RIGHT about now, if things had gone differently, “CityNews” readers ought to have been reading the reviews of Bell Shakespeare‘s newest production of “Hamlet”.

Of course that plan, along with the elaborate program of celebrations for Bell Shakespeare‘s 30th year of operation, has gone awry because of COVID-19.

Historically-minded theatre buffs would be aware that the choice of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy was quite deliberate. For when in January and February 1991 Sydney and Canberra saw what actor John Bell was up to when he launched his eponymous company, first in the Homebush Showgrounds and then more enticingly at the National Zoo and Aquarium in Canberra, it was “Hamlet” he chose.

It was played in a large tent pitched at the aquarium and to get there you had to go through a glass tunnel, surrounded by sharks and stingrays – not a bad metaphor for the court of Denmark, we thought.

Bell, by then known as Australia’s pre-eminent stage actor, had been in love with Shakespeare since he was a boy in Maitland, but he was equally enamoured by the travelling tent shows like Sorlie’s that passed through town. One of his earliest triumphs had been playing Henry V in a tent in Rushcutters Bay before he went away to work for five years at the Royal Shakespeare Company.

From such experiences he derived the idea of returning to something like the Globe Theatre’s “Wooden O” and doing Shakespeare nearly in the round in a rough, accessible way that ordinary Australians would understand.

Although helped by funding from the late philanthropist Tony Gilbert, architects and powerful friends to help design a purpose-built tent in which his company would draw the nation, practical considerations meant that the company ended up in conventional theatres.

None was so suitable as Canberra‘s replacement Playhouse, which had gone up in 1998, and it bore a remarkable resemblance to the shape of the Globe Theatre. Both Bell and his successor as artistic director, Peter Evans, have regularly named Canberra’s Playhouse, with its potential for both intimate and grand theatrical moments, as their favourite space for playing Shakespeare.

Playing in repertory with “Hamlet” was a radiant production of “The Merchant of Venice”, directed by one of Canberra’s own, Carol Woodrow.

It was a clear signal, and one from which the company has never diverged, to keep close to Australia’s seat of government. Over the years following, many federal politicians have sat in Bell Shakespeare productions and many national premieres have been held here, too.

Thirty years of history followed as the company worked its way through the greats of the Shakespearean canon, but also side-tracking into more obscure shows we might never have got to see, like “Pericles” and “The Two Gentlemen of Verona”.

Names were made. John Polson, who played the very first “enfant terrible’ Hamlet in 1991, went on to found Tropfest. Essie Davis, straight out of NIDA, played Juliet. Joel Edgerton played the young Prince Hal, the prototype of his script for the 2019 Hollywood film “The King”. Clowning actor Darren Gilshenan became the company’s regular funny man, playing more than 20 roles, including in a quirky production of Goldoni’s “The Servant of Two Masters”, one of the company’s regular forays into works by other greats.

Bell productions left classically-educated Canberrans gasping for breath as they rode roughshod over Shakespeare’s famous iambic pentameter, turning it into Aussie English prose, engaged famous directors like Michael Bogdanov, who staged a sexy “Troilus and Cressida”, while also supporting up-and-coming directors like Lee Lewis, who set “Twelfth Night” in the Victorian bushfires.

Most reviled of all was Barrie Kosky’s minimalist production of “King Lear”, which de-glamorised Bell, seen as Lear sitting in the wasteland of a bus station waiting room.

From the earliest days, Bell and Evans played with cross-gender casting. Jim Sharman’s 1997 production of “The Tempest” had Kerry Walker playing the councillor Gonzalo, but this practice was to reach its apogee in 2017, when Kate Mulvany played Richard III.

Sceptics sneered when they heard about it, but the breathtaking performance in which she played the manipulative Machiavellian king “straight”, defied the cynics and won them over.

We were about to see history repeat itself, for Evans had cast Harriet Gordon-Anderson, seen last year in Molière’s “The Miser”, to play Hamlet and with the same directive to play it not as a woman but as Hamlet himself.

Evans told me just before the Canberra season of “Hamlet” was cancelled, “Harriet will be performing as a female body in Hamlet, who is an actor and a hyper-male character… Hamlet is similar to Richard in his masculinity, his relationship with women and his sexuality.”

Unless Bell decides to revive the production post-COVID-19, we will never know how his sumptuous 1960s-themed show would have turned out.

The 30th anniversary celebrations were to have been bookended by that perennial favourite “The Comedy of Errors”, and to give gravitas, “One Man in His Time: John Bell and Shakespeare”.

For the time being, to this Shakespeare fan it is the case, as in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 58, that “I am to wait, though waiting so be hell”.