Walking Shadows Vol. 1:
Director’s Statement

I worked with the 2021 Full Time Howard Fine Acting Studio Australia students as their resident Shakespeare teacher for three classes face-to-face in late July and early August 2021, beginning their work with Shakespeare as actors, before the second major Melbourne lockdown due to the pandemic forced the school to move to online learning. The students then worked with me once a week in Zoom classes, working on their monologues and their comprehension of Shakespeare, hoping that they would be able to do their normal live presentation of the work in a final open class with audience at the end of the year.

Sadly, that was not to be, as Melbourne remained locked down for 116 days until late October 2021. But, if nothing else, we have all learned to be adaptable and so the school quickly pivoted to find another way to present the work.

Studio Director, Philip Hayden, also an actor, had been in the cast for my third season of Shakespeare Republic: #AllTheWebsAStage (named the most awarded Anthology Series & listed in the Top 10 web series globally in the 2021 WSWC), rehearsed and directed in real time via Zoom in the global lockdowns of 2020. So when I went to him with a proposal to create and shoot a new series with the students using their final monologue work in the same way, he eagerly jumped on board.

The result is Walking Shadows Vol. 1 – a new 22-part Shakespeare series created as part of the educational outreach of Shakespeare Republic and Incognita Enterprises, commissioned by Howard Fine Acting Studio – featuring a new generation of actors freshly graduated and eager to leap onto the world stage.