It would have been interesting to hear Barrie Kosky and Kip Williams talk about the theatre on Tuesday night. In the last 30 years Barrie Kosky has built up a reputation as a great theatrical innovator. The first glimpse of him in the Nineties at Melbourne university made you reach for the word wunderkind – not least because of his production of Don Giovanni with student singers. He was palpably a magician of the theatre and perhaps especially of the opera. And as things have developed with his reign at the Komische Oper he has for all his consummate theatricality blended with the contemporary German tendency to present an interpretation that is in dialogue with the work. Australian instances of this: the way he rejigged The Flying Dutchman or his colourful mutation of Nabucco always had the music to fall back on which was not true of all his ventures into – are we allowed to use the term? – the theatre proper. There was a King Lear decades ago full of strange chants as well as insertions of ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy’, but it was one of those productions where everyone seemed to be losing her head except the king played by the everlasting John Bell. Kosky is always visually ravishing but then some necessary question of the play has to be considered. It was almost as if he didn’t want anyone else’s words put into his mouth, almost as if a predetermined text served as an impediment to him. This was even true of his production of The Trojan Women with Robyn Nevin which met with such ill luck but which certainly represented an attempt on Kosky’s part to meet with one of the great magnetic forces of Australian theatre. Robin Nevin certainly found him a deeply sympathetic directorial presence. And he spoke the other night of the absolute sanctity of government funding to the opera in German.

Kip Williams has made a name for himself because of the way he has used projections in order to fill the stage with images and apparent characters especially in The Picture of Dorian Gray which was such a spectacular hit first with Eryn-Jean Norvill and then with Nikki Shiels. Next year we’re told Sarah Snook, no less, will be doing the one-man show in London.

We should, of course, be careful of attributing the one-hander to Kip Williams projectionist hijinks. It was possible to catch in a long-ago 1960’s childhood John Gielgud doing his one-man Shakespeare show The Ages of Man and watch, dazzled from the front stalls, tears pouring down his face when he did the ‘Howl’ from King Lear.

And if Wilde is what you’re after, you could, back in 1964, see the great Irish actor Micheál MacLiammóir in The Importance of Being Oscar, a one-man show by an actor Orson Welles adored, so comprehensive that it not only included graphic extracts from Dorian Gray but the handbag scene from The Importance of Being Earnest (with MacLiammóir effortlessly switching from Lady Bracknell’s voice to Worthing’s) and the whole of The Ballad of Reading Gaol and a chunk of the letter to Bosie De Profundis. Even Herod’s speech aghast at Salome, in Oscar’s original French.

The one-man show can simply be the suggestiveness of a great actor’s voice. None of which is to deny that it would be a thrilling thing to see Sarah Snook – the most highly regarded Australian actress of her generation – lighting up the stage with a whole theatre of characters. Sarah Snook is world famous because of Succession. It’s worth remembering that when Matthew Warchus of the Old Vic was asked why he had cast her in Ibsen’s The Master Builder he said ‘to keep Ralph on his toes’ which is a pretty extraordinary statement given Ralph Fiennes’ reputation.

But we should keep an open mind on the projections. It’s something which Opera Australia in their co-production of Mozart’s Idomeneo (with Victorian Opera and featuring the German/Canadian tenor Michael Sharde) will be using to animate this bit of opera seria.

If Mozart is the world’s paradigm of youthful genius, it’s worth bearing in mind Xavier Dolan, that extraordinary French-Canadian film director who seems to have been making films since he was a child. Films like I Killed My Mother and Mommy that have claims to be seen as pre-eminent masterpieces of our time. At the moment SBS On Demand is showing a five-part miniseries by Xavier Dolan, The Night Logan Woke Up, and it’s as dark and bewildering and as full of an extraordinary ability to dramatise time as you could imagine. Anne Dorval, who played the mother in Mommy is utterly – almost unbelievably – different and powerful.

The fundamental datum of the show is that Mireille, the daughter of the family, was raped by Logan who lives nearby. The crime is alluded to over and over so that we see the once-teenage girl, (played by Jasmine Lemée), as a forty-something woman, magnificent and pained, (Julie Le Breton) as she prepares her mother’s body for embalming. Dolan can do what he likes in the way he conjures time and the recreation of time. Le Breton is staggering as Mireille and we also see her brought alive in a fifteen-year-old flashback (when she was thirtyish) just as we see her brother Julian, a dark enigma of a character. The Night Logan Woke Up is a mystery that is all but inscrutable and which shuffles so many hypothetical cards in the mind that you feel as if you’re at the precipice of absolute extremity.

Dolan captures the brutality of the way a mother can talk to a teenage daughter and the way families can turn into writhing snakes of hatred.

Not everyone will like this masterpiece of a show, but it has an extraordinary power which is in no way incompatible with the brutal majesty of violence or the looming sense of deceptions that can eat people alive. Dolan himself plays a brother in his thirties though it’s Dorval as the mother and Le Breton as the 45-year-old Mireille who make you gasp at the power of the art that falls like a fatality at every twist and turn. Dolan is a genius and he makes Montreal seem like one of the world’s great centres of civilisation.