Bill Henson, the greatest Australian photographer, has a show at the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery at 6pm Friday 16 May.

It’s exciting that Melbourne Opera are putting on that very grand and moving French opera Samson and Delilah at Melbourne’s Palais on 1 and 2 June. It is one of the mightiest of all operas and it has a tragic intensity of form that makes it Saint-Saëns one opera that has stayed in the catalogue where he is otherwise best known for that playful piece Carnival of the Animals.

Samson and Delilah outstares the brutal brevity of the bible story which Milton used for his massive appropriation of a Greek, arguably Sophoclean style, for his verse drama Samson Agonistes, which stays in the mind with a sense of doom.

Samson is the invincible hero with the strength of a lion until the seductress Delilah discovers that his strength is in his hair. And so he is shorn of this and blinded. But in the last scene of the 1890 opera his strength is restored and putting his arms round the pillars of the temple he brings it crashing down round the heads of his oppressors.

The Melbourne Opera production directed by Suzanne Chaundy – who did Wagner’s Ring Cycle and then Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg – has the great mezzo role of Delilah sung by Deborah Humble and Rosario La Spina has the incandescently austere tenor role of Samson.

All versions of Samson and Delilah work but the Prêtre version, with Jon Vickers as Samson and that marvellous Delilah Rita Gorr, leave all other recorded versions for dead. Jon Vickers, the great Canadian tenor, finds the outrage in Samson’s devastation. This is a Vickers performance to rival his Karajan Tristan or his Peter Grimes which Michael Shmith said would scare the sharks out of the sea.

Vickers understood that opera was a tragic, not just a melodramatic, medium and people who are going to Samson and Delilah should prepare themselves by listening to the Vickers/Gorr version. It comes across uncannily as the music of damaged archangels.

That brings to mind Satan and his cronies in Paradise Lost which in turn is a reminder of what can be achieved by individual human voices. In our Scripsi days we were lucky enough to get that vocally magnificent actor John Stanton – remember him as Malcolm Fraser in The Dismissal? – reading War Music, Christopher Logue’s Homer, with Logue himself at Ormond College.

It’s a reminder of what the human voice can do with the heightened speech of dramatic poetry with one voice or several if need be.

All of this is suggested by the fact that Paula Arundell is doing Daphne Du Maurier’s The Birds as a one-man show from this week. This is clearly influenced by the Sydney Theatre Company’s one-handers which have been such a success for Kip Williams, the former artistic director of Sydney Theatre Company, that it has made him give up the position and concentrate on the many-voiced and many-imaged spectacle of Sarah Snook as Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Grey, first in the West End and now on Broadway.

It’s a far cry from John Gielgud’s Shakespeare anthology Ages of Man or Micheál MacLiammóir doing The Importance of Being Oscar in the 1960s.

The Birds is of course famously a Hitchcock horror film and the great director said he hated making films where he had to follow the book, as in Rebecca – never mind Dame Judith Anderson as Mrs Danvers, one of the most-celebrated performances in the history of the cinema.

But, The Birds (1963) has one simple premise, the details of which are more or less permanently suppressed, and the thought of Tippi Hedren and Rod Taylor, another Australian like Dame Judith being assailed by creatures from the sky, by furry, feathered fiends is quite enough. It’s not a Hitchcock film we go back to like Vertigo or Rear Window or North by Northwest or, indeed, Rebecca, let alone Psycho.

None of which stops this Malthouse production from being a bright idea in a dark lowering world. But there have always been one-handers and shows based on writers. Miriam Margolyes’ Dickens’ Women followed in the wake of Emlyn Williams long-ago impersonations of Dickens reading. There are Alan Bennett’s monologues – performed by Maggie Smith or Sigrid Thornton or whoever. And then there are one-handers like Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape or indeed Jack Hibberd’s A Stretch of the Imagination, arguably the greatest Australian play ever written.

But what do highbrow people turn to when they just want comfort reading? Well, in the case of Margaret Drabble, Lady Antonia Fraser and Haruki Murakami, they want Lee Child.

We had never read a word of Jack Reacher but when we were encouraged to watch the first episode of the first book of the Reacher streamer on Amazon Prime we were totally bowled over. We were going to the farewell of an old and revered magazine editor and somehow Reacher filled us with delight.

This hulking figure (Alan Ritchson) who knows everything in Sherlock Holmes fashion and can destroy or maim any assailant is wonderfully entertaining and so is the blonde female cop Willa Fitzgerald who likes him. So is the Harvard-educated senior detective, so are the low-lifes of this town in Georgia.

It should be preposterous trash, Reacher is a Tarzan with the world as his jungle, but he’s good, he’s smart and he’s a hero.

There’s actually a book by an academic Andy Martin who looks over Child’s shoulder as he writes. His account is called Reacher Said Nothing and it has its own fascination.

Is it that we can only take to Reacher dramatised with manifest brilliance? Maybe, but the narrative logic is comprehensive and impressive. Perhaps this really is the comfort food waiting for us. Time will tell.

By the way, a list of books read by the newly elected Pope Leo XIV has surfaced.  Among the writers you might recognise if you’re highbrow enough are Thomas Bernhard, William Gass, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Musil and Gerald Murnane.

Bill Henson, unlikely to share His Holiness’s extra-literary opinions, said, ‘Let’s invite him to dinner.’

Well, the X post turned out to be a hoax but apparently Pope Francis was a fan of Borges and Cormac McCarthy.