Collected Works, under the proprietorship of Kris Hemensley, is one of the treasures of Melbourne. It is that rarest of businesses, a poetry bookshop. As The Wheeler Centre comments today, Victoria boasts over 300 book shops, but its City of Literature submission singled out Collected Works as “unlike any other shop in the country… specialising in poetry and ideas, and is the most substantial retail outlet for poetry in Australasia, giving local literature a sense of where it sits within a global sphere”.

A recent rent hike threatens its existence, and so tonight, from 5.30-7pm, a bunch of literary peeps have organised a Collected Works Benefit. There's even a raffle, with donations from a range of poetry folk, including Australian Poetry, Victorian Writers’ Centre, Hunter Publishers, University of Queensland Press, John Leonard Press, and over twenty writers including Kevin Brophy, Joel Deane, David McCooey, Robyn Rowland, Alex Skovron, Chris Wallace-Crabbe and me. More details from SPUNC. At Collected Works Bookshop Nicholas Building Level 1, 37 Swanston Street, Melbourne.

I hope you've all ordered your copy of the 200th issue of Overland, due to be launched in a shower of bubbly at the Melbourne Writers Festival on September 4. I will be there, as I contributed an essay on Australian theatre and nationalism. And tomorrow, as a spin-off, I will appear with some of my fellow contributors in a shipping container on Riverside Terrace at Fed Square for a Melbourne Writers Festival event called "Magazine". Overland editor Jeff Sparrow will be wrangling Kalinda Ashton, Rjurik Davidson, Michelle Carmody and Jacinda Woodhead as well as me, nailing us into the hot-seat and asking probing questions for a magazine-style 15 minutes of fame. It goes from 10am to 1.30pm, and I'm on about 11.30. Please come!

This begins a crazy fortnight or so of heavy litting. For a lot of it I'll be hanging at the 68th World Science Fiction Convention, where I have a busy program of panels. It's my first Con, and I'm as excited as any 13 year old fangirl. I'll post details later and probably elsewhere, for any closet nerds out there. But tellingly, even in the heart of SFF city, I'm doing two panels about theatre ...

Having spent today addressing an empty screen in the increasingly vain hope that the god of critics will bestow some benediction, or at least half an idea, it's a relief to know that somebody else has the motor running. In today's Crikey, Guy Rundle has weighed into the debate about the PEN Macquarie Anthology of Australian Literature. Literary types will know that there's been some to and fro about this anthology already; but here Rundle is looking at the representation of plays. And he doesn't mince words.

"It has to be said that in [the representation of drama] the anthology is a disgrace, an expression of a barely disguised lack of interest in the form by prose-and-poetry-centric editors," says Rundle, pointing out that, among others, Jack Hibberd, John Romeril and Alex Buzo are notably absent. "...One can’t help but look at the formally safe, polite, mildly fey drama selections and feel there is an active bias here by editors against a wilder, more energetic drama that nevertheless reads well on the page (better, in Hibberd’s case, than just about all the selections here) — and that also frequently channels a larrikin, masculinist language that captures Australian sexism, rather than trying to dust over it."

I don't know whether it's an overreaction to masculinism (White's plays aren't included either). I'd say it's more a more or less conscious decision that plays are "for the stage not the page", meaning they're not really proper literature. More on what I and others think in the comments, where editor Kerryn Goldsworthy swings in to defend her baby.

Update: in response to Kerryn in the comments below, I unpack my own criticisms a little, and reproduce them here. I'm sure making an anthology like this involves endless choices, which are all going to be under a spotlight. I don't have many quibbles with the other sections - there I can see the editors have done their best with such pressures of space and significance as they see fit. And fair enough. One can argue about the various choices, but in most genres they are recognisable representations.

Not so with drama. The passion occurs because it so clearly demonstrates how drama is a second-class literary citizen, at the least an afterthought. If the anthology didn't claim that it covered "all genres — from fiction, poetry and drama to diaries, letters, essays and speeches — [mapping] the development of one of the great literatures in English in all its energy and variety", perhaps that would be ok. But it does claim that. As Nicholas Jose says in the intro, "Our aim has been to represent the main currents of Australian writing and to indicate its diversity, including the work of less familiar writers alongside iconic works while also giving an adequate sampling of major authors."

This may be the case with poetry and prose, which seems fairly representative to me. But it is certainly not the case with drama: major authors have simply been left out, there is little idea of its diversity and there is absolutely no idea of what is happening now. It gives a very uncertain idea of what Australian plays both have been and are. I for one think it would have been better to leave drama out of it, rather than to represent it so half-heartedly. It would have at least made the status clear.

ABC Radio National's Book Show grabbed me during the Melbourne Writers Festival and, as we stood huddled from the wind in a corner of Fed Square, asked me what my four favourite books are. A difficult question at the best of times. They edited it nicely and broadcast it yesterday. If, like me, you missed it, you can listen here.

The Public Intellectual (PI, for the acronymic among you) debate continues with a Guardian blog post by Andrew Haydon, in which he robustly - and rightly, to my mind - defends the role of the humble reviewer, the put-upon gumshoe of the profession who does all the legwork. George Hunka questions the assumptions of value in Village Voice critic Michael Feingold's essay on criticism in the internet age. And our Neil Pigot is in the Age today proclaiming the decline of Australian theatre, blaming the funding-led desire to "bureaucratise" the arts for a loss of artistic maverick outsiderdom, and a consequent loss of audiences. Or a lack of new audiences, anyway. An assertion which I wonder about, given the high audience capacities at the Melbourne Fringe Festival - yes, my annual aesthetic breakdown is on its way - which compare very favourably with every other fringe festival in the world.

Critics, of course, come in for a serve. "The situation is further compounded by misconceived theatrical reporting," says Pigot. "Reviewers often misunderstand live performance in the same way that governments do, rarely engaging with the creative ideas driving a project ... too often reviews appear that are an expression of a reviewer's personal feelings rather than an overview of public response to a show or a critique of its place within the contemporary theatrical and social landscape."

There's justice in all Pigot's observations, although I think they ignore a lot of robust vitalities also at work around the place, both in the theatre itself and in the responses to it. Jana Perkovic's new aggregate concept for Spark Online - still in progress - suggests some alternatives on the local criticism question. Moreover - and this is a rare point on which every critic would agree - it's certainly not a critic's job to give "an overview of public response". What, we go to every performance and do vox pops as the audience leaves? Take a clap-o-meter to opening night? (That's about as misleading an indicator as, say, not going at all).

While I'm here, let me point you to James Waites' reservations about Liv Ullmann's STC production of A Streetcar Named Desire. He's not alone - Art Kritique also has some stern words. Both wonder how this production will fare in New York (the phrase "coals to Newcastle" is being bandied about). A shame New Yorkers will never see Blanchett's Richard II in Benedict Andrews' The War of the Roses, but them's the breaks: celebrity directing is so hot right now.

And now, allow me to don another hat. I read two books yesterday. One was China Mieville's excellent The City & The City, which is, for at least two thirds of its length, a completely brilliant spin on the generic detective novel, a kind of fantastic existential thriller that weaves a darkly compelling metaphor about contemporary post-End-Of-History politics. Mieville is a ferociously intelligent writer who takes pulp fiction by the scruff of the neck and demonstrates the meaninglessness of snobbish distinctions between "literature" and generic writing. He's certainly the only writer I've read who created an epic fantasy about trade unions.

The other book, shamefully, was one of my own, The Crow. I haven't read it since I finished it (proofreading a text around nine times for three different publishers will do that to a gal). And, you know, it's pretty damn good. I'd forgotten. Unlike Mieville, it's trad epic fantasy for a younger audience, but it is also a passionate anti-war novel that features concentration camps, child soldiers and environmental degradation a la Chernobyl. If that's not worthy enough, there's some racial and sexual politics in the mix too. But what matters most is that it's a good story, and I really did love writing those characters.

That's why people keep buying it, and why - for the first time for around two decades - I'm making a decent living. And no doubt that is why I'm less insouciant about territorial copyright than Guy Rundle, who seems to think that removing it for Australians (but not for the British or Americans, natch) will be a blow struck for the internet age, dragging us out of mediaeval delusion into the brave new world of the global e-text.

Maybe it's a lack of personal knowledge of how international markets work that makes Rundle claim that writers are a bunch of deluded lefties howling for government subsidies. My genre novels, for the record, like the work of most of Australia's internationally best-selling but culturally invisible fantasy writers, haven't and don't depend on subsidy. They're bringing in much more money than they take out. Removing territorial copyright would probably affect me much less than some others, but I still think that leaving the Australian book market to the tender mercies of Dymocks, Woolworths and a bunch of multinational territory-protected UK and US publishers is a pretty dumb idea.

Yes, the international publishing industry needs to think hard about the impact of the internets. It needs to respond to it with more imagination and chutzpah than the music industry did, and to stop pretending that it lives in the 19th century - publishers all over the world still pay by cheques sent in the post! But kicking the guts out of the local industry isn't the way to international copyright reform. And what's deluded is to think that it is.

Update: some early industry responses on the Ragged Claws blog.

The Productivity Commission today released its long awaited report on the parallel importation of books. I've only had time to read through the overview, but the conclusions are clear. The commission unequivocally recommends the total abolition of restrictions. Surreally, it says that any "contraction" in the publishing industry or in "cultural externalities" (I think they mean all the things that make books different from clothes pegs or fridges) caused by this decision should be countered by... the Federal Government giving more subsidies to literature!!!

That free market ideologues could actually recommend a higher rate of state subsidies, in the name of increasing competitiveness in the publishing industry, totally does my head in. They're effectively passing the responsibility for cultural value from the market to the state. It makes no sense, certainly from my understanding of what free market ideology is supposed to be, but I'm sure this is what it says. Perhaps someone else has a better translation?

RECOMMENDATION 1
The Government should repeal Australia’s Parallel Import Restrictions (PIRs) for books. The repeal should take effect three years after the date that it is announced.

RECOMMENDATION 2
The Government should, as soon as possible, review the current subsidies aimed at encouraging Australian writing and publishing, with a view to better targeting of cultural externalities. Any revised arrangements should be put in place before the repeal of the PIRs takes effect.

It further recommends an assessment after five years, presumably to see what the damage is, while openly admitting that there isn't enough information about the publishing industry available now to make decent decisions. This also does my head in.

If this report is ratified by the government, it will have one immediate effect on me, and the majority of other Australian authors who are able to do so: I will think very hard before publishing in Australia from now on. I will be far better off publishing in the UK or the US, where I will have the benefits and royalty protection of territorial copyright. Which makes me a bit sad.

And I would hate to be a new Australian writer now.

It's Sunday, enough excuse to be bloggishly personal... Ms TN's week as an Author has left me feeling a little (as Bilbo said to Gandalf) like butter spread over too much bread, although I've been fortunate enough to have been doing a double act with the charming Toni Jordan. I've been wearing my populist hat: I've been touring for the Books Alive reading campaign, for which The Gift is one of "50 Books You Can't Put Down", and I've been developing serious muscles lugging various editions of my BFFB (Big Fat Fantasy Books) around the state. I have a quieter week this week, although I'm looking forward to The Villainelles, which includes musical settings of some of my poems, at North Melbourne Arts House and a garden party at Government House. Then, after a swift trip to Sydney to talk BFF at the Mosman Library, I enter Slim Volume territory and become an Arts Elitist: I'm talking about poetry and theatre and even reading some poems of my own at the Melbourne Writers Festival. I'll remind you of these dates and some other interesting MWF theatre titbits closer to the time.

And I've been doing media. Oh yes. Toni and I were big in Saturday's Warrnambool Standard. And yesterday, in a bizarre synchronicity, I appeared in the Age twice. I was a Writer in the My Space column (not online, alas, otherwise you could read fascinating details about the objects I keep on my desk) and then, twirling my moustache, I had a bit part as the Mean Crrritic in a profile of Joanna Murray-Smith. I'm beginning to wonder how many hats I can put on before they cause an avalanche of millinery. I'll be back to what passes for normal in September, and polishing my eyeballs in preparation for the 2008 Melbourne Festival. Can't wait.

Those who have followed Barrie Kosky's theatre over the past two decades should already know that the man is a rampant sensualist. This quality is often obscured - or perhaps evaded - by popular perceptions that he is (a) an arch intellectual or (b) a show off, both of which are assumed to be somehow above sensual delight, or even opposed to it. On the contrary, flamboyance and intellectual passion are the dress of sensual vitality. Underneath the eye-catching raiment, the divine and profane meet in the naked body. And there the self is overwhelmed, even annihilated, by the stimuli of touch and taste, smell and hearing and sight, in a present moment which is so fully inhabited that it becomes all we will ever know of eternity. Ecstasy.

Those who refuse to hide from the intensities hidden within ordinary human experience tend to become mystics or poets. Or, perhaps, a certain kind of theatre director, theatre being an artform where the pragmatic material world and the finite human body collide with the ineradicable human impulse towards the divine, or whatever it is that wrenches us out of our quotidian selves into a wider possibility of being. (We all have our own names for it; I call it beauty). And perhaps it's no wonder that people prefer to think of Kosky as a clever dick. It's easier than admitting the painful, exhilarating worlds that exist at the edges of one's own skin. As the poet said, human beings cannot bear very much reality.

For Kosky, ecstasy begins with his grandmother's chicken soup. "My Polish grandmother," he says, remembering himself as a seven year old boy, "made a chicken soup like no other chicken soup....[It] was the Caravaggio of soups. The Rainer Maria Rilke of soups. The Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli of soups..." It happens when he is watching HR Pufnstuf or losing himself among the mink coats in his father's fur warehouse in Richmond or in the symphonic smells of the boys' changing rooms at school. And, three decades later, he experiences the same rapture in Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. Such ecstasy, as the mystics knew, is not expressible in language, which seeks to imprison the fluid moment in a fixed, linear past:

In the end, this music can only be experienced. Interpretation fails. Words are useless. Recordings do it no justice. You have to see the melody emerge from deep within the singer's body. To hear the melody being born out of the singer's mouth. To touch the melody as it travels through space. To smell the melody as it floats around you. To taste the melody as it submerges into your own body. Echoing. Vibrating. Ecstatic.

For all the impossibilities of language, Kosky's essay On Ecstasy, released this month by Melbourne University Press, is a seductive, exhilarating and illuminating read. It will tell you a lot about Wagner and Mahler and the ecstatic possibilities of theatre but, like ecstasy itself, it's not really biddable to interpretation. Kosky writes like he talks, with the same excessive gestures, the same self-mockery, the same passion, the same sense, dare I say it, of show business. I totally enjoyed it. The best thing to do is to read it for yourself. Second best, you can get to the Melbourne Writers Festival at the uncivilised hour of 10am on August 24, and hear the man himself in conversation with Julian Meyrick. Better still, do both.

Generalising... we could infer that all forms have their virtue in themselves and not in any conjectural "content". This would concord with the thesis of Benedetto Croce; already Pater in 1877 had affirmed that all arts aspire to the state of music, which is pure form. Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belaboured by time, certain twilights and certain faces try to tell us something, or have said something we should have missed, or are about to say something: this imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post responding to an article about Hilary Glow's new book, Power Plays: Australian Theatre and the Public Agenda, out from Currency Press. In particular, I was puzzled by Glow's observation that theatre had become less political in the Howard era, since it seemed to me that, on the contrary, it has become more so. To quote me:

What's shifted is the idea that theatre is primarily a socio-political document, and primarily the home of naturalism. The focus has moved from issue-based plays to a more multivalent awareness that representation itself, in this media-saturated world, is a deeply political issue, and that it is not nearly enough merely to state the issues. ...Puzzling over the claim that theatre is less political, when it is so manifestly not the case, I suspect that this shift away from naturalistic issue-based plays is the change that Glow notes, and mistakes for a lack of political engagement.

In the ensuing discussion, Ben Ellis, one of the playwrights interviewed for the Power Plays, pointed out, very reasonably, that Glow has every right to set her terms of discussion. "I think," he said, "that Hilary's choices allow her arguments about politics and theatre to be focused." And of course, it was unfair to speculate without having read the book.

Well, now I have read the book: and then I re-read my earlier post and thought, damn right. But I have promised to discuss Power Plays, so I will, though I confess to some reluctance. I should point out at the outset that my response is no reflection on any of the playwrights mentioned in this book; that would be another post.

I tried, Ben, I really tried. It is only fair to read any book on its own terms, and I did make a brave effort. My problems begin with Glow's defining of her choices and her definitions of important terms. Her argument is so muddy, so riven with self-contradiction or received assumption, that it almost makes no sense at all. If you are to argue with something, you need an argument to argue with. I disagree, for example, with Michael Billington on many salient points, but Billington always creates an intellectual structure with which it's possible to disagree. And besides, he's a pleasure to read. I don't feel any such clarity about Glow's book.

My problems with Power Plays are on two levels. On one, I disagree with almost every critical assumption about writing and politics and theatre that Glow makes in this book. On the other, quite aside from my own take on these things, the book makes an argument that is often incoherent, and reaches conclusions that are often, on inspection, disappointingly banal.

It's the kind of critical writing about theatre that makes me deeply depressed. It demonstrates the pedestrian ideological mindset and intellectual shallowness that strangled Australian theatre through the 80s and 90s. It is hard to know how to begin to talk about it, partly because its argument is so unclear; so I thought I'd just briefly pull out some individual points.

Power Plays discusses primarily the work of eight playwrights - Stephen Sewell, Hannie Rayson, Katherine Thompson, Andrew Bovell, Ben Ellis, Reg Cribb, Wesley Enoch and Patricia Cornelius - whom Glow interviewed for the book. But she by no means confines her discussion of political theatre to these playwrights: in fact, there is a dizzying sampling of Australian plays and playwrights discussed in this book, from Richard Frankland to Michael Gurr, from Oriel Grey to Jack Hibberd.

Taking a leaf out of Leonard Radic's Contemporary Australian Drama, Glow approaches theatre primarily as a means of tracking social history: "This book contends," she says, "that the Australian theatre of the last decade has been a good place to find out 'what is really happening'." And she is concerned with plays that, as she puts it, reflect a "critical nationalism", which works "against the grain" of John Howard's vision of "One Australia". The writers of these plays "insist", she says, "that their highest motivation is to provide politically informed debate on key issues in the public domain". She is not writing a history of all political theatre, and she is not writing a history of performance.

The problems begin when she starts to adumbrate her definition of "mainstream". She is concerned with "mainstream" playwrights "whose work is performed in and by the leading state-subsidised theatres in Australia" to "middle-class, aging" audiences. "Mainstream" plays are further defined as naturalistic, character-based dramas: they alone "engage with forums of power" and reach a national audience.

Nothing in the book answers my earlier questions about this definition of "mainstream", which I might as well repeat.

Surely the book is making a self-fulfilling argument in accepting those assumed limitations? The STC has been hosting things like Howard Barker's Victory, or Kosky's The Lost Echo. Benedict Andrews's production of The Season at Sarsaparilla critiqued modes of perception in its design and direction. And the politics in next year's STC program is quite difficult to escape, although at least a third of it eschews the naturalistic model of "unified narrative, psychologically plausible characters and emotional engagement" (although I always hope for emotional engagement). Which at the least brings into question the idea that the formal choice of naturalism has to be observed in order to be programmed.

The mix gets more complex when you look at all the theatre companies supported by the Major Performing Arts Board, which include the Malthouse and Company B, as well as Bell Shakespeare and all the State companies, and if you include the Melbourne Festival.

The examples I've noted seem to me to be quite noticeable eruptions of political critique in mainstream venues that, yes, absolutely have to get those bums on seats, but are still exploring work that reaches beyond the model of dramatic naturalism. Isn't an important part of this discussion that the parameters of the "mainstream" have noticeably been changing over the past few years?

This insistence on a very limited view of "mainstream" theatre - and the associated claims for its political significance, which underlie this book's argument - is a critical weakness. Even on her own terms, Glow uses "mainstream" very loosely: sometimes, as in the introduction, "mainstream" becomes a synonym for "play". It's muddied further by Glow's many discussions of independent theatre or independently produced plays, such as Ilbijerri Theatre, The Keene/Taylor Theatre Project or Melbourne Workers Theatre. Why insist so strongly on the definition of "mainstream" in the first place if, in the body of the book, it means so little? It is hard to see it as anything more than a rhetorical claim.

The definition of "political" is similarly problematic. After some discussion of the difficulty of defining political theatre, Glow accepts that political in this context means "the interrogation of systems of power". This might work if the book were more aware of, and interrogated, the systems of power at work in Australian theatre, but these remain largely unaddressed.

Glow has, for example, some strange ideas about agency: she says several times that writers "choose" to be mainstream playwrights. Hannie Rayson, it seems, "chooses" to have her plays performed at the MTC, rather than, say, at La Mama (oddly, given its noble history of political theatre, not mentioned in this book). Even the briefest consideration suggests that it is the MTC that chooses, otherwise we'd have mainstream playwrights coming out of our ears. No doubt this confusion stems from Glow's conflation of a formal style - naturalistic plays - with her definition of a category of theatre - theatre made in special buildings for middle-class audiences. But it is indicative of a general fuzziness.

Worse, this definition of the political as interrogating systems of power could be applied to almost every play ever written. Glow localises it by bringing in the notion of "critical nationalism": she is concerned with plays that argue against the prevailing nationalism promoted by the Howard Government. The danger of Glow's argument becoming purely reactionary ought to be obvious; especially if, as is widely expected, Howard gets voted out in a couple of weeks.

It is also very parochial: our theatre only counts as political in this purview if it explicitly addresses our "Australianness". There is no discussion of political theatre writing here in any wider context: you will look in vain for any references to Edward Bond, or Howard Brenton, or Augusto Boal, or even Bertolt Brecht. (David Hare gets a couple of mentions, but only because he visited Australia, and Samuel Beckett gets a very small guernsey in a discussion on Ben Ellis). One very serious problem with this book is that, while it might have a lot of breadth in the range of Australian theatre it discusses, it has hardly any depth at all.

There are other strange acrobatics. Glow has already claimed that theatre's highest good is as a public forum for informed political discussion. She has a fair bit of trouble squaring this instrumental view of art with her own objections to the equally instrumentalist economic rationalist model that she objects to from the Howard Government, but solves the contradiction by ignoring it. Instrumentalism is, it seems, ok if in the service of one kind of politics, but not in another.

Likewise, Glow quotes Terry Eagleton on ideology, which he says constructs a "reassuringly pliable" view of the world, and then speaks of theatre's capacity to unsettle ideological frameworks; but she nowhere questions the ideology adumbrated in the book. And this is an avowedly ideological argument, as expressive of a heterodoxy as anything it argues against.

I finished Power Plays with the gloomy thought that this book reduces theatre and art as effectively as any argument by Andrew Bolt: it employs the same parameters of discussion, and merely mirrors the effect - left wing, instead of right. Passion, intellectual play, love, formal curiosity, actual social engagement, the very experience of theatre itself, seem very far away. No wonder "we no longer feel", as Glow says, "that theatre is as important as life itself".

I hope some of you took advantage of Currency's generous offer last month, and bought and read the book. Now I've had my say, I'm fascinated to hear yours.

A little belatedly - Radio National's The Book Show broadcast my review of Ursula Le Guin's Voices last week. As I say of Ms Le Guin:

Language has always been central to the serious magic of Le Guin's work. In a short passage called 'A Few Words to a Young Writer', she says:

Socrates said, 'The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.' He wasn't talking about grammar. To misuse language is to use it the way politicians and advertisers do, for profit, without taking responsibility for what the words mean. Language used as a means to get power or make money goes wrong: it lies. Language used as an end in itself, to sing a poem or tell a story, goes right, goes towards the truth.

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.

As a writer and reader, I find this statement inexpressibly moving in its directness and wise courage. And it also points to the deeply radical impulse that lies behind Le Guin's work.

Full transcript and audio here.

A bonus for all you happy readers: Victoria Chance from Currency Press has a special offer to TN readers: if you order Power Plays online before Monday (click here) and write "Theatre Notes" in the comment box, you'll get a 20 per cent discount when the order is processed. Note that the discount won't appear until the order is processed but, Victoria assures us, "we will do it".
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Ms TN is surprisingly well after an intense three weeks of theatre. I put this down largely to having severely edited my diary so that I was only doing one thing. Next month I'm back to wearing three hats (I have to do the rewrite on my novel) but I'm beginning to see the point of a singly-focused life. Not that I seem very capable of it.

But today, swimming out of the post-fest haze, comes Corrie Perkin's preview of Hilary Glow's book Power Plays: Australian Theatre and the Public Agenda in the Australian. (Reviewed in Eureka Street here too: link via Ben Ellis, one of the playwrights discussed in the book, who also include Stephen Sewell, Hannie Rayson, Wesley Enoch and Patricia Cornelius).

The book is on my to-read list, so I can't comment on its substance. But a couple of Glow's comments made me pause. She says that under the Howard Government, theatre companies have been forced to adopt a more conservative repertoire and avoid risk. "I think there has been a change," says Glow, of the past few years. "And it's a change in which it's harder for critically adventurous work, challenging work, to emerge."

There is most certainly a truth in this - I've recently criticised the MTC for its conservative repertoire, which to me appears to emerge precisely from various kinds of risk avoidance. But equally, fresh out of a festival notable for its adventure and challenge, and packed with profoundly political works, ranging from Laurie Anderson's Homeland to Athol Fugard's Sizwe Banzi is Dead to Jérôme Bel's anti-spectacle The Show Must Go On, it strikes me that this is a very partial view. On the contrary, in many places I'm picking up an increasing political thoughtfulness, an increasing engagement with contemporary issues, an increasing sense of urgency among artists to connect, to speak, to make.

What's shifted is the idea that theatre is primarily a socio-political document, and primarily the home of naturalism. The focus has moved from issue-based plays to a more multivalent awareness that representation itself, in this media-saturated world, is a deeply political issue, and that it is not nearly enough merely to state the issues. You can see this awareness, to cite a few examples among many, in productions like Stephen Page's Kin or Nigel Jamieson's Honour Bound, both on at the Malthouse, or in independently produced plays like Hélène Cixous's The Perjured City, or Philip Ridley's Mercury Fur. All of them wholly engaged political works which certainly meet the benchmarks of adventure and challenge.

Criticising the controversial Behzti by Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, British critic/blogger Andrew Haydon recently observed: "Plays which 'expose secret, seedy worlds' in my experience often do so at the expense of pretty much anything else that might make a play watchable or indeed, uh, theatrical...The whole play would have sunk utterly without trace were it not for the disgrace of its being rioted off stage." He goes on to comment of "issue-based" plays:

...writers frequently appear to be encouraged to produce what amounts to emotional pornography - moreover: authentic, “urban” or exotic emotional pornography. And lastly, and worse, they appear to be encouraged to do this in a very narrow, restrictive, shallow sort of naturalism, which utterly refuses any use of language, metaphor, or most of the other things that actually make theatre vital.

I'm all for conversation, for art being on the public agenda. But as I said in my review of Sizwe Banzi Is Dead, "political writing, if it is to mean anything, has to reach both higher and lower than the banalities of ideology". That means, among other things, an attention to the form of theatre itself, and not regarding it as simply a vessel into which are poured various worthwhile messages.

Puzzling over the claim that theatre is less political, when it is so manifestly not the case, I suspect that this shift away from naturalistic issue-based plays is the change that Glow notes, and mistakes for a lack of political engagement. And while Glow's book includes a variety of writers, many of whom I admire, it has to be said that some of them have given me the most boring nights I've ever spent in the theatre.

Six months after this beautiful book found its way into my lustful hands (my fault entirely, I fear; it took me a long time to read it), my review of Iain Sinclair's London: City of Disappearances has been broadcast on ABC Radio National's The Book Show. No direct link, but you can hear me trying to negotiate my own English for the next few days on the podcast for September 25 (I'm about half way through). Or you can read on:

You can no more summarise London: City of Disappearances than you can summarise London itself. It’s not a book that you can read sensibly, from the front page to the back, and close with a satisfying bang, certain in your grasp of what you have just experienced. It is, rather, a book that you inhabit. You trip over things, forget things, find yourself fascinated, bored, fascinated again.

It’s the kind of book that you pick up and open at random, to find yourself wandering through spectral industrial landscapes, or forgotten streets lined with strip clubs and ghostly book shops. You enter compulsive fictions that solidify into bricks and mortar, or realities that dissolve into vapour as you approach them. Time warps and hiccups. You get lost.

London: City of Disappearances is, as the editor Iain Sinclair says in his introduction, “a gazetteer of erasures, each disappearance represented by a random object or image: a cabinet of curiosities”. Or, elsewhere, “entries for an ever-expanding encyclopaedia of loss”.

The losses include possibilities unrealised, things that were never were. It’s a book that is as full of unanswered longing as memory itself. It doesn’t attempt to describe London, so much as to mimic the city: the metropolis here is a living hive, a dense web of memories and transient relationships, an organic architecture that breathes and decays like a living body.

As the contributor Bill Drummond recounts, this anthology spins out of a very simple idea. “The remit for this piece,” he says “was vague but simple: did I want to write about things in London disappearing?” Drummond then goes onto tell us, “The trouble is, I don’t really give a shit about London. Never lived there. Wouldn’t mind if the whole lot disappeared before my eyes…”

Which shows clearly that Sinclair’s editorial eye, as might be expected for one of Britain’s most widely respected innovative writers, is neither limited nor petty. Each contributor brings his or her London – the London they hate, the London they lost, the London they barely survived, the London they love. Like any great city, London is infinitely multiple.

Sinclair has organised the book into sections, with an acutely sensitive eye for detail and nuance. Some parts are geographic – the West End, the East End – and some are thematic, like a section called “Bibliomania” (which might, in fact, be a sub-heading for the entire book). And the narratives evolve with the unpredictable beauty of Mandelbrot fractals: one account answers or contradicts another; an allusion in one piece might turn up as the subject of the next. At more than six hundred pages, with almost sixty contributors, it makes a hefty and fascinatingly complex tome.

Unsurprisingly, this is above all a city made of words: it excavates a literary London inhabited by famous names (Daniel Defoe, John Lennon, Alan Sillitoe, William Blake, John Bunyan) but also haunted by transient eccentrics, forgotten poets and vanished bookshops. It attracted my eye in part because, as well as writers like Marina Warner, Michael Moorcock, Will Self, JG Ballard or Thomas de Quincy, the contributors include many important figures from the counter-culture of contemporary British poetry, a scene from which Iain Sinclair himself emerges. It’s a chance to read some fascinating writers like Lee Harwood, Tom Raworth or Bill Griffiths.

Through these fragmented texts rises a narrative rich with baroque and shabby detail, shining like an oil slick with a hypnotic, and sometimes toxic, fascination. Stewart Home, for instance, launches a scathing attack on what he calls the “zombiefication of the British counter culture”: the heroin chic of the 1960s that, among other people, destroyed his mother. Recalling a famous poetry event attended by William Burroughs and RD Laing, Home writes:

“The State of Revolt” marks the onset of counter-cultural rigor mortis and this living death occurred not with a band but a smacked out whimper. It is also a death that we won’t fully comprehend until the chatter of neo-critical production about the 1960s ceases to mask the violent silence that lies at the core of that decade, and which will yet prove to be its most enduring legacy.

And then there’s Ann Baer’s haunting memories of Mervyn Peake, or John Welch’s poignant account of a couple of unknown writers who lived on the margins of the ‘literary life’ with, as he describes it, “its interminable fantasies of inclusion and exclusion”.

Among the most moving sections of the book are its evocations of the long-vanished Jewish Whitechapel in the East End, which never recovered from the bombs of the Second World War. There is a beautiful remembrance of the great Yiddish poet Avrum Nacum Stencl, who died poverty-stricken and forgotten, and of Kafka’s final lover Dora Diamant, who fled to London as a refugee from Nazism and lived there for the rest of her life.

And through these overtly literary remembrances and fictions weave many other ghosts: Anthony Rudolph’s startlingly beautiful oral recordings of his grandfather Josef Rudolph (dealer in second-hand clothes and army surplus), or Aileen Philby, the destroyed wife of the celebrated spy Kim, or the millionaire king of the vanished strip clubs of Soho, Paul Raymond. And threaded between these accounts, like a rollcall of the dead, is a list of vanished buildings: short, bald descriptions of the histories of specific addresses.

As you read on, distinctions between fiction and history begin to corrode. An extract from a nineteenth century Times article looks as authentic – or inauthentic – as a fiction. The cumulative effect is a little like reading a book by WG Sebald, if you can imagine Sebald refracted through a multi-faceted prism into sixty very individual voices. The details of Sinclair’s curios emerge in a kind of melancholy clarity that is heightened by an acute sense of mortality.

It’s a darkly enchanting book that I’ll return to again and again, if only because, like London itself, it needs long acquaintance to begin to discover all its mysteries. Above all, this book is a giant act of imaginative recuperation. It becomes clear that, in writing about disappearance, all these writers are in fact creating another kind of magic: they conjure up the unseen and the hidden, and they bring it into the light.

London: City of Disappearances, edited by Iain Sinclair, Hamish Hamilton

Last night, Lee Lewis' Platform Paper on Cross-Racial Casting was launched at the Beckett Theatre with vim, espièglerie and lashings of after-launch conversation lubricated by copious amounts of wine. Among a crowd of 30 to 40 interested people were Stephen Armstrong and Michael Kantor (respectively executive producer and artistic director of the Malthouse) as well as a notable blogger presence - Matt from Esoteric Rabbit, Ming from Mink-Tails and Daniel from Our Man in Berlin.


An hour and a half flew by. Or it did for me, anyway. Platform Papers editor Dr John Golder was MC; I spoke briefly (see below) and then Lee talked with lively passion about her paper and responded to questions from the audience. Topics covered included: the reasons why she decided to investigate this issue; the responses so far to what she has written; the influence of the dominance of naturalism and Lee's conviction that the first step should be aggressive cross-racial casting of the classical repertoire; the present conservative political climate that has so inhibited experiment on main stages and, perhaps most interestingly of all, Lee's interrogation of her own practice and ethics as a director. Peter Brook turned up once or twice, although sadly not in person.

Conversation afterwards flowed through many byways (the differences between Sydney and Melbourne, Dr Who and Harry Potter, blogging, the general theatrical discourse, the inhibitions that surround discussions about race, and so on...) One major question was how to extend the conversation about cross-racial casting into a general ethic in theatrical practice. Ming - whom I'm sure will write further about this - was bothered that such an important issue was considered by many of her peers to be a minority concern that doesn't affect white people. There was a notable sense throughout the evening that this issue is not about "worthiness" and rather has everything to do with the task of making exciting theatre that engages with the Australia in which we all live.


It was all, as my kids used to say, very fun. Let's hope the conversation does continue: I'm with Lee in thinking it one of the vital questions in Australian theatre. If you haven't read it, buy the book - I assure you that it's a fascinating, smart and stimulating read - and maybe subscribe to the Platform Papers series, which is well worth your attention.

Here's what I said in launching the book:

I’m honoured that Katherine Brisbane asked me to launch this book, and would like to thank her in absentia. It seems to me that Lee Lewis’s paper, Cross-Racial Casting: Changing the Face of Australian Theatre, is an important contribution to the continuing conversation about theatre in Australia, and I’m delighted to be here today. The editorial board at Currency House is to be congratulated for this series of Platform Papers, which has for the past few years provided a valuable and sorely-needed space for extended and thoughtful analyses of Australian performing arts culture.

This particular paper has already generated a lot of comment and discussion, some of it excited and positive, some of it hostile. Perhaps, as Lee Lewis ventures so fearlessly into such a delicate and complex area, this is only to be expected. But I’d like to begin with some negative theology. There are a number of things that I think this paper is not.

This is not an accusatory paper. It’s not an argument that blindly points the gun of racism at theatre directors or writers or artistic institutions. It is not concerned with apportioning blame. As Lewis quite rightly says, “Little is served by this discourse of blame beyond encouraging inertia”.

Rather, I think Lee does something much more interesting and much more positive. She intelligently and sensitively identifies a complex problem that she perceives within Autralian theatre culture, and then, without ignoring the minefields that surround the issue, she suggests a possible approach towards its resolution.

What is the problem? According to Lee, the diverse ethnic make-up of the Australian population is not reflected by a similar diversity on our stages. Sydney main stages – and by extension, mainstream stages in other Australian cities – remain "reprehensibly White". Not reflecting this diversity, she argues, means that theatre is missing a huge opportunity to re-imagine our national identity, that we are unwittingly participating in implicitly colonial practices that privilege the White over every other kind of identity.

In order to develop her thesis, Lee examines the social construction of Whiteness and the broader implications of the marginalisation of what she calls Third World Looking People. And she takes a searching and not unsympathetic look at how this plays out in the complicated culture of theatre.

The solution, she says, by no means lies in simplistic identity politics. TWLP actors are not, for example, granted the same possibility of transformation that White actors are: a White actor is considered neutral and able to be protean, whereas a TWLP is forever trapped in the biological reality of his or her ethnic origin.

I think Lee’s identification of the problem is pretty much unarguable. On the whole, our mainstages are, as Barrie Kosky said while casting his eye over the STC’s Actors Company, very “white bread”. And actors who do not identify as White are very seldom seen on our main stages outside ethnically-specific roles. We recently had an Indigenous Othello in Melbourne, but we are yet to see a Black Lear or an Asian Hedda Gabler. And, as Lee points out, even if cross-racial casting began to happen routinely, this could only be the beginning of a complex and exciting shift in our cultural dialogue.

I hope that Lee’s paper does lift us past the discourse of blame to a more positive recognition that there is a problem, and more, to further discussion on how it might best be dealt with. I declare this book launched and now pass over to Lee to talk more about her ideas.

And then she did...

Nicholas Pickard's blog report on the Sydney launch here.

Pictures: Top: Lee Lewis speaks at the launch. Bottom: Some of the later conviviality: (L-R) Brad and Sarah from the Malthouse, David, me, Matt the Esoteric Rabbit (front), Stephen from the Malthouse, Ming from Minktails. Photos: Brett Boardman

World Croggon is a little ott at the moment (for those not hip to the cyber-acronyms, it means over the top). While some of my beetle-browed brethren are glued to Harry Potter, and others are just crashed with the flu, Little Alison feels a little like Cadel Evans in last night's stage of Le Tour, going backwards despite his most dogged efforts as Alberto Contador and Michael Rasmussen fly past him on wings of steel. (Ok, I admit, my sleeping patterns are a little disrupted by an unseemly obsession with a bike race: but the metaphor still holds. I really felt for Evans last night).

Anyway, this is a hotchpotch post on some of the things that are taking up my time, and which might interest some of you.

First, Currency House has announced two free public discussion sessions on Lee Lewis's controversial paper on racial casting, one in Sydney and one in Melbourne, where Lee will be in conversation with me at the Malthouse on Wednesday August 15. Details are on Nicholas Pickard's blog. It promises to be a stimulating discussion, so grab the book, read it, form opinions and questions, and come and join in.

Second, I'm making a couple of rare poetical appearances in Melbourne in upcoming months. On Sunday July 26, I'm a guest at the Melbourne Writers Festival, for a session called Poets Against the War. I'll be reading a favourite poem (possibly Neruda's passionate protest against what happened to Lorca in the Spanish Civil War) as well as some of mine, and discussing poetry and war with Barry Hill and JS Harry.

Third, I'm also, to my delight, one of the 200 local artists who will be part of John Cage's Musicircus at the Melbourne Festival on Friday October 26. Look out for me: I'll be there somewhere, sometime, in the BMW Edge, possibly declaiming poems about mediaeval mystics.

Fourth, TN gets a brief mention in Sophie Cunningham's huge overview of blogging in Saturday's Age, which takes a whistle-stop tour through the world of writers' blogs, and which rehearses the debate around the value of blogging through writerly glasses. Worth a look.

Meanwhile, I've finally managed to finish a review for The Book Show of Iain Sinclair's gigantic book, London: City of Disappearances. A very late review. The staff at the ABC have been saintly in their patience. This book inspired lust in me when I saw it, and I don't regret volunteering to review it for one minute; but next time I plan to find one of those slim, lyrical, lucid masterpieces, like Alessandro Baricco's Silk, which you can read on the train because they're about 100 pages long...

Next on my to-do list is proofing an essay I've written for the anthology Navigating the Golden Compass, about Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, which is due to be published in the US next month. I daren't look further down. I think next week looks less squished, but it might just be an optical illusion.

Reviews on Thom Pain and The Eisteddfod up tomorrow. Promise.

Those who think it's been a bit quiet here might recall that I temporarily blew up last week, driving a deep hole in my novel schedule. Those fanboys and girls waiting (with appropriate squeeing noises) for The Singing will be glad to hear that I'm making up for it this week, only surfacing from the heart-stopping adventures in Annar for meals. Or perhaps to say "hello" to my family. Yes, I'm afraid I'm well and truly away with the faeries.

But never fear, brave thespianauts: the blogoverse has been humming with industry. Check out my blogroll (which is already sadly out of date) or the new must-have theatre blog aggregator Theatreforte, which is pretty comprehensive on US blogs, even if the Rest of the World is kinda down the bottom there (and thanks guys for the link...) Then you can catch up on the Mike Daisey fracas that has been entertaining our American friends; or if you feel like some meaty conversation, have a look at Superfluities where George Hunka has a great vid of John Cage on a game show (!!) and is discussing Mac Davies' deeply interesting new book, Art and Politics. More on that when I reach the end of the book, which is now in my hot little hands. Closer to home, Nicholas Pickard waxes indignant about the state of arts discourse, and David Williams has a couple of valuable posts about arts funding.

And don't miss this wonderful post on the Steppenwolf blog from actor Tracy Letts, which hilariously dissects a certain percentage of the audience - mobile phoners, coughers, psychos - which all of us will recognise. (We are - for once - in the majority - we know we're the lovable 99 per cent.)

Meanwhile back in fantasyland - indulge me, guys - I got a letter today enclosing the rather gorgeous bookmarks that will come free with the US paperback edition of The Riddle, due out around now, I guess; and I saw with a certain thrill that Candlewick Press is advertising the domain name booksofpellinor.com. Nothing there yet - it just reverts to Candlewick - but could it be that there will be a website for the Pellinor books designed - well - not by me, but by a real web designer? Something like this gorgeous thing done for Philip Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy would be cool, no? (Ok, maybe I'll have to wait for the movie for that kind of production. Still...)

I'm thinking about Pullman, in fact, because rather foolishly I said I'd write an essay on His Dark Materials and its relationship to Milton and Blake for an upcoming anthology that Borders is putting out in the States to celebrate the release of the movie. So I got my Daemon (Myron?! But look what a lovely, softly spoken osprey he is) from said cool website. Admire below and, if the fancy takes you, get your own.

My review of Barbara Reynolds' Dante: The Poet, The Political Thinker, The Man was broadcast on ABC Radio National's The Book Show today. My rather unsuccessful Simon Schama imitation is presently audible at The Book Show's site, with a handy transcript for those who can't stand it any more.

My review of George Ogilvie's autobiography Simple Gifts, published by Currency House, was broadcast today on ABC Radio National's The Book Show today. Audio and transcript here.

Worth listening to on the same program is Frank Moorhouse's talk on The Writer in a Time of Terror, in which he ruminates on freedom of speech (or the increasing lack of it) in Australia.

My review of JG Ballard's new novel, Kingdom Come, was broadcast today on ABC Radio National's The Book Show. Transcript and audio here (you have to fast forward through David Malouf, ahem, or better still, listen to the whole thing).

Reviewed for The Book Show, ABC Radio National - you can listen to me here or read on...

Contemporary Australian Drama by Leonard Radic. Brandl and Schlesinger 2006.

You shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but in the case of Leonard Radic's new book on Australian drama it's irresistible. The book is grey. Tombstone grey. It gives you fair warning of the quality of the prose inside.

The cover's greyness is marginally relieved by a black and white photograph of the first production of Ray Lawler's Summer of the Seventeenth Doll in 1955. Yes, that's 51 years ago. And this is a book entitled 'Contemporary Australian Drama'? Those of us who believe theatre is one of the most exciting artforms around and wonder at its fusty, old-fashioned image need look for explanation no further than this volume.

Leonard Radic was the theatre reviewer for the Age for two decades and, in the tradition of reviewers such as James Agate, Kenneth Tynan or Michael Billington, now seeks the more permanent legacy of a book to immortalise his critical insights. Or, as the case may be, insight. Radic seems to have had one idea in his entire critical life, and he hangs onto it with the tenacity of a slightly dim bull terrier.

Contemporary Australian Drama follows his equally dull 1991 survey of Australian theatre, The State of Play. The narrative in both books is basically the same: Australian theatre was a colonial franchise until, in the late 60s and early 70s, a bunch of young turks – including David Williamson, John Romeril, Jack Hibberd, Alex Buzo and Dorothy Hewett – began to articulate a new, uniquely Australian perspective.

This thesis is fine as far as it goes. In Radic's hands, that's not very far at all. There's no doubt that the founding of the Nimrod, Pram Factory and La Mama theatres, the formation of the Australian Performing Group, and the tremendous surge of political and artistic energy this released, was a crucial period in our theatre history. Radic's special genius is to make this colourful history more boring than cutting your own toenails.

As I plodded through this book, I saved myself from the insanity of tedium by rereading One Night Stands, Michael Billington's collected theatre reviews for the Guardian. Radic is, in some ways, the Australian equivalent of Billington. They are roughly contemporaneous, both young reviewers of the theatre that expressed the social and political upheavals of the 1970s. Billington, like Radic, was in particular an advocate for a theatre of social and political commitment – a theatre epitomised in Britain by writers like David Hare or Howard Brenton, or directors like Max Stafford-Clarke.

Billington has his limitations: his subscription to a notion of theatre as a branch of sociology meant, for instance, that he initally missed the significance of radical talents like Sarah Kane (although he was man enough to admit it later). But a read through his collected reviews will give you a fair idea of the ferment of ideas that ran through British theatre in the 70s and 80s – the variety of its aesthetic, its political concerns – filtered through a fascinated, mobile intellect. More importantly, it leaves you with the feeling that the theatre is an exciting, vital place to be. 'He loves the theatre,' Peter Hall said of Billington. 'So I always want to read him.'

This sense of excitement is palpably missing from Radic's book. In part, it's a function of his style: where Billington is witty, literate and engaged, Radic is earnest and pedestrian. He has the unstoppable, unvarying stolidity of a cyberman, and about as much intellectual suppleness. The book's single virtue is as an archive: it records the titles, plots and premiere productions of many significant Australian plays, and there is a useful chapter on the beginnings of a national theatre. Considered as a critical history, however, it has crippling shortcomings.

Radic is very clear that his book is about the writers of the theatre and not the directors, designers, actors and other artists who create it. This is, of course, a perfectly legitimate and worthy exercise. His aim, as he explains in the introduction, inspired by the only decent piece of prose in the book – a quote from David Hare – is to track the social history of Australia through the writings of our playwrights over the past 40 years.

This is Radic's Grand Idea, and he grimly sets about applying it to every playwright in sight. It fits neatly over David Williamson and his heirs like Hannie Rayson, those who devote themselves to a formally conventional theatre inspired by 'issues', but less easily categorised writers like Patrick White or Dorothy Hewett, let alone avant garde artists like Jenny Kemp, have to be violently jemmied into his thesis. To this end, the hapless reader is taken through the plot of each play, treated to a series of homilies on its success or failure, and then moved on to the next illustration of Australia's social history.

The champion of this story is David Williamson, who according to Radic 'remains unchallenged as Australia's leading playwright'. Why? Radic says, as if it trumps all argument, 'the box office figures are there on the board for all to see'. This equation between commercial viability and quality is, as Michael Billington observes in other circumstances, 'deeply Thatcherite', and points towards the basic philistinism underlying this book.

While any critic has the right to her individual viewpoint, Radic's Melbourne-centrism seriously compromises his claim to comprehensiveness. To take one example: a chapter is devoted to the oeuvre of Daniel Keene. Anybody familiar with Keene's work will notice that Radic only discusses the plays that have been produced in Melbourne. There is no mention at all, for instance, of Keene's long and fruitful collaboration with Tim Maddock, director of the Red Shed Company in Adelaide. Yet this company commissioned five of Keene's most important plays, all of which have subsequently had major productions in Europe.

Radic also studiously avoids any discussion of the arguments against his nationalistic narrative, such as Julian Meyrick's controversial essay Trapped by the Past, a swingeing attack on the so-called new wave theatre and its suppression of younger artists through the 1990s. And although he discusses plays produced as recently as 2005, Radic fails to engage with of any of the new theatre writers who have emerged since 2000. Despite an epilogue that attempts to sketch out the challenges facing Australian theatre now, this is a book which looks resolutely backwards.

Here is little sense of a critical mind distilling his wide experience into a useful intellectual map, or even researching very far past his personal experience. Compare it to something like David Bradby's excellent Mise en Scene: French Theatre Now, a crisp, intelligent overview of the the major movements in the development of modern French theatre, and its inadequacies become very clear.

The shame is that this is such a missed opportunity. Sure, theatre's failures can make you squirm like nothing else can. But when the art takes flight, when that indefinable magic occurs and the stage is transformed into an arena for our released imaginations, nothing is more exhilarating. It's something that happens now, here, in the same space where you are breathing, and it will never happen again. As Malcolm Muggeridge said of journalism, its glory is its transience. If any art is to inspire lively writing, it surely ought to be the theatre.