The honour of opening this Shakespearean celebration falls to perhaps the best known and most widely fêted of the theatre practitioners on the entire guest list. Globe to Globe has begun with a poem - Venus and Adonis - performed in six languages: English, Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, Setswana and Afrikaans. The claim, however, that this strand of the World Shakespeare Festival features 37 languages is not quite accurate. This Venus embarks on essentially the most flagrant campaign of sexual harassment in all of Shakespeare Among the left-field offerings is a hip-hop Othello, while Love’s Labours Lost, the comedy most in thrall to language for its own sake, will be seen but not heard in British Sign Language. Globe to Globe's Henry VIII will be heard in Castilian, the language of the titular king’s unlucky first wife. The Globe’s programming has plumped for some shrewd cultural and/or political cross-pollinations: look out for a charged account of The Merchant of Venice in Hebrew, while the three parts of Henry VI, which tell of civil war, will be heard in Serbian, Albanian and Macedonian, all of them languages which have recent knowledge of national division. Hence the catchy title, Globe to Globe, which forms only a part of a World Shakespeare Festival continuing until September and taking place all over England and Wales, from Stratford-upon-Avon to the National Eisteddfod.īut the whole thing is starting this weekend at the Globe, where just in the next week you can see a Troilus and Cressida in Maori, Measure for Measure in Russian, a Swahili Merry Wives, a Pericles who for once speaks in his native Greek, Twelfth Night in Hindi and a Richard III who will trade his kingdom for a horse in Mandarin.
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