Vision
The Queensland Shakespeare Ensemble exists to engage Southeast Queensland communities with Shakespeare - in order to strengthen the connections and relationships between community members, and to create evocative, engaging theatre that awakes the senses and impassions the lives of its audiences and artists.
QSE is committed to sharing epic, eternal stories with a live audience and considers the human voice the paramount instrument for doing so. The Ensemble's core belief is that performance is most potent when embodied by actors who train together, exchanging skills, experience and a sense of belonging with one other.
Why Shakespeare?
QSE focuses on the works of William Shakespeare because they reflect the diverse fears, hopes and joys of the current world; and are some of the most deeply layered, finely articulated and moving studies of human behaviour and passion ever created.
Shakespeare demands of his actors an intense intellectual-emotional-physical-spiritual connection and his language is the ultimate actor training and community building tool. His plays - created when language was a rhythmic, physical, aural experience - insist on a whole-body relationship to words, challenging theatre artists to act boldly and speak with desire. Shakespeare is an indispensable antidote to the move towards visual storytelling in live theatre, and although the Ensemble produces other playwrights and authors, Shakespeare will always be the home from which we travel.
Click here for Artistic Director Rob Pensalfini's 2007 ETAQ State Conference Keynote Address entitled "Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say" — Shakespeare and the Capacity to Sustain Complexity.
Performance History
Since its inception the Ensemble has gained a reputation for energetic, accessible and unique productions of Shakespeare's plays. The Ensemble formed in 2001 and presented several staged readings at the historic Avalon Theatre in St. Lucia (now closed). In 2002, As You Like It - directed by Artistic Director Rob Pensalfini and featuring the live music that QSE has become known for - marked QSE's first full production. A workshop production of Pericles, directed by Ira Seidenstein, was presented in 2003, followed by a 17-actor Coriolanus - complete with battle scenes - later that year (directed by Anne Pensalfini). An intensely vocal and experimental re-working by Stephen Daniels, The Madness of King Lear, played in March 2005 at !Metro Arts. In November, Rob directed the company again in its ground-breaking re-gendered Comedy of Errors.
In 2006, Shakespeare's Shorts, a trio of severely abridged hysterical tragedies (The Half-hour Hamlet, Instant Romeo & Juliet and Midsummer's Mechanicals) performed at a dozen festivals, libraries and schools. This was the same year that Shakespeare's Briefs -or- Let's Kill All the Lawyers! played in the Banco Court as part of the World Shakespeare Congress activities, presided over by actual Supreme Court judges, and our highly physical adaptation of Ted Hughes selections from Ovid's Metamorphoses made QSE's first non-Shakespeare production a critical success, garnering a Matilda Award for director Leah Mercer.
2006 also marked the inaugural year for the Arts in Community Enhancement (ACE) program in Borallon Correctional Centre. The project concluded with a performance of an hour-long version of The Tempest for an audience of inmates, prison staff, and family members of project participants. Six prisoners and three QSE Core Ensemble members played roles. ACE was made possible through partnerships with The Department of Corrective Services, The Supreme Court Library, The Queensland Law Society and The University of Queensland. The program is being delivered again in 2009 with the financial support of the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland.
Shakespeare's Shorts played seasons at !Metro Arts and in Ipswich in 2007, which was also the year that QSE began its relationship with Roma Street Parkland, performing Much Ado About Nothing directed by Jo Loth. At 2008's production of Twelfth Night, directed by Rob Pensalfini, audiences were able to purchase picnic baskets through our long-time supporters DeliOz, and enjoy an hour of live music prior to the show in the beautiful Parkland. That production netted Matilda nominations for Rob (Best Director) and for Gavin Edwards (Best Supporting Actor, as Malvolio). A new incarnation of Metamorphoses, directed by Jo Loth, played at the Visy Theatre in March 2008. Roma Street Parkland continued as the venue for both of QSE's 2009 shows: the evocative Shakespeare cabaret Food of Love, directed by Cienda McNamara, played in the more intimate Harry Oakman Pavilion in May, while the amphitheatre stage in October hosted As You Like It.