On his first trip to Australia, Professor Gary Watt from the University of Warwick joins with composer and director of The Song Company, his friend Antony Pitts, in a celebration of the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare's death, A Strange Eventful History.

Watt combines teaching in the School of Law with writing and broadcasting and regularly leads rhetoric workshops with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

"Shakespeare takes up a lot of my scholarly interest but it's really a passion," Watt says, "so it's a great opportunity to come to Australia and combine with The Song Company in their musical take on Shakespeare. It doesn't feel like work."

Watt continues, "Antony and I work very well together. We spark off each other in a very creative way. I think we both enjoy the playfulness and potential of language. The sum of our parts is better than just our own individual ideas and I think that's the essence of The Song Company too. It's a beautiful mystery and the collaborative approach suits us very well."

Watt explains that his background as a university lecturer in law involves legal advocacy, teaching and performance, three aspects which all have rhetoric in common.

"As a teacher you have to be able to move your students to a new level of understanding; as a lawyer you have to persuade; as a performer you have the same sort of rhetorical influence on your audience."

When Shakespeare was at school rhetoric was one of the three main aspects of his education.

"He would have had many hours of training in rhetoric," Watt says. "If we want to appreciate Shakespeare's plays we can learn a great deal from how he uses language in a rhetorical, persuasive and subtly psychological way. You could look at the way in which Antony and Brutus discuss the rights and wrongs of Caesar's assassination in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar as an exercise in rhetoric."

In A Strange Eventful History Shakespeare's words, supplemented by a few words from Watt, are interleaved with atmospheric music to set a contemporary scene of about 400 years ago.

"We want to imagine that we're going back to Shakespeare's day, exploring the music and also the sound in the plays," Watt says. "There's original pronunciation and the sort of music that he would have grown up with and heard every day."

As well as settings of music by John Banister, William Byrd, Johnson and Landsman there will be contemporary settings from The Song Company's Call for Scores including a piece commissioned from former Song Company member Ruth McCall, a setting of Shakespeare's Sonnet 76: "Why is my verse so barren of new pride?" There are also some dances by Thomas Morley including Munday's Joy, The Queenes Alman, La Volta and Mal Sims.

One of the great joys of The Song Company is the wit and playfulness of many of its performances. And how well this will fit with Watt and Pitts' interpretation of Shakespeare's writing. They have taken as the basis of their entertainment the monologue spoken by the melancholy Jaques in Act II, Scene VII of Shakespeare's As You Like It: "All the world's a stage". It begins with the infant, "mewling and puking in the nurse's arms," moves to the "whining schoolboy", to the lover, "sighing like a furnace" and to the soldier, "jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel". After interval the Justice, "full of wise saws and modern instances" makes his appearance, followed by the pantaloon and finally the old man approaching death, "sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything".

"My little bit of new writing is in there too," Watt says, "but I don't want to get in the way of Shakespeare but just get the whole thing to flow and bring it all together. But the star of the show will be Shakespeare's text and the music – a lovely blend of old and new.

"There'll be street cries of London and I'll give some of the great speeches from some of the favourite plays. And also sonnets. We'll be taking the seven ages of man as 'the strange eventful journey', a journey not only across time and space but also the journey of a lifetime, a universal journey. We can see the stages through Shakespeare's very perceptive eyes."

Watt says that Shakespeare's deep poetry of speech cuts across language and different cultures; that its rhythms and music appeal in the same way as the music of Mozart.

Perhaps understandably for a lawyer, Watt nominates The Merchant of Venice as his favourite Shakespeare play and Shylock as his favourite character.

"Shylock's a very controversial figure and he divides people's opinions. Like so many of Shakespeare's characters he sets up this great puzzle as to whether we should love him or loathe him and he shares with many other Shakespearean characters a great sense of humanity, but he's challenging. I think one can see quite a bit of Shakespeare in Shylock."

Watt wants to stress the richness of this program and its playfulness.

"Playfulness with words and music. And an adventure across space, from England to Australia, and across time: the 400 years since Shakespeare died."