One of the great things about the Australian Ballet’s Romeo and Juliet is that the kids love it. Even the guys who from 16 to 76 can be reluctant ballet-goers (always inclined to think it’s a bit gay in the unfortunate adolescent sense of that word) have found the revamp of John Cranko’s production a wonderful and exhilarating thing. The Ballet have been doing this most dynamic choreographing of Prokofiev’s score for nearly 50 years now and it’s remarkable how much this version of Shakespeare’s great valentine to young love has retained all its vibrancy and sap. Callum Linnane is a dynamic enraptured Romeo, chafing at the bit and full of every height and depth of ecstasy and Sharni Spencer is a moving and exquisite Juliet. It’s remarkable how much Shakespeare’s depiction of the headstrong poignancy of blind and magnificent teenage love, a love so luminous that it’s shocking that it could turn tragic, is contained in the magnificence of this ballet and the way Cranko ensures that every lyrical move in the dance will be resurrected and modulated with a desperation that whispers of doom. And of course the sheer lyricism of the work is part of its starkness and depth: when Albert Finney played Shakespeare’s Romeo on stage he said he couldn’t understand why the lovers didn’t just run away together. This Australian Ballet production captures with a magnificence worthy of Prokofiev and Cranko the burning intensity of a love that thinks it can conquer the world and it also has all the glamour and insolence that goes along with it. Remember Mercutio, Romeo’s mate who gives the great Queen Mab speech and who says in the bitterness of death ‘A plague on both your houses’? Brett Chynoweth captures all his devil-may-care swashbuckling dash and he has a worthy sinister antagonist in the Tybalt of Adam Bull. The Australian Ballet’s Romeo and Juliet exhibits with a superb choreographed precision the way in which this greatest of love stories presents life as something that can be thrown away in one danger-defying instant and the terrible plangency of the cost. It is swooningly romantic, as it should be, but it also has all the danger and drama, the swordplay and the heartache of the Montague/Capulet feud.

The Prokofiev/Cranko Romeo and Juliet is a version of course and it’s fascinating and a bit weird that the latest National Theatre Live offering Jack Absolute Flies Again by Richard Bean is actually a version of one of the most celebrated comedies in the language, Sheridan’s The Rivals, the one that gave us Mrs. Malaprop and Dame Edith Evans one of her greatest roles. To be fair Richard Bean was responsible for one of the most stupendously successful adaptations of all time when he turned Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters into One Man, Two Guvnors which was fabulously funny as an NT Live Broadcast with James Corden but just as good – well, almost as good – when we saw the National’s production on stage here without him.

Lyndon Terracini who’s stepping down as the artistic director of Opera Australia, alas, knows all about the variety of different productions. Some of us wish to God we had seen Alex Jennings, the Sydney Henry Higgins, in the OA’s production of My Fair Lady, directed by the original Eliza Doolittle, Julie Andrews, no less. (Ian McKellen told me when he was still young enough to play the role that he wouldn’t touch it because he didn’t think he could equal Jennings.) Some of us wish we had seen the staggeringly performed Lohengrin of Jonas Kaufman in a production that was a bit less of a post-modern doodle. But think of what Lyndon Terracini achieved through the Opera with his tremendous verve and warmth and commitment. This was a colossus of a man who straddled worlds. Two Melbourne Ring Cycles, each of them revelations and of the highest standard and a third one – so sadly postponed over two years of Covid – planned for Brisbane next year. The musicals like Evita with Tina Arena, the razzamatazz of Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour, just the kind of spectacular event crying out to happen which was pure Terracini. And now the Cameron Mackintosh Phantom of the Opera.

Lyndon Terracini is a man of whom it can be said, ‘What do they know of opera who only opera know?’ He is a great fixer, a huge enthusiast, a supreme entrepreneur.

And there’s certainly enterprise on show in next year’s season of the Sydney Theatre Company. It will involve all sorts of riches. You can be a great admirer of Edward Albee and wonder if The Goat or Who is Sylvia? with Claudia Karvan and Don Hany is going to equal the production Kate Cherry did fifteen years ago but who could resist seeing those two on stage? Claudia Karvan was stunning in the TV version of Puberty Blues and think of how fine Hany was as the conservative bishop in the TV Devil’s Playground.

And speaking of television, isn’t there a touch of genius in Kip Williams getting Sigrid Thornton to play Arkadina, mother and actress, in Chekhov’s The Seagull. There’s an impressive film of this very great play that has the young Vanessa Redgrave as Nina and James Mason as Trigorin but Sigrid Thorton is infinitely preferable to Sidney Lumet’s choice of Arkadina, Simone Signoret. Thornton is ideally suited to the eternally young, breezily neglectful star actress who provokes the fatal resentment of her son, Konstantin. Australia’s Zoe Caldwell played the role on BBC television and there’s a recent American stab at it with Annette Benning as Arkadina to Saoirse Ronan’s Nina but Thornton whose natural palette has great swerves of warmth and coolness seems an inspired choice for the role of Chekhov’s actress mother dancing on ice. But the Sydney Theatre Company has all sorts of fascinations next year.

Nevil Shute’s On the Beach is a famous Australian novel and Kip Williams the Artistic Director of the STC who likes to present the theatre as his camera and cyclorama is going to present it on stage. What an extraordinary vision it might provide of Australia at the end of the world.