The appointment of Dean Bryant as head of the Malthouse Theatre took some of us by surprise. He had just done Circle Mirror Transformation for the Sydney Theatre Company with Rebecca Gibney adding her star lustre to proceedings. The play itself was the work of Annie Baker who has written some fraction of the masterpieces of the last dramatic stretch, in particular Aliens and The Flick which were directed here, incomparably, by Nadia Tass.

But Dean Bryant has always seemed an establishment director in a perfectly honourable sense, fascinated by the musical when it is thought of afresh and it’s characteristic of him that he should have done a version of My Brilliant Career co-written with Sheridan Harbridge and with his partner Matthew Frank.

Dean Bryant has always been a director who can re-think the musical – for instance in productions stretching back to his unforgettable and dazzling Sweet Charity – and he has always seemed fascinated by the idea of female casting that went against convention. Hence casting Miriam Margolyes against type in The Lady in the Van in a way which was earthy beyond the gestures of Dame Maggie Smith.

Dean Bryant seems to have steeped himself in the history of the Malthouse despite his lack of obvious affinity with previous directors like Michael Kantor (and his lieutenant Stephen Armstrong). He is not wrong when he says, ‘The Malthouse has always been the place for work that crackles with now-ness. Theatre that surprises you, unsettles you, seduces you. I want every show to feel like an event.’

The announcement is certainly that and in some ways it’s as arresting and surprising a bit of artistic and directional casting as that of Anne-Louise Sarks as the head of the Melbourne Theatre Company. You get the strong sense of selection committees who are very reliant on their perception of a candidate’s ability to run a theatre company rather than an especial intimacy with the kind of theatre that they are liable to want to stage.

But there’s no particular reason to doubt that Dean Bryant’s fascination with mainstream shows will yield comparable fruits and excitements to Anne-Louise Sarks’ Streetcar with Nikki Shiels or to such recent MTC productions as Sigrid Thornton in Mother Play or Mitchell Butel’s Kimberly Akimbo or the current South African commission Destiny.

Artistic directors rise to occasions unpredictably. Dean Bryant may be the most mainstream head of the Malthouse since it was called The Playbox Theatre under the directorship of Carrillo Gantner but that may be a liberating thing. Carrillo Gantner was an enthusiast for Australian plays and it was through him that we saw the original production of Hannie Rayson’s Hotel Sorrento. Personal ambition of a perfectly defensible kind can be the great spur to personal and supervisory achievement.

Dean Bryant speaks of ‘Craft that dazzles…. Theatre that knows it’s theatre and uses that to conjure something that our screens never can.’

Well, they’re different mediums however closely related. Just at the moment Sarah Goodes – who would have had high claims to inherit the MTC – is mounting a Joanna Murray-Smith version of The Talented Mr Ripley with Will McDonald from Heartbreak High in the role we have seen – on screen indeed – played by everyone from Alain Delon to Matt Damon. Of course, Joanna Murray-Smith has a special claim to adapt this material because her play Switzerland has such an arresting take on the story. And it’s fascinating that Dame Helen Mirren is to play the role of Patricia Highsmith in the film of Switzerland directed by Anton Corbijn.

Sarah Pierce – currently on Binge and Foxtel in a third season of The Twelve with Sam Neill – played Highsmith brilliantly on stage. Mirren can be seen on YouTube doing Strindberg’s Miss Julie, one of the greatest plays ever written – though perhaps not a greater one than Middleton’s The Changeling which she also did for BBC TV in 1974 – but if you want entertainment light as air have a look at the The Thursday Murder Club on Netflix.

Remember the days before Covid when baby boomers and their juniors would go to see what were classified – a bit derisively – as old duck films for a glimpse of the great ladies of the British theatre. Some of these films like the Charles Dance directed Ladies in Lavender presented Maggie Smith and Judi Dench at the height of their powers and that’s true too of Zeffirelli’s Tea with Mussolini where Cher takes it up to Dame Maggie and shows she is an actress of the same stature.

There were some utterly banal old duck films too but The Thursday Murder Club eventually wins the viewer over just as the original books have had the success of the plagues of Egypt.

In The Thursday Murder Club Dame Mirren is a former head of M16 and she is the resident of an elegant old folks home where her comrades in arms are a trade unionist played by Pierce Brosnan and a former psychiatrist called Ibrahim who is an expert on post-traumatic stress disorder played by Ben Kingsley. The whole shebang looks like being sold by the wicked David Tennant but the detection trio enlist the aid of a star nurse (played by Celia Imrie) as well as a smart and very likeable young policewoman (Naomi Ackie).

With all the effort to hold on to your reasoning powers this blatant appeal to nostalgia and the spirit of cultural empire just wins you over. It survives every mad incident in the book and has an ending that makes you lust for the astringencies of Reacher, one of the favourite pastimes of Dame Margaret Drabble when she’s slumming it. But The Thursday Murder Club is such a dynamically conceived diversion, directed by Chris Columbus who made the first two Home Alones as well as two Harry Potter films.

It’s a winner and you will ultimately delight in the way it turns your brain to mush.

By the way: Robert Wilson, mentioned in last week’s column, was set to do a show about Mary Queen of Scots in Adelaide with Isabelle Huppert. That most hypnotic of French actresses once shared the stage with Anna Massey in Schiller’s masterpiece, Mary Stuart.