REVIEWS:

There's a famous monument at the corner of Victoria and Russell streets, opposite Trades Hall, that celebrates the eight-hour day and its mantra of eight hours' labour, eight hours' recreation and eight hours' rest.

Yet as most of Kevin Rudd's "working families" know, in recent years this neat formula has become a rather fanciful ideal that no longer bears any relationship to their lengthening working day.

This increasing problem of work-life balance is at the core of Ben Ellis' The Zombie State, a co-production between Melbourne Workers Theatre and Melbourne University Student Union.

Ellis presents us with a series of loosely connected scenes of contemporary life - a hospital queue, a bus ride, a nightclub, a kitchen table discussion - all designed to show how the imperative to work longer hours is stripping away people's humanity, and turning them into "zombies".

Throughout it all flits the figure of Prime Minster Kevin, reassuring everyone that his government is doing its best to enable them to work, work, work. Whether there is any time left to be a "family" is of course the moot point.

Despite The Zombie State's connections to actual society, the play is anything but realist in style. Ellis employs the techniques of "verbatim theatre", where samples of recorded speech are reassembled as play scripts. This lends an immediacy and authenticity to the scenes, though the collage effect limits the development of dialogue and scene.

Kate Davis' design neatly imagines the various scenarios, building to an apocalyptic vision of society as asylum, and invoking the nightmare depravations of Hogarth's "Gin Lane".

Actors Syd Brisbane and Peta Brady anchor the production with solid performances, and the rest of the student cast bring varying degrees of clarity to their roles. Director Daniel Schlusser maintains a mostly effective grip on his large ensemble, though it is hard to keep focus and often difficult to tell who is speaking on stage.

Despite the limitations then, with its mix of agit prop and community theatre, Ellis' The Zombie State brings a necessary critique to an issue of vital concern.

Much of what passes for live theatre these days doesn't really belong on the stage.

This frozen-solid story-telling would be better filmed, or written up as a column in a magazine.  It's soap opera and sitcom and op-ed that doesn't need to be witnessed.  The "love" experience adds nothing.

The Zombie State, then, is an embarrassment to the rest.  To undead theatre that abounds.

Writer Ben Ellis and director Daniel Schlusser have gene-spliced political satire, good ol' fashioned parable and teen horror to make a play that is laugh-out-loud funny, tragic and disturbing. Sometimes all at once. And it couldn't exist in any other medium.  It's live on stage or nothing.

The Zombie State makes you sit up and lean forward.  Makes you wish you'd sat in the front row.  The pro-am cast is huge but each and every one of the performers has created something unique, something really memorable.

There's an exciting vision here, that extends from Kate Davis' evocative designs to the excellent make-up. (Half the cast are brain-eating zombies the rest are politicians!)

In a strong year of theatre, The Zombie State is right up there...among the best of the best.