Performance Monkey

Can you stage the internet? I'm just back from the sweetest, saddest performance I've seen in ages - and also the first that, in barely more than an hour, tells the story of the web's utopia turning to dystopia.

Chris Goode is an utterly beguiling theatre maker, and The Hippo World Guest Book opened Lean Upstream, a festival devoted to his boundary-blurring work. Goode's erudite, funny website burrows into ideas or sets them juggling. He is also the only person to have performed a play in my home. We Must Perform a Quirkafleeg was a deceptively rambling tour round geekboy obsession, full of facts and whimsy, but building towards pure wonder. At the close, he simply left the building, after having traced his outline in salt on the floor. We stepped around the salty silhouette for days, as if living in a Weegee crime scene. (He did, however, refuse food, a terrible rebuke to my inner Jewish mother, even though I pursued him round the room with platters of filo pastry.)

Homestyle suits Goode's manner - he's a big chap, with a shy boy's bulk and an enthusiasm that feels personal. He has, I remembered tonight at the beginning of The Hippo World Guest Book, the gentlest smile and softest voice, both wonderfully employed here to suggest the beaming hopes of early web communities. Other than a recorded introduction by Oliver Postgate, the late, solemn-toned master of British children's television, all the words come from the edited guestbook of an American hippo-fancier's website. Goode beautifully replicates the juddery spelling and grammar, recites the punctuation (exclamation mark) and obeys the convention that capital letters might suggest RANDOM SHOUTING. The early sections of the show are hippo-snortingly funny.

But a site designed to burble enthusiasm for all things hippoid (hippotudinous?) is soon rattled by recalcitrant schoolkids, glinting pornsters and people who really really dislike hippos - or, at least, who wish to vex those who love them. 'Osama bin Laden' is just one of the hippo haters. Defenders of the portly grey beast refute them, perhaps unwisely; their harried, desperately reasonable messages read like outtakes from Ban Ki-moon's email account.

Goode approaches the scamps, trolls and cyberanonymous postures perfectly seriously - as if even the crudest, daftest, attention-baiting message represents an expression of inner need. He beams sweetly whenever someone says they love hippos ('sooooo much'); or, with grave sincerity, he opines that hippos are less attractive than, say, Johnny Depp, or that hippos may be working with the squid to undermine humanity. Even the shouts seem wrenched from a place of distress (the net turns out to be a place where people can hear you scream) - Goode waggles his hands helplessly as the sudden volume jolts his body forwards.

All these voices slowly disappear, and the guest book becomes an unweeded garden, its visitors howling at an empty cybersky. The site grinds to a close, choked by spam - but even here, Goode excavates a nugget of hope, wistfully seizing on the filter-dodging, cliffhanger scraps of narrative embedded in autogenerated spam.

Goode prefaced the performance by saying it was the last time he'd perform the piece. But he has Postgate's recording, and a small stuffed hippo - someone should really persuade him to revive it again. And again. I felt melancholy by the end, and slipped away before Goode's post-performance conversation with the estimable critic Matt Trueman. Perhaps real people, chatting in a real room, would have cheered me up.

It has been a while since the performance monkey put paw to keyboard, but he has still been, y'know, seeing stuff in theatres. Some of these things have been terribly cool, and have involved magical oracles, properly good nervous breakdowns and St Paul's Cathedral. And some of these things have been terribly lame (including a ballerina asking us to share her therapy, a playwright mawkishly disinterring the dead, a once-sharp writer utterly losing the plot). But what I miss - what we all miss, surely? - is ecstasy.

It's fitting that the monkey's estivation coincided with the death of Pina Bausch. Shocking though the grim reaper's turning his attention to dance this summer, also taking out Merce and Jacko too, Bausch's death was the one I took personally. I'd never met her, but as a spectator her work took me to places I'd rarely experienced.

The headiest rush of summer reading came via a gift from my friend Martel, a part of the Melbourne University Press' cherishably neat On... series of books. Short, sharp and unnervingly orange, On Ecstasy is by Australian opera and theatre director Barrie Kosky. I've never seen a production by this opinion-cleaving enfant terrible, but I now have a good idea of what drives him: Kosky writes in a state of blissful delirium, from his early exposure to recordings of Madame Butterfly ('why did her voice caress my skin, sink into my flesh and whirl around in the middle of my stomach?') to applauding the way Mahler induces 'vertigo, claustrophobia and neurosis.'

Kosky wants performance (and, possibly, life) to operate as an exalted, alchemical sensorium, with no place for timid souls. By the time he described his productions of Wagner (The Flying Dutchman is 'a seasick phantasmagoria', and the score of Tristan and Isolde tears through text 'like a knife slashing meat'), I was almost giddy.

The most mind-boggling was his production of The Dybbuk, staged in an abandoned Melbourne warehouse, in which the heroine and her possessing spirit were exorcised, both in filthy underwear, first in a barrow of mucky potatoes, then rolling and screaming around the floor. Dead, their near-naked bodies hung from butcher's hooks, the heat of their frenzied bodies visibly steaming in the icy space. It was, Kosky confirms, 'one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen in the theatre.'

And that, my friends, is what I want from a night out. Cerebral theatre, architectural dance can both be alluring, and I love knotty, difficult things - Mark Morris' dense new piece to a mad Charles Ives score or Fiona Shaw's barnstorming stomp through Mother Courage have both set my head whirring in recent weeks, even if they leave my heart still. But is it so wrong to long for performance that sinks its teeth into your neck, shakes you till you are breathless and then leaves you, weeping and shuddering in a corner?

I'm just about to leave the house to see Michael Clark's new dance piece, set to his glam rock heroes, which promises disconcertingly intent dancers and music cranked up to eleven. That might do it...