By now, most of you would know I have been in Sydney being Daniel Keene's handbag as he picked up the NSW Premier's Play Award for The Serpent's Teeth, which was commissioned for the STC's Actors Company last year, and which, incidentally, will have a season at London's Riverside Studios in September. A jolly, if not precisely Bacchanalian, evening was had by all, and I caught up with some of those charming Sydney people, including Louis Nowra (who with Rachel Perkins and Beck Cole won the script writing prize for the brilliant SBS series First Australians) and fantasy queen Kate Forsyth. But enough of the social pages.

I grabbed the opportunity to catch the New York company Elevator Repair Service enacting the entire text of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, an achievement I felt a little ambivalent about. I'm hoping to write about it once I've ground down the long list of urgent non-blog tasks that await me, which will take a couple of days. And I realise I haven't had a chance to report on last week's fascinating Australian Theatre Forum, which seems to have been an unmitigated success. Bear with me as I readjust to the mundane duties of my desk...