So the Matthew Warchus/Jack Thorne A Christmas Carol opened again to just as rapturous a response as it did a year ago though this year we had the Welsh actor Owen Teale – best known in a popular context as the villain who killed Kit Harrington in Game of Thrones – as that old moneybags miser, Ebenezer Scrooge. It’s a story that goes so deep in our culture and somehow this version of it animates every audience to the point of exhilaration if not ecstasy. The first night the audience roared with delight. It was as if Dickens’ reanimation of the Christmas story was brought alive to them like a lost dream. A friend took his twelve-year-old granddaughter who adored it and so did a Gen Z-er who is a performer herself and one of the toughest judges of theatre you could encounter. We sometimes forget that the experience of gorgeous theatre, the kind of theatre that looks like magic is ideally experienced at an age like twelve and if it is it will stay with you for life.

Every critic has had the unhappy experience of panning the work of people she likes and admires. It must have been around 1960 that Frank Thring – that mesmerising Melbourne eccentric – played the title role in the play actors still refer to superstitiously as the Scottish tragedy. He had been in the legendary Peter Brook production of Titus Andronicus with the Oliviers, he had played Pontius Pilate in Ben Hur and Herod in The King of Kings so he might have seemed to be in with a chance as the soulful villain with a soul. But no, everyone hated it. Poor Frank Thring who was wonderful in that old comedy The Man Who Came to Dinner was universally deemed to be a shocker as the thane. He contacted Harry Standish and said, ‘Harry was I really that bad?’ ‘Frank,’ Standish replied, ‘You were terrible.’ And Thring said what a ghastly thing it was to repeat a failure night after night for a month or more of performances.

The commercial theatre has made a tremendous effort to catch up with the way the pandemic closed down the world (not least the city of Melbourne) but it’s still a bit amazing that the Michael Cassell group is proclaiming with such delight that MJ: The Musical – the Michael Jackson musical – which has garnered multiple Tony awards is coming to Sydney in 2025. It sounds on the face of it a weird idea for a show. Take one of the greatest dancers in any field since Nijinsky – now that’s going to be easy to cast – and then add into the mix an extraordinarily weird personality. It was as if the boy who had been pushed into group stardom by his overbearing father to be a member of the Jackson Five somehow felt psychically obliged to recreate his childhood with his young visitors but was this an innocent thing because at some level he was still pining for the childhood he never had or was it creepy as we sometimes imagined. There were witnesses and counter-witnesses, the trial was such a mesmerising thing that we watched it with actors playing the real-life figures and repeating the real-life words. And then there were people like Elizabeth Taylor who maintained that Michael Jackson was as clean living as the next little boy. People seemed to be lying in every direction and people revised their statements and there at the centre of it was the white-faced black man who danced like an angel and was also the victim of a cornucopia of deadly drugs.

But there’s no disputing that Michael Jackson is a fascinating figure and somehow there’s the sense that it’s the art which will last longest. But who would knock back the chance to see a show about this whirling enigma who is such a figure of tragedy?

The most famous of all tragic heroes Hamlet has been on show in a production directed by Campbell Thompson at Ormond College which ends on Saturday night. Any production of the play about the man in black who meditates on why he doesn’t avenge his father’s murder will produce its startling moments and revelations and it’s not hard to imagine them multiplying in the directorial consciousness of Campbell Thompson whose conception of theatre is very influenced by the work of that extraordinary man Peter King. On YouTube there’s a Trevor Nunn doco about famous Hamlets where you can see Vittorio Gassman the great Italian actor and Maximillian Schell though you have to guess at the meaning of the Italian and German from the context because they are not subtitled.

Many years ago – in fact in 1964, the four-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth – the London-based Australian actor Keith Michell did an anthology of Shakespeare’s work with another very distinguished expatriate Googie Withers (and she did The Cherry Orchard with Frank Thring in 1973). There was a full supporting cast and a 50-minute abridgement of Antony and Cleopatra. Some people remember from their childhoods the moment when Michell’s Hamlet’s hand shook convulsively when he realised he had killed Polonius.

Six, the musical that turns the wives of Henry VIII into storming rock chicks is a reminder that Keith Michell was a very distinguished monster monarch for the BBC in The Six Wives of Henry VIII in 1970 just before Glenda Jackson took the world by storm in Elizabeth R.

It was sad to see the passing of Antonia Byatt the other week. She was one of the most distinguished writers of her generation and her The Virgin in the Garden and The Frederica Quartet series is liable to last as long as there is a memory of the period it reflects. The sister of Margaret Drabble also wrote Possession, a romance about two very viable Victorian writers, brilliantly sustained and with an extraordinary wind-in-the-hair excitement.

You sometimes wonder if there is any limit to the talent and the breadth of mind of Tim Winton. The other night we stumbled on Ningaloo Nyinggulu, a doco about the aquatic and other wonders of a hidden world. Whale sharks, beauteous wallabies, blind centipedes. And there in the far Western centre of it there’s Winton. Literate, rhapsodic and enthralled. It’s free on ABC iView.