Kate Flaherty
Ours As We Play It: Australia plays Shakespeare
UWA Publishing, 2011
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.
About the Author
Kate Flaherty is a lecturer in English and Drama at the Australian National University. She has first-class honours in English from the University of Sydney, an MA in Theatre Studies from the University of Leeds, UK and a PhD from the University of Sydney.
Kate has published several essays on contemporary Shakespeare performance in Australia, and is co-editing a collection on Shakespeare and Learning.
Kate lives in Canberra with her husband and their three children.
