Last week, Abdulla Al Asam performed at Shakespeare’s Globe as part of Globe Education’s Sam Wanamaker Festival. The annual celebration brings together 42 students from the leading UK accredited drama schools. This year, Globe Education also welcomed Abdulla and his colleague Mohammed Ziyara who, from the Youth Activities Department, Ministry of Culture, Arts and Heritage, Qatar, as part of Qatar-UK 2013 Year of Culture. Abdulla shares his thoughts with AYT…

As an actor, I never expected that my first taster of performing Shakespeare would take place in the country of his birth, let alone a location so fitting as Shakespeare’s Globe theatre. Of course, I have gained a large amount of experience performing modern drama in Qatar, which perhaps is to be expected in a country whose recent development has come to define modernity.

It was this cultural contrast between the UK and Qatar that made my experience at the Sam Wanamaker Festival at Shakespeare’s Globe so enjoyable and beneficial.

My colleague Mohammed Ziyara and I were invited to participate in the festival, alongside 42 students from UK drama schools, by Globe Education, as part of Qatar UK 2013 Year of Culture. Qatar UK 2013 is a year-long celebration of the long-lasting friendship between Qatar and the UK and aims to cultivate mutual understanding between the two countries. Our inclusion definitely brought a different perspective to the weekend, and it was a brilliant experience sharing knowledge and bouncing ideas in an international group.

The weekend involved a variety of workshops and classes, each led by an expert who helped us improve our performance skills. I found all the Globe staff I met to be extremely helpful and encouraging, but the chance to talk about acting with students in the UK who share my interests and passions was a real highlight of the trip. As a whole, I would describe my experience as both unique and extreme.

What I found most encouraging was the internationality of our medium. The UK is, of course, home to not just Shakespearean-era plays, but a whole variety of modern theatre. Working with British students in the weekend’s workshops and bringing in various performance elements that I had learnt in my home country was a great experience.

I found that acting and humour easily transfers over boundaries. My highlight of the weekend was performing the castle garden scene from Othello with Mohammed in front of an audience of 1,500 on the Globe’s stage – in Arabic! With very few of the audience able to speak our language, my ability to translate the scene through my acting was truly tested!

Standing on the stage, I felt very intimately connected with the audience and the Arabic humour we brought to the scene was definitely appreciated by those watching our performance. Throughout Iago’s devious discussion with Othello about Desdemona, we used our environment to great effect to bring Othello’s passion to life. At one point, a pillar even became Desdemona!

The weekend left me feeling even more excited by my craft and inspired with a huge range of new ideas. Exchanging these ideas with students from another culture has also really highlighted to me the benefit of Qatar UK 2013 and the cultural exchange it is promoting. I would like to thank everyone involved in the Sam Wanamaker Festival for giving me such a unique experience. And I am looking forward to the chance to welcome some UK drama students to Qatar in the future.

Image: Abdulla Al Asam performs at Shakespeare’s Globe as part of Globe Education’s Sam Wanamaker Festival, Sunday 7 April, 2013. Photographer: Ellie Kurttz 2013.

As a consequence of continual developments in the digital world, the way in which we acquire and document knowledge is changing. The arrival of the Kindle has revolutionised how we see books; iPads and netbooks have changed how we function in the work place and social media is fast changing how we communicate.

It is pretty amazing, but these new ideas should not make us blind to how important it is to keep recording history. Just because we now live in a fast-paced world where everything can be saved to a hard drive in an instant or tweeted for all the world to see does not mean that we shouldn’t work to record what we are doing and take time to look at how we got to where we are today. These technologies can actually help us to preserve history. I am talking about the importance of archiving.

There are so many amazing theatre collections out there and many wonderful people working to preserve our theatre world and make it available to the public.

Visiting theatre collections is often possible by booking in advance and giving a reason for your visit: the National Theatre, the Shakespeare Centre, the V&A theatre collections and the Globe all work like this. I personally love the Bristol theatre collection. Although they do not have a searchable online archive, they are extremely friendly if you contact them and they do have a list of their collections online so that you can see what they have before requesting to visit. They also hold lots of events and exhibitions. I contacted them regarding the history of sound in theatre and they invited me along, let me read in their library all afternoon and spoke to me at length about the history of the Bristol Old Vic.

I have also been lucky enough to pass through the doors of the Garrick Club which is home to a very extensive theatrical library and I was given a guided tour of their theatrical paintings and drawings. If you like theatrical art, they are definitely a good place to look and they have a great online searchable art collection.

However, if you don’t have the time to make a visit to a collection, there is also a lot you can find out online. Good examples of online searchable resources include Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre, the Royal Opera House (a favourite of mine, with lots of pictures of historical costumes) and the V&A, which has a selection of archives available online. The Rambert Dance Company is also currently undergoing the process of cataloguing and digitising their material so that it can be available for public use and they have received Lottery Funding to do so.

There are loads of really great ways to preserve digital material too. Storify in particular is quite fascinating. By pulling together interesting topics and building “social stories” – collating them into a narrative – it allows you to kind of document twitter. Many libraries and collections also now catalogue audio and digital material, for example The Routledge Performance Archive.

So, if you want to know a little bit more about how we got to where we are today in the theatre world, don’t be afraid to make contact and explore all the free resources that are available. It is a bit geeky, but hey, also really interesting!

Image by Anne G.

Reactions to the Globe to Globe project (37 plays in 37 different languages) have mostly been along the lines of: but, Shakespeare’s all about the language! How will it be if you can’t understand any of it? Well, having seen a dozen now, I can say that it’s rather like opera. Opera-lovers wouldn’t think twice about going to see a show in Italian or French; it makes it easier in some ways to concentrate on the music. So with Shakespeare (which, let’s face it, often has rather silly plots), a similar approach is necessary: your brain latches onto bits and pieces of text, sure, but is mostly watching the visual and the spectacle. It makes you focus on costume, set, gesture and nuance in a way that is very easy to overlook if you’re concentrating on the language.

The same was true of Deafinitely Theatre’s Love’s Labour’s Lost: I don’t understand British Sign Language, but there are some signs – and gestures – that are universal. The sign for “sexy lady” for example, is pretty much as you’d imagine, as is “I don’t want to have sex with you, push off”. In a rather odd play which centres around a battle of the sexes (four men, four women, who all conveniently fall in love in neat pairs), I’m sure there were acres of nuance that I lost. However, in this sprightly and highly amusing version, there was enough less-subtle-stuff for those of us ignorant of BSL to get the gist, helped by synopses of each scene. It’s a very silly play with an even sillier ending, but this version – in the sudden sunshine – felt like a big party.

There was a real sense of community at the Globe. Everyone was talking and signing and laughing and hugging; there was a feeling that people were re-connecting, catching up and making new acquaintances. Applause/appreciation in BSL is shown by holding arms up, palms flat, and shaking  the hands. There was something oddly moving abut seeing the whole audience waving – much more so than during a curtain call characterised by polite clapping.

There was a lot to like about this production, not least the atmosphere that Deafinitely Theatre created at The Globe. Director Paula Garfield had worked hard – and successfully – to bring out the comedic aspects, which stopped the audience getting too bogged down by the rather ramshackle plot. Judicious cuts helped, too. Nadia Nadarajah was an impish and imperious Princess of France, quick to enjoy games at the expense of the men courting her and her ladies. The sparring between Matthew Gurney’s Berowne and Charly Arrowsmith’s Rosaline was fantastic to watch; Arrowsmith’s mocking signing become more and more languid as she wound Gurney up – you got the impression she could hardly be bothered to move her hands to insult him. He – in a rather natty pair of orange trousers – considers himself quite the intellectual, and their consequent bickering was handled with great dexterity.

What made this production work, for me, was the music. Perfectly judged, witty and expertly played, the music was performed to match up to the signs, to emphasise or illuminate – it made the jokes funnier and the pathos more dramatic. Played by Jon Whitton and Flora Curzon, and designed by Phillippa Herrick, the music really brought the threads of the production together for me. A lively and engaging production of one of Shakespeare’s odder plays.

Love Labour’s Lost was part of the Globe to Globe Festival. For more information on the rest of the Globe to Globe festival, see the website here.

2012 marks a major year for literature all over the world. From Shakespeare to Dickens to the best of Ireland’s authors, literary festivals offer a jam-packed few days of writing, reading and guest speakers, as well as the opportunity to indulge in the delights of each city. A Younger Theatre has checked out some of the best literary festivals that the UK and Ireland have to offer over the coming months:

The World Shakespeare Festival will celebrate the Bard as part of the Cultural Olympiad. Celebrations will be particularly centred in London as crowds flood in for the 2012 Olympics, but the event will also be marked in cities such as Stratford-upon-Avon, Newcastle, Birmingham, Brighton and Edinburgh. Beginning on 23 April, Shakespeare’s birthday, and running until November, theatres all over the UK will have productions and exhibitions on offer.

The Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon – along with staging many plays – will host an exhibition, ‘The Stories of Shakespeare’, in association with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. There will also be many other events, such as the Swan Theatre’s Creative Dialogues (Translating and Transposing Shakespeare, Reinterpreting and Reimagining Shakespeare, and Shakespeare and the Contemporary Artist). Stratford-upon-Avon will also have its own Literary Festival from 22-28 April.

Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London will host all of the playwright’s 37 plays on stage in Globe to Globe: “a multi-lingual Shakespeare project”, from 23 April to 9 June. “Each [play will be performed] in a different language [and] each by a different company from around the world”, says the website. The official opening will take place on the 21-22 April. In September, the theatre will also feature Stephen Fry’s first performance on stage in 17 years, as Malvolio in Twelfth Night.

Meanwhile, in Scotland, from 10 August to 2 September, the Edinburgh International Festival will stage a Polish production with English subtitles entitled 2008: Macbeth, while Wales’s National Theatre will present Coriolanius in August.

The Dickens 2012 Festival will celebrate the two hundredth birthday of renowned Victorian author Charles Dickens (February 7) with myriad events over the course of the year. The main attraction is the Charles Dickens Museum at 48 Doughty Street, “the author’s only surviving London house”, but ensure you visit before 9 April when the museum will close for a refurbishment. It is also holding a special Flash Fiction Workshop for 16-24-year-olds on 11 March. Young Writer-in-Residence Femi Martin will run this workshop as well as a number of others. The event is free but places are limited. The Museum will also play host to If These Walls Could Speak… on 3 April, honouring the new work of upcoming English writers over wine and sherry (drinks that Dickens himself was apparently partial to). You can also follow in Dickens’s footsteps on the Museum’s ‘Dickensian London Walk’ until 4 April for £10, prior booking essential (Call 0207 405 2127 or email).

The V&A Museum of Childhood is collaborating with the English Association and the Dickens Fellowship to present the Dickens and Childhood Conference on 18 June. Held at the V&A, student attenders can look forward to a £25 concession rate, lectures from Dickens specialists and talks from children’s authors. The Museum of London is also getting involved: it is running  an exhibition called Dickens and London until 10 June, including “manuscripts of some of his most famous novels, his writing desk and chair, artefacts, paintings and audiovisual effects to create an immersive and exciting journey through Dickens’s imagination”.

Known as the ‘Literary Capital of Ireland’ and the home of celebrated writers John B. Keane, Bryan MacMahon, Brendan Kennelly, Gabriel Fitzmaurice, Maurice Walsh, Robert Leslie Boland, George Fitzmaurice and Seámus Wilmot, the town of Listowel, Co. Kerry, will host the forty-first Listowel Writers’ Week. The event will take place from 30 May to 3 June. There are 14 three-day Literary Workshops on offer, covering genres from creative writing to poetry to screenwriting to journalism to memoir. There are only 15 places per workshop, each costing €175. The festival will also have readings from several internationally acclaimed authors, including Belinda McKeon. A weekly ticket costs €100, or €180 for two, and concession tickets are available for students. You can make bookings by calling +353 682 1074.

Galway City in Ireland is well known for its arts, especially literature. The twenty-seventh Cúirt International Festival of Literature, on 24-29 April, will showcase some of the best writing talent to come from the island. The annual Cúirt/Over the Edge Showcase on 25 April is highly regarded and will feature the fiction and poetry winners of the Cúirt New Writing Prize 2012. More events will be announced on the website shortly so make sure to have a glance at its Twitter or like its Facebook page.

Cambridge Wordfest (Spring 2012) is celebrating its 10-year anniversary in style. Held from 13-15 April at various venues throughout the city, Festival Director Cathy Moore says to “expect a three-day party bursting with everything from big-name authors to debut writers, [to] personal inspirations [and] global themes”. They will be welcoming top-notch writers from all over the UK, including Julian Clary, Michael Portillo, Grace Dent, Charley Boorman, Ian Rankin, Michael Rosen, Cressida Cowell and Andy Stanton. The festival will also have a wide range of literary events during the weekend: Writing Creative Non-Fiction, Ghost Writing Masterclass, A Room of One’s Own Workshop and Walking Tour, Poetry Workshops, Getting Published Today Masterclass and Crime Writing Workshops are just some of the delights to choose from. The box office is now open for bookings: have a look at thewebsite or call 01223 300 085.

The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival at Christ Church, Oxford, has one of the most spectacular backdrops of any festival. From 24 March to 1 April, the festival will display a wealth of creative knowledge and entertainment, and more than 80 events that will take place. The guest speakers include Peter Carey, Vikram Seth, William Boyd, Robert Harris, Anthony Horowitz, P.D. James and Ian Rankin. Check out the website for more information, as well as its Facebook page and Twitter. Call the box office on 0870 343 1001.

The Bath Literature Festival will be held from 2-11 March. This year’s festival has a smashing line-up of authors and events, from Writers’ Surgery workshops for anyone suffering from writer’s block, to Britain’s only poetry pub crawl, to a talk with The Times columnist David Aaronovitch. A fun few days in one of the most beautiful English cities, this festival is certainly not one to be missed. You can follow it on Twitter for the latest updates.

This is only a selection of the fantastic festivals and events that are going on throughout the country this year. If you’re a prospective or established author, or just a lover of words, soaking up the rich literary atmosphere will do your writing the world of good!

Image credit: Dickens 2012 Festival.