What in the world do plays do? What happens when imaginative plots touch our present concerns through the embodied experience of performers and audiences? With Shakespeare as an expansive test case, Kate investigates how plays play on the stage of public culture. Her book, Ours as we play it: Australia plays Shakespeare, examines contemporary Australian performance. Other research concerns educational applications of Shakespeare since the advent of English curricula at school and university. Recent publications analyse theatrical rivalry, the agency of the touring actress, civic disorder, sectarian tension, and military commemoration through their involvement with Shakespeare in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Australia. Kate’s current project is an international and interdisciplinary collaboration called ‘Reading Riot through Shakespeare’. In it she aims for an improved understanding of riot by learning more about the affective and performative dynamics it shares with theatre in the long and colourful history of Shakespeare-associated public disturbances.
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