George Hunka at Superfluities Redux (whom I'm sure you all read religiously) blogs on the recurrent death of criticism, and in particular on the argument that its death sentence is signed by the new democratisation of the web. This is (sigh) an old and whiskery argument, but as George points out,"the real danger is in formalizing (the) informal process of inclusion and exclusion". It's an interesting read. As a bonus, check out some rare photos of Sarah Kane performing in Howard Barker's Victory.

Meanwhile, Katharine Brisbane delivered the Philip Parsons Memorial lecture over the weekend, giving an overview of four decades of Australian theatre. An extract is published in the Australian (free registration required). (Update: full text here.) As she says:

More people attend arts ventures than sport, according to polls. In 40 years it is a record of which we should be proud. And yet (with rare exceptions) the leaders of this industry are not influential in the way leaders of other professions are. A new play may be acclaimed but is rarely discussed as an insight into, or barometer of, our culture. Artists have become a collection of specialists for whom communication outside their art has become more difficult. The less they try to break through this barrier the more they are misunderstood. It seems that only for artists is the word elite a pejorative. In the sports world they are heroes.

Brisbane suggests this is the result of a demolition of a "culture of inclusion", which meant that theatre failed to take its audience with it. I suspect this problem might have more to do with the media than with audiences. Worth thinking about in tandem with George's post.

Lastly, for those who might be interested, I have idly started a new blog called Lost Poems. This came about because a week or so ago, in the interests of order, I plunged into the labyrinths of my computer and discovered a bunch of poems that I had completely forgotten about. What to do with them? A blog seemed like an excellent idea. From now I'll be posting one every few days, until I run out of poems.

Those unfortunate souls who follow Ms TN on Twitter will be aware that this week she has been under the weather. "Crapulous" is the adjective that springs to mind: neither ill enough to hang up her boots by her sickbed (with attendant sympathies, flowers and Belgian chocolates) nor well enough to gird her loins and spring with a happy cry into life's melee. This is one of the most boring states on the planet, and I am well bored with myself.

Still, I've been attending theatre, even if in my bathchair, and will blog about Red Stitch's admirable production of The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later and the MTC's Next to Normal as soon as I can think in paragraphs again. This week's pick is Debbie Tucker Green's Random, which is presently showing at the Lawler Studio as part of the MTC's Education Program. This production opened at the World Theatre Festival in Brisbane earlier this year and features an exemplary - nay, breath-taking - solo performance from Zahra Newman. Get thee hence, and at once: it closes at the end of next week.

In other news, US playwright Tony Kushner is in the headlines, following the last-minute withdrawal of an honorary degree from NY university CUNY. The decision follows accusations from CUNY trustee Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld that Kushner, an outspoken critic of Israeli policy on Palestine, is an anti-Semite. George Hunka at Superfluities Redux has been tracking the scandal closely, with follow-ups here and here. The public outcry, which includes high-calibre names like Harold Bloom, has forced the trustees chair to reconvene another meeting next week to "reconsider" this decision.

Lastly, shifting to another hat: I'll be at Readings in Carlton at 6.30pm Monday night, with my poetry fascinator firmly affixed to my forehead. It's my first reading in Melbourne in two years, so I'm looking forward to it, and I'll be joined by new poets Chloe Wilson and Jessica Wilkinson. Gold coin donation. Details here.

The Wheeler Centre, aka the Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas, nicely asked me for another response to Jonathan Mills's lecture, so this time I went for something slightly more personal. It's up today on their site. And while you're there, you might want to check out the series of discussions the centre is hosting next month on arts criticism, provocatively titled Critical Failure: why arts criticism is failing us all. I'll be part of the theatre discussion, which is scheduled for September 8. Plenty to chew on there, though I'm hoping that it won't be me that's mostly being chewed.

Elsewhere in blogland, George Hunka posts some recondite statements about the dramatist's art from British playwright John Whiting, which are well worth a ponder. Once you get past the insistence on the masculine pronoun, the assumption that art is a job for "a man", there are some interesting points about the individual as opposed to the communal voice. And I hope you'e following Chris Goode's Edinburgh diary on his blog Thompson's Bank of Communicable Desire, as he rehearses and performs Tim Crouch's The Author at the Edinburgh Festival. And, being Goode, much other stuff. Someone said that they print out Goode's blog posts to read on the bus, which is, in fact, probably an excellent way to read them, especially given the uncertainties of Melbourne's public transport system.

Closer to home, Robin Usher reports in today's Age that the MTC could "do an STC" and appoint Oscar winner Geoffrey Rush as its new artistic director. I guess they could do a lot worse: and we all know Rush is a man of the theatre. But would he be interested, I wonder? One can't help suspecting the job is a bit of a poisoned chalice... And while I'm at it, let me point you to Jeff Sparrow's excellent comment piece on The Drum, which looks at the neo-liberal commodification of politics, and the concomitant panic about "authenticity": "Pro-wrestling makes a pretty good analogy for where we're at: an election is a product designed for TV, in which the wacky antics of assorted larger than life characters disguise how little's actually at stake. Welcome to the desert of the Real, as someone once said." Indeed.

It occurs to me that in the past couple of months I've been doing more criticky stuff in the off-blog world than here, which perhaps accounts for this paradoxical feeling that I'm getting nowhere, while running as fast as I can. I'm not sure what I think about this: of course I have that old-fashioned pleasure at being in print, but it's also one of those odd reversals. While most people think of blogs as the lightweight aside to the main game, I've always thought of my work here as the real deal. Is this a presage of the post-internet, where the glittering pixels get folded back into ink and paper? Who knows?

Anyway, on to business. My Australian review of the MTC's production of Boston Marriage is online today. Readers might also be interested in my earlier review of Hoy Polloy's 2007 production of the same play. At least you can't say that I'm not consistent, even across very different productions. (No, there's no conscious plagiarising of myself there).

Meanwhile, on the plays-as-literature issue, George Hunka is also opining in print in the current issue of the Yale School of Drama's Theatre journal. It is clearly a trending topic in the zeitgeist. He posts an extract at Superfluities Redux.

1. Ex-Melbourne and Red Stitch director Sam Strong has been appointed the new artistic director of Sydney's Griffin Theatre. Joanne Erskine has the goods at Cluster.

2. Critic Mark Mordue has won this year's Geraldine Pascall Critic of the Year Prize. (Those of you with long memories will recall I was last year's winner; this year I was on the judging panel and can say he was the unanimous choice.) More on Mark's work from James Bradley at City of Tongues. Another blogger/freelance critic: it suggests that the common perception that blogs are the death of criticism might be getting a few critical hits.

3. George Hunka at Superfluities Redux posts details of Howard Barker in conversation on, well, all sorts of things. Go hence.

4. The Guardian flatters me outrageously by listing me as one of five must-read critics, alongside Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Peter Campbell and James Wood. Excuse me while I lie down and recover.

George Hunka is back at a smart new site, a new play in his pocket, after a meditative few weeks hanging out Montauk with burbling nature (and Edward Albee, which is probably not at all the same thing) at the Albee Foundation.

Here at TN we've been sorely missing his voice in the blogmix, but he's assuaging us already with notes on Wedekind, contemporary French theatre, a quote on Messiaen and Schönberg (which contains my latest favourite phrase, "liberated dissonance") and, of course, the ongoing Organum, where he dares to speak of love. Sadly but understandably, the comments section is gone, but he courteously provides an email address for conversation.

So George Hunka is asked along to a show at Playwrights Horizons in New York, and his invitation stipulates that he is asked to blog his thoughts, positive or negative. The show gets on his wick so badly he leaves at interval. He then, as requested, blogs his displeasure. And the shit hits the fan.

Not from the aggrieved theatre company, which quite properly has nothing to say, but - perhaps surprisingly - from his fellow bloggers. Some, like Matt Freeman, are discomforted by his leaving at interval. (This question has already been debated on this blog, after a controversial walkout of my own. At the time, Age dance critic Hilary Crampton picked up on TN's walkout and defended the critic's right to express outrage and "take strong action", claiming that "in claiming democratic rights to freedom of speech, artists must also allow critics the freedom to comment on their public presentations".)

But Matt was simply, rather mildly, asking a question. Not so Leonard Jacobs, a critic and editor at Back Stage and blogger at the Clyde Fitch Report, who went ballistic. His beef is that the show to which George was invited was a preview. (Unlike here, where we have maybe three or four days of previews, NY previews go for weeks; this particular show doesn't officially "open" until later in September.) In a series of increasingly inflammatory posts, Leonard accuses George - and then, when it was revealed that a number of bloggers had been invited under the same conditions, Playwrights Horizons - of appalling dereliction of professional ethical standards. Mixed up with this is a fuzzy objection to bloggers getting free tickets, which seems to be regarded as a form of payola: as he elegantly puts it, "just because there's a pimp doesn't mean you have to fuck everyone".

Well, here's my 2c worth. TN doesn't review previews. I saw a Malthouse show in preview a while back because I was going overseas and it was the only performance I could attend (for the record, I thought the show was poor) and that was on the understanding that I did not blog it. So I didn't. But in this case, where comment has been specifically invited by the theatre, I don't see any problem.

Elsewhere, bloggers who pay for preview tickets now regularly blog about shows that haven't officially "opened" for print. The Guardian theatre page often rounds up these responses. In the strange case of the recent RSC production of King Lear, which was officially in "preview" during its entire Stratford season, the only critical responses for weeks were from bloggers. In this case, there is a clear line drawn before "official" and "bloggy" reviews. Here in Melbourne, where the performing arts culture seems to be miles ahead in its acceptance of bloggers into the general discourse, the line is a little fuzzier.

TN has uncontroversially operated as a freelance reviewer from the start, requesting and receiving free tickets like any other critic. Perhaps it's an Australian thing: along with with my fellow bloggers Chris Boyd, Nicholas Pickard, Richard Watts and Matt Clayfield, I operate on a nexus between print and online publication, reviewing for both, and perhaps this makes us seem marginally more legit. Though I think it's more that many people here have been starving for some decent public conversation about theatre.

More germanely, the upset seems to be about George's "destructive" negative reaction (positive reviews on another blog seem to have attracted no controversy at all), a perennial issue in theatre reviewing. As he quite rightly asks, if his response had been rapturous acclaim, would anyone have been bothered? I expect not. In a general sense, it still seems to be considered impolite for a critic to criticise, along the lines that "if you can't say anything good, don't say anything at all".

As far as I'm concerned, this is the death of dialogue: such an attitude has pretty well killed off critical discourse in Australian poetry, where people regularly refuse to write about books they don't like. To take a local whipping horse, Age theatre critic Cameron Woodhead: I might disagree - and often - with what he has to say, but I'll defend to the death his right to say it. And conversely, my right to take issue with what he says.

Apropos of this question, I was buttonholed at a Melbourne Writers Festival dinner last week by historian Ross McMullin, who wanted to grill me about my reviews of Hannie Rayson. McMullin is the biographer of Elliot Pompey, the real-life model for a couple of characters in The Glass Soldier, and is also a friend of Hannie's. This very pleasant man was clearly one of those for whom my reputation as bitch critic had gloriously preceded me.

Given my record with Hannie's plays (four strikes out of four, as I recall), he suggested that I should not review them at all. He seemed to think that having an aesthetic viewpoint in itself represented some kind of conflict of interest.

When I asked if he was suggesting that I had a personal animus towards Hannie which then informed my reviews - which I would strenuously deny since, whatever else I am as a critic, I seriously attempt to be at once honest and fair - he said no, he wasn't suggesting that. I then said that I always went to the theatre hoping that it would be good, and that if it ever happened that I enjoyed a play by Hannie Rayson, I would have no hesitation in saying so. And launched into my impassioned spiel on the necessity for frank and honest discourse yada yada. I'm not sure I convinced McMullin, though he did allow that he himself had been known to review books negatively, and that it was legitimate to do so.

Finally, to leave the last word with George, it's a question of respect - for audiences, for readers, and for theatre practitioners.

Artists are not children to be coddled and protected from criticism when they, or their producing organization, invite it from whatever source, and critics are not paternalistic playground monitors, to pat artists on the head when they do well or scold them when they do poorly. Artists are fully-grown mature adults, well aware that they conduct their professional lives in the public arena. Criticism, whether it's from a reviewer or from a friend over drinks after a show, is the risk one takes, consciously, when one chooses the profession.

Readers of both blogs and newspaper reviews, similarly, are not children. ...they are fully capable of reading, fairly and critically, the reviews we write and decide on the basis of that whether they want to see the show or not. They are aware that these are opinions, nothing more and nothing less. And the more familiar they are with an individual critic's prejudices and interests, the more they are fairly able to judge whether the play itself holds any interest for them or not. People who have been reading "Superfluities" for the past few years, as well as the reviews I've written for other publications, are well-aware of my own, and my fairness when it comes to reviewing shows which don't conform to the aesthetics I hold for my own creative work.

Yay to that. The alternative is a bland, boring, defensive culture that actively seeks to eradicate difference. I've lived in a culture like that, and believe me, it's no fun at all.

Your weekend reading: over the past few weeks, George Hunka at Superfluities has been nailing his equivalent of Martin Luther's 95 Theses - 95 Sentences About Theatre - up on his front door. A Protestant, perhaps, in the profound sense, making his claim for the true sacredness of theatre against its gross commercialisation, its profiting by the sale of indulgences. Much to ponder, argue with and enjoy.

To my distress and dudgeon, I did Matt's Which Book Are You? quiz and found out that I am J. Alfred Prufrock. I guess it could be worse, but I'm not sure how. Anyway, perhaps there is a truth there - I am short, I drink a lot of coffee, I'll never play Prince Hamlet and maybe I am measuring out my life in blogs. And it's only getting worse. In one of my lives I have actual fans, whose mail keeps piling up uncontrollably, and in a (probably futile) attempt to wrestle my selves into some kind of order, I've started a Books of Pellinor blog. Pretty, ain't it? Like, I needed something else to do...

Meanwhile, as promised, Ming has posted at length on Lee Lewis's Currency House paper on Cross Racial Casting. And over at Nicholas Pickard's place, the debate still rages. Lewis seems to have touched some very sensitive nerves. (Yes, I will - when I have a moment - buy the paper and read it for myself). Watch this space for details of an up-coming public forum with Lee Lewis in Melbourne-town.

Skipping over to George Hunka - the man is, according to the current issue of The Dramatist, one of 50 playwrights to watch in the US, but us blog denizens knew that already, eh? Anyway, check out his excellent meditation on Howard Barker's latest book, A Style and its Origins (written, it seems, by Barker's alter-ego, Eduardo Houth). More blowing of the budget, I fear.

And finally, just to prove that theatre types have their sweaty fingers pressed firmly on the popular pulse, see several bloggers on Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - Andrew Haydon at Postcards from the Gods liked its new grunge aesthetic and thought it the best yet (as did I); Richard Watts thought it was good, but not as good as the last one and Isaac over at Parabasis has got all the fanboys excited with a suggestion that someone write about the books as literature...