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.
In 2010, the Bell Shakespeare Company toured
Shakespeare’s mercurial comedy Twelfth Night around Australia.
Directed by Lee Lewis, the production was grounded in the context of the Black
Saturday bushfires of February 2009; the actors 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.
Using costumes drawn from a large pile of clothes donated to charity set in the
centre of the stage and a scattering of cardboard boxes around its edges, Lewis
delighted in the playful theatricality of disguise, the simple answers to
switching identities at the drop of a hat, and made sure that joy and an
effervescent sense of life were never far away from the very tangible sorrow, melancholy
and heartbreak that sits at the core of all Shakespearean comedy. I mention
this production for two reasons: first, it was the first time that I saw a
production of Shakespeare and understood – felt – the story and the very real
humanness at its heart; and second, because Lewis’ Twelfth Night felt like a fresh new play, a play written
now, for a contemporary audience.
This article was first written in March 2013
and revised three months later for publication on an online editorial website.
It was never published, so I am posting it here, now, in light of a recent
production of Hedda Gabler
in Sydney.
In the past two
years in Sydney
alone, audiences have been given the opportunity to see numerous classic plays in
their intended form or in new ‘updated’ versions by various writers and
directors (and writer-directors). Following Simon Stone’s reworking of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, versions of Seneca’s Thyestes, Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, Bergman’s film Face to Face, and Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof have all been
reinterpreted from their original ‘classic’ texts. While these have resulted in
many critical and popular successes, I have come to realise that there is a
very distinct view or presentation of the world that comes across in a large
number of these new versions. Beneath their accomplished surfaces is a more
troubling issue – the misrepresentation of women in theatre.
