of the Howard government's mean years, and it is our task as artists to propose a more complex, critical, playful reading of reality. When I have been in places with healthy theatre cultures -- for example Berlin in the last decade -- I am conscious of the density and diversity of activity. You sense very strong voices -- writers, directors, actors, critics -- in vigorous dialogue with each other and their culture. The theatre then no longer feels like the plaything of a few but is instead one of the mechanisms with which a society thinks about and dreams about itself.