Twelve months ago I had just finished sitting on the Drama Committee of the Australia Council, grants having been decided for 1996. The Council was funding 45 companies on an annual grant basis, this including those with the Major Organisations Board. Let me ask you - what do you think might be the average percentage of Australian content programmed by these forty-five companies? In my experience of asking this question before, I reckon you'd be thinking perhaps 30%, maybe 50%, or even as high as 60%. Well let me tell you: the figure was, for 1996, 86%. The Bell Shakespeare Company does no Australian content - thank God. Thank God because, as used to be the case with Anthill who did at first and at its height only classic theatre, so long as the national balance is right, there is health in having a company exclusively devoted to the classics. Or whatever. I would like to see a company exclusively devoted to musicals, including the vast repertoire of neglected musical theatre of this century. Along with cinema, the musical is the great entertainment form of the 20th century. I want to see Lady in the Dark and Pal Joey and yes, even The Desert Song. Aubrey Mellor was somewhat deluded when he announced the program for the 1997 season a few weeks ago in describing Playbox as 'unique' for its exclusive commitment to Australian plays. twenty-five of the forty-five Australia Council's companies do 100% Australian content. So, averaged out, the forty-five companies have Australian works as 86% of their programme. Generally, the overlap of companies funded by the State Ministries would reinforce this figure.

This statistic has some very serious implications, none of them to me at all healthy. It means that the choice from the whole of the world's repertoire - from Sophocles to Arthur Miller and John Osborne and Dario Fo, and from all the new plays that are being produced throughout the world tonight - must be squeezed in to 14%. So we're lucky to get a few Shakespeares but never, I repeat never in Australia, the great Troilus and Cressida, or Henry VI Part 3 or Henry IV Part 2. And while we get the occasional Chekhov, Ibsen, Molière and Brecht, what about Lorca and Lope de Vega, Turgenev and Bulgakov, Schiller and Kleist; what about Marlowe and Middleton and Marivaux; Goldoni, Gorky and Giradoux; O'Casey and Synge and Yeats? I've never seen The Bourgeois Gentleman, The Wild Duck, Arms and the Man, The Rules of The Game, Golden Boy or Desire Under the Elms in forty years of theatre-going. I want to, and I want to see them here and not in London. Of course I don't mean slavish productions of the classics as they were, but reinterpreted ones that reveal why they still speak to us here and now: Neil Armfield's The Country Wife, Graeme Murphy's Nutcracker and Baz Luhrmann's La Bohème. And is this 14% trying to tell me that with the rare exceptions of Neil Simon and Alan Aykbourn there are so few compelling new works - from America or England, let alone France, Germany, Italy, Holland, Argentina, Venezuela, New Zealand, Canada, India, Malaysia or Indonesia to name but a few - to ignore them. No, I don't believe it. Do we want to know what's going on in the rest of the world apart from what CNN tells us or don't we? Do we want not to be condemned to repeat the past by allowing it to speak to the present or don't we? We are doing too many new Australian plays.

Heretical? So be it. Few directors have done more in this country to promote Australian playwriting than myself, directing many and producing many more. And I'm delighted to be premiering Katherine Thompson's Navigating next year. But I want to see other playwrights as well. And I want the best foreign plays of the past and present to inspire and challenge our writers. With the exception of the State Theatre Company of South Australia, most of this 86% is new work. Perhaps a great deal of it is the same new work doing the rounds. But I don't believe we have enough writers to fill 86% of the nations theatres with first-rate new work, and if it isn't first rate then audiences are an endangered species, and we all risk extinction. And in turn the shortage of supply to meet demand affects film scripts and television scripts. Have your seen an episode of Medivac? or The Territorians?! Incidentally 95% of the Creative Development and Performance Project grants were for new Australian work also. I want fewer but better works on our stages. I don't want our authors writing only for small cast sizes and small stages. I want more Floating Worlds and Traitors and Macquaries and Mukinupins - epic works - on our big stages. I want theatricality, and poetry, and big ideas and big emotions. And frankly if it comes to a desperate choice between Research and Risk then I want Risk. And I say no more grants below 30. I got sick to death of applications that were going to be multi-media and multi-layered and multi-cultural and visual theatre and physical theatre and cross-artform theatre and all the old-hat Suzuki and Butoh and Lecoq-based gestural, nonlinear theatre that 86% of the directors under 30 wanted to experiment with when they've never ever tackled conventional and traditional theatre. You really need to know what you're reacting against in order to progress in a search for the new.

And many of these applications were for group-devised projects with no assigned writer. This way madness lies. Theatre has always needed the writer and always will. And while it may be a 20th century term, there's always been a director, a driving cohesive force, too. Frankly I think the predicted revolution coming with the 'information superhighway' will serve theatre rather than threaten it. Theatre is, and always has been, an event where people gather together and interact, and we need this as we need food and drink. I wish our theatres were still located in red-light districts, with bear-baiting and two-up joints next door, as was the case in 16th century London and Tokyo - vibrant, sexy and vulgar, stimulating all the senses at once.

Nobody seems to complain very much when 86% of our opera and music programming is the classic repertoire. We should be - there's not enough Australian, and not enough new foreign work. Where are the new operas such as The Ghost of Versailles, or McTeague (from the movie Greed), or The Black Rider with libretto by William Burroughs and a score by Tom Waits, premiered in Paris by Robert Wilson in the late '80s. Concert- and opera-going is inconceivable without Puccini and Verdi or Beethoven and Brahms let alone without the lesser known lights Berg or Monteverdi or de Falla or Piazolla or Satie or Respighi or Jacopo Peri and so on. Music audiences seem to be still strangely resistant to 20th century music when we're only four years away from the 21st century! But while our trade and industry, science and medicine, look out to the rest of the world, our theatre is looking in upon itself. Dangerous.

There is this fabulous thing that is the human being. There are more wonders in this organism than could be dreamt of in any philosophy, and while national characteristics are marvellously distinguishing aspects of identity, we all finally share the same essential qualities on the parameters of good and evil, honesty and hypocrisy, saintliness and sin. These universal qualities we need to identify and connect with other nations and races.

Where did it all begin?

The classic traditions are, it seems, generally in disrepute and in retreat. I read that Melbourne University for one is cutting back on its teaching of the classics. You would only know that 51% of Americans are factually idiots if you know that 'idiot' is an ancient Greek work for 'non-voter'. Like it or not our theatre and dramatic traditions are sourced from the classics. This is where it all began. We are already in so many ways dangerously marginalised. We cannot afford to ignore our non-Australian traditions and inspirations.

There are still a few antediluvian theatre producers around who believe we cannot produce the talent to fill a juve lead role or direct a Broadway musical. Happily they are a rare exception. And it is pathetic that we directors, myself included obviously, have taken no steps towards preventing second-rate foreign directors from taking our work in this country. Note that Christopher Renshaw did not win the Tony.

These few producers excepted, it seems that while the cultural cringe receded with the flood waters of pro-English sentiment years ago, now there is a prevalent and rampant strut - a chauvinism that believes We Can Do Anything Better That You Can. Who cares about the rest of the world, who cares about the past in any form, most of all theatre? Knock it down. Throw it out with last year's antiquated mobile phone. For theatre neophiliacs - the lovers of new things - its simple, or simplistic: old plays are old-fashioned. Who cares? Forget 'em! This isn't provincial insecurity, this is adolescent arrogance on fast forward. I'm frightened we're throwing the baby out with the bath-water and we're pushing shit uphill and the result will be that we'll be up shit creek without a paddle.

The problem is money isn't it? The amount of Australian work being done is, I've no doubt, to a very large extent the result of the fact that for a number of years the Australia Council's guidelines included Australian content as one of its criteria. More Australian content might mean more cash, so lets do 100% Australian content. But it is no longer. Have the general grant companies read the new guidelines? Even as I write these very words the ABC's Review programme is telling me tax deductions for artists are under threat unless it can be shown the art is showing a profit! Good God! The arts 'industry' must now also be profitable! This defies all possibility of Research and Risk.

Review is getting the axe anyway so does it really matter what it says? Or if we have an ABC at all? Nothing really matters. Anyway the wind blows. Bohemian Rhapsody. Queen, 1975.

It's a deliberately ambiguous statement. Nothing really matters.

I believe Sydney and Australia have the opportunity to be as stimulating and as vibrant in our artistic endeavours in 2000 as Vienna and Paris were in l900.

So long as the winds blow. Let's get out of the doldrums.

Thank you.

Richard Wherrett