Shakespeare’s work might have been around for four centuries, embedded in the Western canon with no signs of being dethroned but keeping a theatre company that focuses on his work around is no easy feat. The success of festivals like Auckland’s Summer Shakespeare and companies like the Pop-Up Globe show that the demand from audiences for the bard to end all bards is real, but survival isn’t quite as easy.
Over on the North Shore, Shoreside Theatre has been providing its community with Shakespeare for 30 years, and continues that run with this year’s productions of Romeo & Juliet and Much Ado About Nothing, two of Shakespeare’s most well-known, and widely performed, plays. James Bell, current board member and longtime participant, is open about the fact that Shoreside Theatre is a community theatre; people are doing it for the love and the passion of it.
“We’ve got people who have done many, many Shakespeares and they come back every year,” Bell says. “Some people only come once, and we’ve had brief interactions with people who are now famous, and I think that’s what’s great about it. It’s true community theatre. We have people who were once in the audience as children who are now performing, or who are now making those Elizabethan dresses, which is really heartwarming.”
He also credits Shoreside’s “respect for the period” as one of the reasons why they’ve built a following. “We’ve explored beyond that period a little bit, but I think a lot of modern Shakespeare productions fall into the trap of thinking they have to be different, just to be different,” he says. “We’ve tried to be deliberate about those sorts of decisions, trying to maintain that true respect for the period – with easy to understand, simple storytelling.”
Beyond its annual Shakespeare performances, Shoreside Theatre has been serving North Shore audiences for 50 years now under a few guises. It was founded by Carol Dumbleton as Milford Little Theatre in 1976 as a way to get youth involved in the theatre, later rebranded as Milford Playhouse to cater to older students, and in the 90s it finally enshrined itself as Shoreside Theatre to cater to both actors of all ages, and to recognise that their community was larger than Milford, but catered to all of that side of Auckland’s Harbour Bridge (and likely beyond). As well as the summer dollop of Shakespeare, the company also performs a mid-winter Agatha Christie season, and a One Act Play Festival in the September school holidays.
The company’s current residence is the amphitheatre comfortably situated behind the cafe at the Pumphouse Theatre, famous for its location on the shores of Lake Pupuke in Takapuna. “Somebody – history doesn’t recall who – thought that grass bank would make a great amphitheatre, and it happened, as often these things do,” says Bell. “Somebody had a great idea and the community runs with it.”
Dumbleton – who Bell refers to as the matriarch of Shoreside Theatre – thought that it would be a “great spot” for an outdoor Shakespeare under the stars. Their first production was Richard III. Bell actually designed the lights for it. “I don’t remember much about it except that it consisted of a followspot on top of a rostrum on top of a hill. It’s a miracle I didn’t fall off.”
The outdoor space is one of the consistent throughlines. Speaking as an audience member, an outdoor amphitheatre adds a spontaneity and liveness that can often be lost in a black box theatre. Suddenly, the actual environment is brought into the show; the shifts in weather, shifts in energy, the idea that the world might interfere or amplify the action.
It also involves the audience in the essential contract of live theatre in a more explicit way. Everyone’s sitting in the same natural light, breathing the same oxygen, and we all know that everybody is performing a play. The fourth wall suddenly becomes kayfabe; we’re all in it together.
“There’s also the consistency. We show up every year,” says Bell. Consistency is one of those rare things that is easier to underrate, especially when it comes to building a community of both participants and audiences. If you look at Auckland’s festivals, you can reliably assume that there’s going to be a pride festival in February, an arts festival in March, a comedy festival in May, and so on and so forth. Individual events with locked in dates, year in and year out, are a rarity, even for companies that have an annual programme.
Shakespeare also brings his own community with him, so to speak. Other companies and staples of Auckland’s theatre calendar that foregrounded Shakespeare – such as the aforementioned Auckland University’s Summer Shakespeare and the Pop-Up Globe – have risen and fallen while Shoreside remains. “If you’re a young costume designer who loves making Elizabethan dresses, there’s not that many places you get to do that craft,” says Bell. “But if you can find yourself a nice little home at a theatre company who does a show a year, it builds that sense of community and that, in turn, brings the audience back.”
The company offers free tickets for children (12 and under). One reason for this is accessibility – more people being able to see shows does, generally speaking, lead to more people seeing shows. Another is that Bell believes their shows easily disprove a common misconception around Shakespeare; that it’s difficult to understand. “You only need to sit in an audience with a bunch of kids and watch as they cheer for the good guy and boo for the bad guy. They know what’s going on,” he says. “It’s no different to me than going to the opera. I don’t believe that everyone who goes to the opera speaks Italian.”
“I challenge people who say they don’t understand Shakespeare to go see theatre in languages they don’t speak. Your knowledge of theatre, and storytelling, will get you through understanding what’s going on.”
Building that community also means continuing to be accessible to that community. Shoreside Theatre are currently looking to do New Zealand Sign Language performances in the future, on top of pay-what-you-can tickets and indoor matinees, which specifically cater to older audiences or other audiences with access needs who have been coming for years, but might not be able to cope with the outdoor benches or simply the task of sitting outside in the dark until 10:30pm, but for whom a 2pm indoor matinee on a Sunday is absolutely doable.
What keeps Bell coming back are the audience reactions. He’s now directed 17 Shakespeare productions for the company, and occasionally he’ll sit off to the side and listen to them. “The realisation that these jokes that Shakespeare wrote, however many hundreds of years ago, are still making people laugh,” says Bell. “The fact that we’ve created something that the audience is enjoying and understanding, that’s broken through that so-called barrier of Shakespeare.”
Romeo & Juliet and Much Ado About Nothing are being performed now as part of Auckland Shakespeare in the Park until 14 February at the Pumphouse Theatre.
