It was as challenging, engaging and inspired a piece of theatre as I have seen in many a day. To my mind, it is ideal festival fare, stretching the boundaries of how theatre and music interact, demanding much of the audience and rewarding those who get into it.

What has surprised me is the negativity of many of the reviews and online comments about it.

The Giacomo Variations is best described as a chamber opera, meaning it is performed with an orchestra of less than 50 who are not only visible to the audience (rather than hidden in a pit) but to some extent interact with the action on stage, and as a play in which four actors act out scenes adapted from the 1790 memoir of Giacomo Casanova, Histoire de ma vie.

The theatrical scenes are interspersed and underscored by selected musical passages from the operas Don Giovanni, Cosi fan tutte and Le nozze di Figaro, as well as a couple of other excerpts from the music of Mozart.

The two male actors play the older memoir-writing Casanova and his younger self, often on stage at the same time – which mimics the style of the book (or at least the copy I have – there have been several versions), in which Casanova narrates incidents in his life and muses on various – very various – topics.

The two female actors play the Countess Isabella in earlier and later life, she who was the sister of the Austrian princeling who gave Casanova a home for the last 12 years of his life, during which he wrote the memoirs that keep him famous today.

All performers but the actor playing the older Casanova also play various other characters who come up in the stories, and the older male steps into alternate roles – characters from the operas whose roles he claims to have inspired or written himself.

The overall effect is to intertwine Casanova’s claimed autobiographical notes with lyrics sung by characters from the Mozart operas. Could these operatic characters have been based on Casanova? Could he have had a hand in writing them? Could he have done all the things he said he did?

That this could be more than grandiose fiction is borne out by Casanova’s known friendship with Mozart’s librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, and his acquaintance with key figures from the 18th century, including Madame de Pompadour, George III, Frederick the Great, Catherine the Great, Benjamin Franklin, Rousseau and Voltaire. He met the Pope, escaped from the prison in the Doge’s palace and, most notoriously, enjoyed a string of liaisons across Europe that eventually made his name a byword for a champion of sexual conquests.

Significantly, not all of this is imparted to the audience of The Giacomo Variations. If all one knows of Casanova is his reputation as a womaniser – and none of his life as a law graduate at 17, an amateur physician, a failed priest, an occultist, a gambler, a Freemason, a Rosicrucian, an alchemist, a courtier and a spy – then much of this production will be a mystery.

That does not mean it is a failure, any more than an ignorance of the work of Mozart would. Only some of the sublime music was vaguely familiar to me.

While I greatly enjoyed the structure of the piece, its interweaving of theatre and music, of fact and fiction, of themes particular to that 18th century which saw the ineluctable shift from divine monarchy to revolutionary parliamentarianism, the absolute masterstroke of the production lies in the casting.

I can hardly imagine a living actor who could be capable of convincingly conveying the truth of such a man as Casanova, so seductive and so repellant, so witty and so cruel, so articulate and so emotionally stunted, as John Malkovich. I think he was superb, in total control and fully in touch with a person whose inability to love frightened himself.

I have seen Malkovich on stage before, in the 1990 West End production of Lanford Wilson’s Burn This, for which he was rightly lauded – which is only to say that I’m not starstruck about the actor, I just think he gave a superb performance.

I also think the rest of the cast was terrific. Ingeborga Dapkünaité was wonderful as the older Isabella, particularly at the beginning of the second act as she fruitlessly tried to get the old lothario to open his heart, only to be kept at a deliberate emotional distance. I don’t have much experience with opera, but if the singing is like that of soprano Martene Grimson and baritone Andrei Bondarenko I will gladly change that.

And the 41-piece version of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra sounded extraordinary to me, under the baton of Martin Haselböck. I think letting the players be visible (sometimes with full house lights up) and having some of them turn to occasionally watch the action on stage was a very clever and engaging tactic.

There is an obvious risk in a piece like The Giacomo Variations that allows theatre lovers to decry the musical interruptions and opera fanatics to abhor the talkie bits, but really, I would have thought a Sydney Festival audience could rise above that. The criticisms I’ve read seem to be emabarrassingly parochial, small-town and small-minded in nature.

Full credit to director Michael Sturminger for coming up with the concept and executing it in a way that amply rewards those who get it. I feel I did.

Hazel and I went to Sydney to see Lipsynch, the latest theatrical work by Robert Lepage‘s company Ex Machina to come to Australia.

Canadian Lepage has acquired a reputation as a global theatre practitioner, one who succeeds in creating theatre that is meaningful, modern and international.

His projects bring together actors, writers, designers and technicians from around the world, and give them the responsibility and the freedom to create great theatre.

This production of Lipsynch fits that bill.

It is extraordinary.

After eight and a half hours that was never less than rivetting, I found myself rising spontaneously to my feet with tears in my eyes to applaud loud and long.

As the performers and techs lined up on stage, the actor in me envied them for their participation in theatre of such ambition, such scope, such technique.

On this project, Ex Machina has worked with Théâtre Sans Frontières, based in Newcastle, England (the company with the Greek name is from Canada, the company with the French name is English. OK).

Lipsynch plays out in nine parts: nine stories that weave in and out of each other, overlapping in time, location and language to create an over-arching narrative sparked by the death of a young Nicaraguan woman. In the telling of her story and those of her son and seven other main characters, Lipsynch explores the concept of voice and its role in shaping the human condition.

Communication, information, language, accents, jargon, lip reading, aphasia, singing, poetry, audio recordings, radio, film, TV, film scripts, a baby crying, body noises after death, voice training, speech therapy, film dialogue dubbing, loss of voice, train announcements, giving voice to emotions, voicing opinions, providing a voice for the voiceless: each of the nine acts builds the story but also provides some new elements to consider regarding the voice.

Being Lepage, this production has high production values that embrace emerging technologies, clever costumes (and hair), elaborate perspective tricks, video on stage, surtitles, amazing lighting and an astounding set.

Ultimately, my full engagement with a theatrical production is usually informed by my impression of the actors. If the performers convince me I’ll forgive a whole bunch of minor stage sins, but if the actors don’t carry me away it doesn’t matter if the writing, direction, lighting, sound, set design or special effects are stupendous, it will leave me flat.

Lipsynch features nine actors of great skill and commitment. Each dominates one section as the title character, while playing one or more secondary roles in other sections plus a handful of walk-on cameo roles.

The realisations of the main characters are multi-layered, deeply personal, three dimensional portraits that develop as they age in the story. The actors’ ability to sustain performances of such intensity over such a long period of stage time is a tribute to their skill.

The secondary characters are also mostly convincing but the playing of some of the minor roles tended too much toward cartooning. Granted, the audience seemed to appreciate the opportunity to guffaw, and I have to assume it was deliberate since they’re the same actors who do such wonderful work in their main roles, but it sometimes seemed a bit out of place and distracting.

The actors are surrounded by ambitious sets in which the clever mechanics of advanced stage design are on display, ingenious devices evoking the interior and exterior of an aeroplane, a film set, some trains, some cars, a radio studio, a book shop and any number of living rooms, offices, cafés, restaurants and bars.

The entire production design embraces new media and technology and provides its characters with devices that are increasingly commonplace in our daily lives: mobile phones, computer screens, video recorders.

Lepage has said

“The voice is internal machinery that finds its ultimate expression outside the body but to examine it and try to understand it properly, one needs to pull away from the visual stimuli for a while and go where the voice is ‘seated’. As in our other shows, the form and structure of Lipsynch is baroque and unconstrained but this time the characters seem to have emerged from a place that is more profound.”

That place is not a happy place, although one not without hope. Lipsynch touches on some of the more devastating aspects of the modern human experience. The trafficking of women for sexual exploitation, child abuse, paedophilia, incest and rape are hardly hallmarks of an advanced civilisation.

Alzheimer’s, mental illness and brain tumours also come up in Lipsynch. Some of what the actors have to portray must be psychologically draining if they are to sustain conviction and not descend into caricature.

Many of these issues could be seen to be major concerns for humanity going into the 21st century. That Lipsynch is set variously in Canada, Germany, Nicaragua, England, USA and the Canary Islands between the mid-1970s and the present gives you some further idea of the scope of  this remarkable theatre project.

I should also say that there are a lot of laughs in this show. I found some of the deliberately “comic” moments to be a little constructed, but the audience was more than willing to go with anything that was funny, possibly as a form of nervous relief from some of the more serious stuff.

Personally, I derived more pleasure from some of the more quietly amusing aspects of Lipsynch: a clever plot twist here, a sly play on words there, a cinematic or literary reference slipped in.

All in all, the lengthy running time of the whole show was in no way a burden. It certainly worked for the story, and gave each performer ample time to take the spotlight.

That strategy will only work if every actor is capable of  carrying the story and themes forward with conviction and commitment.

The Lipsynch cast certainly does that.

Dawson is currently Producer with Merrigong Theatre Co in Wollongong, which no doubt influenced how this play came to be the only in-house production in the 2008 season of a predominantly entrepreneurial company, staging visiting productions at the IPAC theatre.

Thieves Like Us is set mostly in 1989 with some scenes set in 1985. In 1989, Shannon is a hacker trying to explain that she wants to code for the good guys, just like her idol, whose life’s work Shannon has busted into. Dr Holly Arrow, however, is not too pleased at having to fly to Australia to investigate this threat to her professional status as well as national security.

The 1985 scenes gives us background on Shannon as she rents a room in the household of Kathleen, a secretary and single mother to Robert, then 12 years old and in school shorts.

Nerdy nice guy Robert becomes friends with Shannon and she teaches him to use computers and modems to poke around in the 1s and 0s that make up the emerging internet. By 1989, Shannon has figured out how to get inside LUCY – a critically important computer thingy, the function or nature of which is not revealed – and tells its creator so, leading to her interrogation by this American coder-turned-government agent who has the power to tell Australian guards to turn off the cameras and threatens to send our young heroine to Pakistan.

Robert is also interviewed by Dr Arrow, on the basis that maybe he actually wrote the program that busted LUCY, as is Kath, who thus gets the opportunity to stand up for the rights of Australians charged with crimes in Australia to be threatened only by Australians.

There are significant bits of back story, plot detail and story structure that I won’t detail here so as not to spoil the story.

My overall reaction is that the play and the production were definitely worth seeing. The script has flaws ranging from superficial but annoying (“open source” is referred to in the play, when it didn’t emerge as a term for making software source code open to public scrutiny and manipulation until 1998) to some deeper structural issues, but it is a good story with well-developed characterisations and Dorney displays a gift for writing believable, naturalistic dialogue.

The staging was good, with the single set of the interrogation room with table and chairs dominated by an eight screen bank of video panels, variously displaying the room itself as seen through two security cameras also visible to the audience, various external and internal backdrops and visual effects used to underscore the action and dialogue, on at least one occasion to very good dramatic effect. The actors and lighting were relied on to set different scenes in Kath’s house. I do, however, question the use of the smoke machine – what was that supposed to achieve?

Of the four performers, I thought Amy Usherwood was excellent as Shannon. A recent NIDA graduate, she was assured in the way she inhabited the role and believable in her onstage relationships with the other characters. Shannon is a choice role for an up-and-coming actress, with the script giving plenty of room for nuance and interpretation as well as fodder for some onstage dynamics, if not fireworks. She’s a girl, she’s a geek, she’s got a story and she’s got ambition – what’s not to like? Usherwood has a good time with it, and has an appropriately strong stage presence. It certainly doesn’t hurt the story that she’s also very good looking.

Leon Cain was also terrific as Robbie. He manages the challenging transition from smarty-pants but nice 12-year-old (who comes back to kiss his Mum goodbye in case he gets hit by a car) to horny, geeky and convincingly world weary teenager (but still a nice boy). Cain is very relaxed in his role, which plays well against the intensity of Shannon, the strident protectiveness of Kath and the aggrieved menace of Holly. Robert is both observer and participant, drawn into the action and able to comment on it, and Cain seems to enjoy himself.

Laurie Foell‘s Holly was the least successful character in the performance I saw. While the role could be better written and the director could have helped establish a different characterisation, Foell’s performance delivered a Dr Arrow who was peculiarly and permanently panicked about events, rather than the icy cool implied in much of the script. She certainly wasn’t helped by being given some ridiculous bits of stage business, to which neither the character nor the actor seemed suited. I was most surprised by Foell’s lack of vocal projection, undermining the authority of the character and leaving me wondering whether I’d missed a plot point or two.

I actually found Holly Arrow to be potentially the most interesting character of the lot: what was it that turned her from an MIT-based hotshot programmer to a ready agent of US imperialism and baravado? Does she feel personally threatened by Shannon’s emergence as a possible rival? Does she fear that Shannon will also be sucked into becoming a government propaganda mouthpiece? Who taught her how to hold a gun? And what the hell does LUCY do?

I don’t know whose choice it was to have Holly presented as a trouser-and-waistcoat wearing, gun-toting, childless chauvinist but they should have had a bit more faith in the audience. Same goes for making her fierce and febrile rather than cool and calculating.

As well as her demand for Australian interrogation techniques, Ann Burbrook as Kathleen also gets to make a speech about short-sighted education systems that failed to come to grips with the emerging importance of computers. Kath actually carries quite a lot of overt social comment in her lines, but Burbrook does a great job with them, flinging them about with conviction, hands on hips, as her son’s future or her lifestyle choices or her country’s independence are threatened.

Burbrook and Cain also have some lovely moments together as mother and son, physically comfortable with each other and skipping lightly through the kind of exasperated banter that is convincing in the right hands.

Music played an important role in this production, used to generally great effect. I had hoped against hope that we wouldn’t hear from Mi-Sex but sadly Computer Games did make an appearance. This 1979 track was dated by 1985, forgotten by 1989 and utterly pointless in 2008. Oh but wait – it’s about computers, get it? Apart from that, there was some good use of specific tracks and ambient background music, well selected and mixed.

All in all, I think director Dawson did a pretty good job with this. Choosing to produce a play by an old friend described as “his first full-scale professional work” could have been a big mistake, but there is enough in the script to convince that Thieves Like Us was a good choice for Merrigong’s home-grown production. Dawson seems mostly to have things in hand, although I’m not convinced that some of the trouble that Foell gets into with Holly isn’t due to directorial choices. He certainly should have helped her more.

Dawson does make sure that the cast use the space to good effect, and David Thomas’ design supports him in that. It’s a very talky play, but there is enough movement to keep everyone interested – with the exception of one strange, elongated and spectacularly unsuccessful silent face-off between two characters that almost looks like the actors have forgotten their lines.

This production does a great job of avoiding traps associated with this subject matter. All too often, drama about computers is instantly dated or just unconvincing. Same goes for drama set in the recent past. Same goes for story lines that refer to political events. Dorney, Dawson et al take this on and meet the challenge well. It probably doesn’t hurt that on the one hand Dorney is also a director and Dawson is also a writer, and on the other that most of the creative team have experience with multimedia.

While I wasn’t surprised that this production – an untried original Australian play dealing with contemporary subject matter – debuted in IPAC’s smaller Bruce Gordon Theatre, I was surprised at the small audience turnout for opening night. Granted, it was a Monday night, but I hope there are better houses for the rest of the play’s run (until 13 May).

Thieves Like Us has brought to my attention at least three considerable new talents to watch in playwright Dorney and actors Usherwood and Cain, while underscoring what it a boon it was that theatrical multi-talent Burbrook moved to the Illawarra.

One final point: I have yet to work out to what the play’s title refers. Shannon is accused of theft but rightly denies it. I’m not aware of any other thieves in the play. Is the title a reference to New Order’s 1984 single, itself named for the 1974 Altman movie? Maybe it’s the 1937 Edward Anderson novel that Nicholas Ray in 1950 turned into the noir classic They Live By Night, which was Altman’s inspiration? There’s also a British sitcom of the same name, but I can’t see a connection with any of them to this play.

It’s a terrific piece with a great cast, led by Geoff Kelso (an actor who has long specialised in playing “exceedingly silly”) as the late, lamented Spike Milligan, a true master of comedy.

Spike is in an English mental hospital just when his Goon Show colleagues (Jonathan Biggins as Peter Sellers, David James as Harry Secombe and Tony Harvey as Wallace Greenslade) want him to write one more series of the anarchic and hugely influential comedy radio show.

I very much grew up with the Goons, listening to them on weekend radio, adopting the various characters and finding friendship with like-minded souls similarly addicted.

When you look at the principal performers’ subsequent work, it’s not hard to see that the Goon Show was an incredibly fortuitous melding of comic forces.

And of course, the Goons paved the way for the Monty Python crew and a host of other comics who redefined British comedy in the latter half of the 20th century.

This play examines the personal cost to Spike, the show’s main writer.

I found it unsettling to think about the whole “you have to be crazy to write crazy comedy” scenario that so nearly lost Mr Milligan to us altogether.

It’s hard to work out whether he was already unbalanced (perhaps by his English/Indian/Burmese upbringing and/or his WWII experiences) or lost touch with reality somewhere further along the track.

It was also very emotional for me to think that someone who brought me such joy and laughter during my formative years was in so much pain.

It’s also very pertinent for anyone involved in creative work (which web designing very definitely is) to think about the costs of that creativity – to themselves and their families.

Ying Tong is brilliantly written and would be worth seeing with any cast, but I do think they have found a near-perfect Australian group of performers.

It was nice to catch up with Tony Harvey, with whom I worked when we were both puppeteers for the Marionette Theatre of Australia some 24 years ago. He has a terrific stage presence – I doubt whether very many blokes that big in a dress and headscarf could bring home the emotional truth of Spike’s wife leaving him.

I also know Jonathan Biggins from his days in Newcastle, where his family was a major force in the local arts community. Peter Sellers is a tough role to play – he comes across as a hugely talented individual prepared to sacrifice Spike’s sanity for his own career. Biggins does it brilliantly.

Being the father of a three-year-old and a six-year-old, I know David James best from his Playschool appearances. Some will also recognise him from many (many, many) TV adverts. While not quite blessed with Harry Secombe’s formidable girth (the self-described Sir Cumference), James plays him to the hilt: the likeable, confident Welshman who forged a deep friendship with Spike during their military stint and also recognised Peter Sellers’ remarkable talents.

And Geoff Kelso. He must have drooled when he read this script. Not only can he be as silly as only Spike Milligan can be, but he gets to go deep beneath the performer’s facade to wrestle with the fears that beset all the greatest creative artists. It’s a standout performance. I suspect Spike would have approved.

Ying Tong is still touring the country – see it if you can.

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