Monday night's episode was different: it was filmed live at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas at the Sydney Opera House and it was entirely about the one topic. And that topic was Shakespeare.

There was a vague attempt to spin it as the "dangerous ideas" of Shakespeare, but this was a fascinating, if occasionally fairly scholarly, exploration of the greatest English language playwright, with Bell Shakespeare's founder John Bell, the writer and academic Germaine Greer, actor and playwright Kate Mulvaney, writer and actor Kylie Farmer and philosopher AC Grayling – who'd presumably been recruited on the grounds that he was sitting around and didn't particularly object.

Those who decry Q&A as being nothing more than a barely-contained televised slanging match would be pleased to see the civility with which five articulate people all agreed that Shakespeare was pretty great, still relevant, had much to teach us about the human condition and so forth. It just seemed weird shoe-horning this into the Q&A format.

That's partially because on a typical Q&A the topics can all be discussed from different perspectives, and while all five panellists were able to give interesting insights into the question of, say, the portrayal of female characters in the comedies versus the tragedies, it's not as though everyone had wildly different takes on whether or not the sonnets were autobiographical (answer: no, they weren't) or whether Shakespeare offers "wonderful insights into human nature and the variety of human experience", as Grayling put it (answer: yes, he does).

Even the most provocative questions regarding whether Australian theatre is well served by continuing to perform Shakespeare over new writers didn't ruffle any feathers: Greer pointed out that Shakespeare got people into theatres, Bell added that his former company Nimrod would use the proceeds from their one Shakespeare performance a year to commission new works, and everyone agreed that the most urgent problems facing Australian theatre isn't Shakespeare.

So it wasn't combative or fiery, and five minutes on the Dark Lady of the sonnets almost certainly going to be waved about as more evidence of the ABC's bourgeois obsessions by certain commentators of an anti book-learnin' stripe, but was it good television?

Well… yes. Just not by normal Q&A standards.

Greer opened the night by paying tribute to the passing of her old friend Richard Neville. "We lost him some time ago when he became ill, and part of me is glad that the struggle is over and he's at peace," she said, with genuine emotion. "He was charming, and we don't have that many charming men that we can afford to lose them."

Unsurprisingly perhaps, the most powerful moments came from the performers on the panel. Mulvaney and Farmer performed Sonnet 127, with Farmer reading her own translation of the poem in the Nyungar language of south-western WA, which acted as an elegant illustration of how universal Shakespeare's themes remain.

It also gave extra power – and, in the current climate, a potent political cast – to the poem's language: "In the old age, black was not counted fair / Or if it were, it bore not beauty's name / But now is black beauty's successive heir / and beauty slandered with a bastard's shame?" "I'd like to think he's lobbying for the beauty in the blackness," Farmer explained, accurately.

Bell closed the program by reading one of the lesser-known speeches from the Book of Sir Thomas More (a collaborative play which Shakespeare reworked - the soliloquy in Shakespeare's own hand has been recently scanned and put online) in which More calls for humane treatment of refugees resonated with Lateline's subsequent discussion of the closure of Manus Island.

That's as close as we got to a "dangerous idea" in this episode, which in some ways would have worked better in The Book Club than Q&A.

But as a gear change from the bitterness of some of the recent shows, maybe a bit of a palate cleanser was a good thing? As Tony Jones quipped before the broadcast, "If past Q&As have offended / Watch this one and all is mended."