Virgins: a musical threesome by Mathew Frank and Dean Bryant, directed by Dean Bryant. Musical director Luke Byrne, design by Adam Gardnir. With Esther Hannaford, Rosemarie Harris, Verity Hunt-Ballard, Amanda Levy and Kellie Rode. The Tower Theatre @ the Malthouse until February 11

I am becoming rather thoughtful about musicals; there's a lot of them about these days. And I wonder...

The richest Australian prize for music theatre, the Pratt Prize, is slanted toward developing one particular genre of music theatre, the Broadway musical; founder and philanthropist Jeanne Pratt said when the prize was launched that she "was more or less trying to find an Australian Irving Berlin". To the end of promoting this artform, the Pratt Foundation (which of course has every right to encourage whatever it likes) has a company, The Production Company, which last year ran a season of performances of Oklahoma!, Kiss Me Kate and Andrew Lloyd Webber's Sunset Boulevard.

No one is going to sneeze at a $80,000 prize; and the sheer fact of it must be exercising a magnetic pull on Australian music theatre. The argument is that the Australian musical (which has had a fairly disastrous history, from the famous debacle of Manning Clark's History of Australia to the enthusiastic kitsch of Eureka! a couple of years ago) needs all the help it can get. This may well be true. But music theatre is a broad church, inhabited by many more forms than the traditional Broadway musical, or its contemporary off-Broadway offshoots such as Urinetown. Although, of course, it behoves me to remember indigenous shows like The Sapphires, or the cabaret of Eddie Perfect or Paul Capsis, I find myself worrying about ecological diversity.

Don't get me wrong; it's not like I think the musical should not exist. But if that broad church "music theatre" tends, particularly in its fringe manifestations, primarily to the poles of Broadway and the West End, I believe that it's a problem. I'm thinking rather wistfully of the energy and inventiveness of Australian music theatre in the 70s and 80s - John Romeril's rude and crude The Golden Holden Show, produced in 1975, or Daniel Keene's Cho Cho San, Madame Butterfly reimagined with banraku puppetry and a score that mixed jazz, rock and opera, which was the theatre hit of the 80s.

It's a question even in New York: critic George Hunka, surveying the New York Fringe Festival, comments sardonically that for all its pop and verve, the program is populated by "knowing, sly" musical comedies, all vying for a slot on Broadway, or at least off-Broadway. The writers of Virgins, Mathew Frank and Dean Bryant, have, in fact, already had a musical produced in New York, and the gravity of the American Dream looms large in the three pieces presented here. I guess that Melbourne is about as off-Broadway as it gets.

The show is really three mini-musicals, of which only the first, The Virgin Wars, is overtly American. It's an amusing skit which exposes the conflicting messages given to young contemporary women who must, in a culture saturated with images of sexuality, preserve their chastity. Five young women are touring American high schools, using their cheerleader sassiness to promote the excitement of preserving oneself for marriage. Meanwhile, their bump'n'grind routines convey entirely another message - and it seems that some of the girls are not as pure as they make out. As it were.

The next two pieces directly address media representations. Girl on the Screen concerns a woman journalist assigned to investigate soft porn websites run by women. Are they, she asks, empowered by what they do, or are they merely exploited by a world shaped only by male desire? The straightlaced journalist finds that the truth is more complicated than she imagined - and worse, that her employment by a multinational media company is a more profound form of prostitution.

The final show, Jumpin' the Q, invents the ultimate bad taste reality show: singing asylum seekers from a variety of countries (Russia, Columbia, Iran and Zimbabwe) compete for a visa, a recording contract and a new life in Australia. The exploitative voyeurism of of reality tv is here lifted to new heights, although it's actually not that hard to imagine such a show being seriously mooted: some things in our modern world are beyond parody.

Each of these shows is inventively directed by Dean Bryant, with a minimal but effective design that permits the Tower seating to be rearranged twice in the course of the evening. And performances are without exception full-blooded and fun: there's a lot of talent on show here. The five-piece band grinds out an entertaining marriage of rock and musical numbers, and if there are dramatic longueurs, especially in the final piece, they are largely compensated for by some spirited singing and dancing.

The Virgin Wars is the most successful of these three, perhaps because the ideas it addresses are the most apt to its form. In the other two I found myself contemplating an uncertain marriage of form and content: the attempt at serious social commentary collides heavily with the entertainment aesthetic of the musical. In the middle is, perhaps inevitably, a soft centre.

Are the asylum seekers amusing caricatures of different nationalities (notwithstanding that the Zimbabwean is a white refugee), or people whose histories and personalities should rouse empathy and understanding? The production oscillates uncomfortably between these questions, never quite resolving them. Jumpin' the Q has enough intelligence to avoid the worst traps that lie waiting for it in tackling this subject but, perhaps out of an admirable respect for the issues it addresses, it fails to be bold enough to pull off its own conceit. Part of me wished that it was much crueller, that it dared to follow to the end the logic of its own bad taste.

Perhaps being under the rubric of "entertainment" means that one cannot create too much offence: and certainly it is difficult to pull the emotional gems of real drama out of the froth of musicals. Which isn't, of course, to say that it can't be done. But that's another argument.

Chris Boyd's review at The Morning After

The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, music and lyrics by William Finn, book by Rachel Sheinkin, conception Rebecca Feldman. Directed by Simon Phillips. designed by Dale Ferguson. With Marina Prior, Tyler Coppin, Bert Labonte, David Campbell, Christen O'Leary, Tim Wright, Magda Szubanski, Natalie Mendoza and Natalie O'Donnell. Playhouse @ the Victorian Arts Centre, until February 25.

The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee has been a phenomenon on Broadway, and it's easy to see why: it's a bright, appealing show in the best traditions of American musicals, with enough satirical bite to avoid the saccharine. Think Little Shop of Horrors, with its light comic digs at American materialism and off-beat love story, replace the gothic elements with a parody of contemporary small town America, and you have the tenor about right.

It takes that most American of inventions, the competitive spelling bee, and wrings surprising dramatic mileage from this simple idea. The spelling bee is, of course, already a performance, where a hapless child stands in front of an audience and tries to spell increasingly obscure words. When they get a word wrong, they're eliminated from competition, and the winner is the last one standing. It is, in many ways, a precursor of the Big Brother/American Idol "reality" shows, and with the same ruthless subtext of predatory competitiveness.

And, as The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee or, indeed, Big Brother, demonstrates, any situation in which contestants are placed under pressure opens rich possibilities for emotional revelation. The successive rounds of the spelling bee include dramatisations of the children's inner thoughts as they stand in front of the microphone, groping for some clue on how to spell a word like "xanthosis" or "appoggiatura". These vignettes reveal the complexities of their lives, and in the process offer up a breezy portrait of the neuroticisms of middle class America.

Logainne Schwarzandgrubeniere (Christen O'Leary), for instance, has to be a poster girl for her two gay fathers, who are anxious to show what a successful child they have raised. Leaf Coneybeare (Tim Wright) is from a large home-schooled family, and feels outshone by his bright siblings. Marcy Park (Natalie Mendoza) is a prodigy who longs for the liberation of failing, and Olive Ostrovsky (Natalie O'Donnell) misses her mother, who has gone to an ashram in India for nine months. And then there's William Barfee (Magda Szubanski), obnoxious, arrogant, clever, asocial and lonely, and the former spelling bee champion Chip Tolentino (David Campbell), who is tormented by the travails of adolescent lust.

The spelling bee itself is run by Ms Peretti (Marina Prior), a former champ herself who scatters seductive charm over any male within smiling distance, and Vice Principle Panch (Tyler Coppin), who is as asocial as some of his pupils. And the whole is watched over by the ironic eye of the streetwise Mitch Mahoney (Bert Labonte), who is doing community service for unknown transgressions as the "comfort counsellor". His job is to console the losers although, as he says, he'd like to see what would happen if they had to cope with something really bad.

To be a loser is almost synonymous with sin in a society where Donald Trump is the model for ultimate success. The irony is, of course, that the children who win are the misfits and the socially inept, "losers" in almost every other sense.

Simon Phillips has put together a classy production with an excellent cast, and it bounces along entertainingly from the first number, neither insulting your intelligence nor boring you. The set is a basketball court-cum-school hall, with a curtained stage at the back, behind which sits the band. The stage is used inventively and flexibly: the playing space includes the auditorium, for of course we are the fictional audience of the spelling bee as much as the actual audience of the musical. This complicity is underlined by a bit of audience participation: four contestants are drawn from spectators. They compete and are eliminated (in one case, with a particularly good speller, with some difficulty), comforted and sent back "home".

The band is tight, the music catchy, the singing (especially from Marina Prior) glorious. And the performances are essays in comic deftness: just this side of caricature, with enough depth to generate moments of real feeling. In short, this is a show with bags of charm, and an undoubted winner for the MTC.

Is it churlish of me to cavil at this point? No doubt...but let me be a churl anyway. It's my job. What is the MTC - the largest subsidised theatre company in the southern hemisphere - doing putting on what is, by any other name, a commercial musical? Surely this is the kind of decision that has actual commercial producers gnashing their teeth? The fact that I know a lot of the answers - looming large among them the parlous funding for even the large state companies - doesn't mean that the questions go away. Primary among them is, why have subsidised theatre at all, if it is only to produce commercial shows?

I've added a few new blogs to my theatre blogroll - scroll down the sidebar and check them out!

The True Amazon Adventures of Roger Casement by Andrew Shaw, directed by Robert Reid. With Mike McEvoy, Elliot Summers, Robert Lloyd, Michael F. Cahill, Tobias Manderson-Galvin, Johannes Scherpenhuizen, Liz McColl, Simon Morrison-Baldwin and Alicia Benn Lawler. La Mama until February 18.

The so-called Black Diaries of Roger Casement are a kind of Turin Shroud of modern history. Sir Roger Casement was a distinguished Victorian human rights advocate whose reports on colonial atrocities in the Belgian Congo and rubber plantations in Peru earned him a knighthood.

But Casement, an Anglo-Irishman, was also a believer in Irish Independence. In 1916 he arranged for a German ship to sail for Ireland with "several machine-guns, 20,000 rifles and a million rounds of ammunition" for the Irish Volunteers. But his plans were exposed, and Casement was arrested and imprisoned in London for three months awaiting trial. He was hanged by the British for treason on August 3, 1916, for his part in the Easter Rising.

While Casement was in prison, the diaries - supposedly seized in a raid on his house - were used to destroy his credibility and character. The diaries contained explicit details that revealed Casement to be a promiscuous homosexual with a taste for rough trade. Selected extracts were shown to public figures and known sympathisers, who consequently shrank back from appealing for clemency for a "degenerate". The Black Diaries effectively hanged him.

Predictably, perhaps, given the underhand way in which the British authorities used the diaries, and their subsequent keeping in conditions of extraordinary secrecy (the first independent examination of the documents only happened three years ago), their provenance has always been surrounded by controversy. Particularly in Ireland, there has been a widely held belief that the diaries were forgeries, partly out of a disbelief that a hero and martyr could possibly be gay: as de Valera said, he was "too noble to be a degenerate".

The unequivocal 2002 judgment of handwriting expert Dr Audrey Giles that the diaries "were genuine throughout and in each instance" has done nothing, however, to end the controversy. Many experts argue that her examination was incomplete, and failed to take into account inconsistencies in the text and other issues which, at the very least, throw doubt on their authenticity.

In our times, Casement is in danger of becoming a martyr for gay pride as much as for the Irish Nationalists. Poor ghost. Playwright Andrew Shaw has no doubt: "we can accept the diaries as real, why shouldn't they be?" he says, dismissing the arguments for their inauthenticity as "a claim designed to safeguard an Irish martyr against the perversion of homosexuality".

I'm not so sure; in this age, the counter-arguments may have nothing to do with homophobia, and everything to do with concern about the lengths to which the British authorities could go in order to hang a troublesome dissident. However, Andrew Shaw has created an intelligent and witty play out of the hallucinatory realities that circle around this case.

In the opening scenes a young civil servant Thomson (Mike McEvoy) is blackmailed by two Foreign Office officials (Robert Lloyd and Michael F Cahill); the police have certain information on his private life, and he will be prosecuted for homosexuality - unless, that is, he reads the private diaries of Roger Casement and uses them to create a forgery which fits in with the known details, but which proves Casement to be a degenerate.

Thomson likes to think he is a humanitarian - he admires Casement's work in the Congo and the Amazon - and is something of a naive romantic. But he takes the job to save his own skin, knowing that he will help to hang a man whom he admires. He hopes to salve his conscience by showing that, even though Casement is queer, he is also a human being capable of love; and the project also appeals to a certain literary vanity. The irony is that when the actual diaries turn up and Thomson's forgeries are no longer needed, Casement's adventures are not the romantic idylls of Thomson's imaginings, but something altogether more ambiguous and disturbing.

Shaw interleaves scenes between the civil servants and others between Thomson and his lover with dramatisations of events from Casement's diaries, which relate a somewhat brutal narrative of what we would now call sex tourism as well as the corruptions and brutalities of plantation life. He artfully illustrates not only the hypocrisies of Victorian society - at least one of Thomson's superiors is himself homosexual - but also its mechanics: the levers of class and money and exploitation that constitute a colonial empire. Sharp and subtly inflected performances from these three actors (I especially enjoyed the panicked vulnerability of Thomson, too intelligent to hide from himself the implications of what he is doing) intensify the ironies of these scenes.

In the middle of this machinery is the hapless character of Casement (Elliot Summers) himself, who is a cipher - on the one hand condemning the exploitation of "natives", while on the other exploiting them sexually. But instead of creating a truly complex contradiction, Casement comes across merely as a hypocritical prig, weakly shoring up his own authority at the expense of the man he claims to love but, in fact, exploits and betrays. It's a factor of Summers' rather blank performance, I think, as much as a question not quite resolved in the script. While Shaw's Casement is certainly flawed, it is difficult to see how such a moral quisling could be fired by the desire for justice that motivated his reports of human rights abuses or the support for an independent Ireland which finally ended his life.

Robert Reid's direction is arresting, if perhaps a little ambitious for the intimate stage of La Mama: the artifice of this production might work better with the distance of a proscenium. The actors are in white face, and half masks are used to indicate the masks of colonial rule, effectively theatricalising the roles and selves of colonial rule. The English servant and the plantation slave, both at the bottom of the class hierarchy, are represented by a bunraku puppet. Sometimes the staging is very effective indeed: a scene where Casement's assistant is whipped is startlingly violent and unbearable, especially from a distance of less than a metre - hard to do in a small theatre. It's a production that doesn't quite achieve its own ambition, but is well worth a look.

Dumb Show by Joe Penhall, directed by Peter Evans. With Aaron Blabey, Anita Hegh and Richard Piper. Designed by Christina Smith, lighting design Matt Scott, music by Darrin Verhagen. Melbourne Theatre Company @ the Fairfax, Victorian Arts Centre, until February 18.

Joe Penhall is that very British phenomenon, the straight-talking celeb. Asked what he thought the problems of British theatre were, he responded: "Too much mediocrity in the West End. It's like watching BBC1. They're just milking the tits of a giant, wobbling, quivering fucking middle-brow cash cow if you ask me."

Ironically enough, without the profanity (I am a courteous and restrained individual) that was more or less my sentiment at the end of Penhall's Dumb Show, a play about the mutual parasitic relationship between celebrity and tabloid journalism. It's a classic issue-based play, setting up a confrontation with enough moral ambivalence to keep the audience teetering to and fro in their sympathies, without reaching so far into the heart of things that it confronts anything too visceral. Middle-brow indeed.

My first, not very interesting, thought about Dumb Show was to wonder why a story about the grubby hypocrisy of British tabloid newspaper journalists would be of interest to Melbourne theatre goers. Australian tabloids have got nothing on the excesses of Fleet Street, nor can we match the trashy glitz of British celebrity; and the issues as presented here have little to do with us. But then, I will follow with breathless interest stories about decaying 19th century Russian bourgeoisie or 12th century English kings, without the question of irrelevance entering my head. The real question is, I think, one of sentimentality.

In Dumb Show, Richard Piper plays Barry, a vain and insecure tv celebrity. He becomes the target for entrapment by a pair of unscrupulous tabloid journalists, Greg (Aaron Blabey) and Liz (Anita Hegh), who disguise themselves as bankers and dangle the bait of a huge fee for a dinner talk. Of course, behind the moral outrage of the journalists lies the grubby business of the scoop, the voyeuristic and predatory amorality that feeds on the pain and humiliation of its former favourites. But, as the play reveals, it is a symbiotic relationship: the celebrity needs the press as much as it needs him, to feed his fame and his egotism.

And that, really, is as far as it goes.

I have heard sentimentality described as "unearned feeling", and it's a description that fits this play to a tee. I have seldom seen a work so brazenly manipulative, shamelessly raising the emotional stakes to wring the hearts of the audience, without anywhere risking real feeling. And of course it's full of jokes, defusing moral or emotional discomfort with those crackling one-liners. Yes, I laughed at one or two of the jokes, but less and less as the show went on.

In this, I fear, I was a little solitary: the MTC audience lapped it up, practically booing the villains and cheering the main guy as if it was a Victorian melodrama. I sat, as Michael Billington once memorably said, in "mutinous isolation". I don't like having my feelings pushed around, as if my mind is nothing but a series of buttons to be pressed by this or that turn of the plot: if I want that, I can always watch Neighbours.

It's a shame to see such a talented cast and director spending their efforts on work so unrewarding. Anita Hegh, in particular, was unable to access her considerable powers in the character of Liz, who is, like her colleague Greg, thinly drawn; neither of the journalists are much more than empty representations of the moral and emotional bankruptcy of their profession. Richard Piper as Barry, predictably, makes a meal of his role, which gives him plenty of scope: his character is pathetic, greedy, morally dubious, vacuous: but also raffishly charming and funny. His performance, like all the others, has that painful sense of actors mugging their roles, going for crude surface in the absence of any other ideas. But, given the script, it's hard to see what else they could have done.

Peter Evans' direction is competent, ensuring the show runs smooth and fast. At the beginning, he has the two journalists enacting their roles-within-roles as heightened, almost grotesque caricature, dropping this style when they reveal their "real" selves. It's an interesting idea that doesn't come off, partly because then it's difficult to see how Barry could possibly have been taken in by them.

In short, another play that slips out the memory as soon as you slip out of the theatre: slight in every respect, vaguely insulting in its manipulativeness, curiously untouching. The kind of thing, the MTC would argue - with some justification - that it is forced to do in order to keep the box office ticking over: as one might say, "milking the tits of a middle-brow cash cow". But that's another argument.

It's all happening in the theatre blogosphere. First of all, my estimable colleague Chris Boyd has kicked off his own theatre review blog, The Morning After: Performing Arts in Australia, with a couple of reviews of Cheek by Jowl and Robert Lepage at the Sydney Festival, so do check it out.

And the question of the theatre audience is the topic du jour in the US, where the blogsters are all arguing hammer and tongs. It was indirectly sparked by my posting the Foreman quote, which led to George Hunka over at Superfluities posting a quote from my essay on Howard Barker. In response to Scott Walters at Theatre Ideas agreeing with Barker, but with a caveat, George posted this passionate response, where he says in part:

Some audience members see ... difficult work as an attack, as perhaps they should, since it tells them that their conception of the world isn't theirs but a reflection of something manufactured for them to keep them asleep. Nobody, especially those who are confident in their self-indulgent belief that they know how the world works, wants to hear that. Others, seeing the same show, won't see it as an attack at all, but will be open-minded enough to see it as an invitation to a new vision: their own. Neither Foreman nor Barker wants the audience to think like them, to feel like them, but wants them to think and feel for themselves, individually, to find liberation in confronting their own darkest depths. The dramatist is a metaphor in his or her own work, a metaphor for individual perception, as the lyric voice serves in his or her own poetry. It is an invitation to profound, wrenching, transformative, painful change. As somebody once said about omelets and eggs, you can't make an epiphany without shattering a world.

Scott Walters responds here with a long and interesting post, and Matt Freeman on his Theatre and Politics blog here. And some lively discussion continues in the comments... all in all, it makes for a fascinating conversation.

A Richard Foreman quote to stir up the New Year, which comes courtesy of New York blogger/playwright George Hunka:

I BELIEVE THAT NOW IS THE TIME FOR A CELEBRATION OF ELITIST ART!

Let's dare proclaim that in the face of a society increasingly crying for a media-driven, market-oriented, popular art, reaching out to everyone at once – while 'deep thoughts' are officially allowed in such art, they must only come in a form that is easily communicable to all.

BUT I MAINTAIN
that to feed the individual human spirit, the true art of these times must be a kind of demanding gymnasium where sensibilities get rigorous exercise – so that those sensibilities then become more refined, able to pick up on and appreciate the patterned intricacies of a world which is usually, in art, simplified into recognizable social and psychological clichés or knock-out effect. Such normal strategies lie about the world because they talk about what we already know (which is always wrong) in languages with which we are already familiar (and therefore put our more delicate mental mechanisms to sleep) – all this, instead of waking us up with the uncharted energies that throb behind the facade of the shared world of communicable convention.

Theatre Notes is limbering up - back next week.

It's that time of year again, when it is conventional to drink too much, to rush around snarling at your fellow harrassed shoppers, and to say things like, where has this year gone? And of course, time for the annual Olympian view of the year's theatre, as seen from the critical eyrie.

Glancing through my reviews, what strikes me principally is how much good theatre, of many different kinds, that I've seen this year. And, perhaps perversely, I finish this year feeling more optimistic about the state of Melbourne theatre than I began it.

2005 was dominated by two very different events - the radical shift of artistic direction at the Malthouse Theatre, and this year's extremely successful Melbourne Festival. Under Michael Kantor's artistic direction, the Malthouse has done the unimaginable - turned around the stale post-70s aesthetic of the Playbox Theatre and made a space for a broader perception of theatrical possibility. Likewise, the Melbourne Festival's 2005 program, by general agreement the most exciting for years, was a sell-out success. Artistic director Kristy Edmunds foregrounded innovative work by local and international artists which galvanised everyone who attended, sparking engaged (and often vastly differing) responses. Theatre is looking sexy again: more importantly, the broadening of aesthetic possibility is beginning to attract a different demographic, younger people who have heretofore rather spent their dollars on film or books. We can only hope that this trend continues.

On the other hand, theatre, as always, teeters in a state of permanent crisis, and there are many reasons to be worried about the future of the arts here. If even Hannie Rayson's absurd melodrama Two Brothers can prompt Federal Ministers to talk about abolishing the Australia Council, what happens if there's some real critique? This year also saw the abolition of the Australia Council's New Media and Community Arts Boards - both of which supported innovative artforms - under a major restructure, to the wide disquiet of the arts community.

The recent bundle of legislation passed through Federal Parliament includes amendments to the archaic sedition laws that potentially affect artists as much as journalists or anyone interested in social critique, and the banning of compulsory union fees at universities with a consequent disastrous effect on cultural life in our tertiary institutions. These laws represent the latest and most damaging salvos in an ongoing war by the right wing against Australian culture: only this week, the attack dog of the Right, Andrew Bolt, savaged the alleged "group think" of arts funding bodies (conveniently ignoring the fact, for instance, that the Australia Council also funds the right wing magazine Quadrant) , and it's hard not to wonder how much this indicates more aggressive government interference in - and ultimately, repression of - art that doesn't toe the official line.

More particularly, to return to theatre itself, there has recently been a rash of doom-laden opinion pieces about the lack of new Australian theatre writing. Even Helen Thompson, who has certainly seen more Melbourne theatre than I have this year, comments that there has been "a dearth of new Australian writing for the stage".

I am frankly puzzled by this perception. This year I have seen a lot of new Australian writing, in conventional and innovative forms. I don't want to minimise the difficulties playwrights face here, which are complex, and at once familiar to anyone working in theatre anywhere and particular to this culture. The fact remains that I've seen a lot of new Australian theatre writing this year, ranging from full-on mainstream adaptation (Andrew Upton's marvellous version of Cyrano de Bergerac at the MTC) to the innovative - Subclass26A at 45 Downstairs, for example, or Stuart Orr's brilliant operatic riff on Nazism, Telefunken and Margaret Cameron's poetic meditation The Proscenium, at the Malthouse.

We had Wesley Enoch's breathtaking (and breathtakingly directed) Black Medea, a Belvoir St/Malthouse co-production; ambitious, if ultimately flawed adaptations by Tom Wright (The Odyssey and Journal of a Plague Year); Ben Ellis' Kafka's Metamorphosis and Patricia Cornelius' Love - both of which, sadly, I missed as I was overseas. And in the smaller independent companies there were productions of a new generation of young writers - Lally Katz, Tee O'Neill, Angus Cerini, Robert Reid and others. And that's without even looking at the work La Mama constantly does in creating a haven for new writing, both with regular readings of new playwrights and productions.

So where is this dearth of new Australian writing? It's underfunded, no question; it struggles to be seen and heard - even, it seems, by those who have seen and heard it. But it's most undoubtedly there. And the best of it has a promising energy and intelligence, a restlessness which challenges the artform and the society in which it's produced.

Perhaps this perception has, in part, been fed by the tendency of independent companies like Theatre@Risk and Red Stitch to put on international plays. But it seems chiefly to derive from the change of direction at the Malthouse, and its abandonment of the Playbox program of doing only new Australian plays. This has led to assertions that the Malthouse no longer supports new Australian work, an argument that a quick look at their 2005 program would quickly dismantle. The policy does signal a move away from a conservative aesthetic dominated by the idea of the "well-made play", towards a more integrated model of theatre writing - the idea that, like Shakespeare, the playwright is a theatre worker who collaborates with others to create his art.

In any case, Australian theatre seems more broadly imagined than it was a year ago, and for that I am profundly grateful.

So, to my stand-out productions (or, at least, those I haven't mentioned yet). It will be no surprise to anyone that Ariane Mnouchkine's Le Dernier Caravansérail gets my vote (as well as, it seems, everyone else's) for the most significant production of the year. I suspect that Théâtre de Soleil's tour will come to be seen, in retrospect, as influential as Pina Bausch's tour was on Australian dance in the 1970s - its achievment, beauty and power were nothing less than inspiring.

At the Malthouse, Michael Kantor's production of Patrick White's The Ham Funeral was sheerly beautiful, and placed White where he belongs - squarely in the Australian theatrical tradition, from which he has been carefully edited for the past three decades or so. And Barrie Kosky's 21st Century cabaret with the amazing Paul Capsis, Boulevard Delirium, deserved its standing ovations.

Among the independent companies, I remember Anita Hegh's extraordinary one-woman performance of The Yellow Wallpaper; Act-O-Matic's very classy production of The Laramie Project; Chamber Made Opera's return season of its wonderful and witty send up of film noir, Phobia; and the poignant fairytale Felix Listens to the World, made by the young company Suitcase Royale. And I also would like to mention Out on a Limb, Sarah Mainwaring's moving performance art piece at La Mama, which has stayed with me a long time.

Theatre Notes is taking a short break for Christmas, but will be back with bells on - and perhaps the remnants of tinsel - for what looks like a fascinating 2006. The big question for me is, what now for the Malthouse? Will they be able to keep the momentum going? Tune in here to find out...

And a very Merry Christmas, or other seasonal greetings, to all my loyal readers and to the companies who have supported this blog. You've made it all worthwhile. Thanks too to those who brought the comments section to life this year - the more debate, the better for theatre, and the better for all of us.

Have a good one.

Billy Maloney by Bill Garner and Sue Gore, directed by Denis Moore, designed by Shaun Gurton, lighting by Nick Merrylees. With Don Bridges, Jim Daly and Ruth Schoenheimer. At North Melbourne Town Hall until December 10.

Billy Maloney left me cogitating about the connection between art and politics. This is a much more difficult question than it might appear to be in this play, which overtly sets out to celebrate the life of a fascinating early Melbourne radical and to rouse the audience to emulate his exemplary idealism. But in assuming that art can be unproblematically political, in the way that, say, a political rally is, I fear that Bill Garner and Sue Gore may have missed the point.

The play itself is a biopic of Dr William Maloney, a part of Australia's history that John Howard's government would prefer remained forgotten. MLA for West Melbourne from 1889 -1903, he was a dyed-in-the-wool progressive: an indefatigable campaigner for free speech and social justice, who introduced one of the first bills for female suffrage in the British Empire and organised the first May Day march. He was a medical reformer who founded the Medical Institute, which gave free health care to Melbourne's poor, and championed issues to do with women's health.

As an obstetrician, he was able to see first hand the consequences of women being unable to control their reproductive lives, and was a vocal supporter of Bessie Smyth, founder of the Australian Women's Suffrage Association and an early campaigner for women's health and contraception. The illegitimate son of a wealthy and unconventional woman, Jane Maloney, he also changed the legal definition of children born out of wedlock from "illegitimate" to "ex-nuptial".

But Maloney was much more than an earnest social campaigner. He was a colourful figure, a 19th century Melbourne Bohemian, who dressed like a Baudelairian flaneur. When he was in Paris, he attended Victor Hugo's funeral, and he corresponded with the 19th century Christian philosopher, art critic, artist, social critic and teacher John Ruskin.

Garner and Gore deal with what is clearly a complex life of commitment with a conceit: two historians, Ian (Jim Daly) and Jocelyn (Ruth Schoenheimer) are about to present a commemoration for Billy Maloney when, all of sudden, a foppishly dressed elderly gentleman - Bill Maloney (Don Bridges) himself - appears and insists on re-enacting crucial episodes in his life. Ian and Jocelyn play along, playing different parts as Maloney demands, doing various business with the audience, exhorting the audience to sing along, and so on.

I can't say that it's not entertaining - the quality of the performances from the fine cast and Denis Moore's sharp direction ensure that everything bounces along brightly. But the effect is rather like a cross between a Methodist meeting and Playschool; on the one hand, some heavy-handed, rather moralising underlining of the parallels between Maloney's time and ours, in case we didn't get them first time, and on the other a lot of "business" between the actors to set up the artifice ("It's your turn to play the Speaker!") . After a while I wondered why the audience - largely grey-haired and perhaps themselves refugees from the Old Left - didn't object to being treated like children.

This kind of theatre stems from the nationalistic idealism of the '70s, including the rather sentimentalised idea of a knockabout larrikin Australian rebel, eccentric and quixotic and deeply warm hearted, a truly Bob Hawke-ian "man of the people". The form - schematic biographical sketches, overtly theatrical and quasi-Brechtian - echoes a play I saw in 1989 at The Church (which in fact starred Denis Moore in the title role), Essington Lewis: I am Work; and it has the same kinds of problems. While I am all for the invoking of cultural memory that this work embodies, and my political sympathies are all with the subject matter, I had a great deal of difficulty with its approach to theatrical form.

I am no expert on Billy Maloney, but allusions to Goethe, Hugo and Ruskin suggest an aesthetic component to his idealism that the script barely touches on. And it made me wonder how much Maloney's achievements and - perhaps - contradictions are diminished by an infantalising aesthetic which panders to a fear of an audience being bored by anything too "serious" or too depressing. There are, for example, asides about the kinds of poverty which Maloney encountered and which no doubt radicalised him, but they are no more than hints. There are gestures towards the kind of intellectual idealism Maloney seems to have embraced, but again, nothing too difficult.

The issue goes deeper than a question of emphasis. Maloney several times quotes "There is no wealth but life!", which comes from John Ruskin's series of essays on Political Economy: "There is no wealth but life. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration..." These essays are in part a discussion of value, which Ruskin anthropocentrically concludes "is the life-giving power of anything": which in effect means that true value is not monetary but aesthetic.

This places aesthetic squarely as a political and economic issue, and also suggests that politics is, in part, a question of aesthetic. The true utopian asks not only for bread and water, but demands nourishment for the soul. And while Billy Maloney fulfils one of Ruskin's demands of a work of art - that it "preserve and communicate the knowledge of facts" - its text barely scrapes the surface of the other, which is to excite "vital or noble emotion and intellectual action". There are moments - a quote from Victor Hugo about freedom, or a wonderful image of Maloney as Don Quixote - which teasingly suggest what might have been possible but, for the most part, we stick with the comedy. The profounder possibilities of art or, indeed, of politics, are assiduously avoided in favour of a cosy and nostalgic sense of togetherness.

I recall that rebarbative English playwright, Howard Barker, and his fulminations against this kind of liberal, humanistic theatre: "There is great safety and security to be enjoyed in the exchange of conscience-ridden observations, affirmations of shared values, humanistic platitudes," writes Barker. "But the stage remains essentially sterile." There is none of Brecht's alienation, which is the challenge to think, here. Brecht, the political playwright par examplar, was never afraid of stirring the emotions of his audience ("Get them by the balls and their hearts will follow"). And being unfairly gifted, he was also a great poet, and a great deal of the potency of his plays lies in their tough poetic.

Fresh from a marvellous performance of Brecht's Mother Courage in LA, it's hard not to compare the devastating effect of his essay on war in the context of contemporary politics with the exhortation to a singalong that is the main affect in Billy Maloney, and not to conclude that Brecht has the more radicalising effect. On the one hand, a heartwarming affirmation: on the other, heartbreaking and pitiless analysis of hard realities. One shouldn't abuse Gore and Garner for not being Brecht - nobody but Brecht is Brecht - but theatre should be more than a history lesson. I can't but wish for a deeper faith in the possibilities of theatre than was on show in this play.

Your peripatetic crrrritic is back from LA, which was a gas. I read poems and talked about myself to people who were polite enough to be interested, and checked out a little of what is a very interesting music scene.

I got a bit of everything: I saw the NY New Music Ensemble at the LA arts museum, LACMA; the Canadian band Broken Social Scene at the Henry Fonda Theatre in Hollywood Boulevard; jazz at the Catalina Club, which is like stepping straight into a black and white 60s movie; the extraordinary trumpeter, composer and improviser Wadada Leo Smith at the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall (the closest I got to Disneyland) as part of the Redcat program produced by Calarts Theatre; and finally, again at LACMA, a mind blowing performance of Bach's Goldberg Variations, by the Russian pianist Sergey Schepkin. Oh, and lots of art - a Kiki Smith exhibition and a wonderful William Kentridge piece at the MOMA in San Francisco (where I also went to the City Lights bookshop and hung out at a beat bar) and Pisarro and Cezanne at LACMA.

It's fair to say that I had a most interesting time.

And yes, Virginia, there is theatre in LA. I managed to get to one play - a production of David Hare's translation of Mother Courage put on in a gorgeous new theatre space, the Boston Court, in Pasadena. One gathers that government arts funding is thin on the ground in the US; in any case, the whole theatre - an award-winning, state-of-the-art 99-seat theatre and concert space, plus the productions - is privately funded by patrons and subscribers.

I saw the final performance of the season. It was a great production, despite starting with choreographed movement which was faintly redolent of student theatre. The set was simply a tree (a real tree) in the middle of a semi-circular, quite shallow stage; back stage was bordered by a veil of suspended ropes, which meant the actors could enter the performing space from anywhere. From the tree's branches were suspended dismembered arms and legs, which felt a bit overdressed, as did a little of the lighting; but this is a mere quibble.

It was performed by a multi-racial company of real depth, but the star was Camille Savola as Mother Courage, who gave one of those iconic performances which sear themselves into memory and that you feel privileged to have witnessed. It was superbly judged: tough, unsentimental and profoundly moving. And what a play for our times! There is a sharp contemporary bite to Brecht's pitiless analysis of the business of war. This was underlined by a speech Savola gave at the end of the performance, among other things a rousing cry for the defence of democracy in a land where, as she said, "our democracy is daily being taken away", and a reminder of the real place that art has in the continuing struggle for actual freedom, rather the blood-tainted advertising slogan that freedom seems to mean these days.

Interestingly, The Threepenny Opera was also on in LA, so Brecht must be striking many chords. I didn't see it, but my theatre partner for Mother Courage did, and tells me it was equally potent. Perhaps things are so grim in the US now that Brecht's plays - Mother Courage was written in 1939, as Germany lurched into the nightmare of Fascism under Hitler - have found, once again, their real meaning. A chilling thought, but no more chilling than the realities that are now shaping our lives.

Which reminds me to direct you to Melbourne playwright Jasmine Chan's excellent blog, Endpapers. Jasmine is currently in South America, and her observations on her encounters are fascinating and beautiful. If you read nothing else, read her passionate open letter to John Howard, On the Sedition Act, which addresses the implications of some alarming new legislation which even now is on its ways to becoming law. "Art," says Jasmine, "is what constitutes cultural memory. Cultural memory is a light by which we all have the right to look. Without a diverse, inclusive, holistic cultural memory, a society is condemned to darkness." Amen to that.

Back to normal broadcasting later this week.