Tempest

• In 2024 not one mainstage theatre company in Australia will perform Shakespeare.
• The only exception will be Bell Shakespeare.
• Theatre makers such as Lachlan Philpott, Nakkiah Lui and Andrew Bovell have been calling for less Shakespeare and more new work since the mid-2010s.

A forum for conversations

• He is important because we have, for 400 years, made him important, using his work to have rich conversations about identity, truth, meaning and morality.
• These conversations are worth participating in.
• The fact that none of these companies will perform Shakespeare next year suggests a decline in engagement with the canon outside of adaptations.
• We risk understanding ourselves merely through the lens of now, rather than enriching our present through discussion with our history.

Critical engagement

• We are not restricted to either using Shakespeare as a sock puppet to voice our own ideas, or ignoring him altogether.
• Like any fruitful conversation, it means listening, sitting with discomfort, learning, recognising what still speaks to us, and responding to what doesn’t.
• Conversing with Shakespeare does not mean smoothing over problems or forcing him to agree with us.
• The scenes in which Shylock is forced to surrender both his property and his faith were jarringly and uncomfortably melancholy.

Talking back to history

• What are we doing differently today, and what should we be doing differently?
• Nuanced, two-way conversations with our cultural history are vital to progress.
• It means learning from, questioning, and talking back to our history.