The culture wars continue

So yesterday the Malthouse launches what is, on first sight, its best balanced season yet, demonstrating diversity, depth and - addressing a weak spot - a lot of work by women. It includes classical tragedy (Kosky's production of Euripides' The Women of Troy, with Robyn Nevin and Melita Jurisic) and a new Indigneous play (Dallas Winmar's Yibiyung, directed by Wesley Enoch). It includes dance (Shaun Parker's Blue Love), music theatre by Meow Meow (Vamp) and a remount of Ranter's exquisite Holiday. They've invited the bad boys from Black Lung in for a residency at the Tower. And - to my mind one of the biggest attractions - they've programmed Jenny Kemp's long-awaited new show, Kitten.

And what do we hear from the Age? That its "aesthetic vision is too limited" and lacks "diversity"! How much diversity do you want? But hey. Look at the byline. It's no surprise that this beat up is by Robin Usher, who has never permitted the facts to get in the way of a good snark.

Now, I could imagine criticising the Malthouse for having too much diversity: perhaps you could argue that by producing such a variety of work by such a variety of artists, they fail to create an autonomous identity as a company. But the Age critics complain, rather, that they have a house style that stamps everything they do into identikit theatre. Apparently Marius von Mayenburg is paying homage to Barrie Kosky (which is probably news to Mayenburg and to Kosky, but there we are). Ionesco's Exit the King was "too vaudeville". Too many pop songs. Etc.

Instead of being "too fringe" and "elitist", their crime a couple of years ago, these days they're producing too much "entertainment". ("Is this what we want from a subsidised theatre company?" asks Martin Ball). But people seem to have forgotten last year's experiments like Anna Tregloan's theatrical installation Black, or Uncle Semolina & Friends' OT, or Brian Lipson's A Large Attendance in the Antechamber or the achieved theatrical mastery of The Tell-Tale Heart - all, surely, examples of precisely what a subsidised theatre ought to be doing.

It goes on: Geoffrey Milne has dragged out that old canard, that they have "shot the writer". Now Geoffrey, I did some counting a while back (scroll down) and added up how many new Australian plays - actual plays - were produced in various years under the Kantor/Armstrong diumvuriate compared to the Playbox, and the figures show - unambiguously - that it's not true that the Malthouse has "abandoned" writers. Even this year they're producing five new plays - six, if you count Andrew Upton's libretto of Through the Looking Glass - which compares fine to the six new plays produced in Playbox's final year of operation.

And even a success story can be turned into failure - although ticket sales have increased by 20 per cent in the past year and they're running at 70 per cent capacity, more than twice the average capacity of Playbox days, Usher snitches that their audiences are "tiny" compared to the MTC. Although he strangely fails to mention that the MTC has theatres with twice (or even eight times) as many seats.

This kind of stuff makes me throw up my hands in bafflement and despair. Of course the Malthouse is not beyond criticism - all our companies ought to be scrutinised and held to account. But let's base criticisms on the work to hand, not on a bunch of lazy and unexamined assumptions.

There's rather more balanced coverage by Corrie Perkin in my home paper The Australian, here.