30/04/2014

Revenge wheel: The serial protagonists of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus



This is an edited version of an essay originally written for ‘ENGL394 – Popular Theatre: Polemic, Mirror, Satire’ at Macquarie University in April 2011.


T’will vex thy soul to hear what I shall speak;
For I must talk of murders, rapes and massacres,
Acts of black night, abominable deeds…
Aaron, V.1.62-64

Titus Andronicus has been maligned and derided for its excessive depiction of, and reliance upon, violence and brutality since its writing and performance in 1594. Despite Shakespeare’s age at the time of writing Titus Andronicus,[i] the play displays a markedly youthful brashness and sensationalistic attitude which highlights his knowledge of classical authors and sources, as well as a desire to create a work which appealed to a wide audience[ii]. Throughout the play Shakespeare harnesses the conventions of a revenge tragedy to his now-trademark sophistication of language, humour and rhythm, and challenges the established perception and tolerance of violence and abuse, as well as its implications and consequences. In doing so, Shakespeare shows how Titus Andronicus is “as much about how the audience experiences violence as entertainment as it is about the tragedy of the endless cycle of violence itself,”[iii] and thus demonstrates how popular theatre avoids adhering to the status quo of the period and, in this case, for all time.

29/04/2014

Jon Kudelka.
The Weekend Australian: Review. September 4-5, 2010

26/04/2014

Why Shakespeare



The glib answer is, of course, ‘Why not?’
But the proper, longer – real – answer goes a little something like this.

Four hundred and fifty years ago, a boy was born in Stratford Upon Avon, the son of a glove maker and wool merchant. He studied a little Latin (and less Greek) at the local grammar school, and discovered the power of storytelling, the joy in making things up and sharing them. After marrying and becoming a father to a daughter, Susannah, he disappears from history for about a decade – what he was doing or where he went no one really knows. Theories abound, but they’re just stories when it boils down to it, his very stock in trade. We can only guess, but we know what happened next.
He wrote plays, sonnets, poems. He loved and learnt, listened; lived. Within the wooden O of the great Globe itself, he created kingdoms for a stage, had outcasts to act and monarchs to behold his swelling scenes. He captured the soul of the age in such a way no one before or since has ever come close.
He wrote before dictionaries in their strictest sense were a dream, though books of words were being compiled in their own respective manners. He created words as he needed them, and we still use them. Spellings were erratic at the best of times, because there was no accepted way of spelling any one single word. Spellings were influenced by accent, dialect, speaker and the ear of the person writing it down, hence the reason his name is spelt diversely in various records.
Every other contender for the authorship theory falls flat on their face when you realise that Shakespeare wrote for a group of actors – the Chamberlain’s (and then King’s) Men – and every role was specifically tailored to an individual’s talents. There are no small roles, the old adage goes, only small actors, and for Shakespeare’s troupe, there was no such thing as a small actor. Forget unimaginative theories like the necessity for him to have been learned at university, a soldier, a merchant, a Moor, a braggart, a thief, a king; forget the need to have travelled to the continent and further abroad: he had every bit of knowledge he could ever want at his finger tips, the most powerful repository for every scrap of recollection he could ever collect. He had two ears and an incredible memory, and learnt at a young age to listen, to savour details, to remember and save and scrounge scraps wherever you could find them. He listened, and in doing so, created worlds from words.
He was a genius, but only insofar that geniuses are merely a focussing lens for a collective group of dreamers, thinkers and practitioners. Each role was tailored to a specific actor because they created their role from the ground up, everyone making scenes from scratch, while Shakespeare beautified them, clarified their dramatic arc and rhythm.
He wrote for a blank stage, devoid of any decisive elements of set, yet his worlds are as rich as Breughel’s or Hogarth’s. He used words words words to create his pictures, and if you can’t imagine them, then perhaps it’s not his fault.
He wrote before dramaturgy was a thing, before there was any modern – let alone post-modern – way of seeing theatre. We may see holes in his characterisations, his plots perhaps seem implausible, and his endings often leave us feeling confounded, but that is because we are looking at his plays four hundred and fifty years later. After four hundred and fifty years of dramaturgical thinking, as ways of thinking about dramatic forms and principles have changed and evolved.
He did not write roles for exclusively male actors. Some of his greatest roles are his Cleopatra and his Lady Macbeth, who both make their male foils look rather weak in comparison. His Rosalind is a joy, while his Juliet is naïvely worldly. He was writing in a time when women were not allowed on stage. It wasn’t so much that there was a law explicitly forbidding it (that had, in time, been lifted); it was just the convention. Boy-apprentices played female roles, while the share-holding members of the troupe played the other meatier roles.
Four hundred and fifty years ago, there was no such thing as racially prejudiced casting, or gender-biased casting. There were simply a group of actors in a troupe – typically white men – and roles were created for them. There is nothing in the world stopping gender- and racially-blind casting from being implemented across the globe today in every production. Nothing, except perceived ‘convention’, absurdly-ingrained tradition, and small-minded didacticism.
Shakespeare wrote humans, not characters. He understood human psychology better than perhaps any dramatist or writer before or since. He understood jealousy, love, madness, sickness, health, youth, old age, beauty, truth, deceit; humans. Us.
Shakespeare is bulletproof, foolproof, idiot-proof; indestructible. You can cut up his works, rearrange them, bowdlerise them to buggery and back; you can adapt them, conflate them, transpose them, savagely edit them down, but they still bounce back. In the eighteenth century, English theatre adapted (or Bowdlerised) every Shakespeare play they could lay their hands on to fit their accepted conventions of dramatic form: tragedies were rewritten to have happier endings, comedies were conflated and edited, histories were sidelined, and the great tragic roles were reprised time and time again by the same actors, well into their old age. What we are doing to Shakespeare now is nothing new. We can edit and adapt his plays until our heart is content, but we have to remember it is not new. Shakespeare did it himself.
‘Shakespeare’ is not a brand name; his is not an icon synonymous with, nor a byword for, quality. Each play needs to be renegotiated and tackled head-on with every new production, with every passing day. ‘Shakespeare,’ as a catch-all term for his collected works, cannot be left on a shelf or revered on a pedestal otherwise he and it will become stale, a museum piece; his importance will not be reasserted.
Like the other great masters of Western culture, be it in art, literature, science, music, history, there is a reason why they are the masters. No one before or since has done what Shakespeare did in such a short space of time. No one. In just twenty-odd years, Shakespeare wrote thirty-seven plays, one hundred and fifty-four sonnets, and several poems (and that’s just what we are certain of).
Like it or not, Shakespeare is responsible for much of the dramatic ancestry which informs our contemporary theatre practices today. He changed the way we think about characters, about plots, about stories; about cause and effect, about motivations, scenes, dramatic arcs, beats and moments. He gave actors advice and mercilessly parodied his own contemporaries, and he never shirked away from challenging the status quo, though he was always careful to do it at one or two removes, often in a place calling itself Rome.
Why Shakespeare, you’ll ask me. Because he was human, I’ll answer. Because he understood what it is to be human, what it is to be mankind in all of our crazy, passionate, fluctuating, contradictory and compulsive moods. He understood what motivates us, what rash deeds we may do when we let our instinct overtake our senses. He understands us, because he was one of us. He lived four hundred-odd years ago, yet he understands us better than we sometimes do ourselves.
Why Shakespeare, you’ll ask.

Because he was Will.


And where there’s a Will, there is always a way.


25/04/2014

Jon Kudelka.
The Weekend Australian: Review. December 20-30, 2012.


Jon Kudelka.
The Weekend Australian: Review. November 20-21, 2010

Cardenio, or A Lost Play Found?

Poster for the RSC's 2011 production of
'Cardenio: Shakespeare's Lost Play Reimagined'

There’s a satirical news story going around the internet at the moment that the lost play Cardenio has been found, printed, in the personal collection of a recently deceased English Lord. The ‘holy grail’ of literature, [The History of] Cardenio is a play written in 1612-13 by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, and dramatises an episode in Cervantes’ Don QuixoteThe story has appeared numerous times over the past fortnight, yet the reportage doesn’t change. At least seventeen days too late to be an April Fool’s hoax, I wouldn't doubt if the story is in fact an elaborate kind of meta-hoax designed to celebrate Shakespeare’s four-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday.
Finding Cardenio is akin to discovering Father Christmas doesn’t exist, or that the grass isn’t in fact greener on the other side of the hill. I love the idea of Shakespeare collaborating on a play adapted from Don Quixote; I’d love to know what Shakespeare thought of Cervantes’ story – I’d like to think he was rather quite taken with it, if a little apprehensive, but delighted with its erroneous knight, his portly squire and their wide travails across the length and breadth of Spain.
Part of my fascination with the story of Cardenio, as written by Shakespeare and Fletcher, comes from not knowing the play, from not having the Jacobean play-text to hand; comes from not being certain of its contents, composition or plot, apart from its entries in the Stationer’s register, court records for the Christmas period of 1612-13, and the accounts kept by John Heminges for the King’s Men. While we do have a seventeenth century adaptation of the play, published as Double Falsehood, or the Distrest Lovers, the fact we don’t have the original is all the more reason to dream, to conjecture, to rhapsody and to imagine. Sometimes it’s best not to have all the answers; sometimes it’s better to not know everything; sometimes the world is a richer place for muses of fire that transcend the heavens of invention…

Cottingley Shakespeare


I’ve never bought into the argument against Shakespeare of Stratford not authoring the works he is credited for. It doesn’t make any sense. Yet, still reams of academic papers and books are written on the subject, scholars divide themselves into various other camps too numerous to list in detail here (a full list can be found, as with everything, on Wikipedia). (And then there's that film, Anonymous - the less we say about that, the better.)
The argument goes something along the lines of ‘how could one William Shakespeare – the son of a glove-maker, merchant, and once-Mayor-of-Stratford – a man who was illiterate, whose name is spelt in twenty-four different ways at least, and who’d probably never left England, how could this man have been the author of the cornerstone of Western literature?’ The conspiracists conclude that someone of noble birth or standing must’ve been their logical author, because otherwise it wouldn’t make sense. (Really, they can’t stand the idea that someone who wrote that many key works of literature wasn’t born into privilege or wealth).
But what each camp doesn’t actually realise, is that all of them – Stratfordians, Baconians, Oxfordians, Marlovians; all of them – agree on the one incontrovertible fact that someone who called themselves ‘Shakespeare’ wrote thirty-seven plays, one-hundred-and-fifty-four sonnets, five narrative poems (and that’s just what we’re certain of). No one is disputing that. All they are disputing is the exact identity of the writer. It’s a bit like the Cottingley Fairies story – in 1917, two girls aged ten and twelve took a series of five photos which proved the existence of fairies. The photos are real, but the fairies aren’t; they’re merely paper-cutouts. By the same token, the fairies are real fairies, albeit paper ones...

The whole debate is silly, really – surely, just as with Spartacus, we’re all Shakespeare in the end?


23/04/2014

Mirrors, or The Play Chooses You

This is an edited version of an essay that first appeared on thespellofwakinghours in March 2012.

O, is all forgot?
All school-days’ friendship, childhood innocence?
A Midsummer Night’s Dream [III.2]

People often talk about having a favourite Shakespeare play, the one play that they love and admire above all the others, for any number of reasons. While it’s a fantastic thing, I also think it’s not possible to have just one favourite Shakespeare play for life, for the simple reason that as we mature and grow, so do our tastes; we keep looking in the mirror and seeing new things reflected back at us. Throughout my early teens, like a lot of people, Shakespeare was just this guy, you know, who wrote some plays about four-hundred years ago, and people think he’s pretty okay still, but I never really ‘got’ why Shakespeare was Shakespeare, why he held such a godlike position in the literary canon. Mum and Dad took me to see The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) when I was twelve, and I ‘got’ enough of it to thoroughly enjoy myself. (I particularly remember the ‘balcony scene’ in Romeo and Juliet. One actor knelt in front of a chair with three tiny flowerpots strapped to his head, while another actor stood on the chair with a small watering can. ‘The balcony scene,’ the waterer said, deadpan, and the audience roared and applauded.) You could say that was the beginning, if you really wanted to. But if you think about it, this idea of having a sequence of ‘favourite’ Shakespeare plays is actually a part of our education whether we like it or not (or at least it was when I was at school; I believe the continuity and design behind it has been amended and inverted somewhat since then). Consequently, I have a theory happening, and I’m beginning to think it’s more purposeful and subtle – more conscious – than we’d ever assumed at first.

20/04/2014

Coriolanus

Ralph Fiennes, 2012.

John Logan’s script for Ralph Fiennes’ Coriolanus is, like the film, robust, muscular, tremendously masculine, and uncompromisingly contemporary. Set in a place calling itself Rome, it is full of Brutalist concrete apartment blocks, empty streets, protesting citizens and power-hungry policiticans and power-brokers. As Coriolanus himself, Fiennes has the menace, the gravitas and the unnervingly steely gaze of the once-popular general gone bad. As his nemesis Aufidius, Gerard Butler also has the menace and requisite air of danger about him, and in their confrontations, you really do believe they could quite easily kill each other. Filled with muted colours and steely concrete greys, browns, army-fatigue greens and lots of mud, ice and dirt, it is a brutal look at the power that corrupts, corruption that empowers, how hard it is to fight to be heard, and how easily things can go wrong. Again, it’s not a film for the purists, but it is an intense, muscular and thrilling film, pared down with considerable skill and flair by Logan, without losing any of Shakespeare’s humanist touches and flourishes. 

The Tempest

Julie Taymor, 2010.

In The Tempest, Julie Taymor creates another visual feast from Shakespeare’s rich text. Eschewing ‘traditional’ modes of producing cinematic Shakespeares, she filmed the majority of her film on the islands of Hawai’i – the black rock, deep orange gorges, lush tidal forests, rocky shores, cliffs and colours the perfect complement for her vision of sorcery, magic, redemption and love. Prospera’s island, as in the play, becomes a reflection of isolation, creating a new hierarchical order in a ‘new world’, and becomes a kind of antithetical evocation of Donne’s famous observation that ‘no man is an island’. Helen Mirren’s Prospera is a force of nature to be reckoned with, and while the decision to make Shakespeare’s magician a woman was always going to be controversial for many people, I actually prefer it to Shakespeare’s original, simply because there is so much more at stake, between Prospera and Miranda, between both of them and Ferdinand, between Caliban, towards the court and the usurping Duke. While her visuals are excellent and her cast, crew and rough magic all superb, it doesn’t quite reach the insane heights of Titus’ carnivalesque, though it is hard to distinguish exactly how or why. 

The Shakespeare Code (Doctor Who)

Gareth Roberts, w; 2007.

It’s ironic, in a way, that the best (and, perhaps, most ‘accurate’) depiction of Elizabethan England on screen is to be found in Doctor Who’s 2007 episode, The Shakespeare Code. In a show about a time-travelling alien from the future, it’s these historical episodes that can be the most fun, as Gareth Roberts shows here. Filled with in-joke upon in-joke after in-joke, Shakespeare lines are peppered like full stops in nearly every scene, allusions and complicit nods abound, and for David Tennant’s Doctor, you can see he’s having the time of his life. With its story of witches, a lost play – Love’s Labour’s Won – words as magic spells, Harry Potter, and unrequited love, it’s certainly not that far off what Shakespeare wrote about across his career. There’s the mud in the streets, the filth, the gorgeous wood-and-plaster buildings, the dark candle-lit interiors and, like a beacon, the great Globe itself, and it really does feel, well, real, I suppose. As real as it can be for a television show about time-travel set in an imagined version of 1599. There’s more Shakespeare in this forty-five minutes than in the entirety of Shakespeare in Love, and that really only can be a good thing.

As You Like It

Kenneth Branagh, 2006.

Renowned for his popular interpretations of Shakespeare on film, Kenneth Branagh directed As You Like It for BBC/HBO. And while it might not have reached the popular success of his Henry V or Much Ado About Nothing, there is a lot to love in it, most notably Bryce Dallas Howard’s charming, believable and utterly beguiling Rosalind. Filmed on location in Kew Gardens, it is set in Japan after it opened its doors to Western trade and technology in the mid 1800s. Roughly analogous in setting to The Last Samurai, it too features samurai warriors and ninjas, as well as Kevin Kline’s superbly melancholic Jacques, Alfred Molina’s tail-coat-clad Touchstone, and Romola Garai’s gullible and injury-prone Celia. But the film belongs to Howard’s Rosalind, whether you believe her transformation into Ganymede or not. Her capriciousness, delight, glee, sadness, tenderness, affection and mercuriality are all tangible, and by its end you feel as though you too could love her. And in a moment of rare genius, Branagh’s epilogue – with Howard-as-Rosalind-as-herself – is one of the more effective translations from page to screen in this Shakespeare film. Treat yourself. You might just be surprised, and find it’s, well, just as you like it.

Titus

Julie Taymor, 1999.

Prior to studying The Tempest in Year Twelve, my English teacher showed us the first ten minutes of Titus. I was captivated by the child playing at the kitchen table with his toy soldiers; the bold choral, almost fanfare-like music, that heralded the arrival of the army; the soldiers, like full-sized copies of the child’s figurines, clothed in armour and leather, accompanied by motorbikes; the prisoners and spoils of war contained in chariots and carts pulled by horses and tanks; the heightened dance-like movement of the foot soldiers, and the authoritarian address by Titus Andronicus to his people; the way time periods and styles collided against one another with such force that their anachronistic existences were totally justified within the deserted coliseum, the original theatre of cruelty. The rest of the film is nothing short of engrossing, yet also harrowing and exhaustingly exhilarating in a heightened poetic way. Filmed on location in Italy and Croatia, and at Cinecittà Studios in Rome, it mixes time periods like smells in a market place, and concocts the giddiest of pies from its ingredients. Her locations, when coupled with Shakespeare’s text, become metaphors for the psychological worlds of the characters, encapsulating emotional throughlines of scenes, sequences and acts. There is also a frequent and often subtle use of the hand as a visual device – it is both a blackly ironic statement as well as an examination of the nature and politics of power, revenge and violence. Taymor’s ideograph of the hand can be traced in almost every scene – a boy plays at his kitchen table, ripping limbs from his toy soldiers and dousing them in tomato sauce, all in frenetic close-up; senators acknowledge crowds and ask for silence; Basianus holds Lavinia close, out of Saturninus’s reach; Titus fatally stabs his own son; a large stone hand lies crumbling in a public square, its extended finger seeming to grope at the square’s occupants; Titus’ hand is chopped off in a twisted act of salvation; his daughter, Lavinia, is raped and has her hands cut off and replaced by useless twigs; Aaron the Moor protects his infant son from soldiers, cradling him in his arms; Titus breaks Lavinia’s neck with his bare hands in a desperate albeit merciful act towards the film’s conclusion. In its final shot, there is the rarest of rays of hope, as Young Lucius carries Aaron’s infant son from the coliseum, as Elliot Goldenthal’s luscious (and frequently anachronistic) score offers a way out, a way to break the circle of violence and revenge. Granted, it’s not to everyone’s tastes, and many people will disagree with it, but I think it is a tremendously bold, audacious and quite successful rendering of one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays.

William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet

Baz Luhrmann, 1996.

Year Nine English. Romeo and Juliet. Imagine you’re fourteen, at an all-boy’s school (for the time being), and hormones are flying everywhichway, when along comes this play about love and all its heady adrenaline-thumping rushing glory. It’s got everything for nearly-fifteen year olds – swordfights, love and exile, (with only the slight hiccup of a death (or two or four) to dampen the mood). Enter, then, Baz Luhrmann’s hyperactive reimagining. In Luhrmann’s film, moreso than the play (at least on the page), you get sucked into its heady world, it catches you up in its frenetic exuberance and brashness, and disgorges you at the end, exhausted and exhilarated. For many years afterwards, I couldn’t listen to Radiohead without thinking of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Hawaiian shirt or Clare Danes’ angel wings. Despite all its detractors, it’s not a bad place to start watching Shakespeare on film, nor is a bad film by itself. If anything, it’s quite good, even if it is its own cliché (the play as much as the film). But I spose when you’re almost fifteen, you don’t really care.

Twelfth Night

Sport for Jove, 2014
Photo by Seiya Taguchi for Sport For Jove.
Read more.

All's Well That Ends Well

Sport for Jove, 2014 
Photo by Seiya Taguchi for Sport For Jove.
Read more.

05/04/2014

The Winter’s Tale

Bell Shakespeare, 2014
Photo by Michele Mossop for Bell Shakespeare.
Read more.

The Shadow King

Malthouse Theatre / Sydney Festival, 2014
Photo by Jeff Busby for Malthouse Theatre.
Read more.

Othello: The Remix.

Sydney Festival, 2014
Photo by Michael Brosilow for Sydney Festival.
Read more.

Richard II

Royal Shakespeare Company, 2013
Photo by Kwame Lestrade for Royal Shakespeare Company.
Read more.

The Comedy of Errors

Bell Shakespeare, 2013
Photo by Matt Nettheim for Bell Shakespeare.
Read more.

Cymbeline

NIDA, 2013

Image by Catherine Steele.
Set upon a series of tiered white planes, this Cymbeline foregrounded Shakespeare’s jagged and uncompromising prose, his torturously fractured speech-rhythms and borderline incomprehensible plot. Not because the actors, all second-year acting students, were anything less than superb, but simply because it is such a strange play. The actors carried the play with aplomb, making the lines that extra bit clearer, doing their utmost in their beautifully designed and tailored jackets and dresses and skirts to make the play as believable, as real, as possible. One of his Romances, Cymbeline’s ending – another classic revelatory ‘wonder-upon-wonder’ scene – can seem rather awkward and implausible on the page. Here, under the direction of Tom Wright, the scene – indeed, the production – was measured, carefully timed and beautifully judged; what could have fallen over itself became moving, and the grace with which it was played fed reversely back through the previous two-and-a-bit hours, leaving us drained, ours brain fizzing as we tried to make sense of the whole crazy mad tale.

Hamlet

Belvoir, 2013
Photo by Brett Boardman for Belvoir.
Read more and more.

Romeo and Juliet

Sydney Theatre Company, 2013
Photo by Lisa Tomasetti for Sydney Theatre Company.
Read more.

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

Sydney Theatre Company, 2013
Photo by Heidrun Löhr for Sydney Theatre Company.
Read more.

The Merchant of Venice

Sydney Shakespeare Company, 2013
Photo by Rob Studdert (distudio)
for Sydney Shakespeare Company.
Read more.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Bell Shakespeare, 2013
Photo by Lisa Tomasetti for Bell Shakespeare.
Read more.

Henry 4

Bell Shakespeare, 2013
Photo by Lisa Tomasetti for Bell Shakespeare.
Read more.

The Duchess of Malfi

Bell Shakespeare, 2012
Photo by Rush for Bell Shakespeare.
Read more.

Macbeth

Bell Shakespeare, 2012
Photo by Rush for Bell Shakespeare.
Read more.

As You Like It

Belvoir, 2011


Photo by Heidrun Löhr for Belvoir.
Characterised by a theatrical delight and a rare whimsy which is so often missing in modern interpretations of Shakespeare, let alone his comedies, Eamon Flack’s As You Like It delighted in the language, in the words, the rhythms, the theatrical possibilities inherently written into one of Shakespeare’s greatest tour de force’s of theatrical disguise. Switching the genders of characters made no difference to the text, and there was a rambunctious playfulness which even the staunchest purists would’ve found hard to deny or ignore. When the cast appeared as sheep during the interval, the theatrical illusion of a pastoral idyll was complete. The perfect play for summer, it was everything modern Shakespeare should be: smart, funny, sexy, intelligent, respectful, clever, and above all, thoroughly Shakespearean.

Julius Caesar

Bell Shakespeare, 2011

Photo by Fotogroup for Bell Shakespeare.
Peter Evans’ production of Shakespeare’s tragedy deployed his (apparently-trademark) fascination with Meyerhold’s movement technique to haunting effect. The actors would coalesce and scatter across the stage, ringed by black office chairs and a Roman column, slowing down – almost to a stop – as they reached the other side, and then continuing off. Caesar’s assassination was a rare moment of poetry – handfuls of white powdered milk thrown in place of knives, actors jumping and throwing each other away from the stabbed emperor. Reminiscent of modern politics, Kate Mulvany’s Cassius and Colin Moody’s Brutus stole the show, and it was a rare example of a production which intelligently captured the current political mood in such a raw, poetic and theatrical way that you couldn’t help but make this tragedy exciting and profoundly gripping.

Faustus

Bell Shakespeare, 2011
Photo by Rob Maccoll for Queensland Theatre Company.
While strictly not Shakespeare, Michael Gow’s adaptation of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus fused the Elizabethan tragedy with Goethe’s Faust, as well as fragments of puppetry, opera, video projections and a devilishly good dose of audacity, while seeming to utilise every theatrical style imaginable. John Bell dancing in a steel-blue suit as Mephistopheles, Ben Winspear’s rock-god Faustus; a trio of devils singing a Schubert lieder, and a beautifully school-girlish Gretchen in Kathryn Marquet, gave us a vision of hell quite unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. It was sexy, dangerous, edgy and above all, deliciously good fun.

Much Ado About Nothing

Bell Shakespeare, 2011
Photo by Wendy McDougall for Bell Shakespeare.
Directed by John Bell, Shakespeare’s battle-of-the-wits (and -sexes), suitably played by Toby Schmitz and Blazey Best, erupted in a riot of triumph, colour and joy, set in a mid-twentieth century Italian villa. Beatrice and Benedict’s verbal sparring was a match for their physical antics, and as they fell for each other despite their best intentions and the infidelity plot untangled, you felt the passions, the heart and the life at the centre of Shaksespeare’s great verbal duel.

Twelfth Night

Bell Shakespeare, 2010
Photo by Brett Boardman for Bell Shakespeare.
This is the production I credit with showing me just how beautiful and heartbreaking Shakespeare can be, the production with which I ‘got’ Shakespeare on stage. Lee Lewis’ Twelfth Night was set in the aftermath of the recent Victorian bushfires; the characters emerged out of the blackness, exhausted and covered in soot, and proceeded to tell each other a story, assuming the identities and roles of the characters in Shakespeare’s play. Set around a giant pile of clothes and cardboard boxes – a refuge centre, we assumed – Lewis delighted in the playful theatricality of disguise, the simple answers to switching identities at the drop of a hat, and the joy and aliveness was never far away from the very tangible sorrow and heartbreak that sits at the core of all Shakespearean tragedy. Ending with a beautifully effervescent dance to Katrina & The Waves’ ‘Walking on Sunshine,’ it was hard not to be moved by the panache, verve and relish in theatrical delight with which the production revelled. 

Just Macbeth!

Bell Shakespeare, 2010
Photo by Wendy McDougall for Bell Shakespeare.
Adapted by children’s author Andy Griffiths for Bell Shakespeare, Just Macbeth! follows Griffiths’ semi-autobiographical characters of Andy, best friend Danny, and his sister Lisa as they take on Shakespeare’s classic tragedy. Featuring many clever puns, an insane amount of lunacy, and a very clever Macduff as palyed a garden gnome, there was never a dull moment, and the many children (as well as the adults) in the audience delighted in the very silly toilet jokes as well as the overt physicality of all the actors, not to mention the ridiculous situations and costumes they all found themselves in at one point or another.

Measure for Measure

Company B Belvoir, 2010
Photo by Heidrun Löhr for Company B Belvoir.
Continuing his examination of power in Shakespeare’s plays (following Julius Caesar, and the divisive and behemoth War of the Roses, both for STC), Benedict Andrews turned his distinctive aesthetic vision and directorial style to this, one of Shakespeare’s more problematic comedies. Set in a revolving hotel room, complete with sheer curtains, functioning shower, toilet, and television, not to mention video cameras operated by the cast, it took a long hard look at a society where, as he says, “pornography has become mainstream, sex tapes of celebrities are public fodder, politicians speak in the name of God; where all private lives are under constant surveillance, where everything is numbered and consumable.” Culminating in one of Shakespeare’s classic ‘wonder upon wonder’ revelatory endings, outrage is heaped upon outrage, and it leaves is bewildered, morally and imaginatively. This is not so much Shakespeare as Andrews’ stream of falling coloured confetti, his cluttered mise en scene, his over-reliance upon video close-ups, and his hyper-intellectualisation of everything which seems to have no rational explanation in his on-stage world.

King Lear

Bell Shakespeare, 2010
Photo by Wendy McDougall for Bell Shakespeare.
Bell Shakespeare’s 20th anniversary production was a sparse staging of this popular tragedy. Beautifully minimalist, John Bell’s Lear raged with all the futility of man against the storm as the revolving platform spun and spun and spun, as Bree van Reyk’s percussion whipped and buffeted them, stripping Lear and his Fool to their cores. While it didn’t quite hit the heights expected of it, it was nonetheless a poetic and strong production, suitably majestic as befitted the occasion.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Opera Australia, 2010
Photo by Jeff Busby for Opera Australia.
Benjamin Britten’s gorgeous orchestrations, shuffled-around scenes, and sung Shakespeare might sound a bit of an unlikely combination, but when set upon Catherine Martin’s sumptuous turn-of-the-century Indian Raj set, it seems as though it was always meant to be. Directed by Baz Luhrmann, there were brilliant colours – reds, pinks, yellows, blues, oranges, lush greens – enough richly coloured silks, embroidered fabrics, sun-blasted linen and British pomp to set the scene perfectly, and more than enough magic to swoon over. Without his dazzling cinematic tricks, Luhrmann’s direction (here rehearsed by Julie Edmunson and choreographer Belynda Buck) is clear, theatrical, and perfectly attuned to both his aesthetic vision and the demands of the piece, and I am certain this is one of the best ‘Dreams’ I have ever seen.