Yesterday it was reported that police were investigating websites hosting Bill Henson's photographs. Aside from the grim humour of seeing Fairfax and News Ltd prosecuted for distributing pictures they have themselves been instrumental as characterising as pornographic, there is nothing very funny about this. (Better get your pictures of Michelangelo's David and Classical Greek statuary off-line quick - and make double sure that no photos of your kids playing in the bath are littering your hard drive).

What a gigantic waste of police time and public money.

I've held off from reproducing Henson's photographs myself because they are copyright images, but that seems a bit irrelevant now. One of the many odd aspects of the public fuss is that nobody seems to have mentioned that he also photographs male nudes. (And landscapes, trees, roads and urban wastelands). As always, it's the female body that requires custodianship and control. For a discussion of the wider political and social implications of this farce, and some other troubling examples of the censorship referred to in the Open Letter, see Richard Phillips' article here.

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Frost/Nixon, by Peter Morgan, directed by Roger Hodgman. Designed by Richard Roberts, costumes by Judith Cobb, lighting by Matt Scott, composer Paul Grabowsky. With John Adam, Jada Alberts, Bruce Myles, Marshall Napier, Yalin Ozucelik, Neil Pigot, Teague Rook, Kat Stewart, David Trendinnick and Greg Ulfan. Melbourne Theatre Company @ the Fairfax Studio, Victorian Arts Centre, until July 5. Bookings: 1300 723 038.

In contemporary politics, image is all. It was once said that one picture is worth a thousand words: in these hypermediated times, it’s worth a lot more than that. Words have to be listened to and considered, but a single image drives straight into the collective subconscious.

Every gesture counts. The current US Democratic race is a hallucinatory exercise in image management: Hillary Clinton getting down with the working classes, or Barak Obama’s frantic damage control over the release of pictures where he is supposedly wearing “Muslim” garb.

Television asserted its dominance in the 1960s, when Richard Nixon could not compete with the telegenic John F Kennedy. His tendency to sweat and his “shifty eyes” earned him the epithet “Tricky Dicky”.

Peter Morgan’s play focuses on this shift by dramatising the famous interviews Nixon conducted with British talk show host David Frost in 1977, three years after Nixon resigned from the Presidency to a self-pitying and bitter seclusion

Frost, regarded as a flaky celebrity by the Washington press corps, managed to lever out of this superb political operator a startling admission of wrong-doing and culpability, best summed up in the quote: “When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.”

Morgan skilfully crafts an argument (and, interestingly, makes one feel slightly nostalgic for Nixon – everything is relative) that television reduces and diminishes public office and debate. However, the play doesn’t escape its own criticisms – it too “simplifies, diminishes”.

Most of Morgan’s work is for the screen, and so it’s unsurprising that this play, even though it resists the genre of docu-drama, is very reminiscent of a dramatised television documentary – brief re-enactments of a variety of encounters, held together by an explanatory narrative delivered by one of Frost’s researchers, Jim Reston (Teague Rook).

The production is powered by a magnificent performance of Nixon by Marshall Napier, which reaches beyond caricature to glimpses of an awkward and disillusioned man, and John Adams’ performance of the charismatic Frost.

Roger Hodgman’s production is unobtrusive and elegant, using a revolve to swiftly move the action across a stage dominated by a big screen, on which the swollen faces of the actors emphasise the unreal focus of the camera.

It’s easily digestible stuff which walks an uneasy line between fiction and non-fiction. Its high dramatic point is a fictional late-night phone call between Frost and a drunk Nixon which, paradoxically, generates the most truthful moments in the play.

This review is published in today's Australian.

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Daniel Schlusser pointed out last week that an illiterate idiot published in the Age was quoting William Blake in order to condemn Bill Henson. (Formerly Chief of Staff to Howard Federal Minister Kevin Andrews, Kevin Donnelly is also, ironically enough, author of a paper attacking contemporary education called "Dumbing Down"). It's almost Freudian: I can't think of a more apt poet for the defence. No one more fiercely defended the innocence of the body, nor more eloquently attacked the hypocrisy of the prurient:

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen;
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut
And "Thou shalt not," writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.


One could be excused for thinking this has been a bad week for art; but, exhausted as I am, I am inclined to think otherwise. It is a mistake to think that the loudest, most strident voices are the dominant ones. They are not. I have been scanning the media and the internet, and much more often I see thoughtfulness and reason, and disquiet at what has been happening here over the past week. Among the best responses I have read was a letter published in the Sydney Morning Herald from a former police superintendent, Alan Leek, which I'll reproduce in full here for its refreshingly sane perspective from someone who knows very well what child pornography and sexual abuse actually are. One of the aspects I most resent about this furore is, in fact, how it trivialises child sexual abuse:

With a foot in both camps, I have watched with interest as this sorry Bill Henson episode has unfolded. I am in a position, perhaps unique in this farce, of having been a member of the NSW Police Force for 34 years and, for the most part concurrently, proprietor of a commercial exhibiting gallery for more than 25 years.

I am gobsmacked and bitterly disappointed that a police force, which is far better than the one I joined all those years ago and far better educated, still fails to see when it has been ambushed by the pursed-lipped paragons of public morality; those zealots who can't separate nudity from sexuality and who rely on an obsequious police to do their bidding in glorious ignorance. Let's face it; most police would not know their Ansel Adams from their elbow.

Debate is one thing, criminal sanctions are another. Debate should be welcomed - criminal sanctions stifle any opportunity for debate.

Henson's art has nothing to do with exploitation or pedophilia, but enough has been said about that by those more qualified than I.

Not one of the pedophiles I arrested and prosecuted advertised their vile workings. They operated under the coward's cloak of darkness and familiarity. Not for them the arc lights of a legitimate gallery - more the deeper crevices of the internet or the well-thumbed pages of their sordid juvenilia and other paraphernalia.

That senior police fail to utilise their discretion to uphold the independence of a profession I still hold dear, setting themselves up again to be pilloried for ill-informed actions that must surely fail, is a bitter pill for me.

Having worked with scarce resources, I shake my head at the waste portrayed by television images of police seizing crates of artworks, and wonder to what better use their expertise might be applied. Child protection, perhaps?

Ill-informed comment and motherhood statements from political leaders that further cast the burden on police are regrettable.

To ensure that public disquiet is addressed in the future and that the police do not continue to undo their normally laudable work, perhaps those same political leaders might consider a mechanism where pious complaints can be referred to censorship arbiters.

In the meantime, I commend Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, for standing tall when others have lacked the backbone to do the same.

In my various command positions, I would not have sanctioned the actions being taken by police. I would also have no hesitation in exhibiting Henson's work.

In time, this whole inane episode will appear pretty dumb, but the damage to Henson and his subjects and lost opportunities for professional policing are inestimable.

Alan Leek (retired superintendent of police) Breewood Galleries, Richmond

Indeed.

Our Open Letter made the front pages of the Herald Sun, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age (the Australian gave it what perhaps was its real news value and ran it more modestly), and overseas was reported in the Guardian, the New York Times and by the BBC. I and other signatories were on talkbacks all over Australia, on PM, the ABC news and television. It has been misquoted, misrepresented and plain lied about. (I personally wish on Miranda Devine the task of getting the "lockstep" artistic community to agree about anything). It was also reported fairly in many instances, and published in full on the Age's site, so anyone who cares to do so can check what was actually said. The letter has been also been reproduced in OnLine Opinion, Real Time and on many blogs.

Those who are surprised by the venom some responses unleashed against the arts community should get out more. There is a real and abiding hatred of the arts and artists among a noisy minority of Australians, fuelled by perceptions that artists are lazy, rich bludgers who steal the tax-payers' money while lounging about decadently drinking absinthe and (almost certainly) molesting small children. Those who are not aware of this strand of the Australian conversation should be. The culture wars are by no means over. To undo this perception - one which, as we all know, bears no relation to reality - will take long, patient and calm work.

Those of us who care about the arts and freedom of expression should focus rather those on who are also speaking, if less stridently, more rationally and thoughtfully about this issue. Over the past couple of days, I have done a scan of blogs and media coverage, and it seems to me that these voices far outnumber those rushing to lynch Henson. I am not so sure that the "arts community" is as "out of touch" as some interested commentators claim.

Samples of the more interesting commentary, in blogs and other online publications, are below:

New Matilda
Sorrow at Sill's Bend
Discussion (and links to others) at Larvateus Prodeo
The Guardian
Home Page Daily
Superfluities
Sebastian Smee (The Australian)
Guy Beres
Sarsaparilla
Hyperidian Bannerman
Goals + Girls Blog
Cafe Philos
Not Too Much (interesting, a Christian view)
Pavlov's Cat

Interestingly too, given the Malthouse/Victorian Opera's recent production of Through the Looking Glass, Phillip Adams raises Lewis Carroll. And it's hard not to wonder how the upcoming Hayloft production of Franz Wedekind's Spring Awakening will go in its return season at Belvoir St in Sydney later this year.

And, for some comic relief:

Ampersand Duck
Aaron Timms in the SMH
Pauline Futeran

Finally, many people have asked to put their names to the Open Letter. We are now considering how best to facilitate this, and will let you all know as soon as it's decided. Meanwhile, normal programming will resume soon.

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How To Disappear Completely and Never Be Found, by Fin Kennedy, directed by Paul King, Sound design by George Bisset. With Michael F Cahill, Glen Hancox, Helen Hopkins, David Passmore and Tory Rodd. Hoy Polloy Mechanics Institute Performing Arts Centre, Corner of Sydney & Glenlyon Roads, Brunswick, until June 7)

“What makes you who you are? A name? An address? A random collection of experiences, a few memories? …You are who you can prove you are. You are what people think. And that’s the easiest thing in the world to change.”

So claims the doomed conman Mike in Fin Kennedy’s play How To Disappear Completely and Never Be Found, a haunting and powerful exploration of identity and loss that made big waves when it premiered in Britain last year.


How To Disappear Completely explores the netherworld of missing persons. Kennedy sketches a bleak picture of the spiritual bankruptcy of contemporary society, where identity is little more than an advertising brand.

It follows the existential collapse of young advertising executive Charlie Hunt (David Passmore). He has an incipient ulcer, a bad cocaine habit, and his employers are just about to prosecute him for embezzlement.As his life crashes around his ears, he decides to slough off his old “soiled” identity and become someone else.

This was the first unproduced play in 40 years to win the prestigious Arts Council John Whiting Award, and its premiere at the Sheffield Crucible elicited rapturous reviews. Kennedy was tagged as a name to watch.

Even in this imperfect Australian premiere by Hoy Polloy, it’s easy to see why. It’s rarer than you might think to encounter new plays of this quality.

Kennedy has a sure sense of theatrical structure and a poet’s ear for professional vocabularies – the pathologist, the career criminal, the advertising shill – which he moulds into arresting dramatic language.

At once dramatically direct and metaphorically resonant, this writing demands a concomitant level of skill from actors, and is unforgiving if they don’t meet its demands. Hoy Polloy’s hardworking cast gives us a honest presentation of the play, but the performers are seldom able to fulfil its potential.

Michael F Cahill, playing a variety of roles, is the only actor who possesses the vocal skills to exploit the theatricality of Kennedy’s text.

Passmore in the central role has a couple of electrifying moments, but lacks a sense of journey: Charlie begins and ends abject. And too often the other cast members, playing a dizzying array of doubles, fall into mugging their parts when they’re at a loss.

Like the performances, George Bisset’s sound design and Paul King’s direction are patchy: there is little sense of integration and continuity. But there’s enough to give us a sense of this play’s power, and it’s a welcome chance to see one of the major new talents in British theatre.

Picture: David Passmore as Charlie/Adam in How To Disappear Completely and Never Be Found. Photo: Tim Williamson

This review appeared in Monday's Australian. I fear I am not able to do an extended review this week. As you might have gathered, it's been madness here.

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This week has been a dead loss as far as what's loosely called "my life" is concerned. The phone's been running hot with talkback radio calls and bizarre inquiries from journalists ("Does Cate Blanchett own a Bill Henson?"), while I am desperately attempting to get to my dining room table, where the alarmingly fat US copy-edit of The Singing is demanding my attention. (Author copies of the Australian edition just arrived this moment - a short pause for champagne - it's been a long road!)

So I haven't had any time to write the reviews I planned of Hoy Polloy's production of How To Disappear Completely and Never Be Found, and of Two Blue Cherries' gorgeous production of Three Dog Night, in which I was planning to discourse thoughtfully about plays (these days known as "text-based theatre"). And I'm still not sure if I can get there. The Australian ran a short review on Monday of How To Disappear Completely, which will have to do for now, and Three Dog Night has just closed after a deservedly successful season which I hope some of you caught. I'll try to blog them - both these productions deserve attention - but no promises.

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I know it's been quiet on the blog the past couple of days. However, it has not been quiet at home: I've been putting together an Open Letter in Support of Bill Henson from a number of the Creative Stream representatives at the Australia 2020 Summit. The letter has just gone out to media outlets, and runs as follows:

PRESS RELEASE: MAY 27, 2008

Open Letter in support of Bill Henson
From Creative Australia 2020 Summit representatives

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

As members of the Creative Stream of the Australia 2020 Summit, we wish to express our dismay at the police raid on Bill Henson’s recent Sydney exhibition, the allegations that he is a child pornographer, and the subsequent reports that he and others may be charged with obscenity.

The potential prosecution of one of our most respected artists is no way to build a Creative Australia, and does untold damage to our cultural reputation.

The public debate prompted by the Henson exhibition is welcome and important. We need to discuss the ethics of art and the issues that it raises. That is one of the things art is for: it is valuable because it gives rise to such debate and difference, because it raises difficult, sometimes unanswerable, questions about who we are, as individuals and as members of society. However, this on-going discussion, which is crucial to the healthy functioning of our democracy, cannot take place in a court of law.

We invite the Prime Minister, Mr Rudd, and the NSW Premier, Mr Iemma, to rethink their public comments about Mr Henson’s work. We understand that they were made in the context of deep community concern about the sexual exploitation of children. We understand and respect also that they have every right to their personal opinions. However, as political leaders they are influential in forming public opinion, and we believe their words should be well considered.

We also call on the Minister for Environment Heritage and the Arts, Mr Garrett, to stand up for artists against a trend of encroaching censorship which has recently resulted in the closure of this and other exhibitions.

We wish to make absolutely clear that none of us endorses, in any way, the abuse of children. Mr Henson’s work has nothing to do with child pornography and, according to the judgment of some of the most respected curators and critics in the world, it is certainly art. We ask for the following points to be fairly considered:

1. Mr Henson is a highly distinguished artist. His work is held in all major Australian collections including the Art Gallery of NSW, Art Gallery of SA, Art Gallery of WA, National Gallery of Victoria and the National Gallery of Australia.

Among international collections, his work is held in the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Denver Art Museum; the Houston Museum of Fine Art; 21C Museum, Louisville; the Montreal Museum of Fine Art; Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris; the DG Bank Collection in Frankfurt and the Sammlung Volpinum and the Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna.

Major retrospectives of Mr Henson’s work at the Art Galleries of NSW and Victoria attracted more than 115,000 people, and produced not one complaint of obscenity. His work has also been studied widely in schools for many years.

2. Mr Henson has been photographing young models for more than 15 years. Until now, there has been no suggestion by any of his subjects or their families of any abusive practices. On the contrary, his models have strongly defended his practice and the feeling of safety generated in his process, and have expressed pride in his work.

We suggest that the media sensationalism and the criminalisation of laying charges against Mr Henson, his gallery and the parents of the young people depicted in his work, would be far more traumatic for the young people concerned than anything Mr Henson has done.

3. The work itself is not pornographic, even though it includes depictions of naked human beings. It is more justly seen in a tradition of the nude in art that stretches back to the ancient Greeks, and which includes painters such as Caravaggio and Michelangelo. Many of Henson’s controversial images are not in fact sexual at all. Others depict the sexuality of young people, but in ways that are fundamentally different from how naked bodies are depicted in pornography. The intention of the art is not to titillate or to gratify perverse sexual desires, but rather to make the viewer consider the fragility, beauty, mystery and inviolabilty of the human body.

In contrast, the defining essence of pornography is that it endorses, condones or encourages abusive sexual practice. We respectfully suggest that Henson’s work, even when it is disturbing, does nothing of the sort. I would personally argue that, in its respect for the autonomy of its subjects, the work is a counter-argument to the exploitation and commodification of young people in both commercial media and in pornographic images.

Many of us have children of our own. The sexual abuse and exploitation of children fills us all with abhorrence. But it is equally damaging to deny the obvious fact that adolescents are sexual beings. This very denial contributes to abusive behaviour, because it is part of the denial of the personhood of the young. In my opinion, Mr Henson’s work shows the delicacy of the transition from childhood to adulthood, its troubledness and its beauty, in ways which do not violate the essential innocence of his subjects. It can be confronting, but that does not mean that it is pornography.

Legal opinion is that if charges were laid against Mr Henson, he would be unlikely to be found guilty. The seizure of the photographs, and the possible prosecution of Mr Henson, the Rosyln Oxley9 Gallery or the parents of Henson’s subjects, takes up valuable police and court time that would be much better spent pursuing those who actually do abuse children.

4. Perhaps the most distressing aspect of the trial-by-media to which Mr Henson and his work has been subject over the past few days, is how his art has been diminished and corrupted. The allegations that he is making child pornography have done more to promote his work to possible paedophiles than any art gallery, where the work is seen in its proper, contemplative context. It is notable that the attacks on Mr Henson’s work have, almost without exception, come from those who are unfamiliar with the photographs, or who have seen them in mutilated or reduced images on the internet.

If an example is made of Bill Henson, one of Australia’s most prominent artists, it is hard to believe that those who have sought to bring these charges will stop with him. Rather, this action will encourage a repressive climate of hysterical condemnation, backed by the threat of prosecution.

We are already seeing troubling signs in the pre-emptive self-censorship of some galleries. This is not the hallmark of an open democracy nor of a decent and civilised society. We should remember that an important index of social freedom, in earlier times or in repressive regimes elsewhere in the world, is how artists and art are treated by the state.

We urge our political leaders to follow the example of Neville Wran, when in 1982 a similar outcry greeted paintings by Juan Davila. At that time, Mr Wran said: “I do not believe that art has anything to do with the vice squad”. With Mr Wran, we believe the proper place for debate is outside the courts of law.

Alison Croggon
Writer


Signatories:

Louise Adler, CEO & Publisher-in-Chief, Melbourne University Publishing
Geoffery Atherden, Writer
Neil Armfield, Artistic director, Belvoir St Theatre
Stephen Armstrong, Executive Producer, Malthouse Theatre
James Baker, Tax advisor and accountant
Geraldine Barlow, Curator
Larissa Behrendt, Professor of Law, University of Technology Sydney
Cate Blanchett, Actor
Daryl Buckley, Musician
Leticia Cacares, Theatre Director
Karen Casey, Visual Artist
Kate Champion, Choreographer, Artistic Director Force Majeure
Rachel Dixon, New media developer
Phoebe Dunn, Chief Executive Officer, Australian Commercial Galleries Association
Jo Dyer, Executive Producer, Sydney Theatre Company
Kristy Edmunds, Artistic Director, Melbourne International Festival of the Arts
Saul Eslake, Economist
Richard Gill, Artistic Director, Victorian Opera
Peter Goldsworthy, Writer
Marieke Hardy, Writer and broadcaster
Sam Haren, Artistic Director, The Border Project
Frank Howarth
Cathy Hunt, Creative consultant
Nicholas Jose, Writer
Andrew Kay, Producer
Ana Kokkinos, Film maker
Sandra Levy
Matthew Lutton, Theatre director
Nick Marchand, Artistic Director, Griffin Theatre
Sue Maslin, Producer, Film Art Doco Pty Ltd
Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, Director, Museum of Contemporary Art
Callum Morton, Visual Artist
Rosemary Myers, Artistic Director, Windmill Performing Arts
Rachel Healy, Director Performing Arts, Sydney Opera House
Liza Lim, Composer
Jan Minchin, Director, Tolarno Galleries
Helen O’Neil, Executive producer
Charles Parkinson, Artistic Director, Tasmanian Theatre Company
David Pledger, Theatre director
Marion Potts, Theatre Director
Katrina Sedgwick, Festival Director, Adelaide Film Festival
Mary Vallentine, Arts manager

Additional signatories:

The following support the appeal contained in this letter without necessarily endorsing the detailed argument:

John Coetzee, Novelist
Ramona Koval, Writer and broadcaster
Julianne Schultz, Writer

Update: The indefatigable Nick Pickard is logging (some of) the media reaction at Arts Journalist.

Update Friday: TN's round-up of reaction here.

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I forgot to mention, until reminded by my publisher this morning, that composer Andrée Greenwell's chamber outfit Villainelles last night performed settings of poems by me, Jordie Albiston and Kathleen Mary Fallon as part of the Sydney Writers Festival. (You might remember Greenwell as the composer behind Venus & Adonis.) Wish I'd been there. And the charming poetry ezine Pirene's Fountain showcases my work in its new issue, released today.

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Updates below

I am shocked and deeply disturbed to read this morning that photographer Bill Henson - one of Australia's most significant artists - is being investigated by police and threatened with prosecution. Sydney gallery Roslyn Oxley9, which is exhibiting his recent works, cancelled last night's planned opening, amid lurid accusations that Henson is purveying child porn.

It seems surreal: on Tuesday night, I was once again examining a giant, bright yellow poster that announces to the world at large: WANT LONGER LASTING SEX? It's a sight I find unambiguously offensive, but anyone with enough money can put it up where no one can miss it without fear of prosecution. I live in a world awash with advertising images of commodified and sexualised children or women whose bodies are routinely scalpeled and injected with toxins to meet some generically porned-up notion of feminine sexuality, a world where genuine child porn is something that people can access by simply tapping a keyboard.

And what raises the hue and cry? An artist of integrity and passion, whose sensitive and beautiful photographs of adolescents reveal the twilit zones of human liminality, vulnerability and feeling. An artist whose work, in its painful and intimate honesty, directly challenges the crass exploitation and commodification of young bodies by the mass media and porn industries. An artist whose work can, in any case, only offend those who bother to go to the galleries where they are exhibited. This work is, apparently, simply child porn, a form of sexual assault.Update 5: The statement from Roslyn Ozley9 Gallery

As it says in the News Ltd story:

Hetty Johnston, founder and executive director of Bravehearts, a child sexual assault action group, today called for Mr Henson and the gallery to be prosecuted over the images.

"It's child exploitation, it's criminal activity and it should be prosecuted, both the photographer Bill Henson ... but also the gallery because these are clearly images that are sexually exploiting young children," Ms Johnston said.

"They are clearly illegal child pornography images, it's not about art at all, it's a crime and I hope they are prosecuted."

What's pornographic is the pruriently censored images up on the News Ltd site, under the headline "Nude Children Exhibit Shut". The black blocks that conceal their bodies - and vandalise the artwork - demonstrate how shameful we believe the human body really is.

An afterthought: anyone confused about the issue can type "teen porn" into their google (making sure your filter is turned off: and yes, it's a rather unpleasant exercise) and make some direct comparisons between Henson's work and internet pornographers.

Update: More from Chris Boyd

Update 2: A busy day on the anti-art round: artwork by Kevin Rudd's nephew prompts "excessive censorship" by Melbourne City Council

Update 3: PM Rudd himself gets into the act, turns arts critic, condemns Henson's pictures as "revolting" and proves he ought to stick to his own areas of expertise.

Update 4: Police say they will charge Henson. And the senior curator of photography at the Art Gallery of NSW, Judy Annear, defends Henson's work and reputation. She says that he is becoming a "whipping boy" to deflect public anxieties about paedophilia and suggests that the police should be chasing real child abusers.

Update 5: Media statement released this afternoon by Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery.

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Through The Looking Glass, after Lewis Carroll. Libretto by Andrew Upton, composed by Alan John. Conducted by Richard Gill, directed by Michael Kantor, set design, costumes and puppets by Peter Corrigan, lighting design by Paul Jackson. With Jacqueline Bathman, Emilia Bertolini, Kanen Breen, Francesca Codd, Margaret Haggart, Hayley Heath, Dana Hehir, David Hobson, Suzanne Johnston, Stephanie Pidcock, Gary Rowley and Dimity Shepherd. Malthouse Theatre and Victorian Opera @ The Merlyn Theatre, CUB Malthouse, until May 31.

Childhood is a famously troubled realm. A few hundred years ago it scarcely existed past infancy - in mediaeval paintings and drawings, children are depicted as miniature adults, with the same clothing, the same shoes, the same dour expressions. As is still the case in many places in the world, children were part of a family's capital, and were expected to earn their keep from an early age. It took the Romantics to invent childhood, a kingdom in which the child, his eyes still innocent of the vulgarities of adulthood, had a privileged access to being.

The division of the child from the man more or less began with Rousseau, and was extended through poems like Wordsworth's The Prelude, in which the poet dropped the adult "burthen of my own unnatural self" through contemplating the free child he once had been. It took the Victorians to bring this to a rich apogee of sentiment - that staple of Australian childhood, Coles Funny Picture Book, is packed to the gills with dimpled little girls with bows in their hair, clutching kittens and lisping saccharine rhymes about their love for Daddy.


But there was, of course, a darker side to Victorian childhood, when children worked in shocking conditions in "dark Satanic mills" from an early age. Only the privileged could afford a childhood. And violence was a major part of life, even for those privileged children - corporal punishment was a parental duty, its threat reinforced by books like Struwwelpeter, in which wicked children met dreadful deaths in a morally satisfying circle. The tension between childish innocence and childish wickedness, idealised childhood and childhood as a state of degradation and powerlessness, was perhaps at its height at this time.

It resulted in some extraordinary literature, of which Lewis Carroll's children's books, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, are probably the most famous. In these stories, first invented by Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson to entertain the young Alice Liddell during a boatride down a river, enchantment is suffused by a surreal cruelty and callousness. This often discomforting ambiguity is a major part of the books' continuing fascination, and the driving force behind this operatic adaptation by composer Alan John and librettist Andrew Upton.

At the heart of this opera is a photograph Dodgson took of Alice as a child. She appears to have been artfully posed: her head is tilted slightly so she looks over her naked, exposed shoulder, her expression knowing, suggestive of an adult sexuality at odds with her thin, childish body. Whether these and other photos Dodgson took of young girls show him to be a paedophile is a hotly debated question, although there is no evidence that he was. What is beyond doubt, however, is the disturbing power of the image, poised between childish unknowing and adult knowingness and caught in the gaze of the photographer, like those Victorian collections of butterflies pinned under glass.

The opera adapts Through the Looking Glass as a double narrative, exploring the writing of the story, and Alice Pleasance Liddell's subsequent lifelong identification as Carroll's creation, through the strange landscape of Carroll's fantasy. Upton's libretto reaches no conclusions and no judgments about Dodgson himself: rather, he follows Alice through the writer's projections, a confusing mirror-world in which she loses her identity, even her own name; a world in which she exists only as a figment of someone else's imagination. As Tweedle Dum says of the Red King, "why, you’re only a sort of thing in his dream!"

John's score exploits the full resources of a small band - harp, piano, harmonium and percussion - and, like the production itself, makes little concession to the tropes of Victorian England. It's inventive theatrical music, which plunges straight into the action: it's always unexpected, diving from dissonant sound into lyric melody, evoking moods from comedy to sorrow to absurdity. In fact, at the end, when only four musicians stood up to bow, I was taken completely by surprise - how had so few made so much and so various music? I should also note Richard Gill's presence, not only as conductor, but for his speaking part ("Hang onto the goat's beard!") which broke an imaginary wall between band and stage, and stirred a ripple of laughter. As Gill is playing a train conductor, it's also a terrible pun.

Although this double narrative is dramatically clear, if perhaps confusing at the beginning of the opera, it's tactfully done. It brings a Freudian subtext to warnings about the Jabberwock ("The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!") and Humpty Dumpty's exhortation to Alice to stop growing at seven, while still permitting creations like the White Queen and the Tweedle twins their full Carrollean nonsense. And those expecting a lush evocation of a John Tenniel drawing will be disappointed: for one thing, the model for Tenniel's Alice is reportedly another of Carroll's child friends, Mary Hilton Badcock; and for another, Peter Corrigan's design has reached forward into modernity, growing up as Alice Liddel herself did into the 20th century.

So it is an adult Alice we encounter, dressed unexpectedly in trousers and shirt and carrying a couple of suitcases: perhaps she is touring America, where she made a living giving appearances as the "real Alice". And it is the adult Alice who wanders through the looking glass, here represented by giant shards of broken mirror, to reclaim her identity from the perverse trio of child Alices, dressed in long-legged striped stocking and huge bows, which surround her.

Peter Corrigan's design, a stark geometric fantasy, is central to this opera. The set is a white box marked out in squares, with the band perched above the stage. The floor can be darkened at will to become a chessboard (among other things, Through the Looking Glass is a heavily disguised chess game) and the back wall opens into unexpected doors and windows, or remains a blank screen for a series of projections - a painting of a volcano erupting, fairytale castles, ancient murals - that become a mysterious alternative narrative to the action on stage. It has to be said that sometimes the images become rather too mysterious - I was completely thrown by an image of a World War 1 battlefield emblazoned with the title of Robert Graves' famous war novel, Goodbye To All That - but much of the time the incongruity of the images creates fruitful tensions.

It creates a fertile environment for Michael Kantor's spare direction. This is a very stylish production, where the watchword is restraint and clarity rather than excess: those who have seen his recent work at Malthouse might well be surprised. What emerges are startling and haunting images that dissolve from the grotesque to the lyric, conducted with an unerring sense of theatrical rhythm and dynamic. The mise en scene is continually various and inventive. And Kantor has drawn some strong performances from an excellent cast.

Dimity Shepherd steps through the central and very demanding role of the adult Alice with a poignant authority, and is ably matched by David Hobson playing Lewis Carroll and his shadows - the White Knight, the Train Driver and Humpty Dumpty. The scene with Humpty Dumpty (represented by an Ubu doll puppet) is a highlight, and one of the few times Upton uses Carroll's poems unchanged. Another highlight is Margaret Haggart as the White Queen, in a central scene in which time moves backwards and forwards ("it's a poor sort of memory," says the Queen, "that only works backwards").

As it moves towards its close, the opera becomes increasingly elegaic. Midway through, Carroll mourns the loss of the immediate being of childhood, the child who, with careless innocence, reaches with "bright and eager eyes" for scented rushes which at once begin to fade. But Carroll's perception - envious, greedy, banished from Eden - is overlaid by the grown Alice's mourning for her stolen self - the child who became other under the pressure of Carroll's gaze, splintering into unrecognisable shards - and whom she reclaims.

In its final moments, this opera hit me unexpectedly with a surprising and painful release of emotion; somehow it had stolen up behind me while I was watching, without my noticing. It was, I think, something like the kind of recognition expressed in Dylan Thomas's poem Fern Hill (quoted here with the lineation barbarously mistreated by blogger):

...nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace.

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land...

Carroll's famous acrostic at the end of the book, which spells out Alice's name, is almost the final word in the opera. It too expresses a haunting of dull adulthood by charged childish memories - "Alice moving under skies / Never seen by waking eyes". But the effect was more overwhelmingly poignant than this poem, a prime example of Victorian sentiment, can perhaps explain, and probably resulted - I am guessing - from the lifting to the surface of complex subterranean movements throughout the opera, and their unexpected connection with my own complex memories.

Like the truth behind this story, these emotional currents are impossible to trace; they resist conscious intellection and articulation. But I suspect that one of things I ask from art is that it invites such experiences, even if I'm not sure what they mean, or even what they are. Those are the moments that go through you, like wine through water, and subtly change the colour of your mind.

Picture: David Hobson and Dimity Shepherd in Through the Looking Glass. Photo: Jeff Busby

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Good news on La Mama, who on Friday were facing what looked like an impossible task in order to buy their building - artistic director Liz Jones told me last night that they put the deposit down yesterday, having raised $140,000 between Friday and Monday. How heroic is that? They now have until September to come up with the rest of the $1.7 million, so keep those donations flowing in. To make a donation or for more information on how you can help, contact Liz Jones on tel. 03 9347 6948, 0412 909 077 or liz@lamama.com.au.

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