Quick pointer this morning to Peter Craven's latest peroration on the Evils of Postmodernity in this morning's Age. Which gives me an excuse to mention the recent announcement of Brett Sheehy's appointment, after months of feverish speculation, as the new artistic director of the Melbourne Theatre Company. Sheehy's appointment was certainly a surprise to most of us, but it's been warmly welcomed: his solid background as literary manager for the Sydney Theatre Company and artistic director of some of our major festivals means that he brings to the job both a proven talent for fund-raising and a wide appreciation of theatre (including, clearly, "text-based theatre": after all, Sheehy was responsible for programming Daniel Keene's Life Without Me, which Craven liked so much, as part of MIAF). And it suggests a welcome opening of the horizons for the MTC, perhaps modelling itself on the diversity that the STC has been exploring with such success over the past few years.

What Sheehy has never been accused of, until now, is radicalism. Craven expresses alarm that Sheehy's appointment might spell doom for "traditional theatre" and the "well-made play": he claims that "this appointment is remarkably consonant with a world where the recently appointed head of Belvoir Theatre in Sydney, Ralph Myers, is a designer and where the wing of the Sydney Theatre Company most articulately represented by Tom Wright is ambivalent about the viability of what gets referred to as text-based drama". And he makes a forlorn plea for Sheehy to renounce the "smoke and mirrors of post modern moves" and retain "a faith in the play as the thing". Frankly, the only smoke and mirrors here is Craven's argument: straw men are flying in the wind like nobody's business. Still, an amusing start to the week.

The National Times - aka Fairfax's op-ed pages - yesterday hosted a Peter Craven polemic which purported to analyse "the trouble with Australian theatre". I feel I ought to point to it (and to the anger which it has provoked): but is it possible to argue with a critic who, although he writes with an air of impenetrable entitlement, clearly knows so little about theatre?

It's the old wrestling matches - "naturalism" vs "non-naturalism", "writers" vs "directors" - a divide which, it seems, must be preserved at all costs, even if it illuminates nothing about the contemporary scene. In the "Naturalism" corner are Hannie Rayson and David Williamson, playwrights who in fact write television for the stage and have as much to do with naturalism as McDonalds has with haute cuisine. But this is not surprising in an intellectual world in which Robert Wilson makes "mime-oriented experimentalism"; in which a "naturalistic and muted" production of a Tennessee Williams play is a good idea (try reading the playwright himself on what he thought his work should be); in which the desolating Barrie Kosky adaptation of Euripides' The Women of Troy is simply about "standing a play on its head until its teeth rattle to see if it's alive" or the most notable features of the revelatory STC production of The Season at Sarsaparilla were "Peter Carroll in drag and a Big Brother-style camera".

In short, this is Australian theatre criticism as we know and loathe it: ignorant, incurious, self-satisfied and parochial. It's an intellectual world defended by empty rhetoric rather than reasoned argument, claiming to be defending "emotional truth" when in reality such truth is the last thing it's interested in, making spurious claims towards theatrical "cutting edge" and "tradition" while calling for a theatre that has neither. Its sole interest is the boulevard stages of the middle brow.

It's a world with carefully policed borders that stop at the Australian coastline, where we all stand and wave, with a proper deference, at the West End and Broadway. These borders have to be policed because otherwise the absurd implicit claim that Williamson and Rayson could "take their place with Pirandello and the Greeks" would fall apart in the two seconds it takes to write it. They have to be policed because otherwise one would be ashamed to write such insupportable tosh about Robert Wilson or Tennessee Williams. They have to be policed because the only thing that permits such claims to be sustained is a total incuriosity about the arts and traditions of theatre. Can you argue with that? No. In fact, you can't.