Operation Shakespeare

Abstract

This was written by the 17-year-old who ultimately played Tamora in The Shakespeare Globe Centre Australia’s (SGCA) 2006 National Youth Shakespeare Company production of Titus Andronicus, the first tragedy produced for this annual event begun in 1997 (see Figure 11.1). It had grown out of the SGCA’s National Schools’ Festival, which invited high school students nationwide to explore Shakespeare in their own way through the categories of Acting, Costume and Scenic Design, Music, and Movement and Dance, as well as Film and Photography. From the Schools’ Festival the best in each category would be invited to create an instant Shakespeare ensemble totally removed from the school environment. They were treated as young actors, designers, composers,

and choreographers, not school children. The production team were industry professionals, not teachers. This gave the young people a taste of being in a professional company. Originally thematic anthology productions were created. However, as their skills grew the participants had earned the challenge of entire plays, specifically plays that had probably not been performed at school or studied to death for exams. Titus Andronicus was one in a series of such plays, beginning with Love’s Labour’s Lost in 2002 and going on to include Cymbeline, Pericles and Timon of Athens among others.

The one thing most adults comment on when I tell them that I’m about to be in a youth production of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, is that I am too young to truly grasp the significance of such writing and such ideas, because young people lack the experience. I personally find this insulting. Despite a person’s age, we all know what it is like to feel loss to a greater or lesser extent. We all know violence, hatred and suffering, even if we haven’t experienced it, because it is inherent within the human condition and has existed since man first breathed. Just because young people have not experienced a loss of innocence does not mean they do not know how it feels. After all, that is what I essentially see Titus as being about. To the adult complaint that young people cannot effectively understand and perform Shakespeare, I say that it is during that time of growth that those emotions are at their height, as pain, love, loss and laughter are felt for the first time. (Actor Liz Schebesta, Questionnaire responses)