The Paris Transcripts

Overheard conversation between two (2) males, American, approx. 22-28, 5’6”, D-Cup
[9:43am, Thurs. 11 Jun. ’09, auditor situated in hostel shower/'douche' cubicle C]

—Bry?
—Yeah bro?
—Bry?
—Yeah bro.
—Oh.
—(Snorting sounds w/ heavy-grade snot.)
—How long you gonna be bro?
—Oh, I don’t know. Just soapin’ up now.
(Proof positive of 'soaping' appears under cubicle side wall. Auditor adjusts position. Acoustics still good.)
—Hey Bry?
—Uh huh.
—What all fruit did you manage to find?
—Oh. Uh. Got some apples. Ate some of the apples. You’ll find a couple on your bed, along with those coupons. Don't lose them.
—Oh. Okay, great. Thanks. Oh but so Bry?
—Uh huh?
—You know that cucumber?
—(Deep sigh.) Yeah bro.
—We should get on and eat that. We should eat it today.
—Yeah.
—I was just thinking, you know, sooner or later we should just cut that guy in half.
—Yeah.
—Eat it as a snack.
—Yeah.
—You know how we’ve both been wantin’ a snack. Like, out?
—(Sigh.)
—(Sigh.)
—(Sigh.)
//

Direct conversation w/ one (1) male, American, approx. 27-31, 6’2”, robust build, cropped hair
[10:09am, Thurs. 11 Jun. ’09, auditor situated in hostel room 411 “L’Opera Bastille”, by window w/ view over canal]

—Hey dude.
—Hi.
—Hey guys, actually. Okay: Listen up: Have any of y’all [unintelligible] but is blue, with kind of rich yellow zigzagging patterns running down all its length, with kind of off-white piping, extremely plush, extremely high quality, cashmere-blend most likely, I think.
—You’re asking me if I’ve seen this?
—No, dude, I’m telling you it’s been already taken already, and if you do see it, like as in see some fucker in the hallway with it wearin’ it draped on him, what I want you to do is I want you to come tell me immediately, and tell him I’m lookin’ for his ass.
—Sure.
—Y’know, some fuckers got no respect. No respect.
—Someone used my towel the other day.
—Dude no surprises there. People’ll do anything, I’m tellin’ you. I just don’t touch just people’s stuff. I’m prepared.
—Right.
—I mean I got my sleepin’ bag, so’s if I got no sheets, I just sleep in my sleeping bag. I got my own towel, my own two towels, so’s if one of um goes a-walkabouts, I just still towel myself on off. I got my own pillow, so’s I can get a comfy night’s sleep no matter what-all goes on.
—Sure. No, I hear you.
—I made myself a resolution. I said to myself: I ain’t gonna touch other people’s stuff.
—No. Because it’s not nice when people do it to you.
—No. It ain’t. (No joke: a belch used at this point as punctuation.)
(Long pause.)
—Anyway. I’m off to go see the Ark-duh-Try-umpf [sic] today. You boys all stay safe now.
—Okay. Hey, sorry, do you have the time?
—(Consulting one of two [2] digital wristwatches attached to his day bag:) Ten-ten in the a.m. dude.
—Okay thanks.
//

Overheard conversation between two (2) males, one (1) American w/ weirdly high-pitched voice, one (1) Australian w/ sparse beard, approx. 18-23, 5’8”, DD-Cups both
[5:32pm, Wed. 10 Jun. ’09, auditor situated on hostel bar balcony by canal, canal water green and fast-moving]

—What did you make of John Kerry?
—No, so, no. He was gone be a good Presden. The thing is is that we studied him in school, and about his policies, and his policies were the same for most part as Presden Clinnan's. Presden Clinnan was not a good Presden.
—But if their policies were the same?
—(Long pause. American farts mildly. Fart not acknowledged by either party.)
—As in, if, okay: What I’m I think asking is, if their policy ah platforms were so ah so similar, why then the ah difference?
—Oh I see what your question is. I see what you mean by your question.
—Okay. Ha. Good. Sorry.
—The answer to what your question is is well looking now at Presden Bush. Now, people did not like Presden Bush. He was not a liked Presden. But you don’t change Presdence in a war situation. He got us in, he get us out.
—Right.
—You support them.
—Right.
—But so I was gonna say in what would my answer to your question be is that well that Presden Bush was not a good Presden, but he was a cazmadic [sic] Presden. He was so cazmadic. Even Presden Obama wrote in his book—
—Have you read his book?
—No but even Presden Obama who is so far I think a good Presden wrote in his book that Presden Bush was not a good Presden, but he was at parties and such a very cazmadic Presden, so cazmadic that everyone liked him, not as Presden, maybe no, but as more like a good frenn [sic].
—Right.
—But that he really changed whenever he talked about politics.
—Right.
—Presdence has to be cazmadic though. It’s tricky.
//

Attempted conversation w/ one (1.5, really) American female, 50<, better described as a collection of rudimentarily interconnected elliptical shapes than fat, makeup termed neatly by transcriber´s travelling companion “shotgun-applied”*, Byzantine coiffure, prenominate shapes decorated variously with (either) gold chain and(/or) animal-fur-print fabrics of multiple kinds, dizzying to look at, impossible not to
[Time ≈ 2:00pm, Fri. 11 Jun. ´09, transcriber situated on rented bicycle, GPS unknown: somewhere expensive- and impressive-looking (?)]

—Excusez-moi, ou est l—
—I don´t speak Fransch. [sic]
—Oh. Sorry. Hi. Me neither.
—Yeah.
—How are you?
—(Extremely odd facial expression—Disgust? Perturbation? …Hunger?)
—(Producing map, pointing:) Is this where we are?
—You don´t know?
—No. We´re sort of lost. We’re trying to ride through to around Notre Dame. Is this the Opera House?
—(Looking momentarily back at huge potential O.H., then back at questioner, expression shifting but still not really possible to describe:) You have. A map!
—Uhhh... Yes. I do. I have a map. But I don’t know where I am on the map.
—(Another facial reorganisation. Maybe it’s the makeup that makes it difficult to read. It's just hard to believe that this question could really lead to that kind of facial distortion. But so anyway, finally:) Well use your brains! Northern hemisphere! Afternoon! The sun!
—Yes, but—
—North is up!
—…Yes, but I still don´t know where we are.
—You have. A map! (Etc.)

*Just one of several increasingly mean-spirited attempts at description to emerge in discussion both immediately following, and throughout the day of, this maddeningly protracted and Beckettian exchange, which was really just way too confusing and long-winded and irritating and painful to forget, and but which qualities are also, ironically, the reasons why (along with obscene data roaming fees) it's not been reproduced here in toto.
//

Overheard conversation(s) between countless (200+, utterly overwhelming) Americans of mixed sex and age and B.M.I.
[Time ≈ 4:30pm, Fri. 11 Jun. ’09, auditor in Catacombs ≈ 100m underneath Paris, moody darkness, drippy, low-hanging ceiling, skulls of millions staring out indifferently from behind inscriptions in Latin and French on heavy stone plaques]

—(Impossible to record verbatim the cacophony of nervous and [self-]distracting laughter, exhaustive medico-technical descriptions of long-standing podiatric issues, twanging references to off-site activities and persons, occasional ghost noises, less occasional and exaggeratedly girlish squeals, punning, Yorricking, and the endlessly reverberating seismic thrum of innumerable fast-marching, podiatrically-ailing American feet "hustlin' up" on ancient, sacred, subterranean stone, along with that buzzy insectile sound that precedes a strobing red-eye reduc. camera flash, of which latter noise, and associated lightshow, the frequency was such that auditor can only conclude the goal was to avoid any and all forms of darkness by whatever means possible, battery-life and interred restless dead and fellow Catacombers be damned, and but whose effect was in fact to render the piled, horrific ossuary underneath Paris something like an orgy in an x-ray machine)
//

These transcripts were taken in Paris in June '09. There are more of them. They're going to be placed in a larger essay about travel (still early W.I.P.; I'm posting this from Budapest), but they're also (harmless enough) fun, I hope, on their own.

Essay: 438

The bus whimpers in the heat and the view through the windshield cants. The doors open. Sweaty, tired-looking passengers file in two-by-two. I’m sitting on the rightmost fold-down seat of the handicapped/elderly/pregnant alcove. Into the seat next to me—i.e. the centremost seat, which I should’ve registered immediately as odd since the leftmost was available and the bus not crowded—slumps a man who is, at a glance, which is all I give him, forty-ish and average in enough ways to not distract me from what I’m doing, which is reading a book. He’s holding one of those environmentally friendly greenbags—contents unknown, the subject of later conjecture—close to his chest.

The doors close. The bus pulls out from the curb.

Then he asks me: “What’re you reading there?”

(I should preface what follows by saying: I honestly don’t know whether I’m just weird in this respect, but I find anything more than the most generic and, even then, totally necessary of conversations held in public spaces pretty uncomfortable. No, painfully uncomfortable. Elevators, buses, trains or train platforms, even cabs, in which it seems there’s this tacit understanding that elevated price plus single-party occupancy equals private space—these are not places where one should hold involved, opinionated discussions. Please understand, this attitude doesn’t come from some precious, crackpot regard for my own privacy; it has grown out of observation. How many times have I cringed at hearing some crusty young woman enumerate and unflinchingly describe her recent nocturnal shenanigans to an enthusiastic and equally crusty girlfriend? How many times have I sat, shoulders rounded, listening to some young hood triage whom of his acquaintance he would stab and whom he would simply smash, given the chance? How many times have I been mortified, over the course of a short bus ride, to come to know the innermost workings of a stranger’s family, or the outermost working of a stranger’s bowels, or a stranger’s innermost feelings about the outermost workings of an elderly family member’s bowels, as intimately as my own? More intimately by far than the workings of my own elderly family members’ bowels? Of course, one might posit that, on the face of it, this is all a far cry from discussing what someone is reading, but the accuracy of that claim really depends on the people talking and the length of their conversation. Suffice it to say this man was nuts, and would swiftly demonstrate it, and the bus was moving slowly enough that, by the end of our time together, there was—to me, at least—little qualitative difference between what we had discussed and any number of discussions I’ve overheard concerning sex, stabbings, shit or any combination of the three. Anyway.)

“What’re you reading there?”

I close my book and show him the front cover. He tilts his head back and squints down at the title, mouthing its syllables as he reads.

“Ahhh,” he says. “So it’d be a World War Two thing!”

“Yeah” I tell him. “It’s set in Germany and Russia.”

“Well, you know that’s where the war was lost. Or so they say.”

I smile, and, making a bit of a broad display of opening the book again, return to reading. After a couple of paragraphs, though, I realise that, while my eyes are following the words, I’m not really absorbing anything. The reason for this, I also then realise, is that I’m pretty sure I can feel his eyes on me. On my head. After a long and eventually disappointing moment spent hoping this feeling will go away, I look up.

He is indeed staring. At my head.

“Is it any good?” he asks.

“I’ve only just begun,” I say. “But so far, yeah. It’s good.”

He moves closer—not leans in, moves closer. As in, uproots himself and replants several inches across his seat, so part of his thigh is now touching mine. For the first time, now, I take a good look at him. His pupils are quivering like a pet rock’s. He is close enough that I can feel the heat of his breath on my face. There is no booze on it, but something like a combination of cured meats and carton eggnog. His upper lip has clearly, bizarrely, been shaved more recently than the rest of his beard. My original guess of forty-ish probably holds, but average? This is rapidly becoming less likely.

“So you like books set in World War Two, do you?” he asks.

I clear my throat. “I guess. I mean, not specifically. I really haven’t read that many.”

He seems to consider this answer—or, rather, me and my having offered it—for a long time. Without breaking his stare, which seems now to be focussed on either my chin or larynx, he adjusts the angle of his head several times. He is considering me very carefully. Whatever the criteria of these judgments, I seem to at least qualify for the final test, because he eventually says: “I’m actually a fan of a trilogy set in World War Two.”

“Oh?”

“Yes.” His tone is tentative, cautious. He cycles through several more readjustments of the position his head, not yet convinced, it seems, that I can be trusted. “By an Australian author. Perhaps you’ve heard of him.” His head drops suddenly forward. He stares out through his eyebrows. “John Birmingham.”

“I haven’t heard of him,” I answer, trying—I notice this only after I’ve said it—to sound innocent.

Not that this elucidates anything, but I’ll later look up John Birmingham and discover that, in addition to the Axis of Time trilogy to which my fellow traveller was referring, his oeuvre includes the non-fiction novel He Died With A Felafel In His Hand, from which the well-known movie of the same name was adapted in the ‘90s, Leviathan: An Unauthorised Biography of Sydney, and How To Be A Man, a “semi-humorous guide to contemporary masculinity”. When Germaine Greer wrote an allegedly tactless article for The Guardian about Steve Irwin’s death, Birmingham drew criticism in the blogosphere for publishing a response in which he called Greer a “childless”, “feral hag”; a “poorly-sketched caricature of a harridan”; and a “wretched bag lady” with a “redundant fright-mask” and a “creepy sexual consideration” for “hairless boys”. Anyway, the path of this reader to that author remains mystifying, but the Wikipedia article on Birmingham sure didn’t render this guy’s admiration any less troubling.

“He’s very good,” says the man. “The Axis books in particular.”

“Oh.”

“Do you want to know what they’re called?”

The part of me that suspects my safety could depend on the answer replies: “Sure.”

•

How’s this for an ironic double-whammy: the other book in my bag—one I don’t read in public because of its unfortunate emblazonment with a somewhat self-helpy-sounding title—is How To Be Alone, a collection or more of less curmudgeonly (and, albeit to my slight consternation thereby, spot-on) essays by U.S. writer Jonathan Franzen. Consider now this excerpt from Imperial Bedroom, one piece in that collection:

“If privacy depends upon an expectation of invisibility, the expectation of visibility is what defines a public space. My ‘sense of privacy’ functions to keep the public out of the private and to keep the private out of the public. A kind of mental Border collie yelps in distress when I feel that the line between the two has been breached. This is why the violation of a public space is so similar, as an experience, to the violation of privacy. I walk past a man taking a leak on a sidewalk in broad daylight (delivery-truck drivers can be especially righteous in their ‘Ya gotta go, ya gotta go’ philosophy of bladder management), and although the man with the yawning fly is ostensibly the one whose privacy is compromised by the leak, I’m the one who feels the impingement. Flashers and sexual harassers and fellators on the pier and self-explainers on the crosstown bus all similarly assault our sense of the ‘public’ by exposing themselves.”

Things have rather worsened since Franzen wrote those words in 1998. Notwithstanding his examples at the end of the excerpt, his piece is generally concerned with the nature of public figuredom. No longer, however, is the infliction of the private on the public (or, perhaps more aptly, the dissolution of the line separating the two; the putting-down of the long-since-arthritic Border collie) exclusively the burden or purview of celebrity. I daresay Franzen isn’t aboard the online networking phenomenon, but the emotionally incontinent Facebook status-maker is the first of several late ‘noughties personages I’d add to his list. More and more, it seems to me, the desire of the private person, the individual, to make herself known trumps all observance for the very principles that allow personalities to grow distinct, to self-determine, to be individual in the first place.

To attempt a comprehensive assessment of the roots of this problem (i.e. ‘Why are people so goddamn lonely?’) is quite beyond the scope of this essay, but intuition tells me that the cult of celebrity has a lot to answer for, along with the entertainments through which that cult’s godheads are announced and dogma promulgated: overwhelming indicators of just how utterly pointless a life unobserved is. So too does the frightening mindlessness of so many emerging pastimes (q.v. the Facebook status-maker); pastimes as insulting as they are entertaining, as lonesome as they are frenetically ‘sociable’, as ruthlessly eugenic as they are seductively inclusive. Along, of course, with our equally mindless, our even grateful, acquiescence to their charms; our willingness to be convinced that the absence of thought is tantamount to the presence of certainty.

Ugliest of all, though, and most relevant here, is the way that these diversions—and please consider the meaning of that word—are not only forcing people to codify their personalities into the more or less banal list of (forgive the cliché, but usually consumerist) preferences demanded by the templates (‘profile’—another word whose several entendres warrant further consideration) within which they are forced so often, in their daily lives, to summarise—and, more sadly, express—themselves, but also producing a particular kind of person: one either unable to moderate, or worse, unable to gauge the appropriateness of, his strong—but, note, never fulfilling—urge to broadcast these preferences in public; his need, welling from some deep, stifled, human place, to say ‘I am here. I am this’. (Other contributions from the public transport zoo to the revised Franzen list: the mobile phone loud-talker; the soon-to-be-deaf iPodist; his dirtbag cousin, the obnoxious-[usually-aggressively-antisocial-]music-played-over-speakers passenger; the [mercifully-less-frequent-but-watch-this-space] proselytising God- botherer).

It seems to me that public transport is perhaps the most distinct of the few corporeal loci where you may find these wounded bleeding; where you may hear lives of quiet desperation growing louder. To those who’d deem my friend from bus 438 not just insane but simply insane, synecdochic of, or analogous to, nothing, I quote Nora Ephron, whose filmography verifies her a font of popular wisdom: “Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy.”

•

“World War Two-Point-One, Two-Point-Two and World War Two-Point-Three,” he laughs. His eyes widen like a stunned lemur’s. There’s apparently something hugely funny that I don’t get about the point-* of the names. The bus doesn’t seem to be moving at all. I do that polite thing where you laugh through your nose and sort of bob your head with a reverse-nod.

There is an awkward pause.

“Don’t you want to know the story?” he asks.

God help me. “Sure.”

I give up on reading now. I bookmark my page and, placing the book on my lap, fold my hands across it.

“Okay,” he says. “This fleet of ships—wait, no, to set up, just quickly: the year is 2020, the world is a very different place—but so this fleet of ships is sent back, using a form of time travel, by the U.N. To the past. To WWII.” (“Double-ya,-double-ya-too”—the acronym stated with veteran’s familiarity.)

He must catch my eyebrows doing something involuntary.

“I’ve corresponded with Birmingham about certain of the technical details,” he assures me. “It’s all thoroughly researched. Playfully realised, but veracious.”

“I see.”

“But so with the ships,” he continues. “They’re found. Some go to the British, some go to the Germans. Others, to the Yanks. The ships are quite amazing to all of them, naturally. The technology. The Russians get a couple, too. This is to be expected.” As he says all this, he holds the shopping bag tight to himself and uses his free hand to draw in the air what I imagine he imagines to be a map of Europe. A number of liberties are taken with the geography. Germany is placed some three air-inches northwest of England. The U.S. is situated either on the itchy left flank of his nose or at arm’s-length, near the face of an elderly woman watching us blankly from across the aisle. Russia is a shrugged curlicue somewhere in the southern hemisphere. “So anyway. Da-da-da. The Course of The War is Changed. But. In some ways, more important than the effect of these new technologies on the outcomes of the war, are the little touches, the fun kind of flourishes Birmingham uses to colour it all in.”

A silence distends. Then me: “Oh?”

“Mm. Yes. Like, for instance, the men of the various nations find a bunch of literature onboard the ships, one instance of which finds them in possession of a book in which J. Edgar Hoover is revealed to be a raving, raving faggot.” To be true to his tone, we might even italicise the second “raving” here, which conjures, for me at least, an image of a J. Edgar not simply homosexual in a time and occupation in which homosexuality was definitely not okay, but rabidly so: mouth-frothingly, secretly-his-wife’s-brassiere-donningly gay; limp enough of wrist to alter the course not only of Birmingham’s novel, but the conflict itself, and thereby the course of human history: frustrating the efforts of the burgeoning communist movement at home and abroad and, alternately (or even simultaneously) displaying an almost touching concern over whether his butt looks big in this thing. Which may or may not be true to life (i.e. playfully realised, but veracious), but is either way not the point. The point is that he says this last bit really loud—Tourette’s loud—and the word “faggot”, enunciated with what could or could not be deliberately ironic precision, cuts through the muggy air and murmurous undercurrent of otherwise sane passenger noise, and all but echoes in the long moment of bus-wide silence it provokes.

I swallow.

“So you enjoyed it?” I ask.

“As revisionist histories go, it’s a good one.”

The bus lurches forward several inches and stops again.

He says, “I can tell you more. Where are you getting off?”

This is an excerpt from a longer work in progress.

Looking the Storm in its Eye

In his introduction to David Foster Wallace's 1996 novel Infinite Jest, American writer Dave Eggers likens the book to a "spaceship with no recognisable components, no rivets or bolts, no entry points, no way to take it apart. It is very shiny, and has no discernible flaws. If you could somehow smash it into smaller pieces, there would certainly be no way to put it back together again. It simply is."

When the Rain Stops Falling, Andrew Bovell's 2008 play, which already has a Victorian Premier's Award to its credit, and which has just enjoyed virtually simultaneous runs with the STC in Sydney and at the Almeida in London, warrants similar marvelling. I saw the latter production last week. This is a deeply moving piece of writing, realised by a freakishly talented cast. With it, Bovell secures his place as one of our most exciting creative minds.

The story of the play spans two continents and eight decades. As Diana Simmonds put it in her review of the world premiere Adelaide Festival production:

"Essentially, over the course of approximately two hours, WTRSF follows Henry, banished from England in the 1960s to the Coorong and thence to Alice Springs by his wife Elizabeth. At the same time, but nearly 20 years later, the audience accompanies his son, Gabriel, just seven years old at the time of his father's disappearance on his own journey to Australia in search of answers. He doesn't know what the audience knows, however, because as well as having seen him say goodbye to his bitter, prematurely-aged mother Elizabeth, her relationship with her young husband has already been enacted by her younger self. Are you still with me?

"In Australia, separate and synchronous, both Henry and Gabriel connect with a young girl, Gabrielle, and her adult self. Supposedly peripheral but actually central to Gabrielle's life is a local Coorong farmer, Joe. Concurrently and together the small incidents and coincidences of their lives combine to dramatically propel the story into the future—2039—when climate change seems to have taken a grip on human existence even as an older and sadder Gabrielle is losing her grip on her own. What happens in the course of the unravelling of these interlinked lives are the usual nothings and catastrophic everythings that constitute 'ordinary people'."

A fine description of an at times bafflingly complex plot. Equally important are the parentheses in which the story's framed. WTRSF’s is a world inverted: one in which the sky is a "carpet of stars", in which snow falls on Uluru, in which fish fall fortuitously from the heavens, in which the future screams at the past. A world in which men teach their fathers how to be sons, and fathers discover that, in fathering, they unwittingly bequeath their own shadows.

Forgive a dual filmic comparison, but it puts me in mind of Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men and PT Anderson's Magnolia. The former for its denial-spiked vision of an apocalypse nigh, a future dumbstruck with grief at its own passing; the latter for its parallel narratives, its insistence on meaning in coincidence, and its ominous mantra: "we may be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us".

WTRSF shares tendencies with Bovell's breakout 1996 piece, Speaking in Tongues, which he later adapted for the 2001 film Lantana: the fugue structures, the ostinato'd aphorisms, the blinkered lives passing by truth in history's narrow, coda'd hallways. WTRSF, however, is a far more mature work. Bovell's structural gameplaying, at times cutesy-clever in SIT, is now put to earnest work on an investigation of guilt and regret, of time's heavily overstated ability to heal wounds, of history's will to repeat itself, of the way our families both create and destroy us, of the slow rot of secrets kept; of the tyrannies of a certain kind of distance, and of how our dire need for change is goose-stepped by our inability to know how we must. His writing is incandescently intelligent. And it kicks you in the heart.

Perhaps my only criticism, born of this very praise: Bovell sometimes overcooks it. His line-by-line cleverness, his ear for that defining phrase, sometimes reminds us more of his presence than perhaps he realises. And while I enjoy these belletristic engine-revs, and want very much to annoy the woman next to me by trying to scribble them down in the dark, I don't for a moment believe they came from any other brain than Bovell's, and, as a result, they occasionally risk making mouthpieces of otherwise exceptionally rounded, painstakingly developed characters.

In this vein, you can almost always feel when a monologue's coming on. No matter how erudite these prove (one leans heavily on Diderot), or to what lapidary gleam Bovell’s polished them, they’re often prolix and almost always disruptive to the play’s BPM, and their threat to becalm the plot is averted only by the actorly chops of the cast. Point being, he might do better to lay off the urge to be ingenious once in a while, as these moments account for few of play's most satisfying—or, indeed, cleverest—, which are usually those more subtly executed; those in which we're beguiled by rhythm, disarmed by seeming effortlessness.

A number of the London reviews have commented on its length. The Independent's Michael Coveney, giving the play a mean-spirited two stars, complained that it "runs for a bladder-bursting two-and-a-quarter hours", with no interval. Which it does. But firstly (and with due respect to the unknowable health of Coveney's kidneys), it didn't feel like two-and-a-quarter hours to me.

Secondly, it strikes me that, as a formal choice, the absence of an interval is designed not simply to serve the pace and elegant musical structures at work. Bovell knows far too well how theatre works not to have considered that, unbroken, even the most entertaining two-plus hours is an ask of the old tookus and lumbar. It's my belief that he, like David Wallace, to at least some degree wants the show to feel long and hard, because what he's trying to get at is difficult to understand and takes place over long, hard-to-conceive-of periods of time. He wants his narrative vault to be exactly as unbreakable as the mysteries of his characters' lives; as inescapable as the inevitabilities to which their actions speed them.

This goes, too, for the initial difficulties the audience must face in establishing the connections between characters, decades: just as the recognitions with which the play is concerned elude us to the ruin of our own lives, so too do the connections that define us resist easy limning: connections between people, between places, between generations, between crimes that exist always inches outside our field of vision, or on the tips of our tongues.

Coveney, in that same review, said, "There isn't much in the way of light relief, unless you count the repetitive and significant remarks about rainfall across the world". It's true. There aren't too many jokes. But who wants them? The cycles and symmetries that Bovell creates lend themselves to a far more adult humour. Think Kafka by way of Kushner. Bovell always puts his audience in the know ahead of his characters, without ever descending into melodrama or suspense for its own sake. The ironies of which this position grants us a view are a rare kind of gift: he makes of his audience an Olympus, complicit by prescience and bound spectatorship in the fates of those mortals living onstage. This is perhaps Bovell’s greatest strength as a writer, his greatest compliment to us as an audience: he knows how to entertain, but means not once to baby us.

Director Michael Attenborough moves the action around a single table and set of chairs (design: Miriam Buether). Colin Grenfell's lighting is subtle and consistent, helping draw together into a single universe the disparate periods in which the action is set. Rain falls in a fine, ethereal mist at several points during the show, to really eerie effect. If there's any real wizardry going on here, however, it's in whatever measures have been taken to avoid cast members slipping. Stephen Warbeck accents the scene changes and heralds woes to come with a haunting and increasingly discordant piano score.

Perhaps it's a case, though, of the production team having done their work too well. The absence of technical flash leaves us to focus on the players.

Simon Burke is revealed as a really seriously world-class actor. His performance is both muscular and sensitive as the appropriately named (i.e. average) Joe, who is by design a nonentity; less, in some ways, a character in his own right than a vector for another. There's a scene in which Gabrielle, Joe's wife of 25 years, appraises his development as a lover: having, at the start, come at her as if "shearing a sheep", he has now grown "tender". Both capacities are expressed in Burke's performance, each bubbling just beneath the surface of the other. His range aside, though, what really distinguishes Burke here is his deep understanding not only his character's pains and joys, and the compromises they demand, but also of where they fit in the story's topography. Rare to see a performance of this intensity not, whether by necessity or intent, elbowing everything else out of the spotlight.

Similar praise must go to Phoebe Nicholls as the emotionally hermetic older Elizabeth Law. This is really the character with whom we go on the biggest rollercoaster, and Nicholls has the goods to keep us with her every inch of the way. She has poise uncommon even in mature actors; a dignity whose backbone is in not caring a damn if we like her. As a result, her turn is totally uncompromising and scarily believable. Elizabeth's peripeteias are the play's most shocking; all the more so for Nicholls' near-feline ability to provoke an audience to do the hard work to access her.

Jonathan Cullen, as the doomed Henry Law, has one absolutely shattering scene midway with Lisa Dillon as the younger Elizabeth Law: characters tearing themselves and each other apart. This is the first moment in a lengthy sequence that finds careful plot setups efflorescing, the first domino in the chain to tip. It's a long, dynamic and demanding scene whose performance made my palms sweat. Tom Mison, an English actor who plays the younger Gabriel, is altogether too handsome and talented and tall and apparently likeable to not loathe utterly and immediately. He was playing a guy whose last name is Law, and he looks not unlike Jude Law, and his performance was impeccably crafted, and heartbreakingly authentic, and I wish him only all the ill in the world.

What's really interesting to consider is whether—or, better, to what extent—Bovell intends WTRSF as a work of allegory. I'm not sure how concerned he is with the slew of actual-factual cataclysms currently pending (e.g., I don't believe the aforementioned bladder issue is a cunning attempt to make us consider our emissions), but nor do I think the catastrophe to which WTRSF points is a purely personal one.

One theory: chuck out the specific ends—Armageddon in general will suffice—and we might read it as a cautionary fable directed not so much at people, but at citizens. At nations. Something at which no British critic has thus far been game to point, no Australian has likely bothered to think up, and whose fact Bovell himself has explicated only in the most oblique ways, is the striking manner in which WTRSF seems to refer to deep and old wounds in the relationship between Britain and Australia. So perhaps: a suggestion that whatever large and new problems the world has to face, they always abut its oldest ones, and these must be faced first, at last; a reminder that every apocalypse is a personal one.

I'd be willing to admit this is an imaginative overreach—the product of searching, like Bovell, for the best hidden and most significant connections—if I thought he believed in accidents. If he weren't in such control, and didn't seem so committed to encoding his work with clues—or things that damned well look like clues—at every level. If not for that non-sequitur in his writer's notes about being ashamed of England and Australia sharing a head of state. If not for his frankness in same: "our ancestors are, for some, those whom you sent away or those who sought to escape the constraints of British society. We are a nation of exiles. And like all exiles we yearn for the place from which we have been sent whilst regarding it with a degree of suspicion because on some deep level we know that it has rejected us".

Whether I'm even getting warm with this or not, there's a synchronicity at work in the dual Sydney/London productions that would not be out of place in the universe of the play itself, and it's one that sees WTRSF doing that to which all theatre ultimately aspires. Ironically, beautifully, the rules and signs that define its fictional world have transcended themselves; the play has grown into dialogue beyond its four walls, longer than its two-and-a-quarter hours. Its simultaneous appearance in the two countries its story inhabits, the two at which it might well be aimed, has rendered its text synecdochic of its own contents. It has become just what it describes and aims to incite.

WTRSF's characters keep telling us that having nothing to say is just another way of having so much to say that you don’t know where to begin. “In the end”, however, Bovell concedes in his notes, “the play must speak for itself of course and be responded to accordingly by its audience… without whom there is no theatre”.

Bovell has found a place to begin. If you didn't catch it, don't worry—you'll get another chance. When you do, go listen. Be that audience.

When the Rain Stops Falling by Andrew Bovell, Almeida Theatre, London, 14 May-4 July 2009.