Last week Ms TN took a few days off to lounge about in the fleshpots of Sydney. And lo, it was good, although the perilous aspect of taking a short holiday is that it makes you understand how much you need a longer one. But it was not all caviar and champagne, I'll have you know. I had a good theatrical reason to be there: viz, it was the final week of Belvoir's justly acclaimed The Wild Duck, a contemporary take on Ibsen's play by Simon Stone and Chris Ryan.

It's so long since I last read this play that I couldn't remember what happened, so when I returned home I dragged out the Penguin classic. The translation is dodgy to say the least - it's full of people exclaiming "I say!" and "Oh, good Lord!", making you think of Bertie Wooster rather more than Nordic forests - but you can still squint through the creaky language and see the structures and ideas that informed the original.


Reading the original text only heightened my admiration of this production, which is the best so far of Simon Stone's increasingly interesting oeuvre. It's a fascinating evolution from Hayloft's Thyestes: Ryan and Stone are clearly applying and extending ideas from that production, but by no means repeating them. The text is, quite correctly, credited as "after Ibsen": it is effectively an extremely well-written new play. There are maybe three or four lines of Ibsen's text, if that, in this version. Major themes and a swathe of characters have vanished: the action is placed uncompromisingly in the 21st century, creating a strangely dislocated theatrical world, a contemporary Australian reality with Norwegian motifs.

What's astonishing (and, in the end, a little mysterious) is that you walk out of the theatre feeling that you have just watched an Ibsen play. The sinews of Ibsen's obsessions - the past that haunts and destroys the present, inheritance and paternity, the social critique of class and gender, the plutonium-enriched explosion of truth - are boldly translated into present day forms. Stone and Ryan's collaboration, astringently dramaturged by Eamon Flack, is a vital re-imagining.

In the first half the impending tragedy is built patiently, stroke by stroke, in a series of short, apparently naturalistic scenes. On the occasion of his second marriage to his 28-year old secretary, wealthy businessman Werle (John Gaden) welcomes home his estranged son, Gregers (Toby Schmitz). It's soon evident that Gregers bears a grudge against Werle for his treatment of his mother, who suicided after one of Werle's affairs. Gregers meets up with his old friend Hjalmar (Ewen Leslie), who runs a photography studio with his wife Gina (Anita Hegh). They live with their 17-year-old daughter Hedvig (Eloise Mignon) and Hjalmar's father Ekdal (Anthony Phelan), who is showing the first signs of dementia. Ekdal, we discover, has been imprisoned over some scandal to do with Werle's business, a disaster which has had far-reaching effects on his family.

In Ibsen's play, Gregers is a fanatic blinded by idealism, a man irrevocably wounded by his father's corruption who tragically wreaks worse destruction by attempting to right his father's wrongs. He worships Hjalmar's integrity, and claims that he will invigorate his life by revealing the lie at the heart of his marriage, but the results are predictably catastrophic. Here the character of Gregers is more ambivalent: he is a cynic who prides himself on his truthfulness, but the sense that his destructiveness is subconsciously driven by envy of Hjalmar's domestic happiness is palpable. Likewise, the marriage presented in the first half of the play is a good one, as opposed to the sense in Ibsen of an educated man limited by his wife's lower class: Hjalmar's family is chaotic, argumentative, loving and arrestingly real.

Part of this production's power comes from the simplicity, even crudity, of its framing. Here the design is exemplary in how it contributes to the meaning of the performance, from Niklas Pajanti's lighting to Stefan Gregory's sound design, which mics the actors so we hear their bodies as much as see them: the labial sounds of kisses, a deep, shuddering, in-drawn breath. Ralph Myers's set is a kind of terrarium or tank that seals the audience from the performers, a literal fourth wall which heightens the voyeuristic sense that we are transgressively peering into privacies. The window/mirror has almost become a cliche in contemporary theatre, but here the design, perhaps because it so aptly represents the play's dynamics, is fresh and striking. At the top of the set are electronic displays, harking back to the scene titles in Thyestes, that introduce each scene with a specific time date and time.

Harsh, directionless lighting reveals a bare, black, slightly scruffy stage. During the first half of the play, this alternates with blackouts between scenes that turn the glass into a mirror of the audience. The darkness itself becomes symbolic of the hidden truths and conflicts that are hinted in scenes played swiftly across the naked stage. The second half of the play is completely different: the Bach cello pieces that play between scenes in the first half is exploded by crashing electric guitar and the stage is flooded in merciless fluorescent light. Now scenes run together, instead of being meticulously individuated, with characters from different scenes simultaneously on stage.

The simplicity of these elements highlights the complexity and nuance of the text and performances. Stone has the talents of a remarkable cast: there is no performance which is not integral to the success of the work. The mark is hit in every moment, from the cauterised relationship between father and son in Gaden and Schmitz's meetings, to Mignon's bewildered pain as a daughter rejected by the father she adores, to Anthony Phelan's anguished portrayal of a disintegrating mind as Ekdal. The emotional weight of the tragedy falls on Hegh and Leslie, and their performances as two people who deeply love each other, but whose love is unable negotiate the disaster that befalls them, is as painful and real as anything I've seen on stage. Theatre seldom draws a hacksaw across your emotional nerves with such intelligent finesse.

It makes me look forward with even more lively interest to Stone's upcoming adaptation of Brecht's Baal, co-written with Tom Wright, which opens soon at the Malthouse as a co-production with the STC. In part this is because I have even less idea what to expect: it seems to me that Stone is continually lifting the stakes on himself, making work that refreshingly refuses to rest on its laurels. And that's exciting.

Picture: Anita Hegh as Gina in The Wild Duck. Photo: Heidrun Lohr

The Wild Duck, by Simon Stone and Chris Ryan, after Henrik Ibsen. Set by Ralph Myers, costumes by Tess Schofield, lighting by Niklas Pajanti, composition and sound design Stefan Gregory. With Johngaden, Anita Hegh, Ewen Leslie, Eloise Mignon, Anthony Phelan and Toby Schmitz. Belvoir, Sydney. Closed.

With All's Well That Ends Well, Troilus and Cressida and, sometimes, Hamlet, Shakespeare's Measure for Measure is most often characterised as one of his "problem plays". This is an anachronistic label, placing Measure for Measure in the context of an early 20th century theatre conditioned by the socially-conscious plays of Shaw and Ibsen. But that doesn't mean that it's not a problem.

It's perhaps Shakespeare's strangest play: intellectually intriguing but dramaturgically absurd. Over the centuries it's prompted a wide variety of critical responses. Samuel Johnson thought the comic bits "very natural and pleasing", while the tragic themes showed "more labour than elegance"; Samuel Taylor Coleridge thought the whole play darkly disturbing, at once "disgusting" and "horrible". While William Hazlitt thought it a marvellous demonstration of natural morality, other critics saw it as variously an allegory of Christian doctrine on mercy and atonement, or as an example of extreme Jacobean negation and cynicism.


All these contradictory assessments suggest a play of considerable complexity: and there's no doubt that Measure for Measure is an intricate beast. It's probably best understood as an exploration of tragicomedy, which at the beginning of the 17th century was a new form. More than tragedy twisted to happy ending, tragicomedy was envisioned as a blending of disparate elements, a dramaturgy driven by contrast that through its violent juxtapositions sought to demonstrate the via media, the way of moderation and humane reason that tempers the extremes of idealism or cynicism, and which finds the middle path between divine justice and human mercy.

It's easy to see why this deeply problematic text would have attracted Benedict Andrews, perhaps the most intellectually rigorous of our directors. His Belvoir St production brings this baggy monster into the 21st century, rethinking it as a play of image and appearance. He presents Measure for Measure as a theatre of substitution, a mapping of lines of power and desire that expose the tensions of the modern state, especially in the perilous margins between private and social moralities.

Ralph Myers's set (beautifully lit, as one might expect, by Nick Schlieper) is a revolving hotel room surrounded by white curtains, which is plonked in the middle of a blank theatrical space. It's neither private nor public, but rather encompasses both spheres: the hotel room functions as an impersonal site of intimate sexual encounters, or becomes an incongruously private space in which the state makes its public pronouncements. On either side of the stage are two video screens which give us, in merciless close-up, images of the actors who are performing live in front of us. It's disconcerting how often the eye prefers the videoed image over the real actor, and this uneasy visual dance between raw and mediated performance underlines the tensions Andrews brings to this production.

The play begins with the Duke of Vienna, Vincentio (Robert Menzies) mysteriously absenting himself and giving all his authority to his deputy Angelo (Damon Gameau), a well-known hardliner on matters of sexual morality. As the Duke explains, Vienna is rife with vice and corruption, and he wishes to investigate this state of affairs as an anonymous observer, in disguise as a friar. Meanwhile Claudio (Chris Ryan) has impregnated Julietta (Maeve Dermody), and under Angelo's unyielding interpretation of the city's laws, is sentenced to death for fornication, despite his intention to marry his betrothed. When Claudio's sister Isabella (Robin McLeavy), urged by Claudio's louche friend Lucio (Tony Schmitz), pleads with Angelo for her brother's life, Angelo reveals his hypocrisy by striking a corrupt bargain: he will spare Claudio's life if Isabella surrenders her virginity to him.

This set-up heralds a comedy of substitutions: Isabella saves her chastity by sending the lovelorn Mariana (Helen Thomson) in her stead; Claudio is saved by the execution of another criminal. In the end, the Duke, having trapped his erring subjects in all their declared lies, throws off his disguise and marries everybody off in a series of judgments that demonstrate both mercy and justice. Finally, the Duke declares his own intention to marry the virtuous Isabella, who in the final dispensations of justice finds herself betrayed by the libidinous currents of power in the city.

Andrews has gathered an impressive cast, and they deliver excellent performances. Menzies is at his best as the Duke, who is played with a sardonic dignity that is disarmingly vulnerable, and there are excellent performances in particular from Frank Whitten as the old lord Escalus, Robin McLeavy as Isabella and Chris Ryan as Claudio. As Lucio, Toby Schmitz exploits the comedy of his role to the point of mugging: fun to watch most of the time, but I wished for more restraint.

What emerges unexpectedly, especially in the more successful first half, is an overpowering sense of human mortality: the production is dominated by a sense of the state as an arbiter of death. As the set itself is a human construction, an island of light propped in a space of edgeless darkness, so this humanly mediated justice plays out against a sense of supra-human fatality, the mortality that no human authority can control or escape. While in Elizabethan times justice was considered to be the worldly manifestation of divine justice, here justice seems profoundly secular, even existential, a human contrivance playing out against an abyss of meaninglessness. It's a sense that Shakespeare brought to fruition later in King Lear: here it's not so much expressed as intimated.

For all the power of this interpretation, the production never quite holds, and it finally founders on the clockwork mechanics of the play's heavy plotting (which is far more intricate than I can describe here). The text fairly creaks with contrivances that sit uncomfortably between the driving inevitability of tragedy and the nonsensical but satisfyingly symmetrical fictions of comedy. Within its absurd frame are, undeniably, dramatic treasures - highlights are the comic interludes where the cocky Lucio retails his shonky gossip about the Duke's corrupt bad habits to Vincentio himself, who fairly chokes with outrage but is unable to throw off his disguise, or the brilliant dialogue between Claudio and Isabella, where he begs and finally bullies her to sacrifice her virtue in order to save his life. But it never quite melds into a dramatic whole.

As it plays out its conceits, it seems more and more as if the production is at war with the play, attempting to drag it from its Jacobean roots into a contemporary reading that, for all the applied intelligence and passion, the play can't sustain. The fault is mostly Shakespeare's: without much more radical cutting than he attempts here, Andrews' elegant framing can't do much about the overwrought contrivances, which in the second half devolve interminably into the comedic tying up of loose ends that by then you no longer care about.

The effect is rather dizzying: close up, and especially in the details of the speeches, this play is all intelligence, rich with Shakespeare's wrought language and complex ideas: but from further back, at the cruder level of structure, it simply seems fudged. I suspect the primary problem with Measure for Measure is that, for all its teasing ambiguities, it's not a particularly good play: what becomes in the tragedies an organic marriage of action and idea is here tripping over its own form. But you can't deny its fascination, which - as is so often the case - stems as much from its flaws as its virtues. I suspect it's one of those plays that is much more interesting to think about than it is to watch.


Like Measure for Measure, Lucy Guerin's latest dance theatre piece, Human Interest Story, explores the mediation of human experience. Her recent works - Untrained and Corridor in particular - demonstrated an increasing preoccupation with spoken language, exploring speech as an imperative, controlling and directing dancers, or distorting it as sonic punctuation, so it became a pure physical act, dislocated from semantics. It's an approach that has more to do with contemporary poetry than with dramatic language, picking out the element in which we swim unthinkingly as communicative animals and revealing it to be abstract, arbitrary, opaque, even sinister.

Human Interest Story goes much further than her previous works, and is perhaps Guerin's bleakest and most powerful work yet. Paradoxically, it is also the funniest. It has an epic feel: it begins in the mundane comedy of domesticity, and winds out inexorably into an increasingly dark meditation on the limits of human autonomy. What, this dance seems to be asking, counts as an authentic human experience? Can we experience anything purely, or is all our being unconsciously mediated through the imperatives of the mass media? Is it possible to escape the wider conditioning of the consumerist society in which we live, or is its influence so saturating, so ubiquitous, that what we imagine as freedom can no longer exist?

Gideon Obarzanek's design is dominated by a huge television set, which in the opening sequences has its back to the audience. Behind it are six chairs, and behind them is a dark, edgeless space (one of the virtues of this production is Paul Jackson's miraculously subtle lighting, which seems almost to shape shadow as plastic matter). Six dancers emerge and begin to recite news stories in precise chorus, moving mechanistically, even neurotically, in tandem with their voices.

It's very funny, and yet it has an uneasy edge, as vastly different events and issues - Michael Jackson, climate change - are rendered down to identical packets of meaning (or meaninglessness) in the language of news stories. During the dance, the light lifts to reveal a vast, matte-black tank at the back of the stage. The tank emerges from the shadows and then vanishes throughout the show, opaque and threatening, a mute symbol of the war industry that underlies western capitalism like a bad conscience.

This opening sequence reminded me of Hans Magnus Enzensberger's discussion of the contemporary tabloid newspaper as the exemplary modernist text, in which each story - natural disaster, celebrity scandal, crime, war, politics - is endlessly interchangable with the others, stripped of context and translated into a module of prepackaged language that communicates nothing, because it is in fact designed not to communicate: it feeds a desire to consume, rather than to know.

Guerin explores how these mediations of reality reach into the intimacies of domesticity, shaping and refracting our personal lives. Her dancers become present not as abstract figures, literally playing themselves on stage and reminding us that dance is also a mediation, an illusion of reality which becomes, for the moments it exists, another simulacra. This is often purely comic: Stephanie Lake steps out in front of the others and speaks about cooking for her children and eating dinner in front of Master Chef in the hope that her culinary ineptitude will be transformed by the visual input of gourmet feasts. And there's an interlude where the television is turned around and Anton Enus ("the most fortunate vowel in showbusiness") reads a series of news stories about the dancers' private lives.

Interwoven with this comedy of the mundane is an increasing sense of anxiety, a subtext that is mostly expressed in the movement, which becomes in the second half of the dance the dominant mode of expression as speech is left behind. The hinge is an early BBC news report about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico; against the dry, factual and (in ironic retrospect) inaccurately optimistic report the dancers circle about it in ever-increasing loops and spirals, in a sudden and surprisingly moving explosion of pure dance.

The dancers turn their attention to written language, laying newspapers precisely on the ground and then crumpling the paper and incorporating them into extensions of their bodies, as heartbeats, as violent expressions of anxiety. In this sequence, the crumpled pages end up stuffed inside the costume of one of the dancers: he becomes a grotesque, distorted figure who is violently disembowelled by the other dancers. It's a compelling image of the contemporary soul, if the soul is what Foucault described as the surface on which is scored the tracks of social power and authority - the human figure overloaded, sickened and finally destroyed by metastasising tumours of information.

The final sequence plays with impatience and refusal, teasing the boredom of the audience, as dancers begin a series of movements only to be interrupted by one of them stepping out of the dance to retie her hair or perhaps walk out into the auditorium, leaving the rest in frozen stasis, waiting for her return so they can resume the dance. This felt like the longest sequence, although I'm not sure that it was; by then I was so enfolded into the performance I had lost all sense of objective time.

From a ground of the absolutely familiar and the commonly understood, Guerin leaps into the world of the body, where gestures are ambiguous, opaque, mysterious. Often in Guerin's work it has seemed to me that the body becomes a site of rebellion against the tyranny of linguistic meaning, which figures as didactic and imperative: the dance, which spirals into pure abstractions out of the impure medium of dailiness in which she works, plays in tension against the legislating impulses of language and choreography, becoming the physical expression of resistance and anarchy.

This seems much less the case in Human Interest Story, where it's clear that the gestures of the body are as mediated as spoken language: what we see are neurotic, truncated expressions of anxiety or violence, or the gestures of an illusory freedom which themselves are mediated through our systems of information and communication. They ultimately become expressions of our imprisonment in the economies of information and money in which we live. Which may be, for all its bleakness, no more than the truth.

Pictures: top: Benedict Andrews' Measure for Measure; bottom, Alisdair Macindoe (on floor), Jessica Wong, Stuart Shugg, Talitha Maslin and Stephanie Lake in Human Interest Story. Photo: Jeff Busby


Measure for Measure by William Shakespeare, adapted and directed by Benedict Andrews. Set design by Ralph Myers, costume design by Dale Ferguson, lighting design by Nick Schlieper, composition and sound design by Stefan Gregory. With Maeve Dermody, Damon Gameau, Ashley Lyons, Robin McLeavy, Robert Menzies, Arky Michael, Colin Moody, Steve Rodgers, Chris Ryan, Toby Schmitz, Helen Thomson and Frank Whitten. Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney (Closed).

Human Interest Story, choreographed by Lucy Guerin. Set design by Gideon Obarzanek, realising design by Anna Cordingley, costume design by Paula Levis, lighting design by Paul Jackson, composition and sound design by Jethro Woodward. Performed by Stephanie Lake, Alisdair Macindoe, Talitha Maslin, Harriet Ritchie, Stuart Shugg and Jessica Wong, with newscast by Anton Enus (World News Australia - SBS). Malthouse Theatre and Perth International Arts Festival, Merlyn Theatre. (Closed).

Ms TN is back in Melbourne listening to the gentle patter of the rain, after a packed couple of days in sun-drenched Sydney. The major event was, of course, the hotly anticipated forum on women in theatre at Belvoir St, where I was part of a panel of "powerful women" (thank you, SMH, my family is now making Dragonball Z noises again) ably conducted by journalist Monica Attard. The panel - see holiday snap below - consisted of me, Gil Appleton, a Belvoir St pioneer and integral to many feminist arts initiatives of the 1970s and 80s, emerging director Shannon Murphy, Bell Shakespeare's associate director Marion Potts and the Sydney Opera House director of performing arts, Rachel Healy.


As everybody knows, the issue is to do with main stage seasons. It's not endemic through the theatre culture - independent theatre, the crucible of Australian theatre culture, has nothing like the same issue. As in every profession, the problem exists in the high-end, well-paid, high-profile jobs.

Everyone on that panel was nervous about the event. Partly it was a desire to do justice to some of the complexity of the question; partly it was because of the heat that has been around much of the discussion. This was naturally exacerbated by Caleb Lewis's withdrawal from the Philip Parsons Young Playwrights Award in protest against the "radical politicisation" of the prize, which is announced simultaneously with the Philip Parsons Memorial Lecture and which that afternoon was announced first, due to the controversy. I am still struggling with Caleb's stand. Does he mean that theatre ought not to be politicised? Is he suggesting that the male-dominated status quo is apolitical? Does the mere discussion of the marginalisation of women really "taint" everything around it? (I get sudden flashes of menstruating women banned from churches).

Ironically enough, Caleb was a co-winner with Tahli Corin, prompting some cynicism around the traps, and not unincidentally, putting Tahli in an uncomfortable spotlight. Which, I may say, she negotiated with considerable grace. But this very response illustrates some horns of this hydra-headed dilemma. The mass reaction to the Belvoir St debate has been a restless and impatient demand for concrete "solutions": among others, Crikey's Steve Dow was scathing that the "ethereal seemed ascendant over the practical". (Although, unlike Dow, I do recall an insistence on mentoring.)

I guess it's possible that the Parsons prize committee was in part influenced by the on-going debate - by a consciousness that women ought to be encouraged as much as men, and that this ought to be pro-active - although this was hotly denied by Neil Armfield, who said the plays were chosen entirely on their merits (and went so far to explain what those merits were). Yet is it such a bad thing if the committee was forced to think about the issue of gender and act on those thoughts? Isn't such action precisely what the unsatisfied are calling for, when they demand "practical" solutions, even quotas? But as soon as it's even perceived to have happened, all hell breaks loose: the prize is "compromised", notions of artistic integrity are in shreds, and women are back in their familiar roles of second-rate wannabes, merely riding the coat-tails of male genius.

Which is to say, there are different issues in the arts to other professions. Theatre is not only an "industry": it is a culture. Artistic merit is a central and thorny question. It's often used by artistic directors and others to evade the knotty questions - all candidates, we are routinely told by main stage companies, are chosen on merit, which given the figures can leave us to reflect on the general mediocrity of womankind. On the other hand, artistic merit is, in the arts, a real issue. That's why it can be so successfully used as a smokescreen: if artistic merit isn't the first aim of our striving, what are we there for?

But how do we measure merit? It is unarguable that merit is read through gender. And that is heinously complex: women can be as rigorous defenders of the privileges of the status quo as men. Their mere presence won't necessarily guarantee equity: as has been pointed out many times, even though women are meagrely represented in main stage creative roles, they mostly run our theatres in managerial roles. More, as the Brontes well knew, the same writing will generate different responses if it is perceived to be by a man than if it is thought to be by a woman. And I'm afraid that, however we like to congratulate ourselves on being more advanced than the 19th century, that is still the case.

The "ethereal" ("ethereal"?) discussion that Dow was so critical about was precisely what I thought valuable about the debate. As the distinguished feminist Eva Cox said to me afterwards, it was "one of the more vigorous discussions about dominant cultures and the difficulty of even identifying them let alone shifting them". (And added acerbically, "John Huxley missed that bit in today's SMH! Why am I not surprised?")

The discussion around gender (as it is around any sort of endemic bigotry) is conditioned by the fact that we've all been here before. Quotas have been tried: they simply created a lot of resentment, even from those supposed to be the beneficiaries, who justly felt their achievements were demeaned; and they also generated a lot of bad, "ticking the boxes" art. This kind of solution is in fact one of the major complaints about the funding processes of the Arts Council in Britain: the focus moves away from making great art to social engineering. I think the major failure of quotas or any other simplistic "solution" is that they permit people not to think: they provide a simple answer that evades the real work.

The real work is changing the complex of ideologies that situates the white, abled, middle class male subject as the normative consciousness, and which constitutes anyone else as Other. The real problem for women is that we are considered to have a gender, while men can be neutral. Men can speak for all of "mankind", while women (or people with the wrong-coloured skin, sexuality, body) speak only to their own kind. The "human condition" has, for centuries, been considered to be a male state.

And the real issue for theatre is that protecting the privilege of a minority means that its culture stagnates.

Marginalising 53 per cent of the population means limiting access to a huge pool of ideas and energy. As any ecologist knows, a population without diversity loses genetic vigor and eventually dies out. Why, to take one example, is the MTC so worried about its aging subscriber base? Is it because of a blindness towards the realities of a large part of their potential audiences? And it's not as if these energies aren't already present. You just have to get out and about in Melbourne's thriving independent theatre scene. I'd be fascinated to see gender figures for non-mainstage theatre: my bet is that gender inequity there is small to non-existent.

In other words, if theatres don't recognise and deal with this broader issue they won't survive. What is required, as in so many things, is clear-sighted leadership, a recognition of the problem that goes beyond token gestures that don't actually challenge entrenched positions.

No way could a single panel discussion come up with quick-fix solutions. There aren't any, and we're fooling ourselves if we think there are. How, in an hour-long discussion, does one justly address a hugely complex problem that permeates not only the entirety of Australian society (where men still occupy the majority of the top jobs and top pay), but which reaches far beyond our sea-girt shores? Remember that Original Sin happened when Eve tasted of the Fruit of Knowledge. We all know we only scratched the surface.

But that doesn't mean that action can't be taken, or that nothing can be done. Identifying a problem is always the first step to doing something about it. But let's get that right first, or else we'll still be stuck in the same circle of hell decades hence.

Picture: From left: your faithful blogger, Gil Appleton, Shannon Murphy, Marion Potts and Rachel Healy at Belvoir St Theatre yesterday. Photo: Dean Sewell

'Tis the season for launches. Last night the Melbourne Fringe Festival launched itself into the giddy stratosphere. More than half a million people watched more than 4500 artists at around 100 venues last year. That's a lot of stuff, and explains why Ms TN - a delicate creature at the best of times - gets out her sal volatile before she consults the program. As I recall, last year she threw up her hands in despair, crumpled into a foetal heap in the corner, and just stayed home being fed grapes by various slaves family members. This year she'll do a little better (frankly, it would be hard to do worse) and will see, well, a few shows, thanks to Fringe AD Emily Sexton, who made soothing noises and guided Ms TN's trembling finger to the "program highlights". But the blog-hungry should keep an eye on the hubsite Spark Online, where our blogging confreres Neandellus and Jana will be logging shows, and of course the indefagitable Richard Watts, who is prepared to fry his brain and see the requisite thousand shows a day. I suppose, as Fringe chair and awards judge, he's obliged.

The night before, the MTC launched its 2010 season with the obligatory fountains of champagne. 2010, which kicks off with the Australian premiere of the Broadway hit The Drowsy Chaperone (starring Geoffrey Rush) is certainly various. Hannie Rayson and David Williamson fans are well-served, with new plays from each (Williamson's Let The Sunshine premiered at Sydney's Ensemble Theatre last year). There are a couple of unknowns to me which spark my curiosity - JT Roger's Madagascar and Tony McNamara's The Grenade - and a lesser Mamet, Boston Marriage, which on the other hand features Pamela Rabe. And there are some potential gems.

Ewen Leslie - an absolute revelation in the STC's The War of the Roses - will star in Richard III, with a stunning cast of women, Jennifer Hagan, Deirdre Rubenstein, Alison White and Meredith Penman (who'll be familiar to Hayloft fans). I'm looking forward to an adaptation of Pedro Almodovar's film All About My Mother - which as you might know, features a production of A Streetcar Named Desire - and Sarah Ruhl's Dead Man's Cell Phone - Ruhl does a genuinely deft and graceful line in contemporary American surrealism. Joanna Murray-Smith has Songs for Nobodies, an intriguing theatrical conceit that is a Bombshells-type vehicle for the extraordinary singer Bernadette Robinson, and Daniel Keene is there with his existential comedy Life Without Me, which features a stellar cast - Greg Stone, Deidre Rubenstein, Brian Lipson, Kerry Walker and Rob Menzies. And it finishes with a production of Marius von Mayenburg's The Ugly One at the Lawler Studio. This is a fantastic play, and I was kicking myself that I missed it at the Royal Court last year, when I saw Anthony Neilson's Relocated instead.

Before I forget, which I have, let me remind you about the Cybec Readings at the Lawler Studio. If you haven't kept your eye on them, you'll have already missed Nicki Bloom's Tender (the Captain helpfully reports here, with a bonus fascinating discussion on text and theatre) and Ian Wilding's The Water Carriers. Which gives you no excuse to miss Robert Reid's The Joy of Text, coming up on September 29.

Meanwhile, the Belvoir St Company B season launch has prompted a lot of disquiet. Where, a lot people want to know, are the women? Do we not write? Do we not direct or design? Nicholas Pickard has the story here. And Katherine Lyall-Watson has some useful basic facts at her Performing Arts Blog.

Yes, a little bit of parochial preening is in order. Our Geoffrey just won the Tony for best actor for his role in the Broadway run of Exit the King - which premiered at our very own Malthouse, of course, in a Belvoir St co-production. What larks, eh?

Meanwhile, my review of the Broadway show Avenue Q is in today's Australian.

News bulletin #153: Our Geoffrey has conquered Broadway with his genius portrayal of the dying Berenger in Ionesco's Exit the King. Among a swag of critical bouquets, New York Times senior critic Ben Brantley calls Rush a "fire-trailing comet" in an unreservedly rave review of Neil Armfield's production. It's a triumph for the Malthouse (known in its overseas entrepeneurships as Malthouse Melbourne) and Company B Belvoir St, which produced the original production. And remember: we saw it here first.

And while we're on the subject of New York: Caryl Churchill's Seven Jewish Children continues to generate controversy after its New York Theater Workshop presentation. George Hunka points to Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon's must-read examination of the play.