EARLY next week I’ll be at the Vanguard in Sydney’s Newtown to see Jacqui Dark and Kanen Breen’s cabaret show Under the Covers. That will bring my 2014 show total to 207, including a strong final burst of seven outings in my last viewing week of the year. It’s a relatively modest number by previous standards and by those of some of my colleagues, but not negligible. Within that there is a personal best: when in New York early this year I managed to see 20 shows in 12 days.

Obsessive? Perhaps, but the performing arts bring me great joy, illumination and nourishment and have done for more than four decades. More than that, putting in the hours, days, weeks, months and years is the only way one can attain knowledge and understanding. It’s incredibly valuable to see many different productions of great works and sometimes to have long-held ideas (or prejudices) shaken. It’s even more stimulating to be present at a new work that so thrills to the core and has so many ideas you want – and need – to see it again and again.

Tony Kushner’s Angels in America was one such work for me when I saw it in 1993 under Michael Gow’s direction at Sydney Theatre Company, and I did see it again and again – a second time at STC; Neil Armfield’s very different but equally moving version for Melbourne Theatre Company and State Theatre Company of South Australia the following year; on Broadway; the film version; and, just last year, Belvoir’s wonderful production directed by Eamon Flack.

Another work that enthralled me when I first encountered it was Thyestes in the 2010 adaptation of Seneca’s tragedy by Thomas Henning, Chris Ryan, Simon Stone and Mark Winter. I was incredibly lucky to get in. The word had spread like wildfire that Thyestes was extraordinary, I was in Melbourne for only a few days and Malthouse’s tiny Tower Theatre was besieged. The gods were with me, I took my seat, and as I write I relive the intensity of the experience – the gloom in the auditorium set against the unsparing white light of the acting area; the faces of the audience one could see on the other side of the narrow stage that bisected the theatre; Ryan singing Schubert; the jittery tension of waiting to see what fresh hell would be revealed when the shutters that hid the stage between scenes were raised again; the theatrical audacity and intellectual complexity of the ideas …

Did anything this year have that kind of impact? No, I can’t say it did. But genius is rare. The thing is, you don’t always get advance warning. You just have to be there. You have to see a lot of mediocre, adequate, good and excellent work to be in the race to see the exceptional and to be able to assess its worth. It’s not about the numbers themselves, it’s that everything one sees adds something to the information bank, even the most misguided of efforts, and helps create perspective and context.

I don’t think I’m alone in loving a list so, this being the traditional time of year for it,  I’m going to make lots. They will be on people as well as art forms – theatre, opera and music theatre, dance, whatever. They’ll appear, mostly daily, over the next two weeks and end with a kind of mega-list, taking in everything I’ve seen since my first serious theatre experience, a production of Oedipus Rex directed by Tyrone Guthrie I saw when I was 17. (It starred Ron Haddrick and Ruth Cracknell and was staged at the University of NSW’s Clancy Auditorium.) Well, obviously I’m not going to list the lot; just the best bits, as far as memory will allow.

I’ll also add a few thoughts about relevant arts issues as the spirit moves me.

Note: most of my theatre viewing is in Sydney, so there won’t be much joy from elsewhere in that sphere. I do get around a bit, but inevitably my lists will be very Sydney-oriented.

Tomorrow: Theatre