This twist on the film title Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, a movie about the cold war, atomic bombs, overt masculinity and mutually assured destruction, is the perfect title for this piece. A piece about my own cold war with, then strange love of... William Shakespeare. Complete with theatrical bombs, incessant masculinity and what I hope is a professionally assured production.

You see, for much of my life I have said “I hate Shakespeare.” I’d then elaborate with “I just hate the slavish adherence to a whole lot of shit that doesn’t make sense”. 

I have always been uncomfortable consuming things I do not understand. I know some let the likes of esoteric poetry, jazz bagpipes and David Seymour’s twerking just wash over them. They don’t need to comprehend it, they just enjoy the art. Not me. 

If I do not understand something I am catapulted back to various classrooms where I would feel dumb if the sense wasn’t clear in every word. And I did well at school. But delving deep into texts to find meaning hidden behind torturous metaphors felt wanky, often unintentional by the writer, and I would feel stupid. And I am pretty sure I am not stupid.

I didn’t always hate the Bard. I loved being Lady MacDuff in Macbeth in 6^th form. I even enjoyed being slaughtered onstage. A scream cut off with a gurgle as one’s throat is “cut” is surprisingly fun to act. And it meant I got to hang out with boys, even if they were murdering me.

I took a Shakespeare paper at University (I did want to be an actor after all). But holy shit they were some of the worst lectures of my life. That the comedies could be made so mind-numbingly boring by someone who was an “expert”, is no advertisement. I was so traumatised by various English lecturers that I dropped the Major entirely, instead turning to Classics and Drama. And I tell you – I use what I learned... Every. Single. Day. 

Ok so maybe not but I was left with PTSD. Post Traumatic Shakespeare Disorder. 

I did valiantly keep dipping in my slippers however. I did valiantly keep dipping in my slippers however. I adored the movie Much Ado About Nothing when it came out, (though it is ENTIRELY about whether a chick put out or not). I also loved both Zeffirelli’s AND Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet, and recently Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth. 

I was on the boards too. When I returned from my OE in London in 1999 I was cast in 1999's Summer Shakespeare A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Ben Crowder and Vanessa Chappel. We had a joyous six week sold out season! It was rambunctious, naughty, fun and Aucklanders lapped that shizzle up. One of the reasons for its success is because they got that script down enormously. The cutting room floor was festooned with iambics, the meaning was clear, all the incomprehensible word soup was gone and the best of Shakespeare’s brilliance shone through. 

Then in 2003 I was cast as Third Witch in Macbeth at the SiLO which Margaret Mary Hollins directed. It too was slashed in length and sold out for weeks. One of my most memorable ever performances was for Auckland Girls Grammar who reacted like we were Taylor Swift. They screamed, jumped, roared with laughter and at the end leapt to their feet at the end, one even running onstage to hug me. Utter theatrical magic. 

But once I started writing and producing my own shows, I put Shakespeare aside. I rarely watched it, having flashbacks to a terrible Royal Shakespeare Company production in London and those awful lectures. Why deal with all the word soup? I found the joy of Jane Austen and the squelch of Dickens. I did shows about the sex industry and menopause, hosted Poetry Slams and fought with former ACT MP’s on Radio New Zealand. 

The only time Shakespeare veered into my consciousness in the last 22 years was when the Pop-Up Globe popped up and repeatedly insisted on casting hardly any women to be “in keeping” with the Renaissance. All whilst enjoying some other improvements of the past 400 years like penicillin, combustion engines and Netflix and chill. I’ve banged on about that at length here so no need to do so again, but suffice to say excluding women to remind us of historic exclusion, didn’t sit too well with me. Happily tho all’s well that ended well as women have been equally cast in their productions for ages, and Pop-Up Globe life continues providing joy all over the motu. 

Cut to 2023. I needed a new show. My solos Promise and Promiscuity and Olive Copperbottom had gone gratifyingly well and I wanted to complete the literary musical trilogy with a well-known figure. I wasn’t sure about Shakespeare given... all of that... but there’s no denying he has one or two fans so I decided to deep dive into the canon to research before I committed. 

It was then I realised, without having to wankily interrogate the text in any way, that his bounty was as boundless as the sea. All that beautiful love poetry in Romeo and Juliet, the hilarious repartee between Benedick and Beatrice is in Much Ado About Virginity, the summing up of FOMO and love in Sonnet 29, and alllllllllll the dick jokes. I even clutched my own pearls when reading about Petruccio putting his tongue in Katherine’s tail in Taming of the Shrew. 

As I read I was also amazed at the one-man idiom machine Shakespeare truly was. That I’d be a blinking idiot to not break the ice into this brave new world, to stop protesting too much and get the fuck on with it.

So I did. And writing it was fun. I am a known punster and suddenly I could pun on puns. A Russian doll of puns. My performance poetry chops meant I could smash out some mean beats and my rampant feminism meant I could make it all about the ladies – what better way to stick a middle finger up to being banished from stage than one woman playing all the roles? SO there. 

Then with my old Shakespearean mate, my workshop director Ben Crowder, we put together a riotous, musical mash up of the Bard’s best bits in The Tempestuous. I banished university trauma, used easily understood tracts and found the fun, magic and heart in my Italian tale of cross dressing, witchcraft, oily suitors, belching stepfathers and a fool called Bozo. Performing it is an utter joy and people are having a grand time whether they know their Malvolio from their elbow-io. 

Oh and there’s quite a few dick jokes. As is correct. 

To finish I’ll misquote Juliet and say; “My new love is sprung from my old hate.” And hey nonny nonny to that.