All the World's a Stage
Welcome from Michael Gow, Artistic Director

"All the world’s a stage." It must be one of the most familiar quotes in the English language. But it also works the other way around, as Shakespeare knew; the stage can show you the whole world. I love this season because each play provides a glimpse into versions of the world we live in. Sometimes these worlds look familiar, sometimes wonderfully distorted, but all provide us with the chance to escape, reflect or be entertained.

Oscar Wilde depicted the absurdities of existence with an endless cascade of verbal play and a light-as-air, improbable plot. In the world of The Importance of Being Earnest, people skate across the most terrifying situations with a quip and a stylish entrance.

Joanna Murray-Smith, in The Female of the Species, crams the study of a fictional feminist with hilarious, outrageous characters all dealing with serious questions about the role of women with no seriousness whatsoever.

In I Am My Own Wife, a Berlin basement is filled with stories from some of the darkest periods of recent history and an extraordinary account of one person’s survival. And we get to see the play being written before our eyes.

David Williamson shows us two worlds on the stage of Travelling North – the dark, cold lives we want to escape from and the sunny, warm, brightly coloured lives we’d all like to run away to.

One of the 20th Century’s most contentious writers, Heiner Müller, uses another writer’s world to comment on his own in Anatomy Titus Fall of Rome. He takes Shakespeare’s early, blood-soaked tragedy Titus Andronicus, rewrites it, subverts it and comments on it with his own poetry to reflect on the violence of imperial power.

The comic genius Neil Simon uses one small apartment as an image of our urban environment falling into hysterical chaos in his play The Prisoner of Second Avenue.