Recently quite a few theatre bloggers have been tracking their creative processes: George Hunka, for instance, is logging some of his thinking material as he writes a new play in his Elf King notebooks on Superfluities Redux. I don't especially want to do this myself - if I wanted to talk about my writing process, I would start a different blog - but I thought some readers might be interested in hearing about the theatre workshops that have absorbed my energies for the past fortnight. Also, they've been fab.

These were two entirely separate commissions that the cosmos decided should be workshopped at the same time. Night Songs, with music by Andree Greenwell, is being developed by Bell Shakespeare's Mind's Eye, and Mayakovsky, scored by Michael Smetanin, is a Victorian Opera project. They couldn't be more different from one another: Night Songs is a music theatre work intended for young adults, and Mayakovsky a contemporary opera. Both are very much in process, and the workshops permitted us writers and composers to get under the hood of the work and give the mechanics a bit of hammering, with the talents and brains of performers and directors to hand. Both weeks ended with showings of the work to small invited audiences.


The Night Songs workshop was at the Bell Shakespeare studio in Sydney. I co-wrote this text in a tag-team process with Daniel Keene and so we tag-teamed the workshop too: I was there for the first half of the week, and Daniel for the second. This worked brilliantly in every respect, aside from the fact that I missed the showing and associated drinkies. Reports were that it went very well indeed. Andree had set about half the songs, and by the end the showing was a reading of the entire text, interspersed with songs where they were completed. We had a great team: Matthew Lutton directed the workshop, with actors Paula Arundell, Cameron Goodall and Thomas Conroy and musicians David Trumpmanis and Loretta Palmeiro, and Courtney Wilson was our hard-working stage manager.


Mayakovsky, which was at Victorian Opera in Melbourne, was much more about exploring the music: Michael Smetanin and I have worked closely on the libretto over many months, and it is pretty much finished. I rather expected to be a useless excresence at the workshops, but fortunately 'twas not so. It was also a chance for me and director Peter Evans to hear the music. I've heard bits over the phone from Sydney, with Michael singing the odd note, but let's face it: it's not the same. Under the exacting musical direction of Richard Gill, four singers (Frederica Cunningham, Olivia Cromwell, Timothy Reynolds and Matthew Thomas) worked painstakingly with pianist Daniel Carter on about half an hour of music, which was again given a showing on Friday. I know I shouldn't say so, but I think it was awesome: this is an opera with grunt. (I mean that literally. There are wild animals on the electronic soundtrack.)

I can't think of a better way of working on a performance text. This is not "development hell"; it's a directed, intensive exploration of a work-in-progress with carefully picked teams, free of the pressures of production. You can get a lot done in a week, if you're working with the right people. And I was. Exciting, inspiriting and enormously satisfying. Huge thanks to everybody involved.

Pictures: top: the Mayakovsky libretto; middle: Night Songs workshop in Sydney with (from left) Matthew Lutton, David Trumpmanis, Cameron Goodall, Paula Arundell, Thomas Conroy and Loretta Palmeiro. Bottom: Mayakovsky workshop at Victorian Opera, Melbourne, with singers (from left) Frederica Cunningham, Olivia Cromwell, Timothy Reynolds and Matthew Thomas.

Ms TN been making sad little meep noises all year about the increasing necessity to pull back on the blog and focus on my own work. Now, as the late, great Midnight Oil once had it, the time has come: for the next fortnight, circumstance will forcibly remove me from my desk. Next week I'll be in Sydney workshopping Night Songs, a music theatre piece co-written with Daniel Keene, with music by Andrée Greenwell, which was commissioned by Bell Shakespeare's Mind's Eye. The week after that I'll be at Victorian Opera workshopping Mayakovsky, an opera scored by my old partner-in-crime Michael Smetanin and commissioned by VO. I don't know why these two entirely separate projects should suddenly come to the fore at the same time, but maybe the universe is telling me something.

And after that, I really have to put my day job first. Next year Walker Books UK is reissuing my fantasy quartet The Books of Pellinor with funky new covers - I've seen the concept art and am very excited - and also some new copy, which I must write; and it's a chance for me to go through the early books and rid them of some minor infelicities. (Cough. Adverbs. Cough.) My forthcoming novel Black Spring, which is due out with Walker/Candlewick in 2012/13, is now at the fiddly stage of final edits. But top of my list is the need to start serious work on the mega-super-dystopian epic that has been knocking on the door for a year now.

These books are how I make my living, and give me the independence to do a number of things, including this blog. Right now I really have to give them the attention and energy they deserve. This doesn't mean that I'll abandoning TN, but inevitably things will wind down a little here. I'll still be posting the odd review - there are some upcoming shows at the Malthouse and the MTC that I'll be covering - but please note, companies, I'll be seeing very little before Christmas, and afterwards will be putting my own work first.

I'll be also taking some time out to think seriously about the future directions of TN: while it will always be theatre-focused, it seems to me that it ought to reflect my wider interests. Eagle-eyed readers might have noticed the description tag has changed to "arts commentary" in the recent redesign. It also occurs to me that I ought to make it clearer - even though it should be clear enough in my reviews - that I write criticism from the viewpoint of a practising artist.

While I'm on the personal: a plug for Boxman, Daniel Keene's new play premiering at the Big West Festival from November 16. It's a monologue written for the young actor Terry Yeboah, and is directed by Matt Scholten. It's a bit of a family affair, as our son Ben Keene is composing the music. As those who have seen the early readings will know, this will be something special. Very limited seating - it's in a tiny venue in Footscray - so book early. Details here.

I've often thought that the major weakness in Australian theatre is its writing. We have an astonishing design culture, an embarrassment of talented actors, and directors, young and established, aplenty. But while our theatre artists can work as if they live in the 21st century, writers are trammelled in expectations and conventions that seem to belong in the Menzies imaginary. This struck me forcibly while watching André Bastian's fascinating production of Elfriede Jelinek's 2002 plays, Princess Dramas, at Red Stitch last week. Scandalously, this is the first production of Jelenik's work in Australia. The introduction to the review got longer and longer, and still I wasn't discussing Jelinek. So I'm getting this out of my hair, and the review should follow directly.

In Australian theatre, we have an obsession with the "classics". Do we produce too few? Do we do too many, at the expense of "new work"? Is it legitimate to rework them? What is a "classic", anyway? In the most recent spin on this question, Peter Craven briefly examined the canonical plays routinely done in London, and compared them to what appears on our own main stages. Unsurprisingly, this shows that we do "lesser" classics (and that term is a whole argument in itself) much less frequently than in London. I am reminded of Michael Billington's shock a couple of decades ago, outside a Cheek by Jowl production of The Duchess of Malfi in Melbourne, that most people he had spoken to had never read the play before, let alone seen it.

Given the population of Greater London is about two thirds of the entire population of Australia, it's unsurprising that there should be a smaller ecology. This needn't mean a narrow focus, although in practice it often does. I've thought for years that this obsession with classics prompts a deeper question, which is touched on by STC associate director Tom Wright in Craven's article: the narrow range of theatre that makes its way to our main stages and into our cultural memory. Wright labels it "canonical collapse", "a failure of cultural memory or curiosity". Ominously, Wright comments: "the pool shrinks every generation and we just get more and more versions of the same". The only argument I'd have with Wright's proposition is a question: where was the canon to begin with?

In saying this, I don't want to erase the work that is achieved here, often in the teeth of considerable odds. Look through the reviews logged on this blog over the past seven years, and you'll see many productions that give the lie to any easy generalisation. The danger of any polemic is that it can simply sweep aside what has been achieved in terms of expanding possibility: I don't wish to do that. It's not true of all our main stages, either: the Sydney Theatre Company, Malthouse Theatre and Belvoir St, to pick a few, have shown over the past few years what main stage companies can do to widen our theatrical language. But I'm sure even they will admit their limitations. What I'm chasing here is a pervasive anti-intellectualism in our culture, which, like the Christian Right in Victoria, exercises a disproportionate influence over our collective theatrical imagination.

What we have in our main stage culture - and often off the main stages too, although independent theatres heroically attempt to broaden the meme pool - is a limited theatrical vocabulary. It's far too easy for a single idea of theatre to dominate the culture; and, as the responses to the Malthouse/STC's Baal demonstrated amply, we have some very sentimentalised ideas of what theatre can be, which automatically discount anything that steps outside them. We can admit a few exceptions (after a struggle) such as the work of Benedict Andrews, but then these become their own hegemonies, representing a singular "alternative".

It's as if the culture can only ever be a binary, two things in conflict. Since when was that true about anything? It's perfectly possible for a single human being to enjoy all sorts of things, from video games to the poetry of JH Prynne. A culture can, ideally, simultaneously sustain all sorts of activities. If it does so, each enriches the others: possibilities open for cross fertilisations that can lead to something genuinely new. But there's no getting away from the fact that we're looking through a narrow window.

Compare, for instance, the MTC's current season with the 2010-11 season at the Théâtre de la Ville. The Théâtre de la Ville is Paris's most mainstream subsidised theatre, the French equivalent of the MTC. There's Shakespeare (As You Like It, A Winter's Tale), Ionesco (two plays - Rhinoceros and A Frenzy for Two) and Chekhov (The Wedding). Plus a menu of "classics" we never get to see, including but not limited to Giacomo Leopardi, Maurice Maeterlink, Pierre Corneille and Christopher Marlowe. Plus a bunch of contemporary theatre, including Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse (although perhaps the most produced contemporary European playwright, again seldom done here), Katie Mitchell, Theatre de Complicite's take on the modern Japanese master Jun'Ichiro Tanizaki, and, interestingly, 1927's The Animals and Children Took to the Streets, which actually premiered in Melbourne at the Malthouse. There's even a reading of Afghan women's poetry, in French and Persian. And that's only some of it.

There are complex reasons for this difference, funding being only the most basic. Even given Sarkozy's swingeing cuts to the arts budget, French theatre, like much European work, is massively better subsidised than ours. In practice, this means not only a wider range of work; crucially, it means cheaper tickets and thus bigger audiences. And because these audiences are exposed to a huge range of theatre, both contemporary and classic, they tend to be informed, unabashed, curious and critical. After all, the only way to learn about theatre is to see a lot of it. And it also, crucially, means that contemporary work has a far vaster range of possibilities from which to begin.

Figure it out for yourself: the most expensive tickets for the most lavish productions at the Theatre de la Ville work out to around $40. We can pay three times as much for comparable productions, even if we have the chance to see them. What makes theatre elite here is not the ideas that inform it, but how expensive it is. And the less that is offered, the more parochial and intimidated the audience; the more parochial and intimidated the audience, the more parochial and intimidated the programming. So it is that what is considered mainstream fare elsewhere becomes risky and dangerous here. This is the problem of "canonical collapse" in its true vicious circle.

I'd argue that the most grievous impact of canonical collapse is on new writing. It's a simple equation: the richer the cultural soil, the more diverse, more confident, more informedly experimental is the work that comes from it. Writers can make do by amassing libraries of work they might never see performed, but then what? The culture itself discourages the work that might emerge from that stimulation. Without a cultural context which recognises the forces, influences and ideas that informs what they write, without audiences driven by curiosity rather than a fear of seeming stupid and a desire for confirmation, they might as well be writing in an alien language.

One virtue of Australian theatre is that it tends to be less Anglocentric than the rest of the English-speaking world: this is the advantage of being a satellite colony rather than a theatre centre like London or New York. Festival directors from Anthony Steel to Kristy Edmunds have introduced audiences to contemporary international work; directors such as Barrie Kosky, Michael Kantor, Benedict Andrews, Daniel Sclusser, André Bastian and others have forged a Australian-European aesthetic which has done much to expand our stage language. But almost all our theatrical innovation, by default, has been in design, performance and direction.

Of course there are contemporary writers who are working outside the conventions: Cynthia Troup, Margaret Cameron or Jane Montgomery-Griffiths are excellent examples of just that kind of theatre writer. This kind of work, which springs intelligently from the the complex meld of ideas called (often dismissively) post-modernism is permitted to exist on the edge of things. (As an aside, it's provoking that my first reach in thinking of this kind of work comes up with all women, whereas the directors are all men). In a culture which has never put a main stage spotlight even on Sarah Kane or Jon Fosse, who are among the major playwrights of our time, it is difficult to see any of them existing outside the margins. It's simply impossible to see them inhabiting the kind of central cultural position of a writer like, say, Elfriede Jelenik. And my concern is that this blindness impoverishes all our writing, from the most marginal to the most mainstream. It's as if are starving to death in the midst of infinite plenty, totally unaware that we are hungry.

Aside from poetry (and even there, not all the time), almost all of our literary art, inside and outside theatre, assumes that writing is an expression of a prior subjectivity, which most usually devolves to the author (this is allied to an anxiety about "authenticity", which has most often seemed to me to be a covert hatred of imagination, and which has given rise to at least two famous hoaxes - Helen Demidenko and Norma Khouri). Within this assumption is a bunch of implied conventions about character and narration.

These assumptions function invisibly, like the air; because they are ubiquitous, they are considered "natural"; but in fact, they are no more natural than guitars or monorails. What's ever been "natural" about a bunch of people in costumes pretending to be other people in front of a third bunch of people who have paid for the privilege of watching them? Audiences are merely trained to expect character, plot, and their ensuing emotional gratification, and to think this is "good theatre". But a downside of these expectations is that is that they are also trained to almost completely ignore the language that creates these things: like the conventions, the language is invisible. When language becomes visible, when it insists itself by becoming less than transparent or even poetic, there's trouble.

This is not to say that plays that work with character, plot et al are without pleasure (see above note about negative capability); but the lack of this linguistic awareness does considerably limit the possibilities of writing in the theatre. Worse, this linguistic unconsciousness actually makes it difficult to see the virtues of those "classics" that operate either outside or more freely within those conventions: Ibsen suffers from this as much as Kane. I'd say this content/style division is pretty much universal in the English-speaking mainstream theatre; in fact, as Susan Sontag pointed out decades ago, it's pretty nigh impossible to avoid it in any discussion of art, as it's so deeply embedded in our aesthetic assumptions. But it reaches a particular crisis in writing for theatre. While design and direction are permitted to be as conscious and metatheatrical as you like, writing tends to be imprisoned in one version or other of these central conventions, and is expected to deliver accordingly.

These assumptions are, most baldly, commercial considerations, more concerned with attracting audiences than with the work itself. So we get the toxic questions that circle around Australian writing: who is your audience? to whom are you marketing your product? And this automatically slams down on possibility, becoming a self-censorship that is much more effective than any conscious policy by any company or any individual.

I don't wish to point fingers here. I'm as aware as anyone of how hard many people work, both inside and outside institutions, to expand possibility, only to find themselves stumped by something that is in fact a self-perpetuating macrocosm. Articulating a problem is one thing: what to do about it, even whether anything should be done, is another question altogether. If you look at the culture as a whole, it seems the battle is overwhelmingly lost: the mass media marginalisation of art is a given; art as a commodity, despite flurries here and there, is a given; and artists continue to struggle to make art despite it all. Does it matter if our theatre culture - and by this I mean, equally, audiences as well as the rest of us - is fundamentally anti-intellectual? Is it enough to have small pools of questioning around the edges, to pay our way to heaven? Is what we have as good as it gets here? I actually don't know.

One for your diary. The MTC's Cybec Readings, developed under the watchful eye of associate director Aidan Fennessy, offers an eye-catching series of playreadings by Raimondo Cortese, David Tredinnick and Tom Holloway. Sadly, the programmers clearly forgot that AussieCon 4 (the 68th World Science Fiction Convention) is on in Melbourne this year on exactly those dates. It causes all sorts of conflicts for Ms TN, who'll be louchely masquerading as an SFF author at the Con... But those without such conflicts should be at the Lawler Studio with bells on: this is a classy program featuring some fab artists. Details after the fold.

The Dream Life of Butterflies
by Raimondo Cortese, directed by Heather Bolton. Featuring Natasha Herbert, Margaret Mills and Anastasia Russell-Head.

Two middle-aged women talk in a room. One is recently returned. One has always been there. Between them sits their past. The Dream Life of Butterflies is a beautiful dissertation on the illusion of memory and the impossibility of retrieving what has been lost. In a seamless single scene, award-winning writer Raimondo Cortese exposes their delusions about themselves and each other, hinting at the terrible taboo at the heart of their relationship.

This is How
An adaptation of the MJ Hyland novel by David Tredinnick, directed by Aidan Fennessy. Featuring Katrina Milosevic, Richard Piper and Luke Ryan.

Patrick, a young motor mechanic, escapes to an English seaside village to lick his wounds after a relationship break-up. However, he soon discovers that his demons have followed him, and he will end up doing a very, very bad thing. This is How traces the journey of a man through Britain’s criminal justice system in the late 1960s. It’s a waking nightmare where fantasy and reality co-exist.

You Won’t be Seeing Rainbows Anymore
By Tom Holloway, directed by Matt Lutton. Featuring Julie Forsyth, Jan Friedl, Francis Greenslade, Bruce Kerr, Thomas Wright and Dylan Young.

Within the world is a city. Within the city is an apartment block. Within the apartment block are six very ordinary human beings. One is on the roof looking back at the world, which seems, in a way, that it’s perhaps, well … dying. With deft humour and his typically distinctive style, Tom Holloway’s genre defying new work guides us through the human condition as it enters its death-throes.

The Dream Life of Butterflies: Thursday September 2, 7pm
This is How: Friday September 3, 7pm
You Won’t be Seeing Rainbows Anymore: Saturday September 4, 7pm
Venue: The MTC Theatre, Lawler Studio
Tickets: Adult $10 (or 3 plays for $24)* / Under 30s $5
Bookings: The MTC Theatre Box Office (03) 8688 0800, mtc.com.au or at the door.

I'm slightly surprised, given the heat the issue has generated, that there's been no response within our sea-girt shores to my ALR piece on the NSW Premier's Literary Award and its subsequent hooha. Or, to be more accurate, not any that I've seen. (If any lynx-eyed commenters care to set me straight on this, fire away). Instead, commentary has been left to our Anglo cousins in London and New York. The Guardian's Stage Blog has run a couple of blogs on the question, most recently Chris Wilkinson's wrap up of the debate, and George Hunka, modernist warrior, goes into bat in the Guardian comments and on his smart new blogsite at Superfluities Redux.

Meanwhile, the current issue of that excellent international theatre journal Theatre Forum arrived in the post yesterday with my essay Benedict Andrews and Barrie Kosky: Two Innovative Theatre Directors. And, I was pleased to see, a photo of Kosky's Poppea on the cover. The web page is not updated yet, but it's a great issue: other essays include discussions of Britain's Punchdrunk, new French writing at the Avignon Festival, New Paradise Laboratorie's Fatebook, Ivo Van Hove's Roman Tragedies, and Young Jean Lee's production of Lear. Plus theatre texts by Deborah Stein and Chiori Miyagawa.

One ambition of my essay, which looks at five recent Australian productions, was to discuss Andrews and Kosky as two quite distinct and different directors. They are often conflated as a kind of two-headed beast - some critics, like Peter Craven, lazily characterise them as a single monster which symbolises What's Wrong With Contemporary Theatre. Sadly, unless you all rush out and buy the issue - which I wholly recommend - it won't get much circulation here. So I thought I would quote the beginning of it, just to give you a taste:

ONE of the great attractions of writing about the performing arts is its impossibility. The greater the impact of a work, the more difficult it is to convey accurately what that experience was. The experience is translated from the immediate present where it lives and exists, into a past tense, which makes it what it never was: a complete and finite object, now preserved in the distorting aspic of memory. Theatre is not a recordable experience: its repetition is, even in its crudest forms, not a reproduction so much as an imitation of its earlier performances. Even filming a performance is unsatisfactory: however artfully done, the most essential aspect of the performance, its elusive present-ness, its quality of being created in the moment before an audience, is irretrievably lost.

Every artform expresses this tension between the present moment and past memory, between now and then, the unfixed and the fixed, the open and the closed. I suspect that one of the reasons why theatre remains fascinating is because it’s an artform that by its very nature baldly articulates these contradictions. Its various disciplines unite into something which is at once a product and more than a product: it’s a commodity that eludes possession, that can’t be confined, that escapes our best efforts at definition. In writing about theatre, every attempt only reveals, as Eliot said of poetry, a different kind of failure.

As a temporal artform, theatre enacts a condition central to the experience of living itself. Raw experience is continuously mediated and shaped in ways of which, most of the time, we are hardly aware – by language, by memory, by consciousness itself. In its more interesting forms, theatre brings this mediation to the foreground; and ideally, by doing so, it makes its audience more aware of the things that shape them and their lives.

The pursuit of this kind of awareness is an abiding obsession of innovative theatre, from Brecht’s theory of Verfremdungseffekt to the disorienting stage images of Romeo Castellucci. Much exploratory theatre plays with ideas of aesthetic alienation, a foregrounding of artifice, that at once refuses an easy articulation of feeling and, paradoxically, intensifies its experience. This has been the case with much of the innovative theatre made in Australia over the past decade, and is particularly clear in the work of two of the most influential auteur directors, Barrie Kosky and Benedict Andrews.

Both bring to Australian theatre a distinctly European awareness, which hybridises with local practice to generate oeuvres of particular interest. They work regularly in Germany as well as in Australia: Andrews is an associate with Berlin’s Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, where he developed a relationship with Marius von Mayenburg that resulted in notable Australian productions, and Kosky was the director of the Schauspielhaus in Vienna and, from 2012, will be chief director of the Komische Oper in Berlin. Their cross-cultural careers are not unusual in Australia, where the smallness and undeniable provincialism of much of the culture has paradoxically sparked a wave of artists who situate themselves aggressively as local artists participating in a global culture. The poet John Kinsella, who works as an academic and poet between England, the US and Australia, coined the phrase “international regionalism” to describe this kind of locally-centred art that, while celebrating its particular locale and tradition, refuses to confine itself in nationalist borders.

Kosky and Andrews are both very different directors, but their work is irrevocably linked. It is seen to epitomise – for better or worse – Australian auteur theatre. They have many collaborators in common – both were often produced at the Sydney Theatre Company under the artistic directorship of Robyn Nevin, who ran the company before it was taken over in 2010 by Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton. Both have also had significant collaborations with the writer Tom Wright, who scripted both Kosky’s spectacular adaptation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, The Lost Echo, and The Women of Troy, and for Andrews dramaturged the adaptation of Shakespeare’s history plays that became The War of the Roses. Wright has also collaborated extensively with Michael Kantor, the artistic director of the Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne which has commissioned and presented work from Andrews and Kosky, and which has been a critical institutional supporter of this work.

...

The major difference between these directors is perhaps their orientation: while Kosky’s first and informing theatrical love is music, which leads him to an almost mystic exploration of the possibilities of ecstasy in the theatre, Andrews is a text-centred director who works are notable for their intelligent formality. They have identifiable and individual styles, but the work of each encompasses a wide variety of approaches and modes.

...And so on, onto discussions of particular productions. I've only dipped into the rest of the mag, but it's up to Theatre Forum's usual standard, and the whole is a brilliant way of keeping up with international theatre. So subscribe, peeps. You know you want to.

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.

A quick blurt, for those who think the artform that's inspired lacklustre talent like Shakespeare, Ibsen, Churchill, Beckett, Brecht, Chekhov, Bernhardt, Buchner - oh, you get the picture - isn't proper literature.

Black clouds are swirling over the NSW Premier's Literary Awards, which this year didn't award a Play Prize, supposedly because of the low quality of the entries. And how quickly it's segued into a discussion that sees plays as the problem children of literature, and perhaps really not literature at all.

Now, before you get me wrong, I know plays are written for performance. I just happen to think that writing plays is a literary, as well as a theatrical, art. Yes, reading plays is a skill - but so is reading novels and poems. We all learn how to read novels. Out of a quirk of Australian culture, we mostly don't learn how to read plays, and don't see them in a continuum with other kinds of writing. They are generally, erroneously, regarded as close relatives of film scripts, but actually have far more to do with poetry. That this has impacted on our play writing culture is undeniable, but the production of mediocre art works doesn't discredit the artform itself. Unless it happens to be playwriting.

I simply don't buy the argument that plays are not "literary": if there's a text, it exists as an autonomous script as well as a "blueprint for performance", and that text can be read on its own terms. Certainly, some of my favourite literary works are plays.

Currency Press has made the connection to the scandalously poor representation of drama in the PEN Macquarie Anthology of Australian Literature. (Their press release is on James Waites' blog). Meanwhile, NSWPLA chair of judges Gil Appleton suggests in the SMH that judges of the play prize ought to be made to see the plays in performance. Aside from being impractical - isn't this a national prize? - it also begs the question. If the judges chosen to arbitrate the award aren't skilled enough to judge the texts, why are they appointed as judges?

In the same story, David Williamson makes some bizarre comments about Chekhov and the perils of literary judgment ("If you looked, for instance, at a play of Chekhov that way you would be deeply disappointed because there would be no wonderful metaphors, no sparkling language - there are just what seems like mundane lines of dialogue … ") which merely obscure the question. It's certainly a novel view of Chekhov's work. Even literary snobs would be hard put to deny the literary worth of Chekhov's plays, mostly because he's a Dead Great Writer. I'd turn the argument around, and suggest that the same qualities that make a great novel - vivid language, wit, inventiveness, formal imagination and knowledge, vitality, passion, intelligence, and (crucially) a profound understanding of metaphor - are those which go to make a great play. And maybe if a "literary" judgment of plays can't perceive or assess these qualities, you have to ask what is wrong with literary judgment.

I personally don't think the NSWPLA result is anything but an anomaly of this year's judges, and this argument is aside from the perceived quality of this year's batch of plays. What the discussion around it does reveal, however, is a pervasive confusion about the artform, which reaches into the play writing community itself. It emerges as an infantilisation of playwrights - sometimes by themselves.

Meanwhile, over the Pacific there's a row about the Pulitzer. The winning play decided by the judging panel was overruled by the Pulitzer Committee, who collectively went to see the winning - un-shortlisted - play the night before deciding the winner. Playgoer has the goods, and finishes by asking: "does the Board treat all the categories this casually? And imagine if they did treat any other, more "serious" category like this--and overrule its jury like this?"

Yes, imagine! But at least we're not alone.

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.

Before I miss the boat, let me alert you to Flashpoint, a series of readings of new writing for theatre. The scripts being performed are all winners of the RE Ross Trust Playwright's Script Development Awards, an excellent prize run by the State Library which fosters new writing, and which I have been very happy to help judge, with Tom Healey and Patricia Cornelius, over the past two years.

The readings kick off tonight, July 29, at the Village Roadshow Theatrette at the State Library, with excerpts from three works by Lally Katz, Carly Beth Nugent and Angela Betzien (this one's a libretto with music by Jethro Woodward). They continue next month at fortyfive downstairs from August 26-28 with work from Aidan Fennessy, Kit Lazaroo and Barry Dickins. Entry is free, which is good value indeed. Bookings for tonight at 03 8664 7099; for the fortyfive downstairs readings, 03 9662 9966. More details can be found here.

Update: The Australian Publishers Association, the Printing Industry Association of Australia, the Australian Literary Agents’ Association and the Australian Society of Authors have banded together to form Australians for Australian Books. Those concerned at the proposed changes can sign their petition online, which is a counter to Dymock's aggressive campaign that misleadingly claims to be about cheaper books for consumers. I urge everyone interested in Australian literature to do so urgently, before this Friday, the deadline for responses to the Draft Proposal.

Below is a slightly extended version of my submission to the Productivity Commission, which is presently conducting a study on the copyright restrictions on the parallel importation of books. Parallel importation is the practice of importing overseas editions of books which are already available here through Australian publishers. The recommendation in the present draft report is that copyright restrictions are dropped after 12 months. The commission claims, on its own admission on slender or non-existent evidence, that this will make books cheaper for consumers.

By effectively removing ownership of the copyright of a book in an Australian writer's home country, this would have a devastating effect on Australian publishers. And also on Australian writers. Publishers, agents, authors, unions, many readers and most booksellers are overwhelmingly against changing the present situation (their submissions can be read online here and here).

I would like to register my opposition to the proposal to lift restrictions on the parallel importation of books. Such a move would have a significant impact on my ability to earn an income as a writer.

I make my living from the sales of my popular fantasy books, and am now - for the first time in two decades of writing - earning an independent income. This means I no longer apply for grants from the Australia Council to support the production of my poetry and prose. The income from my fantasy books subsidises my poetry (I am a prize-winning and internationally published poet) and the theatre criticism I write on my blog Theatre Notes, both time-consuming activities I pursue for reasons other than financial reward.

My fantasy books are published first in Australia, by Penguin Books Australia, and overseas publication follows in the UK, the US and Europe. This means that there are at least two English language editions of my books sold overseas, as well as the Penguin editions.

There is a small but significant fact that is being glossed by booksellers’ blithe claims that authors “still earn their royalties”. I earn a significantly higher percentage of royalties from books sold in Australia than from those sold overseas. Books that are published and sold here earn me the full 10 per cent royalty of the cover price. Books that are sold in overseas markets often have a smaller royalty – ranging from 6 to 8 per cent – and after that, under the agreements from my original publisher, I lose from 25 to 50 per cent of the gross royalty to the original publisher. This is a standard agreement which publishers all over the world use to ensure that their initial investment in an author is financially recognised.

This means that for every book sold in Australia that is NOT published by Penguin, I could lose up to half – or more – of the income I would earn if it were published by the local publisher. Worse, if a foreign publisher decided to dump remaindered copies on the Australian market, I would earn precisely nothing.

The Australian market is a significant proportion of the income that I generate as an author. And this is why territorial copyright is important to my financial independence.

Territorial copyright is a right for all authors in the United Kingdom and America. Neither of those countries, for good reason, is considering abolishing this protection for their own authors. Under the Productivity Commission’s suggested changes to the copyright law, Australian writers will no longer be able to compete on the same terms with writers in these countries.

My books are selling much more strongly now, seven years after they were first released, than when they were first published. The 12 month rule would only punish their further success, and would provide no protection for years of hard labour to writers like myself, who depend on a book’s steady longevity rather than a burst of sales.

The argument as presented by those who seek to lift restrictions is that it would make books cheaper for the consumer, and that those who oppose it are greedy corporate publishers. This is a populist argument with little regard for facts: the relative expensiveness of Australian books is far from proven, and it is less than certain that removing restrictions of parallel importation would make books any cheaper. And it certainly ignores the potential impact on authors.

The best way to make books cheaper for consumers would be to make them exempt from the GST. It was always a scandal that books were included in the first place.

This proposal would have a devastating impact on the local publishing industry – it certainly had negative effects when it was introduced in New Zealand, where the publishing industry now struggles to survive – which, on top of cutting my income, would have indirect effects as well on my ability to continue to write and publish in this country.

If the proposals go through, I will be forced in future to publish initially with English or American publishers, where I will enjoy Territorial Copyright. This will remove the income these books generate from the Australian economy altogether, and ensure that only English or US editions – which, as any writer will tell you, are edited for their domestic markets and so differ from Australian editions – are available in Australian bookshops.

I fail to see how this benefits consumers, publishers, booksellers or myself.

The only benefits that seem likely are increased profits for some retailers, from being able to import cheap or remaindered copies of books. This limited benefit would come at a heavy price to our presently healthy and competitive publishing culture, and would significantly affect the diversity of the books available to consumers.

My situation is far from singular. Artists are routinely urged to become self-sufficient, but parallel importation would make this goal even more difficult than it already is. If the Rudd Government claims to be backing a Creative Australia, why is it entertaining a proposal which would make it much harder for authors to earn a living, in a profession in which earning a decent living is already a rarity?

April 9, 2009

Alison Croggon is a poet, novelist and theatre critic based in Melbourne. As a poet, she won the Anne Elder and Dame Mary Gilmore Prizes, and has been shortlisted for several Premier’s Poetry Awards. Her critically acclaimed fantasy quartet The Books of Pellinor is a popular success in Europe, England and the US and was shortlisted in three categories in the Aurealis Awards, as well as being a Children’s Book Council recommended book. She is Melbourne theatre critic for the Australian newspaper and runs the theatre blog, Theatre Notes.

Every now and then the absurdity of my existence bursts on me afresh. There is that French existential sense, ie, M. Camus (how cool was he?) and his Sisyphean metaphors and the question of why we don't just kill ourselves this instant; but at the ridiculous end of it, there's me, sitting at my computer trying to make things up. Why? Why do I do this? And the answer floats back, like Echo... "because...you want to..." Oh. I see. What was I thinking?

Well, in such moments, one can always turn for some inspiration to the blogosphere, which is perking up out of its summer torpor. There's Born Dancin's Ant Fact Mondays, which are guaranteed to be both educational and amusing. Refreshed, one can move on to another essay from Chris Goode on Thompson's Bank, A Quick Note on Likeness, in which he considers "the difference between the indicative and the subjunctive, between what is and what if". Then you can head towards Superfluities Redux, which is positively bristling with stuff these days, and, among other fascinating posts, check out a moving meditation on the Rothko Chapel in Houston. Don't forget a stop at Andrew Haydon's blog, Postcards from the Gods, which has livened up considerably in the past month, and has some interesting thoughts about that old shibboleth, theatre criticism. Then head to James Waites, who has apparently written a short book on the STC's The War of the Roses, starring our Cate and directed by Benedict Andrews, which also happens to be the last of the Actors Company productions. I confess that I have carefully not read James's meditations yet, because I will be seeing the whole thing for myself next week, which is actually pretty exciting. So I am saving the Waites thoughts up for afterwards, like a special dessert.

Does all that make my own life less absurd? Of course not. But maybe it's more richly absurd, which is probably the most one can ask for.

The virtual library thing is now escaping from Borges' imagination and into the real world. Consider, for instance, the Australian Script Centre, down there in Tasmania. The ASC is now under the directorship of Gail Cork, whom some might remember from her Australia Council days, and has just received a considerable boost from the Theatre Board - $600,000 over the next three years.

In collaboration with Currency Press, Playlab and Playwriting Australia, the ASC has put together australianplays.org, a smart new e-commerce portal, which will be officially launched at the National Play Festival in March. What this means is that practically every Australian playwright you can think of is now for sale online in digital format. This makes up a little for the pathetic shelf-space most bookshops give to plays (which might be even worse than the space they give to contemporary poetry).

Aside from this brilliant online resource, the ASC itself boasts a vast archive of Australian work, including some interesting anthologies. I've been browsing the CD Collection #7, which consists of 27 new plays, many of them award winners. It's a diverse bunch, ranging from Version 1.0's Deeply Offensive and Utterly Untrue to Patricia Cornelius's The Call to Kit Lazaroo's True Adventures of a Soul Lost at Sea. A steal at $25. Hie thee hence and check it out.

Meanwhile, I have a problem. How do you stop listening to Antony and the Johnsons? I seem to be under a strange and intoxicating enchantment...

As I have always suspected, being an Author is not the same as being a Writer. It might even be something like the opposite. I'm beginning to see how one can be so busy being an Author that one has no time to be a Writer. In some weird convergence ("Worlds are colliding, Gerry!), this August I am all over the place being an Author.

On the performance side, on August 21 and 22, the excellent folk at North Melbourne Arts House are hosting the Melbourne debut of The Villainelles, which features poems by Jordie Albiston, Kathleen Mary Fallon and myself set to music by Andree Greenwell. It's "cabaret-folk electronica layered with shades of opera". And I'm pleased, because I'll finally get to see it after missing its premiere in Sydney a couple of months ago.

I'm also doing some Melbourne Writers Festival appearances on August 28 and 29. Of interest to TNers will be a panel I'm chairing with theatre historians Julian Meyrick and Gabrielle Wolf which will discuss the ongoing influence of the theatre of the 1970s. Another couple of sessions are around poetry, including the delightful chance to discuss Anna Akhmatova with Russian historian Orlando Figes.

Simultaneously, the first book of my fantasy series, The Gift, has been chosen as part of the 50 Books You can't Put Down promotion being launched at the Australian public under the giant Books Alive program. This is of course very cool, even if Australian commentator Beth Driscoll thinks that books being promoted as a "thumping great read" undermines the intellectual seriousness with which one ought to approach Literature. (Well, as you all know, I am ever happy to be a crass populist...) So I have a fairly heavy schedule of appearances for this - closet Pellinor fans can find the dates here.

I really don't know why this is all happening at once, but que sera sera. Perversely, perhaps, after months and months of writing nothing at all, I have started a new novel. I guess all this stuff is pretty meaningless if I'm not actually writing. I'll of course be reviewing and blogging as I go, but this might be rather sternly minimal at times. In the interests of health and sanity, you understand...

Your faithful blogger is back is town, with a baroque case of laryngitis incubated on the long-haul flight and an even more spectacular dose of jetlag. Yet for all such minor discomforts, I feel refreshed and revitalised. I had a fantastic time, which reminded me of some important stuff that is all too easily eroded in the hurlyburly chaos loosely known as my life.

I spent the final few days of my visit at the SoundEye Festival of the Arts of the Word in Cork, a completely brilliant and unique event which showcases, if showcase is the word, some of the most exciting things happening under the radar in contemporary poetry in Ireland, the UK and the US. There simply isn't an event in Australia like it (I'm not sure there's an event anywhere like it). It's one of the most intense, exciting and fun engagements with the possibilities of language that I've experienced. I plan to blog Soundeye a little more fully, to see if I can give you any sense of what it was, so watch this space theatrenauts, especially if you're interested in performance and language together. (And no, I'm not talking about performance poetry, but poetry as performance, which, I earnestly assure you, is quite different).

Some thoughts sparked by the festival are gleaming through the fog of jetlag, colliding with further thoughts emerging from the conversation under my review of Chris Goode's ...Sisters, which seems to have melded with attacks on Dan Spielman and Max Lyandvert's Manna, (on this week at the STC). And these thoughts then wandered on further and bumped into other thoughts which have been circling for some months now about the literary and intellectual culture in this country, and how unfruitfully it meshes with our theatre.

I have long suspected that our writing is the weakest part of our theatre, and it strikes me that the reasons for this go much deeper than a simple analysis of institutional structures and practice can reveal. Although I'd claim proudly that many elements of our theatre - performance, visual and sound design, technical skills and so on - stand with world's best practice, writing is too often like a poor, rather dim cousin on the fringes. And this has deep and worrying implications for everything else.

I'm not alone in my concerns about Australian theatre writing, although my thoughts are of a different timbre to most. On my desk when I came home was this month's Platform Paper by Chris Mead, artistic director of PlayWriting Australia, from Currency House: What Is An Australian Play: Have we failed our ethnic writers? I've glanced through it, and will give it a proper read in the next week - I hope - (on my floor is a huge boxful of scripts that I have to read this week as part of a panel for the RE Ross Trust Playwrights' Awards). But superficially, Mead is addressing the Anglocentric focus of Australian theatre culture, and how it marginalises minority writing. It looks interesting, and certainly deserves close attention.

But I suspect my own concerns go deeper than Mead's. It seems to me that any writing that steps outside a lamentably narrow paradigm is marginalised here, at a cost which is felt most deeply in our mainstream, but which reverberates all the way through the ecology of literature and theatre. The marginalisation of ethnic writers is only one of the symptoms. This is because the writing that kicks a culture alive is always the work that is rigorously doing something different, that questions basic assumptions, that won't fit - whether or not it exploits recognisable formal attributes - with what has gone before it.

We (excuse the rhetorical "we" - blame the jetlag, but I'm going to get stentorian now and shout in generalities) think in cliches, and this is where we betray most seriously our colonial mindset and stamp out most enthusiastically all signs of cultural diversity. Because literary thought (and I mean literary thought) in its broadest senses is marginalised in our culture, we lack an intellectual context in which new writing of any kind might be recognised. We are frightened (or simply ignorant) of the possibilities of language. And without a rigorous intellectual context, we will be stuck with half-baked experimentation or half-baked realisations of conventions, because any writing, conventional or not, that passionately addresses the possibilities of theatre will be greeted with hostility or, which is worse, total indifference. And this applies to Henrik Ibsen as much as to Sarah Kane, who is yet to have a mainstream production of her work in this country.

Can we find that context in Australian literary culture? I greatly fear that we can't. Theatre's where much of the most exciting Australian art is happening, and the more interesting reaches of our own contemporary writing are basically invisible, drowned in the sludge that here passes for literary culture. We're hamstrung in so many ways by what the German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger tapes as the inevitable link between "mediocrities and delusions". That why we can't distinguish genuine experimentation from sheer wankery, or even recognise a good play, and turn to tired Anglocentric modes of writerly practice with timid squeaks of relief. If we want our theatre to matter, we have to be smarter. That means a lot of things. But maybe the first thing is to address our own incuriosities and illiteracies.

If you were looking for a model of a writer in the theatre, you could do worse than point to Marius von Mayenburg: playwright, translator and, for the past eight years, full-time dramaturge at the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, one of Berlin’s major theatres. As he says, for a playwright he has the ideal job: it may at times be stressful, it may deprive him of sleep or even sometimes interfere with his own writing: but on the other hand, he is right where the action is.

“All my work is somehow related to dramaturgy,” says Mayenburg. “I react to the traditions we are working with in the theatre, I react to the actors. And in my work, I am reading all the time. I’m always looking for what’s ‘missing’, for what isn’t being addressed in the plays around me, and then I try to write those plays myself.”

Born in 1972, Mayenburg is one of the rising stars of European theatre. His plays are garnering a growing international audience, winning productions throughout Europe and, increasingly, further afield. Last year his play The Ugly One, a sardonic drama about the contemporary obsession with physical appearance, created a small sensation at the Royal Court (ensuring itself a return season later this year).

His widely produced play The Cold Child deconstructs the bourgeois illusion of “family values” so beloved of politicians, unearthing a nightmare overlap between hatred and love, narcissistic self-obsession and self-contempt. His 2004 play Eldorado, which was given a stunning production at the Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne in 2006, mapped these familial passions onto a larger palette that overtly drew on terrorism and the Iraq war to show how capitalism destroys both intimate human relationships and the planet.

And now he is in Australia for the rehearsals of Moving Target, his newest play, which has been commissioned by the Malthouse Theatre. It premieres later this week at the Adelaide Bank Festival before a Melbourne season from March 12 at the Malthouse. Moving Target has emerged from an intense process of collaboration, not unlike those Caryl Churchill used with Joint Stock or Monstrous Regiment in the 1970s to create plays like Vinegar Tom or Light Shining in Buckinghamshire.

It began with a two week workshop in 2006. Mayenburg had a director - Benedict Andrews, with whom he has worked with for five years in both Germany and Australia - a designer, five actors and an idea – the childish game of hide and seek. He returned to Melbourne the following year with a play that drew on the ideas improvised and explored in the workshop, and worked further with the same creative team, and then came back again two weeks ago for rehearsals.

For Mayenburg, who says he has never worked this way before, it was a “liberating” experience. “I didn’t have to invent everything for myself, I didn’t have to worry about the dramatic structure,” he says. “It was good to start from zero to somehow collectively create this work. I enjoy working on my own, and I am very cruel to myself, I throw work out if it’s not working, but here I could give some responsibility to other people.”

Moving Target examines society’s fear of its own children to create a dark work about repression and paranoia that resonates far beyond the domestic sphere. It is a play that doesn’t have characters, as such: rather the actors collectively explore the parental fears prompted by the behaviour of a prepubescent girl. As in Mayenburg's earlier work, the familiar domestic world is peeled back to reveal uncanny and sinister shadows. He directly links the domestic darknesses to larger communal fears. As his work makes clear, he is one of contemporary theatre’s most sensitive observers of terror, tracing its fault lines from the minutiae of domestic relationships to the nuances of global paranoia.

“I am always trying to write about things that irritate me,” he says. “I try to write about things I know about. Fear is so individual, and yet it’s something that we all share: so many terrible things have happened in the world. I didn’t intend, when I started the play, to write about terrorism, but that’s one of the things it’s ended up being about.”

Because of its elliptical lyricism and strangely surreal realism, English speakers most often compare his writing to the plays of Caryl Churchill (Mayenburg himself traces his lineage from Georg Büchner - the only playwright, he says, that he can't work out). Churchill is not a comparison he quibbles with: his dramaturgical work has led to a deep familiarity with contemporary English playwrights. Among others, Mayenburg has translated the work of Sarah Kane (although he hardly confines himself to contemporary writers: he is currently translating Hamlet) and he says the present generation of playwrights is unimaginable without the example of Churchill’s work. “They are all,” he says, “Churchill’s children.”

But he quibbles with the word “poet”, although he has been described as a poet by his own theatre’s director. “I wouldn’t say I was a poet,” he says. “Poets live in their own bubble of genius, waiting for inspiration, for the muse…” (Reader, I confess I laughed out loud at this point, but perhaps I am not a German poet). “Yes, yes, this idea about poets is still quite prevalent in Germany. But if you think like this, you can’t learn, you can’t improve. If you look at the first drafts of a famous writer like Schiller, for instance, you will see it is first written in prose…”

And besides, Mayenburg maintains – I think correctly – that writing for theatre is among the most strict of literary arts. “There are rules in writing for the theatre,” he says. “You have to be aware of physical distance, what people will understand in the first row and in the back row. You have to understand that people will only hear it once – unlike a poem, where you can go back and reread something you don’t understand. You have to be aware of acoustics, how much more important that is in the theatre than it is in film. And theatre is linear, things happen one thing after the other. You can bend these things, but there’s no way of avoiding them.”

Where theatre is poetic, he says, is in how it condenses thought. And in how its images must be immediately physical, in order to communicate complex ideas and feelings. These are certainly qualities of the text of Moving Target: on the one hand, it has the tensile strength, economy and beauty of poetry, and on the other, it is clearly drawn from and written for performance. I can’t wait to see how it plays on a stage.

Another version of this interview appears in the Guardian's theatre blog today.

Little Alison is still in reset mode. On Wednesday night she saw Lucy Guerin's Aether, a work of exquisite complexity and beauty, but can she find the words to describe it? (The audience is expected to shout out: "no, she can't!") It takes a certain answering complexity in the mind to respond to work, and for the moment - I live eternally in hope of tomorrow - TN has the aesthetic sophistication of a shoelace. This lack of creative brio must be why I find myself coming over all editorial. What the hell. It's Sunday, the newly cleansed house is sparkling, and I'm sure you've got a nice cool beverage by your elbow. Right then.

This week, for example, the Short and Sweet Festival is back again at the Victorian Arts Centre, apparently bigger and better than ever. Now, in blogland Short and Sweet has a controversial history. Some of you will remember the wrath visited upon Ming-Zhu last year, when she blogged as a participant in the 2006 season (Chris Boyd's useful summary here, my commentary on the commentary here, and my review of some plays here.)

Patrick White winner Patricia Cornelius is one of the participating playwrights this year, and she was in the Age last week doing the PR thing. Though I noticed Cornelius seemed to argue against the idée fixe that audiences now have the attention spans of the above-mentioned shoelace. (Wherefore the wowed audiences at Ariane Mnouchkine's six hour epic Les Dernier Caravanserail, I wonder? surely if theatre is considered exciting in itself, it doesn't have to be marketed as something that won't hurt for long? - but I digress...) It is this attention span that, it seems, necessitates such festivals, which provide "access" to the arts.

I have all sorts of problems with the word "access". For a start, in my experience the demand for "accessible" art usually comes from people like Andrew Bolt. I am all for community arts, an aspect of culture that was sidelined by the Australia Council's restructure under the Howard Government, which saw off the Community Arts Board and left institutions like La Mama struggling to carry the slack. But I'm hoping - given that S&S organiser Alex Broun has been very active organising arts policy forums for the new Labor Arts Minister, Peter Garrett - that S&S isn't seen as a model for a brave new accessible arts world, because I think it is, at best, harmless and, at worst, a way of seeming to support emerging artists while actually doing very little of substantial worth.

(Aside from good community theatre programs - of which I think organisations like Big hArt are a model - I actually think that the best thing that could be done for access to theatre would be to make tickets cheaper. In Paris, you can pay 10 euro to see Pina Bausch at the very comfy Théâtre de la Ville, whereas a ticket to The Madwoman of Chaillot in Melbourne will set you back almost $80. But again, I digress...)

The short play festival concept is at best a dubiously scattergun way of nurturing new work. But it's attractive in many ways - it's very feelgood, and it's cheap. Participants volunteer their services for a chance at the prize money, thus removing at one stroke the major problem in performing arts budgets: the wages bill. There's something strangely circular about it. As I said in my review of one of last year's shows:

There's a whiff of the MFA creative writing circle here, a phenomenon common in the US, where aspiring poets (for example) learn how to write poetry in an MFA program, are published because they have an MFA, and go on to become creative writing teachers who run MFA programs...a rather pernicious professionalisation, as many have suggested, which explains the smooth edges of so much contemporary American poetry. Short & Sweet has its own version - aspiring S&Sers can enrol for the Short & Sweet playwriting course in early 2007, where they can presumably learn how to write plays for the festival.

It's almost, as a quick look at the website will verify, a small industry, and it's expanding rapidly: there are now S&S festivals for dance and music theatre. On the face of it, as I said, it's mostly harmless. But if Short and Sweet is embraced as a way forward for theatre, I worry.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about at all.

What caught my attention in the Age was a comment by Patricia, where she talked about the "desperation" felt by many writers about the lack of outlets for their work. I don't argue with the desperation; we have all - those of us of literary dispositions - felt this at one stage or another. "There are so few avenues for people wanting to write for theatre now," she goes on to say, "especially with the exclusion of Australian work from our major theatres."

This is where I do a double take. Which major theatres "exclude" Australian work? Even the MTC, which is surely among the most backwards of the major companies in this area, has this year programmed new works by David Williamson, Joanna Murray-Smith and Justin Clements (it has a rather better record in previous years). I can't say I'm excited by the Murray-Smith/Williamson duet, but there's no arguing that it's new and it's Australian.

Cornelius is by no means the only person to say this - it's a common perception. The formation of PlayWriting Australia out of the two former bodies, the Australian National Playwrights Centre and Playworks, is a new attempt to address the difficulties playwrights face. There's an organisation mooted called Melbourne Dramatists which, aside from having the worthy aim of getting playwrights to talk to each other, aims to mitigate the prejudice theatre companies allegedly hold against Australian work. There are playwrights' conferences all over the map, there are workshops and masterclasses and competitions. Playwrights, it seems, need all the help they can get.

I do not doubt that it's hard to get new plays on, despite the support of champions of new writing like La Mama or Griffin Theatre, nor do I wish to dismiss the concerns of writers. But I will point out that it was ever thus. I only need to ask my husband, who is now approaching (or even in) his third decade as a full-time playwright, a "profession", if it so might be called, which combined with my own, means that we do not own a house, a car, shares in Telstra, a country estate or any of the other material accoutrements considered necessary for a comfortable bourgeois life. (Although we do own a lot of books, cds and dvds). And he's successful, accounting - according to the Australia Council anyway - for a quarter of Australia's entire literary exports.

Yes, there's no doubt that it's tough - though equally, it's tough for directors and actors and all those other parts of the industry that face the prospect of 90 per cent unemployment. But is it really as bad as claimed? Do major companies really ignore Australian work?

Robyn Nevin, former artistic director of the STC, addressed this head-on earlier this year. "There's been a perception out there that I've been unwilling to program new Australian plays. Obviously there have been new Australian plays that I've not produced. I've rejected them. Perhaps that's what has generated this criticism because the facts tell a different story."

In fact, says Nevin, the 2008 STC season includes seven Australian plays. "Forty-seven per cent of the plays done over my time here have been Australian," she says. "Thirty-five people have been commissioned and next year we're doing seven Australian works."

The company that gets most schtick for ignoring writers is the Malthouse Theatre. Rodney Hall was one of the first to accuse it of "abandoning" writers, just after the new team took over from Playbox in 2004, and it's been a constant bone of dissatisfaction ever since. The Playbox, the story goes, programmed playwrights, and the Malthouse doesn't. I've heard this so often that I think it's worth looking in detail at the facts.

The past three years' programming doesn't bear out this assertion at all. In 2004, the final Playbox year, the Playbox produced six new Australian plays, its total work for the year (the previous year, the Playbox presented eight). The following year, the new writer-free Malthouse put on, in a season of 11 works, seven new Australian plays - and I mean, plays, texts written for theatre - by Wesley Enoch, Tom Wright (two), Lally Katz, Patricia Cornelius, Margaret Cameron and Ben Ellis. Plus a production of Patrick White. There were seven plays- plus a literary adaptation - in 2006, as well. Since 2005, it's mounted new works by Stephen Sewell, Gareth Ellis, Michael Watts, Ross Mueller, Lally Katz, Tom Wright, Rebecca Clarke, Melissa Reeves and Peter Houghton.

It beats me how that is abandoning writers, although there's no argument that the Malthouse is programming a broader vision of theatre. But the perception that writers are ignored persists, despite the facts. Are writers simply responding to the fact that there are many more plays than stages to put them on? (And perhaps I have answered the S&S question above - is it a place for the overspill, a kind of valve to let the pressure off some dangerous cultural steam?) But it seems to me that these persistent complaints are actually part of a deeper and more complex conflict about the place of writers in contemporary theatre. Which is, actually, quite an interesting discussion.

But now I'm hot and I have to move my desk (only writers know what this means). So I'll leave it to others to tease that one out...

Next week the MTC is running its sixth annual Hard Lines Play Reading Program, presenting selections from four new plays by Peter Houghton, Felix Nobis, Dina Ross and Nic Velissaris. It's the final play-reading overseen by associate director Julian Meyrick, who has coordinated the MTC's writers' development arm since in 2002.

Meyrick is leaving the company at the end of this year to assume a post-doctoral research fellowship at La Trobe University. As yet there's no word on who will be replacing him. (Or, indeed, if he will be replaced: the MTC website says that "currently there are no positions available at Melbourne Theatre Company". Although we also note that the information on Hard Lines dates from last year...)

This year, writers supported by Hard Lines won major awards - the Patrick White (Patricia Cornelius), Wal Cherry (Ross Mueller) and Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards (Jane Bodie) - which shows that Meyrick has an eye for talent. He'll be speaking about his experiences with new Australian drama and the aims of the MTC's development program after Wednesday night's reading.

$5 entry, students free, at the Grant Street Theatre, Victorian College of the Arts, at 6.30pm on November 27 and 28.

First, on Sunday afternoon, I'm co-ordinating the conversation on a Writers Panel to be held at fortyfivedownstairs. The putative title is Words in Space: Writing Narratives of Place and Locality, and the pin is Melburnalia, a production of five short plays about - you guessed it - Melbourne, curated by White Whale Theatre. And it's a most interesting line-up - the writers are Kate Holden, Lally Katz, Ross Mueller, Tee O’Neill and Alice Pung. (If you haven't read Pung's Unpolished Gem, a memoir about growing up in Footscray, well, you should - it was one of my books of last year). I'm sure it can't fail to be an interesting conversation, so do join us.

Details: $5 at the door, 4.15pm – 5.30pm on Sunday November 11, Fortyfivedownstairs, Flinders St, City. RSVPs requested on 9662 9966.

Second, last night the Malthouse launched what promises to be a most fab season 1 for 2008. Richard Watts mysteriously says it's embargoed - nobody told me, and it all looked very public, but you know me and embargoes. UPDATE: yup, it really was embargoed, so Ms TN has politely removed those (minimal) spoilers until Monday. Embargoes have to be shoved under my nose in nice big texta, I suspect.

Ms TN has never understood the concept of "writer's block". I agree that sometimes one can't write and, as Orwell said, if a writer can't write, he's not being lazy: he really can't write. Being a devout believer in the work of the subconscious, I think that so-called writer's block means that the work isn't ready to be written. It can take a long time - sometimes a work can take thirty years' gestation. (It's true! I speak from personal experience!) So you wait, and feed that monster within, and one day out it pops, fully armed, just like Athene from Zeus's brow. Well, there's a bit of sweat involved and, as poor Zeus demonstrates, it can give you a bit of a headache. But, as one of the greater writers commented, ripeness is all. For a writer, patience is more than a virtue. It's a necessity.

So I see with a mixture of puzzlement and alarm that Michael Gow has written a play about writers block. Toy Symphony - which "attempts to capture that terrible thing that stops the act of writing" - follows his 1991 play Furious. Furious was about the same playwright (Roland, presumably Gow's alter ego), this time in the throes of inspiration. I don't know about you, but when I saw Furious it confirmed my growing suspicion that plays about writers ought to be banned. Writers are not good dramatic material. Let's face it, all that fussing about with paper and keyboards isn't exactly exciting. A play about a writer not writing might be even worse than one about a writer writing. I don't know. (One shouldn't, of course, prejudge, but I'd be trotting along to Belvoir St with some trepidation). I'm more interested that Gow is directing Heiner Muller's adaptation of Titus Andronicus for Bell Shakespeare later this year. Heiner Muller. Now, there's a writer.

A couple of events worth noting: one looking back at the "New Wave" theatre of the early 1970s, and the other showcasing some new waves of the present.

Theatre@Risk is presently hosting a Festival of New Writing, including a series of forums and play readings by writers both local and international. It began last Friday, but there is still a lot to see: plays from Europe, including one by UK writer David Eldridge (whose adaptation of the Dogme film Festen was seen here at the MTC) as well as some local names, including Ross Mueller. I'll be panelising with some others on Saturday about "New Forms". Check out the full program here.

Meanwhile, coming up on September 26 at the Open Stage at Melbourne University, there's a weekend-long Symposium called Enter the New Wave, which will examine the Australian theatre renaissance of the late 60s. Keynote speakers include Graeme Blundell, Bill Garner, Max Gillies, Jack Hibberd, Sue Ingleton, Liz Jones, David Kendall and John Romeril, and a highlight will be a performance of Jack Hibberd's White with Wire Wheels. The whole shebang is offered for what strikes me as the unbelievably cheap price of $60. Details on their website.