Now in its 8th successful year, Sport for Jove’s acclaimed Summer Shakespeare Season, has become a must-see on the NSW theatrical calendar. This year Sport for Jove go on a Roman Holiday with two of Shakespeare’s greatest plays – the epic tale of Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra.
These plays are famed for their clarity, political modernity, poetry and their extraordinary pantheon of characters, real men and women who defined the very pulse of their age and who are rekindled in the possibilities of every political leader and every political machination of the 21st Century.
Their rise and thunderous fall threw down to us a set of challenges we may never master. How do we lead a nation? How do we follow a leader? What sparks revolution? What suppresses it? What price freedom…?
And as the merry-go-round of the Australian Prime Ministership has shown in recent years, politics is as personal as life itself. Love, hate, betrayal, sacrifice, lust, confusion, tyranny – power is a fragile house of cards and every nation stands in its trembling shadow.
Shakespeare looked to the Roman past not out of historical curiosity but to awaken us to the struggles, fears and possibilities of our present – our relationships to power, to loyalty, to freedom, to violence, to idealism and to civic duty. But above to imagine new futures…
Sport For Jove’s Outdoor Summer Season will be a study of power and provocation from the perspective of women in leadership. The traditionally male roles of Julius Caesar, Octavius Caesar, Cassius, Casca and many more played by a group of superb Australian female artists in a unique outdoor season.
“How many ages hence shall this, our lofty scene, be acted over in states unborn and accents yet unknown” – Julius Caesar
Directors: Michael Pigott, Damien Ryan Featuring: Camilla Ah Kin, Oliver Burton, Megan Drury, Giles Gartrell-Mills, Teresa Jakovich, Amy Kersey, Felicity McKay, Suzanne Pereira, Rupert Reid, Damien Ryan, Berynn Schwerdt, Georgia Scott, Christopher Stollery, Tony Taylor, Bryce Youngman Designer: Georgia Hopkins Design Assistant: Angelika Nieweglowski Lighting Designer: Martin Kinnane Sound Designer: Bryce Halliday Stage Manager: Paisley Williams Fight and Movement: Scott Witt Technical Manager: Jeremy Page
Sport For Jove’s Outdoor Summer Season of Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra will be presented at Bella Vista Farm Park, Baulkham Hills: 17 December 2016 – 7 January 2017, and Everglades Garden, Leura: 14 – 29 January 2017. For more information, visit: www.sportforjove.com.au for details.
Image: Suzanne Pereira as Julius Caesar – photo by Marnya Rothe