Lowdown’s Tracy Ellis talks with Bell Shakespeare’s Head of Education, Linda Lorenza.

The chic offices of Bell Shakespeare are set appropriately in a sensitively restored historic building. It might not be 400 years old, but like a Shakespeare play, the integrity of the structure has been preserved and it’s been cleverly adapted to the contemporary people and situations it now serves.

Actor John Bell launched Bell Shakespeare 20 years ago with a mission to present Shakespeare’s works to Australian audiences ‘so that they might see their own lives, loves and aspirations in some of the greatest plays every written’. Since then, the brief has broadened to encompass two main-stage Shakespeare productions each year (King Lear and Twelfth Night in 2010), alongside another production, which can be a classic by a different author, a reworking, or something inspired by a classic. This year the company will reprise children’s author Andy Griffith’s irreverent Just Macbeth, while the company’s 2007 production of Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector has been invited to the Festival Iberomericano de Teatro in Bogota, Colombia.

Bell Shakespeare also supports and commissions contemporary works through its Mind’s Eye program, which currently has nine productions in development including an all-girl hip hop take on As You Like It, and a wordless re…