Bell Shakespeare 2010 Season

Next year marks the beginning of a new era in the history of Bell Shakespeare, with Artistic Director John Bell and Associate Artistic Director Marion Potts launching the company’s 20th-anniversary season, alongside a new brand identity and website, and an ever-expanding development arm and learning program.

King Lear is the cornerstone of Bell Shakespeare’s 20th-year celebrations and promises to be one of the great theatre events of 2010.

In an unprecedented union of the company’s artistic leaders, Marion Potts directs John Bell as Lear in a poetic and powerful production of one of the greatest works in Western literature.

Director Lee Lewis takes the 2009 Victorian bushfires as the inspiration for her new retelling of Twelfth Night.

The year 2010 will also see the Company revel in downright silliness with a return Sydney season of Andy Griffiths’ Just Macbeth!

A powerful complement to the anniversary season will be Bell Shakespeare’s association with Sydney Theatre Company in a landmark production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya featuring John Bell in a lead role alongside Cate Blanchett, Richard Roxburgh and Hugo Weaving, with Marion Potts as Associate Director.

Through Bell Shakespeare’s development arm, Mind’s Eye, the Company recognises Shakespeare’s stimulating legacy to artists and theatre-makers, and commissions and develops new works that allow artists to take creative risks and push beyond their imaginative limits. There are currently nine projects in creative development through Mind’s Eye.

Bell Shakespeare’s acclaimed 2007 production of Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector, directed by John Bell, has been invited to the Festival Iberomericano de Teatro in Bogota, Columbia, in March 2010.

Twenty years ago, Bell Shakespeare started with no more than a burning desire to bring classic theatre to the people of Australia, so that they might marvel at the greatest plays ever written and see their lives, loves and aspirations truly reflected.

In the past two decades, the company has played to more than two million Australians, taken productions overseas and established a vast education network across the continent to inspire generations of students and teachers by turning ancient texts into living theatre.

In a long and exciting journey from the inaugural performance of Hamlet in a borrowed circus tent in 1991, Bell Shakespeare has produced 30 of Shakespeare’s plays, some of them several times, alongside other classics.

Bell Shakespeare will be experienced by over 220,000 Australians in all corners of the country in 2010, consolidating its status as one of Australia’s flagship performing arts companies.

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