Chris Goode is an utterly beguiling theatre maker, and The Hippo World Guest Book opened Lean Upstream, a festival devoted to his boundary-blurring work. Goode's erudite, funny website burrows into ideas or sets them juggling. He is also the only person to have performed a play in my home. We Must Perform a Quirkafleeg was a deceptively rambling tour round geekboy obsession, full of facts and whimsy, but building towards pure wonder. At the close, he simply left the building, after having traced his outline in salt on the floor. We stepped around the salty silhouette for days, as if living in a Weegee crime scene. (He did, however, refuse food, a terrible rebuke to my inner Jewish mother, even though I pursued him round the room with platters of filo pastry.)

Homestyle suits Goode's manner - he's a big chap, with a shy boy's bulk and an enthusiasm that feels personal. He has, I remembered tonight at the beginning of The Hippo World Guest Book, the gentlest smile and softest voice, both wonderfully employed here to suggest the beaming hopes of early web communities. Other than a recorded introduction by Oliver Postgate, the late, solemn-toned master of British children's television, all the words come from the edited guestbook of an American hippo-fancier's website. Goode beautifully replicates the juddery spelling and grammar, recites the punctuation (exclamation mark) and obeys the convention that capital letters might suggest RANDOM SHOUTING. The early sections of the show are hippo-snortingly funny.

But a site designed to burble enthusiasm for all things hippoid (hippotudinous?) is soon rattled by recalcitrant schoolkids, glinting pornsters and people who really really dislike hippos - or, at least, who wish to vex those who love them. 'Osama bin Laden' is just one of the hippo haters. Defenders of the portly grey beast refute them, perhaps unwisely; their harried, desperately reasonable messages read like outtakes from Ban Ki-moon's email account.

Goode approaches the scamps, trolls and cyberanonymous postures perfectly seriously - as if even the crudest, daftest, attention-baiting message represents an expression of inner need. He beams sweetly whenever someone says they love hippos ('sooooo much'); or, with grave sincerity, he opines that hippos are less attractive than, say, Johnny Depp, or that hippos may be working with the squid to undermine humanity. Even the shouts seem wrenched from a place of distress (the net turns out to be a place where people can hear you scream) - Goode waggles his hands helplessly as the sudden volume jolts his body forwards.

All these voices slowly disappear, and the guest book becomes an unweeded garden, its visitors howling at an empty cybersky. The site grinds to a close, choked by spam - but even here, Goode excavates a nugget of hope, wistfully seizing on the filter-dodging, cliffhanger scraps of narrative embedded in autogenerated spam.

Goode prefaced the performance by saying it was the last time he'd perform the piece. But he has Postgate's recording, and a small stuffed hippo - someone should really persuade him to revive it again. And again. I felt melancholy by the end, and slipped away before Goode's post-performance conversation with the estimable critic Matt Trueman. Perhaps real people, chatting in a real room, would have cheered me up.

It's fitting that the monkey's estivation coincided with the death of Pina Bausch. Shocking though the grim reaper's turning his attention to dance this summer, also taking out Merce and Jacko too, Bausch's death was the one I took personally. I'd never met her, but as a spectator her work took me to places I'd rarely experienced.

The headiest rush of summer reading came via a gift from my friend Martel, a part of the Melbourne University Press' cherishably neat On... series of books. Short, sharp and unnervingly orange, On Ecstasy is by Australian opera and theatre director Barrie Kosky. I've never seen a production by this opinion-cleaving enfant terrible, but I now have a good idea of what drives him: Kosky writes in a state of blissful delirium, from his early exposure to recordings of Madame Butterfly ('why did her voice caress my skin, sink into my flesh and whirl around in the middle of my stomach?') to applauding the way Mahler induces 'vertigo, claustrophobia and neurosis.'

Kosky wants performance (and, possibly, life) to operate as an exalted, alchemical sensorium, with no place for timid souls. By the time he described his productions of Wagner (The Flying Dutchman is 'a seasick phantasmagoria', and the score of Tristan and Isolde tears through text 'like a knife slashing meat'), I was almost giddy.

The most mind-boggling was his production of The Dybbuk, staged in an abandoned Melbourne warehouse, in which the heroine and her possessing spirit were exorcised, both in filthy underwear, first in a barrow of mucky potatoes, then rolling and screaming around the floor. Dead, their near-naked bodies hung from butcher's hooks, the heat of their frenzied bodies visibly steaming in the icy space. It was, Kosky confirms, 'one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen in the theatre.'

And that, my friends, is what I want from a night out. Cerebral theatre, architectural dance can both be alluring, and I love knotty, difficult things - Mark Morris' dense new piece to a mad Charles Ives score or Fiona Shaw's barnstorming stomp through Mother Courage have both set my head whirring in recent weeks, even if they leave my heart still. But is it so wrong to long for performance that sinks its teeth into your neck, shakes you till you are breathless and then leaves you, weeping and shuddering in a corner?

I'm just about to leave the house to see Michael Clark's new dance piece, set to his glam rock heroes, which promises disconcertingly intent dancers and music cranked up to eleven. That might do it...

For many years, Bausch's company (Tanztheater Wuppertal) didn't appear in London - there was no stage suitable for her intimate epics. Only when Sadler's Wells refurbished did she return. And the first show was Viktor.

I was ill that day, with the winter sniffles, and feeling unprepared for my first encounter with a choreographer noted for her gruelling demands. Four hours later, I emerged exhilarated. This was art made during and about a long, bad century - it offers a social veneer then crushes it underfoot like the carpet of pink carnations in Nelken. There's a collective and individual pain, in the bone and in the society. But also astonishing was what Bausch believed you could put on stage, and how long you could keep it there.

I thought I'd seen extremity on stage, but it was almost impossible to believe how long she was prepared to extend a sequence, how many repetitions she would demand of her dancers, how much attention she would ask of us. A stark example: in Viktor, a woman is used as a water pump. She swallows, her body is worked like a lever, she blurts out water. It seems like a fairly simple metaphor for male cruelty. Except that Bausch repeats and repeats the sequence, until we're feeling it and dreading it, and then almost getting used to it. It becomes a terror, and then a habit - which is terrifying.

We never pay enough attention - and performance rarely goes at a speed which makes it possible. But Bausch made it not only possible, but unavoidable. As with the loss of any great artist, I feel bereft - because now I'll have to do it for myself, make myself look hard, feel keenly.

It's a brilliant reminder of the many-headed nature of a theatre audience, a factor that is often taken for granted. Weaver's story is in her foreword to Theatre & audience, part of Palgrave Macmillan's neat new series of accessible theatre studies theory. The book itself is by Helen Freshwater, who notes both how often critics, academics and practitioners describe audience reactions as monolithic (the monkey holds up a guilty paw: he often uses the grand critical 'we feel,' 'we see,' 'we realise'). And she also wonders why theatrical theorists often regard the audience with 'a complex mix of hope, frustration and disgust.'

As a post-performance discussion will often reveal, audiences offer a hugely varied body of opinion, squirming like a sackful of ferrets. The bravura Melbourne-based blogger Neandallus even uses such disputations as the basis for his reviews, presented as florid, piercing Platonic dialogues.

Yet any performer will tell you that audiences each have their own individual collective character. While on stage, they seem not to experience contradiction, but consensus. Playwright David Edgar in How Plays Work, his rewarding examination of theatrical craft, frequently returns to the weight of audience expectations, and how authors can exploit or undermine them. Genre expectations are so deep-rooted, he considers, that 'theatre's dirty little secret' is that 'audiences know the ending of most plays (or certainly the sort of ending) before they begin.'

It's difficult to think and write about audiences in ways that don't treat them as monoliths, or as passive, or as neatly-defined target groups. It's a fascinating exercise - how do we describe spectators' involvement and investment in performance in ways that respect their individuality but don't become too separate to be meaningful? Are we - sorry, you - a flock of sheep or a chaotic convocation?

Diaghilev, the matchless impresario who spun like a virtuoso, would have been proud. He both hired fashion designers (notably Chanel, now directed by Lagerfeld) and inspired them. However, as a monster among artistic monsters (Picasso, Stravinsky, Nijinsky, Fokine), he would also have been able to insist on changes to the Lagerfeld tutu, which was hideous. Glurdjidze didn't look so much like a dying swan as a fatally injured one - the feathered chocker was hefty as a neck brace, and the bodice swaddled her. As the Guardian's Judith Mackrell suggested, Lagerfeld disregards the needs of the dancing body (his own film of tubby the tutu is here). Where ballet costume works to give the illusion of weightlessness, this was earthbound - less swan than turkey.

The best thing about the programme was that it reminded us how various the Ballets Russes repertoire was, and how it altered during the twenty years of Diaghilev's exacting and unsentimental stewardship. Burning bridges as he went, he kept his eye on the next big thing. Fokine's limpid early pieces gave way to Nijinsky's startling primitivism; Nijinska, Massine and Balanchine followed and tugged the repertoire in new directions.

It was Fokine's perfume and exoticism that dominated the ENB programme. The wretched swan and Le Spectre de la Rose seem to have lost their scent - like flowers long ago pressed in a book, you know they must be important to someone, but struggle to guess who, or why. (Spectre's set, however, does have the most fab artistic wallpaper, except perhaps for Les parapluies de Cherbourg, a movie which is all about the wallpaper.)

There was also a world premiere, Faun(e) by David Dawson, set to Debussy's score to L'après-midi. It shared with Nijinsky's original a narcissistic, masturbatory impulse: two men in grey rehearsal frocks, watching and dancing, older and younger shadowing each other's memories and fantasies in an empty theatre.

A programme bookended by Apollo's diamond patterns and Schéhérazade's deranged tumble of gems and garnets, to begin with Balanchine and work back to Fokine, is to see how Diaghilev steered a path for his company between popular entertainment and stark modernism. And he kept the work coming, and kept people guessing what he'd do next. The unpredictable is always in fashion.

Many have welcomed big-screen opera, live and in high-definition. But theatre is a new development: on Thursday, the National Theatre pioneers an innovative scheme to bring its productions to new audiences, both in Britain and beyond, when its new production of Phèdre is broadcast in over 200 cinemas across the globe.

The National's inaugural productions aren't cosy choices - next up is Shakespeare's problematic fable All's Well That Ends Well. And Racine is a notoriously tough nut to crack for Anglophone theatre. I saw Nicholas Hytner's production at the weekend - not in cinematic close up, admittedly, but certainly up close, as we were goggling from the third row. It's certainly worth a goggle, with some ripe performances and a strong design (set: Bob Crowley; lighting: Paule Constable): a rocky Greek terrace, cut by searing sunlight from which Phèdre cowers in her guilty love.

Mirren, in particular, is great: sardonic notes catch on the iron edge of her voice, while her body appears to be wasting away, as if to tame the heart through sickness.

But I'd also like to hear it for the translation by poet Ted Hughes. First performed in 1998, it has now received a pummelling by critic Michael Coveney, who claims 'You simply don't get the tragic tread of the French alexandrines in a bolshie arrangement of free verse with the odd iambic pentameter thrown in. And there's no formal rhyming, essential to the meaning in Racine, so you're left with a po-faced series of encounters between rather boring people.'

It's true that language is meaning in Racine: the tight verse form mirrors his characters' lack of wriggle room. In Cheek By Jowl's recent Andromaque, for example, the French cast inhabited a cruel geometry that mirrored their situation. Hughes didn't claim to ape the original: he calls his text a 'version', and though it can't reproduce the aural effect of the alexandrines, he makes Phèdre a distinctively pained experience.

This is a play in which desire turns monstrous, curdling relations between stepmother and stepson, father and son, husband and wife. And desire and rage are all interiorised - Racine's protagonists speak to themselves or unload on a hapless confidante (I hope you'll appreciate Margaret Tyzack's magnificent bloodhound features as Phèdre's nurse Oenone: as the queen bangs on about her misbegotten passions, Tyzack looks concerned, mortified and profoundly irritated).

It's true, Hughes makes the tragedy, um, Hughesian - and on its own terms it's a powerful piece of dramatic writing. He truffles for the way emotion turns interior in Phèdre. Unable to find mutual expression, desire feeds on itself, or turns on itself in revulsion, and Hughes richly images that interiorised churn. It's a visceral register: Phèdre wants to empty the blood from her rival's carcass, fears that truth will vomit out of her mouth, feels bloated with her crimes.

See the play as a masterpiece about revulsion as much as desire, and the translation makes perfect sense - culminating in a gory report of an atrocity (delivered with appalled fury by John Shrapnel) that left 'a rag of flesh on every thorn' and feels 'like a great wound through my body.' Hughes returns the body to Racine, locates poisoned passions in the gut and in the blood.

Anyone planning to spend a night with Phèdre? Let me know where you were, and what you thought...

Actually, mediocrity is less forgivable than ambition that doesn't quite come off. I fervently hope that 2009 doesn't hold any plays more lame than the duddest of this year's duds: Nicholas de Jongh's bafflingly overpraised drama Plague Over England and the quickly buried recession comedy Ordinary Dreams. Admittedly, I was on review duty those nights, so money-back wasn't an option (but, oh, how I resent those lost hours). Even so, my heart went out to actors working like demons to flog some life into lines that fell dead from the page. Would it take a heart of stone to demand a refund? Or am I just a big softy?

And, fundamentally, is this refund scheme really the best use of the Richard H Driehaus Foundation's dosh? Was the real point to get attention? If so, job done. But look at how cleverly Britain's National Theatre has used sponsorship - notably the Travelex scheme offering low ticket prices. This scheme has helped attract audiences to sometimes challenging work (this season including new plays and rare revivals). The result is a theatre that buzzes, an audience that is at home with multimedia experiments and audacious stagings, that hangs out in the bars and foyers. Surely growing an audience is more about strategy than stunts.

Those classic stories, though: aren't they weird? No, really. Especially those developed in the dark stew of Victorian morality and the hothouse of the subsequent fin-de-siecle. The period provides a rich source for theatrical adaptation: Alice in Wonderland, The Secret Garden, The Wind in the Willows, among other works by E Nesbit and Rudyard Kipling - and the most poignant wish-fulfilment fantasy of them all, Peter Pan.

A new version of Peter Pan opened last week in a state-of-the-art tent in Kensington Gardens - which is fitting, as it's here that JM Barrie developed the story while attaching himself like a winsome leech to the Llewelyn Davies family. What is it like to watch these plays as an adult?

Some thoughts about that after the click:

It may seem shallow as a puddle to discuss Hamlet through the cut of his suit, but it encapsulates Jude Law's version. He's an angry prince, in part because he's primed to step onto the Danish throne. We never learn what he was studying at Wittenburg, but I'd guess an MBA - with that and the threads he's good to go and fire up his first power point presentation for the cabinet ('Norway: trade is the new diplomacy').

This is quite unlike the outsider Hamlets of recent years. Few have sought power, from Simon Russell Beale's self-hurtingly wry prince and George Anton's extreme provocateur for Calixto Bieto, to David Tennant's antic hero (which, no, I didn't see, thanks for reminding me. But I saw the production that framed him, and at least there's a chance to catch it on screen). Peter Brook staged it as a carpet-bound meditation with Adrian Lester, while the Wooster Group pays impish homage to Richard Burton's landmark filmed version.

Most of these Hamlets have been dangerously funny, or at least witty (as Russell Beale showed, wit cuts both ways). But not Law: he's serious, even stern, and speaks snappily but with odd halts, as if his mind was racing ahead of his tongue. The speed characterises Michael Grandage's production, which gallops through its cut text. People march on, gabble and march off again before they've built a character. In a play haunted by moments of moral choice and possibility, there's no time in which the action can hinge.

This can only limit the prince himself, a man who apprehends more possibilities than most, even as they hem him in. Law is fine (bitter, big hands stretched wide), but he's not my idea of Hamlet. And the production, which closes the Donmar Warehouse's season of classic plays in a West End theatre, suggests that Michael Grandage has retreated from the sharp finesse of his best work.

I'm reluctant to rubbish the season, because it's such a fine idea: yummy casts in nourishing plays, with seat prices far cheaper than the West End norm (I sat in the middle of the back row of the balcony for a remarkable ten quid). But Grandage's productions have been culinary. They look ravishing: set designer Christopher Oram's weathered, beaten textures and Neil Austin's fog and diamond lighting are heart-stopping. Hamlet stages 'To be or not to be' amid snowfall at the back of the granite stage, Law sinking to the ground against the black back wall. Swoony visuals can't themselves make plays sing: if Grandage missed the probing wit in Hamlet, he ducked the darkness in Twelfth Night, and he failed to detect any point at all in Mishima's wigtastic Madame de Sade (Judi Dench and the rest of the cast not so much acting as holding up a wall of heavy rhetoric, hoping it didn't fall and crush them). Only Chekhov's Ivanov emerged as an urgent, necessary play - a black-hearted tragicomedy of depression and debt. It's yelping despair was what we needed to hear. Hamlet's furrowed brow and smart clothes look good but won't help in a crisis.

Greatness, especially in theatre, is a mutable concept: each age takes what it needs from the past, and often those choices are unpredictable. Who would have thought that the acrid Troilus and Cressida or quibbling Love's Labour's Lost would have come to seem among Shakespeare's most pertinent texts? Or that Schiller's impassioned realpolitick would have secured a place on British stages?

Among more recent plays, it's even more difficult to predict what will stick. When text is increasingly a secondary element in so much memorable theatre, we have to wonder which of our own era's drama will survive, and in what form.

Nonetheless, Arcadia is a marvel. David Leveaux's revival is drier than Trevor Nunn's romantic original, and less charismatically cast. But to this fluffy-headed arts monkey it nails the science much more strongly, and the sense that ideas matter, terribly, to everyone onstage is thrillingly conveyed. This is in part due to a remarkable performance from Stoppard's own son, Ed, as the maths whizz Valentine tracking grouse populations on his Apple. He's knobbly and awkward - these are some of the most expressive ankles and cheekbones you'll see on the stage. And he not only gives the impression that he thinks as he speaks, but that he thinks as he listens. It's a rare gift.

Stoppard stretches between Romantic poetry and chaos theory, between the Georgian age and our own. The panorama of his subject matter may be wide, but not his social focus. The play nestles rather too adoringly among the ruling elite, plus the aspiring clever-clogs who hope to join them. Even so, the idea that we can define ourselves by what we think about as well as what we feel is both inspiring and quietly moving. I'm still not comfortable with labelling lays as 'great' or otherwise: but it's hard to think of many modern British plays that so confidently lay claim to the term.

The differences in reception have been marked. Although critical opinion was divided on the merits of recent work by Frankfurt-based choreographer William Forsythe, no-one seems to have questioned the wisdom of devoting a season to his work. For New York playwright Wallace Shawn, however, the reaction has been far more mixed. Some critics have responded positively, but others have dismissed the season as a vanity project, and at the performances I attended, audiences were voting with their feet. Maybe this does nothing more than suggest a difference between Wallace and William - or perhaps it points to a rift in approach between audiences for mainstream dance and theatre.

It certainly suggests that the dance world is far more open to uningratiating work. Forsythe's Decreation, for example, was a very tough watch, but most everybody at Sadler's Wells stayed to the end and there was a whooping curtain call. For all of their distinguished casts (Miranda Richardson, Jennifer Tilly, Jane Horrocks, Clare Higgins), the Shawn plays at the Royal Court have been marked by walkouts - on Monday, half of the audience for Grasses of a Thousand Colours had melted away by the third act, and there were also some noisy removals during the interval-less Aunt Dan and Lemon.

Why should this be? What do the two seasons tell us about each of these fascinating artists? And is the theatre world less willing to experiment than dance? More after the click:

The scene is a checkout queue in my local supermarket. The time is a quiet weekday morning. So quiet, in fact, that few of the lines are open, and the gent in front of me has a full family load of goods ambling towards the till. He asks for help packing his purchases: none is forthcoming. I offer to help: he refuses. I, foolishly, think he's merely being polite (pointless self-denial is the British way), so I offer again. He declines again, rather more forcefully. 'It wasn't an aggressive offer of help, you know,' I say, taken aback. 'Look, I've said no three times now,' he snaps. 'Just leave it.'

Well, I warned you it was minutiae. But there is a point, honest: as I stood there, baffled, oddly chastened and waiting for him to deal with pastas and salads and fancy biscuits, I reflected on how audiences read acting. We go to the theatre and we confidently assign meanings to human behaviour. Sometimes those meanings are diagnostic (he's angry; she's grieving), sometimes they involve a moral judgement (naughty man; nice lady). But although my neighbour and I might disagree about these readings, there is usually a good steer from the performer or production to help us assess the character.

Without context, I realised, we flounder. I had no idea why the man in the queue responded so sharply. Was he painfully shy or furiously self-sufficient? Did he feel that his alpha-masculinity, already severely compromised by shuffling celery on a Thursday morning, was placed under even greater threat when another guy offered assistance? Would he have responded differently to a female shopper? Was he planning to poison his wife with a toxic tagine, and fear that he'd been rumbled? How could I begin to guess?

Or, even more troubling, was I failing to read my own behaviour correctly? Maybe I didn't seem friendly at all, but pushy, or even creepy. Was this a scene about an angry boor spurning a good samaritan, or about a reserved man fending off a meddling loon? Without some establishing scenes involving friends, family, authority figures or a Greek chorus hanging around the frozen goods, it was impossible to know how to read the encounter.

So far, so Thursday. But critics tend to describe characters and performances with just a phrase or a single epithet: recently, I find, I've gone for harried, gorgon, 'a shambles of dubious potential', 'droll-dimpled' ['were his dimples really droll?' asked my editor. Yes, indeedy], 'unglamorous voluptuary' and, I'm afraid to confess, 'a cock with a quiff.' The last was cut, but on grounds of taste rather than its unimpeachable accuracy. All seemed spot-on to me - but how would I sum up the man in the queue? How would I describe myself? How much confidence do we have in our character readings?

Schiller's most frequently revived tragedy, however, is Mary Stuart - Phyllida Lloyd's intense production is angling for Tonys on Broadway, while you only have until tomorrow to catch Terry Hands' sizzling Welsh production, dark and twisty as a thriller.

The friendly Schiller scholar sitting next to me in Mold not only had a useful steer about Mike Poulton's adaptation ('very free') but also about modern German productions. He noted that we heritage-happy Brits keep the plays in period settings. Do Germans treat their national tragedian with similar reverence, I asked? Hell, no. Their stagings are assertive and interventionist.

Mary Stuart, which centres on the Tudor smackdown between Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots, presents a particular problem for the Brits. Our image of Elizabeth is so strongly fixed that experimentation is constrained. The monarch was queen of brand, and developed so strong an iconography that 450 years on we still think: pale face, stern expression, ruff and farthingale. It is difficult for British audiences to look beyond the icon.

Recent film versions of Elizabeth's life have all contained scenes of ambiguous epiphany: Elizabeth's assumption into the role of Gloriana. Cate Blanchett, Helen Mirren and Ann-Marie Duff have at moments of crisis been obliged to forgo their flirty informality and climb into the costume of England's Virgin. Face plastered white, head transfixed by ruff and wig, skirts encrusted with gem and thread, wide and unyielding as a mountain range. This is the face of power, but a power that imprisons the woman who yields it.

Schiller also fits this template - he presents Elizabeth as a victim of her own stratagems, and the more cunningly she bolsters her own position against Mary, Queen of Scots, the more firmly her humanity is subsumed in the role of queen and its formal paranoia. In Lloyd's production, Harriet Walter's elegantly pinched face looks out from atop the restrictions of her dark, plush costumes, as if marvelling at Mary's freedom of movement. Claire Price, a sensational Elizabeth in Hands' production, is trapped even more firmly. At her first appearance, she wears not so much a frock as a gilded piece of furniture - she will later step out of it, and we'll see that it's perfectly self-supporting. If Elizabeth falters, the frocks might rule by themselves.

It may take a brave British director to mess with these images. They have been around for a long time: the earliest popular play about Elizabeth was written soon after her death. Thomas Heywood's If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody is a throbbing testament to the beleaguered Protestant monarch. When Pepys saw a production some 60 years later, he was moved despite himself, but argued that the costumes told the story: 'the play is merely a puppet play,' he complained, 'acted by living puppets.' I've enjoyed watching Elizabeth portrayed on stage as history's marionette, but perhaps it's time for designers to forgo the farthingale and create a new line of iconography?

Of course, it's easy to think this way in late spring, when each visit to the market brings a new treat (this is a theatre column, honest. Though if anyone wants to swap asparagus recipes, I'm all ears, and stomach). But the depths of winter are a greater challenge: six weeks of parsnips don't hold quite the same appeal.

The point, you'll be relieved to know, is that local sometimes represents the pick of the crop and sometimes a cruel restriction of choice. For example, it's a weary truism that London receives an unjust amount of attention in British arts coverage. Why should all the national press turn out for a play in a minute room above a pub, while neglecting a major production on the regional stage?

The ecology of regional theatre is fascinating. I've visited more theatres out of London in the past few weeks than I have in years: Birmingham, Southampton, Mold and Manchester. It's been bracingly eye-opening: a tiny tasting of the work that is happening around the nation, and a wholly unrepresentative sample, but a couple of things are already becoming clear.

Reviewing for a national paper, the productions I've seen have been mainstream shows in established venues rather than experimental work, but each of these important theatres seems to have a different relationship to its local community. Southampton's Nuffield is on a university campus (though not a university with an arts bias); Birmingham Rep alongside several civic monoliths; Clwyd Theatr Cymru outside town, on top of a hill offering beautiful Welsh scenery. I'm so open to correction here, but of the four venues, only Manchester's Royal Exchange seemed to have much of a buzz beyond showtime. The foyers are tempting, there's art and coffee: when I found myself killing time between shows, it wasn't a problem.

The same wasn't true elsewhere: although the shows themselves were well attended, there was less of a sense of a vital resource, however tempting the programmes on stage. How does a theatre make itself essential, even when the show is so-so? Even when there's no show at all? If you want people to use your building, is an innovative outreach department more or less important than a scrumptious cafe?

Numbers are, inevitably, part of the problem. London gets the attention, not just because so much happens there, but because it has audiences to sustain those happenings. Even a tip-top show in a leading regional theatre (and they don't come tip-topper than Mary Stuart in Mold: God, it's exciting) will only have a three-week run, because there simply isn't the audience to justify a longer span. And of course, if you don't like what your local is showing, you may not have many (any) other choices for performance. Parsnips for week after week, perhaps, and no asparagus in sight.

In Britain, as elsewhere, we're right to worry about theatre beyond the cultural capitals. My ArtsJournal neighbour Laura Collins-Hughes wrote recently about a dismaying narrowing of ambition in her (American) local companies. And on the Guardian theatre blog, the redoubtable Lyn Gardner, among others, has worried over the question. What do you reckon, people? How can regional theatres attract the attention they deserve? And how can they truly matter not just nationally, but locally?

Dept of foolishness: It was Laura Collins-Hughes who noted shrinking ambition in a previously adventurous theatre company. Molly Sheridan, meanwhile, was awed by the glossy elaboration of the Met's subscription brochure. Apologies to both for the muddle.

Michael Frayn's 1975 comedy is set in the library of a regional newspaper. (Let's just take a moment to savour those nostalgic words: library; regional; newspaper. Anyone need footnotes, or are you happy to look them up on Wikipedia?). The library is in chaos (and, as it's the 1970s, so is the country). Lucy, the loveably scatty librarian does battle against a hopeless tide of clutter, abetted by a clutch of journalists on the paper who make her den their home from home, until a quietly efficient young assistant arrives to impose order on the chaos.

That imposition occurs between the acts, but what Lesley does in the play is actually achieved by the Hampstead Theatre's dauntless stage management team during the interval. It was magnificent to watch, a 15-minute war on stuff. Scattered piles of paper were stacked neatly, folders were returned to filing cabinets. Upended chairs were removed from the tops of said cabinets, along with books, newsprint and random domestic items. A stern clock is placed on the wall, and neat labels fixed on all the cabinets. Only one desk (Lucy's) is allowed to retain its impedimenta - indeed, the team added yet more drifts of paper, and a whimsical pot plant.

When the lights went up fully on the pristine aquamarine cabinets (sorry chaps, it's the 70s), the audience burst into applause. Christopher Luscombe's deeply pleasurable production nicely reclaims a play full of teasing insights, but I suspect that its the wonders of the interval that will cling to my memory. If the Hampstead Theatre can tame an entire office in a quarter of an hour, imagine what they could do for you? Surely, in these financial times of ours, the theatre should consider hiring them out as bespoke declutterers?