“Shakespeare gets produced constantly. So if you’re going to stage it now, especially in 2025, you’ve got to be saying something new,” argue Ana Ferreira Manhoso and Courtney McManus, founders of Crash Theatre Company. These new approaches to Shakespeare highlight the plays’ elasticity, facilitate commentary on the here and now, and attract audiences looking for something different. Using alternative theatrical forms, styles, and genres enable artists to remix these classic stories in exciting and relevant ways, and audiences around the world can’t seem to get enough.
Crash Theatre Company’s production, Lady Macbeth Played Wing Defence, is an example from West Australia. The musical’s successful tour indicates that many people are eager for current takes on Shakespeare’s plays. “We were writing it during the global Barbie wave and while the Australian women’s national football team were absolutely dominating at the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup. Suddenly, conversations about gender, power, and sport weren’t niche, they were happening on the court and the field, in the classroom and in wider society. We wanted to use that energy to spread a strong social message about women in sport,” the pair explain. The end product is a pop musical platforming teenage girls, a group with little stage time in Shakespeare’s canon. Though music features in the original plays, the far more modern genre of musical theatre further rejuvenates Shakespeare’s forms and structures.
Another story from an oft-ignored group that uses a more recent theatrical form is the Indigenous production As You Like It: A Radical Retelling at the International Festival, from the land now known as Canada. Crow Theatre artistic director Chris Abraham illuminates Indigenous playwright Cliff Cardinal’s thinking: “As You Like It presents a parable of escape and re-invention – a movement from a corrupt world to a restorative forest – but in a country built on stolen land like Canada, that story takes on a very different charge… In this production, the play became a site of inquiry: a way to confront which stories we centre, whose voices we amplify, and what’s at stake when we gather to listen.”
This focus on storytelling is also evident in Hamlet – Wakefulness, from Polish company Song of the Goat. Yet, instead of drawing on performance styles that could be considered new, Director Grzegorz Bral draws on much older forms: “Our theatre believes that the real essence and origin of theatre is music and singing. Before the actors spoke on stage, they sang and danced. And this is what we are constantly exploring – theatre rooted in music and polyphony songs. Singing is an uncontaminated form of human communication, and therefore we use music to surprise our audience with a different way of telling the important and powerful stories.” Ultimately, Song of the Goat’s work is regarded as innovative and experimental because it blends old and new.
Drawing on the ancient in the present also resonates with Abraham because it falls outside of current performance making norms. “Theatrical forms that live outside the mainstream – whether they’re rooted in oral traditions, ceremony, satire, or resistance – open up Shakespeare in ways that make it more porous, more dangerous, and more alive,” he states. Older kinds of performance, when combined with Shakespeare’s plays in a contemporary context, result in something powerful. “Shakespeare’s work is so timeless because it can apply and hold relevance with a simple change of context,” add Manhoso and McManus.
Importantly, and perhaps ultimately, rejecting or challenging mainstream performance makes accessible work and gives opportunities to those who were traditionally excluded. Manhoso and McManus emphasise, “this isn’t about gatekeeping or tradition. It’s about giving everybody access to theatre so we can all tell our stories through art”.
Lady Macbeth Played Wing Defence, Assembly George Square Studios, 30 Jul-25 Aug (not 6, 13, 20), 4.15pm
Hamlet – Wakefulness, Summerhall, 3-15 Aug (not 12), 10.50pm
As You Like It A Radical Retelling, Church Hill Theatre, 20-23 Aug, 8pm