THE WHITE RIBBON

The White Ribbon
Melbourne International Film Festival
Tue 4 Aug, Sun 9 Aug

With his new film, Michael Haneke ploughs his customary fields of collective guilt, invididual crime, shrouds of secrecy and social dysfunction. Set in an Austrian village on the verge of World War I and shot in glistening monochrome, The White Ribbon observes this microcosmos as strands of sadism, lust, affection and punishment unfold.

Told through the steady voiceover of the village teacher, The White Ribbon attempts to paint a picture that, in breadth, range of focus and moral ambiguity rivals the 19th-century social novel. There is no clear protagonist, and no discernible dramatic arc. Instead, the zig-zagging paths of numerous characters from multiple families are given time to cross, tangle and untangle. The pastor’s, and his six children forced to wear white ribbons on their sleeves for a whole year, to remind them of the moral purity they have so far failed to attain; the doctor’s, whose accident involving a horse and a long wire opens the film, sends him to the hospital, and leaves his two children in the care of the village midwife, his informal companion; the baron’s, whose estate employs half of the village, whose distant, moody wife and child are never more than ambiguous about the pleasures of country living, and whose children’s nanny, a girl from the next village, becomes the teacher’s love interest. During the course of the year, this pastoral image is tainted, again and again, with acts of inexplicable, often extreme cruelty.

Like Haneke’s earlier films, so is this one about the return of the repressed. But this time it is not a single act, returning and echoing through the post-traumatic life. Faithful to the novelistic approach, The White Ribbon observes calmly, without a hint of hysterical finger-pointing, the long, steady process by which those without power are in continuous, futile but furious, rebellion against the established power. The culprits are never clearly identified, but that is beside Haneke’s point. The White Ribbon, with its wide-angled social lens, suggests that, in the diseased process of cyclic discipline and punishment, the resentment and retaliation against the authority merely shifts around the society, now here, now there. The Great War of 1914, everything considered, comes as no surprise.

What works in prose may not be so successful on celluloid. Several hundred of the MIFF audience seemed impatient with Haneke’s slowly rolling yarn, and the palpable enjoyment of character portraiture and event description never took off with quite the same success. Still, The White Ribbon is a visually perfect film, with impeccable performances, and if it is broad and deep rather than taut and sharp, well, I’d like to think the world cinema is big enough for both.

Yet another gorgeous film on children, Treeless Mountain looks at two teeny tiny girls, whose mother drops them off to an aunt in the South Korean countryside, and leaves. The aunt grumbles unhappy, the girls try to make sense of the situation, the sky is overcast, they ask for lollies they don’t get, go walkabout, tell each other stories. Jin, the school-aged one, does her best impersonation of serious old sister to little Bin, who toddles around in wearing princess gown and pyjamas and understanding barely anything about the world.

The story is completely limited by the two girls: we know what they know, we see what they see, we understand what they understand. The camera stays at their height, keeps their faces in close-up. The adult world, suddenly, is an incomprehensible and worrying as it once was.

Unflinchingly direct, Treeless Mountain is knee-high in the stuff that could result in sentimental shlock for the cold-hearted, one of those suffer-little-children Dickensian tear-jerkers (and, in many ways, it a film very similar to The Grave of the Fireflies); but it balances its shocking subject by being equally outspoken about both the joys and resilience of childhood, the strength derived from taking the world at its face value.

So Yong Kim, a Korean film-maker who lives in New York, observes the world with astonishing, minimalist humility. To someone who, like me, emerges out of the theatre black box for the film festival, Treeless Mountain serves as a splendid reminder of the finest charms of cinema: it captures the fluid, incidental beauty of the world, the smallest changes in the expressions of untrained young actors, and something about the unstructured, unpredictable way in which life makes sense.

Still Walking
Melbourne International Film Festival
Screening Wednesday July 29 at 12.15pm

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s films – a retrospective of which Melbourne International Film Festival presented in 2007 – all share a preoccupation with death and loss. His cinematic debut, Maborosi (Maboroshi no hikari) follows a young woman as she struggles to cope with her husband’s sudden death. After Life (Wonderful Life), a whimsical fairytale, centred on a dilapidated social services building in which recently deceased go through the bureaucratic process of chosing one memory they will keep in the afterlife; and the widely acclaimed Nobody Knows (Daremo shiranai), looked at a year in the life of 4 children after their mother abandons them in their apartment to live with another man. Yet despite the grand themes, Kore-eda’s films are gentle, humane and thoughtful, sharing an unintrusive, almost documentary notation of interpersonal dynamics.

Still Walking, his second-last feature film, shows clear influence of his mentor, Yasuhiro Ozu, and may be his most universally accessible film so far. Set at the anniversary of the death of their eldest son, it brings together three generations of the Yokoyama family for a lunch, a lazy summer afternoon, and a sleepover.

What’s most remarkable is how unremarkable the premise is: indeed, countless Australian (and American) films look at prodigal sons returning for a visit to their parents, and the tensions revived, the expectations dodged, the disappointments re-simmered. A layered crosswords of love, reproach and rivalry builds up between the siblings, their partners, their children, and their parents. There is never anything so crass as a confrontation, or melodramatic as an argument. For the most part, the family members cook, clean, converse over meals, visit the deceased son’s grave, and have afternoon tea with the boy whose life their son died saving. They discuss jobs, future plans, past memories. Formally and emotionally restrained, it abstains from glib conclusions.

Yet Kore-eda’s gentle touch draws out the complexity of the familial relationships in all its nuance. It is an immensely satisfying film, whose poignance lies in the richness of observation. Kore-eda is able to draw out magnificent performances from his actors, particularly children, and captures the essence both of young (his children blow bubbles in soda, snoop around offices, pick flowers and brag to strangers) and old age (Yokoyama matriarch will gently, but firmly command her son and daughter-in-law, confess to small meanness and hide great generosity). In one scene, a bother and sister discuss the ways their parents approach life while carrying a coffee table down a staircase. Despite the grand arguments they are making, the actors are talking absent-mindedly, paying more attention to manouvring the table than to the weight of their lines. Such small, careful scenes build up into a wonderfully subtle family portrait. There is no superfluous repetition; every detail adds a layer of complexity to the characters. The film that results is utterly captivating despite having, essentially, no central conflict.

Daisies (1966), Dir. Vera Chytilov

Sunnying up the winter, ACMI, in collaboration with the just-finished Sydney Film Festival, is hosting a program of films about women from the 60s and 70s. Focus on Girls 24/7 collects the desperate housewives, the lethargic pop stars, the passionate lovers and the anarchist teenagers across European cinema, spanning Russia, France, former Czechoslovakia, Sweden, Germany, the UK and the USA. These are stylistically brazen and philosophically challenging films, which ask difficult questions about personal freedom in an era in which ‘liberation’ was the main prize.
 
Focus on Girls 24/7 opens with Agnes Varda’s celebrated Cleo from 5 to 7. The only girl among the boys of the French nouvelle vague, Varda’s keen eye blends documentary-style shooting with the hip aesthetics of the era. Cleo, an airhead chanteuse, spends two hours waiting for the results of her cancer test walking around Paris, receiving admirers, whining about death, shopping and falling in love. It is a meticulously plotted film: the timing and the itinerary correspond precisely to the film time, which Varda divides into minuscule chapters, such as “Cleo from 5.04 to 5.08.” Reminiscent of Jacques Demy’s pop fantasies, it turns inside-out the frothy portrait of Cleo, ending in a strangely profound place.

Vera Chytilov·’s 1966 Daisies, banned in Czechoslovakia for its ‘depiction of food wastage’ (the legendary banquet food fight), and earning the director a six-year bar on film-making on the grounds that she ‘lacked a positive attitude to socialism’, is a wickedly inventive rampage against work, materialism and men. Sisters Jezinka and Jarmila hit the streets of Prague on an hilariously slapstick assault on all things good and proper. Ironizing both the patriarchal reality that surrounds them, and their facile construction of girly identity, Daisies is a much smarter film than its playful surface may suggest. Opening and closing with horrific footage of war destruction and nuclear explosions, Chytilova dedicates the film “to all those whose biggest source of outrage is a ruined trifle.”

The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum is the only film in the program (co-)directed by a man, Volker Schlˆndorff with Margarethe von Trotta. Based on a classic novel by the Nobel-Prize-winning author Heinrich Bˆll, and set in the explosive era when Baader-Meinhof Group was terrorising West Germany, it looks at how violence develops, and where it can lead. Katharina Blum’s one-night-stand turns out to be wanted by the police. Her refusal to give in to the police and the tabloid press proves to be her downfall. Reticent housewife Katharina becomes a figure of national scandal, an empty vessel on which general ideas and fantasies are projected.

Larisa Shepitko’s Wings is a brooding drama about a proud woman coping with ageing, loss and disappointment. Nadezhda, a World War II military pilot and a loyal Stalinist, is now a school principal. Detached from her daughter, the politics of the new era, and her own life, Nadezhda’s memories of a happier, more exciting past are depicted in powerful, lyrical sequences. In contrast, Barbara Loden’s Wanda is lost without context. Abandoning her mining town and latching onto a frankly brutal petty crook, Wanda makes a mockery out of the common myth of the road trip liberation. Like a pessimistic sequel to Ibsen’s Doll House, Loden shows how little freedom means without power. Both films by first-time directors, these are film-making gems.

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, by Chantal Akerman, is not to be missed. At 201 minutes, this is a marathon of quotidian actions, yet every minute of it manages to be riveting. Chantal Akerman shows three days in the life of Jeanne Dielman (played by the arthouse goddess of the time and place, Delphine Seyrig, compared to Greta Garbo), housewife, mother and prostitute. It is a life packed with small-scale busyness, a precise clockwork of chores, cooking, knitting, cleaning, that starts to break after Jeanne sees her client on the second day. Mesmerising in its assuredness (it was made when Akerman was only 25), this is a masterpiece of structuralist cinema: showing the power of duration, the effect of repetition, the wonder of people simply existing.

The program is in turns entertaining, infuriating and eye-opening: from somnambular victims of society to pragmatic bread-winners and defiant rebels, girlhood is examined in all its aspects. Seen apart, each film is an enduring classic from one of the most vital cinematic eras. Seen together, they amount to a panoramic portrait of womanhood in barely post-feminist times.

Focus on Girls 24/7 is at ACMI, Federation Square, July 3-12.

Liminal (Theatre and Performance) is a strange beast in the Melbourne theatre eco-system. In this city, where most theatre is produced for free and funding is at best flimsy, independent theatre-making is a long session of musical chairs, and a person who can get a large number of people to collaborate for a longer period of time something of a rarity. Another rare thing in this city, sadly but logically, is an independent theatre practitioner past a certain age: while we certainly have established mainstream theatre artists, there is simply not enough security of livelihood on the theatre margin to sustain long-term artistic inquiry.

As Alison Croggon has noted, Liminal, with their sense of collective, long-term collaboration, defined aesthetics and a clear sense of tangent and purpose, are comparable to the visionary ensembles that are lushly funded in, let’s say, Europe, and heralded as creative laboratories, those raising the roof beams for the future. Ariadne Mnouchkine comes to mind, or Needcompany. In Melbourne, needless to mention, this is not quite the case, and Liminal tend to teach their devoted audience much about the suburban architecture of Melbourne, as we wander the back streets of Abbotsford or Brunswick, looking for the right warehouse or private house where their performances take place.

Based on Ted Hughes’s poetically mighty re-working of Seneca’s Oedipus, this is a production of which completely contradicting things can be said with total plausibility. It has a grand vision, fantastic ideas, excellent human and textual material, powerful execution, and yet it fails to work the way one expects it to. There is a touch of too-much and a touch of not-quite: velvety enunciation and somewhat heavy-metal make-up give Oedipus a little bit of easy slickness it doesn’t need, while choreographic and vocal syntony collapses in moments that wouldn’t matter if the performance didn’t strive for microscopic precision.

Liminal makes theatre full of sound and image, minutely choreographed motion and voice: to experience it in a suburban garage, in a glitchy execution with props collapsing, video and sound occasionally malfunctioning, fails the desired total immersion. The tight intimacy of the space works, and doesn’t: a larger space may have relieved Oedipus of some of its visceral potency, but some airiness could have sharpened our senses, slightly irritated as they were by the physical discomfort of crowdedness, of feet pressed against backs, shoulders rubbing, imperfect angles. Hugely ambitious, Oedipus burns under its own magnifying glass.

Partially, though, there may be an internal failure of rhythm and intent. There is not so much a sense of meandering, as a lack of progression until it kicks into the splendid end. Oedipus starts in high-strung tone, and keeps it, unwavering, until the very end. The result, rather than creating horrific tension, creates monotony. While four Jocastas toss and turn in the agony of loss, blame and fault, the audience, in minute steps, gets bored.

But if I focus so much on the shortcomings, it’s because Oedipus is, overall, stuff of giants. Classical tragedy is already thick with re-telling, with memory, but in this version only detritus of the original events remains. Any recognisable characters are shed for a mask of Oedipus and a chorus of four women in black, who less narrate than reminisce, re-live, mourn and wail. Everything has already happened, and on stage there will be only inconsolable mourning, only senseless rage and self-pity. Spitting mouthfuls of exquisite text – a text with a fine pedigree indeed – they bathe their bodies, voices, and the entire black box in gorgeous monochrome film, Ivanka Sokol’s flickering shadows of cloudy skies, streets, woods, faces.

Just like in Liminal’s previous work, Mishima’s The Damask Drum, there is a sense of reiterative, traumatic, short-circuited memory in these confused blurs of film, the orchestrated imprecision with which they slide up and down, bodies reduced to black dress and white skin, white shadows of trees in the black box. Physical movement is nearly perfectly directed: four women merge together and fall apart, assuming distinct voices only to drown into a writhing, wriggling mass of lean limbs and wild hair. And the text, broken between mouths and personae, is the most exquisite piece of writing I have heard on stage, angular and translucent and raucous and spiky.

At the very end, Claire Nicholls has five minutes of the most accomplished theatre one is likely to see in Melbourne this year. In a move characteristic of the production, a nameless black-dressed woman repeats a monologue of a slave, recounting how Oedipus blinded himself. Only a faint carbon-copy of an event, yet brought to life with such visceral urgency – as she screams, she is helpless, senseless chilling despair;

Suddenly he began to weep          everything that had been
Torment suddenly it was sobbing       it shook his whole
Body and he shouted                  is weeping all I can give
Can’t my eyes give any more        let them go with their
Tears          let them go      eyeballs too      everything
Out            is this enough for you you frozen gods of
Marriage     is it sufficient            are my eyes enough

From this point on we are in theatre heaven – although it required a jump-start. And here lies the problem. While Oedipus is flawed and imperfect, the act of critique becomes hard when what Liminal does is systematically rare, rarely systematic, and totally unsupported. And when such senseless acts of beauty go unnoticed, in Brunswick garages.

Click here for Laneway’s full coverage of the Melbourne Fringe Festival.

Twelve Restless performers, with different levels and types of disability, are confronted with twelve fully-able Rawcus performers in this fascinating exploration of the mystery of the other.

When you stand in front of me and look at me,
What do you know of the griefs that are in me
And what do I know of yours?

- Kafka, as quoted in the program notes

The Heart of Another is a Dark Forest opens with a loop of beautiful live music: guitar, piano, pan flute, cello. I’ve often noted that the fusion of genres in Australian theatre happens less between theatre, performance and dance, and more often with visual arts, music, and puppetry. That is, rather than eschewing dramatic narration for rebellious deconstruction, it engages in a sensuous tickle of all the senses, a total experience. This process usually creates, like in this case, lyrical theatre, stage poetry (as Maeterlinck demanded: “la pièce de théâtre dout être avant tout un poème”), in which the linear time of ascending action is replaced by slowly accumulating image-time, what Gertrude Stein would have approvingly called theatre as landscape.

Some of the most successful Australian theatre of recent times meticulously researched the possibilities of this approach, from My Darling Patricia’s Politely Savage and Peepshow Inc.’s Slanting Into the Void, to Vitalstatistix’s Cake (it is not surprising, therefore, that a number of names overlap in the credits of these shows). To analyse The Heart of Another with an analytical mind, thus, may be doing it great disservice.

There are moments in this performance of terrifying human beauty. More terrifying because resolutely silent – by which I don’t mean that speech isn’t present, merely that the words don’t amount to a statement, explanation, or challenge. They remain a part of the stage poetry.

Right at the beginning, all performers assemble on stage, merely breathing until they slowly smile. The variety of persons, of bodies, is astonishing – the sparse means of physical theatre work extraordinarily well at showing the individual beauty of each one of this enormous, diverse ensemble. Where will they all go?, you wonder. How will they all move? Where will this dense human mass disperse? It does and doesn’t: despite choreographic skill at emptying and populating the stage, The Heart of Another seemingly keeps the theatre densely upholstered, filled to the brim, with thick emotions, with faces, costumes, movement, but most crucially with objects.

A man is back-lit behind a life-size child drawing of a man. A woman cuts out a red heart in the paper, and through the hole starts pulling out a red scarf, a paper chain of little girls, toy animals, which another man gives to a girl, who assembles the lot in a wooden box. A mass of people unfolding a silk scarf, each with their own little assemblages: a collection of chocolate coins, or plastic roses and a plastic wedding cake. Someone’s memories, someone’s very private mementos. A girl puts words in a sequence of glass jars; another listens inside each one. Even the backstage is used to reveal a dark, private space behind the representational space at the front. At different times, the performance is counterpointed by a romantic duet, or a solo in dark sfumato.

On the one hand, it is a performance firmly situated in this world, latching onto an endless array of objects and gestures and relations and characters. At the same time, by refusing any response to this world apart from the hermetically, solipsistically intimist, it is a dance of deep, almost painful privacy. Using semi-abled performers, by definition a quiet part of our society – indeed, any society – underpins this sensuous introspection.

At multiple points, perhaps because of the opening quote, I was reminded of Kafka’s love letters to Milena Jesenska, among the most painfully intimate love correspondences of all times. There is more than a flimsy connection of this barely un-symbolist theatre to the love-letter format, with its own solipsism, planar non-narrative time, and an alchemist power to turn awkwardness, unease, fear and disgust into heavy, difficult and intensely private beauty. Instead of judging, we are led to feel. As a way of approaching the problem of able-bodiedness, this is not unintelligent. Everything in The Heart of Another is heart-breakingly beautiful in silence: loneliness, desire, the inability to connect, the girls and the boys. Members of the Rawcus ensemble seemed unaware of how much admiration they incited: the foyer buzzed with excited whispers on the beauty of particular girls.

There are, however, problems for the analytical mind. Keeping in mind that Australia is a resolutely mute culture in many aspects, that much of its best dramatic writing explores the poetic rhythms of non-communication and non-discussion (eg, Holloway’s harrowing Red Sky Morning), its predilection both for physical theatre and for ‘theatre as a poem’ becomes problematic, politically problematic.

Aesthetically, the silence of objects and people makes for very intense theatre. But, in a rich yet delicate landscape of visual effects within The Heart of Another, every object, motion and gesture resounds with what is left unsaid. The moment in which girls, all the girls, one by one join in a group homogeneous movement, although some simply cannot do it properly, struck me as somewhat aloof. In another, a man with speech impediments reads on the back stage – stirring too many memories of war orphans forced to pose at anti-war rallies, of that banal exploitation of someone’s misery for some quick, cheap compassion.

The wallpaper, framing the entire set in a florally geometric, patterned repetition of the same, may have been intended only as decoration – indeed, I commonly see Victorian wallpaper in Australian performances. It is, however, present as an unconscious atavism, a constant reminder of the oppressive, bourgeois structures that sent us all here. It was a society that created textile printing, the industrial, regimented repetition of geometrically restrained, prettified nature. So we have it: the imperative of pleasant decoration, the imperative of sameness, and in the middle of it all, elementary human wonder dancing. The effect is incongruous, raising more questions than it placates with silence. Are we watching prettified disability? Does it need to come with lush music to keep us calm? Are we refusing to think? These are just some of the nagging questions in the back of my mind. To every such political problem that arises, the answer seems to be to smother it indulgently in beautiful décor.

In targeting the body first and the mind later, there is always the danger of abandoning problems half-way through; of not allowing the audience to see clearly, and of choosing the pretty option over the less aesthetically rounded. This can happen even if there is no intention of glossing over. It happened in Cake, with its cheap conflation of baking, pregnancy and femininity; it happened in Politely Savage, with its ornate orientalization of Australia, the 1950s, and the housewife. The entire subtext of Kafka’s love letters is that of a deeply unhappy existence. Many unpleasant things may have been pushed aside in The Heart of Another in order to please the senses, but we may only realise later.

Click here for Laneway’s full coverage of the Melbourne Fringe Festival.

sKin
La Mama
August 28 – September 13, 2008

It always seemed to me that there is a lot that the garden variety bedtime story and the psychological horror genre have in common, in terms of execution. Both strive to lull the listener/viewer into a particular physical state, resorting to the repetition of motifs, avoiding any emphasis on logic, and creating a low murmur of sensations that teases the body into a state of light but constant focus, through a form of mild hypnosis. The only difference is that, while the bedtime story ends on an arbitrary, subjective point, with its audience seduced (put to sleep), the horror narrative is finely tuned to break the spell at the precise point of climax. A typical bedtime story, then, could be a horror tale without the climax.

Humphrey Bower, Jess Ipkendanz and Gwendolina Holmberg-Gilchrist were the team behind the astonishing The Kreutzer Sonata at La Mama last year, the first prose-based performance I saw completely blow its audience away. Novels, short stories and other forms of epic, non-recitatory writing, rarely turn into excellent theatre. The beauty of the theatrical form and the beauty of the written text are too easy to confuse, turning the stage into a declamatory empty space where something other, more real, is merely described.

More often than not, the solid black box becomes a tunnel, and the entire experience tantalising, but unsatisfying. The Kreutzer Sonata, however, with the simplest means of lighting, music, a few puppets and Bower’s hypnotising voice, seduced, terrified and enlightened. Building delicately upon Tolstoy’s superb narrative structure, which in itself combined prose with the discussion of music, all the bedtime-story elements of the Bower-Ipkendanz-Holmberg team fed into the terror of the murder plot, creating an extraordinarily rich melange of visceral effects, finely tuned to hit the body at the most receptive points. What made it rise above mere radio drama on stage was the way it worked on the body.

sKin, based on Bower’s original writing, is not the same calibre of achievement.

It is, as expected, finely crafted: Bower’s enchanting voice gracefully weaves together the mirroring themes of two tales at points of entrance and exit, unease and confusion, helplessness and gratitude. Ipkendanz’s music seamlessly punctuates the emotional songlines, and Holmberg-Gilchrist’s precise lighting fills the small La Mama stage with the Western Australian outback and Thai alleyways, dark hotel rooms and airy condominiums.

As theatre, this is a work of great subtlety. The stories, however, are afflicted with all the usual problems of local literature: passive characters, vague themes, stuttering development of both plot and ideas. It was the strong philosophical outlines, the emotional tempest and psychological fearlessness of The Kreutzer Sonata that made it gripping theatre. In sKin, the joint big themes of place, race, culture, intimacy and identity are reduced to a murmur in the background of an iceberg narrative.

While one man’s hilarious travel to Thailand develops poetically, culminating in his bright orange, made-in-Yarraville tan, its mirror story, another man’s uneasy trip to a town in Western Australia, is replete with visits from the dead, and the appropriately clichéd vague mystery of the land. The emotional curve of the storyline is reduced to descriptions of the landscape. These are understated narratives in which nobody murders, despairs or reaches frightening yet true conclusions about humankind. And Bower’s voice, hypnotic as always, so effective at narrating chilling details of domestic violence, infidelity and existential despair, now risks putting us to sleep.

Understatement in theatre is a dangerous thing. I would not let anyone but this group of people talk literature to me on stage: what they do is masterfully simple, but works mainly due to their talent and, where applicable, choice of works. Without a striking piece of prose to tie the performance, sKin remains just a bedtime tale.

You can read more of Jana at her blog, mono no aware.

In its best moments, The Zombie State is Saturday night in the CBD.

At a cultural low point in my life, when I used to catch the glorious 4.30am Night Rider to Frankston, it was my weekly dose of the strangest of the Melbourne microcosmos. Nightshift workers, hospitality plebs, aggressive Frankstonians, vomiting girls, the desperate homeless that couldn’t pay their way out of Swanston Street that night, young accountants drinking their way out of existential angst, business tourists, casino winners and casino losers, all mingled in a haze of bile, spit, alcohol fumes, violence, money, vomit. I would escape to the KFC bouncers (another Saturday night phenomenon), a small, pacifist Sikh micro-community, who fed me spicy chicken with vegetarian detachment. The climax of the ride home, which inevitably involved brawls, singing and attempts at backseat intercourse, was the passage down Carlisle Street in St Kilda, when the entire bus would open the windows to shout abusive nonsense at the sex workers (who responded with comparative grace). And I would wonder about the personas these monster people assumed in daylight.

The Zombie State is the same barely controlled human grotesque. It flirts with the zombie horror genre, leaning on its own fear of the mindless crowd, the collective loss of reason. It’s the story of Prime Minister Kevin’s orchestration of Summit 2021, during which aloof teenagers overdose, clairvoyants foretell doom, Crown Casino cleaners clean, zombies dance themselves to death, Night Rider passengers are abducted for underground experiments and a posse of Persephones fight killer seagulls.

As long as the text is muffled, pinched and distorted through the enormous stage activity, as long as the setting, characters and context are barely approximated, it is an Artaudian phantasmagoria of associative illogic, a visual and aural feast as assaulting to the senses as it is delicately teasing to the mind. There is more than a pinch of the post-pretty European to Daniel Schlusser’s direction: that many of these actors are fundamentally playing themselves is not insignificant.

The grand and furious nightmare of The Zombie State was initially conceived as verbatim theatre, drawing upon workers’ submissions to the Howard government’s Commission for the Living Wage, and the line between mundane naturalism and hysterical parody is as sharp and thin as it was on Swanston Street on those cold Saturday nights, when structured mating rituals disintegrated into an orgy of publicly discharged bodily fluids, when healthy, acceptable business aggression morphed into senseless street fighting, and vegetarian KFC bodyguards seemed the most approximate flotsam of orderly humanity.

In terms of the sheer imagery Zombie State generates, there is enough in these 75 minutes to occupy a curious mind for weeks. It is passionately theatrical, with a cast of 26 (huge for Melburnian standards) fluidly moving through the glass cubicles, projections, backstage recordings and sound curtains that build into an experience that’s visceral, immediate, and decidedly un-television.

Alas, the script is the weakest part of the show, and the ending, played straight and political, catapults a mesmerising experience into the realm of didacticism. The Zombie State, for all its expansive, warm illusion of chaos, carefully walks the rope stretched between broad social farce and anti-dramatic fantasia, not giving in to either until the end. Both paths, hoinwever, are essentially neverending, the only possible conclusions being either implosion or explosion, theatre turning onto itself or onto the audience.

Instead, it reveals its political undergarments, with an unfortunate, politically hammy question mark that bogs down what had until then successfully remained mid-air with levity and infinite grace. In retrospect, the entire play looks tainted with programmatic politics, all those moments of social-realist dialogue suddenly springing up in the mind, the playfulness receding, the grand oneiric beauty lost with one sweep of the writing hand. While a zombie is spurting blood in a vague waiting room with an egg slowly frying on the back screen, the dentist can torture him for not having health insurance: our social sensibility is fully activated, but our sensuousness nourished nonetheless. But when Prime Minister Kevin declares that choosing zombidom allows him to rule the country without needing sleep, that delicate tickle of counterpointed images and words is shot down with a loud bang.

As strange as it may sound, Schlusser’s theatre could have been more successful had it completely renounced text. It flirts with the barely controlled plotless chaos of European performance collectives, building powerful effects out of images alone, using text as only one layer of the performancescape (something rare and needed in Australian theatre), but ultimately returns to the dictate of the writer’s message, dismantling its own battle machine. And yet, despite its flaws, I don’t remember the last time it was so exciting to be in the theatre in this city. By all means, this is a production not to miss, a rare gem of near-Regietheater in Melbourne.