Entertaining Mr Sloane by Joe Orton, directed by Simon Phillips. Designed by Shaun Gurton, lighting design by Matt Scott, music by David Chesworth. With Ben Geurens, Bob Hornery, Amanda Muggleton and Richard Piper. Melbourne Theatre Company, Fairfax at the Victorian Arts Centre until February 10.

One of the most famous photographs of Joe Orton sums up his self-consciously louche vulgarity. He is slouched in a deckchair, naked except for a pair of white Y-fronts, smirking ironically at the camera. His immaculately tanned skin glistens, and a single lock of hair curls wantonly over his forehead. But the focus of the photo is his crotch: his legs apart, he is offering his cock for our awed delectation.

Orton was boastful about the dimensions of his penis, but in this particular photograph he is supposed to have stuffed his underpants with toilet paper. This theatrically staged image seems to sum up the flavour of Orton's plays, that sly mixture of self-mockery, frank lust and exaggerated fantasy, leavened with a casual brutality.

What's not so evident in this image is Orton's aesthetic intelligence; the comparisons with Wilde are not entirely unjust. But while Wilde's plays are exquisite machines, the works of a poet, Orton's precision was of another kind. His plays were satires on human animality, casting a sardonic eye on the hypocrisies and cruelties of middle class England. Crucially, as his biographer John Lahr points out, like all great satirists Orton was, first of all, a realist.

It seems to me that this is where Simon Phillips' production of Entertaining Mr Sloane goes dreadfully wrong: right at the beginning. This is a bafflingly bad production, so wrong-headed that it in fact makes nonsense of the play. Phillips takes Orton's disturbingly amoral universe and wraps it in a neat moral. He manages somehow to stage a play about sex without the smallest whiff of real, dangerous lust. Worst of all, he and his cast trample Orton's anarchic comedy into the ground. It's about as funny as a used condom.

Entertaining Mr Sloane, Orton's second play, was his first big hit. Mr Sloane (Ben Geurens) is a sexually charismatic youth who is pursued by both his landlady Kath (Amanda Muggleton) and her wealthy brother Ed (Richard Piper). Kath's father, Kemp (Bob Hornery) remembers Sloane's face as that of the man who murdered his former empoyer. By the end of the play, Sloane has murdered Kemp, and is blackmailed into a "practical" ménage à trois with both the brother and sister.

It's easy to see the spell of Harold Pinter in this early writing - with Samuel Beckett, Pinter was the only contemporary playwright whom Orton respected - and it has strong similarities to plays like The Birthday Party. There's the same focus on human banality, the same pervasive sense of sexual threat. And there is the same quality of edgily heightened realism, a quality Orton always claimed for his work. His plays, he said, were not fantasies: they were accurate portrayals of reality.

Loot, one of the plays that made Orton's reputation, was a disaster on its first outing for reasons that sound very similar to what's wrong here. A peformance of "outrageous mugging" from Kenneth Williams and confused performances from an all-star cast sent it to an early grave. "The play is clearly not written naturalistically," Orton said of Ruffian on the Stair, with the failure of Loot in mind. "But it must be directed and acted with absolute realism...No 'stylisation', no 'camp'. No attempt in fact to match the author's extravagance of dialogue with extravagance of direction."

Certainly, Phillips' production pays no heed to these admonitions. He directs the play as if it is an episode of Are You Being Served? - here are the same stereotypical characters, the same upper-lower-class English accents (with the concomitant laughter at lower-class pretensions), the same broad sexual innuendoes. The effect, predictably, is to terminally deflate every single comic line. I had to come home and read the play again to remind myself that it really is funny.

Perhaps the gesture that sums up the prurience of this production is the difficulty with Ed's smoking. In the script, he is a chain smoker who fetishises his silver cigarette case. Somehow Richard Piper manages to fiddle with cigarettes constantly without ever lighting one. He loses his matches; he takes a cigarette out and replaces it in his silver case; he does everything except actually smoke.

So far as I know, it is not illegal to smoke on stage in Victoria; perhaps the MTC has some sponsorship deal which prevents drug use on stage, or perhaps it simply doesn't want to offend its patrons. But then you wonder why on earth they decided to do this play. Just as this show attempts to show a chain smoker on stage without any actual smoking (despite an important scene where Ed smokes backstage, sinisterly watching the other characters) so we have lots of sexual innuendo - of the eye-popping, crotch-grabbing, bum-slapping kind - without any actual sex.

The performances are bogged down with stage business - the first two pages of dialogue take about 10 minutes - and make the play maybe half an hour longer than it ought to be. People seem to putting on coats and hats and taking them off every two minutes. The leering and winking at the audience seems to go for hours. This sense of everything being muffled by inessential detail is highlighted by Shaun Gurton's over-detailed set, an irritatingly intrusive score by David Chesworth that underlines every "significant" line and a lighting design that, like the production, permits no darkness on the stage.

The actors themselves each seem to be in a different play. There's nothing wrong with Amanda Muggleton's performance as such, aside from the fact that it's utterly wrong for the text. The tragedy that infuses Kath's life is muted into a mere joke, making the misogyny of the other characters both less palpable and less significant. As for Richard Piper: I am not at all certain what he is doing, but it's embarrassing to see such a good actor reduced to such unashamed mugging to the audience, such a meaningless constellation of tics and gestures.

About 20 minutes into the first act, as Mr Sloane (Ben Geurens) lounged unconvincingly on the couch, thrusting up his crotch in an uncomfortable simulacrum of adolescent seduction, an image flashed into my mind. I'm sure it was a photograph of the 1975 production of Entertaining Mr Sloane at the Royal Court, in which Sloane was played by the young Malcolm McDowell. The image of McDowell lounging on the couch showed me what was missing here: a charismatic amorality, a louche, dangerous charm that might, at any second, become threatening.

Geurens plays Sloane with none of the manipulative intelligence or incipient violence the role requires. This has serious ramifications later. When Sloane murders Kemp (Bob Hornery) the scene has no horror or pathos at all: it ought to be frightening. And it distorts the play grievously when it appears that a panicky Sloane - far from manipulating the situation to his satisfaction - has simply been trapped by the wily siblings. As I overheard one audience member say with satisfaction on opening night, Sloane "got what he deserved".

Orton must be spinning in his grave; such neat moralising symbolises everything he was against. The play itself makes no such suggestion. Sloane isn't punished at all. He uses his sexual power to literally get away with murder and to worm himself into a situation of considerable material comfort. And, aside from Kemp, no character in the play has any principles: each of them is prepared to do anything to ensure his or her own gratification.

Perhaps it's the ugliness of the characters in this play, their single-minded pursuit of their own gratification, which makes people flinch. Whatever it is, perhaps it's a tribute to Orton's continuing radicalness that his work must be so castrated before it can appear on stage. But it's a huge disappointment, all the same. One day, I'd like to see the play that Joe Orton actually wrote.

As I lay champagne on ice and chill the flutes, preparing for my Olympian end-of-year reflections, I realise that I've had a good year here on TN. I've seen some great theatre and had a most interesting time: what more could a theatre geek want?


Well, given that "divine" and "discontent" are my middle names, I guess there's quite a lot more to be desired. Imagine, for example, a Melbourne in which artistic achievement was greeted with discernment and enthusiastic curiosity, rather than hostile indifference. Where the arts were funded to achieve what they promised, and where no one was afraid of poetry. Brahms, Xenakis and DJ Spooky would battle it out in the iPods on the street. The Age's senior critics would be John Berger, Eric Bentley, Susan Sontag and Theodor Adorno, with whom everybody else would take issue on a regular basis in the huge opinion section of the arts pages.

Yeah, right. Dissolving back to the world I actually live in, it has been, nevertheless, a vintage year. It was really worth going to the theatre in 2006; I saw very little that was plain bad, and I got so used to not being disappointed that I was surprised when it happened. In all, I saw 62 productions - a respectable amount but by no means everything that was on. As I said when I first started this blog, I can't aim to be comprehensive; so regard this as a personal cross-section of the hundreds of events programmed in Melbourne this year.

A surprisingly high proportion of those 62 productions- 17, in fact, or 27 per cent - struck me as excellent: beautiful, thoughtful, exciting, intelligent theatre. Of those 17, 10 were programmed by either the Malthouse Theatre (six) or the Melbourne Festival (four). It confirmed my feeling at the end of last year that the most significant theatrical forces in Melbourne are these two institutions. But this year, the road for both of them has been far from smooth: they began to hit in earnest the conservative resistances that have always capped (and often destroyed) artistic ambition in this town.

The Malthouse has had a year of consolidation rather than triumph, continuing with a respectable mixture of success and failure to broaden the theatrical vocabulary of mainstream theatre in Melbourne. Its most ambitious show, a production of Marius von Mayenburg's Eldorado directed by Benedict Andrews, was an unambiguous artistic success, and is one of my plays of the year. But it notoriously played to very poor audiences, rapidly turning this production into one of those legends which nobody saw. More seriously, the subsequent financial losses means that the Malthouse has had to pull in its horns. No big productions of Sarah Kane next year, folks.


My other picks from the Malthouse's 2006 offerings are Nigel Jamieson's Honour Bound, Ross Mueller's Construction of the Human Heart, Luke Mullins' adaptation of Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, Kage Physical Theatre's Headlock and Anita Hegh and Peter Evans' adaptation of The Yellow Wallpaper. And an honourable mention to Michael Kantor's production of Michael Watts' play Not Like Beckett, which featured Russell Dykstra's disturbingly hilarious performance of Walter Walloon Beckett. These productions demonstrate the depth of independent theatre in Melbourne (two, for example, originated at the Store Room). They are striking for the diversity of theatrical language they employed. And, most of all, for their unapologetic theatrical ambition.

The Melbourne Festival was a more qualified success than last year - Kristy Edmunds' debut as festival director in 2005 was the most exciting festival for years. It's fair to say that MIAF 2006 didn't quite reach that pitch, but I still found much to enjoy in a rich, various and brave program. The shows that have remained with me are Pichet Klunchun and Myself (possibly my favourite show of the festival), Romeo Castelluci's Tragedia Endogonidia, Robert Wilson's I La Galigo and Marie Brassard's Peepshow.

Meanwhile, smaller companies put on some very impressive work. VCA students were responsible for two of my favourites this year: John Bolton's production of Steve Berkoff's East, produced by La Mama, and Brian Lipson's production of Caryl Churchill's The Skriker: both stunning realisations of stunning plays. The Black Lung, a new independent space, hosted the rude, crude and wonderful Rubeville and Suitcase Royale's charmingly dishevelled Chronicles of a Sleepless Moon.

Stuck Pigs Squealing has seemed ubiquitous this year: if it's not Chris Kohn, it's some other artistic associate of the company infecting the body theatric. Lally Katz and the Terrible Mysteries of the Volcano was this company's most ambitious work so far, an anarchic work that plumbed oneiric depths. My other highlights were Eleventh Hour's production of Endgame, with Peter Houghton as an unforgettable Hamm, and Robert Draffin's beautifully poetic adaptation of Mishima's Noh play The Damask Drum.


Notably missing from this list is the MTC. I was overseas and so missed the one show that might have made it, Doug Wright's Broadway hit I Am My Own Wife. When I think over the MTC's programming this year, nothing stands out: there were inoffensively entertaining shows among the West End and Broadway imports, but nothing that seared itself into my memory, nothing that deeply excited me.

Yet Simon Phillips tried some (relatively) adventurous programming this year, including new Australian plays like Jane Bodie's A Single Act and Ray's Tempest. And he programmed at least one decent play - David Eldridge's adaptation of Festen was among the best writing on show this year, if fatally flawed by a performance of surpassing blankness from Jason Donovan. Probably the MTC's most successful productions this year were Sarah Ruhl's A Clean House and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.

The MTC does middle-of-the-road probably as well as anyone in the world, but vision and ambition aren't words that spring to mind when you consider its programming. Compare the MTC's program to subsidised flagship companies elsewhere - Britain's National Theatre, say, or Paris' Theatre de Ville or, closer to home, the STC, which this year hosted my most regretted miss, Barrie Kosky's epic The Lost Echo - and you'll see it lacks a certain flair.

2006 has been notable for drama off stage as much as on it. There was the scandal of La Mama being put "on notice" by the Australia Council, which exposes just how bad things have become for small-to-medium theatre companies in the funding world. There was the constant sniping against the Melbourne Festival, in which the Malthouse came in for a bit of collateral damage, and which came to a head late this year when Kristy Edmunds was appointed for another year.

These are all symptoms of a complex struggle that is happening on several fronts in Australian culture. As David Marr puts it in an incisive overview of arts funding under Howard, the present Federal Government supports institutions, not artists. John Howard doesn't, after all, hate the arts; he just wants artists to be well-behaved citizens of a relaxed and comfortable Australia. Artists, restless creatures that they are, don't do relaxed and comfortable very well. It's notable that the institutions that have come under the gun this year, from La Mama to the Melbourne Festival, are those which seek to support artists first.

In Melbourne, the battle lines were drawn after a lot of sniping across the bows. Conservative voices from Peter Craven to Andrew Bolt have lined up as one (maybe they are one) to express their disgust about, among other things, "fringe" theatre being done in "mainstream" venues. It's all been rather interesting.

What we've been witnessing in theatre this year is much more complex than a generational conflict. Mark Davis identified the syndrome a few years ago in his 1997 book Gangland, speaking principally about Australian literature (Peter Craven figures in that book, too). Says Davis:

The left liberals who I speak about in the book practice a cultural politics that is remarkably similar to the old white colonial liberalism that they profess to oppose. They practice what they call "tolerance" but in fact operate within and perpetuate what is largely a white, middle class cultural space.

This "white, middle class cultural space" - in theatre, perhaps exemplified best by the old Playbox - is under pressure, not only from younger artists, but from older artists who challenge its assumptions. (You can tell who they are, because they have all been marginalised in Melbourne for years.) Of course, those who were comfortable in the old snoozy hegemony are upset, especially as their barrage of sneers hasn't driven these impertinently interesting works off our stages. Nobody's backing down, and I predict an interesting 2007.

Finally: it might sound self-regarding, but 2006 was the year of the blog. I was a lonely little soldier when I first started TN in 2004, but a quick scroll down the sidebar will show how much the theatrical blogosphere has grown in the past year. TN's readership is steadily increasing with it: unique visits more than doubled, from 23,855 in 2005 to 58,777 this year. TN regulars hail from all over the globe, and grew from 2849 last year to 11,617 in 2006. It's a humble figure in the generality of the internet but, frankly, I'm proud of it.

As for the theatrical blogosphere: as a cybertraveller of some years' standing, I can attest that it's quite a classy little corner of the internet. It's fiercely local and proudly international, it's argumentative and fascinating, it's hungry for intelligent discussion. It's a place where the deadening dominance of places like the Age can be truly challenged.

It's worth remembering that Rupert Murdoch said earlier this year that mainstream outlets ignore bloggers at their peril. There's a lot of crap talked about the new media, but in the centre is simply this fact: blogs are public, accessible spaces that can't be controlled by traditional means. And in that fact is grounds for hope. I don't know what will happen this coming year, but I do know that bloggers will be part of it.

Prost!

Pictures from top: Tragedia Endogonidia, directed by Romeo Castelluci, Societas Raffaello Sanzio, MIAF 2006; Alexandra Harrison and Brendan Shelper in Honour Bound. Photo: Jeff Busby; David Tredinnick and Peter Houghton in Endgame. Photo: Ponch Hawkes

For reasons that utterly escape me, my feed is popping up old posts that I haven't touched at all. Is there a doppelganger reposting whilst I slumber? I have no idea why this is happening, but my apologies for any inconvenience...

Over in his virtual Berlin, Daniel Schlusser thinks that artistic argument is all too polite. He wants blood. Says Daniel:

I suppose I am actually taking a different tack from the "why can't we have more sophisticated arts criticism" and going for the much more Australian excitement of, say, a kick in the head, or roo-boxing, or a game against Port Adelaide. "If you can't win the game win the fight," should be heard from the stands. Think of it as a kind of anti-nuance crusade.

Well, thinks I: let's have some nuance in the first place, before we start campaigning against it. But essentially, I agree with Daniel's main point: watching artists and critics be up-front about their aesthetic differences, ready to defend them with passion and wit, can be one of the great spectator sports. And - if it doesn't descend into brain-dead brawling, with polarised camps scowling at each other like chimpanzees and hurling excrement - it makes us all smarter.

There are two usual responses to challenge in this town: (a) pretend it didn't happen, or (b) smear one's opponent. (Or both). Daniel has a great example of the first strategy: he links to a letter he wrote to the Age after the first production under the new Malthouse team - Michael Kantor's repertory productions of Patrick White's A Ham Funeral and Tom Wright's Journal of a Plague Year - prompted reviews of hostile indifference from Helen Thompson. (My take on those productions, and Helen's responses, here ) Sadly, if predictably, Daniel's letter ended up being published in Real Time rather than the Age. And then no one took any notice, anyway.

In connection with the silence, and the silencings, I often think of Michael Dransfield's poem Like This for Years:

In the cold weather
the cold city the cold
heart of something as pitiless as apathy...

Or equally, of Pope's Dunciad, in which the goddess Dulness drowns everything in a giant yawn:

Nor public flame, nor private, dares to shine;
Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine!

When you think that Horace was complaining about the same things, I guess there's one consolation, poor as it is: it was ever thus.

As you all know, TN is a stickler for tradition. I even managed to arrange some snow for our bushfire-stricken Alpine regions and, since I believe that Christmas was invented by Charles Dickens, here present for your pleasure the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre's A Christmas Carol.



(For those who get that far, Part 2 is here, and features a version of Baby It's Cold Outside. Refreshing stuff as the wind clears the smoke from Melbourne skies.)

Merry Christmas to all TN readers, and here's to a brillo 2007. And many thanks to all of you for your support, encouragement and contributions throughout 2006. TN's 2006 round-up should be up by, well, the end of the year.

Here is a picture of TN this week. Not a happy blogger, is she?

To drive away the clouds louring o'er this house (and just before Christmas, too) I wrote yesterday to Mr Andrew Jaspan, Editor of The Age. And I instantly felt a lot better.

It probably won't achieve much, beyond slamming shut the teeny tiny door that has allowed me to masquerade as an opinion journalist in The Age now and again. (Though I have a feeling that I've already been crossed off Opinion Editor Ray Cassin's Christmas card list.) But it seems worth saying, all the same. I've been watching the most interesting things in Melbourne get squashed flat for 25 years and, my dears, I'm sick of it.

With any luck Mr Jaspan is squinting over his morning coffee at this letter:

Andrew Jaspan
Editor
The Age
250 Spencer St
Melbourne VIC 3001

December 21, 2006

Re: Balanced arts coverage in The Age.

Dear Mr Jaspan

I am writing because I am concerned about the balance of arts coverage in your newspaper. I am sorry for the length of this letter, but I wish to say clearly why, in this instance, I am moved to write.

I am a former journalist (Melbourne Herald, Melbourne theatre critic for The Bulletin) who now writes fiction for a living. One of my activities is the blog Theatre Notes, a theatre review blog I began in 2004. Since it began, it has become a respected and credible voice in the arts world: it was highly praised as an exceptional blog in the introduction to SMH arts writer Angela Bennie’s collection of criticism, Crème de la Phlegm (MUP), and your dance critic Hilary Crampton recently noted it favourably in an article on criticism in Artshub. And so on. I mention this in case the word “blog” makes you think of teenagers on My Space.

Occasionally I freelance – I review for the ABC Radio’s The Book Show and have written opinion pieces for your newspaper, usually in response to current issues of one kind and another. If you’d like to check them out, they are online. One of them, published on July 29, was a very different opinion on the Melbourne Festival than those expressed by Robin Usher and Peter Craven in your newspaper.

Last week, at a lunch for “key media people” to which I was invited, along with Raymond Gill, Robin Usher and other selected arts writers, MIAF announced that Kristy Edmunds’ term as artistic director was to be extended. Predictably, given his history of such pieces, Robin Usher then wrote an opinion piece (December 14) slamming that decision and attacking Edmunds’ programming. It was, in my view, a very slanted article that omitted some important points. Early on Friday morning (December 15), I submitted a short piece of my own (attached) to Opinion Editor Ray Cassin outlining a counter-argument. It was a little bit rude, but not much. I can’t see anything wrong with it as a lively piece of opinion writing.

Cassin’s first email reply was, I thought, very odd. He said:

Hi Alison,
Kristy Edmunds has privately replied to Robin Usher. As with the last round on this topic, she seems to prefer to leave it that way, rather than replying in print. I'll leave it that way, too.
Ray

I responded that “Usher's article is a broadside, and in the interest of balance, some corrective points need to be made publicly and with equal prominence. By someone else, if not me.” When I double checked on the meaning of the first mail, asking if he really meant that if Edmunds didn’t respond, no one would, he replied: “I think I said that I'd rather wait for a response ‘from the Festival’. As I did last time. As you'll recall, when that wasn't forthcoming I ran yours.”

On Monday, I checked with the MIAF PR whether Edmunds would be responding, and Prue Bassett told me that she thought it would be “inappropriate”. I then wrote to Cassin again early on Tuesday, informing him of this and asking whether he would be running my piece. He has not replied. Nor has he replied to my polite follow-up email, in which I said I was concerned that the story was getting cold and asked whether he intended to run any response, by me or someone else.

I have been checking The Age’s opinion and arts pages, and have seen nothing so far that answers Usher’s article. There have been, on the other hand, two interviews by Usher which bring up the Melbourne Festival “debate”, one with the Arts Minister Lynne Kosky and one with the leader of the Opposition, Ted Baillieu.

I wish to make clear that there is – in stark contrast to Usher’s reports – a constituency in Melbourne for the kind of things Edmunds does. I was amazed last year at the continual claims of poor attendance, when I went to so many events that were full. There might be division among Melbourne’s arts habitues about MIAF programming, and even those supportive of her general vision have criticisms; but there is no doubt that her program is sparking a lot of interest and discussion, especially among younger people.

In contrast to the picture painted by Usher, Edmunds strongly supports and programs local artists. MIAF private sponsorship is rising. The audience attendance figures and responses are in fact positive indicators. And so on. I don’t understand why there is no space for this to be said in The Age.

It makes it hard not to suspect that Edmunds is being targeted. Whether this is the case or not – I am perfectly aware of the issue of competing space – the evasion of the responsibility to run a differing opinion (unless it comes from Edmunds herself) gives the inaccurate and unfair perception that Edmunds’ ideas have no support in the community. And it can hardly be called “debate” if only one view is on show.

A festival focusing on contemporary art – especially one that foregrounds innovative artists from Melbourne – is always going to upset some conservative elements in Melbourne’s arts community, but they are not the only or even the majority voices. Of course I recognise that they are entitled to their opinion. What concerns me is that these voices are given an imbalanced prominence in The Age. Frankly, it’s not MIAF that’s “out of touch”.

As The Age is also a sponsor of the Melbourne Festival, this unremittingly negative coverage must be having a major effect on public perceptions. Most people without an insider knowledge of the arts read The Age as an authority on these matters. It may well be – and may well be intended to be – a self-fulfilling prophecy. If so, this seems to me an egregious misuse of the paper’s authority.

I look forward to hearing your response.

Your faithfully

Alison Croggon

Asks Supernaut (aka dancer Frances D'Ath) of the so-called "controversy" around the Melbourne Festival.

Slagging match of the week goes to Melbourne Festival vs. The Media, wherein Robin Usher tries to sound a rhetorical question and get us all wondering, "Hey, yeah, maybe the Melbourne festival has lost its touch".

Is this lame journalism trying to find an angle to cut down contemporary arts in Melbourne and put the big companies - Oz Ballet, Opera and Melbourne Symphony back in their rightful place as the upholders of culture?

Supernaut isn't a great fan of Edmunds - and says why - but looks with even more disfavour on the - well, shall we say one-sided? - mugging of Edmunds that's currently taking place in our august daily journals. And in articulating with scalpel precision the place of "debate" in mainstream media, she proves herself a mistress of snark:

"Robin Usher's extra-lame controversy-mongering and reductionist bottom-line dollar-dollar-bills-y'all art-as-finance in The Age is just puerile and asinine," lisps our fearless Naut, her voice sweet and low (an excellent thing in a woman). "...When the critical and intellectual position of the arts in mainstream Australia is represented by people like Robin Usher and Andrew Bolt, why should such debates take place where these pseudo-critics get a paycheck for mentally feeble drooling?"

Quite. Here we save our spittle for better things.

Prompted in part by a glum viewing of the Short & Sweet website, our favourite New York tragedian George Hunka lets rip on the commodification of theatre as mere "entertainment", which he calls "the new Fascism".

To say that every theatrical production must have an element of "fun" or spass, and then to drag Shakespeare and Brecht and Beckett and Bernhard and others down to our own professional purposes, in support of our own need to be distracted (Attention Deficit Disorder our psychic Black Plague: the iPodization of experience), is to befoul their work, disavow their pain. To take part in the entertainment culture. To paste over the tragic wound that the Art of Theatre can best present, to try to stop the gore with a designer Band-Aid ("Helps make healing fun!"), through which blood and pus continue to seep regardless.

Designer Lucas Krech points out that, nevertheless, play is an essential part of theatre, and that it needn't be synonymous - can in fact be resistant to - crass commercialisation.

George, it seems, is struggling against mindless commercial entertainment. The kind of fluff that does nothing more than causes small green rectangular pieces of paper to change hands quickly. But there is another kind of fun, a powerful and transformative type of play that could get lost were one to simply disregard the whole and focus only on the void. That fun is the kind that acts in counterpoint to tragedy and suffering. A kind of divine play. This is the morbid humor of the gatekeeper in MacBeth or the pathetic antics of Vladamir and Estragon. This kind of desperate humor is necessary in the midst of a world filled with so much suffering.

I agree with Lucas. The tragic and the comic can be equally profound, and they are equally cheapened by the mass culture anaesthetisations that George identifies here. Trevor Griffiths' brilliant play Comedians, for example, has a good look at these distinctions.

Meanwhile, speaking of grim things, Sydney actor William Zappa has started a blog, Acting for the Planet, which aims to be a locus for discussion among performing arts types about climate change. He kicks off with a serious question about the connections between the advertising industry - where most actors earn their bread and butter - consumerism and climate change. Check it out.

Signs of hope? James Strong, the new(ish) chair of the Australia Council, has put his weight behind yet another inquiry into the "troubled" (read: financially strapped) theatre sector. More significantly, as the SMH reports, he has requested an extra $14 million for the small-to-medium company sector. And that, as anyone following the shenanigans earlier this year will know, is the locus of the real crisis.

Short & Sweet 2006: Week 3 Top 30. Various artists. Fairfax Studio, Victorian Arts Centre.

As everyone knows who is not from Mars (or outside Melbourne, which local pundits sometimes seem to think amounts to the same thing), Short and Sweet 2006, "the biggest 10-minute play festival in the world", has been the subject of extensive discussion in the blogosphere recently.

So I took myself along to Week 3 with a certain curiosity, checking my preconceptions at the cloak room on the way in. Given the ferocity of the debate about its virtues, I wanted to know what I thought.

The 10-minute play festival is something of an institution in the United States. From Kansas to New York, from Ohio to Los Angeles, festivals of "shorts" pop up like mushrooms. And it's easy to see the appeal of the idea, in its many manifestations: they are a convenient form for play competitions and they can permit a handy showcase for new writers. And, finally, there is the considerable challenge of the form itself.

What you notice immediately about most US festivals is that they usually run a single program of 10-minute plays. The average seems to be about six works. In play competitions, for example, the theatre company generally broadcasts a call for entries, and then produces winning plays as a single program. Secondly, you notice that the ten-minute play has attracted a number of big names: short play festivals have included works by David Mamet, Christopher Durang, Woody Allen, Wendy Wasserstein and the man who is probably the grand master of the short play, Samuel Beckett.

Short & Sweet crosses the 10-minute play competition with Australian Idol. The idea is to select 30 "top" plays, plus another 20 "wild cards", which are all then given productions over three weeks. They are assessed by a panel of "industry judges" who, with the "people's choice" audience vote, narrow them down to a final few which are presented at the Gala Final. The various winners of the Gala are then showered with $30,000 in prizes and "priceless development opportunities", namely a chance for workshops with TILT, the Art Centre's new works showcase, and a free summer course at the VCA.

This, according to the guff, "encourages the participation of aspiring, emerging and established playwrights, directors and performers from the community to explore their creativity in a supportive, vibrant and creative environment". Note the buzzwords: I'm not sure I've seen so many in one place outside a grant application. It's all very feelgood.

There's also 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.

Cynics might remark that it also has a built-in audience - 300 actors and directors means a lot of family and friends shelling out for tickets ($18-$27 for the competition, $26-$37 for the Gala Night). And certainly it was a partisan and supportive crowd the night I went, with whoops from different parts of the auditorium signalling supporters of each play. Eavesdropping confirmed that I was sitting next to someone's Dad and siblings.

But what was the work like? The evening was slickly presented - fast turnovers between plays, with the actors being efficient stage hands. Of the ten plays I saw, I thought three were decent: Andrew O'Keefe's Uncomfortable Silences, Jonathan Gavin's Sleepless Night and Billy Windlock by Hellie Turner (for me the standout piece).

The first two were well-turned comedic works on relationships, sharp and witty and ultimately without much weight, and performed with a lot of polish. Sleepless Night, directed by Nic Clark, was the only piece that showed directorial flair: it's not surprising to find that Clark ran a short play festival in the Riverina.

Billy Windlock was the only play with real ambition: it evokes a kind of Carson McCullers picture of a small Australian town's secrets and hypocrisies. It was, in the best sense of the word, melodramatic, and despite some overwriting stayed poised with considerable flair on its theatrical conceit. Laura Bray gave a brave performance that only rarely tilted into over acting.

The rest of the program wavered between the usual variants of indifferent directing and acting and unsuccessful writing. There was a tired satire on Jerry Springer, a surprising number of critiques on the War on Terror with various degrees of heavy-handed politicising, and some meek or naive experiments in form.

Is a 30 per cent strike rate - from what I gather, around average for these nights - enough to justify putting on 50 plays? It no doubt gratifies the participants, but if one is serious about supporting new or emerging talent, why not simply select the 10 best plays, give them to the 10 best directors and run a decent season?