One of my minor obsessions is the question: what about theatre for young people? Theatre for children and young adults is generally marginalised as a minority sport. Being a keen reader of children's fiction, I know that some of the work written for young people is as fine as anything written for "grown ups" (try Alan Garner, Sonya Hartnett, David Almond or Alice Hoffman). And so it is with theatre.

In our culture, theatre for young people is either hived off into specialist companies - not that I mean to dismiss what can be wonderful work - or into educational programs. What doesn't happen in any of our major companies is main stage programming of work that is specifically made for young people: that is, a sense that this theatre audience is taken seriously.

Yet this happens routinely in Europe, where major companies commonly program plays for young people alongside their productions of Kleist or Euripides. The National Theatre in London puts on a massive production for children each year (most recently, a very successful adaptation of Michael Morpurgo's novel Warhorse). Correct me if I'm mistaken, but I can't remember the MTC, for example, ever putting a show for children into its mainstage programming. (Update: I was mistaken, as a commenter below points out). Last year the Malthouse came close with their production of Stephen Page's Kin, which I saw with a lot of children in the audience, and it made me wonder why more of this kind of programming doesn't happen.

It's not as if there are not beautiful works written for young people. To take a couple of English writers, try David Almond's Wild Boy, Wild Girl, or the extraordinarily lyrical The Lost Child by Mike Kenny (who is, oddly, extremely popular in France). There's no reason why theatre for young people ought not to be as artful and profound as theatre for anyone else; and to me it seems like such a strange oversight. Young people are, after all, every theatre's future audience.

We can't just leave the anklebiters to the Wiggles. I deeply worry that all the smart young adolescents I know hang out at art galleries and concerts, and scarcely ever think about going to the theatre; they are literate, sometimes scarily so, in film, visual art and music, but not in theatre. (My children are an exception, because they've been indoctrinated).

There is, of course, a lot more to say about all this, and some of those who ought to be saying things are young people themselves. Which brings me to Theatargh, a new blog started by 19 year old arts/law student Chris Summers which promises "thoughts and frustrations on Melbourne theatre through bright young eyes". He aims, he says, to explore "youth and emerging forms of theatre". The blogosphere is of course full of startlingly young persons who make me feel like Methusaleh (hi there Avi and Matt) but Chris is highlighting an area that is sadly overlooked. And he's made an excellent beginning with an interview with Platform Youth Theatre's Nadja Kostich on her upcoming show Tenderness.

The Mercy Seat by Neil LaBute, directed by Alex Papps. Designed by Peter Mumford, lighting design by Stelios Karagiannis, sound by Alex Papps and Mike Levi. With Jane Badler and Simon Wood. Red Stitch Actors Theatre, Red Stitch, until March 8. Bookings: (03) 9533 8083

Neil LaBute takes on the persona of the gritty, macho American playwright (as patented by David Mamet) bigtime. He is a controversialist, a Mormon who was “disfellowshipped” (the stage before being excommunicated) for his negative portrayals of the faithful, and is a prominent member of the "new wave" of US playwrights. In a typical flourish of rhetoric, in which he claimed more or less that American playwriting had lost its balls, LaBute recently accused most writers of being “pussies”.

"We sit back and watch the world go by, writing down the things we find funny or sad while trying to make a buck off it," he said. "We use our lives, or the lives of others, for personal gain, and we defend it by saying it's 'in the public domain' or 'true', and therefore OK to slop around in someone else's pain."

It’s a statement which calls up the ambivalence I feel towards LaBute. He uncovers a certain (partial) truth that writers would do well to remember; on the other hand, the implied sexualised tone of the criticism (you can be sure that LaBute isn’t referring to felines when he says writers are pussies) underlines a macho posturing that is difficult, as it were, to swallow.

I wouldn’t go so far as to accuse LaBute of writing misogynistic plays (others have), but the line between portraying misogyny and endorsing it can be perilously thin. And his plays can get uncomfortably close to blaming feminism and the supposed rise of the strong, autonomous woman for disempowering men, identifying women as the real cause of bad male behaviour.

As LaBute says, “I make trouble for a living”. I share LaBute’s open admiration for playwrights like Caryl Churchill, Howard Barker and Harold Pinter, and admire his bracing desire to ruffle some feathers among the certainties of comfortable American liberalism. But I sometimes suspect that ruffling these feathers takes the mildest of breezes.

In other words, is LaBute the radical force he claims to be? Certainly not on the evidence of The Mercy Seat, a play that bruised some sensitivities because it deals with the aftermath of 9/11 and takes issue with the rhetoric of heroism that surrounded that catastrophe. It was one of the first theatrical responses to the terrorist attacks, and on its premiere in New York in 2002 it no doubt had a resonance that it signally lacks in Melbourne in 2008.

As LaBute describes it, The Mercy Seat focuses “on the selfish acts of my protagonist on a day that most Americans still want to believe was filled with heroism and personal sacrifice. Bullshit. …That day did indeed see many heroic acts, but not everybody who died was a saint, and a good many people felt the ol' US of A finally got what was coming.”

On the surface, the premise is intriguing. Ben Harcourt (Simon Wood) is a married man who is having an affair with his boss, Abby Prescott (Jane Badler). When the Twin Towers were attacked, he was supposed to be inside; but instead he skipped work and headed over to Abby’s place for a swift head job. But the earth moved in rather unexpected ways, leaving the apartment covered in a thin layer of dust and both Ben and Abby shocked and dazed.

The play opens a day later. Ben is still at Abby’s apartment, hiding out. His first response to the disaster is to see it as an opportunity: it’s a chance to leave his wife and children without the mess of painful explanations and to make a run for a new life (or, as he has it, to “walk into the sunset”). He is refusing to answer the frantic calls from his family, who believe he is among the dead. Narcissistic, inarticulate and irredeemably selfish, Ben is revealed to be that classic LaBute creation, a jerk.

On the other hand, the terrorist attacks prompt Abby – shocked, but only up to a point, by Ben’s self-interested response to the deaths of thousands of people – to question some of the verities that have driven her life. This doesn’t prevent her from being seduced by the fantasy of beginning again with a clean slate, the chance to sweep away the lies and start afresh. But the self-revelation that is the engine of this kind of play has a twist that she doesn’t expect.

The central mystery is why a seemingly smart woman would spend more than a single night with this man, whom at one point she claims is merely “a piece of ass”. He is a particularly unimaginative lover, who in three years of enthusiastic bonking has never once looked her in the face, and whose erotic inventiveness is limited to banging her from behind and a little oral sex. (She is so bored she makes shopping lists during the act). Does she put up with him because she’s unconsciously expiating some feminine guilt about earning more money than he does? On the other hand, why is he so obsessed with a woman who is either a mass of spikes or a swamp of neediness?

Who knows? Who cares? I lost interest pretty early on as a certain familiar depression settled over what’s loosely known as my aesthetic senses. The conversation continues in real time, with a bunch of predictably unpredictable revelations and the familiar diversionary monologues that expose the characters’ “real” thoughts, cranking up the emotional mechanics in ways that recall American television or film conventions more than the radical unexpectedness of, say, a Pinter or a Barker.

It’s easy to map the personal onto the political here: the national self-absorption that is blind to the suffering of others, even the suffering of its own; the corrupt corporate ambition that rewards success above all, no matter what it takes to get there. As Ben says: ''I always take the easy route, do it faster, simpler, you know, whatever it takes to get done, be liked, get by. That's me. Cheated in school . . . took whatever I could get from whomever I could take it from.''

But somehow all these metaphorical speculations end up feeling banal: it's full of ideas that are legibly signalled but that fail to lodge at any intellectual or emotional depth. There’s something important missing that I can’t quite put my finger on, although I think it comes down to a certain formal slackness, a lack of theatrical poetic and linguistic excitement. Put The Mercy Seat next to, say, Sarah Kane's Blasted or Pinter's The Homecoming, and it practically goes miaow with pussiness. And without this sense of poetic, the work isn't much more than a low-octane version of the battle of the sexes exemplified in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

It’s not the fault of Alex Papps’s production, which features a beautiful design by Peter Mumford that exploits the claustrophobic intimacy of the space: an ordinary living room covered with a thin layer of dust with the shadows of objects painted on the walls, an uneasy allusion to the shadows that imprinted walls when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Backstage a wide doorway opens onto darkness, a nice metaphor for the emptiness of the lives portrayed here.

Jane Badler and Simon Wood work hard, and produce creditable performances that never quite manage to transcend the limitations of the play. Wood has the harder job: portraying a character who at times verges on the catatonic can sometimes result in a catatonic performance, and he doesn’t always escape this danger. Badler manages the spiky vulnerability without revealing what exists underneath the spikes. There’s a fair bit of aimless prowling around the apartment, but I guess you have to do something with a play which is basically two talking heads. It’s a longish 90 minutes.

A cryptic version of this review appears in today's Australian.

Facebook has its drawbacks (bacn, anybody?) But it does have the Geoffrey Milne Appreciation Society, which I stumbled across this afternoon. If anybody deserves an appreciation society, it's Geoffrey: as a teacher, critic and practitioner, he's been an unsung hero of Australian theatre for decades, and is far too modest to make a fuss about it himself. So off you go: join up and appreciate him.

In a move that confirms its ambition and vision, the Victorian College of the Arts has appointed Melbourne Festival artistic director Kristy Edmunds in the newly created position of Head of VCA Performing Arts. She will take up the position in November this year, after she has finished her work on the 2008 festival.

The appointment was announced yesterday by VCA Dean, Professor Andrea Hull, and a phalanx of VCA honchos, including Head of Production Richard Roberts, Acting Head of Drama Richard Murphet and Head of Dance Jenny Kinder. And everyone looked as pleased as punch. I've seldom been at such a feelgood press conference.

Edmunds’ brief will be to oversee the performing arts disciplines Dance, Drama and Production (which includes puppetry), and to support the creative visions of VCA staff and students. She will help to foster collaboration between disciplines and, in particular, to promote the national and international reputation of the school as a leading centre of artistic excellence by forging relationships between students and staff and the larger artistic community.

“This is a new brief,” said Professor Hull. “We wanted someone inspirational, someone who understands where the students and staff are coming from, someone who understands what drives artists.

“Kristy is an artist in her own right, she has the academic background – and that’s our language - and as an experienced festival director, she brings solid executive experience. We are delighted that she’s agreed to take up this position.”

Edmunds said the position was an exciting prospect. “This is a place of impassioned endeavour,” she said. “It’s a place where people do things, they don’t just think about doing things. I have so many ideas.

“There’s no doubt that internationally the arts are under pressure. There’s a kind of urgency about it. And in a digital age, a mediated age, the intimacy of performance has unlimited potential. It will be a privilege to help a new generation of artists find their uniqueness and integrity.

“We will do some remarkable things.”

Edmunds brings some invaluable assets to the VCA – the networks, both local and international, that she has built up in her four years as artistic director of MIAF, and the respect and trust of Melbourne’s artistic community. She has already fostered some exciting schemes for young Australian artists – Merce Cunningham’s residency at MIAF last year, for example, led to his instituting a scholarship for young Australian dancers to study at his company.

She says her first job is “to listen and to learn”, to find out what the energies and desires are within the institution, and then work out how best to manifest them. As Richard Murphet said, “she is someone who can communicate in ways that students won’t feel alienated by, or imposed upon.”

And the ambition is quite clear – to put the VCA firmly on the map as one of the leading performing arts schools in the world.

Murphet said the appointment was an expression of the VCA’s commitment to growth and change, and especially to being a leading engine of artistic innovation. “If we don’t change, we die,” he said.

Hull said the appointment – the first significant appointment the VCA has made since it became a faculty of the University of Melbourne at the beginning of last year – had been “enthusiastically supported” by their academic colleagues at Melbourne University. It certainly appears to confirm the autonomy of the VCA within the larger institution.

Well, so much for the official report. As far as TN is concerned, this is excellent news. More than just good news for the future of the VCA, it’s good news for Melbourne. It means that when Kristy Edmunds leaves the Melbourne Festival, this city won’t lose the resources and energies, both national and international, that she has created here during her artistic directorship of MIAF.

Instead, they'll develop into long-term influences in our performing arts culture, within an institution that is the driving force for some of the most exciting artistic energies in this city. Look out.

The Australian asked me to write a feature on playwright Joanna Murray-Smith for today's paper. So I did.

This weekend the National Play Festival kicks off in Brisbane. Under the aegis of PlayWriting Australia, the national body that has absorbed the Australian National Playwright's Centre and Playworks, artistic director Chris Mead has put together a program of showcase readings, seminars and performances that aims to get some blood moving through the blocked arteries of Australian playwriting. As he says, he is encouraging people to talk to one another - for example, working to bridge the apparent gulf between those who devise and those write. An admirable aim, and Mead has put together an interesting and diverse bouquet of talkers, with a wide range of both public and private events. Writers - and not only writers - will be watching this event with deep interest.

Meanwhile, closer to home (in my case, much closer), last weekend saw the launch of a new theatre space, the Hayloft Theatre Project, at the corner of Whitehall and Harris Streets in Footscray. It's the brainchild of Simon Stone and company, who pulled off one of the highlights of last year, a skin-tingling realisation of Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening. No word yet on what they will do there, but Ming has a full social report on Mink Tails, and it sounds like some soiree (I was being even older than Ming, and stayed home altogether). I am of course delighted that they've chosen to open their new venue just down the road from me, since verily the West Rocketh.

I dug out the dusters and polishers and have finally updated that theatrical blogroll. A few new names, including hopeful indications that blogs are making their feral presence known in Sydney, like those spidery starfish that are taking over Port Phillip Bay: former National Times critic James Waites is sticking his toe in, as is an Australian stablemate Lynden Barber, with his blog Eyes Wired Open. Also check out a couple of interesting blogs from Europe. I've helpfully put the new listees in bold, so you can tell which ones they are. The roll continues incomplete, but there's some good hunting there all the same. Avant and tally ho!

This Is Good Advice: This Is A Chair by Caryl Churchill, Advice to Iraqi Women by Martin Crimp, directed by Lauren Barnes. Sound design by Rueben Stanton, set design by Rhys Auteri and Vlad Mijic, set illustrations by Vlad Mijic and Harriet O'Donnell. Welcome Stranger @ Trades Hall, Carlton, until February 10.

Sometimes the concept of "British Political Theatre" seems synonymous with David Hare, whom the SMH describes this week as "Britain's most committed left-wing playwright". I'm not sure how one measures such things, but in a field that includes barnacled warriors like Edward Bond or Harold Pinter, this seems, to say the least, highly arguable. Hare takes the prize - in the mass media, at least - because he writes about issues that everybody recognises as politics, from Israel to Iraq, in ways that are utterly familiar to anyone who has watched television. Hare's finger, it seems, is ever sensitively pressed to the pulse of current affairs.

But Britain has produced deeply committed political playwrights whose artistic achievements far overshadow the narrow oeuvre of David Hare. Caryl Churchill is among the first rank of these. Since the early 1960s, she has steadily written plays that express her commitment to socialist and feminist ideals and, later, a disturbingly prescient vision of a natural world being destroyed by the relentless progress of global capitalism. She is also one of the most exciting formalists now writing in the theatre.

This Is A Chair is a case in point. This short and elegant play, premiered by the Royal Court in 1997, is a sardonic evolution of Bertolt Brecht's Fear And Misery of the Third Reich, a series of fragmentary and realistic sketches of the impact of Nazism on the ordinary lives of Germans. Brecht's examination of the nexus between politics and social behaviour is at once oblique and direct, focusing on the apparently inconsequential to illustrate the rapid erosion of rights and freedoms under Hitler's regime.

Churchill has shaved this form to the bone; at first sight, her sketches of mundane social interaction have nothing to do with their purported titles - War in Bosnia, The Northern Ireland Peace Process, Genetic Engineering. They are at once domestic and strangely iconic: a young woman stands up a man with whom she has a date, a couple order their child to "eat up", two old women watch television while discussing a medical procedure. The only overt sign that something else is going on - in the text, at least - is in the scene titles, which, in classic Brechtian fashion, are to be displayed or announced before each scene.

The cognitive dissociation that vibrates between the labelling of significant public events of the mid-90s and the brief sketches that supposedly illustrate them has an effect that becomes progressively more and more uneasy. One hunts for the connections, and finds more usually a disconnection. What comes closer and closer to the surface is the carelessness people display towards each other in their ordinary lives, an ethical callousness that might appear minor and unimportant, but which, in the magnification of the theatre, demonstrates how little people actually perceive each other's pain.

The amplification from the micro to the macro is not a simple question of metaphor, of these domestic mise en scenes illustrating in miniature the larger public events. Rather, Churchill is sketching out an ecology of human affairs, creating a sense of how these small events accumulate into a social ethos. Just as climate change is created by billions of individually insignificant choices, so a callous public ethos is linked to countless smaller events, such as a doctor persuading an old woman not to use anaesthetic during a procedure in order to save money. In each case, the capacity of empathetic responsibility - one of the better human traits - is imperceptibly worn away.

More, Churchill is playing with the nature of knowledge and its relation to reality. The statement "This is a chair" is a common philosophical cue for investigating knowledge: how we know things, whether they exist apart from our knowing of them, what the nature of this knowing is, what role language plays in constituting human realities, and so on. These are the kinds of questions at play, as the program points out, in Magritte's famous painting Ceci n'est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe). All the same, I can't escape a nagging suspicion that Churchill is also employing a playwright's direct literalism in her titling: an insistence that, indeed, things are as they are seen, which is not at all the same as how they are said to be.

It's a subtle thesis which is largely trampled by Lauren Barnes' production for Welcome Stranger, although she makes a creditable attempt at what is an extremely challenging play. Only a writer of Churchill's calibre and precision could even attempt such a stylistic coup, and the demands of this kind of spare text are unforgiving to even the most experienced actors. The actors employ blackboards, emphasising an pedagogic element that might exist in Brecht's play, but which in Churchill's remains ambiguous: it is not a lesson play, a Lehrstücke, so much as an attempt to destabilise the simple categorisations that make it easy for us, in our media-driven age, to ignore the actualities of our actions.

So what is written as a simple interaction is labelled for us: the opening scene, for example, has blackboards behind each actor: He is Bosnia, She is Britain. (I confess, I was at first confused: I thought they had just got their grammar mixed up, not that they were different nations). The effect is to simplify its complexities, to read the play in a directed way that removes much of its jangling affect. In order to play with a proper metaphorical potency, a text of this kind requires an intensity of realism in the performance which is here side-stepped by the approach: the subtext is, as it were, written out for us, and I'm not certain that it's the correct subtext.

All the same, there is enough ingenuity in this simple staging and enough energy in the performances to keep it interesting. It's not surprising that the lesser play - Martin Crimp's 10 minute Advice to Iraqi Women - is by far the more successful piece. Here the actors are working well within their limitations, and Crimp's piece, which depends - albeit in a far less nuanced way - on an ironic dissonance between its text and its content, finds the comedy and depth that eludes the earlier piece.

Advice to Iraqi Women is a litany of the advice routinely given out to mothers to ensure the safety of their children - always supervise children near water, lock away poisons, give them good food. It has long irritated me that such advice is couched in terms that feed parental paranoia, thus no doubt ensuring that we are the most protective parents in history. (Yes, I am all for sensible safety standards...) Crimp picks up on this rhetoric to create what becomes a blackly ironic comment on the hypocrisy of the British Government's slogan "Every Child Matters" while it was simultaneously bombing children in Iraq.

It's performed by three actors seated in a row on three chairs. Beneath them is a stretch of sand, scattered with lit tealight candles that suggest a memorial to the dead. They glance anxiously at each other before blurting out the standard exhortations. "Your kitchen," they intone, "is a warzone." Your garden is a minefield. Death awaits your children around every corner. Beware! Beautifully judged performances, taking their cue from the tone of earnest social welfare and magazine television, highlight the comic unreality of the rhetoric in the face of those who live in actual warzones. It's simple and powerful and very effective.

For all my reservations, This Is Good Advice is a chance to see a couple of plays by two of Britain's major playwrights that otherwise wouldn't get an airing here, performed by an interesting young company. Well worth a look.

I see that the Sydney Festival has been generally greeted with hosannas, palm leaves and so on, with only a few grumpy souls daring to swim against the popular tide and ask "where's the meat?" Much as I hate to align myself with Fairfax critics - or, worse, the "elitists" - and given that my experience of the festival is limited to viewing the program (although I've seen a sizeable proportion of the programmed work and, yes, liked it), I have to place myself with the questioners. A keen sniffer of the wind, I wonder if this festival's unarguable commercialism will indeed be taken as the "gold standard" for Australian arts festivals. In the current funding climate, which is gleaming with the steel of promised razor gangs, it doesn't seem unlikely. And the prospect fills me with gloom. I hope it's unwarranted, but pessimism - if undesirable as a default position - is often borne out in contemplating Australian cultural policy.

Sydney attracted an attendance of an estimated 1 million people (as a proportion of population, a figure of 23 per cent), as opposed to half a million for Melbourne - around 13 per cent. It was an undeniable crowd pleaser, with headliners like Björk, Brian Wilson and Joanna Newsom, some interesting dance, a minimum of theatre and absolutely no "art" music, whether contemporary or classical. There's no doubt in this little blogger's brain that the artistic substance and energy lies with the Melbourne programs over the past few years. (Just compare the programs: MIAF 2007 here, Sydney 2008 here.) As a commissioner and programmer, MIAF artistic director Kristy Edmunds, following on from Robyn Archer, has led the way in curating some of the most exciting and ambitious festivals of recent years, in the face of some of the most vicious public attacks ever seen on a festival director.

The question is whether an arts festival is about, well, art, or whether it has to disguise itself as a big party in order to survive. Those of us who love art have had a good run in Melbourne these past few years. But Toto, I've got a bad feeling about this... are we going see the fabulous land of Oz dissolve back into the grey plains of Kansas? Maybe it was but a fitful gleam that oh so briefly illuminated the antipodean shadows. Maybe I need to get out of the country for a while to regain some perspective. Maybe I'm talking through my hat. Sydney was always a different city to Melbourne, after all. I guess time will tell.

A helpful reader pointed out recently that my blogroll has an outdated link (ie, George Hunka can be found at Superfluities Redux these days). But worse than that, it is woefully behind on a number of excellent blogs that have been swimming into my purview over the past months. Not to mention some fascinating net links I've been gathering with those good intentions that pave the way to hell... Herewith my solemn promise to catch up within, well, a few days. The truth is I've been tired. Very tired. But this too is passing...