Ours As We Play It: Australia plays Shakespeare

By closely examining Shakespeare’s plays as they’ve never been studied before – performed by Australian theatre companies in contemporary Australia – Kate Flaherty, argues that Shakespeare’s plays cannot help but resonate with local concerns.

Flaherty analyses several contemporary Australian productions of three Shakespeare plays; exploring masculinity and madness in Hamlet, the role of landscape and the multiple roles of Rosalind in As You Like It, and hierarchies of gender and social order re-imagined in relation to Australian understandings of power in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Ours as We Play It draws together a wealth of primary resources from theatre archives and rehearsal rooms, including images, reviews, and interviews with practitioners, to compose a picture of Shakespeare’s plays as they are performed in the Australian context.