The Bard in Africa: A Proof Test of Universality

AMERICAN THEATRE: For centuries, Shakespeare’s plays have easily accommodated shifts in cultural fashion, from the happy ending tacked on Romeo and Juliet in the 18th century to Laurence Olivier’s ultra-Freudian Hamlet in the 20th. Granted, both of those were pretty terrible ideas, but they demonstrated Shakespeare’s ability to speak to the values and anxieties of any age. And he needn’t necessarily even speak in his own tongue: The 21st-century fashion is for multicultural Shakespeare, as exuberantly showcased in 2012 at London’s World Shakespeare Festival, which ran the gamut from The Comedy of Errors performed in Dari Persian to King Lear recast as a Belarusian folktale. These productions shift the focus from Shakespeare’s language to his stories and his largeness of spirit.