It may sound banal, but the most important thing, both in film and in the theatre, is the human being - the study of human beings. What you want above all, whether you are doing film or theatre, is to make the audience experience the result as something absolutely alive. The most important thing of all is to create a reflection of reality - to capture a heightened intensity, a distillation of life - and to guide the audience through that magical process.

Of Winners and Losers, interview with Ingmar Bergman

What I have written seems more like the melody line of a piece of music, which I hope with the help of my colleagues to be able to orchestrate during production. On many points I am uncertain... I therefore invite the imagination of the reader or spectator to dispose freely of the material that I have made available.

Preface to the script of Persona, Ingmar Bergman

Persona is one of Ingmar Bergman's most enigmatic films. The idea is notionally very simple: an actress, Elizabeth Vogler, falls silent in the middle of a performance of Elektra. She resumes the performance, but the following day refuses to speak at all. Doctors can find nothing wrong with her, physically or mentally: it seems that she has simply chosen to be mute. Her doctor decides that she should spend the summer at an isolated house with a nurse, Sister Alma. Elizabeth never speaks. Alma never stops speaking. The result is a film that investigates profoundly, and often cruelly, the nature of performance as an existential state of being human.

Meredith Penman (L) and Karen Sibbing in Persona. Photo: Pia Johnson

To attempt to remake Persona as a work of theatre is surely the definition of risk: certainly, director Adena Jacobs and the Fraught Outfit team can't be faulted on their ambition. Such an adventure could so easily end up being a bad imitation, with the haunting performances of Liv Ullman and Bibi Andersson inviting invidious comparison. Yet, miraculously, Fraught Outfit has taken up Bergman's invitation to "dispose freely" of his material, translating it into another form, and, crucially, into an autonomous work.

The Next Wave festival - a look at up and coming artists from around Australia, with a significant international component - is now in full swing, illuminating all sorts of hidden corners of Melbourne. It's a must for anyone interested in what's happening underneath the skin of the culture. I've been out and about over the weekend, catching some of the early events. My program included a Day Pass adventure, which is a seductive and startlingly cost-effective way of experiencing the festival. A guided tour of Next Wave which begins with a breakfast talk at the Wheeler Centre and curates visits around the city to various exhibitions, events and performances, it's highly recommended.

My diary tells me that I won't get to write about most of the work I've seen until after the shows are closed, so here are a couple of brief notes. So far highlights have been No Show's fun Shotgun Wedding, and Natalie Abbott's extraordinary dance work Physical Fractals. And make sure you find time to pop into Laura Delaney and Danae Valenza's installation at the Mission for Seafarers, Hull. I'm also told that The Exchange Program - Dewey Dell and Justin Shoulder - is unmissable, but haven't yet got to either performance. What's clear already is that this is a really exciting festival. Closes Sunday. Check out the program here.

To make life for theatrenauts more complicated: outside the Next Wavey goodness, Persona, Adena Jacobs's theatricalisation of Ingmar Bergman's screenplay, is presently on at Theatre Works. It's incredible theatre. Hoping to do some justice to this production in the next few days, but in the meantime, try and get there before it closes, also on Sunday.

Because Richard Bean's play The Heretic is about climate change, it attracted the notice of hardline climate change denier Andrew Bolt in the weeks running up to its opening. There was a minor flurry of polemic that at once excoriated the "arts community" for its leftie lockstep, and on the other jubilated that at last a climate change denier was being granted her proper prominence. (Granted by whom? That very same "arts community" - apparently an identikit bunch who dress in black, live in Brunswick and plot the downfall of the RSL.) The logical absurdity of this sums up Bolt's usual modus operandi, and is hardly worth addressing. But I assume, operating on the basis that "no publicity is bad publicity", that this kind of controversy is why The Heretic was programmed. I can't think of any other reason.

Andrew McFarlane and Noni Hazlehurst in The Heretic. Photo: Jeff Busby

It's hard not feel a kind of colonial resentment that so many resources - an excellent cast and design team, a main stage budget, hours of work and attention - have been thrown at a British play of such unrelenting mediocrity. Bean's play is given a much better production than it deserves. If we're going to support mediocrity, let's at least keep it local: we have budding Williamsons aplenty here, with the added bonus that they're at least addressing regional specifics. But let me not get carried away with reactionary nationalism, a hat that doesn't really suit my complexion.

The Heretic, as is known to anybody who has followed the jejune controversy, concerns Dr Diane Cassell (Noni Hazlehurst), a climate scientist at the University of York who specialises in measuring sea levels. She has written a paper which questions the consensus that sea levels are rising and which, according to everyone around her, means that she is about to topple the whole edifice of scientific consensus around climate change. This alarms her boss and former lover, Professor Kevin Maloney (Andrew McFarlane), who is trying to swing a lucrative sponsorship for his Earth Science department and believes that publication of the paper will queer his pitch. She also starts receiving death threats from an extremist environmental group called the Sacred Earth Militia.

Today the Minister for the Arts, Simon Crean, is announcing the long-awaited review of the Australia Council. Early reports indicate that one of its major recommendations is the abolition of the boards that overlook dance, music, literature and so on in favour of a single board responsible for all artforms, to reflect contemporary fluidities of practice. Another recommendation, which is likely to get far less airplay, is that Australia Council funding is increased. It's that last one, however, that strikes me as most urgent; and never more than when I look at what's known in theatre as the "small to medium sector".

Haiha Le, Christopher Brown and Naomi Rukavina in The Seizure. Photo: Lachlan Woods

Due in part to government investment - in organisations, in arts training institutions, and in artists themselves - we have seen an explosion in independent theatre over the past decade. Artists have been encouraged to be skilled, inventive, imaginative, entrepeneurial, adventurous and smart. The point is that this has worked. My inbox, which is flooded with invitations, is just one symptom of what has happened in Melbourne. I am constantly turning down invitations to work that I know very well is significant, and not only because I am trying to live a saner life. And that is markedly more the case than when I began this blog in 2004.

All sorts of initiatives have, as intended, nurtured a remarkable diversity, depth and - crucially - quality, in our theatre culture, but our funding mechanisms can't reflect this vitality. Artists have done exactly what they have been asked to do, and the result has been astonishing. Expectations of independent theatre are high, and that's because there's been so much good work to create those expectations. But even attaining "excellence" isn't enough when there simply isn't enough of the arts dollar to go around. Funding has always been a lottery, and competitiveness isn't always a bad thing: but when only a small percentage of those who have earned support can get it, judging by even the most rigorous standards, you wonder how this present richness can possibly be sustained. I guess the short answer is that it can't be.

To turn to matters at hand: it is telling that The Hayloft Project's latest show, The Seizure, is unfunded. Since they first appeared on the scene with Spring Awakening in 2007, Hayloft have established themselves as one of the most significant companies-about-town. Since then, the founding artistic director Simon Stone has moved on to main stages in Sydney (Stone's latest show, Strange Interlude, opened this week at Belvoir St). But, as those who remember shows like Yuri Wells or The Nest will know (both were directed by current AD Anne-Louise Sarks), Hayloft has always been a collective of interesting minds rather than the product of a single vision.

I'm going to be very bloggish today, gentle reader, and tell you all about my week. As always, I've had a problem with hats. My misfortunes began when I accidentally finished a novel. I say "accidentally" because I am working on something else, and around Monday I realised that I couldn't continue it until I had dealt with an earlier idea which I had abandoned, at last count, three times, but which was still taking up space in the "novel" department of my head. Last Thursday I light-heartedly typed "THE END", totally forgetting what happens when I finish a long project.

It's always followed by inexplicable physical collapse, as if my body is taking revenge. Partly as a result of the resulting migraine, on Friday I twisted my foot on the way home from Rimini Protokoll's 100% Melbourne. This meant that on Saturday night, instead of heading off to see Hayloft's new show, The Seizure, I was at home watching my foot turn an interesting shade of purple. Several people have pointed out that, since The Seizure is an adaptation of Philoctetes, a play about a man with an injured foot, this was strangely appropriate. These people are smartarses: worse, they are smartarses with classical educations.

I caught up with The Seizure on Monday night, and since then have been attempting to note my responses to both shows. But there's another thing that happens when I finish a project: my mind packs up and goes on holiday, possibly in a galaxy far, far away. So far, I have been almost completely unsuccessful in transferring into decent written English any of the thoughts that 100% Melbourne and The Seizure have set in flight. Worse, I am leaving Melbourne tomorrow for some other business. I'm traveling first to Adelaide, to be part of a panel at the Adelaide Festival Centre on Thursday night (Everyone's a Critic) and then on to Darwin for Wordstorm and the Poetry Festival, where I will be wearing a couple of other writer hats.

I can only say that if you missed Rimini Protokoll, you missed something special: and recommend that you click here and book tickets to The Seizure, an elegantly realised, austere and compelling work that demonstrates a new departure in the evolution of one of the most interesting independent companies we have. I'm hoping to say why next week, when I return from my round trip of the continent.

The moral of this tale of woe, children, is to be less careless about headgear.

Below is the text of a talk I gave at the Wheeler Centre last month as part of the series Australian Literature 101. I was asked to discuss Ray Lawler's Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, which allowed me to expand some of my earlier responses. Most of all, I'm struck by how Olive has most often been seen as a secondary and ultimately childish character, when I've always thought the principal tragedy of the play belongs to her.

To anyone familiar with Australian theatre, Ray Lawler’s 1950s play Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is a monument: the most famous Australian play ever written or produced. Like many monuments, it generally stands unnoticed in the background, covered with dust and sundry pigeon droppings, and every now and then it’s dusted off to remind us about the achievements of Australian culture. As I said in a review of Neil Armfield’s recent Belvoir St production, which I saw at the MTC earlier this year:

“One of the paradoxes of art is the uneasy legacy of success. As soon as a work is labelled a "classic", it becomes curiously invisible: it transforms into a monument, cobwebbed by all the extraneous things its success now symbolises, and the energies that made it a success in the first place are polished away by the pieties that must now attend it. Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is a good example: a fixity in the Australian theatrical universe, a symbol of nationalistic pride, it too easily becomes a thing instead of an act. It even has a nickname: The Doll.”

Alison Whyte as Olive. Photo: Jeff Busby

The significance given to the Doll as a unique, groundbreaking Australian drama, the “Great Australian Play”, has meant that it has been largely read through a lens of cultural identity, which I think has inadvertently obscured some of its interesting aspects. I agree with everyone, however, that it’s a thoroughly Australian play. Its cultural status has also obscured other plays of the time that might have an equal claim to attention. All the same, it deserves its place in theatre history. I don’t believe it’s a great play – Australian playwrights have arguably written works of greater theatrical and literary significance.  Even in its own time it broke little new ground: it opened in London the week after the premiere of John Osborne’s The Entertainer, which starred Laurence Olivier. Next to The Entertainer, the Doll, as a well-made three-act play, appears a little old-fashioned. But it is churlish to deny that the Doll remains a compelling drama sixty years later: it’s a realist tragedy that still has the capacity to strike home. If anything makes a classic, it’s the ability of a work to remain vivid, a quality of suppleness that allows it to speak to us powerfully in times different from those in which it was written: and the Doll certainly qualifies.

Lawler’s play has suffered from its classic status, as much as it has benefited from it: the nimbus of nationalistic pride, and especially the masculine ethos that goes with that, has tended to obscure its more interesting aspects. Armfield’s magnificent production earlier this year revealed it to be a play of more complexity and genuine power than is usually assumed. I hadn’t seen it, or thought about it much, since I saw the 1978 MTC production in high school: for me, as for many others, it was a dusty part of our theatrical heritage, an achievement worthy of genuine respect, but perhaps not of huge intrinsic interest. Armfield’s production reminded me, first of all, just how well-written it is: it’s an impeccably structured play without one ounce of fat, in which every utterance works inexorably towards its shattering climax.

The other thing that struck me was that in Olive, then played by Alison Whyte, we saw a protagonist every bit as tragic, every bit as iconic, as Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. For me, Olive is the central character – hers is the desire which holds the dream together and which, finally, destroys it. Although the tragedy in the play belongs to all the characters, it belongs most of all to Olive.

I may have mentioned that I am now reviewing poetry for Overland Literary Journal's swish new blog. My most recent review, of Ian Hamilton Finlay: Selections,  is now online. Finlay's a significant poet and a fascinating figure - Concrete poet, "avant gardener", visual artist and sometime playwright. And in case you missed the earlier review, of Sean Bonney's Happiness: After Rimbaud, it's up there too.

From outer-edge indie theatre to main stage is an crucial and delicate transition for any company. One of the best things that has happened in recent years is the opening of both the Malthouse and - more recently, with the Lawler Studio programming - the Melbourne Theatre Company to productions by independent companies. One of the highlights of last year's MTC program was in fact an indie import from Queensland presented as part of the Education Program - Letitcia Caceres's production of Debbie Tucker Green's Random, starring a transcendently good Zahra Newman. This year, as part of the same program, they've brought another Queensland gem, Boy Girl Wall from the Escapists. More of that in a moment.

The Plague Dances: L-R Genevieve Fry, Ida Duelund-Hansen, Lisa Salvo, Ben Hoetjes (masked), Karen Sibbing (masked), Esther Hannaford (masked). Photo: Jeff Busby

The chance to make this transition with a degree of institutional shelter is one of the major legacies of Michael Kantor and Stephen Armstrong's helming of the Malthouse - they instituted the Tower residencies that permit independent companies to explore their practice over a long rehearsal time, and to introduce their work to a wider audience. It gives these smaller collectives the chance to show the very qualities that make them notable, rather than filing them down into something more marketable or conventional. The results - Black Lung's anarchic Tower season, Hayloft's Thyestes, My Darling Patricia's Africa - are their own justification.

It's good to see that Marion Potts is continuing this important project. Four Larks, the latest Tower residents, have been making waves around town for some years now. Resolutely independent, entirely unfunded, they have put on shows in back sheds and abandoned stables in the inner suburbs, gaining a loyal following with their meld of bravura visual theatre and indie folk music. The ambition of their work is palpable, its lush sensuality utterly seductive. The Plague Dances, the work created for the Tower, demonstrates both their strengths and their weaknesses in equal measure.

The Malthouse/Sydney Theatre Company production of Thomas Bernhard's 1984 play The Histrionic is, apparently, the first professional production of Bernhard's work anywhere in Australia. The transparency of Daniel Schlusser's triumphant production makes you wonder what the problem was: why did we have to wait so long? The Histrionic is so manifestly a brilliantly written play, gripping from its beginning to its extraordinary final moments. It's outrageous, sadistic, hilarious, brutally bathetic, playfully and powerfully theatrical. In the most expansive sense of the word, it's an entertainment, exploiting every trick in the theatrical book: but here Bernhard employs entertainment as a depth charge, to destroy the submarine walls of our self-regard.

Bille Brown as Bruscon in The Histrionic. Photo: Jeff Busby

The Histrionic premiered nearly three decades ago. I'm well used to the fact that most significant playwrights, especially those outside the Anglosphere, are largely invisible in our mainstage culture - where are our professional productions of major contemporary dramatists such as (to stick with the Europeans) Jon Fosse, Elfriede Jelinek, Biljana Srbljanovic, Falk Richter? - but for some reason this delay struck me. If anything demonstrates the narrowness of our mainstream culture, it's this kind of catching up after the fact. It's not as if myopia is limited to overseas writers: we had to wait longer than three decades to have Patrick White's The Ham Funeral professionally produced in Melbourne, and his plays are still thought of, even by people who ought to know better, as lesser achievements than his novels. The luminously unconventional, the intransigently theatrical, the poetic, the rawly intelligent, even the beautiful, have more often than not been marginalised in Australian culture.

Nowhere do our colonial petticoats show more than in Australia's anxious love for authority. In our culture, genuine artistic originality, with its unsettling combination of disrespect for authority and serious respect for its own antecedents, can only figure as an embarrassment. It has no visible means of support, no legitimisation beyond its own artistry. In a colonial culture, the fear of being thought "wrong" overwhelms all other possibilities of reception. It even muffles outrage: the response to too many of our most interesting artists has been the white noise of silence. Bernhard is the model of another possibility, and this production of The Histrionic is one of several events that suggests that doors long sealed shut may now, very slowly, be creaking open.

For the past couple of weeks, the Melbourne International Comedy Festival has crashed over our fair city like a tidal wave, dragging the crowds and a bunch of increasingly exhausted critics out into the extraordinarily beautiful autumn evenings. But your humble blogger has remained at home, deaf to the siren call of comedy: far be it from me to "discourage earnest conversation," as psychiatrist Brendan Flynn suggested is the dark heritage of festival time. Flynn would approve of me: I have resolutely remained in my dour study, turning my face from the trivial levity of the light-hearted, to defend Melbourne's beetle-browed reputation as "a home of original ideas". But at least I now know who to blame for the sad state of our public discourse: it's those damn comedians.

Martin Blum as Ray Living in Welcome to Thonnet

And so it would have remained, gentle reader, had not rumours come my ears of a show called Welcome to Thonnet. Playing at the Northcote Town Hall, it is written and performed by Martin Blum. Blum is a very interesting actor: along with talents like Hayley McElhinney and Dan Spielman, he was one of the 12 original members of the STC Actors Company, resigning a couple of years later to travel overseas. The show has been assisted by various other intriguing names: its co-devisors include Chris Ryan, of Thyestes and Wild Duck fame, and Bojana Novakovic (The Story of Mary MacLane, By Herself). Govin Ruben, who's designed lighting for Hayloft and Black Lung, is production designer and provides some incidental performance. In short, all these seemed sufficient reason to wash my inky hands and venture off into the balmy night.

I returned home shaken, to recover from one of the most uncomfortably hilarious hours I have spent in the theatre. Blum is a fearless actor, and his monstrous creation, YA author Ray Living, demonstrates his courage: I haven't been on this kind of razor edge since seeing Howard Stanley's brilliant Howard Slowly shows in the 1980s. Welcome to Thonnet is pitiless: its cruelty plays on the abyss between self-perception and the perception of others that makes David Brent in the UK edition of The Office so toe-curlingly compelling.