A Bicultural Dream in Aotearoa New Zealand: (De)Colonising Shakespeare?

This essay came into being as a way of ‘thinking out loud’ about the stirring of traditions – Shakespearean and Māori – into an idealised spectacle of reconciliation that belies its own theatrical, historical and social foundations.[1] When I was coming up as a theatre director in the USA, the production of Shakespearean theatre was aspirational, requiring rigorous training in textual analysis as well as physical and vocal grace, as was evident in the shows I still remember from school and other trips to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in the 1970s and 1980s. Whether on professional stages, in schools and universities, or in community theatres, Shakespeare’s plays were produced, often explicitly, to uplift us – whoever ‘we’ were – from our otherwise more mundane theatrical and social circumstances and preoccupations. The Pop-up Globe Theatre in Auckland, New Zealand, is a product of such aspirations. It promises an encounter with erudition made accessible through low jokes and entertaining shenanigans.[2] And it certainly delivers. Shakespeare’s plays are great because of their universalism, so we continue to be told. But in fact they were first and foremost products of their place and time, playing on and revealing the strata of class, race and gender in ways that were affirmational to their audiences, acts of reification rather than radicalisation. So too the Pop-up Globe’s bicultural production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2017/2018).[3] In finding common ground with the groundlings, it also necessarily plays into rather than against stereotypes, and toward rather than against affirmation of the status quo. The Pop-up Globe’s success is that it mixes entertainment with education. Its appeal is to teachers, students and their parents – a spoonful of sugar approach to an otherwise starchy run-in with high culture. But what is it they’re teaching?