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Shakespeare’s Shadow: The Belarus Free Theatre’s King Lear at the Globe Theatre

By | August 17, 2015

In 2012, the Belarus Free Theatre participated in the Globe to Globe festival, staging King Lear in Belarusian, radically edited and modernized. The choice to use Belarusian as the primary language of this performance was a daring one, for it is a language that does not exist in a single accepted version and, even within Belarus, is frequently superseded by Russian. An online comment posted under a 2012 review in The Guardian offers a vivid example of indifferent dismissal that such a choice might have produced: “I can imagine few things worse than being subject to Shakespeare in Belarusian. Honestly who’s interested?” Read More

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King Lear by the Belarus Free Theatre

Shcherban, Vladimir 2012

This production of King Lear by the Belarus Free Theatre was first staged at the Globe Theatre in London as part of the 2012 Globe to Globe Festival (April 23 to June 9), and brought back to the Globe in 2013 (September 23 to 28). A theatre in exile from a totalitarian state, the Belarus Free Theatre drew on the history of reading Shakespeare in the Soviet Union, as well as on the current situation in Belarus, to comment on the cruelty, violence, and individual vulnerability generated under the conditions of dictatorship. Read More