Venus and Adonis

Damien Ryan has made good use of his years to perfect this triumphant multilayered telling of Shakespeare’s famous epic sonnet. COVID forced Sport by Jove to cancel its staging, and instead they made it into a celebrated film. Now it takes centre stage where it belongs.   

It helps that Australia’s leading interpreter of Shakespeare knows that stage so well, the making of Elizabethan theatre and Will’s ego-mad collaborators. Backstage they rehearse chaotically, all bawdy banter and meta-theatre winks to the audience, before staging the sonnet at court to the Virgin Queen Elizabeth (a splendid Belinda Giblin).

Shakespeare dramatises the romantic curse caused by Venus’ unrequited love for the handsome Adonis (a versatile, often naked Jerome Mayer). He prefers hunting.

And so with this play within a play, Ryan also weaves this lovelorn theme – and other ideas about creativity and artistic authorship - through Shakespeare’s actors.  And notably the historically possible relationship the playwright has with the Elizabethan feminist poet Aemilia Lanyer. In and out of bed, Adele Querol plays her with a vivacious intelligence: she has her own fiery version of how to play Venus – and Shakespeare.

Love’s perplexities continue in Stratford, where Shakespeare mourns his drowned young son, Hamnet, and sadly negotiates with his assertive if realistic wife Anne Hathaway (a memorable Bernadette Ryan), and the frustrations of his two daughters. These are powerful family scenes, especially with Anthony Gooley who throughout plays a disingenuous, thoroughly believable artist in Shakespeare.

Damien Ryan’s actors are all compelling and speak to us from both history and modernity, true to both period with frank displays of gender bending, transvestism and all things sexual, but in words deliciously spiced with the fashion of Shakespeare. It’s happily a long play, and like the Bard himself only occasionally too wordy, like in the final playing of the sonnet itself, when even Giblin’s Queen yawns into her ruffles.

This is a masterful production in its wisdom, rich language, ribaldry and its own theatrical relish, which threatens but never quite reaches buffoonery.  And it’s sumptuously costumed by Bernadette Ryan, and shadowy lit by Sophie Parker, on an effective set designed by Ryan, who as director so successfully articulates his own play. This Venus & Adonis must travel, it’s a must before it does.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Kate Williams