I feel very honoured to have been invited to help launch Theatre and Drama Heritage Months – especially as I am only a visiting Brit.

It is wonderful and awe-inducing to be standing in the Opera House where many British actors have performed over the years. Allan Wilkie presented 17 Shakespeare plays, here, in 19 days in 1928 – a remarkable output much like a theatre company’s in Shakespeare’s day; Sybil Thorndike performed here in 1933 (I have a soft spot for the family as her grand-daughter gave me my job at the Globe in 1984) and Anthony Quayle played Othello here in 1953. Just across the road, the Old Vic Company with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh played at the St James in 1948. More recently, of course, Sir Ian McKellen played King Lear there with the RSC in 2006.

Mercifully, the traffic is not only one way. I can report that Rawiri Paratene is currently wowing audiences and critics alike at the Globe Theatre in London as Friar Lawrence in this year’s production of Romeo and Juliet. Several leading actors from the NZ Theatre community have trod the boards of the Globe as Fellows in recent years, including Robyn Malcolm, Peter Hambleton and Jonathon Hendry; Vanessa Byrnes was assistant director at the Globe in 2001 and we look forward to welcoming Sylvia Rands and Paolo Rotondo as this year’s New Zealand Fellows in August.

Before they arrive a company of 24 very talented young NZ actors will come to the Globe for a summer school and will have an opportunity to work on the Globe stage with Globe staff and to learn directly from Rawiri’s experience of playing the space. England is thus benefiting from New Zealand’s theatrical talent, too.

When I joined the Globe in 1984, heritage was a rather dirty word. Indeed, one reason it took so many years to build the Globe lay in the antipathy the British had towards “heritage” and what the critic, Robert Hewison, called in his excellent book, “The Heritage Industry”.

Certainly in the 1980s and 1990s there were a number of commercial companies that were cynically exploiting “heritage” to plunder and package the past in a rather Disney-like way.

You could “Chant with Chaucer” in Canterbury and find out what it was really like to be a Canterbury Pilgrim – “only 20 minutes - do visit the gift shop.” You could “Do the Docks” and find out what it was really like to be a docker in Allan Wilkie’s hometown of Liverpool, and actually be accosted by a whore (played by an out of work actor, of course). You could “Do the Don” experience in Oxford and become a scholar for 15 minutes and buy your embossed degree certificate from the gift shop on the way out.

One critic called these experiences the museum equivalent of the McDonald’s meal “fast past” – if nothing else a good way of killing Time. I used to call them “gift-shop foreplay”: - whetting the appetite before you were allowed to buy the T shirt.

Times have changed and attitudes to heritage have changed, thankfully, too.

Heritage is now valued as a healthy noun that recognizes, uncovers and draws from the past to inform and develop our sense of the present and future.

Perhaps Aeneas should be regarded as the Patron of Heritage. Here was the epic hero who was careful to carry his father Anchises on his back out of the burning Troy while leading his son Ascanius by the hand. He took care of both past and future generations. However, he was also mindful to take the Penates, or Household Gods, with him. These are, to me, the symbol of Troy’s “heritage”. The Penates were the essential ingredient for the building of a New Troy or Rome. Aeneas cannot build Rome without remembering his own heritage.

Hamlet has a great admiration for Aeneas’ story but sadly cannot emulate him. It is Fortinbras – the strong in arm – who cleans up at the end. I am not convinced a Fortinbras would do much for Denmark’s heritage other than create a Hamlet Theme Park – Yorickvick?- to keep the masses happy.

Orlando, in As You Like It, does manage to emulate the epic hero, however. He carries Adam, our first father, into the Forest of Arden, marries Rosalind and returns to create a new city – one that remembers Adam and his father’s household gods. Orlando is an anagram of his father, Sir Roland. The present is an anagram of the past. That is healthy heritage.

Both Hamlet and As You Like It were played this weekend along with about 15 other Shakespeare plays at the University of Otago Sheilah Winn Shakespeare Festival organized by the Shakespeare Globe Centre New Zealand and the inimitable Dawn Sanders. Over 400 students from 43 schools descended on Wellington to share their theatrical conversations with Shakespeare. Over 5000 students had taken part in 21 regional festivals prior to the Wellington final. This is an incredible series of events that are helping to develop new actors, new directors and new theatre audiences.

Indeed the Festival was a great warm-up act, on their very eve, for these heritage months. All the theatres in Wellington were packed with students on Friday and Saturday nights thanks to the Festival

Add to that the remarkable Compleate Workes Festival, dreamt up and masterminded by Bill Sheat and you will agree that Shakespeare is alive and well and currently living in New Zealand.

The programme for the Heritage Months reveals the wealth of theatrical activity here: performances, screenings, exhibitions, walks, tours and courses.

Aeneas would probably be first in line for Manawa Pau, when second year students from Toi Whakaari will collaborate on a site specific piece to explore what guardianship and history mean for them as young New Zealand theatre practitioners – modern day Aeneases and Orlandos carrying the past on their shoulders.

I wish I could hear Dame Kate Harcourt read from Katherine Mansfield; having seen Ray Henwood’s All the World’s a Stage at Circa, I would be fascinated to see how he illustrates the portraits in the Portrait Gallery and I know I would benefit from the two day archive course provided by the New Zealand Theatre Archive Trust.

Sadly, I will miss most of the events listed in the brochure as I have to return home to prepare to welcome the SGC NZ Young Shakespeare Company to our Globe. However, I applaud the Heritage Council’s choice of Theatre and Drama for its theme for 2009 and only hope that London will learn from its example.

It is my pleasure to launch this year’s season.