About The Bard, the Force and the Fab Four

Just as Shakespeare in the 1590s revolutionised the professional theatre landscape, so too The Beatles in the 1960s changed popular music forever and Star Wars in the 1970s transformed the movie industry. You don’t need to have ever seen a Star Wars film or Shakespeare play nor bought a Beatles record to know the sound of Darth Vader’s respirator, that Romeo and Juliet die at the end, or that Mother Mary’s words of wisdom (themselves taken from a Shakespeare play) are to let it be. Shakespeare, Star Wars and The Beatles are an indelible part of 21st century culture and pop culture.  

The Bard, the Force and the Fab Four explores the many ways in which Shakespeare, Star Wars and The Beatles have a shared historiography and are all the same kind of pop-cultural revolution. What do the reconstructed Globe, the reconstructed Cavern Club and an underground hotel in Tunisia have in common as sites of cultural pilgrimage? How do Othello, Anakin Skywalker and John Lennon each epitomise the same kind of paranoid jealous misogyny? Why were Will Kempe, Pete Best and David Prowse all ostracised from the franchises they helped define? How did Shakespeare, Lennon & McCartney and George Lucas adapt and transform their source materials, and how have they in turn been adapted? Why do crazy conspiracy theories about all three subjects endure and thrive? Are translating Shakespeare into Te Reo Māori, redubbing Star Wars into Navajo and beaming Beatles music into space all ways of defying our colonial overlords and riling online trolls, or are they testament to enduring legacy? What is changing about the ways we present Shakespeare onstage, is it acceptable to rewrite his endings, and what will his plays mean to us after the apocalypse? This is the book about Shakespeare, Star Wars and The Beatles you never realised you needed, probably because no one ever needed it!

David Lawrence (لبناني بكل فخر) has been called “the Nick Cave of NZ classical theatre” (Salient), “NZ’s foremost authority on Shakespeare” (Taika Waititi) and “the Al Pacino of late night satirical political theatre” (James Nokise). You may remember him from such ventures as the multi-award-winning guerilla theatre company The Bacchanals which he founded and led for 15 years (“The Bacchanals are to classical theatre what Jimi Hendrix is to the blues” – studentz.nz), or the box office behemoth Pop-up Globe (“the best night of theatre ever” – Melbourne Age).