Hamlet: Globe to Globe

NEW YORK TIMES 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2017In the middle of the sprawling Zaatari refugee camp, Dominic Dromgoole watches from the makeshift wings as Hamlet delivers one of his celebrated soliloquies. Four years earlier, Dromgoole, the Artistic Director of the Globe, had come up with a wildly ambitious idea . . . to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death by taking his most famous play to every country on the planet. Over two full years, Dromgoole and the Globe players toured all seven continents performing Hamlet in sweltering deserts, grand Baltic palaces and heaving marketplaces - despite food poisoning in Mexico, the threat of ambush in Somaliland, an Ebola epidemic in West Africa and political upheaval in Ukraine. Hamlet: Globe to Globe tells the fascinating story of this unprecedented theatrical adventure in which Dromgoole shows us the world through the prism of Shakespeare's universal drama. We see what the Danish prince means to the students of Cambodia, the effect of Polonius on the citizens of the tiny African nation of Djibouti and how a sixteenth-century play can touch the lives of Syrian refugees. Shakespeare's timeless power to transcend borders, to touch the human heart, and to bring the world closer together, has rarely been demonstrated in such a bold and brilliant way.