Briefly: Marion Potts, the incoming artistic director at the Malthouse, announced her first season yesterday. And she's giving us a solid line-up of crunchy excellence. This is a heavily text-based season, with a well-judged mix of classics and new work, leavened by four dance pieces: a fine evolution of the Malthouse's style.

2011 opens strongly with Potts's own production of John Ford's Jacobean tragedy, 'Tis Pity She's A Whore, a continuation of the collaboration that created the glorious Venus & Adonis, followed by Robert Menzies in Samuel Beckett's The End, the show that wowed audiences at Belvoir St earlier this year. That's followed by the four dance works in Dance Massive: Chunky Move's Connected; Narelle Benjamin's In Glass (featuring Paul White, whom we last saw in Meryl Tankard's Oracle); BalletLab's Amplification and a solo show from Gideon Obarzanek, Faker.

The Hayloft crew is back after its knock-out Thyestes with another bad man of the theatre, Bertolt Brecht's Baal, translated by Simon Stone and Tom Wright. This is Brecht's first play, the first of his, in fact, that I ever read, and I've wanted to see it for years; I can't wait to find out what they make of it. That's followed by two new plays - Porn.Cake by Vanessa Bates, directed by Pamela Rabe, and A Golem Story by Lally Katz, directed by Michael Kantor. The final play is a return season of Declan Greene's sublime Moth, so all of you who disconsolately queued and missed out this year can get to see it. All of which is enough to make me view 2011 with a sanguine heart. You can check it out for yourself at the Malthouse website.