Nose Candy

It's been a swift rise for Queensland youth theatre company Shake & Stir. Born from co-founders Ross Balbuziente, Nelle Lee and Nick Skubij's mutual passion for Shakespeare and their shared goal of filling a long-established caveat in youth theatre, Shake & Stir has successfully managed to tackle the perennial and colossal task of getting young people to engage with the classics. After storming the stage with 2009's Statespeare, Shake & Stir followed up with the 2011 production of George Orwell's Animal Farm which garnered effusive praise and led the company to make the risky choice to immediately follow with another Orwell classic in 2012, 1984.

With their new show, Out Damn Snot, the company is taking yet another risk, expanding their audience and bringing the Bard to theatre-goers from four-years-old to 40. Co-founder Balbuziente explains the company's journey from Shakespeare to Orwell and, with Out Damn Snot, up someone's nose.

On moving from Shakespeare to Orwell, Balbuziente explains that they chose the successive dystopian realities out of a love of reinterpreting the classics. “The joy that we find when reinterpreting Shakespeare, the same applies when you're dealing with Orwell or other classics,” he says. But with the overwhelming success of Animal Farm, Shake & Stir must have felt no small amount of pressure in bringing another Orwellian dystopia to the stage. “Heck yes,” Balbuziente emphatically agrees. “There was so much pressure. Shakespeare had been the basis for all of work until then, but we'd all been obsessed with Animal Farm since way back in school,” he continues. “It wasn't our plan to do a double bill of Orwell, but we thought we could do [1984] so long as it stands alone as a completely different production.”

It's a huge leap from Big Brother to Out Damn Snot, a show that largely takes place in a young boy's nasal cavity but, Balbuziente explains, getting out of dystopia was one of the reasons for developing the show. “We thought we're going to start getting quite depressed [so] let's do something incredibly silly that appeals to the children in all of us; let's get stupid.”

One could be forgiven for wondering how a kids' show featuring copious amounts of fake snot – 11,000 litres of green slime will be used over the course of the season – could possibly incorporate both Macbeth and A Midsummer Night's Dream. “We went straight to the essence of those two plays,” Balbuziente explains. “We extrapolated the supernatural/fantastical/transformational elements of those two plays and we tried to pull out all of those plots and subplots that would be really fun to play with if we recontextualised: let's not set it within a heath, let's call a character Heath and set it within his nose.”

The show is aimed at audiences as young as four – certainly not the traditional consumer of Shakespeare – but Balbuziente is firm that there's no such thing as too young for Shakespeare. “Never,” he says. “He's the best playwright ever so if children are coming to see a piece of theatre at that young age, why not instil some of the greatest playwright's work at that moment?” With a bit of Shakespeare and a whole lot of snot Balbuziente says, “Honestly I can say that this rehearsal period has been the most fun rehearsal period that Shake & Stir has ever experienced.”