The Theft of Sita: A new wizard of Oz

Nigel Jamieson's magical new show takes Australian concerns and gives them an Indonesian twist. Such cross-pollination wasn't easy, he tells Paul Taylor

The British-born director Nigel Jamieson could scarcely have hoped for a more auspicious arrival in Sydney. He and his Australian wife had driven over from Adelaide in an old jalopy, and just as they were pulling in at four in the morning, the sky suddenly filled with fireworks. "We thought – hey, what a town, and we didn't even tell them we were coming!" In fact, this was the night they announced that Sydney had won the bid for the 2000 Olympic Games and, by a neat twist of fate, Jamieson ended up as one of the segment directors for the opening ceremony. "I was given a section from the arrival of Cook through to 1950s suburban Australia to have a crack at – some canvas..." The result was Tin Symphony which, along with dramatising the symbolic spread of corrugated iron, flew in 200 Ned Kellys in black boxes.

Jamieson – who, in this country, was head of Trickster Theatre and a sometime associate of the National – is in the ironic position of being a Pom who found his true directorial signature while helping Aussies wrestle with their own cultural identity. He landed there during the premiership of Paul Keating, and responded to that leader's rallying cry for artists to be at the centre of a national redefining process. Jamieson figured that Australia is such an outdoor culture that the only way of talking theatrically to a mass audience was through large-scale, site-specific work. This became his métier. His first venture was Red Square in Adelaide, which used a couple of hundred shipping containers to create an alfresco 4,000-seat nightclub, where there was a different show every night. "I'd just open the Yellow Pages and get, say, the Morris Minor Association to lend us 50 cars and put three choirs in them. They'd drive on, pop their heads out of the windows and sing 'The Hallelujah Chorus'."

Since then, Jamieson has been involved in such logistically complex ventures as producing a vertiginous dance using an ingenious system of counterweights on the six-shell roof of the Sydney Opera House, as a part of a worldwide millennium TV link-up; and co-directing a vast gathering in Alice Springs of indigenous elders at the Yeperenye Dreaming Federation Festival for the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association. A preoccupation with the need for Australians to stop thinking of themselves as "down under" and to "realign [themselves] to where [they] are actually located on the planet" runs through his work, and it is at the heart of The Theft of Sita, the spectacular show he is bringing this week to the Riverside Studios for Lift (London International Festival of Theatre).

Artists and jazz musicians from Australia join forces with puppet masters and gamelan players from their nearest neighbour, Indonesia, in a dazzling shadow-puppet play that progressively recasts the ancient Sanskrit story of The Ramayana in the light of contemporary events. In this retelling, Sita, a symbol of the natural world, is held captive by an evil businessman, Rawanna, a demon with more than a passing resemblance to Soeharto, the President who, in his 32-year reign, turned Indonesia into "Soeharto Inc" by the scale of his corruption and nepotism. Punkawan servants Tualen and Merdah, a pair of good-natured buffoons, attempt to help the beleaguered hero, King Rama, and go on a journey that takes them from the ancient forests to the nightmare slums and skyscrapers of the urban dystopia, Lanka.

As the story develops into a virtuoso vision of environmental destruction and corporate greed, there's a corresponding increase in the production's technical sophistication. The intricate and delicate shadow-creatures created by the flat, leather Indonesian puppets have to do battle with such modern monsters as the great log-chopping beast, which is a kind of death-factory on legs with a vicious spanner-mouth. These images are now jostled by projections, video animation, computer graphics and violent footage of the pro-democracy student demonstrations that helped to topple Soeharto in 1998. A show that opens with a traditional fire ceremony ends with Tualen and Merdah hovering nervously at the ballot box.

I caught The Theft of Sita at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and spoke to Nigel Jamieson the next morning. It's a tricky time to take any theatre piece to the Big Apple, and – with Muslims in Indonesia on the rampage in protest at the bombing of Afghanistan and with anthrax-anxious New Yorkers understandably hypersensitive to criticism – it might seem a particularly unpropitious moment to put on a strongly Indonesian-flavoured show that presents a skyscraper-skyline as an emblem of globalising greed. Yet such are the wit and spiritual buoyancy of the proceedings that The Theft of Sita has been, to Jamieson's delight, the sell-out hit of BAM's current Next Wave Down Under season.

The director explained the show's aesthetic. "In the 'Reformasi' period in Indonesia, the press was highly censored, so there were two ways people could communicate. One was via the internet, which I think was behind the revolution because it allowed all the students in different towns to co-ordinate collective action. The other was through the wayang kulit, or traditional shadow-puppet plays, which have long been a means of making coded political comments." Hence thetelling juxtaposition in Sita of puppet screens and computer screens, the traditional and the contemporary eventually collapsing into each other.

The very existence of the piece is testimony to the way that cross-cultural tensions can be transcended. Jamieson and his team, which includes composer Paul Grabowsky and designer Julian Crouch (of Shockheaded Peter fame) went to Bali in November 1999 at a time of considerable political edginess because of the East Timor crisis and the recent presidential elections. The first dalang, or puppet master, they had engaged decided he could not continue with the project and the hunt for a replacement ensued in a landscape of burning tyres and road-blocks. The new dalang, I Made Sidia, then had a traumatic introduction to Australia, when his puppets – traditionally held to have sacred powers – were confiscated by customs and sprayed with gas. ("Australians are very big on foreign pests," remarks Jamieson drily.) There were also problems at the outset with the music – an arresting cross-pollination of the Balinese gamelan orchestra and jazz. The former is tuned according to completely different principles to Western instruments, and the result was cacophony. The problem was overcome by a day of intense mutual listening – a model, says Jamieson, of cultures adjusting to each other.

But does a show like Sita, firmly on the international festival circuit (it opened the Hanover Expo), actually contribute to the cultural globalisation it condemns? The redeeming contrast, I'd argue, is with another puppetry piece, The Lion King, which shops around in various traditions (African chants, Asian shadow-play and so on) to create a commercial synthesis with a top-dressing of mindless, eco-friendly philosophy. That blockbuster began life as a Disney animation. Significantly, it is impossible to conceive of Sita as a movie cartoon or indeed in any other medium. Its meaning is inseparable from the practices it brings together and celebrates.

"I think our theatre has been obsessed for so long with seeing itself as an adjunct of British and American theatre," says Jamieson, who notes that it was perhaps easier to say goodbye British cuisine than to its drama. But there are riches closer to home geographically, and Sita makes a start at engaging with them. It performs, I add, another service for Oz. When you associate Australia and puppetry, you automatically think these days of the "genital origami" originated by those well-hung Ockers in Puppetry of the Penis. With a little help from its Indonesian friends, The Theft of Sita proves that Australia can align puppetry and politics.

'The Theft of Sita' is at Riverside Studios in London from 25-28 Oct; then touring to 24 Nov