Simon Phillips is a happy man the morning he speaks to Canvas.

Not only has the Artistic Director of the Melbourne Theatre Company (MTC) just launched the company’s 2009 programme, which features six Australian plays among its mix of new and old works; he’s also preparing for the company’s long awaited move into its permanent new home on Southbank Boulevard.

“In some ways this season couldn’t really be there without the [new] theatre, so we’re very excited to be launching the season; but it is entirely in the context of having the theatre to play with. It … wouldn’t have come about without that new theatre, and a theatre of that size, to play with,” a clearly delighted Phillips explains.

The MTC’s new base of operations has been 15 years in the planning, and its price tag –  a cool $55 million – suggests that dreams of this magnitude don’t come cheap. But given that the company hasn’t had a theatre space to call its own since moving out of the old Russell Street Theatre in 1994, it would seem a price well worth paying.

The new MTC Theatre houses two performance spaces: the Sumner Theatre, a state-of-the-art 500-seat venue, and the smaller, more flexible Lawler Studio, in which Phillips can program more intimate or edgy work.

Clearly, this will have a liberating effect on the MTC’s 2009 program. So what does Phillips have up his sleeve?

One of the first plays he names is Moonlight and Magnolias, about the behind-the-scenes dramas during the making of the 1939 Hollywood classic, Gone with the Wind. The play will be directed by filmmaker Bruce Beresford, marking his theatrical debut.

“Another interesting thing about Moonlight and Magnolias is it’s actually based on a true and recorded event [when] the writer and director were locked in this office to try and solve the disaster that was to be Gone with the Wind,” Phillips says.

“I like the idea that it’s based on something that surely 95 percent of the population know the reference point [to] and therefore can see it coming together.”

But as well as new work, the season will also see the return of an Australian theatrical classic.

“We’ve been toying with doing a revival of doing a Dorothy Hewitt [play] for some time ... And there was another new work that we could have fast-tracked to make the season entirely essentially new Australian work. But we thought it was appropriate that there be something in there that was revival, celebrating the past as well as the future. And Dorothy Hewitt … has a great magical spirit behind her work, and particularly this work. I think she’s a lyrical larrikin, as it were. Of all the Australian writers, she had a very particular and buoyant and poetic spirit.”

But does Phillips ever worry that the success of companies such as Melbourne’s Red Stitch, who for the last six years have successfully specialised in new work, mean that theatre-goers don’t want revivals?

“I’m always torn on this issue, because I do love the fact that the theatre, of all performing art forms, does feel like it has the ability to articulate current concerns. It can focus in a way that dance, opera or classical music [can’t] … to talk about what people are talking about,” he answers.

“So when there are great and exciting new works coming out I tend to give them priority; but I do think that we all look to the classics to remind us not only of eternal themes, but … I reckon it’s reminding our artists, as well as our audiences, of when things were done in a superbly original way in the past, and that’s useful to keep in our hearts.”

Tickets for the 2009 MTC season are now on sale. Visit www.mtc.com.au for details or to request a copy of their 2009 season brochure.