This is a study in distance. The play’s program indicates that the title is taken from Beckett’s Godot, from the fractured end of Lucky’s wild thinkspate. I’m not sure of the particular significance this speech holds for Mutation Theatre – perhaps it’s because the calm and the blue, the patch of sky, is the last thing glimpsed in Lucky’s speech before the grey scudding of the skull, the skull, the skull, which is, apparently, shrinking and wasting concurrently, obliterates even the foolish semblance of meaning which the so-called speech pretends to. That is to say, the sky is the last thing seen before the skull closes overhead (overmind).

The skull is a singularly distant place to be, and these two, the characters played by Tresise and Epps, are characters disappearing, albeit gradually, into the dim skull-zone. On the one hand there is a sense that they are trapped together. The setting is a mock backyard beautifully designed by Ashlee Hughes and McCarthy, with astroturf and fake sky painted on a broad canvas that curves around and encompasses the stage. The fakeness of the setting, with its sky-painted canvas boxing them in, comes to resemble the painted interior of a sconce-case. It’s a little like the dome wall in The Truman Show, only in miniature. But on the other hand, they are both on the verge of separation, of being consumed by their respective introspective obsessions and meditations.

Or perhaps it’s not a question of separating, but rather a question of never meeting to begin with. They are fixed, each in their own skull, and despite their numerous attempts, affable attempts, to sally forth and join the other in conversation, they are drawn back, again and again, into the comforting and excruciating vagueness of the skull.

While the scenario bears a circumstantial similarity with Godot, the two of them waiting, all action constrained by existential vagrancy, I think perhaps a more comparable scenario, one which better accommodates the hesitations that mark this performance, is Beckett’s Molloy, where there is the repetition of that same movement, of the approach that is broken off. I think especially of the repeated image of two men approaching one other, tentatively, or purposefully, but then mutually deciding to turn around and head back, each to their own ruminations, to their own skulls, to their own distance.

So a study in distance … but of what? The times. So Calm, So Blue is very much a piece of its time. These are characters who are expressions of their time, expressions narrowed by nationality, race, class and gender, but still rich in their cultural contemporaneity. It is in the music they play, the moral and ethical positions they assume, the cultural associations which have currency for them, their diction and vocabulary, obviously, but also in their silences. I don’t mean this to be a commonplace. Of course, new theatre, theatre that is scripted or improvised, is always an expression of its times. I mean that this is an attempt, stricter than most, perhaps more self-conscious, to provide an index of the moment, to be present, somehow, now. That is to say, with it’s overt references to Beckett, Grotowski and Ranters inter alia, this piece attempts to connect the tradition, or a tradition, with its own moment, to make the tradition present for the present.

A study of presence conducted at a distance. It is the great Eastern problem of philosophy, is it not? And there is a pseudo-zen quality to the work. These are skulls aspiring to be stones, the stone which, according to Leibniz is like a man who has lived for exactly one moment.

But these are not stones. The zen is pseudo. It is Kahlil Gibran pseudo. It is theatrical. The moment is fleeting. The distance, which apes contemplation, becomes melancholy. Treses especially appears resigned to alienation – so often quarter turned from the audience, flat delivery, a fixed, mask-like grin. It is an optimistic piece, because that is part of the “time” they express, but they are less generous with that optimism.

Less generous, I mean than in Habitat. Habitat was the piece that these three, McCarthy, Epps and Tresise staged early last year and which this current piece has evolved out of. McCarthy writes in the program that At the time Habitat was created, I was living above a shop on Smith Street. Not long after that, there was a period of ten months in which I moved house five times, only to end up three doors down from where I started.

For the earlier work, Habitat, which was set in a Fitzroy sharehouse, the audience was in the room, they were an acknowledged presence in the room where Tresise and Epps were chatting. But here it feels as though we’ve been studiously removed. It’s not only that we’re no longer figured in the dialogue; it’s also because of those distant stares which dominate the performance – they look through us. Grotowski, an acknowledged presence behind the work, asks, somewhere or other, Why worry about what the audience’s part ought to be? In extending the project they began with Habitat, they have come to dismiss, more or less, the role of the audience. This makes their immediate debt to Ranters’ Holiday somehow more stark. In the earlier work the direct influence of Ranters was clear, but so too was the departure. The departure was in their relationship with the audience.

Between the expectations of the audience and the intentions of the performer there is an inevitable tension, one which springs from the natural inscrutability of each to each. This tension is an energy, and the energy is a source of so much that is wonderful in theatre, so much that is transformative – the hot breath of an expectant audience; the impertinent gaze of a performer. In Habitat, in a coup de theatre moment, the tension was suddenly defused, completely evacuated from the small theatre, by the simple act of opening a window, literally, onto the street outside. That place, the theatre, was in that instant no different from this place, to use Grotowski’s way of putting it, the world outside. It was an instant of reconciliation between the audience and the performers, a moment of wonderful though completely unstable harmony.

Here the audience’s presence is not acknowledged, and consequently the acknowledgement of the performance by the audience is muted. There is a scene where some kind of transformation is aimed at, a decorative transformation, lights and music. It is certainly spectacular, expanding and elevating the closed set; it is also a revelatory moment in as much as it discloses the wonder, otherwise only faintly acknowledged, that lies behind James and Matthew’s distant staring and silent contemplation. But it is inconclusive, which is perhaps the dominant mood of the piece.

This is work then feels more like a station on the way to somewhere else – a point of recollection and recapitulation – a grounding point before ——

Do you find anything bizarre about my way of speaking? Not the voice I mean but the words. I use none but the simplest words I hope, yet I sometimes find my way of speaking bizarre.
All that Fall, Beckett

I’ve now seen three Wotherspoon/Warner productions, including These Are the Isolates which won best new play (or some such thing) at last year’s Fringe, and regardless of who they’ve brought in to direct (in this case Erin Kelly), or which of them has written the piece (this time Wotherspoon, last time Warner, time before that Wotherspoon), or who else they’ve got with them on stage (Peter Berzanskis is also in this one), there has been, I think, a certin consistency of mood between all three of their pieces, an enigmatic quality which, when everything comes together, seems beautifully obscure, and when it doesn’t seems frustratingly wilful.

I’ll skip over the frustrating parts, mostly because I’ve talked about them before, and others have talked about them before, and there comes a point where you have to just accept that, well, this is the way they’ve decided they want to work, and you might as well try and look past it and see what else might be going on.

What I find interesting in their work is the linguistic self-consciousness and the way that underlines the deliberately literary and un-natural quality of their scenarios. The language they speak seems like a dead language, one which is staked through with formalisms and dislocated with unlikely constructions.  A language, in other words, which died a violent death. The struggle to get this dead weight up and about, to make it expressive, has great universal appeal, for all language, not only stage lanuage, is dying, and it is part of our condition that we wrestle with its heavy torso and unresponsive limbs our whole life, it is, to quote Beckett, “unspeakably excruciating”.

after all this
devised and performed by Elbow Room
Dear Patti Smith Gallery
27 Sept – 1 Oct

This is fairly miraculous stuff, if that construction doesn’t obliterate the meaning of miraculous, and it deserves a much more comprehensive review that what I can offer right now.

A while back, I was talking with Jana P. about “rigorous theatre”, and I recall being somewhat dismissive when she suggested that Elbow Room were “rigorous” – which was not meant necessarily as a complaint, I just hadn’t drawn the line between some of their more-or-less whimsical inventions and let’s say the kind of strict, point-vice arrangements I would normally describe as “rigorous”. Well, I was wrong: they do make rigorous theatre, and this example is mink tight.

Through three stages, or scenes, after all this dramatises the tendency in Western Culture to imagine an afterlife. Specifically, this play looks at the psychological “uses” of our belief in the hereafter. Stage by stage, the audience ascend through a multi-levelled gallery space – white walls, bare floors, sparsely lit – on the one hand literally tracking the notion of a soul rising from the earth, while the performances themselves follow the progressive intellectual rarefaction of salvation, where it begins with a pre-modern (or at least childlike) hope of seeing loved ones again, through ideas of reward for altruism, especially as such ideas are impacted by mathematical Darwinism, to post-modern millennial re-interpretations of the dualist distinction between body and soul.

Through all of this the performance is never essayistic, even where tackling difficult subjects like theoretical biology. It also shows off a super intelligent wit. For example, Angus Grant and Emily Tomlins, playing a pair of child siblings, begin the evening with a game of shadow puppets under their donna. Apart from being rather cute to see two adults in their peejays and the rest, these opening seconds don’t only cast us back into “Angus” and “Emily’s” infancy, but also philosophical infancy, back, that is, into Plato’s Cave of Shadows and the idea of platonic dualism, the philosophical font of modern Christian theology. The whole piece is littered with similarly clever asides and details that enrich the ideas at play (Up & Go? – genius!).

Jane Austen Is Dead … See You at the Wake
written devised and performed by Letita Sutherland and Mel Dodge
Gertrudes Brown Couch, Fitzroy
21 Sept-9 Oct

This is actually a double bill of two mostly unrelated pieces, although the titles go together beautifully.

The first is a monologue on dating and Jane Austen. Our hostess is single, still, and apparently it’s all Austen’s fault. Over a gentle half an hour of fairly frothy reminiscences we learn that, with her Darcys, Wentworths, Knightlys and that guy from Mansfield Park, Austen simply set the bar too high. In the real world, we’re told, men are a sad bunch of Bingleys and Willoughbys. It is possible, though I probably put myself in with Tom Betrand from Mansfield Park, what with the interest in theatre and the enormous debts. Still, he’s no Darcy, that’s for sure.

What we see then is a process of disillusionment, as the scales are removed and Austen’s influence is disentangled from real life expectations. I guess I might have preferred some insight into the original entanglement, into how Austen came to figure so significantly in the first place, because that’s something I’ve never really understood: the full Austen thing. Not the greatness of her writing, which is given, but the personal investment some folk have in the fantasy of Austen.

The conclusion is that what Austen wrote, really, are fairy tales. It’s a solid conclusion, with fine critical pedigree – it was Nabokov’s estimation too – and neatly rounds out performance that sits on that largely illusory line between standup and theatre.

See You at the Wake is a more ambitious and more theatrical work, and less successful for it, which is so often the reward for ambition. Dave is dead and we’re invited to the wake. Dave lived on the street and was estranged from his family. Those appearing at his wake include family members who don’t remember him, street kids who are grateful to him, ne’erdowells who are there for the booze, Centrelink officers who don’t care and an officious funeral director, all played by Dodge and Sutherland. The characters are a lively bunch, but the comedy is often too fussy and overworked, while the processional is rather ramshackle.

Nicola Gunn’s At the Sans Hotel is like a rocket with one of those deceptive slow-burning fuses that snake up the inside of the cylinder. At first, nothing seems to happen. The flame disappears from sight. There’s a little smoke and some hissing.
The production starts with apologies, confusing explanations and diversion, and plenty of contradictions. There’s also wine, lots of audience banter and just a light note of hysteria. Then, without warning, it takes off on a brilliant zigzag flight across the night sky, illuminating and beautiful, before it finally detonates in a bewildering constellation of exploded subjectivity.

Formally, this is a fascinating production, exploring different affective ways of ordering movement and time in the portrayal of various psychological states. The material is inspired by the experience of Cornelia Rau, the possibly schizophrenic German-born Australian resident who was unlawfully detained by Australian immigration officials in 2004-5, but it goes so much deeper, getting so far beneath the mere facts of the case that we ultimately lose sight of them entirely.

Black Box 149
written and conceived by Rosemary Johns, performed by Majid Shokor and Dennis Coard, directed by Matt Scholten
La Mama Theatre
21 Sep-2 Oct

A dramatic interpretation of the grounding of British Airways Flight 149 at Kuwait International Airport during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

Central to this work is the warning “fear rots your mind”. Dennis Coard plays the pilot of flight 149. The action is set some time post-9/11, and the now retired pilot has gone to ground in the Australian outback, hiding from who knows who. Much of the opening half an hour is taken up with a more-or-less deranged political rant that sounds a lot like something from a semi-rabid conspiracist’s forum, with a little family history thrown in to break up the black tar. The point here is that, yes, clearly the rot has set in. But the point is over extended and this is not time well spent. When the pilot finally takes off his tin-foil hat and begins describing his actual experience in Iraq, things improve markedly.

As a spy thriller this tale is engrossing. The question is whether American or British forces deliberately put the civilian aircraft and its passengers in harm’s way. There are some genuinely impressive descriptive scenes of what life was like for the crew and passengers held captive by Iraqi forces. Majid Shokar is wonderful as both an Iraqi interrogator and especially as a bus driver, but is somewhat underused.

I know there’s a lot of noise outside but you have to close your eyes
by I’m trying to kiss you
137 Greeves Street
21-28 Sep

Despite being staged in a share house kitchen down Fitzroy way, the production values here, in the set and lighting, while definitely low-tech, demonstrate a fair degree of professional talent and a more-than-passing interest in what might be called the dramaturgy of design.

Two old friends meet up at a bar for a girls’ night out. Immediately we see that something has come between them. What? It is the “female experience”. Thus begins a spiky but not humourless series of devised scenes, monologues and disruptions aimed at a sort of vivisection of female frustration.

I loved their unabashed addiction to verbal poetry, to long imagistic riffs on anger and dissatisfaction. Many of these dramatic poems have a terrific clarity about them.

One might complain that the political aspects of the drama are undercut by a solipsistic tendency in their analysis, a tendency perhaps typical of this kind of ambitious devised theatre; but what is most impressive here is the play’s resilience at precisely these moments. This work is spiky, but not brittle. We don’t cringe when an image slips from place and clatters to the floor – we don’t recoil, expecting the whole piece to shatter like glass. Instead, there is a humour in the work that, like a transparent coating, subtly strengthens the material without affecting its reflective quality.

Look. I know I shouldn’t have expected anything earth shattering. Yes, I know I’ve got more chance of winning a Pulitzer myself than ever actually agreeing with the judges, especially in the drama category. Yes, this was always going to be a relatively frivolous piece. Yes, the farce has to come first because that’s what it is. Yes it’s also a very clever script, especially with all the mirrors and inversions between the first act and the second act and with the multi-levelled connections with Raisin in the Sun. Yes, some people in the audience no doubt felt themselves uncomfortably implicated, just as some people evidently found Alison Whyte’s performance supremely witty. Yes, I am obscurely embarrassed about being so damn humourless.  But no. No, no, no, no, no.

On the one hand I sympathise with Guardian blogger Andrew Heydon when he says of Clybourne Park that “its ease and familiarity of form, and the desire primarily to entertain, leave it a pretty blunt instrument for any more serious purpose.” But I also feel like I don’t really know that for sure. I feel like there might actually be enough in this script – and the more I think about the script the more impressed I am with its intricasies – to really mean something here, in Australia, if only the production wasn’t so silly, if it was more delicate, if it toned down the performances, dried itself out, perhaps worked the patter less, tried to make a conversation out of it, not always been grinning so stupidly.

Land, and specifically the ownership of land, is the perpetually deferred problem that essentially defines Australia’s greatest socio-economic emergency, the chasm in living standards between white Australia and black Australia. And it has been so ever since Phillip laid anchor at Sydney Cove.

This is admittedly a rather large and awkward bag to drag with you to the theatre, but I think that, by the playwright’s own admission, such loftiness is/might be appropriate here. Norris has said in an LA Times article that Clybourne Park is about “war and territoriality and why we fight over territory”. Any local production of such a play, a play which deals in land and race, will inevitably be performed in the long shadow of our own national situation, and it must, if it is to be successful, find a way of engaging that grim reality.

So my problem is a point of tone. Although there are some exceptional moments, including Bert LaBonté’s furious last scene, the play’s coda with Luke Ryan and Alison Whyte, and Greg Stone’s impressive work in the first act as the grieving father, overall the portraits are too outlandish and ridiculous, in some cases too downright clumsy, to convey the potential value of Norris’s work as anything other than a comedic insight into where America is at with race relations and class conflict, and as an opportunity to gossip about gentrification and the housing bubble.

Norris’s play finds its historical inspiration in Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 Civil Rights classic Raisin in the Sun, a play about an African-American family who purchase a house in the all-white suburb of Clybourne Park. Where Norris picks up, still in 1959, we meet the white couple who are selling out, Russ (Greg Stone) and Bev (Alison Whyte), and learn something of the tragic circumstances that have motivated them to go through with a sale that is so unpopular with the rest of the neighbourhood. Their cosy community is not, it seems, as cosy as it could be.

It’s interesting to observe in act one, which is framed as a fifties-sitcom-plus-tragedy, the way that Norris complicates the problem of racism. Racism is first mingled in with an array of other prejudices, for example against the deaf, the mentally disabled and women. All these prejudices emerge as material for the sitcom: opportunities for the audience to giggle at those closed-minded ethical positions we all imagine as typical of the 1950s. Racism, at least initially, is not the most serious crime which the Clybourne Park community are guilty of – it only the background. It is in fact the neglect of Russ and Bev’s son, a veteran of the Korean War, which Norris offers as the real tragedy. Racism only comes to assume a special place in the white folks’ constellation of prejudices because, as we learn, if a black family moves in, the value of neighbourhood real estate will plunge – and this is what really terrifies Karl (Patrick Brammall), the community association representative sent to twist Russ’s arm.

Norris has said that what he is trying to get at are the “incredibly personal, inexplicable, ungraspable, indefinable reasons” for racial conflict. I think that in complicating Karl’s motives, this is exactly what Norris is aiming at, suggesting that his motives, as racist as they are, are also confused, tied in with a percieved need to protect his pregnant wife financially. But the way in which the scene is played in this production gave me the impression that the racism is being explained – in a literary sense – by reference to falling property prices, as though the only thing about black people that makes Karl uncomfortable is their deleterious effect on market value.

The second act leaps forward to present day Clybourne Park. Just as Karl predicted, the neighbourhood, through the eighties and nineties, became economically depressed, with house prices falling as the original families sold up and moved out. Now, however, because of the neighbourhood’s proximity to downtown Chicago, the area is becoming gentrified, again. A wealthy white couple (Laura Gordon and Patrick Brammall) have purchased the house, the same house, and are planning extensive renovations. Alas for them, there has been a neighbourhood petition against their planned renovations and there are a number of restrictive covenants on the property which have to be negotiated. The scene takes place in the same room of the house as the first act with a wealthy black couple, Lena and Kevin (Zahra Newman and Bert LaBonté), attending as community representatives, along with a lawyer (Alison Whyte) and an agent (Luke Ryan).

What comes through strongly in this final act is a sort of moral critique of the mediocrity of the middle classes, an insistence that they actually be better human beings and not get so hung up with political correctness, with seeming like better human beings.

There’s something almost cynical here. It’s certainly a clever, confronting and perhaps even necessary drama on the state of American race and class relations, although it’s hard to judge on this showing, and I think that the American social situation is relevant to the Australian situation, but I can’t help feeling that Clybourne Park, at least as staged at in this MTC production, comes off as vaguely reassuring. We laugh at America’s problems, but don’t necessarily identify with them. With its comic clumsiness and emotional flat-footedness, I think that this play imposes a distance between Australians and the issues of land and race. America is, culturally speaking, our neighbour, and everyone knows that the middle classes enjoy nothing so much as laughing at the mediocrity and hypocrisy of their neighbours. What they struggle to do is identify that mediocrity in themselves.

Of course, the hypocrisy of the home-owning middle classes is as ripe for demolition here as it is anywhere, and there are certainly moments to make you squirm, but the most impressive impact of this production is as a satire on the human aspects of the property market. It’s no surprise that central to production is the house itself, a comprehensive set designed by Christina Smith. This makes it a somewhat gossipy play that uses the issues of race and class to make chatting about house prices more salacious, but which doesn’t cut as deeply as it might.

Director Daniel Schlusser revisits his 2007 VCA production of Ibsen’s The Dollhouse as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival. Despite the visual mess and notes of extreme realism, one could almost describe this adaptation as charming in its brightness, emotional restraint and almost affectionate fidelity to the original story, a story which is, after all, structured after the conventions of a typical nineteenth-century well-made play. But it is an odd kind of charm, a sinister kind, with a sense of menace or horror or even of death “looming”, to adopt one of the words picked out in this production, behind the bright surface of busy interactions.

The Dollhouse is a portrait of a middle-class marriage in which the couple, Nora (Nikki Shiels) and Torvald (Kade Greenland), have never in eight years had a “serious talk about anything serious”. Torvald has recently secured a new job at the bank (somewhat artlessly dubbed Macquarie Bank) which Nora hopes will solve not only the family’s money problems (they have children), but also open her life to a more authentic joy. Unfortunately, her financial debts, incurred in secret and for the good of the family, are catching up with her and upsetting her illusions.

From the first there is a nervous sense of excitement. The stage is long but shallow in depth, with only a narrow space for the action. Behind the stage there is an imposing metal wall, almost like the great bulkhead of a ship or submarine. It seems to thrust the actors forward, almost into the audience, and, indeed, as the various toys which are introduced onto the set are tossed about by the cast, many of them do end up in the audience. It is insistent and busy, with action right across the stage, and the eye is ceaselessly drawn from one end to the other. All this agitation contrasts disturbingly with the stillness of the monolithic metallic wall, giving the impression that behind this wall lies the great secret, the vibrating source of Ibsen’s true subliminal menace.

The players, which also include Josh Price as Torvald’s fond old friend Dr Rank, Edwina Wren as Nora’s former school friend Kristine, and Schlusser himself as Krogstad, the man which Nora owes money, exit and enter through little hatches and secret doors in this great wall. Live action cameras which follow them backstage reveal a shadowy realm of dark corridors and violent encounters, exacerbating the horror, but at the same time perpetuating the curious surface tension.

GB Shaw famously said that Ibsen gives us not only ourselves, but ourselves in our own situations. This is the first principle of Ibsenism. But, of course, it begs the question, What is our situation? Torvald slouches in his Eames chair, waiting for his promotion, Grand Theft Auto on the mammoth flatscreen, or he retreats into his office, working on abstruse market algorithms, communicating only in occasional monosyllables, distracted by work, by vodka and parties, by comforts, hardly noticing his wife as anything other than another comfort, another gadget, another distraction. Meanwhile, Nora is so habituated to repressing her instinct for truth that she can scarcely follow either her own motives or those of anyone else.

Nora is aware that a modern woman should be able to take care of herself financially, should be sexually liberated, should be able to raise the children and take care of the house, she is aware, in other words, what the ideal post-feminist middle-class woman should be. And, with mixed success, she has achieved this. Her problem, which neurotically obsesses her, is whether other people take her success seriously, whether they really believe that she believes she is a liberated woman. Her situation, then, and our situation generally, is that of the struggle for authenticity.

This is an extremely interesting and ironical dramatic move which, while dodging the historical feminist significance of Ibsen’s great play, points up what is one of the text’s most fascinating aspects: it never occurs to either Nora or Torvald to ask, Who am I? The question is always obscured by another, Who do other people think I am? In truth, the question of identity, the problem of the “real” self, which is so integral to Ibsen in plays like Peer Gynt and Brand, is scarcely relevant here. These characters are actually quite straightforward: they are themselves, nothing more. In the world of Peer Gynt, this simplicity would make them animals, innocents of bestial selfhood, incapable of telling us what they feel, but incapable also of concealing those feelings. And what we see in Schlusser’s A Dollhouse is that this is precisely what they are, innocent animals, but trapped animal, snared and flailing in a web of conventions and expectations.

Schlusser overtly emphasises this animality, even noting it in the program. In Ibsen’s text, Nora is always Torvald’s little lark. Schlusser exaggerates this by inventing a further series of zoomorphic associations, where she is a figured as a monkey or an ape and a cat-woman. The innocence of such associations, and the way they also perpetuate Ibsen’s haunting poetics, making us wonder, as Maeterlinck did of Ibsen’s original, what it could be that has here been added to this scene of contemporary upper-middle class life that makes it appear so strange, so profound, and so disquieting beneath its trivial surface of video games and dress-ups.

So much for the disposition of this piece, but I though there were problems with the extent to which these modernised poetics were made to carry an old-fashioned story – Ibsen’s old fashioned story, that is, distinct from his poetics. In short, I don’t think that the similarities and parallels which exist between the social milieu of Ibsen’s time and our own, while striking to a certain extent, are considerable enough to sustain such fidelity to Ibsen’s original story. Issues such as household debt, social mobility and the strain on traditional notions of family all remain pertinent, but I mean the more specific, let’s say “mechanical” way that these issues are played out in the plot. Dialogue that is specifically drawn from the script to further the story seem actually to break the naturalism of the characters.

In such project, I simply don’t think we need so much of Ibsen’s plot. Where for instance in his production of La vida es sueño Schlusser almost entirely abandons the role of storyteller, it is surprising how little of the original is actually lost. We, here is the future-present, already have everything that we need to experience the events of A Doll’s House, or The Dollhouse, without needing to be told about them. We experience it through the deliberate and targeted recombination of those facts which are shared between us, between Denmark, 1879, and Melbourne, 2007—or let’s say that are shared between Ibsen and Schlusser. Having a firm grasp of the poetics of the piece, its tension and menace, fulfils the ultimate purpose of storytelling better than narrative, restoring a sense of authentic spontaneity to the action, and especially to the repetitions, the duplicate Noras which reoccur through an unlimited number of possible artistic styles. Which is all to say that style should always trump story.

The original conclusion to A Doll’s House, as most readers of this blog would probably know, was so scandalous and original that, for the German performance of the play, Ibsen was forced, by justifiable vanity as much as anything, to pen an additional scene where Nora returns to her husband, swayed by his appeal that she only think of the children. The rigid codes of those chilly nineteenth-century northern states dictated that a wife be faithful to her husband no matter what the personal cost. Schlusser has opted to retain Ibsen’s act of self-mutilation and have a contrite Nora somewhat sheepishly slink back on stage.

Given what I’ve already said about the use of plot, it’s hard to take a position either way on this, which perhaps is a good thing. I think perhaps that the note of ambivalence it adds to the play’s conclusion—where the terminal irresolution masquerades as a neat denouement as Nora solves nothing and takes no definite action—leaves the audience with a vague sense of complicity, or obligation. But in or toward what? It’s a wonderfully provoking way to leave a theatre.

I had a lot of quibbles with this work, quite a lot; and yet, more than any staging of Shakespeare I’ve recently seen, I felt that this one managed to restore that thrilling fizz which so stimulates and inspires the imagination: an emphasis on the endlessly surprising poetry of the text itself. It does not throw an especially strong light on that poetry—it’s does not exaggerated the images or the rhetoric: this is not a grand Shakespeare. But, as the saying goes, one does not need a strong light when there is a true light.

Director Peter Evans’ formula is simple. He does not presuppose the contemporary significances pregnant within Julius Caesar’s blend of sanguinary and supernatural imagery. Here are no extravagant sets or design features that exaggerate a handful superficial associations. Nor are the parts played as facile caricatures of modern historical figures, as if the audience were so myopic that they couldn’t read a character unless written in letters ten-foot high.

Although heavily cut, bringing the play’s forty odd characters down to about ten, the text that is used here contains only a minor number of actual substitutions, elegantly conveying the spare, compact and efficiently Roman thought-patterns, closely framing the conspirators’ dilemma: what is the influence of power on human nature, and is it better to kill one who shows the potential for tyranny than to suffer the risk despotism?

Colin Moody is a surprisingly brilliant Brutus. Although, at first, he seems a long way from the kind of Brutus described in the ancient sources, Seutonius and Plutarch, being somewhat of a lumbering figure, he actually works perfectly as a deep-thinking Shakespearian tragic hero. He has a powerful physical and intellectual presence, but also conveys a suggestive ambiguity; he retains a sense mystery about his motivations as an assassin, as though even in his soliloquies by a trick of body language we feel that he is still keeping a part of himself hidden behind his scrupulous nobility. Despite his frank melancholy, there is also something about Moody’s imposing physical confidence, his bullishness, that effectively conveys his heroic leadership qualities, an aspect easily overlooked if we imagine him only as a Roman version of Hamlet.

Kate Mulvany plays Cassius and is a much more classical choice than Moody, except of course that she is a woman. In figuring a female Cassius, theatre-makers are often tempted by the lazy Freudian insight of an “Oedipal Brutus”, a Brutus who is seduced by his “mother” and kills his “father”. It is a relief then that Mulvany and Evans resist any such a patronising arrangement. This Cassius is very much the fiercely intelligent, coldly ambitious original. Mulvany is strict in her movement and sharp in her delivery—she has the marmoreal rigidity of a Roman funerary frieze, with the same suggestion of intricacy. Of course, having a woman within the conspiracy gives the dynamic a new poignancy, perhaps opening the play to more modern sensibilities. However, nothing opens this play so well as Mulvany’s convincing engagement with Cassius’s conspiratorial genius.

Right in the middle, immediately after the assassination scene, there’s a wonderful metatheatrical moment where the conspirators try and guess at how they’ll be remembered in the theatres of the future. Despite the precariousness of their position, they’re inspired by an optimistic belief that what they’ve done will one day be recognised as a great and lofty deed. If the context of the scene wasn’t so horrific, given the presence of Alex Mengelet’s mutilated caesarcorpse, it would almost be comedic: the conspirators couldn’t be more wrong, and the audience knows it.

Even more than psychological motivations, like the lust for power, political catastrophes are caused by people simply getting things wrong. They read the situation backwards and rush in with irrevocable decisions which have unforeseen consequences.

“The sense of inevitability in this play comes from the actions of the characters themselves as much as it does the portents and prophesies,” explains director Peter Evens. “And that’s the irony. It becomes this unavoidable thing: that Caesar is going to get his revenge and that the violence of the assassination is going to come back on the conspirators in the civil war.”

This is why Julius Caesar really is a political tragedy for political tragics. It’s a warning for the wonks: don’t assume that you alone know how to read the signs, or that you alone know what the Fates have in store.

“These ideas in the play—of fate and inevitability—actually remind me of the way we use polling,” says Evans, musing on how it is that these archaic ideas can still engross audiences today. “You have these political polls that come out every three days, and then the poll itself becomes the news story rather than whatever it is you’re polling people on, which in turn influences how people think about the issue.”

But this is not, thankfully, another version of The West Wing meets Shakespeare. “I’m more interested in bare-stage Shakespeare,” says Evans, “really focused on the language and the actors and the shapes that they make, so the text can breathe and reference multiple things.” For Evans, the way to amplify the resonances is not to fill the play with clever equivalences. “I don’t think it needs an awful lot of help to make it relevant. If you get too excited by making it relevant you can squash it.”

Although this production resists the temptation to force any particular idea or interpretation on the text, there are a number of curious peripheral decisions, curious not least for being so very peripheral and seemingly inessential. While what happens immediately before us is powerful and plain, at the edges of the performance there are a number of dinky little gestures that tend to distract from the boldness.

The point is that these oddly alienating techniques, such as Kelly Ryall’s abrasive sound design, or the characters having to walk slow-motion through an imaginary force-field as they enter or leave the stage, or the use of microphones (at a painfully loud volume) for asides or incidental characters, have the ultimate effect of disrupting the performance and of fracturing the psychological unity which the script has otherwise been tailored to emphasise.

The modernising of the work, the corporate ambience suggested in the costumes and conference chairs, is very lightly worked. There is so much already in this play that the best decision Bell Shakespeare have made is to do very little, or even at times to work against some of the more obvious parallels with the corporate world. Of course, sometimes “not doing” very much with Shakespeare is the hardest thing of all, because it implies an even greater concentration on the text and the history of the text, but it’s an effort here that trebly rewards.

Charles Olsen, from the Maximus Poems

I have links! Neandellus lives! Ring the old bell till its clapper cracks! Here, where I’ve been and what I’ve seen, the links are all for Time Out:

The Rabble’s wonderful tragedy Special which I’ve sketched a longer more coherent response to but haven’t had the time to blog .

The Rising Water thing.

Winterfall Theatre’s take on Caryl Churchill’s A Number.

This was a most welcome production. By my rough count there have been only half a dozen Churchill plays staged in Melbourne since 2005, when Barnaby Chiverton’s Evaporating Sun put on this very play at fortyfivedownstairs. I did see a Churchill play as part of VCA Masters Season last year, neatly put together by Tanya Dickson (the production was so darn classical it even had a periaktoi), but that’s been it for me. One a year is perhaps better than many worthy playwrights get in this town, but I almost feel like it’s a matter of urgency that audiences are exposed to an uncompromisingly intelligent mainstage writer like Churchill, particularly, I think, if we want our mainstage theatres to come into any new kind of seriousness.

The Annie Baker double of Circle Mirror Transformation and The Aliens

In the weeks leading up to seeing these two plays, I was very much down on the prospect of having to sit through two productions from any of-the-moment playwright, especially one whom the publicity was comparing to Sarah Ruhl—and that was despite even VICE Magazine telling me how brilliant she is. (Despite? Because?) Well, Beckett she ain’t, but I still really, really got a lot from especially the Red Stitch production.

The Aliens is a sensitive portrait of the very tail-end of a certain threat (threat? I meant thread) in the the American counter-culture pancho (pancho? I meant poncho–oh, but this was very carefully done). The title references a poem of the same name by Bukowski, a poem which finishes “but they are / there / and I am / here”. Although I’ve managed to read a couple of his novels, I’ve never spent much time with the poetry of Bukowski. What can you do with a poet whose lines are inked indelibly over all the bright-eyed youth of this world’s only superpower? Baker’s would-be Beat novelist Jasper says, “he cuts out all the bullshit”; well, for me he only ever seemed to talk the bullshit up. It’s all perspective I suppose, and this play helps reposition him more sympathetically in my eyes: Bukowski as the hero of small-press America, the great underground of literary magazines. And I’m kinda inspired by that. Bukowski was a great supporter of zines and small-press journals, contributing notably to New Orleans’ The Outsider, which, with its archaic nineteenth century screw press and dedication to full eight-hole binding, which to my tastes is probably the most inspiring of them all.

Although The Aliens has nothing specifically to do with small press publishing, I think the precarious freedom which Baker is describing in the slacker-life of Jasper and KJ, is the same offered by a small press, and, like their protégé Evan, I’m fascinated by that ideal.

Incidentally, The Aliens takes place in the same apparently fictional town as Circle Mirror, Shirley, Vermont. There are plenty of real towns in America and the UK called Shirley, but none in Vermont. But, also, did you know that until the publication and subsequent success of Jane Eyre’s Shirley, that name was basically reserved for boys? Because of the popularity of the heroine in Eyre’s book, who had been dubbed Shirley by a father especially eager for a son, the name then took off as a name for girls. There you go. And here, too… you go… Shiiirleee!

My first assay, part one, here, was naught but a bit of frothy rodomontade against programming and production at the MTC, or at least the MTC as I’ve experienced it these last five years.

I complained at length that, alas and alack, I have never seen anything which, as Adorno would say, broke open the bull’s eye of art: no kind of reality has ever shone through; it has all been a ghastly kind of projection. Even within the narrow performance tradition of “Australian Naturalism” it has been an artistic failure. Yes, to the rigs they pack their stages with naturalistic dramas, but with desperately degenerate examples, such as Rising Water, all effected with a tediously extravagant visual rhetoricism, such as everything I’ve seen directed by Simon Philips.

I find it difficult to get excited by Australian Naturalism anyway. It is not a tradition which seems to value ambitious imaginings. Though she doesn’t call it “naturalism”, which is something I’ll come to, I find myself agreeing with Alison Croggon when she writes that the authority of let’s call it “situational subjectivity” (or “circumstantial psychology”, which is a marginally uglier coinage) has set up expectations in the audience which inevitably stifle innovation and experimentation. But, all the same, Australian Naturalism is not as moribund or desperately safe as the MTC has made it seem. The Joy of Text, both script and production, proves that.

In discussions since then, I’ve had it put to me that the MTC is, really, very much better than it used to be, as the programming of TJOT in fact proves. In an interview with Michael Kantor, for a Time Out Sydney thing I did on the upcoming Threepenny season (which is not online yet), the former Malthouse Theatre artistic director had this to say about the MTC:

It’s much better than it was ten years ago, or even seven years ago. I think the two companies [MTC and Malthouse Theatre] do have an effect on one another.

What we were doing early on was bringing all the independent companies into Malthouse, and that, as a flow on, has actually put pressure on the MTC to work out, well, what’s their relationship to the independent companies, because they had no relationship whatsoever. Like, I don’t even think that the MTC knew there were independent companies. And they’ve had to buy into that to some degree.

Also, having your own theatre changes the dynamic inherently. I don’t think that they’ve worked out yet what [Sumner Theatre] means for them. But they will with time. It will mean that they build a stronger identity.

Sure. I wasn’t an Empty Seat subscriber ten years ago (oh, when we were wits!), but it makes sense that in a busy theatre city like Melbourne, the peak company would shift with the ground beneath it. Few arts organisations can afford to be “floating mountains”. Even the mysterious, cloud-obscured peak called Opera Australia is a far more accountable and, especially under Lynden Terracini with his “new world” attitude to operatic spectacle in the antipodes, more culturally progressive organisation than in the past.

So, yes, the MTC is a stronger institutional beast. It is more responsive. It is better able to account for and co-opt such aberrant talents as emerge from the independent scene and make responsible careerists from them. And it has a clearer identity in so far as it is able to know and respond to what is going on in Melbourne, Sydney, Australia and the world. And there is no better proof of its growing ecumenical capacity than the appointment of culture-hound Brett Sheehy to the role of artistic director. But for all its cultural growth and stronger sense of self, I still doubt the MTC’s capacity to inspire joy and awe.

Here endeth the MTC portion of my rant, for now.

Toward the end of part one I started making vague noises about the central place of naturalism in our native performance tradition. At the time, I was thinking of the debate which briefly flared over at Theatrenotes in June, which seemed to me to raise two rather interesting issues: a) whether what we see on main stages around the country (in both text and performance) can be described as “naturalistic” and b) whether, historically, naturalism really is Australia’s defining performance discipline.

While I agree with Alison’s main argument in her original divagation, that there is a persistent anti-intellectual strain that has passed through into Australian playwriting, the way I read the comment threads here and here is that there exists a general sort of agreement that naturalism is not a serious influence in Australian stage-writing or performance, principally because there is nothing “natural” in it. I disagree.

Of course realism has had no serious influence. Temperamentally, realism rarely seems “natural” to Australian tastes. Day-to-day, we are too obsessed with our precious journalism, in the arrangement and presentation of facts, to trust artistic presentations of the un-composed “real”. Of course, there is plenty of Australian art that gets described as “realist”, but when a literary or dramatic work in Australia is described as “realist”, all that generally means is that it is “gritty” or has a “hard edge”. We thus borrow our dramatic idea of “realist” from Anglo-Western political philosophy, as a substitution for “does not shy away from the brutal aspect of life”. Artistic realism should of course mean something else: the introduction of techniques which objectively replicate in art experiences of the world outside of art. This technical realism, so far as it relates to anything other than costume and accent, is generally avoided in Australian theatre, especially as it relates to the problems of silence and duration.

(For what it’s worth, even though it is not by any stretch a dominant influence, I actually think there’s quite a bit more genuine realism to be found in Melbourne than, judging by the thread at theatre notes, is generally believed. In terms of companies, I think of a group like Ranters. The fact that Ranters are usually placed in the anti-naturalist camp is, I think, instructional.)

We are a supremely sceptical people, and we are proudly certain that there is no such thing as objective fact. (I remember this being the gist of year eleven English, a nice thing to be teaching kids who are trying to make sense of physics and chemistry.) But, perversely, we trust stories. Naturalism tells the story. If the “real” is presented without either a coherent “narrative” or naturalising “context” it smacks of pretentious experimentalism, something unreal. See, for eg, Ranters Theatre. It is stories that seem real to us. This is our heritage. Artistically we are, and always have been, naturalists. It suits out national temper like no other discipline. Australia, like dramatic Naturalism, is essentially a product of the Age of Reason. We are languid democrats, and prefer things no higher than ourselves. We trust that the public knows when to bring a public figure down a peg.

I’m not going to presume to lecture on “Australia” any further, to offer trite reflections of the difference between realism and naturalism. All I will say for anyone still concerned that our naturalism doesn’t seem “objectively natural”, is that, for me, naturalism is to theatre as teleology is to philosophy. It is the study of ends, of reception, of natural design. This is why “our” naturalism looks very much different to, say, English, American or European naturalism: our audience’s expectations are vitally different to those of other national cultures. Naturalism gets its character from the expectation of the audience. That is why, as powerful as naturalism can be in exposing inconsistencies—precisely those inconsistencies which subsist in all we take to be natural—and the roots and causes of national attitudes and institutions, it can also smother the development of new courses of aesthetic investigation as audiences come more and more to expect their dramatic scenarios presented in a similar mode.

If Australian naturalism is “coarse”, invokes clowning or uninhibited sentimentalism or any other non-realist techniques, techniques that in other artistic contexts might fairly be called anti-naturalist, then it is because these techniques, far more than strict realism, appear to the Australian sensibility to better articulate the inherent meaning in dramatic scenarios.

Beneath its consideration of satire and narrative, The Joy of Text is actually a sort of celebration of Australian Naturalism, but a cautious celebration, one which is alive to the hazard of fawning too much on audience expectations. There is a great exchange toward the end which goes something like this:

Diane: He’s imitating us. That’s what we’ve taught him what being an adult is.
Amelia: Literary references and clever banter?
Diane: Yes.

Fennessy’s production was stylised; by a certain standard it was over the top in parts, clownish, sentimental in other parts; but for all that very much in the vein of Australian Naturalism, and, moreover, intelligently handled in the context of the play. What it did was use naturalism to open a window on our obsession with the with hoaxing as a form of satire.

The point is it’s not necessarily a bad thing. That kind of acting is how you make dramatic scenarios seem natural to your average Australian punter. Complaining that this or that so-called naturalism is not “natural” is rather like complaining that a dog humping a trouser leg is not natural. In what sense is it unnatural? It is quetion of the right context— I remember here that The Joy of Text draws its initial dramatic energy from a contest between context and narrative and that context ultimately triumphs. Thus it is that in the context of the Australian stage, the histrionic equivalent of humping a trouser leg may also appears natural. The point is to apply it to a serious subject.

Here’s a link to my TOM review of OSUMTS. Follow the link for a summary of the play and my thoughts about this production. Some additional non-review thoughts below:

It’s an interesting proposition for Hoy Polloy. The play has gained some notoriety on account of the divergence between the author’s religion and politics, and those of his heroes. While the play is a sensitive treatment of young Protestant Ulstermen of 1916, complete with relentless cursing of the hated “Fenian”, McGuinness himself is apparently a proud Catholic Republican. But this is typical of his modus operandi. His dramas can sometimes seem like exercises in empathy, like educational explorations of the extreme aboard the good ship Humanism. Over and again, he places his characters in intolerable or dehumanising situations, only for them to liberate themselves, if not physically, then at least in spirit, through the universal power of the human imagination.

Here he transforms his eight Ulstermen, facing certain death in the trenches, from war-heroes into culture-heroes. These are not only men willing to sacrifice their lives for Crown and Country, they are artists of courage. They have visions and poetical notions which provide the inspiration for their courage. Among the eight recruits, courage is not superhuman, it is exactly human.

This sort of writing leads into some beautiful though highly sentimental arrangements. But it does tend toward a formula. Characters repeatedly extract themselves from various kinds of cowardice—neurotic, nihilistic, depressive, spiritual—by having an inner eye forced open, as it were, by some boon companion who refuses to give up on them. It’s the same formula I observed at work in a production of McGuinness’s Someone Who’ll Watch over Me at fortyfivedownstairs in 2009.

McGuinness is aware of this writerly practice. In the opening monologue, his veteran announces:

Those willing to talk to you of that day, to remember for your sake, to forgive you, they invent as freely as they wish. I am not one of them. I will not talk, I will not listen to you. Invention gives that slaughter shape. That scale of horror has no shape, as you in your darkness have no shape.

This is something of a critique of McGuiness’s own tendency to give a familiar artistic texture to humans under acute stress. It is notable, and not a little disarming, that we go from this monologue directly into a very shapely and consciously structured vision of the war. Although there is no depiction of the battle itself, the play does dwell on the mental horror.

While the production has its issuses, director Steven Dawson does pick up on this tendency and I think, in an epic sort of mode, employs it to strengthen the mythological aspect of his heroes.

“It sure was something,” he says. Impenetrable apathy!

Think about it – how many venues have a curtain onstage? When was the last time a curtain actually came down? It would be a waste of resources. The curtain that falls behind the eyes of the one who would not be a critic has more finality.

“It is because I don’t want to criticise.” I reassure him: criticising is least part of criticism. “No, no, you have your apparatus,” he explains. “You know the technical terms. I can’t really judge.” I plead my ignorance. I tell him that I know nothing. When have I ever known what I’m talking about? Really known? He shrugs. “Yes, but you’ve seen more, stuff.”

I am desperate. I implore him. His detachment suggests that serious dialogue is unseemly, that to insist is poor form. Exasperated by my raving, he tries one last parry, hoping to have done with it all. “What else is there to say? I didn’t love it. But I didn’t hate it.” Yes, yes, but what was it? He sighs, faintly. He won’t waste his breath even for sighing. Fortified behind his premature surrender, there is nothing more to be done.

I can only marvel. These humble deferrals … what miraculous self-sufficiency! No wonder he resents art.