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.

Peter Evans: bringing period back to Shakespeare

In October 2011, following two enormously strong productions for Bell Shakespeare – John Bell’s exuberant Much Ado About Nothing, and Michael Gow’s theatrically-encyclopaedic Faustus – Peter Evans’ production of Julius Caesar arrived in Sydney at the end of a four-month national tour. Intelligent, concise, and subtly condensed for a cast of ten, Evans’ Caesar was a rare example of a production which eloquently captured the contemporary mood (and political climate) in a raw, poetic and theatrical way. Robust, haunting, and profoundly gripping, it made me sit up and take notice of Evans’ work, and remains one of the cornerstone productions in my theatrical fascination with Shakespeare.

Peter Evans is Bell Shakespeare’s co-artistic director, and is about to take the reins of the company once John Bell concludes work on The Tempest. I sat down with Evans at the end of July for a discussion about playing the classics, his career as a director, the challenges facing a specialist company like Bell Shakespeare in Australia’s theatrical climate, his fascination with Meyerhold’s system of biomechanics, and what might lie ahead from 2016.

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.

Molière this!: Bell Shakespeare’s Tartuffe

Following in the wake of the tiresome and convoluted adaptation/new version vs. new plays-and-textual fidelity debate (most of last year), comes another of Justin Fleming’s versions of one of Molière’s plays. Last seen in Bell Shakespeare’s The School for Wives in 2012, Fleming’s skill lies not just in translating Molière’s (French) rhymes into modern Australian ones, but in the panache, flair, wit and verve with which he carries it all off. In Fleming’s Tartuffe, currently playing at the Opera House’s Drama Theatre, director Peter Evans summons up every inch of baroque stateliness inherent in Molière-via-Fleming’s script, and runs with it, creating a sugary confection which simply must be seen to be believed.

Hempen home-spuns: Bell Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream

A Midsummer Night's Dream is certainly one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays. I don’t think there’s barely a day that goes by without another production opening somewhere in the world. Yet despite its popularity, there is a robustness to it that withstands this very proliferation – no matter how many cuts or omissions are made to it, the inherent magic of it still stands, still transports audiences to the “palace wood a mile without the town” where the Rude Mechanicals, the four lovers, and a host of wayward fairies converge upon a midsummer’s night.

Presented here by Bell Shakespeare for a schools audience, it is characterised by cocooning warmth and a very earthy, tactile aesthetic. From the curved wooden wall of Teresa Negroponte’s set, almost like a ruined ship’s hull turned on its side, to the costumes and the actors’ physicality, the robustness of Shakespeare’s script bounces back at you, even if it is somewhat truncated and reshaped.

It’s all Greek to me: Bell Shakespeare’s Phèdre

Untranslatable is a word often used to describe Racine’s plays, we are told in the program to Bell Shakespeare’s latest production, Phèdre. And watching the play, part of me cannot help but wish it had stayed thus, however much it hurts me to admit it. Based on the Greek myth of Phèdre, Racine’s play is a downward spiralling tragedy, much like Shakespeare’s own Macbeth and Hamlet, until at the end, tragedy befalls everyone, and Theseus and Théramène are left to pick up the pieces.

If Anna Cordingely’s set was anything to go by, the production should’ve been sumptuous. A decaying room, perhaps in a French palace, it consisted of an elongated octagonal room with the front walls removed – stairs tiled in black and white, six large windows at the rear, a ceiling with a hole smashed through it (due to a god’s intervention, perhaps?), a chaise divan and two similarly-upholstered chairs… a picture of faded elegance. The space was lit effectively by Paul Jackson in bolts of harsh fluorescence, gentle gold, and electric blue, and added to the former grandeur of the play’s location. Kelly Ryall’s sound design and ‘score’ were both effective in unsettling the audience from the opening salvo of scratching susurrations to the final blackout, almost as if the gods somewhere were spinning disks of thunder and lightning. It was used in scene breaks too, and in tiny unobtrusive blurts when a character entered via the stairs, and though my description of it sounds somewhat disparaging, it was one of the production’s strongest points, and complemented the set in its depiction of a once-faded decadence, something familiar now in disarray, beyond repair. However, when you added the cast – headed by Catherine McClements as Phèdre – something inherently 'magical' disappeared.

Upon the heath: Bell Shakespeare's Macbeth

The houselights go down and you’re plunged into blackness. Thick total inky suffocating blackness. The audience begins to shift uneasily in their seats, caught off guard, until at the rear of the stage, a thin shaft of light illuminates a disembodied face hanging, impossibly, upside-down from the ceiling. We soon realise it’s a mirror, or what passes for a mirror, and it speaks – all at once female and male, its timbre trebled and possessed – and the alltoofamiliar opening lines of the play echo confusingly around the theatre. As the lights rise on the stage, we see a gently raked space – the “blasted heath” – a scattering of gravel, dirt, and tussocky grass. Suspended above it is a black reflective panel, the counterweight to the heath, a mirror for all intents and purposes. And the play begins.

Bell Shakespeare’s first production for 2012 is Macbeth (or ‘The Scottish Play,’ if you’re a superstitious mug), directed by Peter Evans. It’s a play about politics and power, rumours and gossip, witchcraft and lineage, kings and courts, and was written around 1605 in response to the Gunpowder Plot. All that is merely historical context to this production which, true to Bell Shakespeare’s ethos and house-style, is in modern-dress, a fusion of 21^st century jeans, boots and shirts, and 1940s elegance, in the lords’ bright cerulean blue jackets and Lady M’s dresses. Director Peter Evans (who directed Julius Caesar for Bell Shakespeare in 2011) wanted to focus more on the people and the power, the relationships and humanity of – in – the play, than on the politics, a decision which gave the play a weirdly languid dynamic and yet one of the most insanely gripping and astoundingly brilliant endings I’ve seen yet.