Rosemary Gaby

‘The days that we have seen’: History and Regret in Henry IV, Parts One and Two, The Hollow Crown (2012)

Since Anthony Quayle’s landmark history play cycle at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre for the Festival of Britain in 1951, British productions of Shakespeare’s history plays have often been associated with occasions of national significance. In Scott McMillin’s terms, the histories have become ‘curtain-raisers for occasions of wealth and power’.1 The year 2012 was full of such occasions, with the London Olympics and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee both engendering performances of nationhood on a grand scale. While the RSC celebrated the year with its World Shakespeare Festival, it was the BBC that turned to the history plays with a series entitled The Hollow Crown. Promoted as a highlight of the BBC’s 2012 ‘Cultural Olympiad’, this comprised four films of the plays from the second tetralogy, screened across four weeks, starting with Richard II on 30 June.2

A discriminating audience: Touring Shakespeare and mid-nineteenth-century Tasmania

Abstract The 1850s were a defining decade for colonial Tasmania, encompassing the cessation of convict transportation, the establishment of a House of Assembly and the jettisoning of the island’s old identity as Van Diemen’s Land. Many Tasmanian settlers were dedicated to the task of raising the cultural standing of the colony and Shakespeare became an integral part of this process. A steady stream of visiting players from America and England brought Shakespeare to Tasmania in the 1850s, including Sarah and James Stark, Eleanor Goddard and John Caple, McKean Buchanan and G.V. Brooke. Newspapers of the period reflect a lively and varied local interaction with their productions. Focusing on the evidence of contemporary reviews, this paper considers the political resonance of Shakespeare in mid-nineteenth-century Tasmania. It suggests that touring Shakespeare productions opened up key opportunities for this geographically and socially marginalised community to assert a new sense of itself as a discriminating audience, ready to engage with complex and profound modes of thinking and expression.

Then and now: Henry IV's England via the RSC and Bell Shakespeare

Shakespeares Henry IV plays invite a split temporal vision, depicting through one lens historical figures from a specific moment in British history and through another a group of fictional characters from Shakespeares present. The degree to which the plays have been geared towards the past or the present in performance has varied widely, with some landmark productions choosing to utilise contemporary settings and many others constructing medieval or Elizabethan contexts for the plays. This paper compares two contrasting examples: the RSCs 2014 productions of the two parts of Henry IV, directed by Gregory Doran, and the Bell Shakespeare Companys 2013 Henry IV, directed in Australia by John Bell and Damien Ryan. It situates them as, respectively, embracing historicist and presentist approaches to the plays and considers what their divergent representations of Henry IVs England might say about the companies and the disparate cultural contexts in which they reproduce Shakespearean history.

Early Experiments: Pastoral and Elizabethan Staging

This chapter charts the early history of outdoor Shakespeares in Australia from the first productions mounted in the gardens of stately homes to the experiments in Elizabethan performance conditions of the 1950s and 1960s that aimed to showcase the comparative advantages of the Elizabethan open-air stage. Open-air Shakespeares discussed here include those staged by Allan Wilkie’s touring company in the 1920s, Colin Ballantyne’s 1951 As You Like It in Adelaide, and various productions staged in Perth at the University of Western Australia through to the opening of the University’s New Fortune theatre with Hamlet in 1964.

Glenn Elston and the Rise of Picnic Shakespeares

The focus of this chapter is Glenn Elston’s Australian Shakespeare Company and the “Shakespeare under the Stars” phenomenon, which has been largely responsible for the expanding popularity of open-air Shakespeares since 1988. Elston’s productions have toured widely, developing audiences for open-air Shakespeare in Sydney, Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane, and Darwin, and the success of these has inspired many local companies to follow suit. This chapter looks at the history of the company and varied responses to their “larrikin” style of Shakespeare performance. It includes consideration of the company’s 2014 A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Melbourne’s Royal Botanical Gardens.

Introduction: Open-Air Shakespeare, Space, Place, and Performance

The Introduction presents a rationale for the study and sets up a theoretical framework for the analysis of productions in the following chapters. It includes a contextualization of the Australian open-air Shakespeare industry in terms of overseas practice and discussion of recent works that focus on site-specific drama and issues associated with space, place, and performance.

From Local Park to National Park: After the 1980s

Shakespeare in the park has become a regular event in many regional centres. This chapter looks at the ways in which open-air Shakespeares have contributed to the development of community-based theatre companies all over Australia. It surveys some unusual locations for Shakespeare and looks at how some companies have been able to find synergies between Australian space and Shakespeare’s plays. The chapter includes discussion of recent productions by Directions Theatre Company in Hobart, Shakespeare WA in Perth, the Queensland Shakespeare Ensemble in Brisbane, and the work of touring companies, Ozact and Essential Theatre Company. A key focus is the impact of audience expectations for outdoor theatre on decisions about repertoire and artistic approach.

Pageants and Festivals: Shakespeare in the Street

Open-air Shakespeares have played an important role in the establishment of an arts-festival culture in Australia. This chapter considers open-air Shakespeare productions that have been staged within the context of major arts festivals in Australia (particularly in Perth, Adelaide, and Brisbane) and the phenomenon of the regional Shakespeare festival where performances are often supported by pageants, fairs, and community events that take Shakespeare into the street. A key example discussed here is the University of Southern Queensland’s (USQ) Shakespeare in the Park Festival in Toowoomba.

Taking the Bard to the bush: Environmental Shakespeares in Australia

Much Shakespearean stage history and performance analysis focuses on productions staged in indoor spaces, but since the nineteenth century outdoor productions have become increasingly popular around the world, and they provide some interestingly varied modes of interaction with the worlds constructed through Shakespeares verse and prose. Whereas conventional theatre buildings tend to isolate the performance event from the physical and social world outside, open-air productions cannot be cocooned from the places in which they are staged and inevitably perceptions of the locale become an integral part of the performance experience. Audiences at an open-air production experience the ambiguities of simultaneously responding to the imagined locations suggested by Shakespeares poetry and prose, the productions attempts to represent those locations through lighting, costumes, properties and scenery and also, crucially, to the particular characteristics of the space chosen for performance and the sense of place associated with it. In Australia the distance between Shakespearean settings and local space is glaringly conspicuous, yet in recent years many companies have attempted to mount productions in unusual locations, beyond the familiar spaces of city parks and gardens. Focusing on the work of Victorian company, Ozact, this paper considers the emergence of environmental Shakespeare in Australia and its search for synergies between place and play.