It’s a spectacle a lot of people would kill to see: Hugo Weaving in a Sydney Theatre Company co-production of Thomas Bernhard’s The President with the Dublin Gate Theatre company which has in its day brought this country a good deal of the work of Samuel Beckett and some very distinguished Irish actors, such as Barry McGovern, last seen a few years ago in his one-man show of Beckett’s Watt.

Well, Thomas Bernhard is a writer to place with Beckett. The President allows Weaving to boom out as the dictator of this fabricated country, his tyranny close cousin to his bombast. The Irish actress Olwen Fouéré is the President’s wife and she grimaces at the audience as if before a mirror while the President burbles and splashes in his bath. She’s a nightmare but a sympathetic one while he has the nebulous but compelling power of a rhetoric that glows with a pseudo-Shakespearean grandeur even though we know we’re in a world of gesticulation that covers the barbarity of this man of power.

It’s years now since the late Bille Brown did a production of Thomas Bernhard’s The Histrionic by Daniel Schlusser and that play burnt up the stage with its theatrical brilliance and its extraordinary animation. It was in some ways less surprising that the play was so bright-coloured, so energised in the hoops it jumped through, if you were familiar with Bernhard’s fiction which is one of the great bodies of work from the latter part of the twentieth century and is frequently coupled with that of W.S. Sebald.

The late Andrew Riemer said once that his German was not equal to the prose of Robert Musil who wrote The Man Without Qualities but that he could read Thomas Bernhard because he said everything twice. In fact, Bernhard said everything over and over and over.

He was a magnificent stylist but he wrote a bit like Gertrude Stein at her most rhapsodically musical if you could imagine that ‘rose is a rose’ of a writer animated by the vociferation and rage, the blackness of spirit and the unassuagable spite that you might associate with the narrator of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground.

But there are tricks with Thomas Bernhard, not least in terms of the tone behind the vituperation. His overt stance is to hold a mirror – and an apparently very dark one – up to his fellow Austrians with their very easy, languid charm – and point out that they are in fact the sort of Nazi fiends and ghastly Catholics they pretend not to be.

His Gathering Evidence collects his several stabs at a confessional memoir into one volume, formidable and ferocious, in its variegated delineation of infamy. But in fact, the book is tonally more ambivalent than it looks and the trick with Bernhard is that he’s funny and the truths he enumerates keep changing shape. He will say – contra received wisdom – that the great conductor Herbert von Karajan did not turn Tristan, say, into a valentine to himself, he just got better and better which is why people hated him. It’s true that Bernhard became a kind of Shakespearean fool to a country he saw as deluding itself, but he is also a writer full of surprising half-cloaked warmth.

Remember that wonderful Bernhard novel Old Masters about the fellow who goes to the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum every day to look at Tintoretto’s Man with a White Beard? Well, he thinks the essence of the truth of art is to work out the flaw of the work you stare at. It’s a book that glows in the mind, a book about folly and truth and irreducible human personality. And what subterranean drama Bernhard creates when he seems not to be trying. In any case, Sydneysiders should be flocking to the Ros Packer theatre to see one of our most distinguished actors interpret one of the master spirits of the age.

The President runs until 19 May.

At the Melbourne Arts Centre you can see the glorious Heather Mitchell play that formidable figure, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who brought her own kind of individuality and fierce independence of spirit to the Supreme Court in America. RBJ is the work of Suzie Miller who had great success with Prima Facie starring Jodie Comer (in London and New York) in the leading role.

It’s interesting that Heather Mitchell and Hugo Weaving should both be on stage at the same time given what an endearing pair of veteran lovers they made in the two seasons of the streamer Love Me.

Meanwhile, there’s considerable speculation about who might succeed Kip Williams as the head of the Sydney Theatre Company now that he’s heading off to New York for Dorian Gray with Sarah Snook. You never know with these things but Sarah Goodes who had been an associate of the Melbourne Theatre Company was touted to get the Melbourne job which in fact went to Anne-Louise Sarks. Memories of the performances Goodes got from Helen Morse and Melita Jurisic in Annie Baker’s John suggest what she might do with a large enough palette. She also did a very successful production of the Virginia Gay rethinking of that most romantic of tragicomedies Cyrano. It was a show with a lot of warmth and a very broad appeal. But you never know with theatre companies. You wonder if Kate Cherry who ran Black Swan in Perth and then became the head of Nida could be persuaded to run a theatre company again. It’s not hard to be convinced that the head of a company knows what she’s doing when she knows how to cast. Sigrid Thornton’s Blanche in Streetcar for Black Swan was superb and the production Cherry did of The Glass Mengagerie had Ben Mendelsohn as Tom and Pia Miranda as the girl with her treasured glass creatures. Guy Pierce played Chance in her Sweet Bird of Youth to Wendy Hughes’ Alexandra del Lago. Was it Peter Hall who said directing was 60 per cent casting? Cherry also did a classic production of a new Australian play when she directed Hannie Rayson’s Life after George with Richard Piper and Julia Blake. It would also have been good if we had seen more of Cherry’s husband, Kenneth Ransom. Kenny is a born leading man.