Category: Theater

A decade ago, William Shakespeare was the most performed playwright in Australia. In 2024 not one mainstage theatre company in Australia will perform Shakespeare. The only exception will be Bell Shakespeare.

This shift has been a long time coming. 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.

Today, their advocacy is bearing fruit.

Of the 79 plays being performed in 2024, 68 (87%) were written after 2000, 60 (76%) were written after 2014 and 23 (29%) will have their world premiere in 2024. Only three were written prior to the 20th century – and that’s if you count Kip Williams’ new adaptation of Dracula, alongside Bell Shakespeare’s two plays.

New work is important. A truly rich cultural conversation must include a variety of voices and fresh perspectives. But alongside new work and new voices, nuanced engagement with the past is needed.

A forum for conversations

Shakespeare is important, not just because he wrote great plays, and definitely not because he is perfect. 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.

Australia’s mainstage comprises 11 companies: State Theatre Company of South Australia in Adelaide; Queensland Theatre and La Boite Theatre in Brisbane; Melbourne Theatre Company and Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne; Black Swan State Theatre Company in Perth; and Belvoir, Bell Shakespeare, Griffin Theatre Company, Ensemble Theatre and Sydney Theatre Company in Sydney. All except La Boite have announced their 2024 seasons.

The fact that none of these companies will perform Shakespeare next year suggests a decline in engagement with the canon outside of adaptations.

This decline is, in some ways, justified. We don’t need to perform Shakespeare all the time. We certainly don’t need to trot out tired, uninspired performances just for the sake of doing Shakespeare.

But if new work is not in conversation with the canon, we risk taking an uncritical and oversimplified view of the past – and present and future. We risk understanding ourselves merely through the lens of now, rather than enriching our present through discussion with our history.

Playwrights Philpott and Bovell have expressed understandable frustration at productions tying themselves in knots trying to make Shakespeare “relevant”. If your aim is to make the text reflect modern values, why not simply perform a new play?

Perhaps we do need a break from Shakespeare if all we can do is insist he is always, and in all things, our contemporary.

Read: Australian Performing Arts Forum 2023: an overview and summary

Critical engagement with Shakespeare

There is an alternative to this false dilemma. We are not restricted to either using Shakespeare as a sock puppet to voice our own ideas, or ignoring him altogether. Rather, we can perform Shakespeare in a critically engaged, nuanced way.

This means avoiding easy categories like “problematic” or “universal”. 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. Sydney Theatre Company’s 2022 production of The Tempest, directed by Kip Williams, attempted to correct the play’s racism by radically editing the text.

By trying to solve The Tempest, the production glossed over its problems rather than engaging critically with them.

There are excellent examples of Australian theatre makers grappling with problems in Shakespeare.

Anne-Louise Sarks’ 2017 production of The Merchant of Venice for Bell Shakespeare explored the uncomfortable religious and social dynamics of the play.

The scenes in which Shylock is forced to surrender both his property and his faith were jarringly and uncomfortably melancholic. There was no attempt to shrug off the pain of the play’s conclusion for Shylock and his daughter Jessica.

Jason Klarwein and Jimi Bani’s 2022 Othello at Queensland Theatre used translation, casting and design choices to confront and interrogate the themes of the play.

This production explored and highlighted racism and sexism, both in 20th century Australia and within the play itself.

Othello has a vexed performance history, and this production was an important contribution to a 400-year-old conversation.

In Benedict Andrews’ 2009 production of The War of the Roses for Sydney Theatre Company, Shakespeare’s Henry V was stripped back to a series of soliloquies spoken by Ewen Leslie.

Covered in glitter, then oil and eventually blood, Leslie as Henry V invited audiences to confront not only the humanity of “the warlike Harry”, but also the horror associated with his military triumph.

Talking back to history

By confronting – rather than avoiding, removing or “fixing” problems in Shakespeare – productions can invite audiences to ask important questions. Why have certain ideas been acceptable in the past? Why are they not so now? 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.

Decolonising the canon does not mean ignoring it, but dialoguing with it. It means learning from, questioning and talking back to our history. Doing this will allow us to better understand our present and know who we would like to be in our future.

Of the 79 works being performed on the 2024 Australian mainstage, 68 were written in the new millennium. Shifting the balance of old and new ever-so-slightly would enrich our cultural conversation.

Caitlin West, PhD Candidate in Drama and Theatre Studies, The University of Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

Episode Notes

In a news conference on Thursday, Anders Olsson, the chairman of the Nobel literature committee, praised “Fosse’s sensitive language, which probes the limits of words.”

Fosse’s work has been translated into around 50 languages and he is among the world’s most widely performed living playwrights. But he has only recently found major acclaim in English-speaking countries, thanks mainly to his fiction: “A New Name: Septology VI-VII” was a finalist for a National Book Award last year, and two of his novels have been nominated for the International Booker Prize.

He has long been tipped to receive the Nobel. In 2013, British bookmakers even temporarily suspended betting on the award after a flurry of bets on his winning, although the prize did not come his way for another decade. When it finally did, the call from the Nobel Prize’s organizers came while Fosse was traveling to Frekhaug, a village on Norway’s west coast where he has a home.

In a statement sent through his Norwegian publisher, Fosse, 64, said he was “both really happy and really surprised” to receive the award. “I have been among the favorites for 10 years, and felt sure that I would never get the prize,” he said. “I simply cannot believe it.”

Asked what he aimed to convey to readers in his work, Fosse said he hoped to impart a feeling of serenity.

“I hope they can find a kind of peace in, or from, my writing,” he said.

In receiving what is widely seen as the most prestigious honor in literature, Fosse (whose name is pronounced Yune FOSS-eh, according to his translator) joins a list of laureates including Toni Morrison, Kazuo Ishiguro and Annie Ernaux.

Critics have compared Fosse’s sparse plays to the work of two other Nobel laureates: Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett. He’s also been called “the new Ibsen,” after the renowned Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen.

Born in 1959 in Haugesund, Fosse grew up in western Norway, on a small farm in Strandebarm. He started writing poems and stories at age 12, and has said he found writing to be a form of escape. “I created my own space in the world, a place where I felt safe,” he told The Guardian in 2014.

As a young man, he was a communist and an anarchist. He studied comparative literature at the University of Bergen. Fosse writes in Nynorsk, a minority language, rather than Bokmål, the more widely used Norwegian language for literature. While some have interpreted his use of Nynorsk as a political statement, Fosse has said it’s simply the language he grew up with.

In 1983, he published his debut novel, “Red, Black,” kicking off a remarkably prolific career. His most famous works include the “Melancholia” novels, delving into the mind of a painter having a mental breakdown; his novel “Morning and Evening,” which opens with the moment of the protagonist’s birth and ends with the last day of his life; and the seven-volume work “Septology,” an opus that runs for more than 1,000 pages and is about two elderly artists who might be the same person: One has achieved success, while the other became an alcoholic.

Jacques Testard, the founder of Fitzcarraldo Editions, Fosse’s British publisher, said his work touched on themes of “love, art, death, mourning and friendship” while “the landscape of the Western fjords near Bergen where he grew up” was almost a character in itself.

Although he started as a poet and novelist, Fosse rose to prominence as a playwright. He gained international recognition in the late 1990s with a Paris production of his first play, “Someone Is Going to Come,” about a man and a woman who have sought solitude in a remote seaside home. Fosse has said he wrote it in four or five days, and didn’t revise it.

For 15 years, he focused on the theater, and traveled widely to international productions of his plays. But then he decided to retreat back into fiction, and stopped traveling, gave up alcohol and converted to Catholicism.

A former atheist who found religion later in life, Fosse has described writing as a form of mystical communion.

“When I manage to write well, there is a second, silent language,” he said in an interview with The Los Angeles Review of Books in 2022. “This silent language says what it is all about. It’s not the story, but you can hear something behind it — a silent voice speaking.”

While Fosse’s work is sometimes formally experimental — “Septology,” for example, unfolds as a single sentence of stream-of-consciousness narration — it can also often feel immersive and gripping.

Decades of writing have taught Fosse humility, and to cast aside expectations, he said in an email interview on Thursday.

“When I start writing I never feel sure that I will be able to write a new work,” he said. ”I never plan anything in advance, I just sit down and start writing. And at a certain point, I have the feeling that the work is already written and I just have to write it down before it disappears.”

“His work can be deceptively simple,” said Adam Z. Levy, the publisher of Transit Books, a small press that began publishing Fosse in the United States in 2020, with the first of his “Septology” series. “He often writes really spare, pared-down prose, but his books catch you by surprise. They take on this really moving quality. The sentences repeat, they meander, they start in one place then come back to that at some point, kind of spiraling outward.”

Damion Searls, one of Fosse’s English-language translators, said that while Fosse has written in a range of mediums, a unifying thread in his work was a feeling of serenity, which is why his work is often described as hypnotic or evocative of a spiritual experience.

“One of the key words he uses to talk about his fiction is peace,” said Searls, who translates from German, Norwegian, French and Dutch. “There’s a real peacefulness in it, even though stuff happens, people die, people get divorced, but it radiates this serenity.”

Along with the prestige and a huge boost in book sales, Fosse will receive 11 million Swedish krona, about $991,000.

Before Fosse, the last Norwegian recipients of the literature Nobel were Sigrid Undset, a writer of historical fiction who took the prize in 1928, and Knut Hamsun in 1920.

In recent years, the Swedish Academy, which organizes the prize, has tried to increase the diversity of considered authors after facing criticism that only 17 Nobel laureates had been women, and that the vast majority were from Europe or North America. The choice of Fosse is likely to be interpreted as a step back from those efforts.

Before Thursday’s announcement, at a news conference in Stockholm, Fosse was among the favorites, although Can Xue, a Chinese writer of often surreal and experimental short stories was also tipped, as were Haruki Murakami; Salman Rushdie; and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, a Kenyan novelist and playwright.

In a statement released through his Norwegian publisher on Thursday, Fosse said he was “overwhelmed, and somewhat frightened."

When asked nearly a decade ago about his hopes of winning a Nobel, he said that while he would “of course” like to receive it, he was also wary of the burden of expectation it would bring.

“Normally, they give it to very old writers, and there’s a wisdom to that,” he said in an interview with The Guardian. “You receive it when it won’t affect your writing.”

Elizabeth A. Harris contributed reporting.

Over 75 minutes, these women run through a 17-part liturgy accompanied by a pianist (Darnell White) and singer (S T A R R Busby, whose resonant voice leads the joyous gospel numbers). At one corner of this church stands a partially obscured forest. A silent spirit in white occasionally dances out from this surreal fantasy space (scenic design by dots), flitting around in fluid swells of movement. This is the Ancestor (Satori Folkes-Stone, magnetic), who also performs offstage rituals as part of the service. Another young woman, called Free (a less graceful Amara Granderson), is the one wondering whether this is a church, and if she even belongs here.

Like “What to Send Up When It Goes Down,” by Aleshea Harris, “(pray),” which douglas has nimbly written, choreographed and directed, is theater that demands the audience step into a shared experience of Blackness. In these experimental works, theater begins and ends in community.

Thus, douglas’s script aims to make faith more accessible via coy translations: “ghost” becomes “most,” for example, and “hallelujah” is “yahleloo.” The similar sounding words with the music (composed by Busby and JJJJJerome Ellis) trick the ear into fluency, so that a prayer that says “O, abundance! May I meet you. May I know you,” feels as true and traditional as, say, the Apostles’ Creed.

The Sisters deliver improvised gossip and judgmental comments, sometimes, hilariously, at the audience’s expense. The cohesiveness of their vocals and group movements (a stunning mélange of styles, including hip-hop and Afro-Cuban) recalls the deft cast of performers in Ars Nova’s 2022 hit by Heather Christian, “Oratorio for Living Things.” Each Sister sings with her own textured affect, so the psalms they perform feel creased, pleated or smoothed over like fabric. Tina Fabrique’s elastic bellows electrify “A Song (For to Ease My Troubled Mind).” Another Sister Anna (Ariel Kayla Blackwood) spits Noname lyrics atop a muscular beat. (Mikaal Sulaiman’s ethereal sound design lifts the voices higher.)

A whole syllabus of thinkers and artists have inspired (and are referenced in) douglas’s script, including the poets Tyehimba Jess and Raych Jackson. But douglas’s writing sometimes pales in comparison, lacking the same polish and panache. And there are some missed notes: “(pray)” feels more anchored within the distant and recent past, lacking firmer context in the present, and despite the production’s inclusive language around gender, queerness is only occasionally alluded to. The history of race-based attacks on Black churches, like the 1963 Birmingham bombing and the 2015 Charleston shooting, is artfully hinted at with the haunting sound of a helicopter overhead, but feels like a footnote.