It is often said that art is the lens through which we can better understand the world. It seems this adage is one Malthouse Theatre Artistic Director Matthew Lutton has taken to heart. His 2018 season is filled with work that asks questions anchored to the issues of the now, often allegorically but also with pointed directness. This is Lutton's third program for Malthouse, and by far his most explicitly political. "Next year's season is about how art can explore those questions of concern that are very much front and centre in many people's minds. We're living in a world with a whole load of questions - about freedom of speech, about identity politics, about human rights and who deserves them. And I think what theatre can do is not just wallow in doom and gloom, but actually present questions in a way that provokes and inspires," Lutton explains. "There's a lot of work next season that wrestles with these types of question, and while this isn't about finding answers necessarily, I hope a lot of the work also reveals a sense of survival and the ways in which we can navigate the moral murkiness in the world at the moment."
As a theatre maker, Lutton's vision has often been one of polarised scale. For example, his 2016 adaptation of Joan Lindsay's Picnic At Hanging Rock (which will have a revival as the first production of next year's offering) evoked the overwhelming oppression of a vast supernatural otherness, contained within the claustrophobic vessel of an icy Victorian parlour. A similar duality in focus, exploring the macro via the micro, is found in several of the productions on 2018's billing, notably in the most ambitious undertaking of the year, a new stage adaptation of Lars von Trier's cinematic masterpiece Melancholia. In a newly penned dramatisation by Melbourne-based playwright Declan Greene (Sisters Grimm, The Homosexuals) with Lutton slated to direct, Melancholia tells the story of two sisters whose fraught relationship, mired in debilitating depression, is brought into stark relief by the arrival of a rogue planet on a collision course with the Earth.
With the spectre of nuclear war becoming an increasingly common anxiety in recent months, a story envisioning an end to the world that we are helpless to avert feels unnervingly prescient. But more than this, Lutton sees these juxtaposed extremities of scale as an important way for theatre to bridge the personal and the political. "Many of the characters in next year's work, like Justine [from Melancholia], are incredibly complex individuals with rich psychological lives. They're not just some abstract idea on stage, they're people that you can empathise with," Lutton notes. "I think that's a very important facet of theatre; the characters we meet aren't just a totems or political statements. They're complex, flawed, passionate, human individuals who you can go on a rollercoaster ride with. What frames them - the contexts and challenges we see them face - is a way to introduce the metaphorical. That's what wraps around these stories. Because we're interested in exploring big ideas, these projects often sit very comfortably within that vision, because you have personal stories that audiences can relate to, but they can also reach out into broader commentaries and questions at the same time. I think having that multiplicity is incredibly important."
As with previous seasons, Lutton has turned to satire as a vehicle for comic relief that's nonethless plugged into the season's overarching themes. Race, gender and identity politics have all been topics examined through Malthouse's comedy offering in previous seasons, and this trend is carried through to next year's program. Idigenous comedy firebrand Nakkiah Lui, whose salacious and subversive sexploitation send-up Blaque Showgirls had audiences rolling in the aisles earlier this year, will collaborate with Declan Greene in 2018 on a new superhero fantasy cut through with gallows humour, Blackie Blackie Brown. Michelle Lee's Going Down offers another unlikely mashup, using a Sex And The City parody to examine the way our affluent Western society is desensitised to the often bleak realities of migrants and refugees. Alighting on another hot-button subject, Osamah Sami's Good Muslim Boy is a playful but also poigniant look at a man caught between two cultures, an outsider and product of both.
For Lutton, comedy isn't a way of disguising difficult issues. Moreover, humour can sharpen and demystify the politically contentious, he belives. "If, for example, you look at Good Muslim Boy, Osama creates a very intimate connection with his personal sense of negotiating the responsibilities of his religeon and his family, while trying at the same time to be a progressive, rebellious young Australian," Lutton notes. "It's a piece that is so irreverent and yet so understanding of culture and faith, and i think that offers us a piece of theatre in which you gain huge insights into what it means to be a migrant in Australia, what it means to be part of a conflicted culture, in a way that is incredibly entertaining and endearing."
Whereas the political ponderings of some of the next year's work is found in subtle undercurrents, the most dynamic and challenging politics of 2018's season comes courtesy of Belarus Free Theatre, the only theatre troupe in Europe classed as an "enemy of the state," blacklisted by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. The company visited Melbourne in 2016 with Burning Doors, a powerful and disturbing portrait of the torture and abuse faced by artist-activists in Russia and its Eastern Block allies.
"We wanted to bring them back because there a very few theatre companies able to hone the difficult questions facing our societies as profoundly as them. They've got a radar for it, and I think that's because they obviously have a history of their own persecution and of being enemies of the State," Lutton shares. The Belarus Free Theatre will work with a number of local artists - Gregory Fryer, Sophie Ross, Niharika Senapati, Hazem Shammas and Daniel Schlusser - to create a new work of political theatre, Trustees. Described as "a furious and insightful work about the mechanics of authority, self-censorship and freedom of speech in Australia," it's a work that will directly respond to many of the most contentious issues in the Australian cultural zeitgeist. "It's an exciting provocation," Lutton admits. "Their need to make work isn't driven by the normal markers of success or the normal yard sticks. What we've invited them to do, based on their instinct, is to come and work with Australian actors to ask those questions about where those limits or boundaries of freedoms in Australia exists, and which are worth fighting for."
Malthouse Theatre's 2018 season is on sale now.
