A Poetic Monologue of Shakespeare’s Life

This is the story of Anne Hathaway – the unsung hero in Williams Shakespeare’s life, left behind with three young children while her husband, eight years her junior, and pursued his theatrical dream. After the funeral, as Anne opens Shakespeare’s will, her memory drifts back.

Its form has been described as a “poetic monologue that is fragmentary, and richly allusive.”

Directed by Katherine McRae and starring Perry Piercy as Anne, the audience shares details of her historically unknown personal life, a mixture of general information about the lives of women in Elizabethan England, fictional dramatic twists, and twenty-first century interpretations.

Acclaimed Canadian writer Vern Thiessen rummages around in the vast empty spaces that surround the few known facts about Shakespeare’s domestic life.

But rather than indulging in speculation on Shakespeare’s inner life the play offers a vivid recreation of living conditions in Elizabethan England and presents an entirely credible portrait of Shakespeare’s neglected wife Anne Hathaway.

The result is the exact opposite of the romanticised portrayal in Shakespeare in Love and the show arrives at the disappointing but highly probable conclusion that world’s most extraordinary creative genius may have lived an ordinary and relatively uneventful middle-class life.

Play Reading: 11 June 2pm! Call 04 801 7992 to book!