Bell Shakespeare
Exploring our most heartfelt concerns and collective aspirations
Shakespeare’s legacy to successive generations is his firm faith in human potential. Bell Shakespeare is Australia's national theatre company specialising in the works of the poet and playwright who continues to challenge us to reach beyond our grasp and give us the wherewithal to imagine our future.
If we can learn anything from Shakespeare and his contemporaries, it is that we hold within ourselves the power to make choices about who we want to be. Bell Shakespeare believes that our greatest resource is our capacity to imagine and to transform: to picture a different world, to know that it can be one of our own making – and that we can be both its creator and a character within it.
Hamlet (Act 4, Scene 5)We know what we are, but know not what we may be.
Season 2024
Bell Shakespeare
Bell Shakespeare returns in 2024 with a selection of some of Shakespeare’s most magnificent works.
Gallery
Gallery
Artistic Director Peter Evans
New Zealand-born Peter Evans was appointed as Artistic Director of Bell Shakespeare, have been Co-Artistic Director alongside John Bell since 2012.
Evans began his career directing at the University of Auckland, before moving to Australia to study at Sydney’s National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA). While studying at NIDA, Evans worked at Sydney’s Belvoir Street Theatre. Later he assisted Wayne Harrison on the world premiere of David Williamson’s The Heretic at the Sydney Opera House.
An enthusiastic classicist, Evans was handpicked by Bell to co-lead Australia's foremost Shakespearean and classical theatre company. He has directed new versions of Two Gentlemen Of Verona (2005), The Tempest (2006), Julius Caesar (2011), Macbeth (2012), Phèdre (2013), Tartuffe (2014), The Dream (2014) As You Like It (2015), Romeo And Juliet (2016), Othello (2016), Richard 3 (2017), Antony and Cleopatra (2018), The Miser (2019) and Hamlet (2020/2021).