The Comedy of Errors

Bell Shakespeare, 2013

Photo by Matt Nettheim for Bell Shakespeare.

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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.

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.