Shakespeare’s Hamlet in Calais’ “The Jungle”: All The World’s A Stage?

With the recent performance of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in Calais’ The Jungle refugee camp proves that all the world’s a stage?

By: Ringo Bones 

“All the world’s a stage”, indeed, when Shakespeare’s Globe Theater took Hamlet into the notorious “Jungle migrant camp” in Calais. About 300 refugees watched Hamlet – “a play that speaks to the human spirit in its darkest moments” – in biting cold. Under a steely gray sky, in bitter cold weather, actors from Shakespeare’s Globe Theater performed Hamlet back in Wednesday, February 3, 2016 to about 300 refugees in Calais at the ad hoc refugee camp notoriously known as “The Jungle”. Majority of the refugees have not even heard of William Shakespeare and his plays their whole life and there are even a large number who don’t even speak the English language. 

It was a wild thing to do but also entirely appropriate, Joe Murphy, a playwright and co-founder of the Good Chance Project, said it was the ideal play. “Hamlet is the story of a young man who is depressed and frustrated, between life and death, who does not know what to do, who is struggling to make decisions,” he said. “That story is going to translate to thousands of people here who are exactly in the same position.” One of the aims of the Good Chance Project is to provide some light amid the bleakness. Approximately 6,000 refugees from 22 countries live in the camp, the vast majority hoping to get to the UK. Volunteers say most are pessimistic that it will ever happen.  

Murphy said Wednesday’s performance was “a remarkable, beautiful thing.” The audience, who were offered popcorn, chai and synopses of the play in English, Pashto, Farsi, Arabic, French and Kurdish, did not get every nuance, but Murphy said: “Who does?” Well, at least the great English bard will gain a few thousand more fans. 

William Shakespeare Goes the World on his 450th Birthday

In celebration of his 450^th birth celebration, will the 2014 William Shakespeare world tour be a runaway theatrical success?

By: Ringo Bones 

Even to official tenured scholars and devoted fans – no one knows the absolute exact date of William Shakespeare’s birth, but devotees had ever since adopted April 23 as the day to celebrate his birthday. And in 2014, that great bard from Stratford turns 450 and there are plans to celebrate this milestone via a very ambitious world tour that’s as grandiose as the plays created by the great bard himself. 

Shakespeare’s Globe Theater – a re-creation of the theater troupe that hosted most of his plays that dates back during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I – is marking the occasion with an ambitious world tour of Hamlet, the English bard’s most iconic play, which the troupe plans to perform in every country in the world. Given the lofty aims of such a very ambitious Shakespearean world tour, it could well last as long as 2 to 5 years depending on the fans encore. 

Shakespeare Globe Theater’s Artistic Director Dominic Dromgoole tells in a recent press conference that the tour “is a stupid idea.””And the great thing about stupid ideas,” he says, “is that people understand them very swiftly.””So when we go out to people around the world and say, very simply”: “We are taking Hamlet to every country in the world they immediately get the fun of it and the ambition of it.” Given the average times a very experienced theatrical troupe like Shakespeare’s Globe Theater can perform Hamlet in a week, it would probably take them 5 years to perform the play on every country on the planet if you add the travel time.