Wild Surmise at Malthouse Theatre

Alex searches for life on a distant moon; Daniel begs an answer of the poets they cannot provide. And while attentions are elsewhere, a marriage melts into memory. Dorothy Porter’s verse novel shifts from the vastness of space to the minute gaps between us.Love may come undone, but like light from a long-dead star its radiance can continue to move us. The late Porter is such a light, still illuminating Australia’s literary landscape. Wild Surmise is a conversation, and it is its maker’s inimitable voice ringing out among the many, both real and imagined, that chorus in this evocative work.Marion Potts and Jane Montgomery Griffiths last worked together on 2010’s Sappho… in 9 Fragments. They now realise this essentially Melbourne epic, in a work that reminds us that great poetry is not a thing, but an action.