Bell Shakespeare announces 2027 season

When director Marion Potts looks at William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, she sees more than a 16th-century pastoral comedy – she sees the thematic DNA of modern reality television franchises like Love Island.

“People are falling in love at first sight. There are betrayals, jealousies, recriminations and confessionals,” says Potts. “There’s even an exile that feels like an eviction. I began thinking, my gosh, there are really close parallels with reality television and what it says about popular culture. That’s where the play became truly fascinating for me, exploring that heightened, performative reality the characters inhabit.”

Potts returns to direct As You Like It for Bell Shakespeare’s 2027 season, marking the company’s first staging of the 1599 work in 12 years. Next year’s line-up also features a “dark and dangerous” 90-minute adaptation of Measure for Measure, directed by Saro Lusty-Cavallari.

As You Like It follows exiled nobles escaping court corruption into the Forest of Arden. Free from rigid social constraints, they undergo unpredictable romantic entanglements. “It’s liberating and incredibly freeing, but they’re also in freefall,” Potts says.

Both the Elizabethan court and modern reality television construct hyper-gendered environments where men are expected to be buff, women hyper-feminine, and everyone preens for courtship. Potts’ production avoids a literal time and place.

“If anything, it’s set in a world where concrete reality and mediated reality are confused,” he says. “A world not unlike our own, where characters are in constant performance as though they’re being watched, even without cameras.

“It taps into the troubling phenomenon of identity construction, vanity, status anxiety and ‘youthaholicism’ – exploring the blurry line between truth, fake truth and self-deception. That distortion gives rich scope for satire, mirroring the culture of Instaworthy photos, cosmetic surgery and influencers.”

This pop-culture exploration arrives at a pivotal moment for Bell. Facing post-COVID instability, shifting audience habits and severe financial pressures, theatre companies confront a landscape where audiences are risk-averse, booking late and demanding familiar entry points.

Bell Shakespeare artistic director Peter Evans acknowledges these realities, stressing the company is charting a path to absorb rising production costs without scaling back. “We are unwilling to employ fewer artists or do less work,” he says.

To secure long-term stability without compromising artistic scale, the company is launching a permanent financial endowment. By preserving the principal investment, annual interest will be reinvested directly into programming.

To keep houses full, Evans is leaning into traditional stagings with commercially savvy crossover productions. Building on the success of 2022’s pop musical The Lovers, the company is bringing back Mackenzie.

Reimagining Macbeth as a 13-year-old child star and Lady Macbeth as her ruthlessly ambitious stage mother, Mackenzie drew an unprecedented 25 per cent first-time ticket buyers. It now returns for an extensive three-month national tour alongside main stage runs in major capital cities and the Sydney Opera House.

“To see the play packed in with people aged from 16 to 30, repeat customers, is a huge win, and I would say quintessentially part of Bell’s mission statement,” Evans says.

For Potts, bringing a 21st-century lens to classic texts honours Shakespeare’s inherent flexibility.

“Shakespeare’s work exists to be performed, defined by its poetic breadth,” she says. “The plays are not museum pieces – they remain dynamic vehicles that reveal profound truths about contemporary life.”

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