As TN readers will know, the judges of this year's NSW Premier's Literary Awards declined to shortlist any plays, sparking a debate on whether plays are proper literature. So, when the glitterati gather on May 17 to hear the Premier announce this year's literary winners, playwrights will be absent from the tables. Instead, a group of Sydney playwrights and their theatrical peers are arranging their own Salon des Refusés, "to celebrate Australian playwriting and to assert its place in Australia’s theatrical and literary landscape".

I know where I'd rather be; but then, award functions have always rather reminded me of Dorothy Parker's remarks on "Literary Rotarians".

Speakers for the evening include Executive Director of Currency House and co-founder of Currency Press, Katharine Brisbane, and my Australian critical colleague John McCallum, who is a past NSW Literary Award judge, senior lecturer in theatre and performance at the University of NSW and author of Belonging: Australian Playwriting in the 20th Century.

An open invitation is extended to anyone who wishes to attend. You can RSVP and find out more details at Cluster.

The eyebrow-lifter of the week is the NSW Premier's Literary Awards. In particular, the decision by the judges of the Play Award not to release a shortlist, and instead to give the $30,000 prize to PlayWriting Australia, to "support professional development opportunities for new playwrights in 2011".

Perhaps they ought to spend the money instead on short classes for playwrights on entering awards. Of the four prize-worthy scripts Ms TN immediately brought to mind on hearing the news, only one was actually entered: the total entries, for an Australia-wide award, was 25 titles. However, judges in these prizes have the discretion to ask for scripts to be entered, if they think that significant works are missing from the mix; I can only presume this year that the NSW judges couldn't think of any.

Naturally, this has led to various bods asking whether local play writing is in crisis. No more than usual, I'd suggest. It does seem a perverse decision: even from the limited field on offer, Ms TN could have cobbled a creditable shortlist of at least three plays. One of which won last year's Louis Esson Prize in the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards. So, what do you think?

By now, most of you would know I have been in Sydney being Daniel Keene's handbag as he picked up the NSW Premier's Play Award for The Serpent's Teeth, which was commissioned for the STC's Actors Company last year, and which, incidentally, will have a season at London's Riverside Studios in September. A jolly, if not precisely Bacchanalian, evening was had by all, and I caught up with some of those charming Sydney people, including Louis Nowra (who with Rachel Perkins and Beck Cole won the script writing prize for the brilliant SBS series First Australians) and fantasy queen Kate Forsyth. But enough of the social pages.

I grabbed the opportunity to catch the New York company Elevator Repair Service enacting the entire text of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, an achievement I felt a little ambivalent about. I'm hoping to write about it once I've ground down the long list of urgent non-blog tasks that await me, which will take a couple of days. And I realise I haven't had a chance to report on last week's fascinating Australian Theatre Forum, which seems to have been an unmitigated success. Bear with me as I readjust to the mundane duties of my desk...