Gerard Manley Hopkins once wrote that the trouble with scientists is not that they become materialists, but that they end in conceiving a world in terms of formulae. Unfortunately, this is not an ailment confined to scientists. In Sydney and Melbourne the real danger is that directors tend increasingly to conceive of the world of Shakespeare in terms of formulae. At the Nimrod Theatre, in Sydney, the formula was modernism, making Shakespeare our contemporary. At the Old Tote, the formula, as the journalists saw it, was classical. The Old Tote itself was more precise-for classical read Elizabethan-when it presented The Tempest at the Drama Theatre in the Sydney Opera House in January 1978.