Richard Watts reports on the National Play Festival web page debacle on Arts Hub. PlayWriting Australia AD Chris Mead declined comment, saying that the fuss diverts attention from the NPF program. Yes, it does: and isn't that the point? A series of someones decided that this was the image to sell our theatre writing culture. As if it doesn't have enough problems already.

Even a gracious acknowledgement that a mistake was made and nodding towards the concerns would be nice: but as David Williams of Version 1.0 commented darkly on Twitter, "people are rarely interested in disussions of dominance, esp their own. That's what dominance means, the opacity of power".

While I'm at it, check out David's searchingly illuminating post on the The Pleasures of Patriarchy.

As several appalled women have pointed out: with the marginalisation of women playing the theatre headlines, could there be a worse time for the 2010 National Play Festival to feature a suspender-clad nude-buttocked gal on the front page of its website? Click on her bum and you find out about PERFORMANCES. Way to go, guys.

Ms TN is back in Melbourne listening to the gentle patter of the rain, after a packed couple of days in sun-drenched Sydney. The major event was, of course, the hotly anticipated forum on women in theatre at Belvoir St, where I was part of a panel of "powerful women" (thank you, SMH, my family is now making Dragonball Z noises again) ably conducted by journalist Monica Attard. The panel - see holiday snap below - consisted of me, Gil Appleton, a Belvoir St pioneer and integral to many feminist arts initiatives of the 1970s and 80s, emerging director Shannon Murphy, Bell Shakespeare's associate director Marion Potts and the Sydney Opera House director of performing arts, Rachel Healy.


As everybody knows, the issue is to do with main stage seasons. It's not endemic through the theatre culture - independent theatre, the crucible of Australian theatre culture, has nothing like the same issue. As in every profession, the problem exists in the high-end, well-paid, high-profile jobs.

Everyone on that panel was nervous about the event. Partly it was a desire to do justice to some of the complexity of the question; partly it was because of the heat that has been around much of the discussion. This was naturally exacerbated by Caleb Lewis's withdrawal from the Philip Parsons Young Playwrights Award in protest against the "radical politicisation" of the prize, which is announced simultaneously with the Philip Parsons Memorial Lecture and which that afternoon was announced first, due to the controversy. I am still struggling with Caleb's stand. Does he mean that theatre ought not to be politicised? Is he suggesting that the male-dominated status quo is apolitical? Does the mere discussion of the marginalisation of women really "taint" everything around it? (I get sudden flashes of menstruating women banned from churches).

Ironically enough, Caleb was a co-winner with Tahli Corin, prompting some cynicism around the traps, and not unincidentally, putting Tahli in an uncomfortable spotlight. Which, I may say, she negotiated with considerable grace. But this very response illustrates some horns of this hydra-headed dilemma. The mass reaction to the Belvoir St debate has been a restless and impatient demand for concrete "solutions": among others, Crikey's Steve Dow was scathing that the "ethereal seemed ascendant over the practical". (Although, unlike Dow, I do recall an insistence on mentoring.)

I guess it's possible that the Parsons prize committee was in part influenced by the on-going debate - by a consciousness that women ought to be encouraged as much as men, and that this ought to be pro-active - although this was hotly denied by Neil Armfield, who said the plays were chosen entirely on their merits (and went so far to explain what those merits were). Yet is it such a bad thing if the committee was forced to think about the issue of gender and act on those thoughts? Isn't such action precisely what the unsatisfied are calling for, when they demand "practical" solutions, even quotas? But as soon as it's even perceived to have happened, all hell breaks loose: the prize is "compromised", notions of artistic integrity are in shreds, and women are back in their familiar roles of second-rate wannabes, merely riding the coat-tails of male genius.

Which is to say, there are different issues in the arts to other professions. Theatre is not only an "industry": it is a culture. Artistic merit is a central and thorny question. It's often used by artistic directors and others to evade the knotty questions - all candidates, we are routinely told by main stage companies, are chosen on merit, which given the figures can leave us to reflect on the general mediocrity of womankind. On the other hand, artistic merit is, in the arts, a real issue. That's why it can be so successfully used as a smokescreen: if artistic merit isn't the first aim of our striving, what are we there for?

But how do we measure merit? It is unarguable that merit is read through gender. And that is heinously complex: women can be as rigorous defenders of the privileges of the status quo as men. Their mere presence won't necessarily guarantee equity: as has been pointed out many times, even though women are meagrely represented in main stage creative roles, they mostly run our theatres in managerial roles. More, as the Brontes well knew, the same writing will generate different responses if it is perceived to be by a man than if it is thought to be by a woman. And I'm afraid that, however we like to congratulate ourselves on being more advanced than the 19th century, that is still the case.

The "ethereal" ("ethereal"?) discussion that Dow was so critical about was precisely what I thought valuable about the debate. As the distinguished feminist Eva Cox said to me afterwards, it was "one of the more vigorous discussions about dominant cultures and the difficulty of even identifying them let alone shifting them". (And added acerbically, "John Huxley missed that bit in today's SMH! Why am I not surprised?")

The discussion around gender (as it is around any sort of endemic bigotry) is conditioned by the fact that we've all been here before. Quotas have been tried: they simply created a lot of resentment, even from those supposed to be the beneficiaries, who justly felt their achievements were demeaned; and they also generated a lot of bad, "ticking the boxes" art. This kind of solution is in fact one of the major complaints about the funding processes of the Arts Council in Britain: the focus moves away from making great art to social engineering. I think the major failure of quotas or any other simplistic "solution" is that they permit people not to think: they provide a simple answer that evades the real work.

The real work is changing the complex of ideologies that situates the white, abled, middle class male subject as the normative consciousness, and which constitutes anyone else as Other. The real problem for women is that we are considered to have a gender, while men can be neutral. Men can speak for all of "mankind", while women (or people with the wrong-coloured skin, sexuality, body) speak only to their own kind. The "human condition" has, for centuries, been considered to be a male state.

And the real issue for theatre is that protecting the privilege of a minority means that its culture stagnates.

Marginalising 53 per cent of the population means limiting access to a huge pool of ideas and energy. As any ecologist knows, a population without diversity loses genetic vigor and eventually dies out. Why, to take one example, is the MTC so worried about its aging subscriber base? Is it because of a blindness towards the realities of a large part of their potential audiences? And it's not as if these energies aren't already present. You just have to get out and about in Melbourne's thriving independent theatre scene. I'd be fascinated to see gender figures for non-mainstage theatre: my bet is that gender inequity there is small to non-existent.

In other words, if theatres don't recognise and deal with this broader issue they won't survive. What is required, as in so many things, is clear-sighted leadership, a recognition of the problem that goes beyond token gestures that don't actually challenge entrenched positions.

No way could a single panel discussion come up with quick-fix solutions. There aren't any, and we're fooling ourselves if we think there are. How, in an hour-long discussion, does one justly address a hugely complex problem that permeates not only the entirety of Australian society (where men still occupy the majority of the top jobs and top pay), but which reaches far beyond our sea-girt shores? Remember that Original Sin happened when Eve tasted of the Fruit of Knowledge. We all know we only scratched the surface.

But that doesn't mean that action can't be taken, or that nothing can be done. Identifying a problem is always the first step to doing something about it. But let's get that right first, or else we'll still be stuck in the same circle of hell decades hence.

Picture: From left: your faithful blogger, Gil Appleton, Shannon Murphy, Marion Potts and Rachel Healy at Belvoir St Theatre yesterday. Photo: Dean Sewell

Ms TN pushed her delicate nose right onto the grindstone this week (hey, it's hard doing all that heavy-duty ratiocination), but for all the nasal flattening I'm still behind the eightball. I've yet to write about Progress and Melancholy, which I caught on one of its final nights, or Hayloft's BC, which opened at Full Tilt last Wednesday (as I dutifully twitted, a curate's egg but well worth seeing). And on Thursday I saw Meryl Tankard's Oracle at the Malthouse (closing Sunday), which features a performance by Paul White that rewrites the laws of gravity.

I will write about all these events, but I fear this week time is against me. This weekend I am flying up to Sydney for the Belvoir St panel on women in theatre, which is attracting lots of media attention; especially after playwright Caleb Lewis withdrew from the Philip Parson's Young Playwrights Award to protest against its "politicisation" by the discussion. (The debate is this year's Philip Parsons Memorial Lecture, which is routinely presented at the same event as the award).

I'm hoping for an enlightening and open debate that excavates some of the reasons why gender politics in theatre has become such a problem. The figures - in our main stage culture, at least - are brutally clear, but that doesn't mean that identifying the causes and ways of dealing with it are simple. Looking forward to seeing some of you there.

Keen theatrenauts will have no problem calling to mind the on-going debate over the place of women in Australian theatre. Sparked by a season launch at Company B Belvoir St that overshadowed Neil Armfield's farewell season by fielding one woman among a brace of male directors, the debate has widened to a discussion about gender equity in the key creative roles in all Australia's main stage theatres.

The furore has prompted some patronising from the UK, which, as an irresistible aside, feels a bit rich when you consider the National Theatre's current seasons. The October-January season running presently has, out of a total of 30 writers and directors, only five women; January-March has a total of 27, and again only five women. Looks like exactly the same problem to me.

The latest move here is a request from Melbourne University that the MTC appoint an Equal Opportunity Officer who will address the lack of opportunities for women directors. As John Bailey comments, it's a little odd for the UoM to demand the creation of positions while it is so merrily decimating its own departments, but that's another question.

Meanwhile, Belvoir St in Sydney is taking the bull by the horns and opening the question to public debate. The Philip Parsons Memorial Lecture for 2009 will be given over to a panel to debate this very question as it pertains to directors: Where Are The Women? The debate will be introduced and backgrounded by Rachel Healy, director performing arts at the Sydney Opera House, who will then join the discussion. Fielded by journalist Monica Attard, the panel will also include myself; emerging director Shannon Murphy; Marion Potts, associate artistic director at Bell Shakespeare; and Gil Appleton, who will provide a historical overview. Then the floor will be opened for debate. I expect a lively, fascinating and - I hope - illuminating discussion.

The debate, which will be followed by the presentation of the Philip Parsons Young Playwright's Award, is on Sunday December 6 at 2pm, and tickets are $10. Bookings 02 9699 3444.

Fringe shows are now piling up, but not the wherewithal to write about them. Ms TN's got a headache, not of the hangover variety but of the Jane Austen sick-headake kind. I need a shadowed bechamber and some lavender water. But some pointers, all the same, and not only because it's easier to point than to think. If you want reviews now as opposed to later, click through at once to "John Bailey's" excellent new review blog, Capital Idea. It is, as the man says, "a very important blog and should be read frequently". Quite. He's better known to bloggers as Born Dancin', and to others as a Sunday Age reviewer of rare (if condensed) acuity.

Meanwhile, the big talk is women in theatre. After the Belvoir PR disaster, and Neil Armfield's patently inadequate defence, Melanie Beddie has moved the debate south by complaining to the MTC about their lack of the XX chromosone. Blogs and commentaries are catching fire up and down this wide brown land.

What do I think? A lot of things, actually. I have never stepped back from calling myself a feminist, but I hate that thinking feminist ends up imprisoning me in my gender. And I think it's quite right to regard the fact that women are so poorly represented in powerful mainstream artistic positions as a scandal. And I'm also thinking about the essentialist problem (women, being communicative mammals, make a certain kind of collaborative theatre, that is itself marginalised) and the quota problem (it is a step forward for women to be counted on the mainstream stages, even if in aesthetic/ideological terms they do as much for women in general as Margaret Thatcher did for miners).

I'm thinking the question is complicated because of the whole baggage of being a woman, which means millions of signals from babyhood, reinforced if necessary by psychic or physical violence, to stay quiet, to be helpful and selfless and small, to not put oneself forward, to never, ever, ever say how good you are, to speak low and soft lest one be called shrill and monstrous and not-a-proper-woman, to self-efface, to stay away from boring women's business, to hide your intelligence lest a man feel his balls shrink, to remember that to point out that it's a man's world makes you a man-hater, that an outspoken woman will get twice as much shit as an outspoken man, and will have to be twice as smart even to be heard, and that every woman knows underneath, in the reptilian bits of her brain, that the threat of physical and sexual violence is always there to keep her down if all else fails. And so on and so forth in all its infinite variety. And it's not simply about what all this does in the externals of making a career, but what it does to the inside: to what you choose, what your ambitions are, where you flinch, where you don't. And that it's the internals that really count when you're an artist.

And I'm pondering the fact that every woman will experience these things differently, but negotiating them is something every woman has to do. Maybe if a man is gay or black or brown or disabled or lower class, he might have some insight into the insidious effects of this conditioning. But not always. And I think that maybe sometimes, like Frederick Douglass, you have to use the vocabulary of power in order to have a chance of changing things, not the vocabulary of entitled victimhood, and I'm thinking that that is complicated too. And that it takes a long time to change the world, and sometimes those changes aren't as big as they're claimed to be.

Like I said, it's complex.

And while we're on the topic, we might as well give Bell Shakespeare a huge gong, since its 20th anniversary mainstage season - Lear and Twelfth Night - is 100 per cent directed by women. But maybe that's just smart, hip programming.