Behind The Critical Curtain

Everynight, Everynight; All I Will Ever Be: Review

Cameron Woodhead — Mon, 14 May 2012 06:53:12 +0000

Our independent theatre scene continues apace. Apologies to those whose shows I have not had time to attend, or have attended but have not yet reviewed. Can’t do everything. Here are two productions I have seen and written about: they’re both worth checking out.

Everynight Everynight, by Ray Mooney, Frank Theatre Company, Gasworks Arts Park, Until May 27.

Poster for Ray Mooney's Everynight, Everynight at Gasworks

I’m not sure why, or what it says about us, but realistic Australian drama based on criminality and masculine violence tends to draw out our best male acting.

My pick this year – Josh McConville’s terrifying portrayal of a murderer in Gordon Graham’s The Boys, at Sydney’s Griffin Theatre – was a tour de force we can only hope comes to Melbourne. Bravura performances also distinguish this revival of Ray Mooney’s Everynight Everynight.

Mooney’s grim interrogation of institutionalised brutality in Pentridge Prison’s H Division is based loosely on the early life of infamous hit-man Christopher Dale Flannery. It’s gruelling and repulsive viewing: a gang of prison wardens or ‘screws’ (Adrian Mulraney, Paul Ireland, Tony Rickards) attempts to break new inmates through humiliation. Appalling scenes of rape, bashing, and ritual psychological and verbal abuse accumulate.

Prisoners are locked in to a cycle of degrading treatment, partly by their own code of silence, which demands no one snitches to the authorities, not even on screws. Driven to desperate measures, the Flannery-figure (Damian Hill) “resigns from the human race” and leads a prison revolt. The code of silence is broken; a Royal Commission ensues. The play leaves us with the grotesque disparity between the official account and the reality of life in jail.

It’s a very strong ensemble performance with little to fault. Highlights include Hill’s perfectly observed descent from cunning boy to uncontrollable, violent monster, and Steve Bastoni’s superficially attractive but profoundly menacing career crim.

Matthew Adey’s ghostly lighting and the echo chamber of Robert Jordan’s sound design create a desolating and impersonal atmosphere. Stuart Grant’s direction ensures first-rate performances, but needs to address the technical limitations of the space: some action is pitched too low for comfortable sightlines, for instance.

It remains a must-see for true crime fans – an intense, compelling production that forces us to confront a world most people ignore.

All That I Will Ever Be, By Allan Ball, Fly-on-the-Wall Theatre, Chapel Off Chapel, Until May 20.

Allan Ball is better known for his screenplays – American Beauty, Six Feet Under, True Blood – but he began his career as a playwright. Fly-on-the-Wall has tracked down All That I Will Ever Be, a play stippled by Ball’s swift wit, and a shot in the arm to anyone who thinks – not without reason – that America can’t portray gay men without resorting to sentimentality or stereotype.

Omar (Francisco Lopez) is an outsider: Arab-American, comfortably bisexual, a hustler. He’s many things to many people, but lingers over one client – Dwight (Christian Heath), a young, rich boy scarred by loss. But do Dwight’s privileged eyes see Omar for who he really is, and will their romance survive Omar’s rootlessness and endless lies, the very things that allow him to work as prostitute?

Ball’s provocative humour and sharp, complex characterisation are matched by an empathic imagination and a willingness to embrace diversity. How refreshing it is to find a play that reflects the cultural melting-pot of contemporary America without tokenism or well-intentioned artifice. How novel to witness gay relationships as fraught, hard-won things, driven as much by emotion as sex.

A large, talented cast, stylish production values, and Robert Chuter’s swift and assured direction make this an unusually accomplished offering. Lopez’s Omar possesses a rehearsed masculine aura, with flashes of vulnerability shining through cracks in his armour of affectlessness and resentment; Heath’s turn as a damaged rich kid running from privilege and pain proves an intricately tuned counterpoint.

The sole female actor, Sarah Roberts, has two brilliant cameos (as a Valley Girl fag-hag, and Omar’s deluded and ambitious girlfriend) that ring true to the last gesture, with Phil Roberts’ ageing gay man a sensitive and serene presence.

All I Will Ever Be blends outrageous humour and intimate drama. Under all the laughs and raunch and tortured romance though, it’s a penetrating satire of identity politics and unconscious bias, and a thoughtful search for emotional truth in an age slathered with oh-so-hip irony.

Miracle Man: Review

Cameron Woodhead — Fri, 11 May 2012 04:43:21 +0000

Miracle Man, Devised by Pier Carthew and Nicola Gunn, La Mama 205 Faraday St Carlton, Until May 13.

Indian gurus loom large in 60s counterculture, and continue to attract significant followings worldwide. In Miracle Man, Pier Carthew mines his own experience growing up in a family devoted to Sri Sathya Sai Baba – a guru who claimed to be God’s avatar, founded three ashrams in India, and dedicated himself to philanthropic and humanitarian projects.

When he died in 2011, Sai Baba left a staggering material legacy: opulent hospitals and sports grounds, sanitation works and universities. Less edifying details emerged, too – rumours of sexual improprieties, allegations of fraudulent miracles; an obscene amount of cash was found at his residence, as well as hundreds of bottles of hairspray, used to tame his wild afro at official engagements.

Miracle Man is luminous, buoyant comedy that, although it does satirise everything from corruption in India to the gullibility of the faithful, never ridicules the desire for spiritual meaning.

Trailed by a curious outsider (Nicola Gunn), Carthew plays Derek, a devotee who travels from his Melbourne suburb to Sai Baba’s ashram in search of enlightenment. The piece becomes a vehicle for Carthew’s versatile clowning and impersonation skills. Characters flit in and out: Indian construction workers, the Hard Rock Café founder, a German wanderer who claims Sai Baba saved his life, the guru himself.

Perhaps the show could use a cleaner arc, sharper character switches, and pose its undecidable questions more dramatically. Still, the framing device works wonders. Gunn is such a po-faced, agnostic foil to Carthew’s antics you’re inclined to forgive his occasional slips.

It’s playful, enjoyable comedy that deflates, but does not write off, the pleasures and pains (and sometimes the sheer weirdness) of charismatic religion.

The Seizure: Review

Cameron Woodhead — Thu, 10 May 2012 03:03:59 +0000

The Hayloft Project launched Simon Stone’s career, and it remains a leading independent theatre company. Its latest, much anticipated production looks to Sophocles’ Philoctetes, the story of a wounded archer, abandoned on a deserted island, who must be rescued against his will so the Trojan War can end. The show is spare and classical and hauntingly designed, the performances limpid, the script intriguing, but there was something curiously amiss on opening night: its dramatic intelligence didn’t have the power, restraint and clarity so evident in the design and performances. It’s still a must-see show if you care about independent theatre in Melbourne: Hayloft is one of the bar-setters in a flourishing scene, and they place it high.

The Seizure, written and directed by Benedict Hardie, The Hayloft Project, Studio 246, 246A Sydney Rd Brunswick, until May 19.

Naomi Rukavina and Brian Lipson in The Seizure. Photo: Lachlan Woods

Philoctetes is less renowned than other heroes of the Trojan War. He spent the lion’s share of the conflict marooned on a deserted island. He might have wielded Hercules’ bow and poisoned arrows, but during the voyage out suffered a wound to his foot that wouldn’t heal. It festered, causing horrific pain and crippling seizures. The stench was vile. So Odysseus abandoned him.

Ten years later, Odysseus is forced to return. An augury has predicted that until Philoctetes and his immortal bow enter the fray the war will not end. Knowing that Philoctetes hates him and all Greeks for the suffering he has endured, Odysseus sends Achilles’ child Neoptolemus to convince the wounded archer. It is an impossible task. Philoctetes’ pain has come to define him. He will not go, not to end a war, nor for a chance of being healed.

The story has attracted dramatists from Sophocles to Andre Gide, and the Hayloft Project’s austere adaptation is well worth seeing despite niggles in script and performance.

Zoe Rouse’s design, a bare stage shadowed by abstract charcoal on white paper, and Alister Mew’s eerie minimalist soundscape evoke a sense of timelessness and isolation. Benedict Hardie’s direction is poised and spare.

Naomi Rukavina – a standout in a recent all-female Romeo and Juliet – proves again what a brilliant actor she is. Her Neoptolemus binds the drama through a chiselled and deliberate performance, embodying a stern idealism that flickers with boyish brashness.

Given this, I’m not sure why Brian Lipson’s Odysseus is so steeped in ironic clowning. The slippery hero is supposed to be a villain here, true, but not a pantomime one, surely. Giving him lines like: “Stubborn thing!” is unduly facetious. It makes him sound like a theatre luvvy.

Chistopher Brown’s Philoctetes combines intense physical theatre and deflationary humour; and in the most inventive addition, HaiHa Le portrays a wounded crow, keeper of prophecy and observer of human weakness.

Hardie’s adaptation is least successful when it reaches for understated modern idiom, a la Simon Stone’s work, and at its best when it achieves a distilled poetry. It’s talented, but lacks dramatic clarity. Sophocles envisaged Philoctetes as a man so abject – so addicted to his own suffering – he required the semi-divine intervention of Hercules to break it. The original deus ex machina, usually regarded as a dramatic flaw, serves a precise human purpose and I wish it had been retained. Real addicts know what a Herculean feat it is to stop the cycle of humiliation they’re trapped inside; The Seizure would be stronger if it captured that moment.

Australia Day, Hamletmachine, Dialogue with Bunuel, Chernobyl, with Sundry Thoughts on Words in the Theatre

Cameron Woodhead — Thu, 03 May 2012 12:59:34 +0000

And this week at the theatre … I walked out of the latest MTC show, Jonathan Biggins’ Australia Day, at interval. Our national day is politically and culturally contentious, and probably always will be, but Biggins’ coarse populist satire about a rural town council preparing for it left me cold. Rare moments of sharp wit struck like lightning – only to illuminate swathes of low-hanging caricature, thunderous simplification, and the diaphanous grey mediocrity of unimaginative dialogue. Of the performances, only Alison Whyte as an ambitious greenie, and Valerie Bader’s turn as indomitable head of the Country Women’s Association, held my attention. It wasn’t enough to lure me back. Still, this is NOT a review, and I do take into account my punishing last month of Comedy Festival reviewing, which has left me rather demanding of laughland. For another view from someone who saw the entire show, my colleague Elly Varrenti’s glowing review for The Age is here. Chris Boyd’s equally sickening approbation in The Australian may be found here.

Meanwhile, on the independent scene, I went to Revolt Melbourne twice last week, first to see Broken Mirror perform Heiner Muller’s Hamletmachine, viewed through the prism of domestic violence, and later to a one-off evening hosted by Eagle’s Nest Theatre, in collaboration with German company Theatre in der Westentasche. They assayed an obscure snippet from Federico Garcia Lorca in Spanish and English, as well as a German play from Annette Neulist. Thoughts below.

Hamletmachine, Adapted from Heiner Muller, Broken Mirror, Revolt Melbourne, 12 Elizabeth St Kensington, Until May 12.

A still from Hamletmachine. Photo: Sarah Walker.

Heiner Muller is the most significant German dramatist of the 20th century after Brecht, his Hamletmachine a dense, incantatory, post-modern engagement with Shakespeare.

Muller ruptures traditional conceptions of character and narrative. The piece is composed through a series of oblique monologues open to a wide variety of interpretations; the role of performance in determining its length, emphasis and style is much greater than in a traditional play.

The formal beauty of Muller’s language belies the ugliness he seeks to admit. The relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia echoes with the recent past – totalitarianism and global capitalism, the machinery of war, the scourge of domestic violence.

The last frames Broken Mirror’s powerful and richly articulated, hour-long version. Director Douglas Montgomery employs an ensemble of three male and three female actors. It is wreathed in multimedia, brutal choreography and physical theatre, choric delivery and histrionic display.

Muller’s already broken text is spliced again with voice-overs of domestic abuse stories. Such bald representation seems at first glance inimical to the drama, but is cunningly used to shape the mise-en-scene.

A rare tale from a male victim of domestic violence inspires the sight of three Hamlets tortured into women’s clothing. In one meta-theatrical intrusion, Ophelia’s powerlessness is channelled through three female actors at an audition, being tormented by male directors hidden in the audience.

It’s a rigorous and imaginatively realised ensemble performance, seething with sexual menace, gender reinforcement and subversion. Quibbles persist. There are occasional moments of overacting, and the domestic violence stats flashed up at the end are superfluous: the meaning behind those facts, their essence, has already been shown.

Dialogue with Bunuel, by Federico Garcia Lorca; Chernobyl, by Annette Neulist, Eagles Nest Theatre and Theatre in der Westentasche, Revolt Melbourne, April 29.

I went to this avant-garde collaboration between Eagle’s Nest Theatre and German company Theater in der Westentasche for one reason. They were performing a rare work of Lorca’s, in English and Spanish, without surtitles. As avid theatregoers will know, Marion Potts will be directing Blood Wedding in a few months. She is planning, so far as I know, to use precisely this gambit.

Dedicated followers of arts news will also be aware that my friend, the critic Peter Craven, had an implicit shot across Potts’s bow in his recent opinion piece for The Age. Understanding the language, Craven maintains, is integral to the theatre. By all means have performances in languages other than English, but if you don’t have English surtitles, you’ll be ripping the audience off. As an audience member: “You may depart with a very vivid sense of the kind of theatre you are watching – but if you want to know and feel what’s going on you need the words”.

I couldn’t disagree more.

Take the second piece in this Australian-German joint venture, Annette Neulist’s Chernobyl. The play inspired in me the same appal I sometimes get listening to operas sung in English translation: I wished, with mounting fervour as the show dragged on, that I could not understand the words. Whatever stark poetry might have been there in the original German did not survive the voyage.

A stylised dialogue between three figures – Man, Nature and The Sorceror’s Apprentice – it takes the Chernobyl disaster and weaves a repetitive elegy, backed by photographs from the ruined city of Pripyat, now being reconquered by elemental forces.

Leaving aside Phil Zachariah’s unhinged overacting, and the fact that it was more a rehearsed reading than anything else, the lack of rhythm and linguistic dexterity in Rachel Croucher’s translation made me want to scream. The central mantra, chanted with infuriating regularity throughout, is: “Don’t walk on the moss”. Had it been said it German, or Russian, or some other language I don’t know, there’s a chance it would have possessed the sinister, sorcerous effect it was intended to have. Certainly, the strongest part of the performance, an introductory song in … was it Russian? … attained an ineffable sense of grief, grief as a form of drudgery, that seems to permeate, say, boat songs from the Volga, and other Slavic folk music of that kind.

As for the Lorca, why Shakespeare speeches were thrown in with convulsive physical theatre I have no idea, but they sat in strange company. Dialogue with Bunuel was clothed in an accumulation of non-verbal performance: furious dancing and weird ululations breaking, at length, into beautifully spoken Spanish, of which perhaps the only words I understood were “Bunuel” and “poesia”. That the dialogue was repeated in English, or parts of it were, did not diminish the dark power, the voluptuousness and mystery, of Lorca’s poetry recited in his native tongue.

In fact, mystery is crucial to feeling and knowing in the theatre, and in no playwright more than Lorca, whose own fate remains shrouded in it to this day. Lorca’s influential essay ‘Theory and Play of the Duende’, proposed as much. He argued it was duende – itself an untranslatable word referring, among other things, to the sprites of death and the earth – that provoked the deep, almost spiritual response to certain forms of art. “All that has dark sound has duende”, he wrote, “that mysterious power everyone feels but no philosopher can explain.”

To Lorca, art was a struggle with mortality, performance a sort of magic. But you do not have to believe in magic, not really, to agree with him.

Curiously enough, I read Patrick White’s Voss this week. There’s a crucial scene where Voss, the German explorer of the title, reads a poem in German to a roomful of people who do not speak it. Here is the immediate reaction:

He closed the book rather abruptly.
‘What is it Mr Voss?’ Mrs Bonner asked. ‘Do translate for us.’
‘Poetry will not bear translation. It is too personal.’
‘That is most unkind,’ said Mrs Bonner, who would pursue almost morbidly anything she did not understand.

Not long after, the intellectual, obsessive young Laura Trevelyan claims to have understood the poem ‘in a sense, if not in words’. Voss is intrigued:

Without intending it sardonically, he smiled and asked: ‘If you have not understood the poem by words, how would you interpret it?’
Laura Trevelyan frowned slightly.
‘You yourself have made the excuse that must always be made for poetry,’ she replied.

And so it must. It amuses me to think that Craven would play at being Mrs. Bonner (for a fee, of course) but he has, and I don’t doubt for a moment that his true feelings on the subject are more complex.

Of the Eagles Nest Lorca, I can only say that duende was there in the room, and it was the Spanish, as much as anything, that summoned it in. I do look forward to seeing Potts’ production of Blood Wedding, surtitles or no, but perhaps, when it comes to words in translation and performance, I should leave the last one to Laura Trevelyan:

“Words”, she says, “are only sympathetic when they are detached from their obligations.”

The Girls In Grey: Review

Cameron Woodhead — Wed, 02 May 2012 01:55:18 +0000

The Girls in Grey, By Carolyn Bock and Helen Hopkins, The Shift Theatre, Theatre Works, Until May 13.

The Girls In Grey, now showing at Theatreworks.

Anzac Day is a call to remember all who have served, and continue to serve, our country in the armed forces. Among the least recognized are the women of the Royal Australian Army Nursing Corps. During WWI, the Corps was over 2000 strong, and dedicated itself to tending the wounded, often in appalling conditions.

Carolyn Bock and Helen Hopkins’ The Girls In Grey imagines the stories of three Australian nurses, weaving extensive historical research into a poetic script.

There’s the experienced matron Grace (Bock) who joins from an iron sense of civic duty, and comforts herself by writing letters to her lesbian partner back home; Alice (Hopkins), a woman of middle years whose thirst to see the world turns to shattering grief; and the younger Elsie (Olivia Connolly), following love across the sea into a hell no one could have imagined.

Adventure turns to horror as we move from the field hospitals of Egypt and Cyprus, groaning with casualties of the Gallipoli campaign, to the machineguns and mustard gas of the Western Front.

Sometimes the poetry overreaches – clumsy rhyming couplets leap to mind – and scenes with soldiers (Lee Mason) can succumb to melodrama. The acting varies in strength: Hopkins’ performance is self-indulgent and mannered in unhelpful ways; Bock’s crisp, grave and stoic.

Yet the choric effects, structure, and simple design broadly work.

The Girls In Grey is a tribute to the courage of Australian military nurses, who stood firm in the face of terrible confusion and slaughter, and brought solace to many caught up in it.

Far Away: Review

Cameron Woodhead — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 06:40:11 +0000

Paul Ashcroft and Suzannah McDonald in Caryl Churchill's Far Away

Far Away, by Caryl Churchill, SaySIX theatre and Lil’ Artistes, 45downstairs, until May 13.

The title of Caryl Churchill’s Far Away is a provocation. Its dystopian nightmare might seem far out – only Churchill could dream up a theatrical world that combines totalitarianism and, ah, millinery – but it is also ‘far in’. However weird it seems on the surface, this is a sinister, disturbing and blackly comic diagnosis of an all too familiar way of living.

It begins with a portrait of innocence made complicit in violence, of a child sullied by dehumanising rhetoric. A young girl is staying at her aunt’s house in the countryside. Joan (Skylah Cox, Savannah Vote) has climbed out her bedroom window after bedtime and glimpsed horrors in the dark; aunt Harper (Caroline Lee) must explain them.

The scene attains a pallid, lunar sense of menace. The illusion of nature consumes the space. Cox’s wide-eyed curiosity and guileless acceptance are slowly eclipsed by Lee’s heavily-lidded eyes, thin smile, and the shadows of lies crossing her face like fast-moving clouds.

Just as you think you know what’s going on, Churchill changes tack. An adult Joan (Suzannah McDonald) is making high-class hats in a factory, while flirting with another milliner (Paul Ashcroft).

Beautiful hats and a tentative romance have the ugliest context, and in the final scene language itself erupts into a state of total war – grotesque poetry that captures the absurdity of humanity turning against itself and the environment that sustains us.

Justin Martin’s direction creates a chilling atmosphere, drawing out effective performances that trace the vanishing possibilities of being human in dark times. Tom Hodgson’s basic but thoughtful choreography gulls the audience into active complicity in murder as entertainment.

Perhaps the most distressing, from an art lover’s perspective, is Churchill’s dire analysis of the way aesthetics can be deployed to make immoral action possible.

The Plague Dances: Review

Cameron Woodhead — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 04:22:19 +0000

The Plague Dances, by Marcel Dorney and Four Larks, Malthouse Theatre, Until May 6.

Four Larks' The Plague Dances. Photo: Jeff Busby.

Until now, Four Larks’ unique and bewitching style of music theatre has been reserved for those willing to seek out obscure warehouses and private garages. The Plague Dances is the company’s first main stage outing. It delves into the medieval mind, a world of stark religion and incurable diseases, the veneration of saints and early graves.

Hannelore (Esther Hannaford) arrives in a small village, having fled the plague that decimated her home. The priest (Kevin Kearney-Molloy) takes her in, and when the weather improves, the villagers begin to see Hannelore’s arrival as a sign of God’s favour. But when her strange jerking movements cause an outbreak Saint Vitus’ dance, what seemed a divine blessing becomes another curse of the flesh.

Vivid, atmospheric design turns the Tower Theatre into a broken chapel of timber and dust. But it is music that has always been Four Larks’ strongest suit, and Mat Diafos Sweeney’s score – a transporting blend of folk composition, Christian devotional song, with occasional alt-pop intrusions – sounds as if someone had let loose Massive Attack or the Cocteau Twins on a medieval concept album. The musicians and vocalists achieve a haunting, distinctive sound that’s woven into the performance at the deepest level, and is at least as important as Marcel Dorney’s script in generating a lost world.

The Plague Dances features stunning music, and visual theatre that takes us from field to church pew, but the human drama doesn’t always convince. Distilled and intensely rendered acting from Emily Tomlins as a bereaved mother sits cheek by jowl with the unauthoritative fruitiness of Kiernan-Molloy’s priest, for example. And the script itself, while obviously well-researched, could be accused of oversimplifying the violent misogyny of the medieval period to cater to modern sensibilities.

Music and performance craft distract from the blemishes. The Plague Dances remains an involving and sensual experience, and a fine showcase for one of our more original and significant independent companies.

Puppetry of the Penis 3D: Review

Cameron Woodhead — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 02:17:45 +0000

Puppetry of the Penis 3D, Athenaeum, 7pm, until April 29.

Puppetry of the Penis ... Now in 3D.

Dick humour has a long and turgid history that stretches back to Aristophanes. Competition is stiff, but fear not. Australia’s most notable contribution, Puppetry of the Penis, is keeping up with the Johnsons.

Now, you can snigger and occasionally squirm in leg-crossing horror at an impressive range of dick tricks AND have your retinas turkey-slapped by huge bi-refractive willies bulging from the screen. Genital origami. 3-D glasses. What more could you desire?

The whole premise might be thin as a pulled scrotum, but the show unfurls with a puerile, exhibitionist glee that’s hard to resist. It doesn’t hurt that “puppeteers” Sam and Nacho have the kind of equipment they probably have to wrestle into their undies of a morning. They’re huge, and unusually elastic.

The tricks themselves start with variations on the trusty mangina, and the performers are soon twisting their tackle into gastronomic delights – the Hamburger, the Hot Dog, the Ice-cream Cone – or taking us around the world from the Eiffel Tower to Uluru.

Make no mistake, Puppetry of the Penis 3D is a prurient, base-minded diversion. But it’s big. It’s proud. And it’s ours.

The Histrionic: Review

Cameron Woodhead — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 07:32:42 +0000

Thomas Bernhard is one of my favourite writers. His fantastically black comedy features heavily in the very first post I wrote for this blog. (The post also has a link to a characteristically snarky and very funny interview Bernhard gave in 1986, if you want to know more about him.) The production of The Histrionic currently playing at the Malthouse is a rare opportunity to experience his work, and features a towering performance from Bille Brown. I hope to see it again toward the end of the season.

The Histrionic, by Thomas Bernhard, trans. Tom Wright, Malthouse & STC, Until May 5.

Bille Brown in The Histrionic, Photo: Jeff Busby

An actor walks into the tiny Austrian village of Utzbach to perform his masterwork ‘The Wheel of History’, dragging his resigned family behind him. No obstacle can stand in the way of Bruscon’s self-confessed genius – not a pesky emergency exit light problem, not the misfortune of having arrived on Blood Sausage Day, and certainly not the fact that, in his darker moments, he tends to think of the theatre as “one monumental idiotic lie”. No obstacle, that is, save Bruscon’s appetite for invective.

Thomas Bernhard’s The Histrionic is appallingly funny, not least because, as with much of his short fiction, it’s such a remorseless whinge. Whatever else you might say about Bruscon, only a man who loves the theatre could hate it so thoroughly. This being Bernhard, the role burgeons into a two-hour monologue. It’s a comic marathon – one of the most demanding performances of Bille Brown’s career – and he brings it home with intensity, stamina, and histrionic charm.

I’ve always believed Bernhard’s brand of comedy, deeply rooted as it is in failure and complaint, would find fertile soil in Australia. We’re certainly at home with Bruscon’s grotesque caricature of the artistic temperament – narcissistic, imperious, prone to every artistic pretention, batty idea and vainglorious impulse. Brown’s performance will have everyone in the industry wincing in recognition at its mistakes, and it’s hard to be sorry we don’t get to see Bruscon’s play – a dictator-strewn grand narrative history that features Marie Curie in blackface – actually performed.

Theatre and audiences have a symbiotic relationship, though, and the flare of Bruscon’s despair doesn’t spare the latter. His scathing social observations are uncomfortably pertinent: “Wherever we tour/ Jealousy/ Tiny little minds/ Xenophobia/ White-hot hatred of art/ Deep suspicion of abstraction/ Violent loathing of the intellect/ Where else in the world / Could be like this/ Hmm.”

The action is framed by unobtrusively absurd theatre business: gigantic hands are dragged across stage, curtains shambolically open and close. The other characters (including Barry Otto’s memorably decrepit country yokel) barely graze Bruscon’s self-absorption – save to be abused, commanded, or even, in one disturbing moment, tortured – and the decision to play them uninflected, almost zombified, works well. It pervades the theatre with a reality TV level of humiliation, and the vast dilapidation and moistness of the space (Marg Horwell’s stage design runs to a leaking roof) devours presence, forcing Brown to act at a pitch of desperate, manic futility.

Any creditable performance of Bruscon – a role that leaves Ionesco’s Berenger for dust in terms of difficulty – really is a striking theatrical achievement. Brown gives a fierce and fruity portrayal of the ultimate drama queen. He isn’t remotely interested in being liked, milks nothing, and maintains an alarming claim on your attention. Perhaps more vocal modulation, and a softer, more likeable boundary to his character would deepen the performance, which has room to grow, but anyone who cares about acting should line up to see it.

Daniel Schlusser’s production of The Histrionic is directed with an invisible hand, with great attention to rhythm and the dynamic demands of its serious clowning. It’s a pleasure to watch Bernhard’s black comedy performed with such scintillation and skill.