Global Shakespeare
The final plenary of the 2016 World Shakespeare Congress took on the form of a panel of international Shakespeare directors, led by our Executive Producer, Tom Bird, and discussed the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays have been reimagined around the world.
Panel members included:
Wole Oguntokun (Artistic Director of Renegade Theatre Nigeria)
Nikita Milivojević (Director of Serbian Shakespeare Festival Serbia)
Arin Arbus (Associate Artistic Director at Theatre for a New Audience New York)
Caroline Byrne (Current Director of The Taming of the Shrew set in Ireland)
Shakespeare in Nigeria
[The Winter’s Tale, directed by Wole Oguntokun, performed in Yoruba by the Renegade Theatre Nigeria, as part of the 2012 Globe to Globe Festival © Simon Annand]
Wole Oguntokun talks about Renegade Theatre’s current production of Macbeth, which is set in the aftermath of the Nigerian civil war, and producing Shakespeare in Nigeria:
WO: The historical context informs the setting of the play. A lot of themes in Shakespeare’s plays are universal. The aftermath of the Nigerian civil war is apt for Shakespeare’s Macbeth; there is a lust for power, a thirst for supremacy. Shakespeare’s original language is hard for my country, it’s like marmite - you either love it or hate it!
TB: What did you do with Shakespeare’s language to make it yours?
WO: It became Nigerian. The story was the same, but the language was ours.
TB: How did the audience react? Is it normal to set a play in such a raw setting in Lagos?
WO: Its localising it, and you find that more and more, we are doing that.
TB: Do young people encounter Shakespeare in schools in Nigeria?
WO: Shakespeare is compulsory; you must a read a text. I did Julius Caesar. Not many people can cope with the language; they look for condensed versions of the play, or those that can understand explain to others. Shakespeare belongs to all of us.
Shakespeare in Serbia
[Henry VI Part 1, directed by Nikita Milivojević, performed in Serbian by the National Theatre of Belgrade, as part of the 2012 Globe to Globe Festival © Marc Brenner]
Nikita Milivojević talks about staging A Midsummer Night’s Dream during a bombardment of Serbia, and his Shakespeare Festival:
NM: I was staging a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream during the NATO bombardment of Serbia in 1999. Theatre is my second home, and I kept thinking ‘Who’s going to come to theatre during this strife?’ Nobody cares about the theatre now. We announced that we were going to put on one show at 12 noon in the National Theatre of Belgrade, and the theatre was full. Everyone was beautifully dressed; they wanted to show the light in the scenario, that it couldn’t stop their life. We decided to play everyday after that, and other theatres started to play too.
TB: When you staged Henry VI as part of the Globe to Globe Festival, they were in historical costumes. But your setting, with a table with a lot of men sat around, evoked NATO - was this a conscious setting?
NM: I wanted to find the solution, the connection to the play. Battles are always started around the table.
TB: Your Serbian Shakespeare Festival is incredibly daring, and choices of plays are never the obvious choice. You said I could come and meet the 80 year old Turkish women staging Hamlet!
NM: The women were amazed how they could be someone else in theatre. There’s a beautiful innocence that theatre brings.
Shakespeare in America
[Theatre for a New Audience, Polonsky Shakespeare Center, New York]
Arin Arbus discusses the relationship between Shakespeare and America:
TB: Here at the Globe there’s been a lot of discussion about Shakespeare’s language, to cut or not to cut, adding new lines in, changing words. What’s your approach?
AA: I cut it. I usually don’t change the words. I find the sounds of the words give another meaning so that the audience then understand.
TB: Shakespeare is a global person more than anything else. Do you ever think this is a play from England?
AA: There is a lot of Shakespeare in New York, but it’s mostly from England, probably around 80% of it? The Public Theatre and the Theatre for a New Audience are the only companies that stage Shakespeare every year. It’s frustrating, sometimes people look at me and think ‘what do you know?’
TB: Endless plays transfer over to New York, but what comes over here? There is a quality of theatre and of Shakespeare that happens in the States that we don’t get to see.
AA: Jeffrey Horowitz started the company 35 years ago, when there was just the Public Theatre. There was an accepted idea that Americans couldn’t speak the text. This is very different now. A lot of artists want to work on Shakespeare, but there is still the flavour left that we can’t do it.
TB: Theatre is often driven by the concept of a particular director over in England. Do you have a clear concept when you direct?
AA: It does depend on the play but that’s not my entry point. The core relationship of characters, or the idea of the play is where it starts for me.
Shakespeare in Ireland
[The Taming of the Shrew, directed by Caroline Byrne, as part of 2016 Wonder Summer Season © Marc Brenner]
Caroline Byrne talks about her current production at the Globe, The Taming of the Shrew and its Irish setting of the 1916 Easter Rising:
TB: You have very clearly found a historical, geographical context for The Taming of the Shrew. Why did you want to set in in Dublin in 1916?
CB: The Irish were thinking about how they wanted to commemorate the Easter Rising when I got hands on the play last September. How do we remember this mythic event in the Irish psyche? What came about was women were being left out of this conversation, they were left out in 1916 and left our now in 2016. In 1916 women were involved directly in the fighting at the time, they got involved with with the Rising. But they were not remembered, they were airbrushed out of history. I wanted to demonstrate this inequality. It’s all about directing the final speech in the play, and in my Taming of the Shrew, the woman offers the man equality. My Shrew is an imagined version of that time, contemporary and ancient at the same time. What can we learn 100 years later from that society?
TB: What is the place of Shakespeare in Ireland generally?
CB: I’m not sure I know the answer as all my directing has been here in England. But of my own education in Ireland, we did have to do one text at junior level and another at senior, but only by sitting down and reading it. We didn’t have the opportunity to speak it. Shrew has never had a production at the National Theatre in Ireland. Maybe there was an attitude that Shakespeare was from the Empire and people rejected it.
The 2016 World Shakespeare Congress runs from Sunday 31 July to Saturday 6 August, and celebrates Shakespeare’s memory and the global cultural legacy of his works during this quatercentenary year. The Congress takes place both in Stratford-upon-Avon and London, and welcomes delegates from around the world to share in a range of cultural and intellectual opportunities in the places where Shakespeare was born, acted, wrote and died.
Find out more about the Congress.
Follow #WSCongress16 on Twitter for updates.
The Taming of the Shrew concludes its performances on Saturday 6 August. Find out more about the production
Find out more about all shows as part of our Wonder Season
Find out more about Shakespeare in the aforementioned theatres and countries:
Renegade Theatre Nigeria
Serbian Shakespeare Festival Serbia
National Theatre in Belgrade Serbia
Theatre for a New Audience New York