Over 400 Years of Shakespeare

Panellists: John Bell, Founding Artistic Director, Bell Shakespeare; Kylie Farmer, Indigenous actor and Shakespeare translator; Germaine Greer, Feminist icon and provocateur; Kate Mulvany, Actor, playwright and screenwriter; and A.C. Grayling, Philosopher. -- John Bell John Bell is one of the nation’s most illustrious theatre personalities. Award-winning actor, acclaimed director, risk-taking impresario and torch-bearing educationalist, John has been a key figure in shaping the nation’s theatrical identity as we know it over the past 50 years. After graduating from Sydney University in 1962, John worked for the Old Tote Theatre Company, all of Australia’s State theatre companies and was an associate artist of Britain’s world-famous Royal Shakespeare Company. As co-founder of Sydney’s highly influential Nimrod Theatre Company, John presented many productions of landmark Australian plays, including David Williamson’s Travelling North, The Club and The Removalists. He also initiated an Australian Shakespeare style with Nimrod productions such as Much Ado About Nothing and Macbeth. In 1990, John took on an even greater challenge, founding The Bell Shakespeare Company. Since then, his productions as director have included Hamlet, Romeo And Juliet, The Taming Of The Shrew, Richard III, Pericles, Henry IV, Henry V, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, The Comedy Of Errors, Wars Of The Roses, Measure For Measure, Macbeth, The Tempest and As You Like It, as well as Goldoni’s The Servant Of Two Masters, Gogol’s The Government Inspector and Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist. Meanwhile his roles as an actor for Bell Shakespeare have included Hamlet, Shylock, Henry V, Richard III, Macbeth, Malvolio, Berowne, Petruchio, Leontes, Coriolanus, Prospero, King Lear, Andronicus and Jaques. John also played the title role in two co-productions with Queensland Theatre Company: Richard III and Heiner Müller’s Anatomy Titus Fall Of Rome: A Shakespeare Commentary. In addition, he directed Madame Butterfly for an Oz Opera national tour. John’s unique contribution to national culture has been recognised by many bodies. He is an Officer of the Order of Australia and the Order of the British Empire; has an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the Universities of Sydney, New South Wales and Newcastle; and was recognised in 1997 by the National Trust of Australia as one of Australia’s Living Treasures. In 2003, the Australia Business Arts Foundation also awarded John the Dame Elisabeth Murdoch Cultural Leadership Award. As an actor and director, his many awards include a Helpmann Award for Best Actor (Richard III, 2002), a Producers and Directors Guild Award for Lifetime Achievement and the JC Williamson Award (2009) for extraordinary contribution to Australia’s live entertainment industry. -- Kylie Farmer Kylie is an Aboriginal Australian actor, TV presenter and theatre director from the south west of Western Australia – the Nyungar nation – and has worked in the performing arts industry for the past 19 years. As an actor, Kylie has played roles in television shows such as The Gods Of Wheat Street and Redfern Now. Additional film and television credits include Ace Of Spades, Stone Bros and SA Black Thing. She is the host of Waabiny Time, a children's television program educating the very young about Nyungar Language and Culture, which has aired on National Indigenous Television (NITV) since 2009. She is also a past presenter of the Marngrook Footy Show, which also airs on NITV. Her theatre credits – as a performer – include The Caucasian Chalk Circle and The White Divers Of Broome, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo And Juliet, One Day In ‘67, King Hit and Aliwa. She also starred in the highly successful stage version of The Sapphires, which toured extensively throughout Australia and South Korea in 2010. She was appointed 'Associate Artist' at Belvoir Street Theatre in 2011, where she made her directorial debut with the award winning play, Windmill Baby. She also worked as assistant director for Belvoir’s The Business and Ilbijerri Theatre Company’s Beautiful One Day (in partnership with Belvoir). Kylie worked as an assistant director on the film Amy Goes To Wadjemup, and in 2006, took on the role of co-artistic director for the large scale Welcome To Country event as a part of the Perth International Arts Festival. She even tried her hand at script writing for the Screenwest Deadly Yarns Initiative, where she co-wrote the short film Main Actors. Her most recent writing credit was translating selected Shakespearean sonnets into Noongar/Nyungar language for a performance at Shakespeare’s Globe in London as part of their ‘Globe to Globe’ festival (2012). In addition to her performing credits, Kylie has coordinated and managed a variety of theatre, film and television, and radio industry programs. She recently worked as a script and acting coach for Ilbijerri Theatre Company, as well as program manager of the Media and Screen Industry Indigenous Employment Program for Screen Australia, and manager of the Indigenous department at AFTRS. Kylie also delivered a TEDx talk in Manly in 2014, raising awareness about Indigenous languages in Australia. Kaarljilba Kaardn is Kylie’s Nyungar language name. -- Germaine Greer Germaine Greer has spent her whole working life teaching Shakespeare, in Australia, in Britain and in the US. Her Oxford University Press book Shakespeare has been in print ever since its publication over 30 years ago and in 2007 she published a study of Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s Wife. Germaine is regarded as one of the major voices of the second-wave feminist movement in the latter half of the 20th century. Her ideas have created controversy ever since her first book, The Female Eunuch (1970), became an international best-seller and made her a household name (and some argue The Female Eunuch was influenced by her study of Shakespeare). Her work since then has focused on literature, feminism and the environment. Germaine was born in Australia in 1939. She enrolled at the University of Melbourne in 1956, graduated with a BA and moved to the University of Sydney, where she became involved with the Sydney Push Bohemian social milieu of anarchists, Marxists and libertarians. She obtained an MA and moved to Cambridge University to complete her doctorate, throwing herself into a 60s lifestyle that included satirical theatre with the Cambridge Footlights, writing for Oz magazine, nude photo shoots and a three-week marriage. The publication of The Female Eunuch brought her massive international recognition and during the 70s she became a controversial and iconic figure with enormous media exposure. She established a reputation as an iconoclast and a formidable debater. Since that time she has continued her career as a writer, academic and literary critic. She lives in the United Kingdom, where she has held academic positions, specialising in English literature, at the University of Warwick and Newnham College, Cambridge. Though now retired, she continues to write and court controversy and is a popular guest on a wide range of television programs. She lives in England though visits Australia frequently. -- Kate Mulvany Kate Mulvany is an Australian actor, playwright and screenwriter. Kate has written over 25 plays and screenplays, including her award-winning autobiographical piece The Seed. Other plays include The Web, Blood & Bone, Story Time, The Danger Age, an adaptation of the Craig Silvey novel Jasper Jones, which is currently playing in Melbourne, and a new version of Medea, which has had sell-out seasons in Sydney, Warsaw, Auckland and London and won an AWGIE and several Sydney Theatre Critics awards. Kate also wrote the book to the musical Somewhere (music and lyrics by Tim Minchin), and the Australian Anzac oratorio Towards First Light with composer Iain Grandage. As an actor, Kate has performed in many plays for companies including Sydney Theatre Company (The Crucible, King Lear, Proof, A Man With Five Children, Rabbit) Bell Shakespeare (Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Tartuffe), Melbourne Theatre Company (The Beast), Griffin Theatre Company (Mr Bailey’s Minder, Beached) and Belvoir (Buried Child, The Seed, Blasted, Jasper Jones). She was last seen onstage this year in the Justin Fleming adaptation of Moliere’s The Literati for Griffin and Bell Shakespeare. Kate has appeared on television in The Chaser’s War On Everything, Chandon Pictures, My Place, The Underbelly Files, Winter, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, The Book Of Once Upon A Time and Secret City. Australian Story also produced an episode on Kate’s experience as a survivor of dioxin-related cancer from her father’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Kate’s feature films include The Final Winter, The Turning, Griff The Invisible, The Little Death and Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby. Kate was the 2015 Patrick White Fellow at the Sydney Theatre Company and is the Intersticia Fellow at Bell Shakespeare. She is the ambassador for Agent Orange Justice and MiVAC (Mines, Victims and Clearance), both of whom provide support to the survivors of war in South-East Asia. -- A.C. Grayling Anthony Grayling , better known as AC Grayling, is a British philosopher and a Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. Until 2011 he was Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is also associated in the UK with the new atheism movement. University of London. He has written extensively about Shakespeare in several of his books – particularly his essay entitled “The Genius of Shakespeare” from The Mystery of Things and he is taking part in a FODI event looking at the juxtaposition between justice and compassion as inspired by The Merchant of Venice. Anthony has written and edited over 20 books on philosophy and other subjects. Among his most recent are The Good Book, Ideas That Matter, Liberty in the Age of Terror and To Set Prometheus Free. For several years he wrote for The Guardian newspaper and now writes a column for The Times. He is a frequent contributor to The Literary Review, The Observer, The Independent on Sunday, The Times Literary Supplement, Index on Censorship and New Statesman, and is also a frequent broadcaster on the BBC. He writes the Thinking Read column for The Barnes and Noble Review in New York. Anthony’s books on civil liberties and Enlightenment values have been politically influential, and in 2010 he was one of 55 public figures who sent a letter to The Guardian expressing their opposition to Pope Benedict state visit to the UK. For several years Anthony was a Fellow of the World Economic Forum , and a member of its C-100 group on relations between the West and the Islamic world. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Anthony sits on the editorial boards of several academic journals, and for nearly ten years was the honorary secretary of the principal British philosophical association, the Aristotelian Society. He is a past chairman of June Fourth, a human rights group concerned with China, and is a representative to the UN Human Rights Council for the International Humanist and Ethical Union. He is a Vice President of the British Humanist Association, the Patron of the United Kingdom Armed Forces Humanist Association, a patron of Dignity in Dying, and an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society. Born in 1949 in Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia, Anthony moved to England in his teens and now lives in London . He is married with three children.