Anthea Hill is Lucrece in Auckland Shakespeare Company's first production. Picture / Adam Baines
On the 400th anniversary of his death, the enduring relevance of the Bard has been emphatically demonstrated by an outpouring of Shakespearean drama - from the triumph of the Pop-up Globe through to university productions and a wildly exuberant Pacific Island interpretation of Macbeth.
The well-heeled established companies have missed
the party and it has been younger practitioners on shoe-string budgets who have thrown themselves into the challenging and deeply rewarding task of interpreting Shakespeare's densely poetic language.
The Auckland Shakespeare Company turned to crowd funding for their first professional production which breathes life into one of Shakespeare least known works. The Rape of Lucrece is a narrative poem retelling a historical legend about the son of tyrannical Roman king who raped Lucretia, the noble wife of a Roman soldier.
Shakespeare highlights the calculating malevolence of the act and shows how the harm done to the victim spreads outwards to her family until the entire society is forced to confront the way rape debases our humanity.
Director Rita Stone's intelligent staging uses a masked chorus to intensify the drama while Paul McLaney's sensitive music is tightly aligned to the rhythms of Shakespeare's verse.
