Catching up

Regular readers of Theatre Notes will have caught a few criticisms of the Age's insipid coverage of Melbourne theatre over the past months. And for the record, I will post the latest here.

I just caught up with Ben Ellis' review of Cameron Woodhead's demolition of David Grieg's The American Pilot, recently mounted by Red Stitch. Not having seen this show, I have no opinion of the production or play: but I'm wholly with Ben on his opinion of Woodhead's "toxicity". I think it's a serious problem that a reviewer who so transparently knows so little about theatre and whose main vocation seems to be that of a walking sneer should be the new senior reviewer at the Age. In comparison, the daze of Leonard Radic seem almost halcyon. And that's saying something...

...and before I forget

I must award the coveted Golden Knob Award, since I know you are all out there biting your nails dying to know who's won. And since the Green Room awards were an internet event this year, Theatre Notes feels justified in doing the virtual ceremony. Yes, imagine a set like the one at last year's AFI Awards (which I almost reviewed as the worst I have ever seen...) with tacky gilded pillars, conjure the rubber chicken and frozen veg, and you're almost there.

(Ahem)

Frankly, Melbourne's crrrritics have been a little boring lately. We all seem to have been behaving ourselves. But there is one late candidate for the Golden Knob - my spies tell me that a well-known freelance critic rang the MIAF office demanding an extra complimentary ticket to Le Dernier Caravansérail and threatened negative coverage of the show when he was told this was not possible. This plumbs new depths of knobdom, past mere ignorance and philistinism into sheer corruption. Such action is, I hasten to add, very unusual. I could be very naive, but I've never heard of anyone else doing it.

But despite this high standard, one nominee continues to rise above the rest. He has maintained impeccable standards of knobjockeyhood for years and the Melbourne Festival did nothing to lower them. Again and again he spat on innovation, declaring there is basically only one choreographer who does anything worth looking at (our home boy Graeme Murphy). He even gave a program a bad review. Yes - stand up, 2005 Golden Knob: Neil Jillett!

The t-shirt is in the mail.

MIAF Knob-Jockey Awards

To err is human - why, even Theatre Notes has proved her humanity this way. Everyone makes mistakes, and in that giant jury in the sky we all hope that we will be forgiven our sins, yada yada. But there's getting it wrong and then there's, well, something else. Sometimes Melbourne's critics get it so wrong that you wonder why they claim to be interested in art at all. To celebrate this, I've inaugurated the MIAF Knob-Jockey Awards, for particularly stunning instances of critical philistinism during the Melbourne Festival.

So here are the candidates so far. (Drum roll) -

First, we can't overlook Neil Jillett, who has been doing his bit to cheer the hearts of Knob-Jockey afficionados everywhere in his Sunday Age reviews. Melburnians must be inured to Jillett by now, who for many years has been a reliable indicator of artistic worth - if Jillett hates it, it's probably worth seeing. Despite his distinguished record of Knob-Jockeydom, his review of Green in the Sunday Age was a doozy even by his standards. The review's not worth arguing with: it merely stands as an extreme example of Knob-Jockey Activity at its most destructively blind.

But it was the imperious, passionate diva Diamanda Galas who seemed to bring out the worst in Victoria's Finest. I didn't see her first show, Defixiones, but it was, said Sunday Age critic Owen Richardson, "hard work". Negating at one stroke the extraordinary power of Galas's presence and voice, Richardson complained that Ms Galas neglected to sing in English, thus making it impossible to relate to the performance, although apparently a translated text of the poems was provided. "This may sound like Anglophone philistinism," says Richardson querulously, "but surtitles would have done the trick."

Owen, here's some news: it is Anglophone philistinism, actually. Surtitles? Ms Galas herself had something to say about this during the performance of Songs of Exile (which I did see): "I don't work for the Maytag corporation," she said. "And I didn't come here to give the people Down Under work that was less than room temperature..."

Ms Galas, who clearly likes taking the fight into the enemy's territory - my kind of woman - also had some unkind words for the Age critic John Slavin, suggesting in Greek that he practises self-abuse. In this case, there's more at stake than a diva's wounded vanity. The review annoyed me as well.

At (yet another) forum yesterday on crrritics, the Australian's Arts Editor Miriam Cosic told me she was shocked at the lack of rigor in Australian academic and alternative writings about art. That may well be true, but rigor is not conspicuous in some mainstream reviewing, either. John Slavin's review of Defixiones is a particularly fine example of this. Among other things, it shows a staggering ignorance of 20th century poetry. That wouldn't matter if he wasn't writing about it with the authority of Melbourne's major daily broadsheet behind him - many people are staggeringly ignorant of any poetry - but since he was, I think it deserves pulling up.

Like Owen Richardson, Slavin found Galas' performance was much too "intense" and "weird" for comfort. Its discomfort - and its subject matter, the genocide of the Armenians and other 20th century atrocities - makes him reach for his Theodor Adorno. He has reached for exactly the same quote before, on at least one other occasion. It is Adorno's most famous statement: "After Auschwitz, poetry is no longer possible".

This is a much debated quote which has reached the status of a cliche; it's also not quite what Adorno said. He actually wrote: "The critique of culture is confronted with the last stage in the dialectic of culture and barbarism: to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric, and that corrodes also the knowledge which expresses why it has become impossible to write poetry today." It comes at the end of a complex essay that argues that it is "barbaric" to write lyric poetry because the culture that produced some of the greatest lyric poets in Europe also produced the concentration camps. The language can't help being fatally saturated with the conditions that made the death camps possible.

Adorno also said, in response to Paul Celan's poem Todesfuge ("Death Fugue") "No lyric poetry after Auschwitz!" Which can be interpreted to mean that in the face of such human enormity, it is no longer possible to make a lyric beauty that is not, at the same time, denied.

Slavin does not hint at any of this complexity, however: he takes it as meaning that Adorno endorsed a blanket ban on poems. According to Slavin, Adorno's statement is "contentious" because poetry is the "paramedic of culture", the task of which is to "cleanse language" that is "polluted" by "history, politics and media".

Hmmm...

It was precisely this "cleansing" function of language which Adorno claimed was barbaric in the face of the death camps, which were intended to cleanse the pure Aryan race of the pollution of Semites (and homosexuals, dissidents, Gypsies and other undesirables). "Cleansing" is a word we now associate with "ethnic cleansing", an activity patented by the Nazis themselves. I'm sure that Slavin doesn't intend to back the Final Solution in his review; but if he does not intend it, he is showing an inexcusable carelessness of thought.

He clocks that Galas' work is "political". It is, in fact, profoundly so: in the questioning way that at once creates and destroys beauty, that refuses the seductive and lulling comfort of consumable art for the raw, unmediated pain of lament. But for Slavin, "political" can only mean that Galas is making "protest art", "like the Beat poets of the '50s and 60s" with whom she has, apparently, "much in common". This "protest art" fails because it doesn't communicate "a position which can be shared and acted on". Slavin should read his Adorno again, and not only to get the quotes right: there are screeds of arguments against precisely this kind of instrumental view of art.

Aside from this, the comparison to Beat poets makes no sense at all. Anyone with a modicum of knowledge about 20th century poetry (and who has seen Galas in action) can only say, huh?

Galas was singing the words of a number of poets in Defixiones. It's news to me that the distinguished Greek poets Yannis Ritsos and George Serferis were actually Beats. And I'm sure it would be news to the Syrian poet Adonis, whose poems Galas also sang that night. These are, to my knowledge, completely different poetries, even from each other. But I guess you learn something new every day.

Finally, Slavin dismisses the enthusiastic audience response to Defixiones as "romantic despair": nothing more than an adolescent pose for dysfunctional "Goths". It's not really possible to tackle the implications of this statement here; it requires a book. (I'm quite certain that it wasn't "romantic despair" that Ritsos suffered all those years in prison; and also that "romantic despair" doesn't quite cover the response to atrocities like genocide). Suffice to say that Galas certainly articulates human grief; but despairing she is not.

I should say again I didn't see this particular show, so I can't give you my view on it. My spies tell me that there seemed to be a big problem with the sound system that night, but neither of our astute critics appeared to notice that.

This is about more than mere disagreeement about the aesthetic quality of a performance. Whether a critic likes a work is really neither here nor there (I liked Galas, Slavin didn't; so what?) It's about the quality and integrity of response. Slavin merited Galas's wrath, because he was talking pretentious nonsense. And he fully earns his Knob-Jockey nomination from Theatre Notes.

Congrats, fellas!

When is a novella not a novella?

Reviews of The Yellow Wallpaper, Anita Hegh's extraordinary one-woman show on at the Store Room until April 3, have brought out my inner pedant. The implication - and more than implication - is that the performed text is selected from a much longer literary work.

In her review for The Age, Helen Thomson claims that The Yellow Wallpaper is a "novella". The crispest definition I've found describes a novella as a work of prose fiction of between 17,500 and 40,000 words. But The Yellow Wallpaper is uncontroversially a short story - it's just over 6000 words long.

"Gilman's text requires careful reading," says Thomson, judiciously and rightly. But surely critics are not exempt from reading carefully? Perhaps the odd phrase or two might have been edited out - it's hard to tell on a single listen - but, so far as I could hear, Anita Hegh performed the entire text, as written by Gilman. The only changes I could trace seemed to be some pre-recorded repetitions.

"...The selection of material in this adaptation," Thomson goes on to say, is "crucial". Quite.

The Sunday Age's Bill Perrett has a thing or two to tell Chekhov in today's paper. His plays are too long. Poor Perrett complains that he had to sit through more than TWO HOURS of The Cherry Orchard at fortyfivedownstairs, and clearly suffered. He resorts to that handy reviewer's standby - "it could have done with some trimming" - while suggesting that David Lan's translation could have been less faithful to the original and, presumably, have left some bits out. He doesn't illuminate us, sadly, about which bits should go. There's this sub-plot about an orchard, for instance...

Our pundit is certainly in no danger of cutting himself on his incisive perceptions. Before floundering through some character description, he magisterially informs us that Chekhov depicts "some of the great forces of Russian history - and of the world at large and humanity in general" - with "complexity", no less. But, luckily for Perrett's rapidly numbing bum, he does all this with "wry humour", which no doubt focuses those vapid platitudes wonderfully.