AustLit

'In recent decades Australian theatre has produced many well-received performances of Shakespeare using Australian settings and accents, so when Geoffrey Wright’s 2006 Australian-gangland adaptation of Macbeth was first publicised hopes were high that a significant Australian Shakespeare feature-film might finally have arrived. In the event, while the film did win AFI awards for production and costume design, it did not achieve anything near the kind of critical or box-office success that attended Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 Romeo + Juliet or even Wright’s own 1992 Romper Stomper. Like Romper Stomper, Wright’s Macbeth was inspired by Melbourne’s underworld, anticipating the popular Underbelly TV mini-series that fictionalised the 1995-2004 Melbourne gangland wars and was first screened in 2008. While the experience of Wright’s film as a whole might resemble – both literally and metaphorically – Coleridge’s famous summation of Edmund Kean’s acting as like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning, its location provides occasion for some inspired filmic responses to the dominant image patterns of Macbeth. This paper considers the evocation of locale in Wright’s film and some of the ways its physical and social setting reimagines the play’s key motifs in contemporary Australian terms.' (Author's abstract)

'This essay examines Fred Schepisi’s 2011 film adaptation of Patrick White’s novel The Eye of the Storm. The process of bringing White’s novel to the screen is complicated by White’s own allusive response to Shakespeare’s King Lear, which erects parallels to Lear’s tragedy within its narrative of the members of a wealthy, emotionally scarred Australian family reuniting at the death of its over- bearing matriarch. In translating the work of the first Australian Nobel Prize-winning author to the screen, Schepisi and his collaborators engage with two over-arching and competing cultural canons: the national importance, fame and famous difficulty of White’s prose work, and the status and significance of Shakespeare’s texts and their adaptations. At times both play and film strive to articulate their meanings via references and similarities to Lear, and to varying degrees exhibit deference towards or disregard for their Shakespearean inheritance within an Australian context. The film of The Eye of the Storm therefore constitutes a test-case for the difficulties and opportunities presented by literary adaptation from complex and culturally elevated sources, but it also exhibits, like the novel, a subversive urge to transplant and translate an English icon to an antipodean setting. It engages with two texts, one nested within the other, and in adapting, editing and extrapolating from them produces a third at once faithful, disrespectful, divergent and nationally specific, which popularises White and naturalises Shakespeare.' (Author's abstract)

'The Shakespeare Tercentenary Memorial Fund was established in Sydney in 1912, with the intention of raising money to erect a local memorial to Shakespeare on the three hundredth anniversary of his death. The fundraising events became in themselves an opportunity for colonial Australia to prove that this was a place that appreciated culture, and could create works of pageantry and art. Throughout the process, the women involved seized their own opportunity to prove themselves the equals of their men in their valuing of Shakespeare and willingness to work towards a shared goal.'