The combinations and permutations of different forms of artistic activity are always weird. Stacks of people will want to see Tyler Atkin’s Bosch and Rockit which features the young blond boy Rasmus King (a striking, largely silent figure in the surfie series Barons) and Luke Hemsworth, the eldest of the three brothers of that clan, as his dad who’s doing his best to avoid the hand of the law and experiencing gulfs of communion with the boy who thinks he’s on some sort of magical mystery tour. They’re both marvellous and Rasmus King is set to play that musical magician Daniel Johns whose group Silverchair turned into Australia’s top band in the late Nineties. But the power of Bosch and Rockit shows how much we need heartwarmers which are also weird enough to ring true to life.

Of course if you want music from the mouth of the lion you will be lining up to book your tickets to Simon Rattle’s tour next year in his last stint as conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra: he’ll be doing John Adams, Debussy and Ravel in Melbourne next May as well as that spectacular work Mahler’s Seventh while Sydney will get in addition to these the LSO’s interpretation of Bruckner’s Eighth. It’s strange to think that within living memory Sir Simon Rattle was the bright young boy who somehow had the world listening to the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra because of the sounds he could get out of them when they played Mahler to the extent where the Penguin Stereo Guide would sometimes rank the Birmingham/Rattle recordings above or on par with those of the greatest twentieth century conductors.

Do we see those comedies like Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow which Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni made with De Sica as great art or just knockabout comedy? The Italian Film Festival which starts on Sept 15 will provide a chance to make a judgment. Loren was one of those Italian stars who absolutely made it in Hollywood. She’s in El Cid, the medieval spectacular with Charlton Heston, and she even made a film of Shaw’s The Millionairess with Peter Sellers. Besides, she won the Oscar in her own right (not in the foreign film category) for De Sica’s Two Women in 1962.

Mastroianni was never a household name outside of Italy but he was in some of the greatest films ever made. Not only Antonioni’s La Notte with Jeanne Moreau but Fellini’s La Dolce Vita as well as giving that extraordinary performance in 8½ where high comedy – and Marcello was a high comedian to rank with Rex Harrison – turns into something else, a lightning art that can encompass all the potential tragedy in the world.

Arthur Miller tells the story in his memoirs of how Mastroianni – a stage actor like his contemporary Vittorio Gassman, the person everyone should listen to reciting Dante, the Italian Olivier – was rehearsing Miller’s After the Fall, the play about Marilyn Monroe, in Italy and he paused in his endeavours and said, in some wonderment to Miller, ‘All this fuss over a woman!’ And when Miller said, ‘Why, what would you have done?’ replied with a shrug, ‘Take a walk.’

The woman in his life, or one of them, was in fact a great beauty who was also in a less thwarted way than Monroe a great actress, Catherine Deneuve.

But Marcello always sent up everything including his own artistry. Acting? It was something he did while he was thinking of something else.

A lot more people would have seen Sigrid Thornton in Sea Change and long before it All the Rivers Run and The Man from Snowy River than have ever seen her on stage but Sydney will get its chance when she makes her debut with the Sydney Theatre Company in The Lifespan of a Fact. As an actress she’s sometimes confused with the sweetness of her most famous characters where she is dramatically capable of great coldness and toughness. And her Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire for Kate Cherry’s Black Swan Theatre Compay in Perth held its own with anyone’s including Cate Blanchett’s. There are also the might-have-beens in any actor’s career. Apparently many years ago Bruce Beresford – the man who made Don’s Party and Driving Miss Daisy and who writes for this magazine – wanted Sigrid Thornton to play Evonne Goolagong. It’s interesting that the indigenous actress Tasma Walton played her daughter in the pilot of Little Oberon in 2005 which seemed very fine and deserved much more of a chance.

There’s a school of thought, an indomitable one, that says Kip Williams at the Sydney Theatre Company wants to eliminate the actor, or at least any quantity of them, in the world of backward projections which can take a couple of thesps and turn them into a whole theatre (or is it cinema?) of types. He did it with great success in The Portrait of Dorian Gray with Erin Jean Norvill eventually alternating with Nikki Shiels and he’s done it again in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde with Ewen Leslie and Matthew Backer which has just had its season extended. The Wilde and the Stevenson are both homages to the late Victorian cult of the glamour of evil.

You wonder if the new Robert Harris thriller Act of Oblivion will make it onto the English stage. His detective stories about the Roman lawyer and orator Cicero did. The new one out in September from Penguin/Random House is about the regicides who executed Charles I and the hunt that was made for them. Harris showed how brilliantly he could animate history in An Officer and a Spy which brings alive the Dreyfus case – the infamous saga of the French soldier who was condemned as a traitor – with absolute attention to the long stairway of the historical record. Act of Oblivion would be liable to make a riveting bit of dramatic reconstruction and it has the weird advantage that the English Civil War and the execution of the Stuart king effectively ended the greatest period of English drama. The Restoration was a different thing.

If the Brits do it, however, chances are they’ll find a different sense of epic and horror than projections provide.