Theatre / “Hir”, by Taylor Mac, directed by Blake Selmes. At Lieder Theatre, Goulburn, until April 22. Reviewed by HELEN MUSA.

FOR his first mainstage production as new artistic director of Goulburn‘s 132-year-old Lieder Theatre, Blake Selmes has chosen a play as confronting and repulsive as any in the contemporary repertoire.

US playwright Taylor Mac’s 2015 play “Hir” is structured around one of the most ancient riffs in all dramatic literature – the return of the protagonist after a harrowing period at war – think Aeschylus’s “Agamemnon”.

But this is neither a Greek tragedy nor a gentle, sentimental homecoming play. There is no uplifting experience achieved through pain and suffering.

When Isaac returns from Afghanistan, where his job was to scrape up body parts, he finds not the home of his dreams, but a filthy house where his formerly violent father is dribbling from a stroke, his little sister Maxine is transitioning to become Max and his mother, Paige, is conducting a one-woman revolution as she attempts to enslave and humiliate her former tormentor.

In his set, Selmes uses visual imagery as repulsive as the subject matter, to conjure up a family home in an isolated “no man’s land” housing estate built on landfill, now turned into a rubbish dump by a vengeful mum.

You might wonder at Selmes’s selection of such a play, but as well as plumbing the lower depths of human experience it is also richly funny, with a vein of extraordinary dialogue that sounds almost Irish in its inventive humour, and the choice makes the statement, loud and clear, that Lieder Theatre has its feet well and truly in the 21st century.

Brilliant though the words are, this is hardly a laugh a minute, but I noted that it was stimulating discussion in the audience at interval, a sign of the play’s impact.

The play has been widely praised in the queer community for its challenges to hetero-normative conformity and the title “Hir” is a nongendered word for “her/him”, but gender identity is only one subject in this exploration of trauma.

Selmes has transposed the play from America to Australia and the articulate dialogue doesn’t always sit easily in a country known for a more laconic rather than eloquent turn of phrase. Even so, the actors brought it to life, so that it ended up as a feast of acting from a tightly directed cast.

As Paige, Melissa Chandler turns in a bravely vicious performance untainted by false maternal sentimentality. Many actors would have been tempted to give her a softer edge.

“We don’t do houses, we don’t do chicken, we don’t do financial responsibility,” Paige proclaims as she proudly takes her triumphant revenge, while spouting all the “woke” phrases she’s picked up from Max.

Martin Sanders delivers a bravura performance, not deviating one iota throughout the evening from his role as the dribbling, incontinent father Arnold, reduced to a near-vegetable but still capable of spouting hateful insults.

Emmi Robinson has the pick of the roles as Max. Easily the most articulate funniest of the characters, Max as played by the versatile Robinson, reveals a vulnerable side that longs for escape and affection.

The play is held together by Harrison Treble as Isaac, whose tender dreams of home are linked to the very masculine violence, which he, Paige and Max deplore. Treble captures the shock, bewilderment and gradual bitter understanding of a serviceman touched by PTSD.

In the end, Isaac finds that there really is no place like the home he had imagined.