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Article Excerpt
Delegates at the opening ceremony of the eighth World Shakespeare Congress in Brisbane, Australia, on 16 July 2006, saw some quaint footage from the 1955 Swan Hill National Shakespeare Festival. The film provided a silent glimpse of a period in Australia's history in which Shakespeare's prestige was riding high, when staging Shakespeare and an arts festival seemed to go hand in hand. Ironically, the biennial Brisbane Festival, which began the same week as the World Shakespeare Congress, presented relatively little in the way of Shakespeare performance, prompting John Henningham to complain in the local Courier-Mail that 'our theatre establishment has failed its audiences, its performers and its city'. Under the heading 'Lean visit for Bard hungry', Henningham noted the absence of big-ticket performance events apart from Bell Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and lamented the fact that Queensland's professional and subsidised theatre companies seemed to have forgotten the Bard at a time when so many Shakespeare lovers were visiting the state. (1)
Shakespeare's comparatively low profile within the 2006 Brisbane Festival program reflects a wider trend throughout Australia. While many communities have picked up the baton from Swan Hill and are continuing to produce vibrant local Shakespeare festivals, it seems that Shakespeare no longer appeals to the directors of the country's major arts festivals. Their priorities, quite understandably, are with new writers and new approaches to performance. Nevertheless, it is surprising to look back and see just how quickly and emphatically big festivals have changed direction away from a time when Shakespeare would be an expected, if not inevitable, festival centrepiece.
Contemplating the forthcoming Olympic Arts festival, Robert Turnbull described Australia as 'Festival-Mad' in The New York Times in January 2000 (2), and it does still seem that Australians can mobilise just about anything--from wooden boats to bananas--to provide occasion for a festival. Arts festivals have proved particularly important to Australian cultural life in recent decades. As oneoff, high-profile events they can generate audiences and commercial support for local productions that might otherwise not get off the ground, and they can counteract cultural isolation by drawing together a range of artists from interstate and overseas. The festival phenomenon has played a major role in expanding and shaping public tastes, offering a much wider cultural choice than what was once, according to Turnbull, 'an opera scene dominated by Joan Sutherland and an Anglicised theatrical life that looked toward London's West End'. Given the contribution Shakespeare has made to the festival and the contribution the festival has made to Australian cultural life, it is worth asking: what has happened to Shakespeare within the arts festival scene? This paper considers the functions Shakespeare has served within the development of a festival culture in Australia and the ways in which festival programs reflect shifting perceptions of Shakespeare and of what an arts festival should be.
Australia's first attempt at a major Arts festival was the Festival of Perth, inaugurated in 1953, but drama festivals had been taking place in many regions of Australia for some time before this. According to The Companion to Theatre in Australia, the Great Depression brought about a general fragmentation of the theatre industry in Australia, after which local drama festivals became a valuable means of bringing amateur and semi-professional theatrical groups together. (3) The festival became an important meeting place for isolated theatre groups. Professional festivals began to develop out of the amateur movement in the 1950s and 1960s and soon became international in focus. Melbourne's Moomba Festival began in March 1955, the biennial Adelaide Festival of Arts was established in 1960, Brisbane's first Waranna Festival was held in October 1962, the Festival of Sydney began in January 1977, and Darwin's Bougainvillea Festival was launched in 1979. Currently the Confederation of Australian International Arts Festivals draws together the Energex Brisbane Festival, the UWA Perth International Arts Festival, the Sydney Festival, the Adelaide Festival of Arts, the Melbourne International Arts Festival, and Tasmania's Ten Days on the Island.
Strangely, the Shakespeare Festival has not yet emerged as a strong cultural presence in Australia. Canada and the United States have well-established annual festivals such as the Ontario Stratford Shakespeare Festival and the Oregon Ashland Shakespeare Festival, as well as ambitious undertakings such as the 2007 Shakespeare in Washington Festival which includes over 100 events presented between January and June. In comparison, Australian Shakespeare festivals are on a much smaller scale. They have cropped up in several regional centres around the country, but they tend to be relatively localised events: none have as yet developed a national profile. Their productions of Shakespeare are usually devised locally, specifically for the festival with which they are associated, and they only run for a few days. They contrast sharply with the major Australian arts festivals, which focus on new works and are generally cross-cultural and assembled from prepackaged elements that have toured elsewhere.
If we look back a bit, however, we can see that Shakespeare's standing in the festival scene used to be considerably higher in Australia, and that the gulf between...
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