The seven ages of John Bell

This is a slightly edited version of an article written for the Australian Writers’ Guild’s Storyline magazine, published in August 2015 in Volume 35.

For thousands of young people across Australia each year, Bell Shakespeare’s Actors At Work programme brings the plays of William Shakespeare alive in an accessible and vibrant way. A core part of Bell Shakespeare’s learning programme since the company’s first season in 1990, Actors At Work travels the country with little more than the Bard’s words and their imaginations, and provides many students with their first experience of Shakespeare and/or live theatre.

Like many of these students, John Bell’s first introduction to Shakespeare came when he was at school. “I had a fantastic English teacher at that time who taught Shakespeare, and took us off to see the Shakespeare movies, and any live theatre that came to town, so I’d already got hooked on language and Shakespeare, poetry, some novels of course… we did about six Shakespeare plays in my high school years – two a year in great detail, so we got through it very thoroughly – and then I got interested in performing.”

“Selling you quiet”: The new frontier of digital theatre

This is a slightly edited version of an article written for the Australian Writers’ Guild’s Storyline magazine, published in January 2015 in Volume 34.

In a technologically-saturated age, when most art forms are moving towards modes of digital creation, distribution or enhancement, theatre is perhaps the only art form whose existence cannot be adequately captured or recreated in a virtual space. True, theatre is being filmed and broadcast in cinemas across the world and being made available online, both in Australia and overseas, but it doesn’t capture the same experience as being in a darkened space with a hundred other people, watching performers in a space in front of you. Perhaps the future of digital theatre lies not in accurately capturing the performance in a recording, but in something else, in the creation of a world in which the performance can sit.

Sydney’s Griffin Theatre Company, in collaboration with Google’s Creative Labs (henceforth referred to as ‘Google’), has instigated a digital theatre project which is attempting to test the boundaries of overlap between traditional theatre practices and the endless possibilities of digital technology. In short, their goal is to create a prototype in which the theatrical performance is just one element of a wider world, of a wider conversation about the performance, one which takes place on social media platforms, and actively encourages audience participation and interaction.