I may have mentioned that I am now reviewing poetry for Overland Literary Journal's swish new blog. My most recent review, of Ian Hamilton Finlay: Selections,  is now online. Finlay's a significant poet and a fascinating figure - Concrete poet, "avant gardener", visual artist and sometime playwright. And in case you missed the earlier review, of Sean Bonney's Happiness: After Rimbaud, it's up there too.

From outer-edge indie theatre to main stage is an crucial and delicate transition for any company. One of the best things that has happened in recent years is the opening of both the Malthouse and - more recently, with the Lawler Studio programming - the Melbourne Theatre Company to productions by independent companies. One of the highlights of last year's MTC program was in fact an indie import from Queensland presented as part of the Education Program - Letitcia Caceres's production of Debbie Tucker Green's Random, starring a transcendently good Zahra Newman. This year, as part of the same program, they've brought another Queensland gem, Boy Girl Wall from the Escapists. More of that in a moment.

The Plague Dances: L-R Genevieve Fry, Ida Duelund-Hansen, Lisa Salvo, Ben Hoetjes (masked), Karen Sibbing (masked), Esther Hannaford (masked). Photo: Jeff Busby

The chance to make this transition with a degree of institutional shelter is one of the major legacies of Michael Kantor and Stephen Armstrong's helming of the Malthouse - they instituted the Tower residencies that permit independent companies to explore their practice over a long rehearsal time, and to introduce their work to a wider audience. It gives these smaller collectives the chance to show the very qualities that make them notable, rather than filing them down into something more marketable or conventional. The results - Black Lung's anarchic Tower season, Hayloft's Thyestes, My Darling Patricia's Africa - are their own justification.

It's good to see that Marion Potts is continuing this important project. Four Larks, the latest Tower residents, have been making waves around town for some years now. Resolutely independent, entirely unfunded, they have put on shows in back sheds and abandoned stables in the inner suburbs, gaining a loyal following with their meld of bravura visual theatre and indie folk music. The ambition of their work is palpable, its lush sensuality utterly seductive. The Plague Dances, the work created for the Tower, demonstrates both their strengths and their weaknesses in equal measure.

The Malthouse/Sydney Theatre Company production of Thomas Bernhard's 1984 play The Histrionic is, apparently, the first professional production of Bernhard's work anywhere in Australia. The transparency of Daniel Schlusser's triumphant production makes you wonder what the problem was: why did we have to wait so long? The Histrionic is so manifestly a brilliantly written play, gripping from its beginning to its extraordinary final moments. It's outrageous, sadistic, hilarious, brutally bathetic, playfully and powerfully theatrical. In the most expansive sense of the word, it's an entertainment, exploiting every trick in the theatrical book: but here Bernhard employs entertainment as a depth charge, to destroy the submarine walls of our self-regard.

Bille Brown as Bruscon in The Histrionic. Photo: Jeff Busby

The Histrionic premiered nearly three decades ago. I'm well used to the fact that most significant playwrights, especially those outside the Anglosphere, are largely invisible in our mainstage culture - where are our professional productions of major contemporary dramatists such as (to stick with the Europeans) Jon Fosse, Elfriede Jelinek, Biljana Srbljanovic, Falk Richter? - but for some reason this delay struck me. If anything demonstrates the narrowness of our mainstream culture, it's this kind of catching up after the fact. It's not as if myopia is limited to overseas writers: we had to wait longer than three decades to have Patrick White's The Ham Funeral professionally produced in Melbourne, and his plays are still thought of, even by people who ought to know better, as lesser achievements than his novels. The luminously unconventional, the intransigently theatrical, the poetic, the rawly intelligent, even the beautiful, have more often than not been marginalised in Australian culture.

Nowhere do our colonial petticoats show more than in Australia's anxious love for authority. In our culture, genuine artistic originality, with its unsettling combination of disrespect for authority and serious respect for its own antecedents, can only figure as an embarrassment. It has no visible means of support, no legitimisation beyond its own artistry. In a colonial culture, the fear of being thought "wrong" overwhelms all other possibilities of reception. It even muffles outrage: the response to too many of our most interesting artists has been the white noise of silence. Bernhard is the model of another possibility, and this production of The Histrionic is one of several events that suggests that doors long sealed shut may now, very slowly, be creaking open.

For the past couple of weeks, the Melbourne International Comedy Festival has crashed over our fair city like a tidal wave, dragging the crowds and a bunch of increasingly exhausted critics out into the extraordinarily beautiful autumn evenings. But your humble blogger has remained at home, deaf to the siren call of comedy: far be it from me to "discourage earnest conversation," as psychiatrist Brendan Flynn suggested is the dark heritage of festival time. Flynn would approve of me: I have resolutely remained in my dour study, turning my face from the trivial levity of the light-hearted, to defend Melbourne's beetle-browed reputation as "a home of original ideas". But at least I now know who to blame for the sad state of our public discourse: it's those damn comedians.

Martin Blum as Ray Living in Welcome to Thonnet

And so it would have remained, gentle reader, had not rumours come my ears of a show called Welcome to Thonnet. Playing at the Northcote Town Hall, it is written and performed by Martin Blum. Blum is a very interesting actor: along with talents like Hayley McElhinney and Dan Spielman, he was one of the 12 original members of the STC Actors Company, resigning a couple of years later to travel overseas. The show has been assisted by various other intriguing names: its co-devisors include Chris Ryan, of Thyestes and Wild Duck fame, and Bojana Novakovic (The Story of Mary MacLane, By Herself). Govin Ruben, who's designed lighting for Hayloft and Black Lung, is production designer and provides some incidental performance. In short, all these seemed sufficient reason to wash my inky hands and venture off into the balmy night.

I returned home shaken, to recover from one of the most uncomfortably hilarious hours I have spent in the theatre. Blum is a fearless actor, and his monstrous creation, YA author Ray Living, demonstrates his courage: I haven't been on this kind of razor edge since seeing Howard Stanley's brilliant Howard Slowly shows in the 1980s. Welcome to Thonnet is pitiless: its cruelty plays on the abyss between self-perception and the perception of others that makes David Brent in the UK edition of The Office so toe-curlingly compelling.

A few years ago, I spent some time with the Seagram Rothkos in the Tate Modern collection. Grouped together in a specially designed gallery, they are extraordinary paintings: their profound reds and blacks create thresholds of light and darkness, unstable luminosities that grow more profound the more you look. They are invitations to a pregnant emptiness, doorways - two-faced, like the Roman god Janus - which at once forbid entrance and draw the viewer into their ambiguous interiorities. More than anything, they seemed to me to be like stages: framed spaces which vibrate with mysterious potential. Something may have happened, or be about to happen. Or it may have been happening while I was looking.

It is, as Rilke said of the theatre, all in the gaze: "gazing so intensely that as my gaze / at last swings up, an angel is forced down..." Through the intense relationship of looking, the human impulse towards the divine inhabits the material world, for a brief, inexpressible moment. Inexpressible because it's impossible to find words for that suspended feeling of simultaneous entrapment and liberation, of irredeemable bleakness and strange joy. They are paintings precisely because words are not sufficient. As Sean Scully says, Rothko's works with colour "communicate a fully lit and orchestrated generosity... Wherever they are placed, the works inhabit and light the space without trying to control it. Theirs is simply an act of giving."

Colin Friels and André de Vanny in Red. Photo: Jeff Busby

Given this sense of the stage, and especially of exchange with a viewer, it was no great surprise to discover later that theatre was of major importance to Mark Rothko. In one of his most famous essays, The Romantics Were Prompted, he said: "I think of my paintings as dramas; the shapes in the pictures are the performers. They have been created from the need for a group of actors who are able to move dramatically without embarrassment and execute gestures without shame.... They begin as an unknown gesture in an unknown space. It is at the moment of completion that in a flash of recognition, they are seen to have the quantity and function which was intended. Ideas and plans that existed in the mind at the start were simply the doorway through which one left the world in which occur.... The presentation of this drama in the familiar world was never possible... [My emphasis]"

Rothko's interest in theatre was practical as much as theoretical: in the 1920s, he trained and worked as a actor, and he applied, without success, to join the American Theatre Laboratory, a company then at the forefront of American avant garde theatre. The Laboratory had a direct link to the Russian director Stanislavski, and its students included Lee Strasberg, Harold Clurman and Stella Adler, all of whom went on to enormously influence American theatre. Stanislavski himself was a colleague and defender of that other great Russian director, Meyerhold: although the two are often thought to be at loggerheads, in reality their admiration was mutual. Stanislavski remained loyal to Meyerhold even after Meyerhold was murdered by Stalin's police.

This gives an interesting gloss to Colin Friels's attacks, retailed to everyone who will listen, about the present state of theatre, and in particular his attacks on the auteur director. In playing Mark Rothko in John Logan's play Red, Friels is portraying an artist who is a premier avant gardist of his time and an ultimate auteur: a man who insisted on the philosophical and literary thought behind his painting, and who believed that his individual vision, and especially his feeling, could be communicated to others through his work. One can't but wonder how Friels negotiates the contradictions of his convictions in playing Rothko, but it must be admitted that he's helped by the play. Here the artist is erased by his persona, in a representation that is ultimately as vulgar as the crude copies of the Seagram murals that we see on stage.

Once upon a time, O my best beloved, when the jungle was so primitive that not one animal had an iPhone, Ms Alison did one thing at a time, and that thing was mostly poems. But the gods of boredom, or the current economic imperative, or fatal curiosity, have meant that over the years Ms Alison has divided and multiplied in an amoebic fashion into all sorts of different Mss. This has all been great fun, and most deeply interesting, but it does result in periods of deeply uninteresting strife, when all the different Alisons start fighting among each other, and the Boss Alison can't get any of them to shut up and behave themselves.

Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word: L-R, James Henry, Christopher Green as Tina C, Auriel Andrew

The only answer to such a situation is to start doing something else. (Obviously.) So, in a sudden clarifying blaze of financial panic, I began another novel. In her transcendent wisdom, Boss Alison also accepted an invitation from Overland Literary Journal to review poetry regularly for their blog. My first review, of UK poet Sean Bonney's collection Happiness: Poems After Rimbaud, was uploaded yesterday. Meanwhile, an offering from another Alison, an extract from the libretto for the opera Mayakovsky, is in the Autumn issue, which has just been published. You should all subscribe: not because I'm in it, but because of everything else that is.

Meanwhile, Ms TN, the Alison who attends to this blog, has found herself severely behind her own schedule. So she begs, as she emerges in a disheveled fashion from the recent scuffle holding a steak to her eye, that you excuse her brevity. She hopes she will not be forced too often to short notices, but what with one thing and all the others, that is how it is at present. Herewith is a brief record of the past fortnight's theatre attendances. I can't find a through line: these are all completely disparate experiences.

Last night I went to see Tina C: Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word at the Malthouse. Country star Tina C is the invention of British theatre maker Christopher Green, and she brings an excoriating experience of cultural imperialism to her hapless audiences. Just as the intrepid explorers "discovered" Australia and scrawled their own names over the map, ignoring the perfectly good names that had been used for thousands of years, Tina C offers us an Australia redrawn through the naive gaze of a celebrity outsider.

A quick pointer to George Hunka's excellent roundup of the scandal unfolding around Mike Daisey's The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, in which journalistic and theatrical ideas of truthfulness have collided head on. The ensuing debate opens a can of worms about documentary theatre. My comment on Superfluities, which I'm pasting below:

It seems Daisey – unwittingly, I think, in that I don’t believe he did anything in bad faith (update: it is undeniable that Daisey lied, both to his audiences and to TAL about the nature of his work) – encouraged people to think of his work in the ways it was received. There’s no doubt that the facts he’s retailing are pretty much true, whether or not he personally witnessed them, as anyone who reads the accounts of Foxconn elsewhere would know; but putting his work in the context of TAL would only make the distinction between the ethics of journalism and theatre more confused. There’s a larger question underneath there, about the illegality of imagination in contemporary culture, and the passive acceptance of various kinds of authority, that I find disturbing. I haven’t seen Daisey’s shows, but it seems clear that he’s not making verbatim theatre, where one might be on surer ground. But he has created a persona who acts very much like an investigative journalist, and that brings him up front in conflict with the ethics and responsibilities of journalism. My first thought was the scandal around the fictionalisations of the Independent journalist Johann Hari, whose career was basically destroyed when it was discovered that he was taking imaginative liberties in his stories, placing himself at the centre of events or conversations where he was not present and, worse, which might not have happened. This is the same problem, but from a different practice in which fictionalising is part of the practice.

But I agree, what’s mainly disturbing is the complacent acceptance of the “authentic” in the audience. Brecht’s practice was about stimulating the performance of thought, both in his actors and in the audience. This is the reverse of that: it’s about different kinds of authority which anoint the transmission of information with veracity, and that veracity then driving action. I am mainly surprised, perhaps because I haven’t seen Daisey in action, that so many people who ought to know better took Daisey’s monologues as literal fact, which suggests a shocking naivety: it’s like those people who send wedding presents when characters get married in soap operas.

Just a note on the “willing suspension of disbelief”: Coleridge specifically was speaking of the fantastic, works like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, in which it was wholly clear to any reader that the story wasn’t “true” in any factual sense. “My endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.” In other words, the disbelief comes first, and then is suspended. This work, it seems to me, asked for belief without any sense of disbelief, and therefore contains no moment of suspension, or of movement to what Coleridge calls “poetic faith”: and that is clearly its problem.

You can read George's editorial, with handy links, here. Footnote: the real issue with This American Life is that Mike Daisey misrepresented the nature of his work to Ira Glass, and misled the program. The lie exists in that action, not necessarily in the work of theatre itself. The ethical problems around it do raise questions about documentary theatre, or theatre that presents itself as factually true.

A quick pointer to Jana Perkovic's fascinating critique of The Wild Duck, and the conversation which it's prompting. Warning: long. But stimulating.

I missed the opening night of The Seed. From other reviews I've read, this was probably a good thing: sometimes it strikes me that press night is probably the worst time to review anything. Instead, I attended a matinee a week or so after the opening, and saw a work that had been run-in in front of audiences and was probably closer to the director's intention. I walked out with one big, nagging question. What's wrong, I thought, with making things up?

Tony Martin, Sara Gleeson and Max Gillies in The Seed. Photo: Jeff Busby

The Seed is a fictionalised autobiographical play by Sydney actor/writer Kate Mulvany (as the program explains, it's based on her own family history, reinforced by interviews from Vietnam veterans). Before this production, directed by at the Fairfax Studio by Hayloft artistic director Anne-Louise Sarks in her MTC debut, it had two successful outings at Belvoir, in which Mulvany played the role that is presumably based on herself.

The play itself shows that Mulvany is a writer of considerable talent, with a good line in tough, sparky dialogue and an actor's understanding of the stage. But its framing and structure are clumsy: The Seed feels chained by its roots in biography and social issue. It's a text struggling to take imaginative flight, a play that wants to be a play but is bogged down somewhere in a no man's land between documentary and fiction. This is reinforced by the meta-fictional figure of Rose, who carries a tape recorder as part of her mission to note down her family history, presumably so she can write the play we are watching, and flicks it on whenever her father or grandfather threatens to launch into a speech.

Over the past week or so, I have announced in every possible internet way my intention of seeing less theatre and giving some necessary time to my other writing hats. It is somewhat awkward to find that while I was, perfectly sincerely, proclaiming my stern resolution, I managed to see four shows last week. As the poet said, Between the idea. And the reality. Between the motion. And the act. Falls the Shadow... Oh well. There's always next week.

Anthony Phelan and Anita Hegh in The Wild Duck.

One of the shows I saw was the Malthouse edition of Belvoir St's production of The Wild Duck. Luckily I saw that one in Sydney. I don't have much to add to what I said then: the production has transferred triumphantly to the Merlyn, basically replicating the space at Belvoir Upstairs. There are subtle refinements, but it is the same show: the performances remain remarkable, the emotional impact devastating. It's deeply intelligent, beautiful theatre, and pairs with Thyestes as Simon Stone's best work so far. And it's selling out fast: best to book now, if you don't want to be disappointed.

At the other end of the scale, I caught the train to Thornbury to see a play in a backyard shed. It was Summertime in the Garden of Eden, the latest offering from Declan Greene and Ash Flander's queer theatre collective, Sisters Grimm. This was, in its own way, as remarkable as The Wild Duck. Both shows, in completely different ways, demonstrate how little (and how much) it takes to make compelling theatre: you can make it with almost nothing, if you invite the imagination of the audience in to open up its dark and tender places. It's the one thing theatre can't fake, and no amount of plush can cover its absence.