Everyone who has read the work of the late great Thomas Bernhard, the Austrian novelist forever spitting his fellow Austrians out of his mouth, notes the richness of the figure of the Actor in his very exuberant book Woodcutters. We were stimulated by this at the same time that we were being sucked in by the the Austro-German streamer Der Pass (Pagan Peak on Apple TV). It’s one of those shows that takes its bearings from the Danish/Swedish confluence in The Bridge, cultures intimately connected and contrasted. It was not hard watching the Austrian Nicholas Ofczarek to imagine him as the Actor. We were fascinated to see the burly dissipated-looking Ofczarek has not only done Jedermann twice at Salzburg, but from 5 November is doing Bernhard’s Holzfällen (i.e. Woodcutters) followed by Richard III at Vienna’s Burgtheater.

He plays a flawed drug-taking figure, breathtaking in his panache and mesmerising in his dramatic magnetism. His character does zig-zagging deals breaking the law to capture its spirit. Der Pass has a character who is a card-carrying sadist who is enlisted to lure the murderer and it is also full of the macaberie of the Krampus figures who at Christmas pursue, or feign to, children who haven’t been good. It has a densely literary script and looks as though it has been shot in wintry monochrome until a dash of red illuminates the world. It also recalls Auden’s remark that Nazism was Catholic Austria’s revenge on Prussian Germany. But Nicholas Ofczarek makes you want to book tickets to the Bernhard and Shakespeare to which he is likely to bring his histrionic majesty. An economical alternative would be to bring Ofczarek to one of our arts festivals.

How saddening it is to see that Ian Judge has died. He directed one of the very finest productions of an opera ever mounted in Australia when he did Gounod’s Faust for the old Victoria State Opera. He had an absolute belief in how opera could be made to come alive and he was self-taught in the deepest way. He would say of a famous singer, ‘I stopped her being dull’ or ‘eventually I had her not only holding the whip but cracking it’. But he would also say that the renowned American baritone Thomas Hampson was too operatic and heavy when he recorded show tunes which was a pity because he was so lively and understated when he did opera. And what was his apprenticeship with Verdi? ‘Over and over I watched Domingo as Otello with [Carlos] Kleiber in the pit.’ He didn’t mind if a production was ‘clapped out’ if it had this kind of musical grandeur but he was fascinated by the connections between music and speech.

He said the great quality that Moss Hart (who directed the Rex Harrison/Julie Andrews My Fair Lady and the Richard Burton/Julie Andrews Camelot) had was that he was a master of the mystery of how speech could issue into song and seem natural. He thought the same thing of Hal Prince and he had a parallel story of how he immersed himself in theatre: he just watched Othello with Olivier in the title role, Frank Finlay as Iago and Maggie Smith as Desdemona over and over until it was a part of him.

He also loved the fact that someone famous as a singer Alfred Drake (who created the lead roles in Oklahoma!, Kiss Me Kate and Kismet) could also play the King in the John Gielgud-directed Hamlet with Richard Burton in 1964 on Broadway. He had a similar experience when he did Henry VIII spectacularly at Chichester using veteran television actors like Tony Britton as Wolsey. It didn’t matter, he said, all that ancient Rada elocutionary skill was still there, perfectly and athletically preserved.

He was fascinated by Anthony Warlow during his stints in Australia and would like to have seen him do Carousel because of the lightness of touch he could bring to his baritonal prowess.

Ian Judge also did an offbeat Wizard of Oz with the young Imelda Staunton whose performance in Mrs Warren’s Profession with her daughter Bessie Carter (from Bridgerton) which we’ll see broadcast here from 23 October. It will be fascinating to see what she makes of the role of the madam with the mathematical wrangler of a daughter.

On YouTube you should be able to find the version with Coral Browne who uses her own Australian accent for Mrs Warren and, from memory, has a very credible daughter in Penelope Wilton. Many years ago Imelda Staunton did a BBC Radio Pygmalion in which she was matched by the Higgins of Dinsdale Landen. Elijah Moshinsky told me that Imelda Staunton’s performance in Gypsy was one of the greatest things he had ever seen which was high praise from the one-time Melburnian who had directed Shadowlands (the play about C.S. Lewis) on stage and Ibsen’s Ghosts with Judi Dench and Ken Branagh on television.

It would have been good if Moshinsky had done that Uluru Ring Cycle he dreamt of with Sidney Nolan. As a student I saw his Hamlet with Horatio, a dope-smoking bad guy who channelled the Ghost. His staging of that late dark Verdi masterpiece Don Carlos was superb. A revival of his Barber of Seville opens on October 31.

It was a remote possibility that loomed this week, the Nobel Prize for Literature, being given to Gerald Murnane. An old literary editor friend rang with some quotes from years ago attesting to Gerald’s greatness: the minimalism, the monotony, the music and the magic that came from the distillation. That was before the New York Review of Books essay about Gerald from our resident Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee but you suspect there has to be concerted political support for someone to win the Nobel as Patrick White did in 1973 at the height of cultural Whitlamism. I’m grateful to my friend Andrew Fuhrmann for at least making me aware of who László Krasznahorkai (this year’s winner) is.

Diane Keaton was inseparable from the 1970s. ‘La de da’ she would say as Annie Hall in that role for which she won an Oscar. But who else could have combined this with the absolute reality she brought to Warren Beatty’s Reds or the extraordinary way she complements Al Pacino in The Godfather films. She seems to have been a bright, kindly, easygoing person, loyal and unfettered by convention, but what an extraordinary actor.