Brett Sheehy’s appointment as artistic director at the MTC loomed over this year’s Melbourne Festival theatre program. Those hoping for some insight into his curatorial approach will have found much to admire and much to disturb them. The strike rate was reasonable; the gulf between the best and worst the Festival had to offer, appalling.

It was nowhere wider than among local shows. Ganesh versus the Third Reich, from Geelong-based Back to Back, was a masterpiece at the vanguard of contemporary theatre-making.

Building on Small Metal Objects and Food Court, the company presented a shadowy fairy tale with a comic-strip aesthetic. It told the provocative story of a Hindu god travelling to Nazi Germany to reclaim the swastika, and unfurled into a ferocious critique of cultural appropriation and the perils of its own artistic practice as an ensemble working with disabled performers.

Other Australian shows failed to inspire. Any theatrical possibility Half-Real opened with its use of interactive technology was quickly closed off by a tedious, generic narrative. Gary Foley is an engaging raconteur at the forefront of Indigenous activism, but his one-man show wasn’t theatre, and would have been better as a lecture series.

The real stinkers – Whiteley’s Incredible Blue and Site UnSeen – cast serious doubt on whether Sheehy has the requisite depth of knowledge of Melbourne’s independent theatre scene to be consistently effective. The latter gave community theatre a bad name – more unfortunate because there are superior examples of it around. The prospect of a panel of Festival programming advisers might help redress the issue.

Internationally, Thomas Ostermeier’s Hedda Gabler and Pan Pan’s The Rehearsal, Playing The Dane were highlights. Schaubühne Berlin has been so influential for director’s theatre here: Ostermeier’s classicism might make our directors reflect on what bold, progressive theatre actually means beyond obvious fashions. In contrast, The Rehearsal gave us a wacky, postdramatic Hamlet that generated incisive performances and sinuous insights into the text.

The New York Theatre Workshop’s Aftermath created documentary theatre from Iraqi refugee stories – a powerful corrective to the dehumanising influence of war. Rhinoceros In Love, however, proved deeply underwhelming: of heritage interest, perhaps, in the struggle for free artistic expression in China, but in performance, a combination fried rice, dried out from spending too long in the bain-marie of the international festival circuit. I didn’t see Journeys of Love and More Love, but heard that theatrical smorgasbord also lacked real bite.

I couldn’t divine much in the way of an overarching vision, but if around half the performances are worth seeing, who cares?

A more concerning question of Sheehy’s artistic leadership lies in his failure to address the overwhelmingly negative critical response to Site UnSeen. Instead, he vapidly enthused about winning the show’s “shelter-building contest” on its Facebook page. Evidently, if it doesn’t work out at the MTC, Mr. Sheehy has a promising career as a rough-sleeper. That’s some consolation.