Globe to Globe Festival

• 1. Introduction

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  The Globe to Globe Festival opened on the 23rd of April 2012 at Shakespeare's Globe in London, and what followed over the next six weeks was unlike anything the theatre had attempted before. Thirty-seven companies arrived from around the world, each bringing a Shakespeare play performed in their own language. The question at the heart of the festival was deceptively simple: how much does Shakespeare matter beyond the English-speaking world? And a second, quieter question sat beneath it - how many people in London itself had never once set foot inside the Globe's famous wooden O?

  The answers, when they came, surprised even the organisers. More than a hundred thousand people attended the performances across the six-week run. Eighty percent of them had never previously visited the Globe. The festival had not just brought the world to Shakespeare; it had brought entirely new audiences to the theatre itself. Director Tom Bird oversaw an experiment that ranged from Māori to Mandarin, from Belarusian to British Sign Language - and the question of what holds a performance together when you cannot understand a word of it would prove to be the festival's most revealing discovery.

• 2. A Festival Born of Olympiad

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  The Globe to Globe Festival did not arrive by accident. It was conceived as part of the World Shakespeare Festival, which was itself one strand of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad - the arts programme that ran alongside the London Olympic and Paralympic Games. The Cultural Olympiad gave the festival its scale and its ambition. Tom Bird, as the festival's director, shaped the programming around a specific and unusual premise: that Shakespeare should be performed in the languages of London, the city that is home to speakers of hundreds of tongues.

  This framing made the festival something more than an international theatre showcase. It positioned multilingual Shakespeare not as an exotic curiosity but as something native to the city hosting it. A Swahili production by Bitter Pill performing The Merry Wives of Windsor, or a Gujarati production of All's Well that Ends Well by Arpana - these were not distant imports. They were languages spoken by Londoners every day. The blog record of the festival, maintained both on the Globe's own website and through the Year of Shakespeare blog, preserved audience and critical responses as the weeks unfolded.

• 3. Thirty-Seven Languages on One Stage

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  Urdu opened the festival with The Taming of the Shrew, performed by Theatre Walley from Pakistan. What followed was a programme spanning languages from every inhabited continent. Japanese, German, French, Lithuanian, Turkish, Hebrew, Armenian, Georgian, Polish, Greek, Korean, Italian, Yoruba, Zulu, Xhosa, Sesotho, Setswana, Afrikaans, Māori, Bangla, Dari Persian, Shona, Serbian, Albanian, Macedonian, Brazilian Portuguese, Mexican Spanish, Argentine Spanish, Castilian Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, Juba Arabic, Arabic, Russian, British Sign Language, Hindi - thirty-seven productions in thirty-seven languages, one for each of Shakespeare's plays in the canon.

  The range of companies was equally striking. The Vakhtangov Theatre brought Measure for Measure in Russian. The National Theatre of China performed Richard III in Mandarin. Belarus Free Theatre, a company known for operating under political pressure at home, brought King Lear in Belarusian. Ngākau Toa performed Troilus and Cressida in Māori. The South Sudan Theatre Company, performing in Juba Arabic, brought Cymbeline to the Globe's stage. Habima National Theatre performed The Merchant of Venice in Hebrew. Deafinitely Theatre presented Love's Labour's Lost in British Sign Language - a production that made the question of language itself into the subject of the play.

• 4. Companies, Nations, and Voices

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  Isango Ensemble, the South African company, performed Venus and Adonis in a remarkable six languages simultaneously: Zulu, Xhosa, Sesotho, Setswana, Afrikaans, and English. Grupo Galpão brought Romeo and Juliet in Brazilian Portuguese. The Q Brothers, in collaboration with Chicago Shakespeare Theatre and Richard Jordan Productions, performed Othello as an English hip hop production - placing it alongside the foreign-language work without contradiction, since the festival's intent was always about the diversity of Shakespeare's reception rather than strict linguistic difference.

  The Henry VI trilogy was split across three national theatres in the Balkans and neighbouring region. The National Theatre in Belgrade performed Henry VI: Part I in Serbian. The National Theatre of Albania took Part II in Albanian. The National Theatre of Bitola, from North Macedonia, closed the trilogy in Macedonian. Henry IV was similarly divided: the National Theatre Company of Mexico performed Part 1 in Mexican Spanish, while Elkafka Espacio Teatral performed Part 2 in Argentine Spanish. The Bremer Shakespeare Company brought Timon of Athens in German. Meno Fortas, the Lithuanian company, closed the festival with Hamlet. Shakespeare's Globe itself performed Henry V in English as the final production, on the 9th of June 2012.

• 5. What the Experiment Revealed

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  The festival had described itself, from the start, as primarily an experiment. The aim was to test what foreign-language Shakespeare could do in a city as linguistically diverse as London, and to probe how central Shakespeare remained to theatrical cultures far from England. The results pointed in two directions at once. Audiences followed performances in languages they did not speak, responding to the physical storytelling, the music, the rhythm of verse even when its meaning was inaccessible. The productions demonstrated that Shakespeare's plays carry structure and emotion that survive translation - not just into words but into entire performance traditions.

  The other result was the audience itself. The eighty percent figure - those who had never been to the Globe before - pointed to something the festival had unlocked in London's population. Communities whose languages were represented on stage came to see their own language given space in one of England's most prominent theatres. The Gujarati-speaking community, the Yoruba-speaking community, the Dari Persian-speaking community each had reason to attend that they had never had before. Arpana's production of All's Well that Ends Well in Gujarati carried that significance, as did Roy-e-Sabs performing The Comedy of Errors in Dari Persian. The festival's records, preserved through its blog documentation, held the responses of audiences encountering Shakespeare in their mother tongue at the Globe for the first time.