May 4 – 6 | 7:30pm | Ithaca Hall | All tickets $12 | BUY TIX

Actors the world over are readily drawn to Shakespeare’s powerful portrayals of despair, rage, and bleakness. We at QSE have explored Shakespeare’s despair and loss a fair bit over the years of Dare to Share, with titles like World in Flames, Seven Deadly Sins, and Torn Apart.

This year we are focusing on Shakespeare’s exploration of hope, which reveals it not as some kind gentle bright-winged angel, but as a force for change.

Hope is not optimism. Hope is not denial. Hope is not passive. Hope is the conviction that, despite how things appear when we accept the present moment, things can change. Hope activates and enervates. Hope demands action. Hope does not always triumph, but it never dies.

Hope is amoral. Hope can be comforting, and Hope can be terrifying. It’s not always pretty, but then who is?

The actors of the 2023 Queensland Shakespeare Ensemble have been training together since the end of February; exploring voice, movement, language and more through a selection of Shakespeare’s speeches and scenes as well as other forms of text.

For three nights only we will share some of these pieces with you, in theatre in the round, offering a rare insight into our training and rehearsal processes and practices.