Review: Triple Bill of Wild Delight, Little Mercy

The oft-asserted wisdom behind the categories “Fringe” and “Mainstream” runs something like this: the mainstream is mainstream because it is more fun, while the fringe is the fringe because it’s so unremittingly serious its arty eyebrows disappear up its own fundament.

As those who read Ms TN with attention will know, she is a mortal enemy to these categories. Because one needs some kind of general handle, I prefer the slightly less unsatisfactory “main stage” and “independent” for distinguishing between companies with large institutional structures and those running on rags and hope, and I certainly never use them as aesthetic predictors or descriptors. Otherwise you fall into absurdities, such as Peter Craven’s and Robin Usher’s claims a few years ago that artists such as Jérôme Bel or Romeo Castellucci – who have played some of the largest venues in Europe – are “anti-mainstream”. Whatever that means.

Anyway, the point is that fun occurs, or doesn’t occur, across the entire spectrum of theatre. (Actually, “fun” is a depressing word, which for me evokes the spectre of cocktails with suggestive names in bleakly desperate nightclubs, or The Footy Show, or a certain scoutmaster I once encountered who had an extraordinary talent for killing any kind of social enjoyment by shouting: “Now everybody listen! We’re all supposed to be having fun here! Will the mums stop chatting and line up so we can wrap them in toilet paper, ok? We’re all having fun! Ok?”)

There’s “pleasure”. Or “delight”. Spontaneous joy. Whatever. It’s a lightness of being that rises involuntarily and lifts us momentarily out of time on a gust of laughter. Like happiness, it can’t be commanded – which is why that scoutmaster got it so wrong, and why it’s so sheerly embarrassing to watch a bad comedian. In such moments of delight, we forget the weight of ourselves. We become bigger than we are, and more innocent; we might gasp at comic savagery, but our souls are never shrivelled by its calling to our meaner selves. So while the Sam Newmans of this world might claim they’re “just having a bit of fun” by saying black people are just like monkeys, they never inspire delight. Sam’s just saying he’s the biggest boot on the block, and his obsequious followers snigger in the bully’s shadow.

True delight is liberation rather than such enslavement. For instance, on Friday I spent five hours at La Mama, at Moira Finucane and Jackie Smith’s Triple Bill of Wild Delight! (It comes with an exclamation mark). On a balmy autumn evening, the moon swinging high over our heads, it was hard to think of anywhere better to be. We arrived to find La Mama’s courtyard decked out as a cantina, with coloured lights and candle-lit tables, serving pre-show sangria and barbecued corn cobs and chorizos, before being ushered into Finucane’s one-woman storytelling fantasia, The Feast of Argentina Gina Catalina. Argentina Gina Catalina is – well, what is she? Her footsteps melt the pavement where she walks; her deadly gaze can freeze the hearts of two thousand pirates; she’s the daughter of wolves and whales and a priestess who can make a cascade of oranges fall out of the sun. She is the embodiment of excess and desire, and she carries the tropes of magical realism beyond parody, into sheer hilarious poetry.

Finucane’s performance is as over-the-top as her gorgeous costumes; she ignites a spectacle of desire that somehow, for all its excess, unwaveringly maintains its own reality. Duende, maybe? The sensuality of the language takes cliche and sets it on fire; even as our credulity is mischievously mocked by more and more outrageously absurd stories, we believe in Argentina Gina Catalina. In between each narrative, we’re fed and watered with various delicious titbits: olives, bread, Spanish cured meats, mussels steamed in boullibaise, chocolate cake, ice cream and tequila (the food is provided by KT Prescott).

After a half hour’s break in the Pleasure Garden, there’s contemporary circus with Azaria Universe, Jesse Love and Derek Ives in Tooth & Nail: a show with trapeze and aerial acts (astounding in La Mama – who would have thought it?) in which the traditional circus tropes – especially the sexy showgirl – are undermined, mocked and also brilliantly realised. We still, after all, want to see deeds of derring do, even if the co-stars are bickering and putting razor-blades in each other’s toffee apples. The final act, in which the naked performers stand before us wearing huge cartoon animal heads, is so blazingly strange that it knocks the performance into some other dimension. Perverse, disturbing and oddly beautiful.

And after that comes Salon de Dance DELUGE, hosted by Maude Davey, which features an all-star cast of performers mainly drawn from Melbourne’s rich dance scene. It features 19 acts, performed inside and outside La Mama; they range from the absurd (two identical Frauleins with blond pigtails performing a bawdy version of the lederhosen slapping dance, or Moira Finucane, dressed as a prim waitress, orgasmically eating a meat pie to AC/DC’s TNT) to the beautiful (Brian Lucas, performing a dance of yearning as he rises operatically from a sea of red fabric) to the macabre (Yumi Umiumare’s weeping, faceless woman dancing in a dark forest, or Finacune’s later adventures with a sauce bottle, as excruciating a performance of sexual loneliness as anything I’ve seen). Or there’s Christopher Green’s recital of Molly Bloom, as you’ve never heard it before, which gives us, as he points out, some “proper acting”. As, indeed, it does.

Everything is directed with unobtrusive slickness: food is served, theatres re-dressed, costumes changed, tomato sauce mopped, with never a glitch in the action. Stage manager Cath Carmody must be working harder than anyone else in Melbourne. She and her staff of enablers, plus the first-class performers, add up to a show that reminds us why life is worth living. It’s wit, poetry, hilarity, nonsense, pleasure, beauty, all rolled into a gloriously subversive, wickedly sexy evening that nourishes both soul and body. You can book each show separately, but I recommend seeing the lot if you possibly can. Long live Finucane and Smith, I say.

The night before, your fearless correspondent was pursuing pleasure at the Collingwood Underground Carpark. Plunging like a dark mouth beneath the tower blocks of Collingwood, it seems at first glance an unlikely venue for seekers of delight: but enter past the forbidding portal, and you are in another world, possibly Berlin circa 1984, where gorgeous denizens of the underworld gather around an incongruously cosy bar, as music blares at a decibel level beyond the range of the human ear.

The occasion here was Sisters Grimm’s production of Little Mercy. At the proper time – or, to be more accurate, a little after the proper time – audience members were led along a path in the darkness marked out, like an airport landing strip, by rows of candles, to a surprisingly intimate theatre scratched together somewhere in the bowels of the carpark.

Little Mercy is an absurdity devised by Declan Greene and Ash Flanders, a fond pisstake of that staple of Hollywood horror movies, the demon child. Roger Summers (Sean-James Murphy) and his wife Virginia (Ash Flanders) are the successful power couple: he is a celebrated musical director, his wife a successful glamour alcoholic. There is only one grief in their life: they have no child. As the play opens, they are rushing off to the premiere of Annie when Virginia (searching for her earrings) discovers a letter from an orphanage mysteriously left beneath a couch. Just as she reads the contents, lightning flashes, thunder rolls and the child itself, Mercy (Susie Dee, in frilly dress and pigtails) appears at their front door.

A carnivorous cuckoo, Mercy settles into the house and begins her murderous career by killing the adored but ancient cat (a stuffed toy which scuttles in and out of the stage on a skateboard) and blinding her tutor (Cara Mitchell) by substituting sulphuric acid for her eye drops. The one difference from the Hollywood version is that, instead of being sent back to the Abyss from whence she came, Mercy wins the day.

It’s acted with the appropriate po-faced melodramatic passion by its cast, with some ingenious stage tricks and multi-media. In some ways, it recalls The Thirty Nine Steps, which the MTC produced in 2008: it has the same light hearted delight in meta-theatrical camp, the same low-tech pleasures. And the production and performances are high quality, with Ash Flanders as the soft-hearted innocent Virginia stealing the night, so by the end I wholly believed his performance. Nonsense, yes, but irresistibly funny nonsense, delivered with brio and flair.

Finucane & Smith’s Triple Bill of Wild Delight: The Feast of Argentina Gina Catalina, Salon de Dance DELUGE and Tooth & Nail. Devised by Moira Finucane and Jackie Smith, with numerous collaborators. La Mama Theatre, until March 28. Check the La Mama website for details of performance times.

Little Mercy, by Ash Flanders and Declan Greene, directed by Declan Greene. Costume design by Alice Swing, lighting design by Katie Sfetkidis, print media design by Andrew Downer. With Ash Flanders, Cara Mitchell, Sean-James Murphy and Susie Dee. Sisters Grimm @ Collingwood Underground Carpark, 48 Harmsworth St, Collingwood, until March 27. Bookings: Sisters Grimm.

Review: Lloyd Beckmann, Beekeeper

Lloyd Beckmann Beekeeper, a particularly personal show devised by Tim Stitz and Kelly Somes, is suffused with an old-fashioned, home-made charm. In the sympathetic environs of La Mama, Stitz summons up his own grandfather and, sometimes in dialogue with himself, unearths some painful family history. And, as the title suggests, the audience learns a lot about bees and beekeeping along the way.

For millennia, bees have been a symbol of fertility and industry. They are a miracle of natural production: they gather pollen and transform it into honey. But this symbol has a sweetness cut with a bitter tang: in Lloyd Beckmann Beekeeper, the old man narrating his story uses the brutal life cycle of the bees, who evict their queen from the hive when she gets too old to be useful, as a metaphor for the inevitability of his own aging and death.

The show begins outside, in La Mama’s newly extended courtyard, as Lloyd Beckmann, in full bee-keeping regalia, enters with his smoke machine and welcomes his visitors. After a short lecture on the habits of bees, larded with some comic gallantry for the ladies, we are invited into the theatre, which is transformed into a simulacra of an old man’s bedsit, complete with family photos, old furniture and pot-plants. Here we are given drinks and nibbles, and a taste of honey, and learn a little about Mr Beckmann.

Gradually, the conceit shifts from our being visitors to Beckmann’s bedsit, to our being witnesses to the relationship between Stitz and his grandfather, with Stitz playing both roles. Stitz’s performance is slightly stylised and heightened, with a touch of music hall. In his grandfather he recreates a recognisable Australian speech-pattern that is now mostly lost, except perhaps in the country. It’s careful to the point of pedantic, and the major curse-word is “flaming”. Beckmann also reanimates a kind of courtesy that is forgotten in our tell-all age. We now assume talking out our troubles is therapeutic, but to another more stoic, and perhaps more proud, generation, any self-dramatising was considered in the worst of taste. Sorrow and pain were private matters, and self-pity was for sissies.

It’s a reticence that can’t but be admirable, but it’s also frustrating for anyone who wishes, like Stitz himself, to push past the boundaries of silence. A major tragedy in Beckmann’s life is the death of his baby grand-daughter in a car accident and the subsequent suicide of his son, who is Stitz’s father; but when Stitz asks what his father was like, all Beckmann can do is offer him some of his old belongings, his boots and clothes.

The show is in fact a complex meditation on memory and the scraps and fragments that ultimately constitute history. It exposes how the act of remembering is not only a reclamation but an act of imagining. Imagination, in the best Proustian tradition, is helped along by sensory triggers: taste and smell matter as much as hearing and sight. The emotional tenor is calibrated by a supple and effective lighting and sound design, which allows Stitz to shift between direct, unadorned performance and a heightened theatricality.

It’s charming for its conceit, which literally invites the audience into the experience (it’s something to see a theatre full of people unselfconsciously craning their necks to look at a family photograph, as if they really were visiting an old relative). But its achievement is in its tact, which leaves the unanswerable questions unanswered.

Lloyd Beckmann, Beekeeper, devised by Tim Stitz and Kelly Somes, directed by Kelly Somes, performed by Tim Stitz. Lighting design by Bronwyn Pringle, composition and sound design by Li Stringer, sound design and realisation by Neddwellyn Jones, aroma design by Jodie Ahrens. La Mama Theatre, closed.

Review: The Drowsy Chaperone/Acts of Deceit

It’s Australia Day today. As our national day of celebration, it acts as a post for all sorts of flags. Once, in more innocent times – or at least, in the days when White Australia was a harmless nationalistic masthead that merely signified cutting off the pigtails of Chinese goldminers – it meant the Land of the Long Weekend was nearing the end of its summer hols. The Australian Worker returned to his factory in the worker’s paradise, there to cock his snook in a suitably larrikin fashion at the Boss, while stealing his copper piping.

Then our Indigenous people were given the vote, and we found that a sizeable slice of the Australian population thought that Captain Arthur Phillip’s arrival at Botany Bay marked a day of calamity. In response to this and other kinds of thoughtfulness, Australia Day has become an occasion for bashing Indian students, dubious dress-sense and general boganoogery, which itself prompts a wave of horror from the anti-thug brigade in the national press.

I’m not sure that Australia is more racist than it has been. A certain zombie element is certainly expressing its racism in worse taste and with more confidence, and – seizing the commercial opportunity – supermarkets, insurance salesmen and furniture barns are cashing in on the patriotic ka-ching. Luckily, that’s not all of Australia. It’s certainly not the Australia I know. As a proud, card-carrying “arts extremist” and, well, ordinary urban citizen, I can testify to the tolerance, intelligence, ingenuity, passionate thoughtfulness and, yes, decency (George Orwell valued decency highly, and so do I) of the Australia I inhabit.

Phew. Just had to get that off my chest. Now from the editorial to the reviews: which will, I fear, be brief. Today is somewhat crowded. and I am working against other deadlines at present which limit my time.

The splashy opening of last week was, of course, the Melbourne Theatre Company’s production of the Broadway hit The Drowsy Chaperone. If anything expresses Australian colonialism, it’s a willingness to take the cultural lead from the traditional Anglo centres of culture, Britain and the US; in theatre’s case, Broadway and the West End. However, the paradox of colonialism – as cricket and soccer demonstrate so well – is that the damn colonials end up doing the mother country’s culture better than the mother country itself: and Simon Phillips’s production here is a case in point.

The Drowsy Chaperone might usher in a subtext of nostalgia for the days when we – meaning white, middle class audiences – could comfortably laugh at wops and dagoes with funny accents. And it unashamedly claims that theatre is about entertainment and escapism, and nothing else. (It’s actually the “nothing else” clause that I object to – I know very few extremist arts elitists who aren’t up for popcorn). But its ironic self-commentary means that it has its cake and eats it too.

Disliking The Drowsy Chaperone would be like disliking kittens: pointless and somehow inhuman. This is a preposterous cocktail of a show, delivered with just enough lemon to cut against the syrup, and Phillips has given it a superb production. It plays homage to the golden age of musicals, when life was grand (if you were rich enough): it evokes 1920s Broadway, when Dorothy Parker was sharpening her pen at the Algonquin Round Table, Gershwin and Cole Porter were shaping the tunes and the Great White Way was paved with rhinestones and sequins.

What makes it more than merely an exercise in nostalgia is its simple but ingenious framing. When the lights go down at the start, they stay down: we sit in the anxious darkness that precedes every show, and Geoffrey Rush’s voice, refracted through a New York accent, floats across the auditorium. “I hate theatre,” he says. “Well, it’s so disappointing, isn’t it?” And he tells us the prayer he delivers before every show: that it will be fun, that it will be short, that the actors will strictly observe the fourth wall and stay out of the audience, and that it will deliver an escape from the mundane travails of ordinary life.

The light lifts on a small, unimpressive apartment to reveal Rush, whose character doesn’t even have a name – he is simply the Man in the Chair. He is a musical theatre geek – for him, Elton John is a decadent shadow of Gershwin, and Cameron Mackintosh’s spectaculars are an unspeakable vulgarity. The Man has the blues, or at least an ill-defined anxiety he calls the blues, and to combat his melancholy, he proposes to share one of his favourite albums – a 1928 cast recording of a chestnut called The Drowsy Chaperone. He fussily puts it on the turntable and the overture begins.

And suddenly the blinds lift on his windows to reveal a real band playing outside. The walls ascend to reveal another, more glamorous world, the characters enter one by one, and the musical comes to life in his apartment. The musical itself is a ludicrous parody, performed by an outstanding cast with a brio that lifts it beyond its undistinguished score. It’s wittily annotated throughout by the lugubrious Man in the Chair, with occasional unwelcome interruptions from the “real” life he wishes so desperately to escape.

As well as theatrical stars like Rush, Richard Piper and Robyn Nevin (whose technical control is, in case we’ve forgotten, superb), Phillips has cast from experienced music theatre stagers, with a lineup that includes Adam Murphy, Shane Jacobsen, Rhonda Burchmore. And it’s the cast – which has depth as well as breadth – that makes this show. Choroegrapher Andrew Hallsworth has put together some ripping dance routines – I’d forgotten, for example, how sheerly pleasurable it can be to watch a great tap duet. It all generates pure comic showbiz, with a sparkle heightened by Dale Ferguson’s ingenious set and spectacular costumes. A sure-fire crowd pleaser.

At the other end of the scale is Gary Abraham’s Acts of Deceit (Between Strangers in a Room). At La Mama’s Courthouse Theatre as part of the Midsumma Festival, this shows Melbourne’s indie scene at its considerable best. It’s loosely based on James Baldwin’s second novel, Giovanni’s Room, which explored the alienation of a young, gay American man in 1950s Paris, his inability to reconcile his homosexuality with his ideals of manhood, and the catastrophic consequences. It is, in fact, the kind of thing that in lesser hands could be teeth-achingly pretentious. When delivered with the skill and passion you get here, what occurs is gut-wrenching, compelling theatre.

David (Jay Bowen) is waiting in Paris for his would-be fiancee Hella (Joanne Trentini), who is travelling Spain as she decides whether to marry him. While she’s away, he meets a young West African barman, Ku-Jean (Terry Yeboah), and begins a passionate affair. His deceptions of his lover, his fiancee, his gay friend Jacques (Dion Mills) and a young woman whom he sexually exploits (Zoe Ellerton-Ashley) begins, of course, with his self-deception.

The major change in Abrahams’ sensitive adaptation of Baldwin’s novel is to transform the race of David’s lover from Italian to West African. It’s appropriate: as a black, gay man, Baldwin was himself one of the most insightful commentators on race relations in post-war literature; it also introduces a subtext about illegal immigrants that gives the text a contemporary spin. Also impressive is how the text wears its intelligence lightly, echoing Baldwin’s literary sophistication without weighing down the play’s dramatic force.

Perhaps what I most admired about this show – besides the passionate and, above all, accurate performances, which are truly extraordinary – is the delicacy and honesty with which the production explores a complex emotional and moral situation, eschewing judgment for insight. The design team – lighting, sound and set – use simple strokes to effectively evoke the glamorous squalor of jazz-era Paris. But don’t take my word for it. Go see it for yourself.

Picture: The Australia I adore: Melbourne cafes.

Shorter versions of these reviews appear in the Australian.

The Drowsy Chaperone, music and lyrics by Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison, book by Bob Martin and Don McKellar, directed by Simon Phillips. Melbourne Theatre Company. Playhouse Theatre, Victorian Arts Centre. January 21. Until February 27. Tickets: $115. Bookings: 1300 723 038.

Acts of Deceit (Between Strangers in a Room), directed and written by Gary Abrahams, from a novel by James Baldwin. Sets and costumes by Kat Chan, lighting design by Katie Sfetkidis, sound design by Jim Westlake, music composition by Lachlan Tan and Geoff Chan. With Jay Bowen, Terry Yeboah, Dion Mills and Zoe Ellerton-Ashley. Dirty Theatre and La Mama Theatre, 2010 Midsumma Festival. Courthouse Theatre. January 22. Until February 7. Bookings: (03) 9347 6142. Tickets: $25.

Fringe: Attract/Repel, The Ridiculusmus Readings

Attract/Repel is an intriguing work of theatre at the Store Room which meets, head-on, the question of racism. One of the best things about it is how it does so without fuss or apology, yet instead of visiting the expected arguments of victimisation or entitlement it manages – delicately and with humour – to excavate something of the complexities of human social relationships, to explore the fluidity of the categories of “us” and “them”.

A devised work directed by Ming-Zhu Hii, and generated in collaboration with the performers (Jing-Xuan Chan, Fanny Hanusin, Georgina Naidu and Terry Yeboah), Attract/Repel it has a pleasing transparency about its motives and aesthetic which focuses on the particularities of experience to illuminate general truths, rather than the other way around. The most important aspect of this approach is that contradiction is embraced rather than glossed.

As it begins, the four cast members enter the space one by one, each carrying a suitcase. Each is regarded with suspicion by those already occupying the territory of the stage, until they find their own space. It’s an elegant introduction, and is almost a theatrical illustration of an image used by the poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger. In an essay on migration, he describes how one passenger in a train carriage will immediately occupy it. When another enters, he is regarded with mistrust, even veiled hostility; but once he has settled in, he too occupies the carriage. When a third passenger enters, both will regard the new occupant with the same mistrust, until she too has settled in. Enzensberger uses this metaphor to describe the tensions between successive waves of immigrants, pointing out that migration has been the essential history of human beings for millennia. Difference always generates hostility until it is absorbed into the fabric of a society, at which point it becomes part of the “us” that makes a “them”.

Once all four performers are on stage, they introduce themselves by asking each other their full names. Because they are from different cultures – Chinese/Australian, Chinese/Indonesian, Indian/Celtic, Ghanaian – they each have names that immediately signal their differences: none has a standard western christian and surname, although their names have all been “translated” into western formats. They ask each other how many languages they speak (an average of about three each, as I recall). They ask each other to say “I love you” in their native language. Georgina’s native language is English.

And so begins an intriguing exploration of the mechanics of making human beings “other”. The achievement of Attract/Repel is that it at once enters the realm of personal experience and frames it in a series of wider questions: what is racism? Who is racist? Is racism only a question for white privilege? How, in a supposedly multicultural society, does it actually function? What does it feel like to encounter racism? And through these apparently simple questions, which immediately subvert themselves in ways that are comic, unexpected and moving, a picture emerges of something that is not simple at all: a social texture that is full of ambiguity and contradiction, and which is reinforced by the most apparently trivial of gestures as much as by its coarser manifestations.

Ming-Zhu Hii has learned a lot from Jérôme Bel, notably from the apparently straightforward simplicity of his approach in Pichet Klunchun and Myself. However, she has framed this work in a sculptural installation of neon lights designed by Damien McLean, originally inspired by a Dan Flavin installation. This framing makes it more self-consciously theatrical and less joyously transparent than Bel’s work, but has its own attractions. The cast use chalk to write on blackboard walls, giving the work a pedagogical frame that is undermined by the playfulness of the performance. There is some stylised movement which doesn’t always throw off the smell of studio improvisation, but on the whole the conceit is startlingly successful. The stern simplicity of the work liberates a sense of play, which in turn releases a very human complexity that evades the traps of earnestness or simple moralising.

What makes this work is ultimately the generosity and skill of the performers; they slip with grace and subtlety between raw expressiveness and artifice, keeping both qualities constantly in play. We are never quite permitted to forget that this is a performance, that these performers are playing characters, even if those characters are themselves. At the same time they bring to this consciously theatrical construction a disturbing ability to generate authentically naked emotion. It’s intelligent and deeply felt theatre, alert to all its possible pitfalls and evading most of them. Ming-Zhu Hii and her collaborators have created a work that seems to be all light surfaces but which resonates in some deep places.

The Ridiculusmus Readings were, as the name suggests, a series of play-readings of works in progress by Ridiculusmus, the British comic duo, David Woods and Jon Haynes, who brought us an unforgettable The Importance of Being Earnest a few years ago. Over four nights, they read differing combinations of three plays, one of which involved a volunteer cast of around 50 people.

I’m not quite sure how to describe the reading I saw, which included the play with the cast of 50 (a hyper-theatrical and possibly awful play about Princess Diana called Goodbye Princess). For one thing, in the tiny La Mama space, the cast outnumbered the actual audience, although maybe it’s truer to say that in many ways the cast and the audience were the same. Which made it a peculiarly immersive experience.

Both plays were reflections on contemporary Britain. Total Football is a two-hander about a PR campaign to jazz up enthusiasm for British Identity by finding golden moments in British public history (including Winston Churchill’s declaration of war on Germany and a winning goal by David Beckham). It was a sly and hilarious pisstake on nationalism as a brand, performed with faultless comic timing by Haynes and Woods. Goodbye Princess was read by practically everyone. I guess it had the same concerns as the first play, with added metatheatrics and idiot royals. But what made it totally enjoyable was being in the middle of this anarchic communal reading, complete with misreadings, missing characters and lots of coarse acting. Totally irresistible fun.

Picture: Attract/Repel at the Store Room Theatre.

Attract/Repel, conceived and directed by Ming-Zhu Hii. Lighting design and dinstallation by Damien MacLean, with Rachel Burke, music by Yusuke Akai. With Jing -Xuan Chan, Fanny Hanusin, Georgina Naidu and Terry Yeboah. The Melbourne Town Players @ The Store Room, Melbourne Fringe Festival, until October 10.

Ridiculusmus Readings by David Woods and John Haynes. La Mama Theatre, Melbourne Fringe Festival. Closed.

Review: Happy Days, Care Instructions

Over the past few days. Ms TN and the man to whom she’s a spectacularly Bad Wife (although, of course, a deeply empathic partner and awesome literary colleague) have been discussing whether to revisit Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, which both of us saw on opening night at the Malthouse. It ended up being a peculiarly Kierkegaardian dialogue.

“I think,” said my beloved, “that I’d prefer to stay home. It was such a brilliant experience, it gave me so much, that I would only be trying to repeat it. And I’d prefer to treasure the experience I already have, rather than to overlay it with another memory.” “On the other hand,” said I, “I’m dying to see how Julie Forsyth’s performance has evolved since opening night. It won’t be the same experience, sure. But it would certainly deepen the memory.” “Yes…” said the Man, a true Forsyth fan and so sorely tempted. “Lemme think about it.”

The upshot of this kitchen table philosophising is that I’m going again, shepherding my eager offspring who are, encouragingly, all Beckett fans. And the man of the house, observing the dictum that you can’t enter the same river twice, is staying home in the unusual quiet, perhaps trying to write his own play, or washing up the dinner dishes, or waiting impatiently for the next stage of Le Tour de France. And so peace reigns among the Croggon/Keenes.

Domestic voyeurism aside (which is not, after all, entirely inappropriate for this play) the point is that this is an unusual conversation. My crowded diary means I very seldom think about seeing a show more than once, no matter how much I enjoyed it. Michael Kantor’s production of Happy Days is, however, a work of theatre that rewards on every level: emotionally, intellectually, sensually, spiritually. It’s up there with The War of the Roses as one of my peak theatrical experiences this year, leaving me with that boundless elation that is the true rush of the theatre addict. As I said in my review for The Australian, employing my best reviewerese, it’s “a great performance of a great play by two of our great actors”.

It’s difficult to do justice to elation, which might be why I’ve been shilly-shallying so much in writing about it for the blog. Another reason is that I wrote about Beckett a couple of months ago, when I saw André Bastian’s season of short plays at La Mama, and I hate repeating myself. Much of what I wrote about the short plays applies to Happy Days: Beckett’s uncompromising truthfulness, his stern theatricality, his strong relationship to visual art, his profound tenderness and compassion. But maybe what leaps most vividly out of this production of Happy Days, even more than his vaudevillean comic gift, is Beckett’s attention to beauty.

Beauty is not a word often associated with our Sam. He’s considered to be, well, hard work: worthy but glum, the province of humourless intellectuals who enjoy having the meaninglessness of life jammed down their throats. Yet, as even the briefest survey of his work attests, he paid a great deal of attention to the beauty of form. His work has never been especially biddable to those ideals which claim beauty as a conventionalising template of perception, a kind of anodyne fodder for the cultural consumer that anaesthetises the contradictory pains of living; but it’s beautiful all the same.

Perhaps it’s worth divagating for a moment to consider what beauty might be. As Ezra Pound said poignantly in the Pisan Cantos, “Beauty is difficult”. The German composer Helmut Lachenmann has written compellingly on this question, in an essay called The ‘beautiful’ in music today (published in an early print edition of Masthead). Noting that the idea of beauty was “downright suspect” among the avant garde of the mid-20th century, he goes on to suggest that beauty has a profound moral dimension which artists ignore at their peril. As he says:

Today the call for beauty is more suspect than ever – whether the concept is a pluralism embracing all conceivable types of hedonism, or else a reactionary hangover after false hopes and promises, or just academicism of whatever sort. Its proponents betray themselves over and over again as they cry out for ‘nature’, for tonality, for something positive, ‘constructive’, for ‘comprehensibility at last’… It is high time for the concept of beauty to be rescued from the speculations of corrupt spirits, and the cheap pretensions of avant-garde hedonists, sonority-chefs, exotic-meditationists and nostalgia-merchants. The mission of art lies neither in fleeing from, nor in flirting with, the contraditions which mould the consciousness of our society, but in coming to grips with them and dialectically mastering them…

Yet we still try to cultivate the hope that the human genus is capable of acting rightly, which presupposes that it is capable of recognising its own structure, and that of reality. We still believe in a human potential. Beauty is what we call that feeling of happiness which in art, as a human message, is released by the communication of some sort of belief. And yet such belief, even in its most illusion-free variants – such as in Beckett’s art – is not contained in a philosophical or intellectually encoded message, but in the experience, communicated by sensory perception, of people who succeed in expressing themselves … knowing full well that the artist has not something to say, but something to create.

It’s a good description of the kind of beauty Beckett creates. In Kantor’s production of Happy Days sensory pleasure is foregrounded, paradoxically focusing Beckett’s uncompromising attention to an illusion-free reality. Kantor’s gift for theatrical excess is squeezed to a diamond focus by Beckett’s unforgiving strictness, making the best of both of them. All the production elements – Anna Cordingley’s spectacularly curtained set, Russell Goldsmith’s bold sound design and Paul Jackson’s lighting design – frame and amplify the performances, driving the experience home to the heart, where it most truly belongs.

The core is, of course, performance and text. Winnie is one of Beckett’s most poignant characters: trapped in a mound of earth under a pitiless sun, her days shaped by the tyranny of an alarm bell, Winnie (Julie Forsyth) passes the time by chattering to her mostly invisible and mostly silent husband, Willie (Peter Carroll). With bright, unquenchable, but doomed courage, she finds consolation for the unbearable – encroaching death, soul-corroding loneliness – in the most trivial aspects of daily routine. And each discovery is greeted with rapture. “That is what I find so wonderful,” she tells Willie. “Not a day goes by without some blessing.”

Winnie’s courage is in her lack of self-deception: she knows there is no hope, and that her life has no meaning beyond its immediate actions. But she persists anyway. So familiar is Beckett’s language, so intimately real in all its theatrical absurdity, that Winnie gets under your skin. She is all of us, a soul trapped in the material decay of the body, longing to be loved, yearning towards the “holy light”. Yet Happy Days is not only a shatteringly moving picture of loneliness endured. It’s startlingly contemporary in its picture of humankind trapped in exhausted nature, a world in which the sun beats down so harshly that Winnie’s umbrella catches fire. Like any great writer, Beckett made faceted metaphors which attract new meanings in every era, and climate change gives Happy Days a grimly apt relevance.

Forsyth – ironic, funny, despairing, heart-rendingly brave – finds every nuance in the fragile rhythms of Beckett’s prose, creating a performance of limpid clarity. I still remember Forsyth in the Anthill production of Happy Days 20 years ago, and there are resonances of that performance here, refined and focused and deepened. I’m convinced that this is one of the great performances of the role.

Importantly, Kantor paid serious attention to casting Willie, which is, superficially at least, an unrewarding role: he’s barely seen on stage, and when he is visible is mainly seen with his back to the audience. And yet, for all that, Willie is crucial to the play, as Winnie’s (mostly) absent interlocutor. Peter Carroll is an inspired choice: he crawls around the set like a broken clown, and even when not visible he is palpably present. He almost steals the show with just seven lines.

And yes, I’m looking forward intensely to seeing it again tonight.

In some graceful programming, the Malthouse is simultaneously presenting Care Instructions in the Tower Theatre. An Aphids show directed by Margaret Cameron, it demonstrates how Beckett’s tradition is still a living theatrical force. This show enchanted me at its premiere at La Mama’s Courthouse Theatre last year, and it’s no less enjoyable to revisit.

This production is sharper, its theatrical gestures heightened and thrown into relief. Care Instructions is basically a fairytale about washing. Its central theme – if one can speak about themes in a work like this – is the bad fairy in Sleeping Beauty who curses the young princess, and the show itself is a process of exorcism, a lifting of the curse. Cynthia Troup’s allusive, fluid language makes this not so much a play as a spell.

Margaret Cameron’s direction unites the Joycean fluidity of Troup’s script with a Beckettian aesthetic: the three women appear in white mob caps and linen laundry bags against a black background. But the design also recalls the unsettlingly erotic sculptures of Louise Bourgeois. It’s a reminder that an important strand of modernism, the great artistic movement of the early 20th century, was a liberating assault on the stereotypes of gender. James Joyce’s famous Molly Bloom monologue at the end of Ulysses has, for example, been cited as an exemplary feminine text.

Just as important was the influence of brilliant women artists, not only giants such as Virginia Woolf or Gertrude Stein, but equally interesting if less well-known talents such as Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes or H.D. Troup’s text, drawing on these traditions, is scored as accurately as music, and demands a similar kind of listening. Using myth, song, nursery rhyme, poetry and the washing instructions on labels of clothes, Care Instructions explores the archetypal figure of the godmother.

Personified by the laundresses Jane Bayly, Liz Jones and Caroline Lee, she is an ambiguous figure: slyly wicked, anarchic and disobedient, she’s also a guardian and an agent of liberation. At the core of the performance is a delight in the small pleasures of sensual life: the smell of clean washing, the feel of wind and sunlight. The opening monologue by Jones, projected on to the front of a clothes dryer, is perhaps a few beats too long, slightly imbalancing the performance. But this show evades mere whimsy, generating an irresistibly playful charm.

Earlier versions of these reviews were published in The Australian.

Happy Days by Samuel Beckett, directed by Michael Kantor. Set And costume design by Anna Cordingley, lighting design by Paul Jackson, sound by Russell Goldsmith. With Peter Carroll and Julie Forsyth. Malthouse @ the Merlyn Theatre, CUB Malthouse until July 25.

Care Instructions by Cynthia Troup, directed by Margaret Cameron. Music by David Young, lighting by Danny Pettingill. With Jane Bayly, Liz Jones and Caroline Lee. Aphids and Malthouse Theatre @ the Tower Theatre until July 26.

Review: Aviary

Aviary at La Mama is an elegant showcase for three young writers: Anna Barnes, Dan Giovannoni and Ming-Zhu Hii. It stems from an intriguing premise, which in its way is exemplary: director Melanie Beddie commissioned these short works using Darryl Cordell’s striking design as the creative stimulus. This immediately throws the focus onto the space, demanding that the writers think in three dimensions.

And the design does open a lot of possibility. La Mama has been transformed – the famous staircase is hidden by a wall, and the kitchen area is covered by another staircase, which leads up to a flat upper level surmounted by a television. The set is dominated by a Beckett-esque tree, with space beneath the stairs that can be used in different ways, as concealment or as extra rooms.

Unsurprisingly, it’s prompted very different responses – although they loosely revolve around common themes about intimate moments and relationships (and, as the title suggests, images of birds), these works demonstrate a variety of approaches to writing and theatrical aesthetics. Performed by three actors, Chloe Gordon, HaiHa Le and Carl-Nilsson Polias (I’m beginning to see a pattern here), the whole evening has a nicely disciplined sense of formal shape. However, the writing itself is a bit of a mixed bag.

It opens promisingly with Anna Barnes’ Revelation or Bust, which is the most interesting writing of the evening. This is a poetic piece voiced by three characters which pulls on contemporary apocalyptic terrors, both religious millennial fantasies and more concrete anxieties about climate change. Barnes brings the vocabulary of the MySpace generation to bear on ancient fears about the end of the world, crafting a work which shifts elliptically, like neurotic subterranean thoughts, around personal and universal death.

The central obsessions are two events which took place last summer: the deadly Victorian bushfires, and the terrible incident where a man threw his four-year-old daughter to her death off the West Gate Bridge. I have to register my discomfort with the second: although the metaphor is gracefully used and not in the least offensive, I found myself worrying yet again about the ethics of so directly exploiting real human suffering for the purposes of art.

Despite this reservation, the writing marries a very contemporary diction, the notion of evolution and Blakean images of flight and freedom to pull off what is a rather beautiful work. This play is light without being slight, and demonstrates Barnes’s sure control of her chosen form. As her ideas deepen and extend, as I am sure they will, she be a writer to watch.

Edmund and Grace by Don Giovannoni and Ming-Zhu Hii’s Small Movements for Three Actors are not so successful, although they are equally ambitious. Giovannoni’s play is about two brothers (played without attention to gender by Carl Nilsson-Polias and Chloe Gordon). They narrate a dark fairytale while playing Pinteresque games of power, one scrambling over the other for dominance and each stealing the other’s identity, as a shadowy older man lurks sinisterly in the background. The gender-play here is potentially interesting: the weaker brother is always the one with the feminine name. But not much is really made of this idea.

The primary problem with this script, aside from a great deal of repetition that adds little to its complexity but a lot to its running time, is that it doesn’t make much emotional sense. For a surreal narration like this to catch attention, the movements of feeling beneath the words must be mercilessly clear: here the action seems to emerge randomly, with the sense that the characters are illustrating some kind of thesis rather than emerging from any real emotional place. Despite the heroic efforts of the actors, Edmund and Grace end up being confusingly obscure rather than, say, mysteriously compelling.

Small Movements for Three Actors is basically baffling. A series of fragmentary dialogues between a couple, there is a Beckettian touch in the third performer who sits on top of the staircase echoing parts of the dialogue and at various times swapping roles with the other performers. The performance has touches that end up feeling superfluous – actors running from one end of the set to the other and slamming into walls, the television images of vegetation – simply because you can’t work out why they are there. A monologue by Nilsson-Polias about caring for a parent with dementia begins to generate some dramatic interest, but this then dissolves back into the flux, leaving the impression that another play has wandered in by mistake.

I’m assuming this text is meant to make us attend to each moment, with little eddies of emotional clarity emerging from the Heraclitan chaos of living; but if that is the intention, it calls for a paradoxically steely discipline in the writing that is lacking here. The play feels like a collection of half-thought ideas randomly jumbled together, and never seems to quite decide what it wants to be. Perhaps it’s simply that writing like this is in fact very difficult to pull off, and – as with free verse as opposed to rhyme – its successful execution requires a command of the traditional techniques.

For all that, I was impressed with the production and the performances. Melanie Beddie’s direction is inventive and clean, and gives these texts a lively attention, employing an attractive lighting design by Bronwyn Pringle and a various, evocative soundscape by Natasha Anderson. It’s certainly gorgeous to look at.

Aviary: New Writing for the Near Future, directed by Melanie Beddie. By Anna Barnes, Dan Giovannoni and Ming-Zhu Hii. Design by Darryl Cordell, lighting design by Bronwyn Pringle and music by Natasha Anderson. With Chloe Gordon, HaiHa Le and Carl Nilsson-Polias. La Mama Theatre until August 2.

Review: Oh the Humanity, A Commercial Farce

Feeling, real feeling, is the hardest thing to recreate in art. Too crudely represented, and it is coarsened to sentimentality, a victim of the limited vocabularies we have for emotional nuances and extremes; too refined, and we miss the point altogether, in a maze of cerebrations that elide its visceral genesis. The phenomenon of feeling encompasses everything that makes human beings such contradictory creatures: feeling is our consciousness of emotion, a heightened and subtle state of being that, on the other hand, is driven by a little almond-shaped piece of porridge, the amygdala, which is lodged in the primitive reptilian part of our brain.

Language is one of our primary ways of expressing feeling, but it is also one of the best ways of repressing it. This is, of course, why poetry was invented. Poetry is the art of creating fractures in language through which feeling can emerge. Language – especially official, legislative or bureaucratic language but also, less obviously, the social codes through which we organise our most mundane social interactions – orders our realities in recognisable chunks, which at their crudest become clichés that determine our responses. Poetry attempts to smash the cliché in order to release the feeling beneath it.

In this sense, Will Eno is certainly a poet of the stage. Eno is one of the most interesting writers to emerge in the US in the past few years. He is best known for his theatrical monologue Thom Paine (Based on Nothing), which premiered here in an elegant production starring Neil Pigot at the MTC a couple of years ago. Oh the Humanity (and other exclamations), which has just closed after its Australian premiere at La Mama, is a series of attacks on language that attempts precisely to discover the feeling beneath the shells of words, the hidden universe of the self that aches for expression.

Oh the Humanity is a recent play that consists of five short, unrelated playlets that in different ways directly address the audience. In each piece, Eno sets up a recognisable situation and then collides public speech with interior musing. There’s the football coach at a press conference explaining his team’s failure (“The phrase, of course, you are familiar with. It was a ‘building year,’ this last year was. We suffered some losses…”) There’s the two people recording a self-advertisement for an online dating service, and the airline PR woman who is speaking to grief-stricken relatives after an air tragedy.

In these three works, the expected is invaded by the unexpected, as inappropriate privacies are made public. The coach suddnely reveals his inability to love and the crises of his life. “I found myself standing in the unforgivable light of a grocery store, staring at my reflection in a freezer, and realising: ‘You’re not having a bad day — this is just what you look like, now. This is who the years are making you’.” (Shades here of the American poet Randall Jarrell – “if just living can do this to you/ living is terrible”).

The two lonely hearts describe themselves in unlikely ways and reveal fragile fantasies of connection, almost visions, in which they are simply recognised or heard. The PR woman attempts to speak about her own grief in a context in which it is simply unacceptable to do so, revealing the lies she tells herself about death to comfort herself. But spoken to a roomful of devastated families, these understandable self-deceptions become monstrous. They open out as an anaesthetisation against reality, a fantasy of empathy which reveals itself as a kind of callousness.

The final two pieces intensify the ambiguities Eno has set in play. The Bully Composition features two photographers recreating a historical photograph from the Spanish-American War (with the audience as models), in which the desire to recapture the reality of a past trauma becomes frankly predatory, a kind of ghastly pursuit of authenticity that betrays the emptiness of those who seek it. But even this is fractured by a brief, vivid vision of the reality behind the photograph, a flash of imaginative insight. And the final piece, Oh the Humanity, is a dialogue about mortality between a couple, apparently on the way to some event (either a funeral or a christening) in a car. Here Eno smashes the pretence of theatre. Their car – represented by two chairs – won’t start. Pier Carthew, playing the husband, carefully mimes opening a door and stepping out of a car. He circles behind it, staring hard. What’s wrong? demands his wife (Emma Officer). “It’s just two chairs,” he says.

The constant slippages of meaning and register that characterise Eno’s writing make these pieces a difficult ask, and neither Eno’s writing nor the production escape the odd moment of easy sentiment. That is, of course, the risk of so directly asserting the place of feeling, although it must be said that the script is intelligent enough to avoid bathos. Director Laurence Strangio gives the production an appropriately minimal theatrical frame, with the actors changing and setting up new scenes in full view of the audience, but the suppleness of Eno’s linguistic shifts are sometimes dealt with a little crudely: for example, when the football coach segues into a poem, it’s signalled with lighting and sound changes that paradoxically made it less effectively strange. Carthew and Officer give focused performances that nicely articulate the script’s ironies and delicacies, although I felt there was more to exploit.

When Dion Mills made an appearance at the end as “the beauty of things, the majesty of — I don’t know — the world? The universe?”, his sure actorly presence gave that brief role just enough ironic spin to get away with the audacious metaphysical abstraction of his role. He generated the poetic suspension between belief and disbelief, irony and sincerity, that the other actors couldn’t quite attain. But it’s a near miss. I liked this show a lot.

As a writer, Peter Houghton could do with some of Eno’s dramaturgical poetic. He is by no means an elegant playwright, and his new show, A Commercial Farce, has a lot of visible joins and is still a little over-written. But these quibbles are erased by the sheer bravura of its execution and by Houghton’s gift for devastatingly witty one-liners. This sets out to be a very funny show, and it is. Like Eno, Houghton is interested in cliché, but his treatment is more violent: he simply pumps it up until it explodes.

Houghton is a fine actor – he recently played James Joyce in the STC’s glittering production of Travesties, and last year gave us a memorable Hamm in a brilliant Melbourne Festival production of Endgame, produced by Eleventh Hour. He specialises in a particular kind of backstage comedy that he performs himself. Collaborating with his wife, Anne Browning, he’s written and produced a trilogy of monologues, beginning with the hit show The Pitch, a perilously funny satire of the film industry, and culminating in The Colours, which opens this August as part of the MTC’s new Lawler Studio season.

In A Commercial Farce, directed at the Malthouse by Aidan Fennessy, Houghton turns his laser wit onto commercial theatre. It’s as much homage as satire: Houghton has his cake and eats it too. It’s funny for all the reasons that Alan Ayckbourn or Michael Frayn are funny, with added meta-text. It takes all the hoariest jokes of farce – symbolised by the banana-skin and the nose-flattening rake, both awaiting the unwitting foot – and delivers them up crooked. Some of the best jokes involve Ben Grant’s sound design, and Anna Cordingley’s ingenious double-level set is basically a comic booby-trap.

The set-up, as with all farce, is simple, with the necessary spice of panic. Middle-aged director Bill (Houghton) has poured all his money into a production of a farce by popular playwright Dylan Crackbourn, which opens the following night. It’s Bill’s 20th wedding anniversary, it’s nearing midnight, and he’s fighting with his aggrieved wife on his mobile. Instead of popping the champers with Bianca, he’s having one last desperate rehearsal with Jules (Luke Ryan), a television star with no experience of the technical demands of comedy.

Jules is a Generation Y opportunist with an undertow of violence whose every second exclamation is “awesome!” And he simply doesn’t see why he has to slip on the banana-skin or step on the rake. What, he wants to know, is the theme of the play? As he gulps down the sponsor’s wine, Bill despairingly explains the mechanics of farce and its relationship to the tragic absurdity of living. And this in turn lifts the stakes higher: having exposed the bones of comedy, how do you subvert the form enough to make it, well, funny?

The answer lies in two bravura performances that mercilessly expose the close relationship between farce and tragedy. Both performers bring a luminous physical ebulliance to their roles and invest what could be empty stereotype with unexpected flourishes that flesh out their complexities. Ryan is a brilliant fool, but it becomes clear that this youthful scion of Howard’s Australia is not nearly as stupid as he looks. Houghton’s performance brings a genuine pathos to his role: he plays resigned hangdog with a painful verisimilitude, generating the anxiety that gives this comedy teeth. As Bill’s mid-life crisis takes florid flight, it demonstrates the unpalatable truth that nothing is as funny as another person’s pain.

Pictures: (Top) Emma Officer in Oh The Humanity. Photo: Daisy Noyes. (Bottom) Peter Houghton (above) and Luke Ryan in A Commercial Farce. Photo: Jeff Busby

Oh, the Humanity (and other exclamations) by Will Eno, directed by Laurence Strangio. Sound design and composition by Neddwellyn Jones, lighting by Gwendolyna Holmberg-Gilchrist, designed by Laurence Strangio and cast. Performed by Pier Carthew and Emma Officer. La Mama @ the Courthouse Theatre, closed.

A Commercial Farce by Peter Houghton, directed by Aidan Fennessy. Set and costume design by Anna Cordingley, sound design by Ben Grant, lighting by Matt Scott. With Peter Houghton and Luke Ryann. Malthouse Theatre @ the Beckett Theatre, CUB Malthouse, until June 27.

Review: Beckett’s Shorts

Beckett Shorts: Breath, Not I, That Time, Rockaby, A Piece of Monologue, by Samuel Beckett, directed by André Bastian, designed by Peter Mumford, lighting by Stelios Karagiannis, with Uschi Felix and Dion Mills. La Mama @ the Courthouse, until April 25.

folly –
folly for to –
for to –
what is the word –
folly from this –
all this –
folly from all this –
given –
folly given all this –
seeing –
folly seeing all this –
this –
what is the word –
this this –
this this here –

What is the Word, Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett is such a monument that some people don’t even bother looking. The name itself is a mantra, and will do to represent an idea of art – and particularly theatre – that is, well, terribly important and everything but really (as Joanna Murray-Smith claimed in her play Ninety last year) only the province of pretentious undergraduates. That craggy, beautiful face, so beloved of photographers, peers out through the moss of reverence, ascetic, stern, sceptical, strangely neutral, neither judging nor apologetic, a forbidding icon of modernism swept under the bright, ephemeral trash of our neurotic, apocalyptic culture.

My feeling is that is if you’re uninterested in Beckett, you’re uninterested in art. And yet of all artists, he is surely the least compulsory: no one took more responsibility for his writing – poems, prose, criticism, plays – while making the least claims for it. “I produce an object,” he said of his plays. “What people make of it is not my concern.” He might have agreed with the poet Paul Celan, who said that his work was “a message in a bottle, sent out in the – not always greatly hopeful – belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps”. Beckett’s uncompromising, strangely tender bleakness has the kind of truthfulness which makes him, of all playwrights, the least biddable to the commercial vulgarities of theatre.

Two decades after his death, he remains a radical challenge. His longer plays – Endgame, Waiting for Godot, Krapp’s Last Tape, Happy Days – are regularly produced, but the core of his thinking about theatre occurs in his shorter plays, which are very seldom performed. To which end, anyone interested in doing more than squinting at Ubuweb videos of Billie Whitelaw or who is feeling restless with the patchily brilliant DVD of Beckett on Film should book themselves into La Mama’s Courthouse Theatre this instant, where André Bastian’s production of five of his short plays elegantly realises his stern genius.

It’s a demanding evening in many ways: 90 minutes of Beckett is like four hours of anyone else. None of these plays, aside from the 30-second Breath, is designed to be part of a long evening and were mostly first performed on their own: Not I at the Royal Court in 1973, That Time (with Footfalls) again at the Royal Court in 1976, Rockaby at the Centre for Theatre Research in Buffalo, New York in 1981 and A Piece of Monologue at La Mama New York in 1979. But it’s well worth the spiritual exhaustion to witness these soul sculptures, these fragments of being that dwell in the outer limits of mundane human pain, the anguish of the present. They are, in the most complex and unforgiving sense, beautiful works of theatre.

In 2006, I saw the exhibition Samuel Beckett: A Passion for Painting at the National Gallery in Dublin. It was revelatory. I already knew, from reading his essays on Jack B Yeats and others, that Beckett is an inimitable and deeply literate critic of visual art; what I hadn’t realised was how profoundly it infused his practice in theatre. The exhibition displayed the paintings Beckett saw as a young man, when, as he said, he “haunted” the gallery, along with works he owned and fragments of letters and other writings which demonstrated his deep knowledge and love of visual art. Billie Whitelaw’s striking pose in Footfalls, for instance, with her splayed hands crossed over her chest, is taken directly from a mediaeval painting, The Assumption of St Mary Magdalene, by Don Silvestro dei Ghererducci.

It seems obvious once realised. The short plays exist somewhere between installation and poetry, their strict aesthetic bringing the meditative rhythms of visual art into performance. Not I focuses a light on the mouth of the speaker, with another figure standing to the side, mysteriously cowled and dimly lit, generating a disturbing sculpting of dislocated human form, the “she” of the monologue traumatically displaced from her own body. Rockaby and That Time are both recorded voices, the performers motionless listeners, the minimalist power of their gestures amplified by their stillness. In A Piece of Monologue, the white-haired figure stands front stage, illuminated by a single light that throws his face into cadaverous relief, like an ancient statue or a figure from a Noh play. These serial alienations focus us insistently, even painfully, on the present: the present of performance as much as the fictional present of Beckett’s characters (or, perhaps more accurately, souls).

Beckett’s figures emerge from darkness, melancholy, afraid, resigned, alone. Always alone. In these plays the dead speak from their long silence, the beauty or torment or desperate mundanity of their lives unutterably absent, vanished into an unreclaimable and fragmented past, attenuated by the fragility of human memory. What remains is an unendurable now, a neurotic, unable circling of trauma, as in Not I, or unbearable memory, as in That Time, recognitions of existential solitude in which the self is all there is, unredeemed and unconsolable. And yet in this recognition is an implacable tenderness: I’ve always thought Beckett the most compassionate of playwrights. There is a true compassion in recognising the worst; it is a relief, in a world where the worst is all around us but is never admitted.

Bastian has framed these plays with admirable intelligence. The evening opens with Breath, written for Kenneth Tynan’s revue O Calcutta!, a 30-second, actorless theatrical sculpture, which acts as a kind of entree. And there is a little sally at the notorious restrictions of the Beckett Estate: the instructions that come with the permissions are projected onto the stage. Peter Mumford’s set is brilliant in its simplicity: it consists of several lengths of black cloth (on which further text – footnotes, titles – is projected) that are suspended from the ceiling. They act as scrims, becoming invisible where needed, providing a subtle, barely discernible barrier between performer and audience. Each play is introduced by the two actors, Uschi Felix and Dion Mills, who read out the production details and stage directions, and the show is punctuated also by deftly chosen readings of Beckett’s poem What is the Word. As the actors read Beckett’s detailed directions, they gather the necessary costumes and wigs and props, so the plays are literally constructed before our eyes. And then the lighting (a completely beautiful design by Stelios Karagiannis) shifts and the play begins. And suddenly we see why these instructions are so precise. Genius is, as Gertrude Stein said, an infinite capacity for taking pains.

But the key to this production is the performances. To be perfectly honest, I don’t know how these two actors achieve what they do: Beckett’s pieces might be short, but that doesn’t mean that they are small. Performing just one would be a mighty challenge: each actor performs two each. The works balance, in that each has one recorded monologue and one spoken. They perform with disciplined restraint, so that the smallest movement, the slightest gesture, becomes weighted with significance. Uschi Felix’s performance of Not I, her mouth becoming a strange, alien animal floating in the blackness of the stage, is simply extraordinary. And I’ll not forget Dion Mills performing A Piece of Monologue, straining under the dim light, clutching his white nightgown, his white hair streaming down from the light, the words emerging from his body as from a threshold of darkness, a cry from the edge of existence.

You have to see these pieces in the theatre to understand that they are nothing but theatre: theatre cut back to its most essential elements, the body in space, the breath, the word, light and darkness, inescapable transience. I was glad I was there.

Pictures: Top: Uschi Felix in Rockaby; Dion Mills in A Piece of Monologue. Photo: Jodie Hutchinson

La Mama is also presenting Waiting for Godot at La Mama, directed by Laurence Strangio, which is on until May 3.

Review: Wretch

A prison is a place where people are watched, and know that they are watched. In these spaces, behaviour shapes itself beneath the pressure of the assumed gaze. Human action becomes, in a disturbing sense, pure performance. As the Abu Ghraib photos brought home brutally by implicating all who looked on them in the act of torture, there can be an uncomfortable element of sadism in the act of looking.

It’s an irony of history that the man who first theorised total surveillance, the Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, was an influential progressive. The panopticon – the institution in which an inmate is watched all the time – has become the symbol of the repressive surveillance state; and yet Bentham opposed slavery, campaigned for the decriminalisation of homosexuality and advocated rights for women. For all his humanitarian views, the chilly intellection in the idea of the panopticon makes mere brutalisation seem almost friendly.

Plays set in prison enact this discomforting element in the relationship between actor and audience. They derive their unsettling power from a meta-theatrical consciousness of the parallels between theatre and prison, heightening the awareness of the mutual confinement of the watchers and the watched, and dramatising the predatory gaze of the audience. This is true of plays as formally various as Athol Fugard’s The Island, Jean Genet’s Deathwatch or Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade. And Angus Cerini’s Wretch is yet another.

Wretch is, in many ways, a wholly uncomfortable experience. Marg Howell’s confronting design transforms La Mama, almost placing the audience inside the white box of the set. The friendly stairs are hidden completely, which radically changes the nature of the space: all that is visible is a floor and overarching ceiling of institutional white tiles, illuminated harshly by fluorescent lights.

The two performers are already seated on stage when the audience enters. When we sit down, we know we are as visible to the actors on the stage as they are to us, and their exposure is a reflection of our own: we cannot conceal from ourselves that our watching is active. As witnesses, guards, silent bystanders, we are implicated in this act of theatre and, by extension, in its social meaning.

The fictional conceit of the script – the co-winner of the 2007 Patrick White Playwrights’ Award – is that it is visiting hour in prison, where a mother (Susie Dee, who co-directs this piece with Cerini) is visiting her criminal son (Angus Cerini). At first, as the banal conversation unfolds into an argument about cigarettes, Wretch appears to be a naturalistic piece enacted in real time, but this soon shifts into another, much more heightened register. Cerini’s densely poetic text attacks language at its most brutalised and grotesque, and wrings out of it a starkly lyric beauty. The play itself sculpts experience into a single, unbearable present, where the past erupts in sudden psychotic shifts, beautifully signalled by Kelly Ryall’s sound design and Richard Vabre’s lighting.

The young criminal in Wretch bears striking similarities to the 15-year-old boy in Cerini’s extraordinary 2007 show, Detest. Although they clearly ring fictional variations on each other, they are not the same man: the story in common with both is that of a young man who beats to death the killer and rapist of an old woman. Here the abjection of Cerini’s brutalised character is, if possible, even more exposed: but this time it’s seen in relationship to his mother, a former street prostitute who is suffering from breast cancer. She has had one mastectomy, and is facing another; but we know as well as she does that she is dying.

Possibly only Susie Dee – whom I last saw on stage 15 years ago – could match Cerini’s style of extreme grotesquerie, which marries outrageous, even Hogarthian, caricature to a pitiable yet complex humanity. Slouched on stage, their bodies somehow deformed and twisted under the lights, Dee and Cerini are two tragic clowns, creatures whose abjection is so extreme, so humiliating, that our witnessing is painful. And yet they are stubborn, they make us laugh, and there are telling moments when the slyness of their understanding, their subversive humour, slide in and slash away any possibility of patronising pity.

This doomed pair confront each other, accuse each other, hate each other, humiliate each other. They reveal their brutalising histories, and we understand that both of them have always, from the moment of their births, been imprisoned: by lack, by cultural deprivation, by the inability to articulate their desires.

We know there is no redemption for either of them, just as there is no escape from our gaze. And yet, just as clearly, we see how much they love each other. There is no moral to this story (for which, more than anything, I thank Cerini); just the fact of their love, in the midst of so much ugliness. And the difficult act of looking.

Wretch by Angus Cerini, directed and performed by Angus Cerini and Susie Dee. Design by Marg Horwell, sound design Kelly Ryall, lighting design by Richard Vabre. La Mama Theatre until March 8. Bookings: 9347 6142.

Review: Care Instructions, I Like This

Care Instructions by Cynthia Troup, directed by Margaret Cameron. Music by David Young, lighting design by Danny Pettingall. With Jane Bayly, Liz Jones and Caroline Lee. La Mama @ The Courthouse until November 29.

I Like This, choreographed and directed by Antony Hamilton and Byron Perry. Lighting and sound by Antony Hamilton and Byron Perry. Costumes by Paula Levis. With Antony Hamilton, Stephanie Lake, Alisdair Macindoe, Byron Perry and Lee Serle. Chunky Move – The Next Move, Chunky Move Studio, until November 29.

O, my back, my back, my bach! I’d want to go to Aches-les-Pains. Pingpong! There’s the Belle for Sexaloitez! And Concepta de Send-us-pray! Pang! Wring out the clothes! Wring in the dew! Godavari, vert the showers! And grant thaya grace! Aman. Will we spread them here now? Ay, we will. Flip ! Spread on your bank and I’ll spread mine on mine. Flep! It’s what I’m doing. Spread ! It’s churning chill. Der went is rising. I’ll lay a few stones on the hostel sheets. A man and his bride embraced between them. Else I’d have sprinkled and folded them only. And I’ll tie my butcher’s apron here. It’s suety yet. The strollers will pass it by. Six shifts, ten kerchiefs, nine to hold to the fire and this for the code, the convent napkins, twelve, one baby’s shawl. Good mother Jossiph knows, she said. Whose head? Mutter snores? Deataceas! Wharnow are alle her childer, say? In kingdome gone or power to come or gloria be to them farther? Allalivial, allalluvial!

Finnegan’s Wake, James Joyce

Sometimes it’s assumed that the sheer pleasure of playfulness indicates a concomitant lack of seriousness. This makes me think of a Chinese ink drawing I saw many years ago at the old Melbourne Museum, a portrait of an enormously fat Buddhist monk reclining idly on the ground. I have seldom seen such knowingness so economically expressed in a few brushstrokes. He was looking out with an expression of profound, unmalicious mischief, his face luminous with some deep, mysterious joy: he seemed to hold within him a bubbling fountain of laughter on the verge of erupting. I know just about everything, the monk seemed to be saying. But, in the face of eternity, human knowledge is a huge joke. So pass me the rice wine and the dumplings…

At the other end of the scale – or maybe not – is the seriousness of children at play. For children, play is crucial means of discovering their worlds, of beginning to grapple with the things that baffle or frighten or fascinate them. The truthful aspect of the oft-cited (and pejorative) description of artists as “childish” is that artists have never stopped playing. Why, after all, are plays called plays? And this playfulness is particularly clear in these two pieces of theatre, one a dance, one a beautiful realisation of a poetic text.

It was impossible not to think of James Joyce’s richly playful Finnegan’s Wake – in particular, the famous passage on the washerwomen by the River Liffey – when watching Cynthia Troup’s fantasia on washing, Care Instructions. While Troup can’t hope to match Joyce’s encyclopaedic wordplay and linguistic inventiveness (well, who can?) she draws similarly on a deep well of myth, rafting her melodious language with allusions from fairytales, nursery rhymes, poetry, the Bible, Greek myth, washing instructions from the labels of clothes, and any number of other sources.

In Margaret Cameron’s hands (and with her marvellous trio of performers) it becomes an enchanting evening of theatre. I use the term advisedly. Some kind of magic is going on in this incantatory language: a summoning of the sensual pleasures of clean sheets and crisp linens, the smell of washing in sunlight; a joyous celebration of the labour that invisibly cleanses the human world. Like all magic, it’s double-edged: cleanliness implies filth and disease. And magic of any kind pulls on darkness as well as light, just as the self is a dense, amoral weave of good and bad, the selfish and altruistic.

Care Instructions is irresistibly Beckettian, not only in how the performers are constrained by being in big laundry bags, but also in how it resembles a painting or installation. It opens with a filmed monologue, performed by Liz Jones in a mob cap, projected onto the circular window of a dryer (whose drone accompanies much of the play, sending out the scent of warm, dry laundry). As she speaks, the linen bags that litter the set begin to move, like strange larvae, until at last they give birth to three women (Jones, Caroline Lee and Jane Bayly). What follows is a meld of nursery rhyme, story, song, dance (and, of course, washing instructions).

It could be merely whimsical or even kitsch, but manages to avoid both. I can’t think of a better way to disperse the clouds of a bleak Melbourne evening than to spend some time with these three witches – or graces, as they also are.

Unless, of course, you wander down to Chunky Move to see I Like This, the collaboration between young choreographers Byron Perry and Antony Hamilton. Anyone who has watched these dancers in action will be familiar with their physical wit, and here is an opportunity to see how dancers can make brilliant clowns. I Like This is, appropriately enough, an almost preternaturally likeable show.

The conceit is simple: we are watching a work being assembled as it is performed. Hamilton and Perry crouch for most of the time centre-stage, fiddling with a sound system and surrounded by a wild tangle of wires, the evil geniuses orchestrating the action. Stephanie Lake is – initially at least – a kind of tv-show host, rather like the role played by Brian Lipson in Two-Faced Bastard (with which this show bears some affinities).

All lighting and sound is lo-tech and controlled by the performers. Much of the visual wit emerges from hand-held lights that the performers switch on and off in the total darkness of the Chunky Move studio, revealing brief glimpses of vignettes or comic poses that invite any number of narratives from the audience. It’s performed to a collage of music that ranges from early blues to Phillip Glass, with side references to zombie movies or Star Wars. It’s unashamedly self-referential – this is a dance that is all about itself – yet its teeming imaginativeness ensures that it’s continually surprising. It is as if the choregraphers have sketched out a couple of formal conceits and then squeezed out every possibility and combination.

What drives the show is the play between the choreographers’ control and the way the dance continually seems to escape them. And what makes it work is the dancers’ split-second precision and physical humour. Often it is laugh-out-loud funny, but this doesn’t erase the possibility of some beautiful moments – a lone dancer with a light wandering into the darkness until she becomes a star wandering through the firmament, or the two choreographers crouched beneath a doona cover that transforms into a cloud at the centre of an electrical storm, before they emerge, like two naughty boys playing at bedtime, to argue about how best to end the show.

Picture: Jane Bayly, Liz Jones and Caroline Lee in Care Instructions.