‘My native English now I must forgo’: Global Shakespeare at the Edinburgh International Festival

Shakespeare for global audiences

The 2011 season of the Edinburgh International Festival (EIF) focused on East Asia. Aware of the increasing economic and cultural connections between the East and the West, the festival drew inspiration from the ‘timeless beauty of the rich and varied cultures of China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea and Vietnam’. ¹ The festival programme included examples of Asian performing arts combining Western and Eastern traditions, drawing attention to the hybridisation of current artistic practices in music, dance, opera, and theatre. The ‘visit’, as the director of the festival Jonathan Mills put it in the opening message of the programme, has usually been the other way around, with Western artists looking towards East Asia in search of inspiration. He mentions Claude Debussy and Gustav Mahler as two examples of Western musicians fascinated by Asian artistic traditions, but he could also have mentioned theatre practitioners and theorists such as Antonin Artaud, Berthold Brecht, Eugenio Barba, or Jerzy Grotowski. The Shakespeare productions of the 2011 season proposed a shift, with the East visiting the West in both a literal, geographical sense – with the companies’ physical displacement from Asia to Edinburgh – and an artistic one, in which Asian artists found in Shakespeare their inspiration from the West.

The three Asian Shakespeare productions of the season were The Tempest, by the Korean Mokwha Repertory Company, adapted and directed by Tae-Suk Oh; a solo show of King Lear written, directed, and performed by the Taiwanese Wu Hsing-Kuo; and The Revenge of Prince Zi Dan, an opera based on Hamlet staged by the Shanghai Peking Opera Troupe under the direction of Shi Yu-Kun. The three productions were examples of global Shakespeare, understanding global following Sonia Massai’s definition: ‘far from meaning “universal,” “global” is in fact the product of specific, historically and culturally determined localities’. ² As illustrated by the 2011 season, global Shakespeare is in fact the sum of individual local productions.

Shakespeare has been performed at the EIF in a range of languages and theatrical traditions that he could not have been imagined (see Supplemental Appendix: Shakespeare productions in other languages at the Edinburgh International Festival). Of the seventy-two Shakespeare productions performed at the festival since its creation in 1947, twenty-five have been in languages other than English by companies from Asia and Europe, crystallising the festival’s international dimension. The diverse origins of the companies reflect the emphasis on internationalism: from its inception, the festival was conceived as an international arts event, ³ with a mission to ‘present a wide range of performances from the world’s leading artists to the widest possible audience’. ⁴ This suggests that the artists in the programme are chosen because they are considered to be representative of their field. Their diversity is also related to the global circulation of theatre companies staging Shakespeare, often using the plays to create productions for global consumption.

The conception of the EIF as an international event prompted the billing of the first Shakespeare productions in languages other than English as early as 1948, with the Compagnie Renaud-Barrault performing Hamlet. However, Shakespeare productions in other languages in the first three decades of the festival were limited to three – in contrast to the forty performed in English in this period. The actual upsurge of global Shakespeare did not occur until the later 1980s and, since then, the festival has developed a taste for international Shakespeare. Venues elsewhere in the United Kingdom have similarly opened out to international Shakespeare. ⁵ By inviting foreign companies to perform Shakespeare in their own languages, the festival has not only reasserted its international dimension, but it has also contributed to enhancing the visibility of such theatre in the United Kingdom, providing access to non-English-speaking and non-Western theatrical traditions.

Shakespeare productions are especially suitable for international festivals because they are recognisable for the ‘global spectator’, to borrow Dennis Kennedy’s phrase. According to Kennedy, Shakespeare ‘can evoke a global response, because it continues to appear as a stable referent in a shifting theatrical environment and shifting world’. ⁶ Relying on Shakespeare, on that stable referent and global response that the plays motivate, is particularly useful in the festival context which, as Kennedy argues, promotes ‘a kind of performance that dislocates both itself and the audience’. ⁷ In similar terms, Bruce McConachie states that

Perhaps the biggest drawback of international festivals is the decontextualization of their performances. Most productions at festivals have originated in a different city and with a local audience, one that might not share the interests and concerns of the national and international spectators attending the festival. Many directors and companies get around this problem by mounting well-known plays for festival spectators – the plays of Shakespeare, Beckett, and Chekhov, for example. ⁸

The performance of Shakespeare’s plays alone is not enough to avoid the decontextualisation of international festivals. Productions often employ other strategies in order to ensure their accessibility, such as stressing the cultural differences of their source culture, privileging form over content, simplifying traditional techniques, or blending different cultural traditions. Such strategies are more evident in productions in other languages, as they have to overcome two main challenges: the performance in a new context plus the difficulty of the language barrier. Using Shakespeare is to the advantage of these productions, which often rely on the audiences’ familiarity with the story, so that they can follow the plot even if they do not know the language. In these productions, as Alexa Huang has argued, ‘the theatre audience is simultaneously an outsider (to the foreign style) and an insider (familiar with certain aspects of Shakespeare)’. ¹⁰ However, it would be a mistake to assume that all festival-goers possess such previous knowledge about the plays and that, even if they do, they are prepared to depend uniquely on that and radically change their usual mode of reception, setting aside their linguistic understanding to focus completely on watching, complementing the non-verbal language of the performance with their previous knowledge. With some exceptions, spectators expect some kind of linguistic access, especially in those cases in which language appears central to the performance. To provide that linguistic understanding, summaries and surtitles often accompany these productions.

Due to the intense circulation of companies of diverse origins performing in a variety of languages and theatrical traditions, Shakespeare productions at the EIF raise several issues about performance, language, and audience reception. This article argues that there has been an evolution towards a global Shakespeare at the EIF, and that Shakespeare productions have been both an active agent and a product of the interconnectedness of theatre cultures in international festivals. To demonstrate this, the article considers three categories that illustrate the evolution of Shakespeare festival productions: Shakespeare without his language, heteroglossic Shakespeare, and new-brand Shakespeare. These categories unveil the adjustments and strategies of Shakespearean theatre to adapt to the festival context, at a time when they are also used to assess the shifts in Shakespeare studies regarding global Shakespeare.

Shakespeare without his language ¹¹

In 1954, the preliminary programme of the EIF made the following announcement about the theatre section of that season:

the Old Vic will present Shakespeare A Midsummer Night’s Dream with complete Incidental Music of Mendelssohn, Ballet, and the Scottish National Orchestra…The Comédie Française will present a season of French plays…The Old Vic will present a Shakespeare tragedy on the Apron Stage of the Assembly Hall…Negotiations for contemporary plays are in course of completion. ¹²

The three Shakespeare productions in foreign languages in the first three decades of the EIF’s history were Hamlet (1948), by the French company of Madeleine Renaud and Jean-Louis Barrault; Richard II (1953), by the Théâtre National Populaire from Paris; and Richard III (1979), by the Rustaveli Company from Georgia. Even though performances in foreign languages were not a novelty at the EIF, hearing Shakespeare in other languages certainly was. This conditioned the reception of the first foreign Shakespeare productions, with a great deal of attention paid to the language of the performances. In 1948, The Scotsman announced the performance of the first example of Shakespeare in a foreign language at the festival with an article that retraced the history of the French translations of Hamlet, ¹⁵ somehow justifying thereby the performance of the text in a language with such a strong translation tradition. Moreover, the success of the production was inevitably measured against its ability to overcome the language barrier; for the critic of The Edinburgh Dispatch Evening, ‘The language barrier was smashed. Barrault’s performance carried stage and auditorium to harmony on a play beyond the necessity of words’. ¹⁶ This ability explains the widespread critical acclaim of the production and the numerous praises for Barrault, whose performance in the title role was compared to those of English actors such as John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, or even David Garrick. ¹⁷

The comparison with English-speaking productions was not restricted to the virtuosity of the main actor but also addressed the reading of the play. The critic from The Daily Telegraph was enthralled by the French choices, and paid attention to the differences with the usual British stagings of Hamlet, in particular, the depiction of some characters, as Claudius and Gertrude, whom he described, respectively, as ‘not the lustful Nordic that Hamlet’s description makes us picture, but an authoritarian ruler of character and decision’ and ‘an elegant lady from Paris’, instead of the ‘stupid, amiable woman who takes things, and kings, as they come’. ¹⁸ The critic wondered at the new meanings that the French director discovered in the text and stated that, in England, ‘tradition takes it for granted that certain things will happen in certain ways, and our directors yield to the force of this assumption without even knowing that they are doing so’. ¹⁹ This foregrounds the potential of global Shakespeare to work with readings of the plays that differ from those in the English-speaking tradition.

A few years later, in 1953, Richard II, directed by Jean Vilar, the founding production of the Avignon Festival back in 1947, ²⁰ toured to the EIF. Vilar was praised for his performance in the title role, the use of the bare stage, and the choice of French translation, which Vilar had especially commissioned from Jean-Louis Curtis. The reviews appraised the translation, which ‘inevitably lacked the royalty of Shakespeare’s phrase, but it had much of the raw material of his poetry’. ²¹ As in Barrault’s Hamlet, Vilar’s production was also text-based, had the actor-manager in the title role, and presented festival audiences with the French tradition of Shakespeare in performance.

Coming twenty-six years after Vilar’s performance and from a more distant location, the 1979 Richard III by the Rustaveli Company offered a more radical vision of Shakespeare. In contrast to the actor-centred conception of theatre of the two French productions, the Rustaveli showed a shift towards directorial authorship which, although acclaimed by many, led to more controversial reactions than the two previous examples. The production suggested a 20th-century setting and placed the action in England, although it was performed in Georgian – a language with which the majority of the audience was certainly less familiar than with French. The actors were in modern dress, a Union Jack flag appeared over the throne (which some critics read as a mistake, claiming that it should have been the English flag in order to have been historically accurate), ²² and songs such as ‘God save the King’ or ‘Dear London Town’ were some of the elements that the Rustaveli used to convey their image of England. The purpose of the Rustaveli was not to stage a story about England’s historical past: as the supposed inaccuracy of the flag suggests, the image they created was a simplified, somehow stereotypical vision of England, which just served as the fictional setting of the action. As the critic for The Financial Times put it, ‘It is clear that for Robert Sturua, the director, the rivalry for the English throne in the Middle Ages is not more serious history than The Mikado is a serious study of Japanese Monarchy’. ²³ For this critic, Sturua’s approach to one of Shakespeare’s histories was comparable to the 19th-century English comic opera The Mikado, which is set in an exoticised Japan. His comment suggests that offering an equivalent image of England (in terms of exoticism and stereotypes) is not appropriate, and that the historical authority of Shakespeare’s plays should be preserved in performance.

While the production seemed to fail the expectations of The Financial Times critic, it nonetheless enjoyed excellent reviews and high attendance. Iain Crawford comments that,

As usual, no amount of advance hype would persuade people to fill the theatre for a play in an obscure language on the first night, but word soon got around via the mysterious Edinburgh galley wireless and, by the end of the week, the Rustaveli could have filled the place for the rest of the festival. ²⁴

However, not everyone shared the enthusiasm. Allen Wright expressed his dissatisfaction with the choice of Shakespeare’s plays in that season in his review in The Scotsman. The 1979 programme also featured Troilus and Cressida by the Old Vic. For Wright, this choice of plays was the wrong way around:

Robert Sturua and the Rustaveli Theatre Company from Georgia might have made something really exciting out of Troilus and no doubt the Bristol Old Vic Company would have been seen and heard to greater advantage in Richard III, but the fates have decreed otherwise, and we are left with a sense of frustration that the Trojan Wars and the Wars of the Roses are being fought on the wrong battlefields. ²⁶

The first three productions of Shakespeare in foreign languages at the EIF illustrate some of the most frequently recurring issues of performing Shakespeare in translation in an English-speaking context. The first, most evident language-related problem, not unique to Shakespeare, is that the productions need to find the means to be accessible to a majority of spectators who cannot understand the language of the performance. The second issue is that, in the absence of Shakespeare’s English, reviewers, and, very likely, general spectators, are tempted to establish a clear distinction between a national, English Shakespeare, and foreign productions. In the case of the three festival productions, the reactions in the press indicate that the ‘myth of cultural ownership’, identified by Kennedy as the illusion that Shakespeare belongs to English-speakers, ²⁸ dominated reception.

Accessibility and authority in performance therefore need to be established beyond words. The two French productions were accessible thanks to Barrault’s and Vilar’s performances, which allowed the audience to focus on their talent as actors and their expressivity rather than principally on the language. Richard III enhanced its accessibility by emphasising its visual dimension, as Wright notes: ‘There are, however, times when the imagery of this stimulating production forms a substitute for the poetry’. ²⁹ This can be viewed as a deliberate strategy to make the production appealing for an international audience (their tour included other international festivals, such as the Avignon Festival, where the production was performed in 1981), or as one of the effects of performing Shakespeare in translation. As Kennedy argues, Shakespeare in translation has led to the development of performance techniques privileging the visual, often exploring scenographic and physical possibilities in more overt ways than Anglophone productions have done. ³⁰ Even though the productions were mainly identified as examples of Shakespeare without his language, to borrow Kennedy’s phrase, ³¹ the three productions overcame the language barrier and offered festival audiences the opportunity to compare their approaches with their own theatrical tradition.

The rise of heteroglossic Shakespeare

In the mid-1980s, Shakespeare productions in foreign languages and traditions conquered the stages of the EIF, integrating the festival in an increasingly interconnected theatre market in which foreign companies not only exhibited the work of their own national authors but also staged the plays of so-called universal playwrights like Shakespeare. Between 1985 and 1990, six Shakespeare productions in other languages came to Edinburgh: two of them were German and the remaining four Asian. The late entrance of these productions in the festival programme, while other authors were already being performed in foreign languages, has two main possible explanations. First, international companies were invited to stage plays of their national authors in their own theatrical styles, so that their productions were perceived not just as examples of international theatre practice, but as representative of theatre practice from a specific theatrical tradition. Second, the traditional Anglophone text-centred approach to Shakespeare in performance, in which the function of performance is to ‘(re)produce meanings located in the text’, ³² left no space for Shakespeare productions in other languages, as most of the festival audiences would not have had access to the textual component. Both reasons might have been equally influential, but the second is particularly crucial, since it is only by transcending the binary of play text and performance, and approaching ‘theatre language as a language in its own right of which the verbal is only one element’, ³³ that understanding, or at least enjoying, productions in other languages is possible. The transcendence of the binary perception involves both practitioners and spectators, who are invited to embrace the challenge of experiencing theatre without the full understanding of its verbal dimension.

The Asian productions from the 1980s and 1990s sought to transcend the binary of play text and performance with productions that drew on their local performing traditions, placing the stories in the companies’ countries of origin. Two of the productions, Macbeth (1985) and The Tempest (1988), were directed by Yukio Ninagawa. Apart from laying special emphasis on the visual dimension of the mise en scène, Ninawaga’s Shakespeare productions combine Japanese and Western styles and motifs. His productions have been discussed together with those of Peter Brook and Ariane Mnouchkine as representative examples of intercultural Shakespeare for international audiences, that is, productions combining Shakespeare’s plays with elements from other theatrical traditions (i.e. acting styles, costumes, music, dance, masks, etc.), usually devised for audiences not familiar with the theatrical style. ³⁴ One of the particularities of Ninawaga’s mix of styles is that the context of reception tends to foreground one style over the other: whereas they are perceived as Western when performed in Japan, they are read as Japanese by European audiences. ³⁵

The other two productions from Asia, Kunju Macbeth (1987), by The Shanghai Kunju Theatre, and Kathakali: King Lear (1990), directed by Annette Leday and David McRuvie and co-produced by the Kerala State Arts Academy, were, respectively, performed in the styles of Kunju theatre (also known as Kunqu, one of the forms of Chinese opera) from China and Kathakali, a traditional dance from the Indian region of Kerala. Combining the names of the theatrical style and of Shakespeare’s play in the title explicitly brands the productions as intercultural Shakespeare. Kunju and Kathakali are highly codified performing traditions, which means that most of the spectators would have missed part of these productions’ significance not only due to the language (Kunju Macbeth was performed in Mandarin and Kathakali: King Lear suppressed all verbal expression) but also because of the lack of cultural references to understand the conventions of these traditional styles. The achievement of these productions was that audiences grasped their overall meaning even in the absence of these references. The souvenir programme of Kunju Macbeth, which advertised the visit of the company to Edinburgh as ‘the first ever European tour of the most exciting company in China’, ³⁶ attempted to familiarise the audiences with some of the codified elements of Kunju, as the costumes or character types. However, without time to assimilate the new codes described in the programme, audiences were likely to pay more attention to the most spectacular aspects of the production, like the final battle between Macbeth and Macduff, transformed into a display of traditional Chinese martial arts. ³⁷

Apart from the focus on the spectacular, which might actually result in the exoticisation of these theatrical events, the absence of references can lead to a cognitive change in the audience. Spectators can no longer rely on their usual understanding of the plays, mostly based on familiarity with the language or the theatrical style, so they concentrate instead on their emotional response. As one of the reviews of the Kathakali: King Lear observes,

The intricate choreography, and particularly the hand movements, constitute a sign language to which most of us have no access. Yet, by the end of the evening, emotion as powerful as that of any more orthodox production of King Lear hangs in the air. ³⁸

Among the strategies employed to promote linguistic communication, the use of surtitles is a relatively new technique. Surtitles first featured in opera in the 1980s and became a widespread practice in international theatre in the following decades. ³⁹ The first allusion to translation devices in a review of foreign Shakespeare at the EIF appears in 1988, with Ninawaga’s The Tempest: ‘No-one has solved the problem of simultaneous translation but a system of surtitles was showing signs of improvement as the performance proceeded last night’. ⁴⁰ The use of surtitles responds to what Marvin Carlson has called ‘hetereglossic theatre’. Carlson states that our heteroglossic cultures, in which a variety of languages are spoken, have permeated contemporary theatre. This heteroglossia is characteristic of contemporary theatre, which no longer addresses purely local and national audiences, but integrates spectators of different cultural backgrounds and languages in events with an international scope such as the EIF. Surtitles provide key lines to follow the action, giving access to ‘a readily accessible, if necessarily abbreviated gloss on the language spoken on the stage for those in the audience to whom it was not otherwise accessible’. ⁴¹ To make the language ‘readily accessible’, the trend in Shakespeare in performance is to write the surtitles in contemporary English, instead of using Shakespeare’s language, which would take the audience longer to read. In semiotic terms, the surtitles add another layer of signification, one that each member of the audience interprets differently, depending on their linguistic and cultural background.

Regarding linguistic competence, spectators at the EIF can be divided among those who do not understand the language of the production, but understand the surtitles (speakers of English of diverse origin); those who share the language of the production but not that of the surtitles; those who understand both and whose reception experience, as a consequence, is mediated by oral and written language; and, finally, those who understand neither the language of the production nor the surtitles. Consequently, the English of the surtitles at the EIF does not correspond to the mother tongue of the whole audience but works as a lingua franca for the majority of festival-goers.

Productions of Shakespeare at the EIF have shown that the influence of surtitles on reception should not be underestimated. In the 2000 Hamlet, performed in a translation into contemporary German directed by Peter Zadek, the surtitles hindered the reception of the production as, instead of providing a version of the dialogue in contemporary English, they reproduced Shakespeare’s text. Thom Dibdin commented in The Scotsman:

it is not just that they were out of time with the words on stage, but that they did not reflect what was being said. The surtitles gave out a full Shakespearean text, complete with all its archaic words. The actors were speaking a modern translation in a modern setting. ⁴²

The heteroglossia of Shakespeare’s performances at the EIF was maintained in the 1990s and the first decades of the 21st century. In parallel, Shakespeare studies moved from Kennedy’s idea of ‘Shakespeare without his language’ or ‘foreign Shakespeare’ to Sonia Massai’s concept of ‘world-wide Shakespeares’, which rejected the notion of English Shakespeares as the standard. After the fascination with Asian Shakespeare in the 1980s, the organisers of the EIF turned their attention to European companies. From 1991, with a Romanian Ubu Rex with scenes from Macbeth directed by Silviu Purcarete, until 2002, with a Macbeth from the Netherlands by Alize Zandwijk with Ro Theater, there were seven productions by European companies, all performed in their mother tongues with English surtitles. This focus on European Shakespeare responded to the political context: a new European identity was emerging after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism, and Shakespeare served both as a vehicle to reflect on this new identity and to examine the recent past of many countries. The references and interpretations related to the European past and present were unavoidable, above all when it came to German productions staged in the festival. Peter Stein’s Julius Caesar (1993), produced with the Salzburg Festival, echoed recent political events, leading a reviewer to compare this particular Caesar with Mikhail Gorbachev, ⁴⁴ and the aesthetics of the Berliner Ensemble’s Antony and Cleopatra (1994), also directed by Stein, placed the action before the First World War, setting aside the love story to deal with ‘politics and the horrifying consequences of the grim logic of imperial expansionism’. ⁴⁵ Whether focusing on recent European history, or relying on Asian theatrical traditions, heteroglossic productions conquered the stage of the EIF in the last decades of the 20th century.

New-brand Shakespeare

There are no examples of Shakespeare in languages other than English at the EIF from 2002 until 2011, with only two of his plays, both English-language, performed in this period, by directors from the European mainland: Hamlet, directed by Calixto Bieito in 2003, with the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, ⁴⁶ and Troilus and Cressida, directed by Peter Stein in 2006 for the Royal Shakespeare Company. This decrease might be due to the emergence of festivals specifically devoted to Shakespeare in performance. In 2006–07, the Royal Shakespeare Company organised the Complete Works Festival. ⁴⁷ Elsewhere in Europe, regular festivals include the Gdańsk Shakespeare Festival (Poland), the Gyula Shakespeare Festival (Hungary), and the Craiova International Shakespeare Festival (Romania), ⁴⁸ all members of the European Shakespeare Festival Network, which actively contributes to the visibility of productions in a variety of languages and theatrical styles. Back in Britain, the second decade of the 21st century has brought a significant rise in the number of touring international Shakespeare productions. Huang has referred to this increase as the emergence of ‘a new brand’, ⁴⁹ with these productions competing with British ones. From 2011 until 2018, Shakespeare productions in other languages have reappeared at the EIF, contributing to the creation of this ‘new brand’. Four of the eight seasons in this period (2011, 2012, 2013, and 2016) have featured productions in various languages and styles. Altogether, these festival seasons have presented Shakespeare in seven languages, taking the festival spectator on theatrical journeys from Edinburgh to places as far apart as Germany or Korea.

Among the Asian productions of the 2011 season, The Revenge of Prince Zi Dan, a performance of Hamlet in the style of Peking opera (also known as Jingju), is a good example to examine the strategies productions use to adapt to the festival context. Directed by Shi Yu-Kun, The Revenge of Prince Zi Dan had at its back an intense international tour, including festivals such as the one at Kronborg Castle, in Denmark (2005), or the Almagro Festival of Classical Theatre in Spain (2007), among others. In an interview to The Telegraph, the adapter, Feng Gang, mentioned that the production had been specifically designed for foreign audiences, making it more intelligible for them than a ‘real’ Chinese opera. In his own words, ‘We want to take Chinese opera overseas, but our traditional plays, while very eye-catching, were incomprehensible to foreigners’. ⁵⁰ In another interview, for The Scotsman, he declared that Shakespeare was a deliberate choice to make their traditional operas more accessible for Western audiences: ‘we are trying to adapt Western stories, so they can translate into your culture. King Lear, Othello, A Midsummer Night’s Dream – all these plays could work as Peking operas’. ⁵¹ Once more, Shakespeare is the vehicle to provide access to new productions for audiences unfamiliar with the style but familiar with the story; a strategy that has proved especially useful in the case of eye-catching yet highly structured traditions as Peking opera or, as seen above, Kunju or Kathakali.

Peking opera combines singing and acting, and part of the meaning is encoded in the gestures, music, make-up, and costumes of the actors. It mixes acrobatics, pantomime, martial arts, and onstage music. Whereas the significance of specific gestures or musical patterns was imperceptible for the festival audience, the emphasis on the visual was such that those who knew Hamlet could easily follow the storyline and, for those who did not, the surtitles were there to help. This was partly achieved thanks to the elision of many of Hamlet’s monologues and the acceleration of the pace of the action, placing the focus on the key moments of the plot. The adaptation had such a clear narrative drive that it almost transformed Hamlet – known as the play of delay – into a play of action. Only 3.3, in which Hamlet decides not to kill Claudius at prayer, conveyed some of the young prince’s doubts about his vengeance, performed here as a pantomime. The style was highly formalised, but the production used some of the conventions to its advantage. The moments of pantomime and the acrobatics (in particular in the case of Polonius, interpreted here as a clownish character performed by an actor squatting under his long dress) helped to transcend the verbal dimension, which was completely suppressed in the pantomime scenes.

Privileging form over content, as in The Revenge of Prince Zi Dan, often results in a homogenisation of responses when the productions tour the festival circuit. ⁵² Most of the reviews of the production at the EIF highlight the attractiveness of the music and the aesthetics; several include a few notes about the conventions of Peking opera, and a few attempt to find Shakespeare in the adaptation. ⁵³ At the Almagro Festival in Spain, the reviews also praised the production’s visual dimension and the cultural differences of the performing style. ⁵⁴ The combination of a foreign style and Shakespeare answers the demands of festivals for international productions that are intelligible for their audiences, although they are likely to elicit homogenised responses. The intense circulation of productions such as The Revenge of Prince Zi Dan in the festival circuit links festivals to the globalisation of theatre, as global spectators are presented with the same productions and react to them in, if not exactly the same, at least similar and predictable ways.

The variety of languages in the productions (combining the languages of the performance and the one in the surtitles), added to the linguistic diversity of the international audiences, gives a precise idea of Carlson’s concept of heteroglossia in contemporary theatre. A Midsummer Night’s Dream (As You Like it) (2012), by the Russian company Dmitry Krymov’s Laboratory, took this notion of heteroglossia one step further by mixing different languages on the stage: it was performed in Russian with English surtitles and featured songs in German. The linguistic mix was in line with the general comic tone of the play and the production’s blending of genres – it combined meta-theatre, dance, and puppetry to tell the story of the mechanicals’ performance of Pyramus and Thisbe. The coexistence of Russian, German, and English implied that the linguistic understanding of the production would vary depending on the spectators’ relative command of each of these languages.

In 2016, the Berlin Schaubühne’s Richard III, directed by Thomas Ostermeier, brought heteroglossia to the fore for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. The production was in German, with fragments in English, such as Richard’s opening monologue – performed first in German with some interruptions by the celebrants of the house of York and, later, in English without interruptions – and the emblematic lines, ‘A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!’ Both A Midsummer Night’s Dream (As You Like It) and Richard III integrated several languages in the performance itself, in addition to the surtitles; however, only Richard III used this as a deliberate strategy to accommodate the production to the festival context. The introduction of English fragments facilitated the interactions between the stage and the auditorium in the specific context of the EIF, whether providing essential information for the understanding of the play (as in Richard’s opening monologue) or simply reproducing the most popular lines in English. The use of English in these two key moments offers a creative solution to the loss of a feeling of identification associated with listening to well-familiar lines. Thus, the English fragments in Ostermeier’s Richard III fulfilled two functions: they promoted communication and encouraged a sense of identification. In its performance at the Avignon Festival the previous year, the production had added one more language, with Richard’s most popular line being heard not in two but three languages: ‘Ein Pferd! ein Pferd! mein Königreich für ein Pferd!’; ‘A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!’; ‘Un cheval, mon royaume pour un cheval!’ Such combination of languages leads to a more complex heteroglossic Shakespeare, one that confirms the new brand of Shakespearean performance in which Shakespeare stands as a ‘global celebrity’, ⁵⁵ inspiring the touring productions of international artists.

Shakespeare on the transnational stage

Theatre festivals such as the EIF have undergone an evolution from their initial conception as international events, in which artists represented their countries of origin, to their transformation into transnational spaces where national differences are dissolved in favour of an interconnectedness of theatre cultures. At the EIF, the contribution of Shakespeare productions to this interconnectedness has been twofold. On one hand, Shakespeare in performance has acquired the form of heteroglossic theatrical events in which multiple languages and styles have come into close contact. On the other, the evolution towards a global Shakespeare could not be more evident: whereas Shakespeare productions were performed by English-speaking companies – mostly British – in the first decades of the festival, international Shakespeare has become one of the attractions from the 1980s onwards, with a particular appeal for Asian productions. The three categories of productions analysed in this article (Shakespeare without his language, heteroglossic Shakespeare, and new-brand Shakespeare) illustrate this evolution, and indicate significant shifts in Shakespeare studies – from Kennedy’s idea of ‘Shakespeare without his language’ to Huang’s ‘new brand’. The performance of Shakespeare’s works in different languages has opened the Edinburgh stages to a global phenomenon: as Ton Hoenselaars has pointed out, ‘More often than not…people’s familiarity with Shakespeare around the globe comes via translations of his plays and poems into languages other than the playwright’s own Early Modern English’. ⁵⁶

The circulation of Shakespeare productions between the EIF and other festivals, such as the Avignon or the Almagro Festivals, is linked to the existence of a festival circuit, an international theatre market in which the packaging of Shakespeare in theatrical formats that break with a British tradition of playing the Bard’s plays has proved successful in box-office terms. Nevertheless, the predominance of Shakespeare’s plays – and of a handful of those – has led to a certain standardisation: Shakespeare is the playwright most often performed in many international festivals, these productions frequently tour intensively and, as in the case of The Revenge of Prince Zi Dan, many are specifically designed for international touring and give rise to similar responses independently of the context of performance.

The increasing ties between international stages have led to a change in the forms of production. Apart from the addition of surtitles, companies have developed mechanisms to facilitate cross-cultural accessibility. Whether the trend to stress the visual languages of performance responds to a view on directorial authorship characteristic of Shakespeare’s productions in languages other than English or is a strategy to ease the cross-cultural transfer, this emphasis contributes to facilitate communication in the festival context. Moreover, the integration of several languages in the performance itself, as in Ostermeier’s Richard III, goes a step further, directly responding to the heteroglossia of festival audiences. Despite the possibility of eliciting homogeneous responses, the role of these productions in the globalisation of theatre is not necessarily negative: many of them draw on Shakespeare as an empowering resource to introduce new theatrical styles in festivals with such cultural capital as the EIF. Far from being exiled in the absence of their original English, as the character of Mowbray complains in Richard II when he states that, in his banishment, ‘my native English, now I must forgo’ (1.3.154), Shakespeare’s plays find in world languages and styles the means to signify anew.

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