The first few days of the Melbourne Festival have been a time of maximum input, with no time for outputting (aside from Twitter, which exists, as you know, outside time). I've seen five MIAF shows so far, and will be logging my reviews in the next few days. But because the season is so short I wanted to tell you of my highlight so far: Stifter's Dinge, Heiner Goebbel's miraculous automaton, which leaps from the writings of the German Romantic writer Adalbert Stifter. It's on at the Malthouse, and there are several showings before it closes on Tuesday. I'd be running for tickets. No YouTube clip can tell you what it's like to be there: it's not like anything I have seen. And I can't stop thinking about it.

Ms TN's second week of Fringe demonstrated her craft and guile in negotiating the program: I enjoyed all three shows. There were a couple of regrettable TN misses - I intended to see Uncle Semolina & Friends' mega one-night-only production of Peter and the Wolf at the Collingwood Underground Carpark, but the Australian sent me to the bling opening of Hairspray instead (print review here). And a temporary brainfreeze meant I turned up an hour late for Mothlight, a circus show that I'd been greatly anticipating (shows at the Fringe Hub start an hour earlier on Sundays - doh!) Any reports on these shows, or others worth noting, are most welcome. Also, keen theatrenauts should keep an eye on Neandellus, Capital Idea, Sometimes Melbourne and Cameron Woodhead's new blog, Behind the Critical Curtain, for more reviews of more Fringe events.


My Fringe blogging is now all done, but the Fringe proper continues until October 10. I'm attending From Somewhere Underneath, Part 2 at the Donkey Wheel tonight. But that, like the MTC's offering next week at the Melbourne Festival, Life Without Me, (written, for those few who don't know, by my husband Daniel Keene), will be a family affair: courtesy of Platform Youth Theatre, my son Josh, along with a number of other young artists, is making his writing/directing debut. Then the Melbourne International Arts Festival officially opens on Friday night, although I'll have already seen two MIAF shows by then. I'm looking forward to it: I missed most of last year's festival, Brett Sheehy's first, because I was unexpectedly awarded a Poetry Tour of the UK and Ireland. One shouldn't look a free overseas trip in the mouth, but I was a bit sorry about missing the fest. (Only a bit, mind.)

But now, without further ado: Notes On What Ms TN Saw At The Fringe, Part The Second:

Intimate Exposure

Intimate Exposure takes place in what is surely the most notable new space in Melbourne: The Substation in Newport. The Substation is a magnificent early 20th century industrial building, built in 1915 by Victoria Railways to convert electricity supply for Williamstown. After it closed in the 1960s it was derelict for years, until it was restored to become Hobsons Bay Community Arts Centre. Upstairs at present is the Fringe Furniture Exhibition (my favourite piece being a steampunk gentleman's valet). And downstairs, in the catacomb-like rooms which once housed the rotary converters, is Intimate Exposure: three short dances especially created in and for these spaces, punctuated by two dance films by Dianne Reid.

There's an organic feel to how the event is structured. The audience members wander downstairs to see Dianne Reid's film she sleeps, a brief meditation on chronic illness featuring Jaye Hayes, which is on a loop in one of the basement rooms. In our own time, we reassemble in the central corridor, and the crowd is then divided in two for for the first dance, Soft Targets [solos], danced and choreographed by Jade Dewi Tyas Tunggal and Amelia McQueen. The audience is reunited for the next three dances: Carlee Mellow's Simmer, in another room; Dianne Reid's gorgeously lyrical film Magnificent Sadness (Luke Hickmott), in the corridor; and the final part of Soft Targets, a duet this time, with William Bilwa Costa manipulating the sound live.

As the live performers are all women, the dances made me especially aware of the female body: vulnerable, manipulated, assertive, comic. This is especially the case in Simmer: that which bubbles away beneath the surface. The dancers perform the soundscape, at first singing wordlessly, exploring their voices as instruments. The dance is a witty exploration of feminine inhibition: the dancers wear pink gumboots and strangely crocheted dresses that makes them seem to be parodies of femininity. They ask nervous questions of the audience without waiting for answers, and dancers Madelaine Krenek and Paula Lay end up shouting through plastic tubing into a paddling pool, literalising the piece's title, while Sarah Black's rebellious body neurotically articulates the rage beneath feminine obedience, until her apologetic smile or her tears no longer seem to be part of her face.

Tungall and McQueen's dances work specifically with the Substation spaces, focusing on the body's vulnerability in the graffitied shadows of the industrial brick walls. I thought their solo pieces more successful - McQueen writhing to a sinister heartbeat score in an enclosed space so small she can barely stand up, while we peer down a tunnel like voyeurs, or Tungall, her mouth covered by a strange crocheted mask that looks as if it were made of internal organs dyed in day-glo colours, retching as if her body were poisoned, before she plunges all of us into total darkness by switching off the light. Until October 9, Newport Substation.

The Event

John Clancy's meta-meta script, The Event, is given a spare and intelligent treatment by director Daniel Clarke and performer Nick Pelomis. It is, basically, theatre in the third person: the actor stands in the pool of light, and informs us that he, the actor, is standing in a pool of light, speaking words written by the author, and making gestures as rehearsed, in front of a bunch of strangers (us). Clancy's text is a smart and detailed deconstruction of a particular type of theatrical event. Because it is so smart, the pedant in me wants to point out that there are many kinds of theatrical events, employing or breaking different sets of conventions to those fondly satirised here, but it is only a minor point, since what Clancy's describing is the most conventional conventions.

I spent two days trying to remember what it reminded me of. For what it's worth, it reminded me of the clip below: Charlie Brooker taking the piss out of television news.



The Event could get a bit cute for its own good, but mainly stays a leap ahead of us. The most effective moments are those where the text cheats, leaping out of its meta-self-consciousness into sometimes quite moving meditations about contemporary life (that then snap back to reminding us that this is performance - haha, that wasn't me - a device technically known as "having one's cake and eating it").

But it all works: even though The Actor pauses at several points to tell us exactly how many minutes have passed, and how many more there are to go - a risky strategy, because it immediately makes the audience aware of time in a way that theatre seeks to defeat - it doesn't drag. Pelomis's performance is very likeable, making us intensely aware that, for all the skill and distancing techniques employed in the performance and the script, he is a living, breathing human being in the same space as us. Well worth a look, although I think this kind of theatre finishes where work like last year's Fringe hit Yuri Well begins. The Loft, Lithuanian Club, Fringe Hub, until October 9.

Dances with Worms

Which brings me to Dances with Worms - like Yuri Wells, a collaboration between Stuart Bowden and Benedict Hardie. I have no idea how to describe this one, without making it sound desperately unfunny and deeply infantile. The fact is that this show is very smart, and very funny indeed. But it is, perhaps, more than a little infantile: its scatalogical jokes and, most of all, its forlornly comic hero, Stuart, seem to place it in an adulthood that is crippled by nostalgia for its own past.

I don't think it was just Bowden's red velour dressing gown that made me think of Barry Humphries's Sandy Stone, a similarly lugubrious character nostalgically washed up on the edges of suburbia. When the audience enters, we see on stage an old-fashioned electric organ topped by an aspidastra pot plant, a large amplifier and a beige lounge chair on which is seated a worm (a long brown sausage with goggle eyes, glasses and black wool hair). Stuart emerges clutching two mugs, a skinny, slightly stooped, shy-looking man, and drops a kiss on the worm. Which he continues to embrace with increasing passion - until, with a start, he becomes aware of our gaze and stops, embarrassed. The worm, it turns out, is his wife; their relationship, we obliquely discover, is undergoing some kind of crisis.

In between, to the accompaniment of Stuart's ukelele, the odd skirl from the organ and some nifty sonic layering with a loop pedal, we are treated to some scatalogical and surreal fairytales and songs. They work just on the hilarious side of what would be otherwise searingly painful explorations of sexual humiliation. Performed with po-faced exactness by Bowden, it's worth the price of admission for its evocation of the Savannahs of Melton alone, let alone Bosley the Pencil's disastrous encounter with a lustful balloon. Highly recommended. Old Council Chambers, Trades Hall, until October 9.

It's unlikely to be published anywhere: so here is the celebratory speech I wrote for last night's launch of Philip Salom's new collection of poetry, Keepers, now available from Puncher & Wattman.

I am honoured to be be asked to launch Philip’s new collection, Keepers. And as I‘ve read and reread it, I’ve been pondering how to describe it. What kind of book is this? It’s easy to praise, but far less easy to categorise. Reading it is entering another reality, a reality constructed of language that is as complex and ambiguous as those we inhabit. The conceit – a series of linked poems forming an implicit narrative about the staff and students of a School of Arts – is simple; but its execution belies this apparent simplicity. Here are some attempts at a description:

Keepers is a prodigious act of imagination and thought. It’s a work of poetic virtuosity that wickedly undoes its own virtuosity. It’s a witty, beautiful and moving series of reflection on art and artists that is itself a work of art, that enacts its own argument: “Art is a strangeness come to wake them”. It’s a work of fiction, creating in its slim 100 pages an entire world, populated by a cast of immediately memorable and recognisable characters. It’s a satire of contemporary academia and culture, sometimes stingingly funny, sometimes scathingly black, that exposes and mocks the “health and safety” culture that represses and marginalises the dangerous reaches of the imagination. It’s a memento mori, that reminds us, as the poet says in a meditation on the Japanese board game Go, that the “game of poetry is mortal / accretion”. Perhaps it is, in the end, an opera, a story of love and death.

The art school is like an aquarium, as Salom suggests at one point, or a zoo or a gallery, that becomes a burning glass for emotion: love, hatred, abjection, desire, envy, spite and, increasingly, sorrow. The Keepers of the title are, among others, the staff members in the school. “The students,” as it says in the poem "The Kept Ones", “do not feel kept, but of course they / are kept. Someone or something or some household / keeps them. The staff members keep and are paid to keep keeping.” The poems dance around all the senses of keeping and being kept – the sexual economics, as suggested in the leering lecturer, “his voice in her head like a hand on a thigh”, and the ancient sense too of artists as custodians of knowledge, keeping the flame. Both these meanings – and others – are kept continuously in motion through the book.

Perhaps inevitably, as I spend a ridiculous proportion of my waking life in the theatre, the first word that occurred to me in thinking of Keepers was “play”. Keepers offers some of the most playful language in contemporary Australian poetry: the book is a celebration of poetic forms, and each poem generates a sensually charged language of constant transformation. But it also calls up another sense. Keepers is a kind of theatre: its characters flicker across the darkened stage of the mind, melancholy, estranged, hungering, each poem a spotlight in which we uneasily enter, like voyeurs, their secret thoughts and shames. And here even props have voices: inanimate objects, like "The Printmaker’s Copper Plate", or the plastinated corpses of Gunther von Hagens, articulate their thoughts. Dead artists – Dmitri Shostakovich, Artemisia Gentileschi, Francis Webb, Eadweard Muyerbridge - rise and speak with the living. In a brilliant (and brilliantly funny) series of fantasy lectures, "Lectures They Never Had", ideas lift like acrobats from the page and perform themselves. Keepers is a theatre of hallucinatory memory, of a present haunted by the thickening past of a culture that stirs and breathes in an artificial environment.

The poet himself contains multitudes, but remains invisible, vanishing into his own language. Or does he? Underneath almost every poem is a contrapuntal footnote, ironic, vernacular, prosaic, supposedly extracted from the diary of a character called Alann Fish. Fish is the cleaner and general dogsbody at the art school, and a key character in the unfolding narrative of the poems. He works in the basement, the id of the institution, and is a keen flaneur and a obsessive player of Go. Go is a defining metaphor throughout this book, which introduces another sense of the word “play”: the game of art, the game of life, the game of language. Most of all, the game of poetry. It’s not surprising to learn that Alann Fish is himself a poet, and is planning to release a book.

“I think I am real,” says Fish early on in the story. In the circling narratives of the art school, Fish becomes the work’s emotional centre, the ironic counterpoint of silence to the institution’s voluble artifice. Of course, the more real Fish becomes, the more vertiginous his existence, the more we’re haunted by his inner emptiness. This may be, in the end, a book about loneliness: all of its characters are devastatingly alone, and none more than Fish. One of its more beautiful images is one of the final visions of Fish, unravelling in a soft riot of internal rhymes before a mistakenly kindly neighbour:

Sunlight took his hat off
for him, and doffed it, and the wind that loved
the lorikeets and dried them, blew his shocked
expression off. Only his hands lifted from him
a question that wasn’t a question and therefore
said nothing.

I’ve barely scratched the surface of Keepers here, but will leave it to you to discover more of this book’s multiple pleasures for yourself. I recommend it unreservedly, and declare it launched

A couple of months ago I had the pleasure of editing Cordite Poetry Magazine's Creative Commons issue. Now, for your further pleasure, the second part of the issue, Creative Commons Part II - the Remixes, is online. Also, I finally got around to writing an editorial about the whole exercise. It's been a fascinating project.

And if you're in the mood for more poems, come along tomorrow night to Carlton, where I will be launching Philip Salom's new poetry collection, Keepers, out from Puncher and Wattman Poetry. Tuesday October 5, 6pm, Bella Union Bar, Trades Hall. All invited.

Sometimes a gal just has to do the bullet-point thang, even if I'm not quite sure how to get a bullet point on blogger and have to settle for an asterix instead. Here's a catch-up list of interesting stuff that I've been noticing around the FaceTubes:

* Fringe: As y'all know, Melbourne has donned its party hats for the Fringe. Ms TN has done her share of reviewing, with more to come, but (praise the Lord!), despite rumours to the contrary, she is not the entire Internetz! For more reviews of more shows, check out my blogger colleagues John Bailey at Capital Idea, Neandellus, Crikey's Curtain Call, The Groggy Squirrel or Drew Review. And feel free to post other links, if you know of them, in the comments.

* Did I tell you that Edward Albee is coming to Melbourne? One of the major figures of contemporary American drama, Edward Albee will be discussing his half century of working in the theatre at the Melbourne Theatre Company at 3pm on October 17. Expect sparks - Albee often delivers them. The event is free, but bookings are essential.

* The SMH's Jason Blake offers up an interesting analysis of the Sydney Fringe, which made its debut this month to a mixed reception. The comments are also worth reading.

* Don't miss George Hunka's moving tribute to one of my own favourite critics, Jan Kott, on Superfluities Redux:

There are a lot of walks in Kott’s more autobiographical essays: walks with friends, through old neighborhoods. Bearing Kott’s thoughts within my own on my walks through the streets of New York, even as I lack the resources or the status to see all of the theatre I might like to see (and as indigent dramatists do, I borrowed this book from the public library too), he accompanies me and teaches me to see, as he does, the theatre in the everyday, the everyday in theatre...

* From the sublime to... well, other critics, anyway. Those who don't start twitching at the mere whisper of "internet v print" might be interested in checking out Chris Wilkinson's latest response to the Woodhead/Croggon wrangle on the Guardian Theatre Blog. (They might be even more interested when they read the headline - "Why Sex Is Better In The Theatre"... though sadly it's not as exciting as it sounds). Meanwhile, the Thread That Will Never Die: The Sequel continues on TN... though there are far more interesting conversations elsewhere.

* Among these conversations are those sparked by a recent Blogging Unconference hosted by the Wheeler Centre (check for report and follow-up links), a follow-up to the Wheeler Centre's Critical Failure series, which started the whole damn thing. Best of all, the busy pencil of Crikey's Culture Mulcher, W.H. Chong, captured us all in glorious black and white; which, we all agreed, the interwebs most certainly are not.

* And finally, the social pages: Angela Meyer of Literary Minded reports on the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, where your humble blogger was hobnobbing as an instamatic hipster on Tuesday night.

Direct your browsers this instant to Marion Potts's robust and optimistic Rex Cramphorn Memorial Lecture, delivered yesterday, which is now online at the Malthouse site (pdf file). Aside from giving a glimpse into the creative philosophies that will be powering the Malthouse 2011 season (due to be announced in November), Potts casts her eye over a rapidly changing theatrical landscape, in which many major theatres will be seeing changes of artistic leadership next year.

"How often," asks Potts, "do we see the brilliance of an idea undermined, not by the limits of our imagination, or our lack of talent, but by the pressured environment of its creation, by insufficient interrogation, lacklustre thinking?" She looks instead to what we can aspire to be, arguing for a diverse and rigorous culture, and most of all for a theatre of agency and transformation, in which practice embodies value.

And I almost forgot - the big news is that Matt Lutton, AD of Perth company ThinIce whose work was seen here most recently in The Trial, will be Potts's associate director.

You can tell it's spring, because the ants are co-ordinating a spirited insurgency in the bathroom, and bare branches everywhere are bursting into blossom. Most tellingly, the Town Hall in North Melbourne is overrun with young people in black eyeliner, who are spilling down the steps and colonising the pavement cafes.


Ms TN has been slapping on her eyeliner with the rest of them and thronging the halls, albeit in a sober fashion suitable to her advancing years. I read a couple of years ago that Guardian critic Lyn Gardner sees six shows a day during the Edinburgh Fringe. I couldn't do anything remotely like that without the inside of my skull turning into something like mashed banana. So there's inevitably a chance element to the few shows I see out of the several hundred on offer, and they can hardly be thought of as representative: for those contemplating Fringe visits, the wisest strategy is to grab a program or browse the website.

Also, the performing arts continue outside the Fringe. I saw Bangarra Dance Theatre's Of Earth and Sky on the weekend: if you can beg, borrow or steal a ticket (or possibly buy one at the box office) before it closes next Saturday, do so. It's extraordinarily beautiful. I'm hoping to write more on Of Earth and Sky later this week, if I can think of the words: but today, let me briefly bring you up to speed on Ms TN's Adventures at the Fringe So Far. And I mean briefly. Ms TN is unseasonally under the weather today.

The Arrival


Shaun Tan’s moving graphic novel about the experience of immigration, The Arrival, is adapted for the stage by new company Mutation Theatre, under the eyes of emerging directors Sam Mackie and Patrick McCarthy. Getting to the venue was an adventure in itself: as the skies darkened over the surreal landscape of Docklands, half industrial chic and half just industrial, we encountered lonely bowler-hatted figures waving signs in the dark, to guide us to Shed 4. It almost - but not quite - felt like being on a strange film set, half Coppola, half Tati.

The show takes place in a gigantic metal warehouse, in which is erected a tent-like structure. Around 18 bowler-hatted young actors enact - now with carnivalesque excess, now with lyrical poignancy – Tan’s simple story of a man arriving in a strange country, having left his family behind. Tan's drawings are projected onto the ceiling of tent, as a counterpoint to the performances on stage. The result is an ambitious work of physical theatre that is often completely enchanting. Its strengths make you forgive its unncessary length and lack of focus as youthful excess. If this is the new generation of theatre makers, the future is looking good. Sadly, closed.

Home?


Written and directed by Jono Burns, Home? must be one of the slyest shows of the Fringe. An unapologetically autobiographical account of Burns's time at New York's Actor's Studio, it is a hilarious take-down of the pretensions and absurdities of the acting life and, in particular, method acting. Burns gives a tour de force performance, embodying around a dozen unlikely characters, from Phillip ("Do you know how many red-haired Jewish gays there are in Minnesota? Eight!") to an abrasive busker in Central Park. It gradually becomes clear, however, that Home? is more than a fond satire of an interesting and sometimes confronting time: it's also a moving account of coming to terms with loss.

Ably supported by musicians Sunny Leunig and Cathryn Kohn, Burns gices a virtuosic performance: turning on a dime from hilarity to real poignancy, he compels your unwavering attention for the hour-long show without missing a beat. Given the similarities to some of Peter Houghton's one-man shows, it's not surprising that Houghton's collaborator Anne Browning should have directed it with such a deft hand. Small, but perfectly formed. Fringe Hub, until October 1.

The Endarkenment

The Endarkenment, a post-apocalyptic musical by young writer/actor Fregmonto Stokes with score by Angus Leslie and Julius Millar, is the sort of rude, disorderly show that embodies the spirit of the Fringe. It makes almost no sense at all, has some of the most absurd costumes I've seen, and is powered by a rough, irreverent energy (and three cyclists, who every now and then cycle up the watts for a couple of torches). A spirited piss-take of online worlds such as Second Life, here called Corporate Life, it takes the form of a liturgy in which the high priest, Bugsy (Peter J. Reid) conducts a ceremony designed to appease the angry post-capitalist gods Imacdonald, Harvey Norman and Old King Coal. His three acolytes Swatch (Amy Turton), Flappy (Rueben Brown) and Zak Pidd (Goose) enact their fall of from grace and the subsequent Minor Economic Correction that saw the world fall into darkness.

Accompanied by a band of what appear to be pixies playing some very wonky pop, the performers belt out some fun numbers with ferocious gusto. Its satire of 21st century excess is limited to a basic attack on the alienation of virtual life, and some (admittedly enjoyable) wordplay on internet acronyms, but there are a couple of moments that pierce through the nonsense into something genuinely uncomfortable. Fringe Hub, until October 1.

Testimony


Testimony opens with a riveting image: we walk into the theatre to see a grotesque figure, dressed in what appear to be filthy white rags, standing on a podium, his back to the audience. When the lights go down, he turns to face us, and we see that he is abject indeed: his testicles, the size of grapefuits, dangle between his legs, forcing him to stand bowlegged, and his face is marred with what appears to be some terrible skin disease. This creature is, we learn, Octavio Asterius, the degraded modern remnant of the minotaur, the monster in the labyrinth of the contemporary imagination. Here, using an old convention of the theatre, he is on trial, with the audience as his jury and judge.

Graham Henderson's monologue was originally written as prose, and despite the best efforts of performer Matt Crosby and director Suzanne Chaundy, its transposition to theatre isn't entirely successful. The staging is simple: Crosby is framed by projections manipulated live on stage from a light projector, which are ingeniously various. Crosby's performance is detailed, brave and physically impressive; but his undoubted commitment is let down by some indifferent dramaturgy.

Testimony shows little grasp of dramatic structure, which means its energy really begins to sag in the final 20 minutes. Worse, the prose segues without warning from epiphanies of soaring poetic to moments of bathetic banality that recall nothing so much as a yoga meditation. If the text could be excised of its increasingly turgid repetitions, and could solve its problematically simplistic relationship to the audience, it might make a brilliant, albeit rather shorter, show. As it is, it founders under its own weight. Fringe Hub, until October 9.

Since 2007, The Hayloft Project has established itself as one of Australia’s leading independent companies with a string of elegant, razor-intelligent productions. In particular, they've attracted attention for their reworking of modern classics, such as Wedekind's Spring Awakening, Chekhov’s Platonov and, controversially, a fascinating version of Three Sisters, 3XSisters. For Thyestes, Malthouse's Tower Theatre residency for 2010, director Simon Stone reaches much further into the past, to the plays of Nero's tutor and adviser, philosopher and sometime dramatist, Seneca the Younger.

He's linked forces again with Black Lung stalwarts Mark Leonard Winter and Thomas Henning. Others include Chris Ryan (seen most recently in Malthouse’s Elizabeth and Benedict Andrews’s Measure for Measure at Belvoir St), Hayloft dramaturge Anne-Louise Sarks, one of the brains behind Hayloft's Fringe hit Yuri Wells, and sound designer Stefan Gregory, who was responsible for the astonishing sound in the STC’s The War of the Roses. The result is Hayloft’s best work yet, and one of the highlights of the year. Thyestes is rock'n'roll theatre: confronting, transgressive, uncomfortably hilarious, obscene, horrifying, and desolatingly beautiful.

Yet it's hard to know where to begin talking about this show. Thinking about it is very like contemplating one of those breeding tangles of snakes that David Attenborough's Life featured a couple of weeks ago on the ABC: it's an orgy of forms and ideas, each writhing about the others, which makes the mind slide distractingly from one thought to the next. I think that above all, you're dazzled by the sheer outrageous excess of it, its shockingly wasteful expense of energy. And yet this impression of excess is created by what is surely one of Hayloft's most austere productions.

The austerity begins with the design, which is stark black and white, reflecting the absolute moral world of classical tragedy. The Greeks didn't do shadows: this is a universe of darkness visible, where the hidden is dragged into the unforgiving light. Claude Marcos's traverse set - effectively a black, narrow, enclosed box, with a white interior exposed by Govin Ruben's harsh fluorescent lights - embodies this sense of continuous revelation. When the blinds that serve as curtains are down, as they are between every scene, it's impossible to see the audience on the other side: each new scene reveals the audience as well as the actors. This becomes increasingly disconcerting, because one of the paradoxical effects of this show is to erase distances: between then and now, them and us, the actors and ourselves.

A major reason for this sense of collapse between boundaries is Stefan Gregory's sensually enveloping sound design. Gregory shamelessly exploits the capacity of music to locate us ecstatically in the present: the soundtrack includes Schubert and Handel, Wu Tang Clan and Ice Cube, Roy Orbison and Queen. This connects with another convention - the use of surtitles - to make Thyestes seem like a kind of opera. It looks like theatre, sounds like theatre, but in its strangely abstracted narrative, and especially in its emotional excess, it works more like an operatic history.


And what of the story itself? Simon Stone and his collaborators claim their version of Thyestes is "after Seneca", but it's probably more true to label it "before Seneca". Seneca's actual play - notoriously "modern" in that very little happens aside from the climactic event - is enacted in a mere couple of scenes, right at the end of the show. The rest is an excavation of the bloody history of the House of Tantalus: the first and worst of all unhappy families.

From Tantalus himself, who stole ambrosia from Olympus and who most notably slaughtered and cooked his son Pelops to feed the gods, to Menelaus and Agamemnon, who besieged Troy for 10 years to recover the faithless Helen, this single family constitutes the DNA of what we think of as canonical western literature. The doings of Tantalus's descendents exercised, among countless others, Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and, later, Seneca. And through his influence on Jacobean and Elizabethan tragedy, and especially on Shakespeare, Seneca is arguably the biggest classical influence on English drama. What Hayloft presents isn't recognisably Shakespearean. It's not particularly Senecan, come to that. And yet its effect is surprisingly close to both: which I think is a result of a complexity of texture on the one hand, and a primitive, unforgiving harshness on the other.

Its narrative genius is the surtitles, which flash up before each scene, describing the plot of the story, before the curtains rise on the stage, revealing another, altogether more mundane reality. It's a brilliant way of coping with the tale's anachronisms, which are mostly removed from the actual performances, and become instead a framing device. And this convention means that the dozen or so short plays or tableaux that make up the whole need not concern themselves at all with plot. When the curtains rise, we are suddenly pitched into 21st century Melbourne, into the unremarked spaces between larger, tragic events. What we see are overwhelmingly domestic scenes.

The story begins with the murder by Thyestes (Thomas Henning) and Atreus (Mark Leonard Winter) of their half-brother, Chrysippus (Chris Ryan), at the urging of their mother Hippodamia, who is angry that her sons have been passed over to inherit the throne. The first scene is brilliant in how it winds you into its double reality: the three actors perform with an almost documentary realism that at first almost makes you believe you're overhearing three young men passing time, late at night, at a party. Until, that is, Chrysippus turns his back, fiddling with his iPod to get a favourite song, and the two brothers stand up, suddenly full of menace, and pull out the gun, and the machinery of tragedy is activated. Oddly, not so much on stage, as in our minds.

It's clear from the beginning that this version of Thyestes is primarily about the relationship between two brothers. The show has a genuinely Freudian edge, and not just in its unafraid confrontations of sexuality. Its increasing sense of disturbance is in how it echoes those dark jealousies that only exist between siblings, and that can continue lifelong, coloured into adulthood by the uncontrolled passions of infancy. Chrysippus's murder is at first presented as the originatory crime from which emerges the others, but as this bloody family history unrolls before us, it becomes clear that even this is an echo of earlier crimes, that these brothers are trapped in a hell of repetition that is the curse of their family.

This understanding has both a symbolic and a literal value: we understand the story in wholly contemporary terms, in how incest, for instance, can be passed down from generation to generation, the parent visiting on the child his or her own suffering; and we also understand it as myth, as a representation of something larger than it is. This dislocatedness is why it is, at times, very funny indeed. Some of its most powerful moments are when these double recognitions, which weave a complementary dance through the show, suddenly unite into a single breathtaking image.

The most memorable perhaps is when the curtain rises on the suicidal Pelopia (Chris Ryan), singing a Schubert lieder: mother of a child who is the product of incestuous rape, she is the image of unhealable damage, lifted suddenly into an ecstatically operatic moment, pain and beauty united. In such moments - there are others - the performers embody Nietzsche's idea of the tragic: a Dionysian image of absolute negation becomes, through the ecstasy of performance, "the absolute limit of affirmation". It's a quality that Barrie Kosky also achieves, although in very different ways: and the secret is in the balance between restraint and excess.

Winter, Henning and Ryan are astounding, on the one hand achieving a naturalistic authenticity that locates these extreme events in the middle of the mundane present, without on the other losing a sense of heightened reality. We believe in these ancient tales of warring kings, because we also understand, through these performances, that betrayal, violence, sexual excess, greed, despair and madness are, in fact, the most ordinary of human realities. Scratch the history of any family, and you will find such behaviours lurking not far beneath the surface. I'm not the first, for example, to link Thyestes's eating of his children with incest: in Hayloft's rendering of the story, this connection is even clearer, as it becomes a mirror of Thyestes's rape of his daughter Pelopia.

There's much more to tease out, but I've probably said enough. If you can possibly get there, don't miss it. The word is out, and it is wildly good: and the critics are in unusually rhapsodic alignment. The season has been extended an extra week, so there is still a chance to see it. But I suspect you'll have to be quick.

A short version of this review was in Monday's Australian.

Pictures, R-L: top, Mark Leonard Winter and Chris Ryan; bottom, Mark Leonard Winter, Thomas Henning and Chris Ryan. Photos: Jeff Busby

Thyestes, co-written and directed by Simon Stone, after Seneca. Co-written and performed by Thomas Henning, Chris Ryan and Mark Leonard Winter. Set and costumes by Claude Marcos, lighting by Govin Ruben, sound design by Stefan Gregory. The Hayloft Project and Malthouse Theatre, Tower Theatre. Melbourne Fringe Festival. Until October 9.

Update: The article is online here. With thanks to Nicholas Pickard. (Now with crunchy comments! [Further update: sadly, it seems that three comments is the most that Fairfax mods can deal with.])
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This morning Age critic Cameron Woodhead takes aim at Ms TN with all guns blazing. But sadly, because the Age has not put this article online, I can't point curious readers in its direction: you will all have to go out and buy the paper. (Too bad if you're in Perth or London - I'll of course link at once if it is uploaded, so you can all read it for yourselves and make up your own minds.) My reportage will inevitably be partial, because I don't want to quote the whole damn thing. Suffice to say that Woodhead claims that he has been misrepresented. He has some justification for his complaint, although, as those who were at the Wheeler Centre's Critical Failure panel will know, not as much as he thinks.

I would not mind his defending himself so much, if he were not so interested in misrepresenting me. Woodhead describes Theatre Notes as if my major activity, in the six years since I began it, is to attack Mr Cameron Woodhead. A quick search reveals that this is by no means the case. This is the 929th post I have written for this blog: out of those, I can find six that mention Woodhead. Which is to say, he has occupied precisely 0.6 per cent of my blogly attention. These posts are all online, and you can go and read them for yourself. On the other hand, by tomorrow, unless it is uploaded to the Fairfax website, Woodhead's article will be available only to those who keep archives or who make a special library visit.

This suggests something about accountability, which is a major prong of Woodhead's attack on Theatre Notes (as singular representative, I presume, of the entire internet - the only other blog he mentions is the Guardian). He claims that as a blogger I am not accountable, and even hints darkly that I am unethical. "Croggon," he says, "seems to have fallen into the trap of thinking that - because a blog, by its nature, offers a right of reply - she can evade the obligations that inhere in her critical authority." He lists the responsibilities a critic has: "checking your evidence has a solid basis; the accountability of putting your name to your opinions; being disciplined about your writing, always conscious of the responsibilities of having a public voice; respecting the law of libel".

This blog in fact observes all those responsibilities (especially the one about defamation). I'm pretty sure that, in my five years as a cadet and later as industrial affairs reporter on the Melbourne Herald, I have a rather stronger grounding in journalistic practice than Woodhead: and I use all those skills here. I moderate comments with a light hand, but I immediately take down comments that are defamatory (as a sidenote, mockery isn't the same as defamation). And as a blogger, I have an extra accountability that Woodhead does not have: towards my readers. If I make a mistake, a reader will point it out. If I enrage a reader, that reader will take issue with me online. If I don't continue to write stuff worth their time, readers will not bother to visit the site.

Everything I write here is under immediate scrutiny, and must endure sometimes very robust debate. (Check out, for example, the discussion about Martin Crimp under my recent review of The City, where I have been forced to vigorously defend my assessment of that play against, among others, Woodhead himself.) Woodhead seems taken aback by this robustness. I guess if you're not used to your lunch answering back, it must be a little disconcerting to be slapped by the salad. In any case, the one debate I am not interested in pursuing is a bitchslap between crrritics. Why? Because there are many more interesting things to discuss. Like theatre, for instance...

A while back, I teased out some of my thoughts on nationalism in Australian theatre into an essay, How Australian is it?, for the 200th edition of the literary journal Overland. And being good chaps, they've now put it online.

To rephrase Borges: being Australian is either an inescapable act of fate – and in that case we shall be so in all events – or it is a mere affectation, a mask. The best of our contemporary theatre has dropped the mask. In the volatile performing arts, it’s difficult to forecast what will happen next; it’s possible that this renaissance, which has animated Australian stages for the past five years, will simply lose energy and peter out. It certainly has its detractors. But perhaps the genie is well and truly out of the bottle, and our theatre has grown past the need to merely perform its national identity.

You can read the whole essay here.