Sadly, as time has gone by, I haven’t had the same passion or dedication to writing about theatre. I’ve decided I’d rather write for it. My playwriting practice has taken precedence.

And so comes the time to take my pet theatARGH to the vet for a long, long sleep.

There won’t be any new reviews on theatARGH from this point forward. The old ones will certainly stay, though. If only for me to laugh at in the future (read: tomorrow) when I consider what a precocious little twat I was / am / can be. Some of them are interesting pieces of writing, I guess. They certainly make points that I still believe in. But lots are just uninspired drivel. Being a ‘critic’ is a hat I am genuinely interested in wearing at some point, but not at the moment. Not at this point in my artistic education. And especially not when things are starting to happen with my existing plays and new plays, and the people I am reviewing are starting to become my peers. For the sake of sanity, professionalism and transparency, it’s best I leave this theatARGH thing in the time and place that it was.

I love blogging, but I love tweeting more. I’ll occasionally tweet about shows that I’ve seen and what I thought of them – please follow me @christopherrrrr or http://www.twitter.com/christopherrrrr. I might return to blogging at some point in the near future, but it will probably be a more creative blog about personal process than a strictly ‘review’ blog. As long as I have an internet addiction, I can promise that I’ll be digitally around.

So that’s it for now, folks. Thanks so much for reading for the last three years, regardless of how erratic I’ve been. It’s been a pleasure seeing your shows and writing about them. I hope you’re seeing my shows soon. And reviewing me.

Lots of calm, placid love (not an ARGH in sight),

Chris x.

May 13 – May 30, Tower Theatre, Malthouse.

Bookings at http://www.malthousetheatre.com.au

This review will be featured in Farrago, Melbourne University newspaper, edition 5 2010.

LALLY KATZ AND THE REVELATIONS OF THE FANTASTICAL THEATRICAL INTERVIEW

Chris Summers

Cast

CHRIS SUMMERS, early 20s, University of Melbourne student, emerging playwright, short sandy hair and deep bags under his eyes. Tongue always flapping, thoughts always ticking over, scribbles that run off the page and up his arms and across his chest like hair. A watcher.

LALLY KATZ, 30, VCA graduate, blossoming playwright whose career is boiling and bursting at the seams. Unkempt hair and a wild imagination that fills pages and stages with life and magic from Melbourne to New York. Generous, hilarious, vivid and spirited. A dreamer.

Setting

An abandoned theatre: rich, red tatters of curtains, chipped wooden banisters, ripped upholstery and a wide empty stage dusted with crumbles of brick and stone. Unsafe, old-fashioned and untouched. Nonetheless, a place with possibility and with heart.

Scene One

A cough from nowhere. A chandelier flickers from the ceiling as the bulb of a spotlight slowly warms. From the darkness flecks of dust and flaps of moth become illuminated, weaving in and out of the light. The spotlight rests on a dot on the stage that begins to grow bigger and brighter.

Another cough, followed by the crunch of footsteps.

CHRIS SUMMERS’s leg appears in the spotlight, then his arm, as he puts down a small chair. He walks offstage, then walks back on again. He moves around the spotlight and puts down another small chair on the other side, next to the first. He walks back to the other side and then moves into the light. He shudders, then eases down onto the chair.

He coughs again.

From a battered leather satchel, he pulls out a laptop. He switches it on and waits for it to start up. When it does, with a polite ding, he scratches his head. His chin. Then he starts to type.

LALLY KATZ is lowered from the ceiling and onto the second chair, a titanium MacBook Pro glistening on her lap. She smiles at the screen.

CHRIS: Hi Lally.

LALLY adjusts her hair in the reflection.

LALLY: Hello!

CHRIS: We’ve actually met before. I’m that blonde kid who you occasionally bump into at the theatre. I’m a big fan of your work. As a young writer, still struggling to understand my own voice, I admire the way you’ve come to recognise, craft and develop your own.

LALLY: Yes, we’ve met many times, and it’s always a pleasure! And thank you for your lovely words. I’m looking forward to our correspondence.

A pause. CHRIS looks at his screen in concentration.

CHRIS: I want to start with your beginnings. Wanting to be a playwright is not always a popular choice for kids when film and TV dominate. When did your ambition to write theatre start

LALLY sighs to herself, thinks.

LALLY: I always loved making stuff up, organising groups of people to play pretend and then making other people watch us.  I was constantly getting the neighbourhood kids together and making them dress up and we’d create characters and worlds together. That’s just naturally what I’ve always liked doing.  And I guess that’s more conducive to theatre than to film or television.

There is something about the immediacy of theatre: the way you can make these moments together– you can create worlds straight away just by all believing in them together…

CHRIS: How did people react to you wanting to write plays?

LALLY: My parents were just so happy that I had found something I loved. They have always believed that people should just follow their hearts, and have always encouraged my brother and I to do that. I imagine that it would be very difficult if you constantly had people questioning and doubting your decisions. You have enough doubts yourself without other people’s doubts!

CHRIS: I can agree with you there from firsthand experience (laughs). So were there particular writers, or particular works that influenced you? Did your inspiration come from theatre writing on the page, or was it from the experience of live theatre and the way it can affect people?

LALLY: I have always loved the play Our Town. I don’t know how well known a play it is in Australia. But in the States, it gets performed at high schools all the time. It’s written by Thornton Wilder and it is utterly heartbreaking. It taught me that you can write about whatever you want as long as the heart of it is true.

Almost all of the really great theatre pieces I’ve seen had a really powerful rhythm that moves beneath the world created onstage, and that takes the audience with it…

I guess what I find most inspiring in any theatre show, whatever form it’s in, is that in the audience you are as much a part of creating that experience/world as the actual performance. It’s all created from everyone being in the same room, dreaming together.

CHRIS: That’s a really beautiful image Lally, all being in the same room dreaming together. Was the first time you saw one of your own plays performed an experience like that?

LALLY: The feeling of watching my plays early on was utter excitement and terror. I would just be so nervous about anything going wrong. I was terrified that the actors would say the words the wrong way … It always makes me physically twitch when someone says a line wrong, even slightly wrong. I hate it, because the whole meaning and rhythm changes. But more than anything, I was just really excited and really nervous, and also at times embarrassed, because so much of myself was being revealed.

CHRIS: Are the same jitters and fears still there when you see your plays now?

LALLY looks around, a little nervously, then back to her computer. She reads from it.

LALLY: Yeah, it’s pretty similar! I still really want everyone to get their lines exactly right. I’m still terrified of things going wrong and I’m still really excited and nervous. And I’m also slightly embarrassed about how much of myself I am revealing!

I guess now I have seen enough of my plays to work out what is working and what isn’t working. My instincts are sharper now and I understand theatre better. It used to take me years to figure out what had worked and what hadn’t worked in a play. Now I know as it’s happening – which is useful and sometimes painful.

But then again, you’re so paranoid as you’re watching your work that maybe you don’t know completely. Often if there is someone in the audience that I know and I am nervous of, I will picture what their reaction to everything is and that will sometimes inform how I end up seeing the work. This is a bad thing to do though.

CHRIS shuffles on the chair, stretches his legs and scratches the back of his head. He scrolls the screen up and down.

CHRIS: You say you have discovered that one can write about whatever they want, “as long as the heart is true”. I’m interested, what does it mean to you for the heart of a work to be true?

While CHRIS is talking, LALLY notices that she is covered in dust. She reaches out her right arm then fiercely blows on it; a cloud floats off into the light and slowly settles in the dark.

LALLY: I think the times when the heart of a work is not true is when you are coming at it instead of from in it.  I’ve done this when I’ve been really nervous about a project, or when I’ve felt that people expect a certain kind of writing. It is usually when I’m afraid that what I do isn’t good enough…

When the heart of a work isn’t true, the writing isn’t alive.  You can tell when you’re writing it (though you can block it for a bit) and most people can tell when they read it. However, sometimes this is actually an essential part of the drafting process. Sometimes you have to have a draft that is fixed up structurally, but loses some of its life. Then your job in the next draft is to put the life back in and find your heart in it again.

LALLY raises her other arm, cobweb dangling from her fingers, and blows all over CHRIS. He coughs and splutters over himself. LALLY props herself up again.

I think when you’re writing with your conscious brain is when things lose their life; because you are making things happen because you think they should happen, rather than your subconscious feeling it … However, again, this can be a necessary part of drafting.

You have to be careful. You have to work out how to tell the difference between something that came out right the first time you wrote it, and something that needs work. You can destroy plays by re-drafting them unnecessarily, but at the same time, theatre is a collaborative art form, so you need to be able to take feedback and work with other people’s suggestions, especially if you want your plays to go on! So it’s about working out how to make your play the best that it can be, without killing it.

CHRIS, stifling a cough, wipes the screen of the laptop. He hunches over the chair.

CHRIS: Have you ever written a play where the heart wasn’t true?

Pause. His words hang there.

LALLY: I have never felt it in a whole play or I wouldn’t let it go on. But there will be moments where I can see the bare bones of the cogs moving and I am certain that audiences would feel that too; where for a moment the characters kind of stop being alive and are just forcing something to happen for the sake of the play.

Pause.

I hate those moments, but sometimes they just stick in there!

The spotlight browns, brightens, and then the bulb bursts. The laptops shut as glass falls across the stage and audience. LALLY is hoisted back up towards the ceiling and, on her way up, trips the chair over on its side. Everything is dark. Silence.

Scene Two

Days pass. A few; a week. Night falls and outside, morning comes, once and again. Life happens. But inside, time has gone nowhere.

Finally, another light starts to warm the same spot, though it is weaker than before. Slowly CHRIS appears. He has not moved. He gently brushes sleep from his eyes, bugs and spiders from his jeans and his laptop. He puts the other chair upright and then, sitting in his own, starts up his laptop.

CHRIS: Sorry it’s been so long for me to get back to you. First week back at
Uni. I hope I didn’t leave you hanging.

LALLY descends from the ceiling and back onto her chair. She is wide-eyed and fresh.

LALLY: Sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you! I’ve been in Sydney and have had deadlines …

CHRIS squints at his screen in concentration.

CHRIS: I’ve been thinking about your approach to the personal and fantastical.

The logo on LALLY’S laptop lights up.

CHRIS: So, last time we spoke, you mentioned feeling embarrassed with how much of yourself you were putting into your plays, and how much people were seeing of you. Do you worry about how to balance the personal in your work with what it is that the work is actually trying to say?

LALLY: First of all, I think I might have overstated the embarrassment thing.  To be honest, I don’t get that embarrassed.  I might get a tiny bit embarrassed – but not nearly as embarrassed as perhaps I should get.  I’ll have moments where I’ll think, ‘Yikes – this is actually quite revealing!’ but for the most part I’m kind of missing some sort of radar in my brain that inhibits me or stops me from sharing personal information about myself.

I feel like I’m constantly balancing things as I write. There’s part of you that is feeling what you are writing in the moment, and then there’s a part of you that is thinking about the scenes you’ve already written, and the scenes you might write, and where what you’re writing in that moment sits in all that.

Pause. CHRIS looks thoughtfully at the screen.

CHRIS: There are strong thematic resonances in your plays – often harrowing, heartbreaking or disturbingly beautiful. I’ve noticed that artists, particularly women, who are compelled to explore darker ideas and themes in their work, are often labelled as “tortured” or “depressive personalities”. Critics and the media are often unable to differentiate the art from the artist. I’m thinking of Sarah Kane or PJ Harvey, for example. I guess my question is this:  is what you see of yourself in your plays how you actually think about yourself?

LALLY: It’s funny Chris, often I will see one of my plays, or read over an old draft and think, ‘Oh that’s who I was then.’  Or I’ll think, ‘Oh, that was when that was happening.’  But it is rare that I think of that when I am actually writing the work. And it’s usually a different version of reality, like a riddle or something, that I don’t realise the answer to until later.

So, to answer your question: I guess yes and I guess no. Perhaps for a moment. Or in a certain light. But the way we think about ourselves and about other people changes so often; it’s like a snapshot and then you take another snapshot somewhere else. You constantly have epiphanies of yourself and of other people. We are constantly discovering the truth, trying to record it, and then discovering another truth. Do the different truths cancel each other out? Maybe in memory they do. I think we are constantly looking for true versions of ourselves or true versions of the people we know, but they’re always shifting. So, looking back, a snapshot will not be the same image when you look back at it as it was at the time you recorded it. [DK2]

Another pause. CHRIS looks over at LALLY. As she speaks, LALLY slowly puts down the screen of her laptop and faces CHRIS.

LALLY: I’ve been writing a play about my neighbour. She’s an old lady. She’s Hungarian and she came here after the war. Her life is amazing. It’s breathtaking actually. She doesn’t have children, so I feel like if I don’t tell her stories they’re going to die. That seems heartbreaking – for someone’s stories to die with them. Still, she’ll probably get really mad at me when she sees it. I’m really obsessed with her. I ended up spending about a year and a half just hanging out with her and listening to her stories and going to Box Hill with her for lunch. I’m not in her. There’s no part of me in the character that’s her in the play. But her world became my world for a while.  So I could write her truthfully and know her as I wrote her.

Pause.

Although there is a sort of me character that hangs out with her in the play.

CHRIS laughs.

The spotlight starts to shake, more orange than bright, and hundreds of flickers have started pouring into the theatre. They crawl on the chairs, flit through the air, run down the aisles and stick to the curtains. They are fireflies, but in the darkness, they could be stars.

CHRIS shuts his laptop and faces LALLY.

CHRIS: You said that when you were young, what you loved in theatre was the ability to play and pretend, the immediacy of those moments. So much of your work is about imagination – bending time, identity, space, reality. How did the fantastical become your approach?

LALLY: I guess you write how you see the world. And the world and reality have always felt very fluid to me. I have nothing against naturalism. I utterly love some naturalistic plays. But I do think it’s silly if people think that theatre has to be naturalistic, and I believe that audiences are capable of launching off with us much further than they’re sometimes given credit for. Life is pretty strange. You’d have to make a play pretty weird for it to be as strange as life.

CHRIS: Do you think that it’s strange that some audiences have a disposition to expecting naturalism, and a certain kind of “reality” when they go to the theatre?

LALLY: I guess it depends where people are comfortable with letting their dreams and imaginations go.  People want to see a part of life they can identify with. I think that is a normal thing to want. We all want to figure ourselves out through the books we read, the films we watch, and so on. But I believe that people can see themselves, their situations, and the people they know through different styles of theatre. There will always be people who want to experience something different from their lives and there will always be people who really don’t. I think both those kinds of people can get into different kinds of theatre.

Through the space a distant echo can be heard. It could be the memory of an audience clapping, or it could just be the hum of the fireflies.

CHRIS: Thanks Lally. You’ve been so open. I very much look very forward to seeing you around the theatres again soon.

LALLY: I’ve really enjoyed this Chris! Your questions have really made me think.

Pause.

It’s funny, often you don’t think to realise certain things unless someone asks the right question.

After a few moments, they stand up from their chairs and shuffle forward. The ground crunches and the echo fades. Little creatures move around their feet. They join hands and bow to the empty theatre. The curtain drops.

THE END

Apocalypse Bear Trilogy, three interconnected fragments spawned from an original short-play performed as part of David Mence’s Melburnalia experiment, doesn’t shy away from the issues and challenges of representing youth on stage. But with that said, it is not so much a play about youth and young people as it is an exploration, and blurring, of that time in our lives when our fears and desires are at their rawest, most vulnerable and their most frighteningly real. Included as part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival and the MTC Lawler program, and self-directed by performers Luke Mullins and Brian Lipson, Lally Katz’s text traverses time and space, reality and history, to suggest that the chrysalis of change, growth and transformation is something that we peel away at but can never really shed; we never quite emerge the people that we expect to be, or really, emerge at all. ‘That time in our lives’, usually referred to with a whiff of youthful nostalgia, is actually our entire lives, and as our dreams and expectations are subjugated by the disappointment and the drab reality of day-to-day existence, they follow us, and come to back haunt us at the strangest, smallest and simplest moments.

The three scenes – The Fag from Zagreb, Back to the Cafeteria and Into the Woods – share one thing; the conniving, charming and malevolently disarming Apocalypse Bear (Brian Lipson). In the first, he welcomes Jeremy (Luke Mullins) home from school in affluent Kew; Jeremy, quickly drawn into his own reality with an online crush – a Croatian teenager who types in broken English – hardly has time to question the Bear’s presence, or his motivations, other than to serve him; to fix him packet nachos or a sandwich. Slowly, as Jeremy’s world and sense of self ruptures, the Bear coaxes out of him a story of danger and heartbreak set deep in the maze, in the woods, just two stops after the tram stop for home. In the second, he joins Sonja (Katherine Tonkin) in the cafeteria of her high school – they swap food when the Bear is able to illuminate that what she thought was a chicken burger was actually fish. At first Sonja tells the Bear about the popularity contest in her class; how the cool kids are always disappearing with each other, running off and hiding places, and how she isn’t a part of them. But soon she is talking about her husband, her unhappiness and her need for a history; with the Apocalypse Bear, she has aged decades in minutes, and scrambles to find, and reconnect with, some distant part of herself – a part of her story which she had never written. In the final scene, Jeremy and Sonja are a married couple; they live well with good jobs, but there is an air of eerie stagnation over their relationship, their physical interaction, and indeed, the conversation with each other. There is a strange, and poignant sense, despite their obvious love for one and other (they call each-other ‘twins’, which somewhat echoes the ‘buddy-kiss’ of Joe and Harper in Angels in America) of two people suspended, living in different times and places. Docile domesticity – from taking the garbage out to the comments of their friends on Facebook – has gotten the better of them, and while Sonja dreams of a journey into the woods, the Apocalypse Bear is there to greet her, and assist her with the shopping, on her awakening.

There is something very beautiful, original and heartbreaking about the way in which these stories come together under the guise of this clawed beast. It is a testament to the strength and depth of Katz’s writing, and the disturbingly fantastical soundness of her imagination, that we never even question the existence of the bear; he becomes a part of, and the force within, this narrative. The narrative itself is splintered in a way that is, at times, confusing – but like the characters it is exploring, and the painful incongruities of youth and growing up to accept life for what it is, the open questions and ambiguities are wholly satisfying and wholly real. And at the same time, in the haunting final minutes, there is a feeling that we have come full circle in this strange suburbia; we have arrived exactly where we are supposed to. There is never any suspicion of being cheated – no easy lines, cheap gimmicks or showy theatrics in this play; it is theatre, true, pure and powerful, which takes a part of you and never lets it go. It is the best thing that Katz, only thirty with a huge swagger of awards and productions, has written; there is already a greater clarity to Apocalypse Bear Trilogy, and a more thorough, and subtle complexity, than anything she has written prior. It will be truly fascinating to see where her writing grows from here.

The production is stunning and is the perfect showcase of Melbourne talent that the International Arts Festival commands. Mullins and Lipson, with the directorial assistance of Stuck Pigs Squealing contemporary Chris Kohn, give the text enough stillness to breathe without ever being delicate or precious. They find comedy and meaning in subtle gestures and nuanced delivery, and work to create a world which is never the one that we recognise as our own, but at the same time, never one intangible and out of our reach. It is a challenging and intriguing boundary perhaps best evidenced by the projected backdrops; supposedly denotative of a kitchen, or a cafeteria, or the wallpaper of a bedroom, the visuals can never stay in focus – they are always shifting slightly, blurring, and encouraging us to look beyond any singular constructed ‘reality’ of the scene. Indeed, like so much of Katz’s earlier work, Mullins and Lipson have teased out in Apocalypse Bear Trilogy the very strong subtext of metatheatricality and the awareness of both the fake reality in front of us, and the realities we, and the characters, subscribe to in order to give meaning to our lives. As performers, they too, along with Katherine Tonkin’s determined and disappointed Sonja, are fantastic. Mullins, in particular, who’s ambitious but not-quite-there Autobiography of Red in 2007 showed such an interesting and thoughtful engagement between body and text, hits the perfect mark with Jeremy; a character prematurely stunted by aspiration, arrogance, untruth and regret.  Jethro Woodward’s sound design strongly captures, and accentuates, the fantasy, danger and deep sadness of the performance, always bubbling underneath the drama without ever needlessly dominating, while Richard Vabre’s lighting, which shifts between glossy bright states, other-worldly colours and lightning-esque flashes of the Apocalypse Bear, is effective and precise, as always. And as Mel Page’s simple, stark and slowly dismantled set reveals the depth of the Lawler space, we are left with the chilling picture of almost nothing but Mullins and Tonkin, washed in a simple spotlight, standing still in between the trunks of trees.

There is nothing straightforward and easy about how we grow up and find our place in the world; nor what we discard, or choose to keep with us, along the way. Apocalypse Bear Trilogy doesn’t romanticise youth but tackles into it, rips it apart and holds its heart in its jaws while we sit there and watch, feeling every pulse and bloody beat. Like our dreams and our fears, it is gut-wrenching and profoundly moving stuff. Apocalypse Bear Trilogy is theatre unafraid of being challenging and misunderstood. It is also theatre unafraid of being theatre, and unafraid of being so much more.

Apocalypse Bear Trilogy runs until October 24^th with shows at 3pm and 7:30pm that day, MTC Lawler, Southbank. Bookings at http://www.mtc.com.au/tickets/production.aspx?performanceNumber=1998

I sit at the part of the spectrum as someone who, at the very least, wants to be stimulated, irrespective of how successful the piece is on the whole. I don’t want to be comforted or consoled with theatre, and I don’t want to sit in a big space squinting, attempting to watch something that could be done at least a hundred-times better on a TV screen with close-ups, soundtracks, camera pans and montage sequences. I like my theatre theatrical, thank you very much; you can save the rest for a night in with the remote control. So perhaps it shouldn’t have surprised me how much I disliked God of Carnage, Christopher Hampton’s translation of Yasmina Reza’s Tony Award winning play, directed here by Peter Evans with a cast including Pamela Rabe and Hugo Weaving. Taking my seat in the Playhouse and realising that the set, a scarily-imposing French calendar, wasn’t likely changing or going anywhere for at least ninety minutes, I took a few breaths and reassured myself. I knew that I was expecting a particular type of talking-heads theatre for a particular, and very profitable, cross-section of the theatre-going public; that I should keep an open mind (Tony-Award winning after all!) and try and take whatever I could from it. But that knowledge was not enough to keep me from shuffling, twitching, tugging my hair, chewing my tongue and finally fuming. I got just the kind of visceral reaction that I had considered impossible from Melbourne Theatre Company shows. Alas, for all the wrong reasons.

That is not to fault this production, which I can appreciate. It is very solidly, and delicately, directed by Evans, who gets some terrific performances from his cast; Rabe and Geoff Morell, Weaving and Natasha Herbert playing French middle-class and upper-middle-class middle-aged couples respectively, are engaging performers and at times very funny to watch. The physical comedy occasionally works and there’s a few chuckles to be had; particularly in the wonderfully prolonged vomit scene. But it’s all so spick, squeaky-clean and slick; it reminded me somewhat of the approach that Simon Philips took to Tracey Letts’ much darker, but similarly made-for-broadway, August: Osage County earlier in the year. It’s all adequately lit and sounded and costumed, without any kind of interesting or dominant design feature (aside from that precarious, pointless calendar) or anything, really, to detract from the text. Evans has opted for a very inoffensive and efficient enactment of Reza’s script, which also happens to be the biggest problem.

Not that there is much that he could have done with it, really. The flimsy set-up sees the two couples predictably negotiating, then arguing, about an altercation between their sons at school. There’s something profoundly disturbing about violence involving children and the way in which a society responds to it – as Christos Tsiolkas recently explored in The Slap – but here, it’s glossed over and only touched on in metaphorical terms, adding the only thread to an otherwise formless structure. The couples throw things at each other, divide down gender lines and support and subvert one and other, they get drunk and the rich(er) couple attempt to leave at least six or seven times. There’s also an unbelievably implausible, ridiculous subplot or two thrown in about the ethics of pharmaceutical corporations and the moral responsibilities that we have to people in developing countries. There is nothing remotely surprising, or challenging, or even attention-commanding about what unfolds in God of Carnage; the characters are so nauseatingly one-dimensional, narcissistic and bourgeois, and their dramas are absolutely trivial. They seem to spend the whole play going to great lengths to be sure that they don’t actually do anything. Except vomit. And yes, the vomiting is a definite highlight.

What Reza attempts to say about the cyclical nature of violence, the repetition of taught / learnt behaviour, conflict resolution and the way in which dysfunctional couples raise their children is said without a whiff of freshness, irony, or depth. It’s an unashamedly unsophisticated, clichéd and easily-forgotten piece of domestic fluff; when it aspires to something bigger in its ‘serious’ moments, it falls flat on its face. Ultimately shallow as a drama and nowhere near self-aware enough to be a satire, God of Carnage presents an easy night out for the particular Melbourne Theatre Company constituency that it panders to – and it panders very specifically, and very capably. But there’s no hiding that this is a good production of a disappointing, half-thought of a play.

What may be the polar opposite of the God of Carnage brand of theatre, and yet what I believe will similarly not struggle too hard to find an audience, is the much-anticipated second collaboration (after Union House Theatre’s Rageboy in 2006) between camp / crass craftsman Declan Greene and Susie Dee – A Black Joy. We last saw Dee in the fantastic Wretch and Greene has already established a name for himself with his theatre company Sisters Grimm, but this play, using the fortyfivedownstairs space for the Melbourne Fringe Festival, marks an important point of departure for him. While there is no doubt that Sisters Grimm have staged some fantastically glamorous, exploitative, hilariously overblown and cinematically derivative shows, and will continue to do so, A Black Joy, recipient of an R.E. Ross Trust Award, sees Greene moving on his own to stake out territory as an important, and unique, voice in contemporary Australian playwriting. It’s a play that echoes the work of Sisters Grimm in many ways, and also moves in a darker, more poetic, direction.

A Black Joy is a blackly humorous exploration of consumption, celebrity, ambition and desire, fusing high-camp thrills and melodrama with the bite of suburban satire. Plain and overlooked Bette Davis (Carole Patullo) feeds and cleans her morbidly overweight, insatiably hungry boyfriend, John Candy (Tom Considine), whose feet are turning gangrenous and rotten under his huge folds of flesh. Davis’ daughter, Dakota Fanning (Miriam Glaser), a one-time TV celebrity as a result of very-publicised battle with leukaemia and musical theatre fanatic, is seeking the lead role in her school production of Hello Dolly! but instead finds herself falling for Corey Haim (Sisters Grimm co-collaborator Ash Flanders), an insecure neo-Nazi nerd who perversely crank-calls his mother for self-esteem. Things are stranger still at Haim’s home; his mother, Diane Keaton (Anne Browning), a depressed and unstable pill-popping housewife, starts a rigorous training routine to protect herself from the perceived imminent threat of her lesbian cleaner. His father, Joseph Cotton (Chris Bunsworth), eerily obsessed with the plight of minke whales, has a slightly more concerning ethical dilemma in his basement; an unnamed starlet (Megan Twycross) whom he plans on starving, murdering and disposing of in the sea.

If it sounds a little chaotic, the celebrity names a bit confusing and the whole thing a lot disturbing, it is. This is not theatre for the faint-hearted or the easily-offended; indeed, Dee’s production (moodily lit by Katie Sfetkidis and accompanied, live on cello, by Alastair Watts) does not shy away from the gross or gratuitous moments, and nor does it attempt to soften the barbs of Greene’s writing. This is a good thing, as A Black Joy is also incredibly funny and wonderfully constructed; the tone of the piece sits somewhere between vintage John Waters and The Silence of the Lambs on speed. The arcs of these simultaneously revolting and curiously endearing characters, with fantastic performances from Tom Considine, Anne Browning and Carole Patullo in particular, are strongly drawn. And effectively staged in the round, it’s an exhilarating experience as the drama shifts between their stories, and ultimately descends into an unremittingly black spiral of betrayal, torture and murder. Exhilirating, exhausting, unpredictable and utterly worth it; this is impressive, highly theatrical stuff which looks and sounds fantastic, and Dee keeps it all moving at a cracking pace.

With that said, there is a wrestle between the darkness, energy and the humour of the script which can, at times, feel a little unbalanced and awkward – as if the play might not always be certain in which direction it is wanting to go, or what it is that it is wanting to say. An ambiguous storyline about survivors in a plane crash, although assisted by a beautiful video projection design by Nick Verso, is also not as skilfully integrated into the overarching narrative as the other stories.

But these are ultimately minor concerns. The quality of the writing, direction, design and performances make A Black Joy an unsettling, unnerving and still very, very, enjoyable stand-out for the Melbourne Fringe this year. It’s a fabulously taut, twisted nightmare and  a taste of things to come.

God of Carnage runs until October 3, Arts Centre Playhouse, http://www.mtc.com.au/

A Black Joy runs until October 4, fortyfivedownstairs, http://www.fortyfivedownstairs.com

There are many parallels between Wretch and Kane’s, in particular, later work: an intense lyricism, a fluid manipulation of space and time, an experimental use of form, a dark, dry wit. But the strongest similarity is that which Kane is so rarely remembered for – an exploration of humanity and our rawest, darkest desires as human beings. When you unravel its layers and yarns of cheap sex and violence, Wretch is a play about love and how it destroys, rebuilds and reshapes our lives. It is potent, poetic, confrontational, unforgiving and unrelenting. Even if, as it weaves between time and characters, monologues and dialogues, truths and lies, you find that you aren’t always following, you are never given the option to just sit back and watch. Wretch is not simply about understanding a plot and character motivations – indeed, trying to do so might actually be secondary and prove difficult , near impossible in such a non-linear piece. More importantly, I believe, Wretch is about a theatrical experience; one that moves, shakes and affects you and gets to the very heart of theatre itself.

Susie Dee and Angus Cerini, working together to direct the piece from Cerini’s script, play a mother and son during visiting hours at a prison. The mother is suffering cancer, having already had a mastectomy with another pending, while her son is doing time for his part in an assault which left a man paraplegic. The play opens with the two of them sitting in the off-white cell, watching the audience in silence before slowly, chillingly, turning to face each other. From this simple gesture, and in the empty threats and hilariously sick exchanges that follow, we quickly learn that this is not your typical Mother and Son couple of the theatre – this is not going to be an easy journey of reconciliation and rediscovery. Their brief moment of connection is, actually, hardly revisited; the two never cross their half of the stage and never physically interact, as if they were in their own cells, their own worlds rather than the same. And yet despite their hostilities and the spiralling stories which emerge, it becomes apparent that it is the same, complex and disturbing love keeping them separated that is keeping them there at all.

Dee and Cerini perform the dysfunctional dynamic with both vigour and a cool restraint. They never let the dark subject matter reduce them to histrionics, nor their characters’ low socioeconomic standing become a point of condescension; we never laugh at, or write these two off based on where they’ve come from or the way they speak. Conversely, Cerini’s attempt the capture the syntax, starkness and colloquialisms of Australian suburbia comes off as both natural and stylised, enhancing the play’s gritty poetry with a voice so unique to our stages. Dee and Cerini draw our attention to the subtle inflections in tone, the gut-wrenching bellows, the way in which they hold their hands or casually wipe their nose with the sleeve of their tracksuit top – on the small stage even the slightest movements become big for the audience. Both actors, in particular Cerini, have fascinating discipline over their bodies and voices. But perhaps most importantly, they really nail the humour, the derision and the underlying affection, no matter how deeply buried or distorted it may be, between mother and son. Their comfort with, and trust in, each other as actors is apparent and assuring. Despite their positioning in the middle of a bare set, Cerini and Dee fill manage to fill La Mama with tension, intrigue and pure, raw sweat.

And yet I am hesitant to refer to Wretch as a two-hander. Cerini’s script, which was co-winner of the 2007 Patrick White Playwright’s Award, and his performance alongside Dee are completely captivating and immersive. But to call this a two-hander, I feel, would be to downplay and diminish the efforts of the rest of the creative team. This production of Wretch is so memorable because all of the elements have come together to create something genuinely unique. Marg Horwell’s set design of off-white panels, which on closer inspection are dotted with black, effectively encloses the La Mama space and helps exacerbate the claustrophobia of the script, highlighting the closeness and simultaneous distance of the characters. In a brilliant touch, some of the panels are replaced with fluorescent lights which, muted behind sheets of opaque plastic, not only help Richard Vabre create a wealth of subtle backlighting effects but also allude to kitchen / bathroom lights and the domestic roots of the mother and son relationship. The very way in which those lights are concealed further acts as a metaphor for the difficulties, distance and anxieties in their relationship: so little seems to be getting through.

This thread is picked up on by Kelly Ryall, whose sound design perhaps represents some of his best work to date. The soft blips and bleeps that run through Wretch are evocative of transmission sounds; fax machines, dial tones, morse code. And yet despite getting louder, building to moments where the sounds layer and intersect, they still never directly correspond. The tones keep bleeping but they never answer each other; they sit in the air of the space and powerfully counterbalance, and at times mimic, the power of Cerini’s poetry. When, towards the end of the performance, the tones are replaced by eerie bird calls and cries, they act as an unexpected and chilling reflection of the atmosphere onstage. The mood is followed through by Vabre’s exceptional lighting design; a blend of bright states, slivers of light and booming moments of electric, fluorescent flashing (which echoed the taking of photographs in Luke Mullins’ 2007 Autobiography of Red).

Looking back to the parallels with Sarah Kane, I do not think that any influence is just apparent in the textual similarities to her work. Rather, Wretch, like the theatre of Kane and Artaud before her, is an intense and experiential exercise in subverting and reconceptualising what constitutes the theatre event. It is not just about the script or the actors, but the careful arrangement and balancing of the other elements of theatre around them. Wretch is theatre that twists your stomach, your heart and your soul – it is hard to shake off, like a dream you can neither completely remember nor forget. Intelligent, heartbreaking, grotesquely beautiful, Wretch reminds you, when the elements successfully come together, of the force that theatre truly wields.

Wretch runs at La Mama, Carlton until March 8th. Bookings at http://www.lamama.com.au

That is not reason to dislike Michael Kantor’s Woyzeck by any means. It is a very useful demonstration of the musical-hybrid-performance-piece model that the Malthouse has been developing, maybe even perfecting, over the past few years under his artistic directorship. Their offering of a unique, more contemporary, more encompassing approach to dramaturgy has been central to their attempts to draw younger people back to ‘theatre’, to entice them with more than talking heads, easily spotted plot points and text. Really, to make theatre cool. Perhaps this is best illustrated in the casting of perpetual Melbourne rocker Tim Rodgers of You Am I, shaggy locks and sweaty gaunt rockstar sex, in what turns out to be a disappointingly peripheral (albeit heavily promoted and publicised) role. Yelling out to the youth of Melbourne that there’s a new kind of edgy rock-theatre on the street, scored in part by Nick Cave to boot, certainly appears to have succeeded in the case of Woyzeck. The production which I attended on a Wednesday night was close to full, and the majority of attendees looked younger than forty (though I suppose it is debatable how such conclusions are reached – my twentysomething brother dresses with an uncanny resemblance to Joseph McCarthy after all). But the more important question that comes to my mind is – will they come back?

What surprised me most about Woyzeck was how much it surprised me. For a play which I had been told was the darkest of fables, with a heavy, unremitting bleakness at its heart, I was caught entirely off guard by the extravagance and excess of Kantor’s reimagining. I had expected a dark, moody theatrical experience; indeed, the opening tableaux and song, in which the depth of Peter Corrigan’s surreally sculpted set was revealed and the live musicians, accompanying Rogers’ warble, were cast in rich orange, seemed to suggest as much. I was genuinely excited; We Will Rock You this ain’t. And yet, as the play powered on, my expectations coming into the Merlyn and again stirred on by the opening were never quite met; song after song, fragment after fragment, Woyzeck couldn’t seem to quite fulfil, or really engage much, with its promise. I found myself becoming agitated and bored, particularly with what felt to me to be a real lack of sincerity that had, instead, been substituted with an overwhelming self-consciousness. I was surprised, with all the fantastical elements in place, the names attached, the set and the music, with just how hard I was having to work in order to remain remotely connected, let alone stimulated or entertainted, with this Woyzeck.

Georg Büchner’s narrative about a poor young soldier, Woyzeck (Socratis Otto), forced into odd jobs by his Captain and bizarre laboratory experiments by the Doctor in order to support his mistress (Bojana Novakovic) and their illegitimate child, is, on the page, a morbidly poetic exploration of morality, class and consequence. Unfinished at the time of his typhus-related death in 1837, the vivid and fragmentary nature of Büchner’s prose becomes disturbingly apparent as Woyzeck, on a diet of only peas, succumbs to his paranoia and psychotic visions, eventually committing a tragic act. The play, in this adaptation by Gisli Örn Gardasson (having been rewritten and ‘finished’ many times by other authors), ends on a suitably ambiguous, amoral note. Woyzeck is thus the kind of work always ripe for reimagining, with something, potentially, always to say about the context of its performance.

It is hardly a wonder, then, that midnight Gothic stalwarts such as Cave would be attracted to such material; indeed, it is his and Warren Ellis’ songs, performed so tantalisingly by Rogers, that suit the snippets of Woyzeck’s descent so well. To their credit, I should probably disclose at this point that generally, I am not a fan of musicals. I find that the ‘dramatic’ or narrative elements of representation in theatre are often done a disservice, or deliberately covered over, by the use of characters breaking-into-song. It is only in exceptional circumstances where the two are harmonised – where there exists not only strong actor-led music, but strong benefits to the drama for the music to happen. I give kudos to the idea of this Woyzeck - I think that Kantor and the creative team’s concept, and the ambition surrounding it is bold. It does also work in tandem with the play’s substance. But, and this is perhaps where my bias starts to filter in, I was not convinced with the way in which Kantor directed the fragments of dramatic material between the songs, and indeed, sometimes inside the songs. Their realisation, and the way that they have been dramaturged in the context of this interpretation of Woyzeck, is really where the play comes undone. It is where, perhaps, the play loses sight of what it is actually trying to be.

The highly stylised, self-conscious approach of Kantor is an odd juxtaposition for the quite serious and philosophical ground being covered by Woyzeck, and yet at the same time, it is immediately the most obvious choice for him. Complete with oodles of plastic play props, flashing fluorescent lights, skimpy cabaret costumes, Santa suits and vaudevillian antics galore, Kantor has envisaged that the most appropriate way to bring new life to Woyzeck’s journey is to subvert the darkness with a camp, villainous, fairtytale-gone-wrong aesthetic. There is no denying that it looks good – even if this style is becoming a little too synonymous with him, maybe even stale. But the more serious problem is glaring: in this instance, at least, there is a complete triumph of style over substance. The experience of sitting through Woyzeck is, quite like the cruel journey of its protagonist, absurd. Kantor’s solution to the challenges, both thematic and structural, posed by fragments is to present them quickly, with a maximum of exaggerated choreography and spectacle, revealing plenty of previously concealed set pieces along the way. Perhaps the most blatant example of this is when, shortly after a musical interlude, a group of musicians, donned in grotesque masks, suddenly appeared above the set in a rig half resembling an opera box, half resembling a deus ex machina. It is unashamedly, confrontationally, theatrical and referential; but for what real purpose in the piece? More broadly speaking, could this Kantor formula simply be reapplied to whatever dark myth the Malthouse stumbles across next, without adding to, or really engaging with, the actual content of the story?

I couldn’t help being reminded of Richard Foreman’s Now That Communism Is Dead My Life Feels Empty (who strangely enough has directed his own Woyzeck), except even amongst all the crossed symbols and iconography of that very contextual play, I found myself aware of its focus, wit and restraint. In Woyzeck, I was thrown by the excess, excess, excess. I kept thinking that I was meant to be looking somewhere. And what I wanted most from the experience, and what I believe would have served both the music and the story better, would have been an attempt to really grapple with the text and Woyzeck and his mistress’ predicament; to explore it, let it breathe and not layer on top every missile of the Malthouse arsenal. Kantor’s approach alienated and isolated me from the issues at the core of the narrative; indeed, the extravagance and self-consciousness actually worked to trivialise them. While there were a handful of moving moments, such as Woyzeck’s monologue in the pond following the tragedy, they were for me few and far between. That is not to diminish the efforts of the cast, who are by-and-large up for the challenges of this production, nor the musical interludes, but rather the ‘style’ of Woyzeck on the whole. Seldom have I had a more frustrating night in the Merlyn, and I wonder whether the experience may have been more suited to a smaller, cabaret venue, set amongst the sounds of bar staff and a few stiff drinks.

But this is the new Malthouse, and it will be interesting to see how the numbers add up at the end of the run – whether this critically acclaimed, to quite the extent in some instances, experiment in ‘new’ theatre pays off. The real test, I suppose, is the longevity of any success with youth. Whether this is what will keep them coming back, or like anything immediately ‘cool’, it will soon disappear into the backwaters of obscurity as they search for the next hit thing.

Woyzeck runs until Feb 28th, Malthouse Theatre, Southbank. See http://www.malthousetheatre.com.au for tickets and more information.

In my first post on this blog, I said that “you won’t be hearing about projects that I am involved in or how my writing is going…but who’s to say where you draw the line between a personal and a more broadly cultural blog?” Alison Croggon rightly pointed out in the comments below that half the interest in reading a blog is in the personal, and I’m beginning to rethink my position on the issue.

The catalyst for the change has not been sudden and is difficult to pinpoint; while it is true that I feel more inclined and more able to talk about writing and theatre work that I am developing, of equal importance is my feeling that this blog is becoming too narrow, too review centric and probably, too boring. There are other things that I want to be able to say about theatre, both in the context of contemporary Australia and the rest of the world, and some of them extend beyond my analysis as a reviewer and into my roles as writer and director. Some of them are just plainly personal. However, a range of questions emerge from the inclusion of such material in the mix: how does it affect and shape the way people respond to reviews in the light of supposed objectivity? Does anyone really expect objectivity from reviewers anymore, particularly in the internet blogging age? Is it still possible to love / hate a work and not be considered biased? So sit tight while I draw up a new constitution (note: will probably remain metaphorical) and assesses the politics of the personal in theatARGH.

The New Electric Ballroom - written and directed by Enda Walsh, Traverse 1, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh. Ran August 1st – August 25th.

A muted grey backdrop and a set littered with hot pink, bright orange and lime green perfectly compliment the eclectic, imaginative and beautifully poetic words of Walsh in this, his latest play. This fable of love and broken hearts, set in the cellar of the home of three sisters, is an intense, slow-burning dazzle of a dream; a text-heavy theatrical experience that traverses time, space, form and style in a way more akin to Beckett and the Absurdists than any of Walsh’s contemporaries (it possesses much of Beckett’s dark sense of humour, too). But what grounds The New Electric Ballroom as a significant piece of theatre is its refreshing lack of pretension and its roaring soul; text-based theatre at its most passionate, captivating and completely mesmerising. Walsh has received just about every accolade and award possible for this work and deservedly so. Theatre like this just doesn’t happen all that often, and never often enough. Here’s looking forward to an Australian company bringing this play to our shores.

Pornography - directed by Sean Holmes, written by Simon Stephens, Traverse 1, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh. Ran August 1st – August 25th.

Hailed as one of the first to deal with the 7/7 London bombings, this play, or rather collection of monologues and dialogues, is more accurately an exploration of London life in the lead up to the atrocity, coinciding with G8, Live 8 and in the wake of the announcement of the 2012 Olympics. It’s a fantastic pastiche of interconnected lives and ideas on the page, with no designated characters and few stage directions. Stephens indeed states that the text can be manipulated and cut up in whichever way the director sees fit; like a pared back Crimp or Kane, the success is all on the shoulders of the director. Holmes plays it relatively straight, creating a variety of archetypal characters (with one or two eccentric exceptions), lines of cables stretching over a junk-littered stage and into the audience. But he isn’t quite sure what to do with his  actors once he brings them on stage; they seem to spend much of the time standing around doing nothing. Thankfully, there is no attempt made to justify the attacks, with Smith ensuring that the perspective of one of the bombers is centred on detail rather than inclination. Holmes’ decision to intercut between the fragments keeps a consistent, exciting pace which serves the tension well. But I couldn’t help feeling that the production was a little too safe; that perhaps the more interesting realisation of this text, both in its dramaturgy and staging, is yet to come (or may well have been at its debut in Hamburg last year).

And so concludes the series of Edinburgh Bites. Unfortunately, I did not get the opportunity to review and write about as many shows as I would have liked – there were numerous cabaret / burlesque oddities, comedies and theatre pieces that I loved, loathed and couldn’t find the time to upload – but it was an amazing experience to be on the other side of the world and experience the theatre there. I feel more equipped than ever to start taking on the Melbourne scene again.