The Anglo-French production of Pierre de Marivaux's La Dispute, which Giles Woodforde reviews today on Page 7, is not the only joint theatrical venture between nations I have enjoyed in the past few days. Last Thursday, I made the 100-mile trip to Derby to attend the opening night of Johnno, a new stage version of David Malouf's cult novel on which the town's hugely enterprising Playhouse has collaborated with La Boite Theatre Company, of Brisbane. The production, directed by Stephen Edwards, has already been staged, to great acclaim, at the Brisbane Festival; it can now be seen until March 31 in Derby. I thoroughly recommend it to anybody who happens to be in that area, or is prepared to make the (not irksome) two-hour, mainly motorway, journey from Oxford.

This was my first trip to the Midlands town in more than two decades; indeed, perhaps only my third or fourth in all. (The first was in the early 1960s when I joined what seemed like thousands of fellow locospotters at the Open Day at Derby Works.) I had forgotten - if I ever knew - how exceptionally friendly the local people are. Ask at a help desk, as we did, for assistance in coping with a car-park payment system seemingly even more complicated than Oxford's, and you'll perhaps be 'rewarded', as we were, with vouchers for excellent cups of coffee. Ask anyone the way, and he or she seems well disposed to stand around chatting for as long as you care to detain them. What a pity I didn't request directions to the life-size bronze street sculpture of Bonnie Prince Charlie, which was commissioned in the early 1990s from my old friend Anthony Stones. Alas, its presence in the centre of Derby slipped my mind until we were heading away from the town. A reason to return again soon . . .

Rosemarie and I were there on this occasion at the invitation of the theatre's management extended through its learning director Michael Drennan, a long-time member of The Oxford Times's reviewing team. Two months into his job there, he is finding it a rewarding challenge and a marked change from his previous career in teaching. Though a theatre of only modest size, the Playhouse remains one of very few in the country to continue producing its own work, rather than buying it in from others.

Johnno has proved to be a success - The Australian hailed it "a triumph" - in a notoriously difficult project (according to David Malouf) where others have conspicuously failed in the past. Of this quintessential novel of growing up in Australia, it has been said that if a Queenslander lost his passport anywhere in the world, he could produce, instead, a copy of Johnno as proof of birthplace. In Britain, the book is much more difficult to obtain. I bought a copy from Amazon - a University of Queensland edition posted to me from a bookshop in the US. Alas, it only arrived this week, and I have yet to find time to read it.

A curious feature both of Johnno and La Dispute, as you can see from the pictures on this page, is that the action was set in both cases in and around water. In all my years of theatregoing, I recall (dimly) only one other play with quite so much diving and splashing. This was a soft-porn production at the New Theatre - visited by me strictly in the line of duty, I hastily add - starring (I think) Fiona Richmond. Now that I have seen two in a week, I am beginning to wonder if I am in at the start of a new theatrical trend. If so, we shall have to start equipping ourselves for a night in the stalls with galoshes and sou'westers.