And they prove that nothing is funnier than cruelty.

From the moment the play opens, we know it’s a fight to the death. It is 2am, and failed history academic George (Garry McDonald) and his wife Martha (Wendy Hughes) are returning home after a boozy evening at the faculty. Martha has invited the new couple in town, blond wunderkind Nick (Stephen Phillips) and his daffy wife Honey (Alison Bell) over for a nightcap.

What follows is a nightmare few hours of social evisceration. Albee’s script is an elegant machine that pitilessly peels open the ugliness of inter-generational and sexual warfare. As copious slugs of alcohol make them progressively more legless, the naïve young couple turn out to be not so naïve, after all: in the end, they are less innocent than their hosts.

Honey and Nick’s relationship, at first glance an untainted thing compared to the alcohol-soaked boxing match that seems to constitute their hosts’ marriage, is at once more and less than it seems. Nick is as unprincipled in his ambition and greed as George claims he is, and Honey is neurotically unhappy, concealing even from herself her knowledge that her marriage is loveless.

Finally George and Martha are left alone to face the abyss that remains once illusion is destroyed, their lives poised on a fulcrum between terror and hope. Nick and Honey, on the other hand, will not admit their inner emptiness. Towards the end of the play, in one of its most quietly cutting lines, Honey tells her husband: “I don’t remember anything. And you don’t remember anything, either.”

Director Peter Evans gives us the play, like Martha’s alcohol, straight. It’s an honest reading that leaves it in its time and place, complete with American accents. His production discreetly foregrounds the artifice of apparent naturalism: the performances are big, taking full advantage of the inherent theatricality of Albee’s writing, and they're viciously funny. Three and a half hours whizz past.

There were trivial things that caught like burrs in my perceptions as I watched the show. I sometimes felt that Matt Scott’s lighting design was a tad obvious, bringing the lights down on “important” moments, rather like the camera in a current affairs show zooming in for a voyeuristic close-up at the critical moment of grief. And the sound design, spartan as it is, sometimes seemed similarly unsubtle.

Christina Smith’s design is intriguing. I spent half the play hating the set, and half the play liking it; rather like its major characters, I guess. An uncomfortable compromise between abstraction and naturalism, it’s a semi-circular stage in front of a flat of empty bookshelves done out in a ugly natural woodgrain, with a pair of antlers sticking out aggressively on the right. Yet often my discomfort with its ugliness felt wholly appropriate. It’s an ugly story, after all, and the design offers no assuaging escapism.

The set does have the paramount virtue of unobstrusively and intimately framing some superb performances: and the performances are the heart of this play. Wendy Hughes’s brassy Martha emerges from a ferocious disillusionment and despair. She is perhaps more tragic than Elizabeth Taylor’s famous performance in the film, because she lacks Taylor’s louche sexiness; it throws a darker shadow over her seduction of Nick, and his later impotence. And Phillips gives a complex and subtle portrayal of Nick that only lacks a little aggression and edge.

Garry McDonald's bravura performance of George – embittered, disillusioned, humiliated and vicious – finds the tenderness that lurks inside George’s cruelty without crossing the line into sentimentality. And Alison Bell’s portrayal of Honey is brilliant: in her hands, the car accident that is Honey is no minor role, but a tragic journey into anaesthesia.

My only real complaint is how Melbourne audiences begin to clap the very instant the stage goes dark at the end of the play. What I wanted, after the last scene’s final devastating admission, was a breath of silence in which those lines could resonate, ripening to their full meaning. But there’s nothing the MTC can do about that.

A shorter version of this review appears in today's Australian. Link if and when it appears.

If you pop along to the Melbourne Writers Festival at 1.30pm this Sunday and wander into the Beckett Theatre, you'll find me on stage with my colleagues Barry Hill and JS Harry. (Harry is making a rare Melbourne appearance, launching her new poetry collection Not Finding Wittgenstein, which has some bizarrely interesting connections with Michael Watts' play Not Like Beckett - both feature very sentient and rather intellectual rabbits. I'm sure there's a thesis in there somewhere). It seems that we're supposed to be discussing the war in Iraq, but I'm assured that is merely a cover story to lull poetry-phobic patrons, and that it's the poetry that will be speaking.

TN jumped the gun last week when we announced Maryanne Lynch's defence of Sleeping Beauty at Arts Hub. Yes, the reason there was no link was that the article wasn't up there yet! It's up there today, and the friendly folk at Arts Hub have passed on the link for your reading pleasure...

In 2004, our most popular commercial playwright David Williamson decided to go into semi-retirement. His decision was on doctor's order's - as the Age reports today, "The pressure of coming up with one, sometimes two, plays a year had taken a toll, as had some of the vitriolic views of critics". (Hey, he should try being me for a few years). Anyway, he's back, writing a vehicle play for the rightly esteemed diva Carolyn O'Connor, which will premiere in the MTC's next season. You can hear the financial excitement crackle through the land.

Despite the awful strain of it all, there are compensations for being Williamson - his last play took $1 million at the box office. And without the annual Williamson play to bump up the coffers, the State companies went into mourning. This is about the economics of survival. As I said in 2004, on the occasion of Williamson's retirement:

The fact that our major theatres are funded so poorly explains why Williamson is a fixture on our subsidised stages. The MTC receives only 15 per cent of its funding from government sources, which leaves 85 per cent of its budget to be raised by box office and sponsorship. In 1996, the most recent figures I could find, the comparable flagship companies in France, the National Theatres, received 73 per cent of their funding from the State, 21 per cent through the box office and the remaining six per cent from other sales.

I'm unsure of the present levels of MTC funding, but they might be even less. Certainly, the STC's government funding amounts to 7 per cent. At this rate, our two largest theatre companies can barely be said to be subsidised. And while our flagship companies are so scandalously funded, it is unsurprising they should fall on Williamson's neck with cries of joy.

Nor, perhaps, is it surprising that the anxiety of underfunding should foster a fortress mentality that makes the State companies reluctant to enter the critical discourse on wider questions about theatre in Australia (such as Lee Lewis's paper on Cross-Racial Casting). But it's lamentable, all the same. And in the end, you have to feel a little sorry for Williamson, who seems to be carrying our State companies on his back. It's not his job, after all.

It's a truism to say that Peter Brook's film King Lear is a masterpiece. But what is a masterpiece? Saying this of a work can be a way of not looking at it: the artwork becomes "timeless", a glazed exhibit in the museum of our cultural self-regard. It turns into a monument.

Thinking this over after watching Brook's film recently, it seems to me that when I say something is a masterpiece, I mean that its achievement is not that it rises into some lofty empyrean sphere where history no longer exists. It's a masterpiece because it does the opposite: because it makes a gesture so potent that it seems to draw all human experience into its gravity, because it reaches deep into individual and collective memory and hauls experience, naked and bloody, into the present.


When Paul Scofield lifts his dead daughter in his arms and howls in the desolate landscape of battle, for a moment he is every father who has stood in the ruins of his home, holding the corpse of his murdered child. When Alan Webb as Gloucester is roughly bound to a chair in his own house and stares at his captors in disbelief and growing fear, he is every prisoner staring at those who are about to become his torturers, pleading a claim of common humanity in the face of everything that denies it. When Lear confesses to Cordelia (Anne-Lise Gabold) that he has wronged her, it touches everything we know about forgiveness: the grief, the shame and the mutual love of the act.

Watching King Lear now is a different experience from watching it when it was made: our world has changed since 1971. But this film illustrates Ezra Pound's truism that art is "news that stays news". Perhaps what is most shocking about Brook's film - and it remains shocking - is how profoundly it galvanises our present. Gloucester is a prisoner in Abu Ghraib; Lear is a bereaved father in Chechnya or Lebanon. The loss, the grief, the cruelty and the love are all of our own time.

Brook's stripped-back adaptation, which uses all the avant garde film techniques of his day, draws from Jan Kott's insight that Lear, like Beckett's Endgame, reveals a world devoid of consolation, morality or universal justice. To underline the Beckettian connection, Brook uses two of Beckett's favourite actors: Patrick McGee, who plays the coolly sadistic Duke of Cornwall, and Jack MacGowan, who plays the Fool. Brook filmed it in the bleak landscape of a wintry Denmark, and portrayed Lear as a king of 10th century Britain, tyrant of a petty kingdom. The eye is undiverted by pomp and luxury: here both nature and man are brutal.

Brook gives us a complex Lear. He is a king whose madness is evident at the beginning of the story, a man whose fierce will is the only force that controls the madness that stirs inside him. The opening scene is a sweeping shot of the commoners who stand outside the door of the throne room, awaiting a fate that will be decided by capricious forces beyond their control.

What follows is a stark examination of the mechanisms of power. Its victims are not only those who are its objects, but those who brutalise themselves in their lust for it. Perhaps the scene that speaks most of this is near the end, when Brook includes Edmund (Ian Hogg) in the background of the shot as Lear speaks to Cordelia when, having lost their campaign against Regan and Goneril, they are led to prison:

When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness. So we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies...

Behind them, Edmund listens. His face, marked by the blood and grime of battle, hardens to stone as he realises that such humility, humour and love, such trust, are lost to him forever. His order that Lear and Cordelia be killed is an act of visceral anguish and denial, a recognition of what he has murdered in himself and cannot bear to witness in others.

Brook's film is a devastating realisation of the play: a pitiless examination of the cruelty and emptiness that lies at the heart of the lust for power. But it is by no means a nihilistic portrayal of humanity. It breaks your heart not because it unflinchingly reveals how cruel human beings can be - that would be merely horrifying - but because it reveals the fragile human possibility that is destroyed by this cruelty.

In King Lear, Shakespeare shows us humanity at its most abject, and - almost miraculously - a great beauty shines within its abjection. When Lear, at the height of his madness and humiliation, prays for those who "bide the pelting of this pitiless storm", lamenting their "loop'd and window'd raggedness", it is a plea to all of us to "show the heavens more just". As too often in this world, the heavens remain unjust: but within that prayer is the awakening of a true compassion that illuminates the value of all real justice.

And maybe that compassion might awaken within those who listen to Lear's speech. That we might "see better" is, after all, what art might legitimately offer us: a slight hope perhaps but, all the same, real and obdurate in a world which so often seeks to make us blind.