For example a recent review by Peter Ward of Daniel Keene's latest play regretted the lack of 'needy dramaturgical input'. Script editing is what I think he meant the play needed, as most do, which is not quite the same thing as conceiving the classics, but is also a major part of the job. I was amazed, and delighted, to discover last year, sitting for the Drama Committee of the Australia Council, that the vast majority of applications included in the creative team the services of a dramaturg, even for the most humble requests for a Creative Development grant. I was delighted, I suppose, because I felt our one small step in 1985 has become a giant leap in so short a time. I was amazed because with the exception of my years at the STC, I've always had to function as my own dramaturg, and when money is tight, as in our case where 86 per cent of the Creative Development grants were being rejected, perhaps the dramaturg was a luxury. Money must be tight now. The presence of a dramaturg on the credit list of any one production's creative team as well as any one company's artistic personnel is again rare, if not exceptional. I mean a dramaturg who does more than compile the programme notes. The significance of good dramaturgy is invaluable, not least of all because it provides for the director an additional, and a more objective, critical viewpoint. This I learnt from that dramaturg par excellence, Philip Parsons. And I pay this tribute now because, while I applaud the ascendance of the notion of dramaturgy, I deplore the relative lack of its practice in current theatre.

I think, with a few notable exceptions, our theatre is in the doldrums - that is, stuck in a very hot zone but lacking strong directional winds to get it moving again. Too little dramaturgy? Too little funding assistance? Too little dramaturgy because too little funding? Too few good directors? Too few good scripts? Or even perhaps - too many Australian scripts? Too many rhetorical questions! More of this later.

The second significant impact Philip had on my theatre thinking, and practice, was the acquisition of a concern for the development of a classic Australian theatre repertoire. Currency Press had begun this process for me with the first of its National Theatre Series publications in 1973 of Louis Esson's The Time Is Not Yet Ripe. When I was appointed to the Sydney Theatre Company in June 1979, I had no hesitation in kicking off with George Darrell's The Sunny South. I wanted to demonstrate that my written commitment (in the mission statement) to Australian classics would not be all talk and no action. By 1979 Currency Press had published only six works in the National Theatre series. The problem of course was that there weren't too many Aussie classics. What many of us wanted, not least of all Philip and Katharine Brisbane, was not just the publication and performance of retrospective classic works but also of prospective classic works. In 1970 the Australian theatre scene was distinguished by the existence of two theatre companies, the Pram Factory in Melbourne and Nimrod in Sydney, which had as their primary, if not exclusive concern, the production of new Australian plays. Such companies in the 1990s are the norm rather than the exception - more of this later. My point here is that by 1979 a small number of new Australian works had been produced and published which had the potential to become classics of the future. The publication of the works was arguably the most crucial factor here. Sometimes publication preceded production; sometimes publication followed a production; and indeed sometimes publication proceeded without production. Most dangerously, many texts were never published at all and perhaps have, as a result, been lost forever. Michael Cove's Kookaburra? Ken Horler's Ginge's Last Stand? for example.

But without publication most of the works with any 'classic' potential would have been, will be lost. Jim Sharman had said to me once in the early '70s that if all Australian theatres were required to do only new Australian plays for five years - voila, we would have, inevitably, a viable Australian body of theatre work. It is interesting to note that twenty-odd years later one Australian theatre has made a commitment to mount only existing Australian plays for five years. The dangers to the box office of the State Theatre Company of South Australia are great - this is extreme risk-taking! - but I applaud the intent wholeheartedly and wish the project, as indeed we all must do, great success. I dearly hope to be part of it. But it could only happen now because there is only now, 25 years after Nimrod and the Pram Factory began, a viable body of Australian works that has come about without the extremity of Jim's proposition, and which now needs to be seen again to test their potential for classic status. Good new works can suffer a bad first production. Belvoir's brilliant recent revival of Stephen Sewell's The Blind Giant Is Dancing is a case in point, which had suffered at the Drama Theatre in 1984. New works can also have a good production first time round, but perhaps in the wrong circumstances, for example the wrong venue. Two of Louis Nowra's works come to mind. When we had just decided to use the then Downstairs Nimrod theatre as a theatre, we squeezed into it Louis' Inner Voices. In the mid-1970s new Australian works by unknown authors were still a risk. Now, our hunger for all things Australian makes such a notion very hard to believe. But it was the case, and so Inner Voices was 'downsized' - in cast numbers and production scale - to fit the limited physical and financial strictures of Nimrod Downstairs. A few years later I would argue the same thing happened with Inside The Island at Nimrod Upstairs. This epic play needed - still needs - the Drama Theatre stage, or similar, to fully realise its epic potential. I think I'm right in saying that neither play has been seen since, yet they are two of many such works that need to be reassessed. I was delighted recently that Alex Buzo's Coralie Lansdowne Says No was reassessed by the Griffin production, but I'm disappointed it was in the same venue as when it premiered in 1973, a venue which had difficulty realising the splendour of Coralie's borrowed Palm Beach eyrie. Stephen Sewell's Welcome The Bright World needs another look, as does Steve J. Spears' Young Mo and Alma de Groen's Going Home and many more. I want to see such works celebrated afresh and with the resources, when needed, of bigger circumstances than they experienced first time round. Until Wayne Harrison and I codirected it on a very large scale at the Drama Theatre in 1986 for the STC, John Romeril's marvellous, seminal, and again physically and thematically epic play The Floating World had not been seen outside small venues on small budgets.

At least no longer do our theatre critics talk of Australian theatre as undergoing a 'renaissance' as they did into the early '80s, implying not only 'rebirth' but also, I think, 'short life'. The Australian dramatic heritage is established, in that a large body of work exists. What we still need to know is what will last. I believe it is crucially time that, come the choice, we look more often at revivals of existing works before, just to fill a quota perhaps, we mount new works.

Where did it all begin?

Leonard Bernstein's wonderful Wonderful Town is an example of Rest and Recreational Theatre. Moby Dick on the other hand, as a novel, is, with capital letters, a Major Tome. I was revisiting Beauty and The Beast the other night. At the conclusion Edna Everage behind me turned to her husband Norm and chirruped, 'Lovely wasn't it? Takes you out of yourself'. The best criticism we can ask for. Beauty and The Beast has a wonderful message at its heart: don't judge a book by its cover. But nevertheless Beauty and The Beast is certainly Rest and Recreational theatre. As a freelance director I've had in 1996 a very good year. I've been employed. Not only that, my work has been with Brecht's Galileo and Beauty and The Beast, and the opera Summer Of The Seventeenth Doll, and The Music Of Andrew Lloyd Webber. Galileo and The Doll are the theatre equivalents of Moby Dick - they are Major Tomes. So I've been able to swing between two pieces of Escapist Fantasy, which have played to huge audiences, and two pieces of Serious Theatre, which have played to small audiences. Which is more important? The money or the box? Which is more significant? Which is more memorable? If you were 8 years old, Beauty And The Beast might be an unforgettable experience. Indeed it might get you, ten years later, to a Galileo or The Doll. But in terms of discovering something about the Australian identity, heightened by the joy of music; in terms of appeal to the challenge of ideas; in terms of the potential for theatre to be unforgettable because it can change our lives, we cannot do without the Galileos and theDolls of this world.

And let's be quite clear about this. Rest and Recreational Theatre inspires only other examples of Rest and Recreational Theatre. The Big Tomes, Serious Theatre, inspire countless and unimaginable other kinds of works, in both form and content. And Serious Theatre needs a great deal of Research and Risk-taking.

What is great about Recreational Theatre is that it doesn't require us to think - we can escape for a moment from the harsh realities of life. This is its great, its popular, appeal. But this doesn't mean to say it's good for us. Kids will usually prefer fairy floss to green beans. Extremist political views will often have popular support, even the support of a majority, but that doesn't mean they're right, that they're good for us. Democracy is not a perfect system of government - E. M. Forster could give it only two-and-a-half cheers. I've been disappointed during the recent race debate that, with the exception of Geoffrey Cousins, no one seems to have challenged the notion that even if Pauline Hanson has majority support, she and her supporters are wrong. The perils of Pauline - the girl certainly takes risks - but Risk without Research is useless. Theatre and politics need research - of the facts, and risk - in facing truth, to elevate their forums into the realms of the high and the mighty.

I deplore, I am frightened by, the serious lack of Research and Risk-taking in our current theatre scene. Research and Development in the theatre, as in industry, is that seed, experiment with and exploration of form and content without which new products, great products, are unlikely. Galileo would not have been written without the crude experiments of The Measures Taken or Roundheads and Peakheads. Research and Risk require a very crucial and quite particular kind of by-line funding because very often they are, for a long time, apparently unproductive. Risk-taking is not only the punt that producers will often want to take with new and untried works by a new and unknown author; it is also perhaps a new vision of an old and neglected work that might cost heaps to mount and has as much risk of failing completely as it does of striking gold. The classics are usually both very expensive and very difficult - risky. And this particular kind of risk is being neglected at our peril. So let me narrow my field of focus even further.

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