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With productions staged by two acclaimed British directors, Stephen Daldry and Howard Davies, dominating Sydney theatre this month, the state capital could be said to be a Little Britain.
If that brings to mind the eccentric characters of the popular TV series of that name, it is intended to do so.
Stephen Daldry's staging of J.B. Priestley's 1946 An Inspector Calls, a social drama disguised as a whodunit, overflows the action from the writer's confined drawing-room setting into the harsh surrounding landscape of an English industrial city in 1912, with the world looking on silently in the form of street kids and later a cross-section of the working class.
Howard Davies, on the other hand, keeps the doomed aristocrats of Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard in their sealed small world but forgets that while Chekhov labelled his 1904 play a comedy the Chekhovian definition of that word means human comedy, with irony and darkness always behind the laughter.
There are a lot of laughs spread across the three-hours-plus of Davies's Cherry Orchard but the audience scarcely feels the compassion it should have for the characters. It's rare that the watcher escapes the sense that these are actors acting.
Daldry at least intends his production to be theatrical.
The faded curtains rise when one of the street urchins kicks to life an old radio and passionate music accompanies the revelation of the setting.
When a factory owner's snobbish wife later descends a staircase from her mansion onto the street, the maid quickly unrolls a carpet for ma'am to walk on, to emphasise the woman's airs and graces.
The plot of An Inspector Calls has the title character arriving at the factory owner's home on the night that the family is celebrating the engagement of its daughter to a rival mill owner's son.
Inspector Goole is investigating the suicide of a young woman and he gradually reveals that each member of the family, as well as the daughter's fiance, had crossed her path and been responsible for actions that had contributed to her desperate action.
When Priestley wrote the play 60 years ago, he hoped that its message, "we are all responsible for each other", would encourage Britons to be less self-seeking.
Daldry had a similar aim when he first staged the current production for Britain's National Theatre in 1992, using the grasping nouveau-riche to comment on the Thatcherism of the day.
While this An Inspector Calls has had remarkable success this is its second visit to Australia the often spectacular theatricality too often works against the play.
The gaunt onlookers in beautifully lit shadows and the literal collapse of the world of the nouveau-riche around them catch the eye but make even more heavy-handed the message that Priestley laid on with a trowel.
If an unfamiliar British cast does a good job between the theatrical effects in An Inspector Calls, an excellent collection of Australian actors is under-served in The Cherry Orchard.
The play deals with the unwillingness of a group of aristocrats, headed by widow Ranyevskaya (Robyn Nevin), to accept that they can no longer expect to live a life of luxury based on the toil of others following the freeing of the serfs in late 19th century Russia.
Ranyevskaya and her playboy brother (John Gaden) laugh at former family serf Lopakhin (Philip Quast in the production's one moving performance) whose enterprise in freedom has set him up as a comfortable member of the middle class, even though his sensible proposal for selling the family's little-used cherry orchard for subdivision into holiday-home blocks would end their financial woes.
Davies's staging is as lethargic as the aristocrats, and he isn't helped by an adaptation by Australian writer Andrew Upton full of jarring words and phrases.
Instead of underlining the universality of the play, Upton's "bloody hell", "crap artist" and "all go-go-go" just reinforce what a disappointing production this is.
