Sometimes you’re just too clapped out to attend the most sparkling bit of theatre and so it was for your columnist the night of the opening of the great Max Gillies’ one-man show at Melbourne’s fortyfivedownstairs.

It sounds however like a delight. The subterranean venue (impossible for the halt down those rickety stairs) has seen its wonders. Some years ago there was a production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America in which Helen Morse, as the mother, out-acted anyone in the history of the theatre of the world including Meryl Streep.

And now here was Gillies. He did a long extract from Jack Hibberd’s A Stretch of the Imagination much of it off-stage as if he were visiting a script which was once the text of his soul and the effect of Gillies vocalising off-stage was very moving. I saw Max Gillies do Stretch and it was one of the greatest performances I have ever seen anywhere – not excluding any of the great theatre dames and knights and their equals: the Maggie Smiths, the Peter O’Tooles, the John Malkoviches and Vanessa Redgraves. It wasn’t ‘better’ than Peter Cummins (who created the role and whom you can hear an ABC radio recording of) but it was extraordinary.

Max Gillies is a legend and after the Stretch sequence he did Beckett’s Eh Joe in which he responded to the ethereal tones of the voice of Jillian Murray. Then there was that old comedic favourite, Chekhov’s stand-up sketch On the Evils of Tobacco. It didn’t matter – it was reported back – that he fluffed some lines: this Gillies show wasn’t about recapitulations, it was a celebration of the magic that remained and defied any sense of ruin.

Max Gillies who might have spent his time with the renaissance of the Australian play (or indeed with Brecht and Beckett and Chekhov): what a Hamm he might have been, what a Galileo, but he had become a household word in one of the great moments of Australian satire which swept in with the great transformation effected by the Hawke/Keating government.

The Gillies Report did for the economically bone-dry, socially liberal technocrats of a Labor that led the world what Edna Everage did for the suburban matron. Gillies captured the cartoonery of the time as it was being sketched. The nation was riveted. It was as if we saw Bob Hawke in particular with new eyes because Max Gillies turned into him and all at once we saw the goblin king where once Hawkie had charmed the world.

Much later, armed with a Guy Rundle script, Gillies appropriated Barry Humphries’ Sandy Stone as a vehicle for John Howard.

Left to my own devices I followed a tip to have another look at Judgement at Nuremberg, that massively articulated film about the Nazi trials from 1961. Kramer was famous for his liberal trial films.

In Judgement at Nuremberg Spencer Tracy plays an American judge who has to try a set of his German judicial peers who are accused of having collaborated with the atrocities of the Nazis. The film includes one of the greater performances in the history of the cinema from Maximilian Schell as the defence counsel and it is the first incarnation of Burt Lancaster all but camouflaged as a great European actor.

And presiding over all this is Spencer Tracy who gives what is probably his greatest performance as a craggy man of integrity intent on justice.

The faces of justice are brilliantly depicted in Philippe Sands’ 38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia which has just appeared in the last few weeks. Pinochet deposed Salvador Allende and a liberal Spanish judge did everything in his power to extradite him (while he was in London) and put him on trial.

Philippe Sands was invited to Chile to give the Bolaño Lecture, the writer whose work we had thrust into our hands by the eminent New York critic Susan Sontag. We inwardly groaned our gratitude but the two books – translated by Australia’s Chris Andrews – were By Night in Chile and Nazi Literature in the Americas.

Bolaño is one of the very greatest writers of the last forty years and someone at the Bolaño event reminded him that Bruce Chatwin mentions Walter Rauff (the Nazi in Patagonia) in his factual novel In Patagonia and Bolaño does the same thing in relation to the Nazi who designed a gas van to kill the maximum number of Jews and ended up in Chile.

One of the weird things about Philippe Sands’ Pinochet/Rauff book is the way the partly fictional re-creation illuminates the truth he uncovers.

And when the book was released in Chile a few weeks ago it hit the bestseller list and was bought by a stack of people, some fraction of whom were pro-Pinochet.

Philippe Sands points out the things that escaped Britain’s home secretary Jack Straw – and his advisor Jonathan Sumption (later Lord Sumption) – when they were given evidence from doctors that he was not fit to plead.

Philippe Sands says they didn’t talk to Pinochet’s interpreter, Jean Pateras, who hated him but also had a soft spot for him.

But this huge legal conundrum has receded from the collective consciousness which means it can be read as a weird sort of detective story with legal reasoning at its centre.

Lord Sumption reviewing 38 Londres Street in this magazine said Philippe Sands ghosts his characters with the stylistic care of Thucydides. This is not true if you see the great Greek historian as reducing all his figures to his own style of speechmaking but it is true in the sense that each of Sands’ figures is placed and their cadences shaped with the skill of a great fiction-maker. And 38 Londres Street is one of those books grounded in truth which are so powerfully embodied that they approximate to the condition of fiction. They fictionalise because they are so powerfully imagined.

What Philippe Sands does is take a group of lawyers who might appear to be minor characters (though they include Tom Bingham, cited sometimes as the brightest of the Law Lords) and presents them as potential oracles, every nuance of their verbal arguments lit and underlined as if they were, by necessity and with considerable brilliance and contrivance, the saviours of the world, at least potentially.

There’s a parallel somewhere here with Max Gillies, the voice soaring or stumbling, the stage sometimes empty.