Shakespeare's Globe on London's Southbank — Photo courtesy of Kieran Lynam
Over the next 6 week's, London's Globe Theatre is offering anyone visiting the British capital the once in a lifetime opportunity to see every one of Shakespeare's plays in 37 different languages. The Globe to Globe festival aims to bring the world to London, to interpret Shakespeare's plays using many different cultures and languages. Israel's national theatre company, Habima, will be performing the Merchant of Venice in Hebrew at the end of May. A South Sudanese group will be bringing Cymbeline to the stage. The Italians (fittingly) are offering Julius Caesar; the Chinese, Richard II; The National Theatre of China's director Wang Xiaoying chose to explore Shakespeare's "wicked horror show of power and paranoia" in staging one of a series of plays about Royal households. On the 23rd and 24th of May, you can catch All's Well that End's Well in Gujarati.
William Shakespeare — Photo courtesy of tonynetone on flickr
Globe to Globe isn't solely aimed at diversifying Shakespeare with national languages. There will be a hip hop production of Othello entitled Othello - The Remix. This particular production will be rocking London's South Bank courtesy of the Q Brothers and the Chicago Theatre company. The Q brothers are America's leading interpreters of Shakespeare and promise to mash up, spin out, and lyrically rewrite Othello, giving it a fresh urban take. If that doesn't tickle your fancy, consider a British sign language version of Love's Labours Lost. That production by Deafinitely Theatre promises to translate the pun riddled farce using the rich physicality of British sign language for both a hearing and non hearing audience.
For those of you who are more comfortable watching Shakespeare in English, the season closes with a production of Henry V, and an exploration of war and peace and what it means to be English.
