Arts editor HELEN MUSA previews the Canberra Theatre Centre’s new season

THE Canberra Theatre has chosen a strangely bookish title for its 2012 subscription season – “Collected Works”.

The title conjures up the idea of a canon of works, such as the Bible or the complete works of Shakespeare, and that means that it’s very solid.

Without doubt, the Belvoir Theatre production of Ray Lawler’s “Summer of the Seventeenth Doll,” directed by Neil Armfield, is a great coup. It’s a rare chance  to see an account of a play that showed us ourselves and our illusions for the first time.

Some inclusions are expected and unknown, with “Terrain” from Bangarra Dance Theatre still on the drawing board and “The Land of Yes and The Land of No”, the Australian revival of a European creation by director of the Sydney Dance Company, Rafael Bonachela.

Old favourites are Sydney Theatre Company with next year’s  “Wharf Revue” and a co-production between the STC and the Melbourne Theatre Company of comedian Jonathan Biggins’s play “Australia Day”. With an all-star cast, it asks the burning question: “Is a sausage sizzle too monocultural?”

It’s been a long time getting here, but at last we’ll see Big hART’s  production of “Ngapartji Ngapartji (one)”, with Trevor Jamieson alone in the play about the Cold War era for Aboriginal Australians that he created with Scott Rankin and family members.

No surprises to see that former Queensland Theatre company director Michael Gow’s production of “Don Giovanni” is coming from OzOpera. That’s now billing itself as “Opera Australia’s Oz Opera,” in case you might confuse it with any other cut-down opera companies.

And there’s Bell Shakespeare. First up is the notorious Scottish play, “Macbeth”, the very mention of which turns actors’ veins to ice, directed by Peter Evans who brought us “Julius Caesar”, with Kate Mulvany, (who played Cassius) as a “highly erotic” Lady Macbeth. In the hope of scoring a hit such as “Twelfth Night”, Lee Lewis returns to Bell directing, not Shakespeare, but Moliere, with “The School for Wives”.

And outside the square? There’s “Midsummer”,  a happy musical about a bad weekend from Edinburgh’s exciting Traverse Theatre.

Then there’s Sasha Regan’s all-male production of the “Pirates of Penzance” from London, named Best Off-West End Production at the 2010 What’s On Stage Awards.  Similarly eyebrow raising, from New York comes Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, known as “the Trocks”, another all-male production and nothing like Matthew Bourne’s production of “Swan Lake”.

Finally, to finish this year of classics on a more sedate note is Belvoir’s production of Noel Coward’s “Private Lives”. But with the enticing Toby Schmitz

(seen last year in “Much Ado About Nothing”) starring, you can bet that won’t be tame fare.

More information and bookings at canberratheatrecentre.com.au