ACTOR-teacher-director-producer-photographer Tony Knight has no idea where Lakespeare, Shakespeare by the Lakes, got the idea of asking him to direct its 2022 production of “As You Like It”, but he’s very glad they did.

Knight, best known in the Australian theatre scene for having headed the acting course at NIDA for 19 years, teaching people such as Cate Blanchett, Essie Davis and Jacqueline MacKenzie, is a man of many parts.

He’s been busy directing a Shakespeare-in-the-park initiative in Adelaide, where his production “Thou, Nature, Art My Goddess” took place in Stockade Botanical Park on September 26.

Staged by Butterfly Theatre, it was a compilation of Shakespeare’s best songs, speeches and sonnets that highlight our relationship with nature, staged outdoors with original music and free, but under booking restrictions – that’s probably the way Lakespeare will have to go next year.

It came about in the time of covid in Adelaide when, despairing of social media announcing that “theatre is dead”, Knight and his colleague Bronwyn Ruciak, who heads up the immersive Butterfly Theatre, asked: “Why don’t we do something in the theatre foyer?”

That was because, under covid restrictions, foyers have more capacity than theatres and “Shakespeare in the Bar”, staged with four actors, was the very successful result. 

“Then we were contacted to do the same thing down on the Fleurieu Peninsula in a hotel, then Bronwyn, who lives near Stockade Park, got in touch with the local council and things started to snowball,” he explains.

Now they’re planning to do Shakespeare in the vineyard, also on the Fleurieu Peninsula, in late October.

“Our concept is raw, no miking, just four actors delivering Shakespearean speeches directly to the audience,” Knight says of the program, adding that there’s no shortage of delicious material, such as wooing, death and revenge.

“The Stockdale Park show ran about an hour and was a case of Shakespeare’s greatest hits, but people seemed to warm to the informality of it,” he says. 

Because of the format they could muck around a bit, so they had a male Rosalind (“As You Like It” fans will know that’s how it all began) leading to a same-sex kiss.

Brought up in Sydney, schooled at Sydney Grammar, Universities of Sydney and NSW and The Drama Centre, London, he has hitherto been a big-city boy.

But during 2015, while teaching the musical theatre course at Lasalle College of the Arts in Singapore, he was bitten by a venomous Vietnamese centipede. Misdiagnosed, the consequences ended up being so serious that he was flown back to Australia to his sister, who lives in Adelaide and offered respite. Now he’s been living there for six or seven years.

While recuperating he had been advised to take up photography and has done so, with three successful exhibitions behind him now. 

“I’m no longer a city person… I’m living in Port Willunga, so after Sydney and Singapore, I’ve gone rural,” he says. 

Knight, who’s still been doing some teaching, feels he’d rather like to work in country schools and says: “I find country people often more generous and spirited”.

He’s been co-directing two-hander plays such as Suzie Miller’s “Reasonable Doubt” and David Ives’ “Venus In Fur”, and plans to do something new but low-key next year.

He acknowledges that we live in an ageist time, which means that many senior theatre people have been forgotten – “I could be in that category but I’ve kind of accepted it,” he says.

He hasn’t been to Canberra for quite a while and is looking forward to it. Through his connection with former NIDA colleague Karen Vickery, now at the National Portrait Gallery, he presented three public lectures on the Australia actor in film complementing the exhibition “Starstruck” and he’s met some of the people involved in Lakespeare, more recently via Zoom.

“It came out of the blue and I thought, I’d absolutely love to do this,” he says.

“I’ve always wanted to do ‘As You Like It’, though I’ve done most of the comedies, but not that one and not ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’.

“I couldn’t be happier.”

Information about “As You Like It” at lakespeare.com and crowdfunding donations for Lakespeare via mycause.com.au