There had been some pretty crook reviews of this latest production of Sewell’s 25-year-old family melodrama so I was trepidatious. I also felt damned sorry for the actors who having just had a couple of scorchers in the press on the day were having to face the music that night. (I was an actor and know what it’s like to receive a god-awful review and then have to draw on every little bit of craft and camaraderie to get out up there again.) But as soon as the 5 actors in Hate appeared, I knew they were going to be fine, more than fine.

I first saw Sewell’s stringent expose of a mega-rich-political family in the throes of its final  meltdown, years ago when I was fresh out of drama school and was struck by its relentlessness and intelligence. It remains relentless and intelligent and it’s first half, although staged in a peculiarly unfocused and vague kind of way with no sense of place at all, is arresting. But it does eventually lose its grip.

Wealthy patriarch and politician (William Zappa is acid itself and someone should give him Lear sometime soon) has summoned his family to their country estate. Wife (Glenda Linscott’s  brittle and off-balance portrayal of the ‘good wife’ is excellent) and their three children, Ben Geurens, the disaffected outsider, Grant Piro, the edgy, ambitious stockbroker and Sara Wiseman, the favourite child who is all mixed up and appears to have gone off the rails.

All kids are in one way or another falling apart, furiously ambivalent about their dividing and conquering father and oddly unconcerned about their desperately sad mother.

There is a massive amount of talking in this play. Not that there is anything wrong with that. I remain, perhaps, one of the few reviewers around who still digs a good old-fashioned well-made-text-based play. And Sewell has proven pretty good at the form – The Blind Giant is Dancing, Myth, Propaganda and Disaster. Hate too is characteristically shot through with black humor, high-flame political rhetoric and a lot of pretty awful archetypes. It’s all compelling enough but by its second act Hate loses touch and becomes just too repetitive, didactic and overwrought for its own good.

Director Marion Potts has chosen a minimalist and metaphoric approach to this production and initially I thought she just wasn’t placing sufficient trust in the play. However, I did  come to appreciate her motives finally.

All the actors do a sterling job but the play’s denouement is just too big and messy, over stuffed with themes and implausible.

Still, Sewell always deserves a look. Even if it’s all pretty nasty stuff this is better than half the shows I saw last year and he is an Australian classic after all.

At The Malthouse Theatre Melbourne until 8 March

Mutation Theatre

at Theatre Works until March 2

Tom Holloway has written some terrific plays (Beyond the Neck, Red Sky Morning), and although this recent one, Love Me Tender, does possess Holloway’s signature subversive playfulness with narrative logic, overlapping, punchy dialogue, and ambitious anti-theatrics, it just isn’t, finally, all that satisfying.

From the sexualisation of girl-children to a contemporary culture suspicious of a paternal love that ‘ought not speak its name’ to allusions of Euripides’ Iphigenia, to the catastrophic Victorian bushfires of 4 years ago, this play is a real tease but without the pay off.

Amidst a kind of sooty, post apocalyptic Australian bush set – all fire damaged and arid – a father/firefighter, a mother, a policeman and 2 narrators all appear to improvise multiple stories by way of prompts, interjections and multiple ellipses. The ‘final’ story is unclear but at its tragic heart is that of a father’s moral dilemma re his daughter (signal Iphigenia).

It could be terrific. It might be provocative. It should be disquieting. But apart from intermittent flashes of luminous, choric narration and a couple of strong, sure performances from Sarah Ogden and Nick Pelomis, Love Me Tender left me hanging out for a single coherent narrative and some good old fashioned catharsis of the classic Euripidean-kind.

When this production does occasionally manage to get-ahold of Holloway’s obtuse, bold, fragmentary text and run with it, the black humor and wry social commentary are lean-forward-in-your-chair- compelling. But director, Patrick McCarthy (he’s been spot on in the past), does not anchor this script’s potentially delicious anarchy in a secure over all vision.