Star-crossed: Bell Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

Alongside A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet is surely one of Shakespeare’s most well-known plays. Even if we’ve never seen or studied the play, we know its story from the plot of countless films, books, artworks, pieces of music created over the centuries. In his first production since assuming the reigns of Bell Shakespeare, Peter Evans goes back to the Bard and gives us a Romeo and Juliet that might be clothed in period costume but act and behave like contemporary teenagers. And like Baz Luhrmann’s hyperactive reimagining set in the fictional Verona Beach, Evans’ production is for the most part strong and accomplished.

Backstage in the forest of Arden: Bell Shakespeare’s As You Like It

As You Like It is a bit of a mad old cornucopic delight. It has everything Shakespeare has to offer – political intrigue, danger, love, mistaken identity, a smattering of philosophy, a few songs, (not to mention a spot of cross-dressing and disguise), and it is full of the kind of whimsy and mad-logic that Shakespeare specialises in. In many ways, it’s not so much concerned with a complex plot, or a plot’s complexities (as, say, in Hamlet or Twelfth Night), but rather the interactions and relationships between characters, the ways in which these interactions explore the play’s themes and issues including (but not limited to) love, identity, and self-expression.

Bell Shakespeare’s current production of As You Like It is a strange old beast. Played out against a backdrop of old canvas dropsheets, with several concealed exits and entrances (as befits the oft-quoted set-piece speech), it is characterized by a peculiar languid energy, a strange “holiday humour” where time slows, love is professed, declared and role-played with varying success, and magic can happen if only they’d let it. Directed by co-artistic director Peter Evans, this Arden is full of ideas, as are all his other productions, but somewhere in the transition from the page to the stage, some of Shakespeare [and Rosalind’s] effervescence is lost, and I don’t think it finds it again, if at all.

Power or the passion: Griffin’s Emerald City

Growing out of the age-old ‘Sydney-or-Melbourne’ debate, David Williamson’s Emerald City is a timely look at the struggle any artist faces – maintaining artistic integrity, or chasing money and fortune – and sets it against the backdrop of Sydney in the 1980s, with all the big brash audacity that makes Sydney what it is today. Produced here by Griffin Theatre Company almost thirty years after it was written, Williamson’s play is a helter-skelter tennis match between acclaimed screenwriter Colin and his wife Kate, between Colin and seemingly well-connected hack-writer Mike, between Mike and his girlfriend Kate, between Colin and his agent Elaine, between… You can almost see each serve, each rally, each shot, every palpable hit (and miss), every point won and lost; it’s a giddy sparring match between equals, and it’s hard not to get caught up in the whole argument – even if it is, by turn, scintillating, bitter, snarky and futile.