Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes in Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film adaptation of Romeo + Juliet.
This Saturday 23 April marks 400 years to the day since the death of poet and playwright William Shakespeare in 1616. Widely regarded as the greatest writer who ever lived, and credited with introducing over 1700 words to the English language – including bedroom, grovel, lonely and critic – Shakespeare’s reputation continues to grow, with successive generations of theatre-makers and other artists forever finding new aspects of his work to explore.
We wouldn’t dare try to come up with a definitive list of Shakespeare’s best works, but among his 37 plays and 154 sonnets, each has its detractors and its champions. Here, an array of Australian arts industry figures tell us which work or production has special resonance for them – and why.
Christos Tsiolkas, Novelist, Playwright, Essayist and Screenwriter
‘Ralph Fiennes’ 2011 Coriolanus is under-rated. I accept that it is not a revolutionary adaptation of the Shakespeare; but it is bold and thrilling and features a great cast. It introduced me to a work by the Bard that I had never read nor seen performed on stage, and – if this can be said of Shakespeare – I think the play too is under-rated. Set in the dying epoch of the Roman Republic, it is savage and frightening. The antagonistic relationship between state and military is still relevant to our 21st Century world but what really unsettled me is how Shakespeare’s language makes you pity and understand, sympathise and be terrorised, by the megalomaniac visions of a tyrant. It gets under your skin and you can’t shake off Coriolanus, as you can’t any of Shakespeare’s great tragic heroes, no matter how flawed and no matter how wicked their deeds. The play, and also the film, is revealing of one’s own lusts for power and it spooks you, like taking a long and honest look into the mirror. Fiennes set his adaptation in the Balkans, reflecting the then contemporary horrors of the dissolution of Yugoslavia. This film version is succinct, nothing feels wasted. The words of Shakespeare resonate and are not lost.’
The television adaptation of Christos Tsiolkas’ 2013 novel Barracuda screens on ABC1 later this year.
Deborah Stone, Editor, ArtsHub
‘It’s tempting to pick one of the plays, which are of course the more sustained and complex works. But the Shakespearean piece that has given me the most powerful personal sustenance is Sonnet 74, which begins But be contented when that fell arrest without all bail shall carry me away… I read it obsessively during the week after my father’s death. The final couplet reads The worth of that is that which it contains, And that is this, and this with thee remains. It captured the sense of continued attachment so important after the death of a loved one. Many years later my son – who never knew my Dad but had been raised with the sonnet – wrote the last few words on a shell he gave to me, so there’s a beautiful sense of legacy and attachment that these words carry for me.’
Elisa Armstrong, Co-Founder, Heartstring
‘Hamlet – it contains the most deep and pertinent questions about existence that are as relevant now as they were in the 17th century. It also throws in some jokes and a great sword fight!’
Heartstring’s debut work, an all-female production of Coriolanus, opens in Melbourne on 27 April.
Grant Scicluna, Screenwriter & Director
‘Flashback, 1996. I was 15, gay, isolated. My teacher Mrs Pritchard did her best to enthuse us about Shakespeare, but despite her efforts I brought to it a heavy sigh. Until I saw him. That blonde fringe. His baby blues as vibrant as the Hawaiian shirt on his gangly, pale frame. I fell in love with Leonardo DiCaprio as Romeo as hard as Juliet does in Baz Luhrmann’s intense, mental adaptation. Leo cries through a lot of the movie, like I did at that age for unrequited love or relief from rejection. They speak Shakespeare’s words with American accents and I could hear them for the first time. Leo screams “The world is not thy friend, nor the world’s law!” and I thought that’s how I feel! Mercutio in heels and a miniskirt says “If love be rough with you, be rough with love,” laying a path out of my misery, suggesting I too could be gangster with love! Never had Shakespeare felt so relevant, “biting its thumb” at the dreary establishment, by merging Shakespeare’s tragedy of young love with MTV. In his brilliant adaptation, Luhrmann made a play about teenagers feel like it was actually about teenagers.’
Grant Scicluna’s debut feature film Downriver opens in Australian cinemas on 12 May 2016.
Jason Klarwein, Director, QTC’s Much Ado About Nothing
‘My favourite Shakespeare play changes year to year. I direct Shakespeare every year for The Grin and Tonic Theatre Troupe, which means I am very familiar with plays such as Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Merchant of Venice. I am always struck by the power of some lines, even though I’ve heard them hundreds of times. My favourite Shakespeare play at the moment is Henry the Fourth Part 1. It is a cracking tale that is funny and heartbreaking at the same time. It is irreverent and reverent. And it ends in a classic showdown like Macbeth. Shakespeare was so good at writing character into his dialogue and Henry 4 is no exception. It is full of fantastic characters such as Hal, Hotspur, Falstaff, Mistress Quickly, Poins and Bardolf. It always makes me laugh and cry. No wonder he wrote a sequel!’
QTC’s Much Ado About Nothing runs from 23 April – 17 May at the Playhouse, QPAC.
Kathryn Osborne, Director & Producer, The Last Great Hunt
‘I studied Contemporary Performance at Edith Cowan University. Our course focus was on making new work, devising, and contemporary arts practice. As you can imagine, there was a divide among the students about the value of performing Shakespeare. There were arguments on all sides. The moderates: “If you’re going to do it, you need to bring some contemporary life and guts to it. Do an adaptation.” The haters: “Shakespeare is just crap. No one wants to go see it.” The purists: “Your duty is to the text.”
‘Going to university straight out of high school, I hadn’t been exposed to much Shakespeare at that point, and to be honest was more of a hater to start. Then I had my first experience of a Shakespeare I loved and it actually came from film: Julie Taymor’s Titus Andronicus. I still now can watch this film and love her use of imagery to tell the story. And, of course, Anthony Hopkins’ performance of Titus.
‘To read, Titus is definitely not the best Shakespeare and was part of his retell-the-Greeks phase. However, this is still my favourite piece of Shakespeare that I’ve seen because of how it first showed me how it was possible to have both the text and imagery work seamlessly to bring the words off the page.’
Lee Lewis, Artistic Director, Griffin Theatre Company
‘Twelfth Night. It is filled with so much pain and so much hope. There are parts of performances from this extraordinary story that I carry with me always – the heartbreaking Dmitry Scherbina as Malvolio in Declan Donellan’s Russian Twelfth Night that visited Sydney in 2006, Max Cullen as Feste singing St James Infirmary in the 2010 Bell Shakespeare national tour. The play requires so much heart and so much light because the shadows inside it are so dark. But you know what, I don’t have to choose – the beauty of a life in the theatre is that I travel with the hope and possibility of directing many of these plays and discovering new favourite moments within them.’
Griffin’s co-production with Bell Shakespeare, The Literati, runs from 27 May – 16 July at the SBW Stables Theatre.
Maeve Mhairi MacGregor, Artistic Director, Loud Mouth Theatre Company
‘The Merchant of Venice has had a hold on me for a long time.
‘It’s one of Shakespeare’s most confronting plays for a contemporary audience, and as such, it experienced an understandable plummet in production after the rise of the Third Reich. The Allies’ fear of acknowledging anti-Semitism as a strong and real part of our history pushed the once popular comedy to the back of the bottom drawer, like German Shepherds being renamed “Alsatians”.
‘History has irreversibly changed this play.
‘Compounding its original context is not only the extended history of the Jewish people, but also the continuation of the cycle of prejudice towards other peoples, encapsulated by Shylock’s “If you wrong us, shall we not revenge”. The Merchant of Venice has been un-domesticated by time, and has been blown open to become a parable for the wages of prejudice on a broader scale.
‘What makes the play’s change over time so special to me is that I like to think Shakespeare saw it coming. It’s just as relevant now as when it was written, though it is an entirely evolved beast.’
Loud Mouth’s next production, How to Hold Your Breath, runs from 29 April – 7 May at The Moonah Arts Centre, Hobart.
Marcel Dorney, Writer/Director
’The power of Shakespeare’s drama can be enormous, and so can its problems: both are unevenly distributed through the work, and they can sometimes, but not always, be separated in our culture, through which their influence runs deep and variegated. That seems obvious to say, but it’s very difficult to live up to; these plays are from a different culture, and any “uncomplicated presentation” of Shakespeare that ignores that is, I think, failing to open the one important door to what the plays might still teach us.
‘Now, watch me contradict myself.
‘King Lear is often described as unperformable, unstageable, etc; some of the capital-G “greatest directors” have screwed it up completely. I love it because it feels like a dramatist stripping down his own culture and its sense of history, even its religion, to dig into its substructure – authority, family, the place of the individual in the species, the species in the universe.
‘I don’t say “roots”, because I still think it’s a play of its time – not to mention how our culture regularly abuses the words “primal” and “universal” to justify existing injustices. Can it be a play of our time? I think that the sense of reduction is incredibly powerful – having removed most of Elizabethan culture from Lear’s court, Shakespeare then removes Lear’s court, leaving Lear naked before the universe. Then things get worse, and more beautiful.
‘We often try to tame it, or frame it, as we do most wilderness that’s older and more vicious than we are. It’s almost as if the play itself fights against the comfort – even the physical comfort – which theatres owe to audiences, which may be why directors can’t bring themselves take the play’s world seriously, and end up competing for “most shocking eye-gouge”, instead of coming to terms with how the play gradually, carefully, crushes everyone in its grip; including the poor suckers trying to stage it in a civilisation still trying to deny the looming possibility of its collapse.’
Marcel Dorney’s next production, The Tragedy of King Richard III, co-written with Daniel Evans after Shakespeare, runs from 21 May – 11 June at La Boite’s Roundhouse Theatre.
Richard Watts, Performing Arts Editor, ArtsHub
‘Franco Zeffirelli’s depiction of young love in his 1968 film Romeo and Juliet was the first time Shakespeare’s words truly spoke to me – perhaps because I was a teenager myself at the time I watched it on television; and just a year or two later I thrilled to the grue and gore of Polanski’s Macbeth (1971) when our English teacher screened it to my high school class in the hope it would hold our feverish adolescent attention. (According to school gossip, it did more than that: it gave some of us nightmares.)
‘More recently I’ve been awed and electrified by Ivo Van Hove’s Roman Tragedies at the 2014 Adelaide Festival – a startling, compelling, utterly of the moment rumination on political power. But the one production above all which remains my personal Shakespearean benchmark is the Royal Shakespeare Company’s touring production of Richard III, which I was lucky enough to see at Arts Centre Melbourne in 1984.
‘Directed by Bill Alexander and starring Antony Sher scuttling athletically about the stage on crutches – vividly evoking Shakespeare’s slanderous “bottled spider” description of the humpbacked warrior-king – this was the play that fanned my nascent love of theatre into a white-hot flame. The complexity of Shakespeare’s writing and his deft grasp of character was on full and breathtaking display in this portrait of a charismatic, complex, damnably likable yet monstrously evil villain. I’ve yet to see Sher’s performance as Richard III bettered, and even though I now know that Shakespeare’s depiction of the last Plantagenet king is Tudor-era propaganda, I’ll always treasure my memory of this production.’
Sam Strong, Artistic Director, Queensland Theatre Company
‘Choosing a favourite Shakespearean moment is as impossible as choosing a favourite child. If my arm was twisted I would say Twelfth Night, for being so autumnal and melancholy it’s only just a comedy. I’ve never seen the reunion between Sebastian and Viola be anything other than breathtakingly moving.’
QTC’s Much Ado About Nothing runs from 23 April – 17 May at the Playhouse, QPAC.
Tobias Cole, countertenor
‘The Shakespeare that resonates with me most is definitely A Midsummer Night’s Dream as I’ve been performing Benjamin Britten’s operatic version of the play since I was 12. The play is a “dream” for a composer, providing a contrast of character groups, comedy and colourful dramatic (and often botanical) language. Also, the verse and prose translate so beautifully into the musical forms of aria and recitative. Britten’s skills are shown in many ways, particularly with the voicing of the characters: Oberon’s a countertenor, a high male voice with an otherworldly quality; Titania a high coloratura (‘trilly’) soprano; the fairies are boy trebles; and Puck is a spoken role who, of course, often addresses the audience directly. But Britten is also an expert with melody and rhythm, phrasing the text in what seems to be the most interesting and engaging way imaginable. Whenever I sing Oberon’s aria, “I know a bank”, I feel like my voice, travelling on a delicious combination of vowels and consonants, is creating an ever changing kaleidoscope of colours and patterns that paint a magical fairy world.’
Tobias Cole performs alongside actor William Zappa in Shakespeare’s: The Sonnets Out Loud at The Street Theatre, Canberra on Saturday 30 April.
