A little something about the Standing There Productions trip to Sydney.

Firstly, you know those brain scans they do to trace activity in the brain after certain stimuli? You know? Colour photographs. The brain is this big blue blob with tiny orange spots on it when the person's trying to find their car keys, but then, when the person is trying to find their way out of a maze or something, there's warm orange everywhere.

After Standing There Productions meetings, I am convinced of this, our brains must look like the warm glowing embers of magma.

So. We had a few of those meetings. Some of them involved other people, some of them involved us. Most of them ended with the three of us leaping through the surf screaming at each other that we're all moving to Sydney, our brains turning a deep, happy blue.

We saw five shows at the Sydney Festival. They were all good. Three of them were excellent. I'd say the best shows I've ever seen. They were more experimental, which is perhaps why The Gate Theatre (a beautiful Irish theatre company I've always loved) didn't come off as well as they usually do. They were performing Brian Friel plays (including this one and this one), which were written with that gorgeous precision, but perhaps it was the direction - I felt it would have been just as good to be at a reading.

Stew and I saw Smile Off Your Face, which was theatre that took you out of yourself: you're put in a wheelchair, your wrists are bound, you're blindfolded, and they wheel you away from everyone else to a show you experience mostly in darkness. It's phenomenal. Liberating. It sends you out into the world with a new face on, asking lots of questions of yourself. Also, for a show the majority of which you are blindfolded, some of the images are very striking.

We wriggled into the final three seats of a show called No Dice, which is still my favourite festival show, including the astonishing Lepage show. No Dice was a 4 hour long performance using transcripts from telephone conversations, performed in an almost pantomime style by brilliant performers using physical gesture, repetition, sensual cues (they made the room hot, they made the room cold, they gave you a sandwich and a Dr Pepper, they used sound and dance and screen and voice). For the first half, Rita and I had no idea the script was based on phone conversations, which made its madness even more surreal and which changed the second half of the show for us, making the experience (I think) even better. Speaking of surreal. Their motto? "Putting the W in mellowdrama since 1995". Read more about them. They are brilliant. I hope they take over the world. A world run by them - funny, weird, sincere, suggestive - would indeed be a fine place to live.

We then saw the Robert Lepage show I mentioned above; Lipsynch. The word for that show is: phenomenal. It went for 8.5 hours, had 5 intervals, involved 9 performers but seemed like it had a cast of maybe fifty, used the crew, the astonishing sets, the screen, opera, sound, words, language (everyone was bilingual) and perception to follow an intriguing story that everyone talked about - predicting the ending and all of us getting it wrong - during the intervals. It was like a film, like a novel, like a painting. It showed you its mechanics, too - it reminded you of construct. I won't describe it in my own words. They're not good enough. Robert Lepage is here. He can do it for you.

Other fun things by this year's festival director (for whom, virtually, I ovate) include Play Me I'm Yours (pianos throughout the streets of Sydney - play them if you want to) and, apparently, La Clique, although I didn't see that.

Aaaaanyhoo. Deadlines, now. Lots of them. Read about those shows, see them if you can. I'll have my eye out for them wherever I am in the world, that's for sure.

Now, to the beach.

So Stewart and Rita and I had a big week in Sydney this past week, seeing some of the best theatre we've ever seen, having some very productive meetings, and instituting a new policy.

I shall tell you about the Sydney Festival when I have more time, but in the meantime, let me just introduce you to our new policy:

Wherever possible (and this contingency should be maximised whenever the opportunity arises) Standing There Productions meetings should conclude with a swim, a surf, and/or a beer with a harbour view.

I know. We're so Hollywood. It used to be about the art.

Now. Somebody hand me my snorkel.

So the Sydney Festival was... well, it was fun at first.

We saw a few things, including the brilliant Small Metal Objects, the staging of which takes place at a train station (Circular Quay) and which broke down so many of the squirm-worthy pretensions that form the backbone of most theatre I seem to go to. It was truly inspired. If you haven't seen it: the actors converse into the headphones of the audience, who watch the crowd until they locate the bodies that match the voices. So you're hearing a conversation and you're looking at the crowd of (real) people at the station who don't understand why there's an audience with headphones looking at them, and then suddenly you realise two of the people in the crowd are the people having the conversation into your headphones. This does brilliant things to the way you watch/are watched/watch other people being watched etc that really makes you think. Add to this the fact that some of the performers are intellectually disabled and suddenly there's another dimension to the people looking/being looked at/"what's going on here? You looking at me?" scenario that already exists in a crowd of people looking at each other.

It would have been interesting to see the show on a weekday, when people at train stations behave differently. I saw it on a weekend, when people were slow, and curious, and bored. Hence there was a man who danced for the audience (what are they looking at? he asked his friend and then gave us something to look at, in case that was what we were there for). There was a group of young boys who circled one of the actors in a way that could have turned out to be threatening, except that all of us were watching, so it didn't.

I know most sensible people have already seen Back to Back theatre performing this show before, when it was in Melbourne, but I hadn't seen it. I'd see it again though, before the troupe (originally from Geelong) takes it overseas and gets famous. I recommend.

Anyhoo, then we went to see a Beckett play, at NIDA. Tell you what, if you've got any spare cash, you should get it down to NIDA pronto. Tin shed, that joint. Smell of an oily rag. Check out the foyer for instance.

Beckett was wonderful. Here is a photograph of Barry McGovern, but only because I can't find an actual photograph of his voice. Gorgeous voice, gorgeous performance, beautiful words, and all in all it was a fantastic piece of theatre with all the artifice that so often forms the basis of the aforementioned pretensions, but with none of the pretensions. Here is a review.

Then, on Sunday, when I had planned to work on my play, my hard-drive died and all my writing was lost. My writing, my notes, all drafts of the comedy festival show since early December... all gone. Forever. Back to the theme of this post: drama, with no pretension.

Back up your files.

Since then, I have been reading about important things like the abduction of children, the meltdown of the planet, the David Hicks situation, and war. Comedy Festival scripts and writing collections are really not that important.

Still. Back up your files. Now.

I am heading off to Sydney tonight to check out the Sydney Festival.

On Sunday, I am sitting in my Sydney hotel room doing lots of homework because I want Melbourne to win the battle of the festivals and I intend to do my part.

Me versus Ralph Fiennes. Clearly the poor chump is in all sorts of trouble.

See you Monday!

I am going to the Sydney Festival this weekend. There are some fairly exciting cultural forces to be reckoned with up there this weekend, including Standing There Captain of Industry Melanie Mars Bar Howlett and a chap who goes by the name of Beckett (seems to have written a couple of plays).

Speaking of culture, did anyone watch that brilliant, brief, dirty adaptation of Macbeth on the ABC the other night? Some of my favourite British performers and some presumably very happy production designers were let loose on a script that has traditionally bored me, despite its obvious brilliance. The whole thing was set in a kitchen, leading to a brilliant combination of Jaime Oliver undertones and ready access to sharp knives. Can't wait to see if their Taming of the Shrew is going to be as good as Ten Things I Hate About You.

(This leads me to an obvservation I have made many times to housemates and long suffering friends: don't you think that the easiest way to tell where a TV show was made is to mute the sound and look at the lighting? Bright or soft warm = America. Dark and shadowy or blue and alarming = Britain, anywhere close to Britain. Stark yellow or flat and white = Summer Bay. It's the Asian ones that are hard to pick. Try it.)

Anyway, the writing's going well thanks.

Shut up.