Monument Shakespeare and the World Stage: Reading Australian Shakespeare after 2000

This chapter examines the monumentality of Shakespeare in Australian culture and ways that twenty-first-century Australia both resists and fashions this monumentality to make cultural sense of itself to itself and to the rest of the world. Examining Shakespeare in performance on the Australian stage can offer a dynamic index of efforts to devise, revise and define an Australian cultural trajectory. While commercial theatre companies stage Shakespeare in a manner that accords with profitability, the State theatre companies must mobilise Shakespeare to speak for something, not simply to Australian audiences. I locate my discussion of this phenomenon in two major State theatre company productions: Hamlet, directed by Adam Cook in 2007 – a combined production of the State Theatre Company of South Australia and the Queensland Theatre Company – and The War of the Roses, adapted by Tom Wright and Benedict Andrews and directed by Andrews for the Sydney Theatre Company in 2009.