Martin Dowle, British Council
June 5, 2014
Why do Ukrainians identify with issues in Hamlet? The Shakespeare’s Globe theatre company performed the play in Kyiv, despite the recent turmoil in the country. Martin Dowle, the British Council’s country director in Ukraine, recounts.
Like in Hamlet’s ‘play within a play’, the Globe actors performed in front of the country’s leaders
On the eve of the presidential election in Ukraine, while battles raged in the east of the country, more than a thousand people packed into Kyiv’s Mystetskyi Arsenal – a massive disused munitions factory turned arts centre, built in 1812 – to see two emotionally charged performances of Hamlet.
The Ukrainian audience included two winning candidates — the incoming president, Petro Poroshenko, and the new mayor of Kyiv, Vitaliy Klitschko. They were watching the Globe’s actors perform on the eleventh stop of a two-year tour to every country in the world. The cast had already travelled by sea to Amsterdam, performed in the Arctic Circle in Norway, at Wittenberg in Germany (where Hamlet studied philosophy), and in Moscow, the Baltic republics and Minsk. […continued]
0
0
0
0
Comments