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Seen around the place, although not that much on my readlists.
Note: I didn't do drama or anything like that at school, just English Lit, so any of the live performances may have been atrociously staged, but I was quite uncritical of them.
school-related Shakepseare
I never did drama or school plays – we had a school musical every year with the equivalent boys’ school, but I never got involved in that. However, back in the 90s, my school had a policy where every year from Year 8 onwards (age 13-14) we studied a Shakespeare play in English class. As a result, there was always at least one in the curriculum, and the Board of Education NSW would often put on productions of the plays and texts for masses of schoolkids to watch and heckle. On the other side of it, though, the English staff at our school would often trawl for Shakespeare productions (or other plays relevant to study) and organise excusions to see them.
Year 8 (final year of junior high in US terms): A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Year 9 (freshman): Romeo & Juliet
Year 10 (sophomore): Macbeth (random note: my year 10 English teacher could cackle like nobody’s business)
Year 11 (junior): Othello
Year 12 (senior): King Lear
Year 12 additional (like AP English Lit, I guess?): Hamlet
For some reason we never did the histories and so I was never particularly interested in them. Possibly the English staff at the school didn’t like them?
The Shakespeare productions I remember watching due to school are:
Hamlet: (1994) Jacqueline McKenzie as Ophelia, and what I remember most is how Ophelia’s ‘o what a noble mind is here o’erthrown’ speech was pronounced at the same time as Hamlet’s ‘I’ve have heard of your paintings too’ screed before Hamlet exits and Claudius and Polonius come in and completely ignore Ophelia. This might be because we (final year girls from an academic school) were more interested in Ophelia and how she was jostled, pushed aside, and basically discarded. In the discussion post-play, we decided that we’d have gone mad if we’d had to deal with all the male idiots in the play, too. This was probably not quite what the English staff hoped for when they took us to see it, but IIRC they seemed amused.
Henry V: (1994) Had a World War I setting, with a mid-twenties Joel Edgerton in the lead role (we all thought he was dreamy) and an Indigenous Princess Catherine who seemed less disgusted with her Act II (?) English lesson than amused. I hadn’t studied the play at this point, so I had no idea what to expect and didn’t know the text. Knowing what I now know, I’d love to see that production again...
Romeo & Juliet: I don’t remember the specifics of this production, I only know that we saw it in a great cloud of students. There was also a small drama company who came to school and did short scenes from it. Including the morning-after-the-marriage scene. To most of us, when the actor playing Romeo zips up his jacket when he’s talking about going, then unzips it when he decides to stay (at which point Juliet tells him to go), the inference seemed pretty obvious. One girl didn’t think so, and had to ask about it. Which meant the actor had to spell it out for her in the post-scene discussion.
King Lear: I know I saw at least two productions of this in 1993 or 1994. The thing that always stands out for me in this play is the eye-gouging scene, and I mostly remember that in one of them the actor playing Edmund threw the bloody paintball globe across the stage to simulate the blinding...and we giggled because it was so OTT. Actually, one of them might have been by the Bell Shakespeare Company with John Bell himself as Lear.
I feel like I must have seen Macbeth live at some point during my high school studies, but probably not Othello.
--
Seen live at Shakespeare In The Park (in this case, Sydney Hyde Park):
The Taming Of The Shrew: I have a feeling I went to see this with a friend or a couple, and the part of the staging I remember best was the very visual sexual gag of Petruchio saying ‘my tongue in your tail’ and sticking his tongue out towards Katherina’s butt (they were both on their hands and knees at this point and Katherina was crawling away from him).
--
The Popup Globe is a production company in NZ/Australia that goes around to cities and builds a temporary replica of the Globe Theatre (a.k.a. a Popup version of the Globe) and then performs plays in it. Basically like the Elizabethan Globe Theatre (or the replica made in London), only portable (lots of steel struts and good engineering). They have two companies that do the plays – when I saw it in Sydney there was one all-male one, and one mixed company. I believe now they’ve switched it to equal gender companies (there was a woman-as-a-man actor in the all-male company performing Midsummer Nights’ Dream and she was also in The Merchant Of Venice
If I'd not been such a doofus, I'd have bought a ticket to all four shows in Melbourne and not just Much Ado. I knew better by the time the Popup Globe came to Sydney and saw everything that they put on.
--
Seen live by the Popup Globe Company in Melbourne and Sydney:
A Midsummer Night's Dream: performed by an all-male cast – the Popup Globe’s Exeter Company – with a very raunchy aspect to it. Hippolyta/Titania was actually a captive in chains and was played by a black man besides, and there were some very pointed references to colonialism and the whole sequence where Titania basically seduces Bottom was pretty much visually an oral sex scene. I’m curious how that went down in class discussion with the busloads of schoolkids who were (like we were) there because they were studying the play.
Both Hermia and Helena were male actors dressed as women (and one of the behind-the-scenes tranformation videos of Hermia is absolutely spectacular), and since the play has a lot of stuff about sex and love and attaction, there was a heavy strain of heteronormativity where transgressive gender roles were played for laughs. They didn’t put half the effort into the actor’s transformation into a Shakespearean play female that they did with Hermia – equating a lack of care with unwomanliness. A lot of Helena’s speeches about her being gawky and unwomanly were orchestrated for audience sniggering, and the choice to make Demetrius (who comes across as a prick in the text) a small guy was there to heighten the hilarity of him being drugged into submission of love with Helena.
A distinct point of interest, however, was that the elves were Maori. They spoke Maori, they moved like native warriors, they carried Maori accoutrements. It made knowing what was going on rather tricky since you either had to know Maori or know the play well enough to get the exposition.
Also a point of interest: the actor who played Robin Starveling (who then plays Thisbe in the play-within-a-play) was a woman dressed/acting as a man which the accompanying booklet said was in the long tradition of women dressing up as men so they could do things that were forbidden to them as women, particularly acting in the Elizabethan period. So it’s a woman dressed as a man, who in the play was then playing a man who was dressed as a woman...
Comedy Of Errors: It was weird. I mean, I love Twelfth Night and the confusion and the mistaken identity and, oh, everything but this just seemed...goofy. Maybe it was the production, which seemed less polished than either Much Ado About Nothing or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or maybe it was just that the focus of Twelfth Night is on Viola-as-Cesario Also, one of the twins (the wealthy twins) was American while his twin was Australian/NZ and so the Australian/NZ tried to put on an American accent and I just...my brain went splodey.
The Merchant Of Venice: I suspect I appreciated this less than I should have. I was trying to make sense of the plot and the speeches and it was kind of difficult, not really assisted by said schoolchildren also watching this.
Macbeth: Nothing stood out here in the production. Maybe I was burned out by the time I watched this one; IDK. Not that Macbeth has ever been my favourite of plays...
Much Ado About Nothing: Melbourne 2017. This was the first Popup Globe production that I saw and it made me really appreciate the Globe Theatre and the way Shakespeare got staged. It was, frankly, awesome. Beatrice was American, Benedict was black, Cladio was Maori, and a lot of the processings – wedding and funeral fr inst – were staged with Maori traditions, including some of the warrior dances.
I mean, I generally like Much Ado but this was a really good production and loads of fun.
In spite of the raunch and suggestiveness of a lot of Shakespeare’s dialogue that I recognise as an adult, I didn’t get much of the innuendo as a sheltered kid: it was unusual language to describe things, sure, but the last few years have changed that. I notice the interaction of speech and bodily staging a lot more.
I don't think we saw a live production of Othello but that was one of my least favourite works that we studied so I may not have paid any attention to it.
The War Of The Roses, Part 1 and Part 2: This is about 10 hours of selected scenes from the various histories, stitched together to allegedly form a narrative of the rise and fall of royalty through the 14th-15th Century, with questionable success. It was during the Cate Blanchette/Andrew Upton phase of the Sydney Theatre Company and I went to see it and found it...not very engaging. Then again, I never studied the histories (as noted above).
Movies:
Romeo and Juliet: Baz Luhrmann's R&J which I loved for the translation into a modern gang-family setting that showed exactly how Shakespeare wasn’t about setting but about people, Zefirelli's Renaissance Italy with the fencing fights and a teenaged Juliet also worked for me.
Othello: Lawrence Olivier in blackface.
Macbeth: Don’t remember what production, but it felt very cheap!BBC and my HS English class laughed a lot at the drama of the lightning and the trees.
Much Ado About Nothing: Kenneth Branagh w/ Robert Sean Leonard, Kate Beckinsale, Branagh, and of course Emma Thompson.
Henry V: Kenneth Branagh w/ baby Christian Bale.
A Midsummer Night's Dream: the one with Callista Flockhart and Michelle Pfeiffer and Stanley Tucci.
Twelfth Night: With Helena Bonham Carter as Olivia – Trevor Nunn’s version? I love this, not least because Viola and Sebastian actually look a little alike and the staging totally works for me.
Hamlet: Kenneth Branagh’s 2 hour abridged version as well the 4 hour version; one was with Yr 12 Extra English class, the other was with a friend I met in 1st year uni, whom she dragged along because I was ‘the only one in her circles likely to appreciate it’. The idea of Hamlet and Ophelia as sexually intimate made a lot of sense given Hamlet’s rants about women and sexuality, and Ophelia’s charged ravings once she goes mad. I also saw the Mel Gibson Hamlet, which was okay but I thought a little incestuous.
--
Bar'd Work
Incidentally, for lowbrow Shakespeare, the production company Bar'd Work is running a ShakesBeer production of Twelfth Night in various Sydney pubs in the next three weeks which I have to get tickets to, since going to Perth to see the Popup Globe Company do Hamlet, Measure for Measure, and Twelfth Night is seriously stretching my finances right now...
Note: I didn't do drama or anything like that at school, just English Lit, so any of the live performances may have been atrociously staged, but I was quite uncritical of them.
school-related Shakepseare
I never did drama or school plays – we had a school musical every year with the equivalent boys’ school, but I never got involved in that. However, back in the 90s, my school had a policy where every year from Year 8 onwards (age 13-14) we studied a Shakespeare play in English class. As a result, there was always at least one in the curriculum, and the Board of Education NSW would often put on productions of the plays and texts for masses of schoolkids to watch and heckle. On the other side of it, though, the English staff at our school would often trawl for Shakespeare productions (or other plays relevant to study) and organise excusions to see them.
Year 8 (final year of junior high in US terms): A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Year 9 (freshman): Romeo & Juliet
Year 10 (sophomore): Macbeth (random note: my year 10 English teacher could cackle like nobody’s business)
Year 11 (junior): Othello
Year 12 (senior): King Lear
Year 12 additional (like AP English Lit, I guess?): Hamlet
For some reason we never did the histories and so I was never particularly interested in them. Possibly the English staff at the school didn’t like them?
The Shakespeare productions I remember watching due to school are:
Hamlet: (1994) Jacqueline McKenzie as Ophelia, and what I remember most is how Ophelia’s ‘o what a noble mind is here o’erthrown’ speech was pronounced at the same time as Hamlet’s ‘I’ve have heard of your paintings too’ screed before Hamlet exits and Claudius and Polonius come in and completely ignore Ophelia. This might be because we (final year girls from an academic school) were more interested in Ophelia and how she was jostled, pushed aside, and basically discarded. In the discussion post-play, we decided that we’d have gone mad if we’d had to deal with all the male idiots in the play, too. This was probably not quite what the English staff hoped for when they took us to see it, but IIRC they seemed amused.
Henry V: (1994) Had a World War I setting, with a mid-twenties Joel Edgerton in the lead role (we all thought he was dreamy) and an Indigenous Princess Catherine who seemed less disgusted with her Act II (?) English lesson than amused. I hadn’t studied the play at this point, so I had no idea what to expect and didn’t know the text. Knowing what I now know, I’d love to see that production again...
Romeo & Juliet: I don’t remember the specifics of this production, I only know that we saw it in a great cloud of students. There was also a small drama company who came to school and did short scenes from it. Including the morning-after-the-marriage scene. To most of us, when the actor playing Romeo zips up his jacket when he’s talking about going, then unzips it when he decides to stay (at which point Juliet tells him to go), the inference seemed pretty obvious. One girl didn’t think so, and had to ask about it. Which meant the actor had to spell it out for her in the post-scene discussion.
King Lear: I know I saw at least two productions of this in 1993 or 1994. The thing that always stands out for me in this play is the eye-gouging scene, and I mostly remember that in one of them the actor playing Edmund threw the bloody paintball globe across the stage to simulate the blinding...and we giggled because it was so OTT. Actually, one of them might have been by the Bell Shakespeare Company with John Bell himself as Lear.
I feel like I must have seen Macbeth live at some point during my high school studies, but probably not Othello.
--
Seen live at Shakespeare In The Park (in this case, Sydney Hyde Park):
The Taming Of The Shrew: I have a feeling I went to see this with a friend or a couple, and the part of the staging I remember best was the very visual sexual gag of Petruchio saying ‘my tongue in your tail’ and sticking his tongue out towards Katherina’s butt (they were both on their hands and knees at this point and Katherina was crawling away from him).
--
The Popup Globe is a production company in NZ/Australia that goes around to cities and builds a temporary replica of the Globe Theatre (a.k.a. a Popup version of the Globe) and then performs plays in it. Basically like the Elizabethan Globe Theatre (or the replica made in London), only portable (lots of steel struts and good engineering). They have two companies that do the plays – when I saw it in Sydney there was one all-male one, and one mixed company. I believe now they’ve switched it to equal gender companies (there was a woman-as-a-man actor in the all-male company performing Midsummer Nights’ Dream and she was also in The Merchant Of Venice
If I'd not been such a doofus, I'd have bought a ticket to all four shows in Melbourne and not just Much Ado. I knew better by the time the Popup Globe came to Sydney and saw everything that they put on.
--
Seen live by the Popup Globe Company in Melbourne and Sydney:
A Midsummer Night's Dream: performed by an all-male cast – the Popup Globe’s Exeter Company – with a very raunchy aspect to it. Hippolyta/Titania was actually a captive in chains and was played by a black man besides, and there were some very pointed references to colonialism and the whole sequence where Titania basically seduces Bottom was pretty much visually an oral sex scene. I’m curious how that went down in class discussion with the busloads of schoolkids who were (like we were) there because they were studying the play.
Both Hermia and Helena were male actors dressed as women (and one of the behind-the-scenes tranformation videos of Hermia is absolutely spectacular), and since the play has a lot of stuff about sex and love and attaction, there was a heavy strain of heteronormativity where transgressive gender roles were played for laughs. They didn’t put half the effort into the actor’s transformation into a Shakespearean play female that they did with Hermia – equating a lack of care with unwomanliness. A lot of Helena’s speeches about her being gawky and unwomanly were orchestrated for audience sniggering, and the choice to make Demetrius (who comes across as a prick in the text) a small guy was there to heighten the hilarity of him being drugged into submission of love with Helena.
A distinct point of interest, however, was that the elves were Maori. They spoke Maori, they moved like native warriors, they carried Maori accoutrements. It made knowing what was going on rather tricky since you either had to know Maori or know the play well enough to get the exposition.
Also a point of interest: the actor who played Robin Starveling (who then plays Thisbe in the play-within-a-play) was a woman dressed/acting as a man which the accompanying booklet said was in the long tradition of women dressing up as men so they could do things that were forbidden to them as women, particularly acting in the Elizabethan period. So it’s a woman dressed as a man, who in the play was then playing a man who was dressed as a woman...
Comedy Of Errors: It was weird. I mean, I love Twelfth Night and the confusion and the mistaken identity and, oh, everything but this just seemed...goofy. Maybe it was the production, which seemed less polished than either Much Ado About Nothing or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or maybe it was just that the focus of Twelfth Night is on Viola-as-Cesario Also, one of the twins (the wealthy twins) was American while his twin was Australian/NZ and so the Australian/NZ tried to put on an American accent and I just...my brain went splodey.
The Merchant Of Venice: I suspect I appreciated this less than I should have. I was trying to make sense of the plot and the speeches and it was kind of difficult, not really assisted by said schoolchildren also watching this.
Macbeth: Nothing stood out here in the production. Maybe I was burned out by the time I watched this one; IDK. Not that Macbeth has ever been my favourite of plays...
Much Ado About Nothing: Melbourne 2017. This was the first Popup Globe production that I saw and it made me really appreciate the Globe Theatre and the way Shakespeare got staged. It was, frankly, awesome. Beatrice was American, Benedict was black, Cladio was Maori, and a lot of the processings – wedding and funeral fr inst – were staged with Maori traditions, including some of the warrior dances.
I mean, I generally like Much Ado but this was a really good production and loads of fun.
In spite of the raunch and suggestiveness of a lot of Shakespeare’s dialogue that I recognise as an adult, I didn’t get much of the innuendo as a sheltered kid: it was unusual language to describe things, sure, but the last few years have changed that. I notice the interaction of speech and bodily staging a lot more.
I don't think we saw a live production of Othello but that was one of my least favourite works that we studied so I may not have paid any attention to it.
The War Of The Roses, Part 1 and Part 2: This is about 10 hours of selected scenes from the various histories, stitched together to allegedly form a narrative of the rise and fall of royalty through the 14th-15th Century, with questionable success. It was during the Cate Blanchette/Andrew Upton phase of the Sydney Theatre Company and I went to see it and found it...not very engaging. Then again, I never studied the histories (as noted above).
Movies:
Romeo and Juliet: Baz Luhrmann's R&J which I loved for the translation into a modern gang-family setting that showed exactly how Shakespeare wasn’t about setting but about people, Zefirelli's Renaissance Italy with the fencing fights and a teenaged Juliet also worked for me.
Othello: Lawrence Olivier in blackface.
Macbeth: Don’t remember what production, but it felt very cheap!BBC and my HS English class laughed a lot at the drama of the lightning and the trees.
Much Ado About Nothing: Kenneth Branagh w/ Robert Sean Leonard, Kate Beckinsale, Branagh, and of course Emma Thompson.
Henry V: Kenneth Branagh w/ baby Christian Bale.
A Midsummer Night's Dream: the one with Callista Flockhart and Michelle Pfeiffer and Stanley Tucci.
Twelfth Night: With Helena Bonham Carter as Olivia – Trevor Nunn’s version? I love this, not least because Viola and Sebastian actually look a little alike and the staging totally works for me.
Hamlet: Kenneth Branagh’s 2 hour abridged version as well the 4 hour version; one was with Yr 12 Extra English class, the other was with a friend I met in 1st year uni, whom she dragged along because I was ‘the only one in her circles likely to appreciate it’. The idea of Hamlet and Ophelia as sexually intimate made a lot of sense given Hamlet’s rants about women and sexuality, and Ophelia’s charged ravings once she goes mad. I also saw the Mel Gibson Hamlet, which was okay but I thought a little incestuous.
--
Bar'd Work
Incidentally, for lowbrow Shakespeare, the production company Bar'd Work is running a ShakesBeer production of Twelfth Night in various Sydney pubs in the next three weeks which I have to get tickets to, since going to Perth to see the Popup Globe Company do Hamlet, Measure for Measure, and Twelfth Night is seriously stretching my finances right now...
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