One thing we have a lot of in Sydney is plays. From the SBW Stables to the Sydney Theatre, Belvoir Street to the Opera House, the one thing you can be assured of in this city is text-based narrative theatre. Sure, Performance Space does its bit to introduce the theatrehound's palate to a wider selection of what is possible on the stage, but for the most part words, strung together in such a way as to create lines and scenes and acts and stories, are the meat and potatoes upon which we Sydneysiders must dine.

Coming from Melbourne, where the selection is somewhat broader, it was initially very strange for me to find myself in a place where the word is king. (The word may be my stock in trade, but my first love was the image, let's remember, especially when it was moving.) But rather than complain ad nauseum, like some, about the environment I have chosen for myself, I decided instead to make the most of Sydney's love of the well-made play. Instead of longing for physical theatre, I would pay closer attention to interpretation, to dramaturgy; instead of praying for so-called hybridity (a stupid word, in any case), I would pay closer attention to narrative structure and the mechanics of language. And while the well-made play may be Sydney's primary obsession, new writing from here and abroad is another, and there would never be any risk of going wanting for interesting objects of study.

There would, however, be the risk of going wanting for interesting productions of those objects. A play on the page is one thing. The same play on the stage is another. The first is a literary object, the second a theatrical one; both, either or neither can be art, but only the latter is a piece of theatre. Of course, the former can be theatrical, but its theatricality is merely a quality, a trait. A cinematic piece of theatre is still theatre, after all, just as a theatrical film is still a film. In any case, one always runs the risk of attending a production of a text that is not as interesting as the text itself. (Obviously, this interestingness has nothing to do with fidelity to a text, or even exploration of it. Doing something irreverent with a writer's work, including disregarding or going beyond it completely, can be just as interesting as the work itself, even for entirely different reasons. It will surprise no one that I am thinking of recent discussions surrounding Daniel Schlusser's Peer Gynt and The Hayloft Project's 3xSisters as I write this, noting quietly to myself just how much I've missed already this year.) While I imagine it is possible for a truly horrendous production to obscure even the most obvious of an interesting text's qualities, I am happy to report that I have seen few such productions, and would in fact have to wrack my brain to come up with some. (Excluding truly horrendous productions of Shakespeare, which are unfortunately dime a dozen, most truly horrendous productions in my experience have been of texts I would rate as mediocre or lower to begin with.) Much more common, especially around these parts, are productions that, while far from horrendous, fail to equal their source text for power and complexity. (Rochelle Whyte's production of Dea Loher's Tattoo, which ran at the SBW Stables, was, for me, one of those. A text awash in moral greys was here rendered entirely in moralistic black and white. Black comedy and domestic horror were very carefully separated so as not to touch, where in fact I think the point of the piece was to have them bleeding into on another.)

That said, Sydney has been blessed of late, at least as far as plays go. We've had a run of really interesting texts turned into really solid theatre. We've had Lee Lewis's production of Vassily Sigarev's Ladybird for B Sharp, Lewis working the text in such a way that it seemed to be speaking of both contemporary Russia and Sydney's western suburbs at once, an anti-Putin protest turned (in my eyes, at least) timely prediction of recession-era Australia. (The show also had one of the best ensemble casts I've seen in some time, with Yael Stone, showing a nasty streak only ever hinted at previously, particularly impressive.) We've had Richard Cottrell's production of Tom Stoppard's Travesties for the STC, which was not, as some said, the equivalent being hit over the head with a really big book, but rather like being engrossed in a fantastic conversation with incredibly intelligent, incredibly silly people. (Obviously, intelligence and silliness are not mutually exclusive. Remember, Monty Python was comprised, but for one American, entirely of Oxbridge chaps.) Somehow, inexplicably, this was my first encounter with Stoppard, who in one fell swoop redeemed for me the rather too maligned quality of cleverness in art, becoming in my eyes to theatre what Peter Greenaway is to cinema. (And again, the show sported terrific performances, particularly from Jonathan Biggins and Toby Schmitz.)

Even more impressive were Brett Adam's production of Ross Mueller's Concussion, a co-production between the STC and Griffin, and, best of all, Sarah John's production of Duncan Graham's Ollie and the Minotaur for B Sharp. (After failing numerous times to get to both The Man from Mukinupin and The Wonderful World of Dissocia, I ultimately decided to write them off. I made myself a promise this year, a promise that I'd pick my battles. Life, after all, is much too short, as I shall discuss further momentarily.) Concussion was, again inexplicably, my first encounter with Mueller in full flight. (It was not, however, my first encounter with Mueller with his wings clipped. No, that would have been his contribution to Melburnalia, a for-the-most-part-dreadful portmanteau piece from which only he and Lally Katz walked away unscathed. But because I have repressed the memory of the vast majority of that evening, and because Mueller's contribution, (Being) Greg Stone, didn't begin until the show as a whole was well into its third, interminable hour, the encounter, as such encounters go, counted for precious little. I am surprised to learn this morning, as I put the finishing touches on this piece, that the original show has spawned a sequel. I remain sceptical.) Aside from its empty self-reflexivity, which, in striking contrast to Stoppard, threw cleverness into an entirely negative light, Concussion was nevertheless impressive. Mueller is a master of narration, by which I mean not diegetic narration, though the play indeed has plenty of that (the narrator's direct-to-audience monologues, in fact, are the play's weakest, most mindlessly meta element), but rather mimetic narration. Mueller's organisation of narrative information is highly complex and accomplished, as is the manner in which he chooses how and when to reveal it, and why. While some might accuse his structural acrobatics of flying too close to the empty side of cleverness, Mueller employs these tropes in such a way that they are in fact highly affective. The ethical dilemma at the climax of the piece lacks the dramatic potential (and, in my mind, the inherent truthfulness) of the moral ambiguities underpinning, say, Tattoo, but at least in this production the grey was allowed to be just that.

While the performances across the board were excellent, part of me would like to single out Chris Ryan and the always remarkable Belinda McClory for special praise. Another part of me, however, is a little reluctant to do so. I'm not sure what it's like to read, but this uncritical praise of actors is not especially fun to write. Why is it that highly physical performances, like Kathryn Hunter's in Kafka's Monkey, and even on occasion dance, are so much easier to discuss than, say, a performance that is somehow able to make you cry without necessarily being notable for its plasticity? Like a director's interpretation of a text, an actor's, too, is something that exists in and of itself. But we never really talk about it, except to say, "Oh, Luke Mullins was very good." I suppose it doesn't help that we spend so much time thinking and writing about writing and direction and comparatively little thinking about performance. We need to start thinking and writing more about acting.

I say this mostly because, with no experience writing about actors as anything more than pawns in the hand of a director, I find myself at a near-total loss to talk about Ollie and the Minotaur. Sure, I could talk about the play itself, with its vernacular naturalism run through with quartz veins of tragedy and mythology. ("It's a reminder," wrote Alison when the play came to Melbourne last year, "that naturalism isn't the child of television, but of poetry and classical tragedy.") In Australia, at least, naturalism has become a form that makes itself out to be theatre degree zero when in fact it is anything but, and Ollie and the Minotaur is a fine corrective to the unthinking, bourgeois naturalism of some of our better-known playwrights. I could talk about what it was like to see the piece for a second time, how it had changed, and how my reaction to it had. Certainly, I had been greatly looking forward to seeing how the piece would play in Belvoir Street's downstairs theatre, especially in comparison to fortyfivedownstairs, where it played in Melbourne. I wasn't at all surprised to find that the forced intimacy of the Belvoir space made the piece even more uncomfortable a second time around. But I feel any response to Ollie and the Minotaur is essentially worthless unless it includes a lengthy, detailed critique of what it is that Sarah Brokensha, Adriana Bonaccurso and Wendy Bos are doing on stage, a lengthy, detailed critique I feel I am unable to provide. These are not showy, star-turn performances on the level of Cate Blanchett or Pamela Rabe in The War of the Roses. Rather, they are, or appear to be, complete sublimations of the actors into their characters. Or are they? Part of what makes these performances so moving, I am sure, is the fact that here on the eastern seaboard we haven't seen much of these actors before. They come with no semiotic baggage, no traces of roles past. If, on a structural, dramaturgical level, Ollie's naturalism is underwritten by the myth of the minotaur, what is it on the level of performance that is underwriting the seeming reality of the actors' delivery? I for one have no idea. We need to start thinking and writing more about acting, because these women and their performances deserve words that are better than these.

You will notice that I've put off reviewing these shows, that I've waited a month, in some cases two, to say anything about them. You will notice, too, that I've said very little even now. That's because, enjoy them as I might, very little is ultimately all there is to say about these productions, all there is, with rare exception, to get especially passionate about. What has already been said in the newspapers, in four hundred words or less, is very often all the productions really warrant—they certainly don't warrant thousands of words, and in any case do not inspire the kind of extended consideration required to generate such numbers. Or at least they don't inspire me in this way. What inspires me is formal innovation—and that, in Sydney, is something we don't see very often. (Performance Space, which is cranking into gear for its winter season, is again the exception that proves the rule. The odd STC production, too.) Which I suppose brings me back to the start of this piece, and to my decision to make the most of this city's obsession with text-based narrative theatre. Making the most of it, for me, means going to see it and trying to enjoy it; it does not and cannot extend to writing a terrible lot about it. I'm not inspired to do so. I read recently that Jana refuses to accept comps to shows she suspects she will not like; I'm tempted to follow suit, in my way, and start refusing comps for shows I suspect I will not want to think about. (I could write pithy two-hundred word throwaways, of course, but what would be the point of that?) Whatever happens, one thing is certain: whatever I do write, it won't be appearing here, at least not for very much longer.

Those of you who follow me on various social-networking sites may have recently noticed updates proclaiming that I'd registered a new domain name. You may have suspected that something was up and, well, something is. This blog is going to fade away over the coming weeks, even more so than it already has. Eventually, it will simply be no more. I am in the process of backing up the archives, though that will mostly be for private reference. Not for this rabbit a public corpse. Rather, this blog will become the equivalent of the dog-eared personal diary one keeps upstairs in a box for nostalgia's sake. I have save little interest in blogging anymore and this lack of interest extends to the idea of leaving the dormant blog online.

There are many reasons for all of this, many arguments I could make to justify my decision. I don't imagine many of you—particularly other bloggers—will readily accept them as valid. To those of you who think I have sold my soul to the devil, rest assured that the newspaper hasn't asked me to stop blogging. No, this has been a much longer time coming, as others of you well know.

I have been blogging for a little over six years. For at least three of them, I haven't been writing for my own enjoyment. Every time I expressed a desire to shut the thing down, it was always, "No, Matt, think of the readers!" Nevermind that my lack of interest meant I was almost guaranteed to disappoint those readers, something I seemed to do anyhow as my interests diversified and my original audience became increasingly alienated. Nevermind, too, the fact that I started blogging six years ago as a way of chronicling my filmmaking process, and later as a way of developing my writing to the point that it could be published. Well, I no longer make films and have been getting published for over three years. Unlike Alison and Jana, the best and most committed bloggers I know, I never intended my blog to become my own personal printing press and soapbox. The result of it becoming so has been an ever-increasing lack of interest on my part, which in turn has inspired a most half-hearted effort. As many of you have pointed out in private correspondence, my blog has not been itself for a very long time, except in short, sharp bursts a little like this one.

I don't want to have a break or take a sabbatical. It's time to move on. Frankly, I no longer care enough. There is, of course, nothing to stop me from writing about theatre and dance, cinema, visual art and food and wine simply because I'm no longer blogging. My new site, a one-stop-shop for my film and writing work, will soon be testament to that, and you'll be able to subscribe to updates and all that jazz just as you can now. (As for my theatre reviews, which I have been writing exclusively for this site for sometime, well, I'm sure I'll work something out. I am thrilled by the new-look Spark Online and think Sydney could use something similar.) As for my more personal posts, which have also fallen by the wayside over the years, I'd just as soon send group e-mails as post personal anecdotes in an online diary. At this point, it would be a disservice to you, the reader, let alone to myself, to keep blogging. I have made countless friends and colleagues through my blogging, and it has been a central part of my life. Thank you, all of you, for reading. It has meant the world to me.

Louis Nowra's review of Kristin Williamson's David Williamson: Behind the Scenes, which appears in today's Australian Literary Review, is well worth reading. Not only will save you from reading the book, which on the whole sounds badly written and uninteresting (though I would love to know who Nowra is referring to when he writes of "one shining example" of a non-pedestrian critic), but also because, towards the beginning, it offers an almost word-perfect definition of what I have in the past referred to as placebo theatre. The emphasis, obviously, is mine.

Louis Nowra, 'Life with a wounded outsider', Australian Literary Review:

It was only when I went to see his 1991 play Money and Friends that I understood his success. I watched an audience laughing with recognition as the story unfolded and it occurred to me that Williamson was probably one of the few Australian playwrights who didn't talk down to or at his audiences. He was one of them and he and the audience were engaged in a conversation as equals. His work was one gigantic affirmation of their lives and ideas. He didn't undermine their beliefs, in fact, he corroborated them. One could say that, for his audiences, familiarity bred contentment.

Substitute "complacency" for "contentment" and you'd be somewhere close to nailing it.

Bell Shakespeare and Malthouse Melbourne: Venus & Adonis by William Shakespeare, directed by Marion Potts. Set and costumes by Anna Tregloan, lighting design by Paul Jackson, composition by Andrée Greenwell, sound design by David Franzke. With Melissa Madden Gray and Susan Prior, music performed by Felicity Clark, Michael Sheridan, Bree Van Reyk. Presented by Sydney Theatre Company and Bell Shakespeare. Wharf 2, Walsh Bay. Season ended.

Back in October, I wrote a review in which I more or less lavished praise on The Navigator, a contemporary opera by Liza Lim and Barrie Kosky. I have thought a lot about my response since then, not entirely agreeing with a lot of what I wrote (or rather wishing I had written more), and am convinced now that I was more enamoured with what was trying to be done than with what was actually achieved. The music and singing were brilliant, the stage direction laboured, and the libretto without merit. But I admired its ambition, the fact that it was trying to do something difficult. It may have missed its mark by some stretch, but at least it aimed high.

I bring this up because Marion Potts' Venus & Adonis reminded me very much of The Navigator—or rather, what The Navigator would have been like had it been based on an infinitely better text and been directed with some modicum of modesty. (Sometimes Kosky's maximalism works and sometimes it achieves only vacuous density—or dense vacuity, like a black hole.) The comparison between the two shows is obviously not perfect. Venus & Adonis, after all, is not exactly an opera. (The fact that it co-stars Melissa Madden Gray, of Meow Meow fame, suggests the extent to which its musical tendrils are rooted at least partly elsewhere.) But it does show what you can do with halfway decent writing (Shakespeare's poem, of course, being somewhat better than that) and a vision that is not only rich with aesthetic invention but with textual interest. (One of the problems with The Navigator is that no one had any idea what the libretto was even about.) It also goes to show the appeal of cohesion in art, the merits of everything working, and working in tandem. Where the elements which comprised The Navigator never quite seemed to gel (to the extent, in fact, that I initially thought incohesion was the piece's central aesthetic principle, which it may well have been), those which comprise Venus & Adonis come together in such a way that one is reminded of the Honda commercial: "Isn't it nice when things just work?"

For some, admittedly, not everything does. I remember one of Mr Boyd's criticisms at the time of the piece's Melbourne season, a suggestion that the theatremakers' understanding of the text was, well, non-existent. While I don't for a second profess to have a closer acquaintance with Shakespeare's poem than Chris, who himself admitted to having only a passing familiarity with it, I would suggest that the extra ten months have given everyone time to get to know it somewhat better. (Though he's right to criticise the footage of two horses fucking. It's a cheap gag.)

The resultant understanding is all distilled into a single idea: Adonis as a metaphor for the audience, which must be seduced despite its indifference and, in some cases, outright contempt. I was reminded, however slightly, of Kubrick's The Shining and Welles's The Trial, films which take their source texts for their plot and characters before, having done so, using them to explore themes and ideas that were not necessarily inherent to the originals themselves. (The changes that Welles made to The Trial's ending rewrite Kafka in the most drastic of ways. But while it is essentially a betrayal, it was a betrayal, Welles argued, made necessary by Auschwitz. And it feels that way when you watch it.) Of the two types of adaptation available to the artist, this is easily the more difficult to pull off well, and certainly the more controversial. I think Venus & Adonis falls somewhere between the two strategies, taking what the poem explores—desire and all the torturous crap that comes with it—to explore something other than the poem itself: the relationship between artist and audience in live performance. (I feel like I need a Venn diagram.) If this all sounds rather too metatheatrical, I can assure you its realisation on stage is entirely more sensual than intellectual. This is mostly due to the performances of Madden Gray and Susan Prior. Whether playing their lusty desperation for laughs, like Nicole Kidman in Moulin Rouge! ("Ah, poetry. Yes, this it what I want, naughty words."), or their sorrow for real, they bring their Venus down to earth, rendering the goddess as human as the rest of us—which is, of course, entirely the point, and something Shakespeare would do to the gods time and again throughout his career. That she comes across less as a goddess than an aspiring actress or singer, well, that's entirely the point, too. And I haven't even mentioned their singing…

I didn't catch Venus & Adonis when it opened at the Malthouse Theatre last April, mostly because my world was in a tizz at the time, and time wasn't something I had very much of. When Mr Boyd didn't think much of it, I decided not to waste any more of the little I did have. (Not that Chris is my go-to guy on matters of taste, of course. Ms Croggon, for her part, loved the show. But then I rather suspected—forgive me, Alison—that the poet in her might have been predisposed to do so.) I'm not sure what it was that compelled me to go along when the show came to Sydney, though it likely had something to do with the fact that it was part of the Sydney Theatre Company's Next Stage line-up. Next Stage is Wharf2Loud with a new name, and the three Wharf2Loud shows I saw last year were routinely excellent. (Two of them, Frankenstein and Highway Rock 'n' Roll Disaster, were my favourite two shows of the year.) I can see why Blanchett and Upton decided to bring Venus & Adonis north of the border: on opening night, Upton spoke about how this stream of programming was set up to encourage exploration, of text and theatrical form. This show certainly meets that criterion. Like The Navigator, Venus & Adonis, too, aims high. And in this case, it hits its mark.

Company B: Baghdad Wedding by Hassan Abdulrazzak, directed by Geordie Brookman. With Ben Winspear, Yalin Ozucelik, Arky Michael, Tahki Saul, Osamah Sami, Julia Billington, Melanie Vallejo, Robert Mammone and Tim Walter. Belvoir Street Theatre, Surry Hills. Until March 22. Bookings: (02) 9699 3444 or www.belvoir.com.au

And so it seems that I am doomed to play the naysayer once again. Because while Hassan Abdulrazzak's Baghdad Wedding has had every other member of the punditry doing back-flips (or at least star-jumps) since it opened a fortnight ago, it had me wanting to do little more than walk out, or at least go to sleep, for much of its duration. (And this, I note with a touch of sad irony, on the first night in months I had been looking forward to the theatre.) Yet another example of placebo theatre, yet another paper tiger, it is precisely the sort of show that does nothing new or interesting, theatrically or thematically, to warrant the sort of reception afforded it by the centre-left bourgeois-bohemians in its audience. In fact, it does precisely the opposite: as one its characters notes at one point about words like 'hero' and 'terrorist', Baghdad Wedding encourages lazy thinking, about theatre and issues alike, by over-simplifying both. It may not do this to the same extent as some of the very worst examples of placebo theatre—Gallipoli, The Convict's Opera, Pig Iron People—but does it it nonetheless does. What Scarlet O'Hara at the Crimson Parrot did for the aging matinee set, Baghdad Wedding does for the latte- and sauvignon blanc-sipping ones: it placates, it comforts, it confirms.

To the extent that there has been criticism of the show both in the press and online, this has mostly been limited to an unfavourable comparison of Geordie Brookman's production to Neil Armfield's last year of Wajdi Mouawad's Scorched. It is true that the two productions, more so than the texts they are based on, share a certain visual logic, and the critics have been correct to note the superiority of the earlier piece to the latter. (Upon my arrival in Sydney from Melbourne, where the word mainstage is rarely used in any but the most pejorative sense, Scorched had been one of several shows that had given me some sense, for what was essentially the first time, of what mainstage theatre could be. Sydney Theatre Company's The Great was another, though I saw that on my first night in Sydney and may have just been high on the view from the theatre.) But these superficial similarities, these pale imitations, merely throw into sharp relief how much weaker the current production is than its predecessor.

While some have suggested that the biggest problem is the way the piece plays out in the space, swallowed by the upstairs theatre when the more intimate surrounds of the downstairs space might better suit Abdulrazzak's intentions, for me the problems exist less with the production, however derivative, than with the text itself. Dramatically, Abdulrazzak's writing is at its most interesting nearly two-thirds of the way through, when in one brief scene the dialogue takes on an intensity and character that has previously eluded it; thematically, it is at its most interesting a mere fifteen minutes before it ends. That these periods of dramatic and thematic interest don't at all align, and are, what's more, prefaced by over an hour of relatively boring and sentimental back story, was a fact that had this reviewer, if not the others, looking around the auditorium in desperation to see if anyone else was as turned-off as he was. They weren't.

As intimated above, this reviewer was turned-on only once. In a single, brilliant monologue, Salim (Ben Winspear), who disappeared on his wedding night, regales the audience with his violent fantasies about what he would like to do to an American solider who tortured him in a detention centre. (On second thoughts, perhaps 'turned-on' is not the best turn of phrase to use in this instance.) The Easton Ellis-esque diatribe is exquisitely detailed and harrowing, the dialogue rolling like poetry off Winspear's tongue, the language carefully considered and measured. That it follows a fairly stock-standard sequence, in which the US military is cast unambiguously as the villain and in which the same old Abu Ghraib imagery is trotted out to the same old effect (the image of the barefooted man on the box, having become weirdly and worryingly abstracted through overuse, is now little more than a cheap visual cue to get the audience thinking they are outraged, rather than something that actually triggers them to feel that way), doesn't detract from the quality of the writing. It only makes one wish there was more of it.

In a similar way, the most interesting ideas in the text—a complex of issues thrown up by the return of three Iraqi émigrés to their homeland from London not long after the invasion—are no less interesting, at least in theory, for being rendered as dramatically dullish theatre. No, the real disservice done to them is the fact that they pop up only at the very end, in the last fifteen minutes of the play, when they could have been dealt with at length from the beginning. What makes other texts about coming home interesting, at least to me, is the manner in which they deal with the process of coming home itself. Who a character is and what happened to him elsewhere, while obviously important, is ultimately only relevant to the extent that it impacts upon that character's return. The most important scenes in The Deer Hunter (with which Baghdad Wedding shares a very similar structure) are not those in which Walken, De Niro and Savage play Russian roulette with the Viet Cong, but those which take place later, once the latter two get back to Clairton, Pennsylvania. Unlike The Deer Hunter, Baghdad Wedding leaves this later until it is much too late: returning to Baghdad from London in 2005 was hardly the same as returning to Clairton from Vietnam in 1975, of course (the difference being that between external and internal hells), but that's exactly why the idea of three educated, middle-class Iraqis returning there is so inherently interesting. But the characters' reasons for doing so are given only the most cursory, last-minute look-in, and in any case remain weighed down even then by sentimental residue from the play's entirely less interesting first three-quarters. The last fifteen minutes should have been its first fifteen. It should have gone from there.

'Cursory' may in fact be the word to describe Baghdad Wedding on the whole. Just as the treatment of the characters' return to Iraq is cursory, so is the rendering of the US solider as a stereotypical caricature. And with all the superficial trappings of a well-made production like Scorched, without any of the attendant complexity of that show, Brookman's production, too, is cursory. That it pretends to be otherwise—and has tricked many into believing it—fills me with indignation. But mine is an increasingly tired indignation: while it is true that I am not impressed, neither am I much surprised. Paper tigers stalk our stages; placebo theatre continues to abound. One hopes the reader will forgive this naysayer for declining to back-flip yet again.