Review of Ours As We Play It: Australia Plays Shakespeare, by Kate Flaherty

Abstract

Setting herself a perhaps unenviable task, Kate Flaherty acknowledges near the beginning of Ours As We Play It: Australia Plays Shakespeare that writing about theatrical performance 'is a fractious subject for traditional scholarship because theatre is not enduringly present as an object to be pored over and known' (14). And yet, the great achievement of this book is the way Flaherty re-performs those productions she selects, both in the accounts of the actual performance choices made, and through the contextual analysis that she provides. Flaherty achieves a rich, thick description of Australian Shakespearean performance because she considers it from multiple angles. She writes about the finished production itself, including close description and analysis of the staged action (e.g. 42-43), design elements, such as set, costume and lighting (38, 119), and vocal quality, delivery and inflexion (61, 83).